Dry Your Smile (5 page)

Yetta tried to grab the flailing arms.

“Hokhmah, wait, don't. Here, Hokheleh, here little one, hold on to me, hold on.” She grasped her sister's fists. They spasmed open and closed again around her own in a vise.

“Yetta, oh Yetta … why's it
hurt
so much? It's not supposed to, nobody'd go through it if it was! There must be something wrong!”

Yetta rocked back and forth in rhythm with her sister's writhing, old enmities and judgments suspended, drowned out by the animal cries of the woman before her.

“Can't you get them to give me something? Yetta?
Oh!
Gotta be something … they can give me! It's 1941, not the middle ages … gotta be some shot or—
Oh God!
”

Her sister spoke rapidly, the pace between them accelerated by pain. “There's nothing, lovey. Nothing to give for this. Hold on. Bear it. Just hold on. A little bit more.” But the other was being consumed before her eyes, a body curling and twisting like a shred of paper in flame, the breath coming in sharp grunts.

“Must be …
something
… hell burning inside me … oh
please
dear God …”

The claw-like grip on Yetta's hands ached up through her wristbones. “Hush, lovey, hush. Just a few seconds more.” Then the talons began to relax slightly, the breathing came in slower gusts.

“Oh, there … it's letting up … Oh thank you, God, thank you.”

Yetta eased Hokhmah back against the pillows and extricated her hands, flexing her numb fingers. She dipped a washcloth in the enamel basin by the bed, wrung it out, and bent to wipe the sweat-soaked head that was now crying soundlessly.

“Ach, Gott. Look at you. Poor little one, poor Hokheleh.”

“So …
ashamed,
” came the whisper. “So …
scared.
”

It brought forth a fierce protectiveness in the older sister. “What? Why for? It's
his
shame, not yours. You got nothing to be ashamed. I didn't mean it, what I said before. Momma didn't mean nothing neither. Where's the shame? Nobody
knows
. Essie loans you the money to come here, out of state. I'm with you so you're not alone. None of Momma's friends or neighbors know, so it's no shame on her memory, see?” But the silent weeping continued. “Anyhow, you're right, Momma always loved you best, so how could she mean what she said? The firstborn in the New Country, the first real American in the family, she'd always call you, remember? For you special she'd make
kreplach
in chicken soup, and koogle, and every day when you came home from school—the first one to go from the start to an American school—she'd spread a slice of black bread with
schmaltz
for you and we'd all sit at the kitchen table and you'd tell what the education was like. Remember?”

A small smile played on the weary face below her. “Yeah. She loved me then, didn't she? She loved to hear me singing around the house while I helped with the chores.” Hokhmah's tone changed. “Only later did she hate my voice.”

Yetta seemed to regain her severity the moment her sister regained her pride. “That was after that highschool teacher put it into your head to be ‘a real singer.' That was the start of all the trouble.” She flung the cloth into the basin and stalked back to her chair.

Hokhmah ran her fingers through her matted hair and let out a bitter laugh.

“The start of all the trouble. Everything I was going to become, be, do.” She laughed again, but the laugh was part sob. “Me, here in this dump of a small-town hospital. Me, who was going to sing Tosca and Marguerite on all the European stages. I was going to be beautiful and loved and rich and famous, with a God-given talent pouring out of me that would make the packed houses weep. The only thing that's going to pour out of me is blood and mucus. And a bastard.”

“Momma was right to forbid it. You weren't just anybody, you were the firstborn American, the daughter of a rabbi. You should parade yourself on the stage in front of strangers? You might as well have walked the streets. God forbid. You, who won a real scholarship? Who was educated all the way through one year college even? Who got to go on a foreign-country trip?” Yetta angrily yanked a length of yarn from her ball.

“So what good did it do me? To have a door opened and then sealed shut in my face again? What good? I'm lying here like—like a whore giving birth under the bridge in the Tsar's old Kiev, instead of … instead of the way I imagined it: a pink room filled with flowers, my own handsome doctor husband bending over me, everything spotless and modern and …” The tears started again. “Not this—this
cell
, this stink of Lysol and my own sweat that turns the sheets grey. All I can taste is salt, from crying … When all the trouble started, you say? If Momma wanted me to suffer, she sure is having her revenge.”

“Momma only wanted the best for you. That you catch a good man and give her the first real American grandchildren.”

“Well, I did and I am, but not like she expected,” Hokhmah muttered.

“You know I don't mean like that!” Yetta snapped. “But at least you'll be a mother, the greatest thing that can happen to a woman. Not like poor Esther, a widow already with only stillborn twins to show for it. Not like—not like me, who couldn't even get pregnant.”

“I bet that's not your fault,” her sister said, looking at the broad-hipped thick body in the chair. “I bet it's that good-fornothing husband of yours, that weakling from the Old Country only fit for working in the hardware store with Poppa. I bet—”

“Shut your mouth, Hokhmah. I heard enough about that already from Momma. I didn't want him in the first place. But the
oldest
daughter,” she sneered, “doesn't get asked her opinion, you know. She marries who she's told to marry in the Old Country.
You
were Momma's big hope.
You
were going to be the one who would bring the whole family up, maybe marry a man rich enough to move us all to a big city where Poppa might find a temple congregation, be a real rabbi again. So Momma could be the rabbi's wife again, like back in the village.”

Hokhmah unconsciously twisted and retwisted the damp bedsheet. “I
did
everything Momma said to. I quit college to help Poppa in the store. I helped her in the house. I helped Essie and you. I watched Avraham get sent
all
the way through college, and him only half so smart as me.”

“Hokhmah, you crazy or what?” Yetta chided. “Avraham would need to support a family in time. You know that.”

“And when Poppa died I took care of her. Other women my age had children already. That's how she'd taunt me. Never a word of thanks I stayed with her instead. All those years, singing only to myself in my room but quiet,
quiet
, so she wouldn't hear and have her heart wounded by my voice …”

Yetta sighed and wiped her glasses on her skirt hem. “So? Who knows? You think anybody else gets to do what they want? Life takes and does on you how it likes.”

But her sister rambled on, caught up in an eerie energy of bitterness. “I saved up my pennies scrimped from household money, and I bought the music and learned them in secret—all the arias I might have sung. All of them still there, fragments of melody inside my head, snatches never coming together whole—”

“Ach, you don't even know what you're saying anymore, Hokheleh, you're so tired—”

“Never one full coming-together American meal at home. Always the day-old bread, the cheapest cuts, always either dairy or meat, always the kosher kitchen even after Momma got sick and I had to keep it, her sharp eyes spying out when I tried to sneak and not wash everything separately—dishes, silverware, pots, pans.”

Yetta stared at her in amazement. “Now there's something wrong with keeping kosher? God's own Law isn't good enough for you? Like Broitbaum wasn't a good enough name for you? You always gotta be different?”

Hokhmah shut her eyes. “Oh, you don't know,” she said listlessly, “you don't even know what an aria
is
. What's the use of trying to make you understand?”

“It's
him
put that into your head,” Yetta grumbled. “Like Momma said, he might as well have come from
goyim
, your precious David. Not a religious man, not—”

“He's not Orthodox. He's an
educated
man, Yetta. And he did always fast on Yom Kippur.”

“I should give him a medal?”

“I bet him and Poppa would've liked each other, though. Educated men, I mean—”

“Poppa knew the Talmud like a genius. Your fancy David ain't good enough to clean Poppa's boots.”

Hokhmah buried her face in the pillow. Not to have to hear it anymore. Was that one of the reasons she had loved David? Because he taught her that she could eat ham and lobster and laugh about it and not be struck dead by Jehovah? Because he recognized what she was singing when she sang? She heard her sister rise and move about the small room, arguing with herself.

“Empty he was, your David, behind the eyes. I saw that. I saw it when I went with you to meet him and the other refugees at the dock. Momma knew. ‘We don't got troubles enough of our own?' she said to me. ‘Now Hokhmah has to play big-shot Miss Millionaire? She has to volunteer to sponsor some high-class snob who just discovered pogroms exist? Some pretend
goy
who wouldn't lower himself to speak to the likes of us in the old days?'
Nu?
Momma was wrong? Time proves.” Hokhmah could hear her busily rearranging the few items on the bedtable. “Momma saw the emptiness, when she met him.”

“I saw it, too, Yetta,” came the muffled reply, “but I knew it was there from—from loss. Not from what Momma said—‘a soul full of scorn.' Momma kept hissing any man who could slice cold steel through warm flesh somehow wasn't right.” Hokhmah lifted her face from the pillow. “So much for his being a surgeon, the divine doctor I thought would please her. The tall, light-brown-haired—almost blond even—professional man. The German Jew, the pick of the crop, not Polish-Russian border like us, pogrom-peasants. From Vienna yet, speaking four languages, and with the devil's cleft of a dimple in his chin.”

Yetta paused in her ministrations and nervously tucked a strand of her hair back into its bun. “I never knew what to say around him,” she shrugged, a gesture at indifference.

“You had plenty to say behind his back. I was reaching above my station, wasn't that it? Essie kept saying what would he want
me
for? You all thought he only wanted me for to be sponsored for citizenship. But I'd already done that, through the Jewish Refugee Committee. I knew he wanted me for—for something about
me.
”

Made uneasy by the longing in her sister's voice, Yetta retreated to her chair and lowered herself into it with a short groan. “So maybe,” she offered awkwardly, “we was all just jealous.” But Hokhmah, oblivious of both the offering and its cost, was helplessly tracing memories of her own loss.

“Merciful God, how I loved him! Everything about him—his immaculate hands with their clipped fingernails, the way he could order in French at a restaurant, how he took me to chamber-music concerts—even though he said the performances were ‘lamentably inferior' to those in Vienna. His English was so elegant, wasn't it, Yetta? So much better than mine, and I'd grown up speaking it, even. You know my heart would just stop, for pride, when I was with him? Because he said I was pretty. And with him I was. My skin, my eyes, I could
feel
them glow. With him I always held my head high, because he said I had the throat of a woman in a Klimt painting he'd show me someday. In some museum in Vienna, that I never got to see.” Yetta sat listening, an expression of spellbound wonderment on her face, like a child hearing a fairy-tale. “I
loved
him, don't you see? I loved the way he moved—crisp, never a gesture wasted. I loved even his suffering. The only one left of his whole family. Thirty-seven relatives swallowed up by the concentration camps and belched out in oven-smoke. His whole world gone. The Bechstein piano he'd learned to play Beethoven sonatas on, the fancy Biedermeier glass, the Augarten china. Skiing in Switzerland on school holidays, the Salzburg Festival every summer. Not for him the Judengasse section of Vienna. Did you know that one of his third cousins had married a Rothschilde? One of his greatuncles even converted …” She turned to her sister, who sat staring at her with an awestruck glimmer of comprehension. “Oh, what's the
use?
” she added in despair, “You can't possibly understand.”

Stung, Yetta threw back, “I understand. I understand he
used
you. He needed to be supported in comfort while he studied to take the American medical examinations. You gotta face it, Hokhmah,
face
it!”

“You understand
noth
—” Hokhmah's fierce gaze went blank, her sight wrenched inward as if listening for where the stabbing would puncture next. “Here it comes oh God God God here it comes again …”

This time the pain hit as a great wave, jagged edges of agony bobbing in its sweep like shards of glass that only a thousand years of tidal ebb and flow might smooth. She went under, surfaced, gasped for air, was pulled under again. She was distantly aware of her sister moving, shouting to her, trying to hold on to her against the convulsive pull and roar. Had she once been alive? Was that it? Was that what he'd loved her for? That she'd brought him life after all that death? “You have the pulse of life in you, my dear,” he'd said. She dove and swam in the hurt, a whole wide deep-sea underwater landscape of pain where she cried aloud in voiceless bubbles of oxygen
I loved him
. For having survived. For having realized what was happening to his beautiful rotting Europe. For having escaped and faked papers and crawled through sewers and worked with those surgeon's hands as a manual laborer. For moving on again and sleeping in railway stations and conning police and border officials with his perfect accents in French and Italian. For finally connecting to the Dutch underground and making it to England and to freedom … She floated free now, free and at home in the anguish. She was somebody else.
Est-ce toi, Marguérite, Est-ce toi?