Shining Through (25 page)

“Bad news, Herm?”

“They’re going to foreclose on the house, Betty.”

I don’t think she understood what he meant, but she understood how he felt. She put her arms around him, spoke to him so gently I couldn’t hear what she was saying, and then kissed him until he finally stopped crying.

She took his hand. “Everything’ll be fine, Herm.”

“Betty, honey—”

She turned his hand over and examined his palm. “Ooh! I see
lots
of good things. Lookit here, how the line kinda turns right.

You know what that means? Money!” My father laughed. “No kidding. Money. A long trip. And a beaver coat. Ha-ha, go ahead and laugh. You’ll see!”

My father kissed the top of her head, then her forehead, and when he took her in his arms, I’d walked away.

181

182 / SUSAN ISAACS

My mother had been quite a fortuneteller, though. Okay, no beaver coat, no trip. But money: The plant reopened and my father went back to work.

I bet anything he never forgot how much she believed in him and in the luck of their marriage. And I never forgot what it was like to look at an ordinary, down-on-their-luck middle-aged couple and be able to feel, across the room, the depth and power of true love.

So I knew what the real thing was, and I knew I didn’t have it. But at least I had a lot: a handsome, educated husband, a spacious apartment not more than thirty-five steps from Park Avenue, all the newspapers I could read and all the sex I could desire. My husband didn’t drink, gamble, beat me or womanize; he just didn’t love me.

But by a little more than a month after we’d been married, in late October 1940, I’d come to understand that John couldn’t really love anyone. Well, except for the Lelands, and maybe he didn’t even love them. He idolized or idealized them. This may not have been an electrifying news flash to anyone else, but one chilly Thursday night, it came to me like a shock.

It was about ten-thirty. I’d snuck up into the office at seven.

John’s new secretary, Anna—an older woman with a thick German accent, a gray, chopped-up Dutchboy haircut and glowing, slightly demented blue eyes, so she looked as if she was suffering from a mild case of whatever Hitler had—was not a bad secretary.

“But she’s so
slow
,” John said, almost an apology. He sat on the edge of what once had been my desk.

“I don’t mind. Honest.” I put my fingers back on the home line of the typewriter and peered at the steno pad. I’d begun transcribing the ton of letters he’d been dictating to me for the last three and a half hours. “It gives me something to do.”

“Would you rather be doing this than…” He paused and shifted so he almost sat on Anna’s pencil cup; I pulled it out from under him in time. “…than being a housewife?” Not counting the Are you, Do you, Can I questions he asked SHINING THROUGH / 183

during sex, this was the most personal question he’d ever asked me.

“I’d rather be married to you.” He didn’t look thrilled, but he didn’t look unthrilled, either: just neutral, as if I’d stated the obvious and he was waiting for more. “But it’s sometimes a little—you know—boring. There’s not much to do.” I went on,

“at least not till the baby comes. Especially if you’ve got my streak of German efficiency, you can get through the housework in—oh—an hour. Except on Tuesdays, when I iron your shirts—and what’s that, an extra thirty minutes? And how long does it take to make a pork chop presentable? I’ve got a
lot
of free time.”

“You don’t like all that leisure?”

“No. I know it sounds ungrateful, but I’m becoming
too
well-informed. I mean, I know the exact route of the invasion of Rumania and what the German army ate for lunch on October 7. I practically know the color of Antonescu’s socks.” (I also knew that on that same day, the Germans ordered all the Jews in occupied France to register with the authorities. For what?

I’d asked myself. But I knew it wasn’t a census to satisfy curiosity. The German military mind was purposeful; it didn’t make casual inquiries.)

“Look, Linda,” John began. But then he stopped.

“What? Oh, come on. I know something’s on your mind.”

“It’s not a particularly good idea for you to be seen here.”

“I’m your wife. Make believe I came by to say hello, or to drop off a pot roast sandwich so you wouldn’t be hungry.”

“I don’t mean in the office itself. I mean here.” He patted the desk.

“You mean it would be bad for morale if someone saw me doing your secretary’s work?” He nodded. “But Anna’s bad for
your
morale. She can’t do it all.” He nodded again. “Oh! Okay, I get it. You want me to say, ‘Poor John, you’re under so much pressure. Why don’t you bring a typewriter with a German keyboard
home
, so I can help you in all my free time?”

“Yes.” He smiled a little. “That’s what I want you to say.”

184 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Okay. I’ve said it. But you know, it would have been easier if you’d just come out and asked me.”

John sighed and gazed up at the ceiling for a second, looking for patience. He found it. “All right. Let’s leave now. Take the pad, and then you can arrange for a typewriter tomorrow.” He seemed so pleased at having handed over the details of his life to a more efficient secretary that, as he was helping me on with my coat, he said, “Let’s go out for dinner. I know a little French place that stays open late.”

Everyone at the little French place knew John, although they clearly had not been expecting me. The headwaiter bowed, though, did the merest twiddle of his mustache and said, “
Bon
soir, mademoiselle
.” To my real surprise, John corrected him:

“Madame Berringer.” Give the French credit: They fall apart in battle, but they’re imperturbable when it comes to affairs of the heart—or lower down. “Ah, Madame Berringer!” he said as he started to lead us to a table, and went into something fancy in French, which I assumed meant: Welcome to my humble abode, although, for all I knew, it could have meant: I see Monsieur Berringer knocked you up and had to marry you. He held out a chair for me. I prayed he wouldn’t kiss my hand. He didn’t.

He and John had a complicated French discussion then, and John turned to me. Apparently, it all boiled down to: Does Madame want chicken: I said, Sure, fine, and the man wriggled his mustache for a second and then left.

“I didn’t know you could speak French,” I said.

“Not as well as German, but I can manage.”

“Anything else I don’t know about you?” I watched him put his napkin on his lap and straighten out his silverware. “I mean, anything you want to tell me.”

“Well, no other languages. I’d like to learn Italian someday.”

“Tell me about your parents.”

He peered around the restaurant. There was only one other couple, older. The woman was wearing a corsage. Then he studied a mural on the wall to his left. It was Paris, SHINING THROUGH / 185

I guess, because it had the Eiffel Tower right smack in the middle.

The whole thing was kind of murky, so it was either Paris at dusk or the mural needed a good cleaning. “What about my parents?” he finally said.

“For starters, what were their names, what did your father do, did you have a happy childhood?”

“My father’s name was Charles. My mother’s was Julia.”

“So what were they like?” He shrugged. “What does”—I imitated his shrug—“mean? You don’t know, or you’re not talking?”

“I guess…it means I don’t really know. Honestly, I’m not trying to keep anything from you. It’s just that my parents were very quiet.”

“Did they ever say hi to you, or tell you to wear your galoshes?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What did your father do?”

“He worked in a bank on Long Island. He was a vice-president, but not…it was just a title. If you sat in that particular chair for twenty-five years, they called you a vice-president, but he was essentially a glorified transfer clerk.”

“And your mother?”

“She stayed at home.”

“And did what? Scrubbed floors? Gave fancy tea parties?”

“Neither.” Another waiter came, opened a bottle of wine and poured some for John to taste. John nodded. The waiter finished pouring and then bowed, as if he was taking leave of Louis the Something. “My mother’s family was one of the first families in Port Washington,” John said. “They settled there in the early seventeen hundreds.” I waited. “They didn’t have money, but they had a lot of…pride.” He took several too-eager sips of wine.

“It doesn’t look like you think pride’s a plus.”

“Well, in my mother’s case…it’s as if her pride, her snobbery about her background, was her one and only character trait. I remember once—I was nine or ten—I broke my 186 / SUSAN ISAACS

wrist in gym. We were climbing ropes, and I fell. They called her from school and she took me to the doctor’s. We were sitting there a
long
time. My wrist was getting more and more swollen.”

“It must have hurt like hell.”

“It did. And so finally I said, ‘Mother, could you ask how much longer it’s going to be?’ I mean, she was just sitting there, her hands clasped in her lap, looking straight ahead—not at me, not at my wrist, not even at a magazine. So she got up, and I heard her talking to the nurse or receptionist or whatever. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but all of a sudden she lost control. She raised her voice. Really raised it. ‘My family was living in this town while Dr. Russo’s family were still apes in Italy.’”

“Oh, God.”

“I just kept staring at my wrist. My fingers were starting to swell too. And I kept thinking she didn’t even flinch when she saw my wrist. She’d just spent an entire hour sitting next to me when I was in so much pain—and the only thing she could get worked up about was her lineage. A family tree, but so what?

It was a tree that was completely undistinguished; the only thing to be said for it was that it was tenacious. It held on through the years—didn’t die out.”

This was not the moment to clue him in that he didn’t have to explain “tenacious.” “Did her tree cut any ice with your father?”

“I think so, when they first got married. He was from New Jersey somewhere, and came to Long Island to work in the bank.

I got the impression he’d believed he was marrying into this great American family, a kind of Port Washington Adams clan.

So they wound up being disappointed in each other. He never became a great financier; he stayed a bank clerk. The most interesting thing that ever happened to him was he got bald; I remember he used to touch the top of his head all the time, as if he couldn’t believe his hair had gone. So he was a disappointment to her. And she wasn’t the Junior League charmer he’d thought he was marrying. For

SHINING THROUGH / 187

all her airs, she wasn’t invited
anywhere
. She had no personality to speak of, no…” His voice faded as he looked straight at me.

“No what?” He couldn’t seem to come up with the word. “No class?” I asked.

“I suppose that’s it.”

“So she played gracious lady to an audience of none, and he pushed papers around.” He nodded. “How did you turn out so good?” I saw his expression. “Oh, come on! You know what I mean. So
well
. They must have been smart, terrific-looking.”

“Well, my father was handsome…in a bland, clerkish way.”

“Which one had the brains?”

“Neither one of them, really.” He turned back to his wine.

“So what did you do for laughs as a kid?”

“Nothing special. I had friends to play ball with, but I never was, um, one of the boys. I was too serious for that. You see, I really liked school. More than liked it. I loved it. My mind came alive in high school.”

“Came
alive?
” Oh, come off it, I thought.

“You sound so contemptuous of education…like everyone I went to high school with.”

“And where are they now? you’re going to say. Mopping floors. Punching tickets on the Long Island Rail Road. Right?”

He smiled and said, “Right.” Then the waiter came with chicken pieces hanging around in a sauce with a lot of mushrooms and tiny onions. I tasted it.

“Hey,” I said, “this is great! I thought all that stuff about French food was a lot of bull, but—”

“I’m glad you like it.” I could have been chewing on the tablecloth, for all he noticed; he was staring at the mural of Paris again and chewing his bottom lip. His parents obviously weren’t his favorite subject.

“Your parents died in a car crash?”

“In ’29. A couple of weeks after Black Tuesday.”

188 / SUSAN ISAACS

“How did their death hit you?” He shrugged. “I know you didn’t say ‘Whoopee!’ But were you…shattered? stunned?”

“Well, obviously I hadn’t expected it, but really, I was in law school, and I’d hardly seen them since I started Columbia. I used to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas with friends’ families.”

“Your parents never said, ‘Hey, John, join us for candied yams’?”

“No.”

“Weren’t they hurt that you didn’t come home?”

“Hurt?” He looked so startled. I realized then that Mom and Pop Berringer weren’t the type to pick up the phone and croon a chorus of “Sonny Boy.” John refilled his wineglass, held it up to the light of the candle on the table and stared into its depths.

That was obviously it for the Berringers.

So I moved on. “Did you use to come here with Nan?”

“What?”

“Nan,” I repeated. “Here.”

“Oh. Sometimes. We had five or six places we liked to go.”

“Did she ever cook?”

“Not usually. Well, she cooked selected things. She could make cheese toast and roast a duck and prepare a good salad dressing. Oh, and make a salad.”

“But you didn’t have duck and salad every night. Or cheese toast.”

“No. But we liked to get out.”

“Don’t get mad at me if I ask one question.” John’s shoulders hunched up, as if he already was. “Relax. It’s not such an awful question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you have fun with her?”

“I…valued her beyond anything I can express.” He looked at me; his eyes began to take on the Nan Leland Berringer shine.

“I loved her.”

“Why?”

“Why did I love her? For her intellect—”