As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (9 page)

The day that Bec announced her engagement to Milton Goldberg, in March of 1928, Vivie might have thought her own life was as past as winter. She might have thought that, the newfound fullness contracting in an instant, but the evening before she’d had an encounter that left her feeling more hopeful than she’d been in a long time. Work finished, she’d gone once again up Main Street to the pharmacy. She was about to turn in to it when she saw ahead of her a young couple walking hand in hand. They weren’t talking but wore contented looks. Minutes later, while staring at bars of soap, Vivie realized that nothing about seeing the couple had caused her to trip or lose her breath. For all she knew, she’d been walking past couples for some time and not even noticing them. And so the next day, with Bec’s news, she was determined not to lose the ground she’d apparently gained. “I’m happy for you,” she told her sister, her tone matter-of-fact. Dutifully, she leaned toward Bec to embrace her. But a moment later she pulled her sister close. “I’m so happy for you,” she repeated. “Really, Bec, I am.”

In the fall of 1928, some six months after Bec’s engagement, Vivie began to take an interest in Leo Cohen, a thin, already balding fellow, one of the patients with chronic problems. A touch of headache, a bit of a cough, weakness in the knees—these were the ailments, always a little vague, of Leo Cohen. He seemed embarrassed to see her whenever he came in, once every other month or so, never speaking to her but merely nodding her way then quickly seating himself in the farthest corner of the waiting room, where a lamp set there made for especially good reading of the book he invariably came in with.

It seemed important reading, she quickly noticed. She’d caught a title once,
The Interpretation of Dreams.
Her own dreams were a messy business—trains rushing past her, angry dogs chasing at her heels, one in which her perfectly buttoned dress inexplicably fell off her shoulders—dreams so uncomfortable she’d thought only to forget them rather than record them for interpretation. She’d not heard of the book’s author but she assumed from the solemn look on Leo Cohen’s face as he read it that the author was of some note. And she assumed, too, because Leo Cohen always came in with a book as seriously titled as that, that he was a deeply thoughtful man, perhaps even a professor, someone with an office in one of those imposing brownstones that marked the Wesleyan University campus on High Street.

As much as Vivie noticed Leo Cohen he seemed determined to slip in and out unseen. Finally, one day in March of 1929—Vivie was twenty-five by then—she was able to strike up a conversation with him. A flu had hit the community and the waiting room was unusually full; Leo had to sit by her desk rather than in the far corner. And, oddly, he’d not brought a book.

“Here,” Vivie told him, offering him the
National Geographic.

Once he’d finished, handing the magazine back, she questioned him about what he’d just found so interesting. Seville, Spain, he said. He described the elaborate processions he’d just read about during Seville’s springtime Holy Week and the equally elaborate fairs held in the weeks after. He suggested she look at a photograph of women dressed in the flamenco style, leaning Vivie’s way for the first time to do so. Then she asked him a few more questions, not about Seville but about him. No, he said, he didn’t work at Wesleyan, though he’d heard of the place; no, he had no wife and kids; and no, he was not originally from Middletown.

“Born and raised in Bridgeport,” he said, rising for his examination.

They didn’t converse the next few times he came to the office but he did make a point of saying hello to her when he arrived and good-bye to her when he left. “Good-bye, Mr. Cohen,” she’d respond. “You have a good day now. And feel well.”

June 1929 and Leo Cohen walked in the office on a Friday without an appointment. He had a small bouquet of daisies in one hand and no book.

“Mr. Cohen?” Vivie asked, confused. “Did I forget to put you on my schedule?” She flipped a few pages of her appointment book.

He cleared his throat. “I didn’t come for that.” Then he offered her the daisies. “I came to ask you to dinner,” he whispered. Just as tentatively, he suggested the next Saturday night.

And so she had a date. Just like that: out of the blue. And with such a thoughtful man, she mused, though he was awfully quiet. On her way home she stopped by the Bloombergs’ to run the whole thing past Mrs. Bloomberg. Later she’d tell her mother and Bec. Over tea, Mrs. Bloomberg and Lorna leaned in for the details. The fact that Leo Cohen could hardly get the words out was the best part of all, even better than the daisies.

“I wouldn’t tell Tillie,” Mrs. Bloomberg advised Vivie as she rose to go.

“Poor Tillie,” Vivie said.

“Poor Tillie,” Mrs. Bloomberg, nodding, agreed.

Over the next months, during which Leo Cohen stopped by Dr. Shapiro’s office toward the day’s end with increasing frequency, offering to walk Vivie home, occasionally taking her out to dinner, Vivie gradually learned that she was wrong about everything. Leo Cohen wasn’t even close to being a professor; he was a baker’s assistant, rising at four thirty each morning to get the dough started. And not only did Leo Cohen lack a college education, he even lacked a high school one. He’d been pulled out of school at fourteen, he explained, the poverty in his family requiring him to work. This he’d done at an arms factory near Bridgeport, and because of the lead involved, his health had been off ever since. Dr. Shapiro charged him next to nothing, he added, to which Vivie responded with that assurance that seemed to bubble up more and more, “He does that a lot. Don’t you feel bad about anything.”

This information took a long time to pull from Leo Cohen, who, just when Vivie thought things were steady between them, would sometimes stop coming by to walk her home; weeks would pass without a word, and then Vivie would confront a mountain of self-doubt. Had she made the whole thing up? Was she
that
desperate? And if so, how come she didn’t even know this much about herself. But then he’d return, shy as ever, and she’d get the sense that his fear was even greater than her own. She’d have to crack his shell all over again. Questions about whatever book he was reading could get him going, even animate him, but he remained reticent on the subject of himself. “Not much to tell,” he told her on more than one occasion. But by the time he said this Vivie knew enough to find his story a moving one; she felt sorry for the child wild with curiosity who couldn’t finish his schooling and inspired by the personal drive he showed to overcome that limitation. The books all came from the public library, which he visited weekly, as he’d been doing since he was a kid. Crushed to have been pulled from school, he’d heeded his father’s advice to use the library, where books were both bountiful and free. “That was my father’s best idea,” Leo said, his face brightening with the memory.

He proposed to her on one knee, the traditional way, on a drizzly evening in May. They’d gone walking after a dinner out, and were standing outside her home, under an oak tree at the yard’s edge. When he rose from kneeling, a wet patch marked the knee of one pant leg, something she could see even in the dimness of the fading evening light. He was thin as ever, and a street lamp gleamed on his balding head. The truth was, he didn’t look so good. But she’d said yes and he was smiling as she’d never seen him smile before.

“Are you sure?” Maks asked her later that night after Leo had gone, after the news had been delivered to her parents and Bec. “He just doesn’t seem like, you know, much of anything,” to which Vivie answered, firmly, swiftly, “He seems like a whole lot to me.”

At twenty-six, then, Vivie was finally married, the second Syrkin sister to do so. Bec had been engaged the whole time during Vivie’s courtship with Leo, but Bec was waiting for Milton Goldberg to finish college. And so Vivie left a sister behind at home when she moved with her husband into a tiny apartment over a fabric store on Middletown’s Washington Street, an apartment the same size as Ruth Brintler’s. Ruth had passed away the year before, a loss that broke Vivie’s heart more deeply than she’d anticipated. Still, that first year of marriage started well enough with Mort offering Leo a better job right off the bat at Leibritsky’s Department Store, but sometimes Leo felt good and sometimes he didn’t, which meant Vivie would cook up a soup, feed him dinner in bed. And because of Leo’s fragile health she kept her job with Dr. Shapiro, unlike Ada, who stayed home while Mort worked. Sometimes, too, Leo complained about the job, particularly about Mort’s younger brother Nelson, who had an enviable higher education. “Why do the goods always go to the undeserving?” Leo would say about Nelson, whom he faulted for not honoring the value of his schooling by reading even one additional book. And it was lonely, too, Leo griped on occasion, all day on that Leibritsky’s sales floor, a reader among nonreaders. Could make a person feel invisible since no one ever talked to you about the things on your mind, the things that mattered most. But none of Leo’s complaints, physical or emotional, bothered Vivie, as she came into the arrangement well aware that marriage wasn’t a picnic. She knew, too, that it wasn’t a wall protecting you from life’s more difficult blows. Marriage wasn’t anything, really, she reasoned contentedly enough, just a way to live, a way to love someone else. And most folks find that out, sooner or later. Yes, my aunt concluded early on, even someone like her sister Ada, whom she could still hear screeching with unabashed delight on her wedding day, and who’d carried an unthinking air of superiority since the whole thing happened, and who by then had topped matters off with a first child—a boy, no less—would eventually know that.

But that was lifetimes ago. Early July of 1948, our first weekend in Woodmont, two days of clouds, humidity, winds, but no rain; of the ocean swelling and retracting with more force than usual; of intense games of rummy played on the porch (that would be Bec, Vivie, Ada, Davy, and me); of Leo and Nina reading side by side on the sands of Bagel Beach under a large but, because of the clouds, mostly unnecessary beach umbrella (but at least Nina was actually
at
the beach, I thought); and of Howard dragging himself about while our father continued to punish him for breaking his word about joining the morning minyan by ignoring him and favoring Davy, choosing him as his fishing partner when the clouds finally broke early Sunday afternoon. The sisters were mostly in tending mode—to husbands, meals, children—and whatever echoes Vivie once heard of a younger, screeching Ada had long ago ceased. Time had passed. You could see that most clearly in the way that, once the men packed the car and drove off Sunday evening, my mother, dropping her waving hand, turning from Hillside Avenue back toward the cottage, did so with a look of unbridled, albeit unknowing, relief.

Howard, too, was relieved. But the weekend had affected him, and even after the men left, Howard continued to drag about. Rather than head off for a Sunday evening with his pal Mark Fishbaum he stayed home with us. He was tired, he said, when he phoned Mark. He added that he ought not to have stayed up so late with Mark the previous Thursday evening; the next morning he’d overslept. He might as well have murdered someone, he complained.

The men had been gone for less than an hour when Howard and Nina had their first real fight of the summer. It began with my asking Nina if I could try on the dress Bec had sewn for her. Nina and I were in her parents’ room, which was where we hung whatever summer clothes we needed to hang.

“Come on,” I urged Nina. “Won’t you even try it?” I leaned into the closet, unable to take my eyes from the dress, despite the fact that I’d peeked at it every day that week. The yellow fabric was a soothing pale shade, the cream-colored flowers running across it summery and delicate. The jacket had sleeves that went just past the elbow, an obvious and perfect length. It seemed incredible that after a whole week Nina still hadn’t tried on the dress.

“I can’t see myself in it,” Nina said, not without remorse. “It’s not me.”

“Then
I’m
going to wear it,” I told her, whisking the dress from the closet.

“It’s too big,” she argued. “You’re a twig.”

“Can’t I try it? I just want to see.” I dangled the dress, still on its hanger, before her.

“All right, Molly. Don’t beg. It’s just a stupid dress,” she said.

I wriggled out of my shorts and top. Seeing me in my bra, which was new and barely needed, Nina smiled, a small turnup of the mouth, the very same smile, more plaintive than cheerful, that my mother had offered when she’d taken me just months before to get fitted.

The dress on, I asked Nina to zip the back. But even the secured zipper didn’t prevent the dress from sliding down my frame, its top section settling in waves at my waist.

“Told you. Too big,” Nina said, though she didn’t laugh. She simply took me in, her neutrality a kind of indifference.

“Hey,” Howard then said, surprising us. He stood in the doorway. I grabbed the dress, yanked it high, and clutched it like a towel.

“Where’d you come from?” I asked, embarrassed.

“I was just in my room,” he answered. “I’m not trying to sneak up on you.” He glanced behind him as if to prove he’d been nearby.

“Don’t you know to knock?” I shrieked.

“Don’t blame me,” Howard said, pointing at the room’s open door. “Besides, Molly,” he continued, leaning my way, “there’s not really much to see.” He took a few steps toward me.

“Don’t you dare,” I said, leaping back and landing beside Nina, on her parents’ bed. Howard, I knew, might pull at the dress. In the right mood, he was just that kind of brother.

“Hey, squirt,” Howard said, seemingly surprised by my reaction, “you know I wouldn’t do that.” Despite his words, when he took another step forward Nina and I sat up straighter, even more on guard.

“Relax,” Howard said, staring at us. “Molly, I’m not going to touch that stupid dress.”

“Not
stupid,
” Nina remarked, though in fact she’d said the same thing just a moment ago.