Leaving Brooklyn (9 page)

I thought of my mother's cold cream and my father's shaving cream, which I had seen them spread on their faces with three fingers. After a bit of this, the husband replenishing the saliva from time to time, they could lie down again.

Now came the moment for his bride's single initiative: when “ready,” she was supposed to tell him to “come up over.” My body jerked with an electric shock when I first read those words, and every time after, too, I shuddered and winced as I felt them approaching on the page. Through my unwilling eyes the words suffused me with shame; what mortified me was not the invitation itself but the unnatural coupling of objectless prepositions, the vast and ominous clumsiness of the phrase. It seemed even more keenly peculiar under the circumstances, since no other words were apparently spoken.

“Come on over,” which sounded almost the same, and so amiable and smooth, was a way of inviting someone to your house. But “up over”? I recalled the dogs on the field at twilight years ago, when our gamboling parade celebrated the bomb that ended the war. The black dog really was “up over.” But people in such positions? The words suggested very different sorts of activities: mountain climbing, or scaling fire escapes and roofs, as I did in the apartment building of friends around the corner on Montgomery Street. Or Red Rover, which we played in the streets on summer evenings, when the light lasted forever and the parents sat out on the porches reading newspapers and eating cherries and watermelon. One child got down on all fours and the others leaped over her in turn. “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Audrey come over.” I would put my hands on the back of the crouching girl or boy, straddle, and leapfrog over.

And “come up over” what? Over the bride herself. She was referring to herself, her body, but not naming herself—no pronoun to satisfyingly close the scaling prepositions. The words were maddening, itching with incompleteness and balked expectations. I would have to do those things someday, and though they seemed alien and absurd—especially having someone's spit
all over me—I didn't worry about it, I assumed I would grow into it like everyone else. But those words? I could never, never speak them. It pained me to think the skilled and graceful heroines in the movies spoke them after they were married. Maybe the book was wrong. That might not be the only way to go about it, or even the correct way. My father was always telling my mother not to believe everything she read.

In any event, I was older now. I knew enough not to barge through a closed door. I took another step down the hall and saw that in fact the door was open a few inches. There was a faint light I recognized as the flicker from the television screen. I had badgered my parents so much about the gloom—playing on their conformities, quoting
The Ladies' Home Journal
and its six sister magazines on the subject of the home as an open, cheerful place to which a child should be proud to invite her friends—that they had moved the TV upstairs to their bedroom, restoring light to the living room.

Edging closer, I heard low canned voices, one of which I knew well. Safe. They were watching “Break the Bank.”

“Are you up?” I said, and nudged the door open a few more inches. My parents' heads turned from the TV set to me, parallel forty-five-degree angles. They were sitting side by side, my father in his striped pyjamas and my mother in a scoop-necked sleeveless nylon nightgown. Very neat and chaste, with the covers drawn up to their chests. One of my father's hands was invisible; something moving under the covers, clearly his missing hand, stopped abruptly.

“If you insist on going with me,” I said to my mother, “we'd better arrange where to meet after school.”

“What do you mean, if I insist? You're my child. I have to see what this doctor proposes to do to you.”

“Okay! So where do you want to—”

“Quiet!” exclaimed my father, raising his free hand as if to stave off an aggressor. “Hold it a minute, will you? He's almost ready to break the bank.”

I entered and condescended to look at the screen. The category was biblical figures. I sat down on the edge of the bed. Bert Parks asked a moon-faced man with a bow tie the name of Samson's father, and the man answered promptly and correctly. Manoah. Clamorous applause and clanging of bells, lights flashing.

“Amazing,” said my mother. “Amazing, the intelligence of some people.”

My father nodded his head several times, tightening his lips, grudgingly impressed. He lit a cigar, tossing away the gold ring he used to give to me.

One more correct answer and the round man would break the bank, winning one hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars.

“I knew that too,” I said.

“Really? So what are you doing sitting here?” my father snapped. “Go on TV, make yourself useful.'”

“I did know,” I protested.

“Okay, okay. I didn't mean any harm. Quiet.”

The TV camera panned the audience. The faces were glazed with suspense, the bodies leaning forward as one stiff, excited body.

“To break the bank, can you tell me,” said Bert Parks, “what biblical warrior promised God to sacrifice the first of his possessions that he saw, if he could return home from battle victorious, and ended up sacrificing his own daughter?”

Silence. The contestant clasped his hands and rolled his big eyes heavenward, his Adam's apple jiggling above the bow tie. Bert Parks inclined his body helpfully towards him. My father puffed on his cigar. My mother's lips parted.

“Five seconds,” said Bert Parks.

“Jephthah,” I said.

My mother tilted her head towards me with a trace of apprehension. “What did you say?”

“Jephthah,” I enunciated clearly.

A long buzz sounded and the studio audience groaned in unison.

“Sorry,” said Bert Parks, “the correct answer is Jephthah.”

I shrugged.

“How do you like that? She broke the bank,” said my mother. She kept staring at me, as though she had created a monster. “Did you hear that?” She prodded my father.

“Very smart, Audrey. Very smart. Jephthah, eh?”

“Uh-huh.” A commercial for spark plugs was coming on. The spark plugs were dancing to a tune everyone in Brooklyn knew.

Finally he grinned. “You really broke the bank,” he conceded. “Goddamn! Not bad, Audrey, not bad. Jephthah. Ha! So what else do you know?”

“He didn't intend to sacrifice her. He promised the first thing he saw as he got near his house. He must have figured it would be a cow or a sheep or something, but it turned out his daughter was running down the road to congratulate him. So, you know what God is like, he had to keep his promise.”

“How do you like that?” mused my mother. “You could have won over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“How'd you get so smart?” asked my father.

“I read. I don't watch quiz shows.”

“Smart aleck. Maybe you don't even need to go to college, you know so much already.”

This was our way of raising important issues. The issue of college would be a touchy one, I knew. They assumed I would go to Brooklyn College as other girls in the neighborhood did; they knew nothing yet of my dreams of the Sorbonne, or at least of somewhere outside Brooklyn.

“His mother was a harlot, actually,” I added. “Jephthah's.”

“What has that got to do with it?” asked my mother.

“I don't know. Nothing, maybe. Just a fact.”

“So what was the daughter's name,” asked my father, “if you know so much?”

Audrey, I wanted to snap back, thinking of the contact lens appointment tomorrow, and all the times, when I was small and shy, that he had forced me to say hello to his card players. But it
might sound a trifle hyperbolic. “She didn't have a name, as far as I know. I mean, she didn't really need one, did she? She just had to put her head on the block.”

“I was under the impression that Jews just sacrificed cattle,” said my mother.

“That's true. This was an exception. Oh, she was also a virgin.”

“Well, she wasn't married, she was still living in her father's house. I should hope so.”

“We wouldn't want her following in her grandmother's footsteps.” My father relit the cigar that had gone dead in the ashtray.

“But she felt bad about that.”

“I can certainly understand that,” said my mother.

A new contestant was introduced, a slender young man with glasses and greasy hair, who chose the category of Sports Figures.

“The Greeks have a general sacrificing his daughter to win a battle too,” I continued. “Or, specifically, to make the wind blow so his ships can sail.”

“I really don't care for all this talk about sacrificing children.” My mother had had three miscarriages and, finally, me. She believed, or professed, that children were sacred. She and my father were so grateful when I was born, and healthy too, she had told me. So grateful that they forgot to mention the eye injury in the hospital. What was a little smudge after three losses?

“Max Schmeling!” declared my father. This was in answer to a Sports Figures question: What German boxer did Joe Louis defeat in 1938 to keep his world heavyweight championship title? My father won twelve thousand dollars.

“Oh, I remember that fight. We heard it on the radio with Lou and Belle. It was before you were born, Audrey. I must have been almost pregnant, though.”

“It was a great fight,” said my father, “because in 1938
everyone wanted to see him knock out a Kraut, and he did. He finished him off in the first round. Quiet. Here's another.”

The next question concerned football, in which none of us had any interest, so I said, “The difference between the Greek general and the Jewish one is that the Greek sacrificed her in order to get started, but Jephthah did it afterwards. I mean, the battle was already won, so… Doesn't that seem a little bit, you know, too much?”

“You said yourself, he had to keep his word,” replied my father.

“Maybe he could have broken his word and sacrificed himself.”

“That's not the point. He was acting for a whole nation. He had to overlook personal considerations. That's what men do in time of war.”

“Yeah, what does anyone's private suffering matter in the long run, right? You can probably even get to enjoy it if you practice enough.”

My father pointed the glowing cigar at me. “What are you implying, Audrey? That Jews like to suffer? You know what kind of people say that? Do you know what that kind of attitude can lead to? I'm surprised at you.”

Good. I loved to surprise them. They needed to be surprised.

“I don't think it has anything to do with Jews. I think it's a shame either way. Before, after,” said my mother. “I don't see any difference. A child is a child in any religion.”

“Actually Jephthah's daughter wasn't the only exception,” I said. “Look at Abraham and Isaac. I mean, what kind of God could expect that? That surprises me. It really does. It goes against everything he himself taught. Be fruitful and multiply? Thou shalt not kill? Did he forget? Frankly, I always thought Abraham would have been a better person if he refused. I mean, God has lower moral standards than the people he created.”

“It was only a test. It didn't happen in the end, remember.”

“Oh, sure, at the last minute. Big deal. He made his point,
though. And what if it had been a minute later?” I was standing up and pacing around the room, gesticulating as my father did when he got excited. “But as a test of character I would say, in my opinion, Abraham failed. Some parent. I mean, that's some example he sets. It doesn't exactly inspire the younger generation with trust, does it? Not to mention faith in God. Oh sure, I should believe in someone who would tell my parents to sacrifice me so easily, just to see if they were really obedient. Did anyone ever think of how Isaac felt? Wasn't he a person too? Or just a thing to play around with to prove something?”

“Look here, I don't appreciate it any more than you do,” said my father. “But I don't want to hear you criticizing your own people. There are enough of the others who criticize us. You don't understand the first thing about all this. Wars have been fought because people spread wrong ideas. Now move out of the way. I can't see the screen.”

“Audrey.” My mother gave me her shrewd, to-thine-own-self-be-true look. “What are you carrying on for? It's just a contact lens. You know it's for your own good.”

I sighed. Bert Parks and the greasy young man were back. The question was about hockey. I went to the door. “How about if I meet you at the Utica Avenue subway at three-thirty? At the change booth.”

“Okay, three-thirty. Wear something nice. We'll be in the city.”

The dreaded day arrived. With my mother, I ventured on the subway from Brooklyn to Park Avenue in mythic Manhattan, a mere river away, though it felt like another planet as we emerged into brilliant light. Park Avenue with its sleek buildings and uniformed doormen was awash in sunlit glamour—it was a warm September and the kind of day when each grain of mica in the sidewalk gleams. I was stepping on the jeweled pavements that had brought my grandparents here in the first place. Everyone on the street was slim and fair and brushed to perfection. Everyone was of a higher order of being, including the doormen. I had the absurd feeling I might not understand
the language spoken here. The cars were faster and larger and shinier. The traffic lights twinkled brighter. Even the sky seemed a better blue, an impossibly sophisticated blue.

We passed a magnificent old church, reddish nubby stone, warm, grand contours. I had never seen anything like it in Brooklyn, even though Brooklyn was called the City of Churches—puzzlingly, since nearly everyone I knew there was Jewish. I wanted to stop and look but my mother hurried me along, saying we mustn't be late. I knew she wouldn't stop on the way back either. She could not be true to herself and admire a church.