The Belief in Angels Page 15

  It is inevitable that Oizer should have taken the role of the eldest son in our family after arriving here in America. Foter and Mater are old when Oizer and Rose arrived, and I, the oldest living son, I am still a soldier and living in Russia at the time. Oizer did the job well, and I possessed no spirit, no will, to displace him from his role when I arrived. He had become a great protector and provider for the family, and I am content for him to continue to fill that role.

  Although my foter and mater seemed overjoyed at my arrival, I felt broken inside. I still mourned our losses and blamed myself for not preventing the tragedies back in the Ukraine.

  Soon after I moved in with my family, Foter sat talking with me late into the night. We swirled cheap brandy in our glasses and reminisced about our old life on Bubbe Chava’s farm. I felt safe. I felt a brief sense of lightness as we sat watching the fire dance with the last embers.

  “Those are the best moments in my life. All of us together in the orchards,” I said.

  My foter had taken up pipe-smoking—a habit I thought made him look like a gangster. He tamped bits of spicy tobacco into his pipe as he spoke.

  “The best is coming, Szaja.”

  I said nothing as he lit the pipe and drew in slow, rhythmic puffs of smoke.

  “Szaja, no one could have prevented what happened. Never mind a young boy.”

  I am startled by his comment. Before I could answer, he continued.

  “Let’s not talk about the past again. It’s best to let the past go, otherwise it will imprison you. You’re a free man, Szaja. See a future, create a plan, work hard, and you will realize your dream.”

  But I had no dreams. Only nightmares.

  It is Rose and Mocher who convinced me to move to Brookline to start a tailoring business with them. Rose told me they needed a skilled worker. I had been working in a large sweatshop in Brooklyn with them and I am nearly recovered from my illnesses, thanks to Rose’s ministrations. I knew she felt concerned about leaving me, and this knowledge pressed me into going with them.

  I am torn, though. I wanted to stay with the family, this family my eyes are drinking in with thirsty gulps. For years I had dreamt of nothing more than being reunited with them, of seeing my dear mater and foter again. I thought, in the last days of my work in Paris, that if I could just see them again in America, I would be able to die in peace. This is the thought I lived for.

  But then, living there in Crown Heights with them, taking their love and rebuilding my soul, I felt more like a stranger—a ghost, than the son—the brother, I had once been.

  I am changed, I knew. And I could feel that it is not a change that would be reversed through love or time. There is some missing faculty; a part of me seems gone forever. I felt as much an imposter in my family as I did in the days I am hiding the fact I am a Jew.

  Rose understood this. She is the one person who helps me find myself. She reached into the parts of me that are still intact and drew them closer to the surface. At times this felt healing—I am moving toward a less painful, lighter way of being. I smile and laugh with her teasing and through our laughter my soul breathed air. But at other times, the push toward the surface is a struggle that sent me back into myself, somewhere safer and hidden from even my own conscious thoughts. One day Rose asked me about the camp. I could not answer. That day I realized I could never answer or I would lose the bits that had survived. And this would break my deal with Pieter.

  In the end, after a year living with Foter and Mater, I decided to move with Rose and Mocher to Brookline, Massachusetts, leaving my parents and the rest of the family behind in New York in Oizer’s capable care. I slept on the couch in a tiny apartment we shared.

  “The couch smells like you now,” Rose tells me.

  I laugh. “Not a bad smell. Not the smell of your oily latkes on those winter mornings on the farm.”

  Rose snaps the dishtowel she uses at the sink at my head.

  “Shush. Those oily latkes tasted good enough for you to eat more than your share of helpings, as I remember.”

  About two years after our move to Brookline, Rose and Mocher decided the time had come for me to move into my own place. As I could not cook for myself and possessed only meager home management skills, Rose decided marriage is the most convenient and efficient solution. Rose met with a shadchen who found a woman for me to marry and procured a marriage contract for us. The shadchen arranged for me to move into the apartment this woman, my wife-to-be, had formerly shared with her now-deceased parents. The whole plan is hatched, agreed upon, and finalized in a matter of two weeks.

  Yetta, this woman who lived two floors above us, had recently lost the parents she’d spent most of her life caring for. I had barely noticed her presence in the building before the night we met, except to note that she seemed exceptionally short. She is a formless shape passing on her way up and down the stairs. I’m not sure we had exchanged a single word in the two years I’d shared the apartment with Rose and Mocher.

  I am a single man, nearing forty, who had never courted a girlfriend. This fact my sister and her husband are unaware of. They assumed that along the way—from camp to war, from town to city—I had found at least some women. They assumed I had done what most men do without a wife. But they are wrong. There had never been a time, never been a moment, where I found myself wanting sex with a woman. I had been curious, yes, and often aroused, especially when I am a young man. But the early time in my life had also been spent in a place with no normal outlet for expressions of those sorts.

  Sometimes I overheard conversations between men about the women they bedded. But in my travels I always avoided discussions of women, of anything leading to the merest threat of my great secret. The secret that would reveal the fact that I am a Jew. I worried about this constantly in those years. The secret about my body terrified me in the men’s urinal.

  It is a miracle that, upon my arrival in the camp, the German guards did not examine me more carefully. They took me for a Russian soldier—a Catholic Russian soldier. I would have been murdered as a Jew if anyone had found the truth out. I never fully undressed after the first day’s purification process.

  For me, there are no pissing contests, no drunken size comparisons. Most importantly, there is never any sex. No women. Discovery could equal death. When I had those feelings, I took care of things and told myself I would save myself for marriage and live a pure life. I never dreamed it would take me this long to find a wife.

  This night, I am seated at a table waiting for a woman I don’t know—a woman who has already sat with the shadchen to determine what assets she will bring into the marriage. Our contract has been drawn and signed already. This night is a mere formality for this woman, a romantic gesture pushed forward by Rose and the shadchen so she will have an event to point to as her formal engagement date.

  For me, it seems a good business arrangement.

  I am a man with a business now. Rose, Mocher, and I owned our own tailoring shop. We ran a brisk business in a storefront off of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The building is cramped and drafty, however, and we shared a back room with a cobbler, so we had recently begun hunting for a new building with more space and light. Mocher and I worked directly with the customers at the cash register. Rose sewed in the back. We made money hand over fist.

  Life had become a better prospect for me. I kept a new secret: I saved the profits from my paychecks and had become an anlegen, an investor. It felt like gambling to me. Gambling is a sin, I know, but this is different in its actual design. It is accepted and encouraged, even. Oizer, now married, had become a successful banker. When we wrote to one another, which we frequently did, he gave me tips for buying shares. I started out buying nickel shares in well-known, established businesses. Small investments in safe, conservative businesses that offer small gains and minor risks. But then I began to ask Oizer questions about bigger ventures. I felt confident, and with a low overhead on our business, free rent on Rose’s couch, and no other fi
nancial responsibilities, I grew riskier.

  With Oizer’s guidance, I branched out into investments in the new utility companies and heavy machinery manufacturers. Electricity companies and the farming industry are growing at rapid rates. I found two small companies I liked, Eastern Bell Telephone and John Deere. I began with nickel shares, but gradually increased my monthly contributions as I watched my shares grow. Oizer said the market would take a long time to recover from the fall in 1929, but he could foresee a time when it would make many millionaires again. I want to be one of those milyon merchants. Oizer had already gotten close to achieving this goal, no surprise to any of us. He had always been the financial brains in the family, and now he made sure we all possessed everything we needed.

  “It’s time for you to start a new life, Samuel,” Rose says, as we head toward the living room to wait. “We love you and love having you near us, but I want to see you happy. You need a wife, and maybe children?”

  “Oy, Rose, please. A wife? Children? How could I do this? I have nothing to offer a wife. I am a ghost of a man.”

  “Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik. You are a fine man, Sam. You are a strong, gezunt man with a good mind and a stable job. You’ve suffered enough. Now is your time for joy. Your eyes have been dim with tears and now it is time to open them and see. You are free. You are a free man now, Samuel Trautman.”

  I begin to laugh. Rose stares at me in shock. I can’t resist.

  “Rose, if I’m a free man, why am I being forced into marriage? I won’t be a free man with a nagging wife.”

  Now Rose laughs.

  “I don’t think she’s a nagging woman. I don’t think she’s a woman with much of a voice at all. I’ve never heard more than a peep out of her mouth, and she stayed with her parents even after the rest of her sisters left for marriages.”

  “Maybe no one wanted to marry her?”

  “Sayhak mir nisht keyn tshaynik! She’s a good woman, I’m sure. You don’t want a looker, a shaina maedel, that kind of woman will give you a nervous condition. No, this is a woman who will make a good wife and a good mother. But, best news of all, when you move into the flat in 4C, this will be the woman who will get you off our couch and give us privacy, mirtseshem”

  We are laughing as we hear a timid knocking.

  “I’ll answer it, you sit and behave yourself,” Rose instructs me.

  “Oy, yes, I’ll sit and behave and ask the miaskite upstairs to marry me, yes.”

  As I remember it, the evening is brief. Yetta shyly answered me when I spoke to her. Good, I thought, she’ll be a quiet wife. A wife with nothing to say is a perfect companion. I thought all I needed from this woman is cooking, cleaning, ironing, and someone to run the errands. Children are not necessary. Children are expensive and noisy.

  Yetta seemed older than the shadchen told us. We are told she is only a few years older than me, but she looked at least ten years older. Her face is marked with deep wrinkles like the folds of a fine, ancient linen. A black hairnet held a thick bundle of dark, graying hair at the back of her head. I thought she might be close to fifty. She might be too old to bear children. Less to worry about. I would be closer to my milyon goals with no children to feed and clothe and send to school.

  We finish the dinner Rose prepared and Mocher ushers us into the living room. Mocher goes into the kitchen to wash the dishes with Rose. This is when Yetta speaks—her first pronouncement since the answer she gave to my scripted engagement question earlier in the evening. She casts her eyes into her lap and blushes.

  “What time do you go to sleep?”

  I can’t help laughing. “What time do I go to sleep?”

  She nodded.

  “I sleep at 8:30, why do you ask me this?”

  She blushes and explains, “I want to know how long I might have in the evening for chores before you go to sleep. I don’t want to be noisy.”

  She looks directly into my eyes. I notice for the first time they are a deep cocoa brown with tiny, barley speckles. Like the leather buttons on a man’s tweed coat.

  I nod. “I see. You should feel free to make your own schedule for the household. You will find I’m not a demanding husband.”

  Yetta gives a tiny smile and glances away.

  The evening wraps itself up like its own small engagement present—simple and practical. No frills and bows, simply useful information and straightforward discussion.

  I learned later it is the time after I went to sleep that Yetta is more interested in. Her parents are the only other people in the building who owned a television in those days and Yetta loved to watch television. She already knew my tastes are going to be quite different from hers.

  Yetta is a most uncomplicated woman. The most important detail of our cohabitation for her would be how much time she would have to watch the TV programs she loved. One of her favorite is a show featuring short educational films called The World in Your Home. She loved to sit and watch this show, and others, during the week in the evenings. This didn’t bother me. Mocher and I loved to watch wrestling on the TV and spent many happy Sundays doing nothing else.

  Our wedding date had already been set before we met. The shadchen and the rabbi arranged for it to fall before the Rosh Hashana holidays in August. We made a small wedding. The entire family had been invited but told not to bother with the expense of coming from New York for the simple ceremony. We are too old for a big celebration, and Yetta’s parents, who might have appreciated the fact that their spinster daughter had finally married, are dead. However, her six sisters are all there. They lived in the Boston area. Seven sisters in a family.Oy. Their poor foter. He must have been driven mad by all those women.

  The day after our engagement dinner—to my surprise—I received a letter from Yetta. I found it stuffed under the doorframe, sticking out from the hallway rug, as I left for work early the next morning.

  From this day until her death twenty-seven years later, this is the sole written missive I ever received from Yetta.

  Dear Samuel,

  I am writing to say to you how happy I am with this decision to marry with you. I am making ready to marry you with an open heart. This marraige my parents would be blessing with joy. They are gone now but I want you should know how much they wanted this for their daughter one day. And now you make good this dream of theirs. Yours is a good strong heart. This I know and the shadkhen she tell me also. So, I go forward and give you my dowry, which I not tell the shadkhen is more than she sees or hears from me. You will be a rich man with this marraige to me I can tell you now. I will give you the savings of my parents. This is what I have to offer you. I know I am a funny woman with a diffe-cult face. This I know. But for you, you can make a smile for me and this is a good thing.

  Yours truly,

  Yetta

  I folded the letter back into the envelope and kept it in my pocket throughout the day. I kept pulling it out to read it again. It is a strange letter—an honest letter with a gift, the offer of wealth. This is what Yetta felt she could offer in exchange for the security of a marriage. Could I offer her security, I worried? Could I be a secure man?

  I am a man with many names. Now, I am Samuel, the tailor. Samuel, the investor. An investor with more money to invest now.

  Yes, I decided that day I would become a secure man to marry. I would make myself the man she wanted me to be and fill the role. I watched Mocher with Rose and I knew how to behave the husband. I could do this and it would be easy. I would be true and loyal. Fidelity is a given. I had no need for this woman. Why would I need others? I would be dutiful and prompt. I went to work and I came home from work every night at the same time. No stops for a drink or a chat. I made few friends outside my family. No one else to visit.

  Oizer invested the dowry Yetta brought me. Twenty thousand dollars, a huge sum at the time. It is indeed a large dowry inheritance from her father, who had a good real estate business before he passed. It made us a fortune. Still, I never stopped working. You didn’t st
op working. Who knew what would happen? There could be another market crash. There could be a war to try and save oneself from. There could be a person to bribe in exchange for your life or your family’s life. There are always things you needed more money for. This is the one thing certain.

  Yetta knew we are wealthy, but she never asked me questions or asked to see our financial books. She is a thrifty woman and never wasted a dime on anything we didn’t need. She never asked for more money than the household allowance I gave to her each month.

  For the first year our marriage remained uneventful. The exceptions are the fumblings of our wedding night and the sad attempts at improvement that followed.

  We are virgins and had absolutely no idea what we are doing. I suppose Yetta expected me to be practiced in the deed, but I had a paralyzing fear of seeing her naked body in a bed.

  I saw many naked women in the camp at Majdanek. Dead women. My mind became so tightly shut against this horror it simply registered their anatomy as skin and bones.

  I also felt quite self-conscious about my own body. Since my days in Paris, I’d spent most of my time sitting at a sewing table. My posture is terrible. My muscles are underdeveloped. My body is thin and, like those of most of the Ukranian Jews I knew, hairless. Not like the men I saw on my wrestling shows. I am embarrassed and ashamed of my body.

  Yetta is, as most virgin brides are, shy and modest. She spent a long time in the bath on our wedding night and emerged wearing a peach negligee with so many layers I am worn out by the time I found the appropriate seams to open. She lay back on the bed, rigid. She never opened her eyes and spoke only two words the entire time we are consummating the marriage.