The collected stories, p.2
The Collected Stories, page 2
Later on that night in front of my door I said to Vlashkin, “No more. This isn’t for me. I am sick from it all. I am no home breaker.”
“Girlie,” he said, “don’t be foolish.”
“No, no, goodbye, good luck,” I said. “I am sincere.”
So I went and stayed with Mama for a week’s vacation and cleaned up all the closets and scrubbed the walls till the paint came off. She was very grateful, all the same her hard life made her say, “Now we see the end. If you live like a bum, you are finally a lunatic.”
After this few days I came back to my life. When we met, me and Vlashkin, we said only hello and goodbye, and then for a few sad years, with the head we nodded as if to say, “Yes, yes, I know who you are.”
Meanwhile in the field was a whole new strategy. Your mama and your grandmama brought around—boys. Your own father had a brother, you never even seen him. Ruben. A serious fellow, his idealism was his hat and his coat. “Rosie, I offer you a big new free happy unusual life.” How? “With me, we will raise up the sands of Palestine to make a nation. That is the land of tomorrow for us Jews.” “Ha-ha, Ruben, I’ll go tomorrow then.” “Rosie!” says Ruben. “We need strong women like you, mothers and farmers.” “You don’t fool me, Ruben, what you need is dray horses. But for that you need more money.” “I don’t like your attitude, Rose.” “In that case, go and multiply. Goodbye.”
Another fellow: Yonkel Gurstein, a regular sport, dressed to kill, with such an excitable nature. In those days—it looks to me like yesterday—the youngest girls wore undergarments like Battle Creek, Michigan. To him it was a matter of seconds. Where did he practice, a Jewish boy? Nowadays I suppose it is easier, Lillie? My goodness, I ain’t asking you nothing—touchy, touchy …
Well, by now you must know yourself, honey, whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.
While I was saying to all these silly youngsters “no, no, no,” Vlashkin went to Europe and toured a few seasons … Moscow, Prague, London, even Berlin—already a pessimistic place. When he came back he wrote a book you could get from the library even today, The Jewish Actor Abroad. If someday you’re interested enough in my lonesome years, you could read it. You could absorb a flavor of the man from the book. No, no, I am not mentioned. After all, who am I?
When the book came out I stopped him in the street to say congratulations. But I am not a liar, so I pointed out, too, the egotism of many parts—even the critics said something along such lines.
“Talk is cheap,” Vlashkin answered me. “But who are the critics? Tell me, do they create? Not to mention,” he continues, “there is a line in Shakespeare in one of the plays from the great history of England. It says, ‘Self-loving is not so vile a sin, my liege, as self-neglecting.’ This idea also appears in modern times in the moralistic followers of Freud … Rosie, are you listening? You asked a question. By the way, you look very well. How come no wedding ring?”
I walked away from this conversation in tears. But this talking in the street opened the happy road up for more discussions. In regard to many things … For instance, the management—very narrow-minded—wouldn’t give him any more certain young men’s parts. Fools. What youngest man knew enough about life to be as young as him?
“Rosie, Rosie,” he said to me one day, “I see by the clock on your rosy, rosy face you must be thirty.”
“The hands are slow, Vlashkin. On a week before Thursday I was thirty-four.”
“Is that so? Rosie, I worry about you. It has been on my mind to talk to you. You are losing your time. Do you understand it? A woman should not lose her time.”
“Oi, Vlashkin, if you are my friend, what is time?”
For this he had no answer, only looked at me surprised. We went instead, full of interest but not with our former speed, up to my new place on Ninety-fourth Street. The same pictures on the Wall, all of Vlashkin, only now everything painted red and black, which was stylish, and new upholstery.
A few years ago there was a book by another member of that fine company, an actress, the one that learned English very good and went uptown—Marya Kavkaz, in which she says certain things regarding Vlashkin. Such as, he was her lover for eleven years, she’s not ashamed to write this down. Without respect for him, his wife and children, or even others who also may have feelings in the matter.
Now, Lillie, don’t be surprised. This is called a fact of life. An actor’s soul must be like a diamond. The more faces it got the more shining is his name. Honey, you will no doubt love and marry one man and have a couple kids and be happy forever till you die tired. More than that, a person like us don’t have to know. But a great artist like Volodya Vlashkin … in order to make a job on the stage, he’s got to practice. I understand it now, to him life is like a rehearsal.
Myself, when I saw him in The Father-in-Law—an older man in love with a darling young girl, his son’s wife, played by Raisele Maisel—I cried. What he said to this girl, how he whispered such sweetness, how all his hot feelings were on his face … Lillie, all this experience he had with me. The very words were the same. You can imagine how proud I was.
So the story creeps to an end.
I noticed it first on my mother’s face, the rotten handwriting of time, scribbled up and down her cheeks, across her forehead back and forth—a child could read—it said old, old, old. But it troubled my heart most to see these realities scratched on Vlashkin’s wonderful expression.
First the company fell apart. The theater ended. Esther Leopold died from being very aged. Krimberg had a heart attack. Marya went to Broadway. Also Raisele changed her name to Roslyn and was a big comical hit in the movies. Vlashkin himself, no place to go, retired. It said in the paper, “An actor without peer, he will write his memoirs and spend his last years in the bosom of his family among his thriving grandchildren, the apple of his wife’s doting eye.”
This is journalism.
We made for him a great dinner of honor. At this dinner I said to him, for the last time, I thought, “Goodbye, dear friend, topic of my life, now we part.” And to myself I said further: Finished. This is your lonesome bed. A lady what they call fat and fifty. You made it personally. From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones.
And now comes? Lillie, guess.
Last week, washing my underwear in the basin, I get a buzz on the phone. “Excuse me, is this the Rose Lieber formerly connected with the Russian Art Theater?”
“It is.”
“Well, well, how do you do, Rose? This is Vlashkin.”
“Vlashkin! Volodya Vlashkin?”
“In fact. How are you, Rose?”
“Living, Vlashkin, thank you.”
“You are all right? Really, Rose? Your health is good? You are working?”
“My health, considering the weight it must carry, is First-class. I am back for some years now where I started, in novelty wear.”
“Very interesting.”
“Listen, Vlashkin, tell me the truth, what’s on your mind?”
“My mind? Rosie, I am looking up an old friend, an old warmhearted companion of more joyful days. My circumstances, by the way, are changed. I am retired, as you know. Also I am a free man.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Vlashkin is divorcing me.”
“What come over her? Did you start drinking or something from melancholy?”
“She is divorcing me for adultery.”
“But, Vlashkin, you should excuse me, don’t be insulted, but you got maybe seventeen, eighteen years on me, and even me, all this nonsense—this daydreams and nightmares—is mostly for the pleasure of conversation alone.”
“I pointed all this out to her. My dear. I said, my time is past, my blood is as dry as my bones. The truth is, Rose, she isn’t accustomed to have a man around all day, reading out loud from the papers the interesting events of our time, waiting for breakfast, waiting for lunch. So all day she gets madder and madder. By nighttime a furious old lady gives me my supper. She has information from the last fifty years to pepper my soup. Surely there was a Judas in that theater, saying every day, ‘Vlashkin, Vlashkin, Vlashkin …’ and while my heart was circulating with his smiles he was on the wire passing the dope to my wife.”
“Such a foolish end, Volodya, to such a lively story. What is your plans?”
“First, could I ask you for dinner and the theater—uptown, of course? After this … we are old friends. I have money to burn. What your heart desires. Others are like grass, the north wind of time has cut out their heart. Of you, Rosie, I re-create only kindness. What a woman should be to a man, you were to me. Do you think, Rosie, a couple of old pals like us could have a few good times among the material things of this world?”
My answer, Lillie, in a minute was altogether. “Yes, yes, come up,” I said. “Ask the room by the switchboard, let us talk.”
So he came that night and every night in the week, we talked of his long life. Even at the end of time, a fascinating man. And like men are, too, till time’s end, trying to get away in one piece.
“Listen, Rosie,” he explains the other day. “I was married to my wife, do you realize, nearly half a century. What good was it? Look at the bitterness. The more I think of it, the more I think we would be fools to marry.”
“Volodya Vlashkin,” I told him straight, “when I was young I warmed your cold back many a night, no questions asked. You admit it, I didn’t make no demands. I was softhearted. I didn’t want to be called Rosie Lieber, a breaker up of homes. But now, Vlashkin, you are a free man. How could you ask me to go with you on trains to stay in strange hotels, among Americans, not your wife? Be ashamed.”
So now, darling Lillie, tell this story to your mama from your young mouth. She don’t listen to a word from me. She only screams, “I’ll faint, I’ll faint.” Tell her after all I’ll have a husband, which, as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.
My goodness, I am already late. Give me a kiss. After all. I watched you grow from a plain seed. So give me a couple wishes on my wedding day. A long and happy life. Many years of love. Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rose, goodbye and good luck.
A Woman, Young and Old
My mother was born not too very long ago of my grandma, who named lots of others, girls and boys, all starting fresh. It wasn’t love so much, my grandma said, but she never could call a spade a spade. She was imagination-minded, read stories all day, and sighed all night, till my grandpa, to get near her at all, had to use that particular medium.
That was the basic trouble. My mother was sad to be so surrounded by brothers and sisters, none of them more good-natured than she. It’s all part of the violence in the atmosphere is a theory—wars, deception, broken homes, all the irremediableness of modern life. To meet her problem my mother screams.
She swears she wouldn’t scream if she had a man of her own, but all the aunts and uncles, solitary or wed, are noisy. My grandpa is not only noisy, he beats people up, that is to say—members of the family. He whacked my mother every day of her life. If anyone ever touched me, I’d reduce them to fall-out.
Grandma saves all her change for us. My uncle Johnson is in the nuthouse. The others are here and now, but Aunty Liz is seventeen and my mother talks to her as though she were totally grown up. Only the other day she told her she was just dying for a man, a real one, and was sick of raising two girls in a world just bristling with goddamn phallic symbols. Lizzy said yes, she knew how it was, time frittered by, and what you needed was a strong kind hand at the hem of your skirt. That’s what the acoustics of this barn have to take.
My father, I have been told several hundred times, was a really stunning Latin. Full of savoir-faire, joie de vivre, and so forth. They were deeply and irrevocably in love till Joanna and I revoked everything for them. Mother doesn’t want me to feel rejected, but she doesn’t want to feel rejected herself, so she says I was too noisy and cried every single night. And then Joanna was the final blight and wanted titty all day and all night. “… a wife,” he said, “is a beloved mistress until the children come and then …” He would just leave it hanging in French, but whenever I’d hear les enfants, I’d throw toys at him, guessing his intended slight. He said les filles instead, but I caught that petty evasion in no time. We pummeled him with noise and toys, but our affection was his serious burden is Mother’s idea, and one day he did not come home for supper.
Mother waited up reading Le Monde, but he did not come home at midnight to make love. He missed breakfast and lunch the next day. In fact, where is he now? Killed in the Resistance, says Mother. A postcard two weeks later told her and still tells us all, for that matter, whenever it’s passed around: “I have been lonely for France for five years. Now for the rest of my life I must be lonely for you.”
“You’ve been conned, Mother,” I said one day while we were preparing dinner.
“Conned?” she muttered. “You speak a different language than me. You don’t know a thing yet, you weren’t even born. You know perfectly well, misfortune aside, I’d take another Frenchman— Oh, Josephine,” she continued, her voice reaching strictly for the edge of the sound barrier, “oh, Josephine, to these loathsomes in this miserable country I’m a joke, a real ha-ha. But over there they’d know me. They would just feel me boiling out to meet them. Lousy grammar and all, in French, I swear I could write Shakespeare.”
I turned away in despair. I felt like crying.
“Don’t laugh,” she said, “someday I’ll disappear Air France and surprise you all with a nice curly Frenchman just like your daddy. Oh, how you would have loved your father. A growing-up girl with a man like that in the vicinity constantly. You’d thank me.”
“I thank you anyway, Mother dear,” I replied, “but keep your taste in your own hatch. When I’m as old as Aunt Lizzy I might like American soldiers. Or a Marine, I think. I already like some soldiers, especially Corporal Brownstar.”
“Is that your idea of a man?” asked Mother, rowdy with contempt.
Then she reconsidered Corporal Brownstar. “Well, maybe you’re right. Those powerful-looking boots … Very masculine.”
“Oh?”
“I know, I know. I’m artistic and I sometimes hold two views at once. I realize that Lizzy’s going around with him and it does something. Look at Lizzy and you see the girl your father saw. Just like me. Wonderful carriage. Marvelous muscle tone. She could have any man she wanted.”
“She’s already had some she wanted.”
At that very moment my grandma, the nick-of-time banker, came in, proud to have saved $4.65 for us. “Whew, I’m so warm,” she sighed. “Well, here it is. Now a nice dinner, Marvine, I beg of you, a little effort. Josie, run and get an avocado, and Manine, please don’t be small about the butter. And Josie dear, it’s awful warm out and your mama won’t mind. You’re nearly a young lady. Would you like a sip of icy beer?”
Wasn’t that respectful? To return the compliment I drank half a glass, though I hate that fizz. We broiled and steamed and sliced and chopped, and it was a wonderful dinner. I did the cooking and Mother did the sauces. We sicked her on with mouth-watering memories of another more gourmet time and, purely flattered, she made one sauce too many and we had it for dessert on saltines, with iced café au lait. While I cleared the dishes, Joanna, everybody’s piece of fluff, sat on Grandma’s lap telling her each single credible detail of her eight hours at summer day camp.
“Women,” said Grandma in appreciation, “have been the pleasure and consolation of my entire life. From the beginning I cherished all the little girls with their clean faces and their listening ears …”
“Men are different than women,” said Joanna, and it’s the only thing she says in this entire story.
“That’s true,” said Grandma, “it’s the men that’ve always troubled me. Men and boys … I suppose I don’t understand them. But think of it consecutively, all in a row, Johnson, Revere, and Drummond … after all, where did they start from but me? But all of them, all all all, each single one of them is gone, far away in heart and body.”
“Ah, Grandma,” I said, hoping to console, “they were all so grouchy, anyway. I don’t miss them a bit.”
Grandma gave me a miserable look. “Everyone’s sons are like that,” she explained. “First grouchy, then gone.”
After that she sat in grieving sorrow. Joanna curled herself round the hassock at her feet, hugged it, and slept. Mother got her last week’s copy of Le Monde out of the piano bench and calmed herself with a story about a farmer in Provence who had raped his niece and killed his mother and lived happily for thirty-eight years into respected old age before the nosy prefect caught up with him. She translated it into our derivative mother tongue while I did the dishes.
Nighttime came and communication was revived at last by our doorbell, which is full of initiative. It was Lizzy and she did bring Corporal Brownstar. We sent Joanna out for beer and soft drinks and the dancing started right away. He cooperatively danced with everyone. I slipped away to my room for a moment and painted a lot of lipstick neatly on my big mouth and hooked a walleyed brassière around my ribs to make him understand that I was older than Joanna.
He said to me, “You’re peaches and cream, you’re gonna be quite a girl someday, Alice in Wonderland.”
“I am a girl already, Corporal.”
“Uh huh,” he said, squeezing my left bottom.
Lizzy passed the punch and handed out Ritz crackers and danced with Mother and Joanna whenever the corporal danced with me. She was delighted to see him so popular, and it just passed her happy head that he was the only man there. At the peak of the evening he said: “You may all call me Browny.”
We sang air force songs then until 2 a.m., and Grandma said the songs hadn’t changed much since her war. “The soldiers are younger though,” she said. “Son, you look like your mother is still worried about you.”
