Shining Through (7 page)

Well, she waited for someone wonderful to come along, and he never did.

George Armbruster walked back into my life when I was twenty-eight. As George said: “Hey, twenty-eight’s a lot older than the last time I saw you. But you still got a pretty face.” Then he gave me the once-over. “I bet the rest of you’s not bad, either.”

By Ridgewood standards, George was a very eligible bachelor.

He was an electrician who’d moved somewhere on Long Island but who had his own shop on Metropolitan Avenue and his mother had just died. What could be more perfect? We’d gone to the same high school, and one Saturday when I was at the grocery store communing with a slab of Swiss cheese, he came up beside me. I said hello. Despite a hairline that had inched backward, the face was familiar; he was one of a pack of boys in my English or civics class—the sort of boys who laugh sneaky har-har-hars, and until you see who they’re laughing at, you’re always afraid it’s you. But he was alone now, and seemed okay enough. He said, I forgot your name. Linda Voss. Yeah, that’s right. George Armbruster. You were at Grover Cleveland, right?

He came calling every night. Olga had been thrilled. Holding down a decent job in 1937. So what if he was Lutheran. He was very attentive. And okay, no one would ever say, “Hiya, handsome” to him, but good looks don’t pay the rent.

Even right after he shaved, George’s beard looked dark, like the bully in comics. That wasn’t so bad, but he had eyes, nose and a mouth just slightly less appealing than everyone else’s; there was not a single thing about him to go Ooh, how nice!

No great eyelashes or broad shoulders or even interesting ears.

And while he claimed he was five eight, I was just 42 / SUSAN ISAACS

under five five, and you could have drawn a straight line over our heads.

I said to myself, Well, it takes time to get to warm up to some people. What do I have but time? My front door didn’t have dents from eligible bachelors pounding on it.

Besides, George wasn’t awful. In fact, he was slender and even graceful, like Leslie Howard from the neck down if he’d been an electrician. And he traveled in style. No subway: George had private transportation, his own truck. On the door was painted “ARMbruster Electricals,” and just below that, an arm with a grapefruit-sized muscle.

Every night, rain, shine or sleet, there was George at the door.

Olga beamed and my mother actually risked her makeup to smile when George came for me and said Hiya.

Hiya, he said that first night, as we walked down the wooden stairs from the front porch onto the street. Howya doing?

Fine. I was a nervous wreck. I had a whole list of subjects to talk about, courtesy of the girls at the office. If he was going to be the strong, silent type, I would have to keep the conversation ball rolling all by myself. But conversation wasn’t necessary.

George talked all the time.

“Wanna come see my shop? Hey, I got this new job in Glend-ale. I’m telling you, one more day and the place woulda been on fire. Never saw wiring like that in my life. I turned on my flashlight and thought, Jee-sus, this looks like a plate of Italian spaghetti. And the fuse box! Lemme tell you, it…”

Maybe I’d watched too many movies. Maybe I was a romantic sap. But maybe I’d been alone too long. This was obviously the way men and women talked, and I’d better get used to it.

We arrived at his shop, that first night and every other night for the three months we went together. Oh, boy—went together.

Well, what else should I call it?

“So that George is coming around a lot,” my mother observed.

“Guess it’s serious, huh?” My mother, who gener-SHINING THROUGH / 43

ally went off drinking before George came to the door, passed him now and then on her way out, when she was still sober, so she remembered him. After the second time, she pulled me aside and said, “He certainly is…well…You know how they talk about good things in small packages. Not that he’s
that
small. Having a good time with him?” Another time she giggled and started humming “Here Comes the Bride.”

My Grandma Olga had the time of her life, telling the butcher, the grandson of the man my Grandpa Otto used to work for: Linda and George Armbruster are keeping company. The butcher said, Oh; he hooked up my refrigerator. Every morning at breakfast, Olga demanded, “Tell me about last night.”

Well, I’d say, we had coffee with some friends of his. We went to a movie. The one I saw last week, but I sure didn’t tell him that. Olga would nod, smile. We went dancing at the Trylon Terrace. We went to Coney Island and went on the rides. We went to the city, to a restaurant that had candles on the table.

He’s a real gentleman. Olga agreed. She could see that; George always got me home by nine at the latest.

But none of that was true. That first night and every night…three guesses. We never really needed the truck because we never went anywhere except to his shop. In the back was a couch with an itchy green afghan his mother had finished crocheting the month before she died.

“Come on,” he said, and started to unbutton his shirt.

“George!” I couldn’t believe what he wanted me to do, and boy, did I ever let him know it.

“Come
on
,” he insisted. I shook my head no. “Hey, Linda, you’re so pretty. I wanna see a pretty figure to match that face.”

He turned on a light bulb hanging from an old electrical cord.

And I let him see.

Me, who had never let a boy in high school do more than kiss me good night, and after high school, not much more. I let George take off all my clothes in that dim, flickering 44 / SUSAN ISAACS

light. He was trying to unhook my brassiere, and I was looking at the light bulb and thinking: Some lousy electrician, some rotten connection. Me, who had the guts to tell one of the senior partners in the first law firm I’d worked for, Listen, Mr. McCal-lister, I’m not that kind of girl. Well, I was.

For a little more than twelve weeks, I let George Armbruster do anything he wanted on a couch that smelled like it had gotten rained on two years before and never really dried. Not that George’s anything was such a big deal. I thought: This is what people make such a big to-do about?

What went on between men and women seemed like Thanksgiving turkey: Everyone always says, “Great!” even though it’s invariably dry and disappointing.

And then one night he stopped coming around. George has a real bad cold, I told my mother. He called me at work, still has a fever, I said to Olga. George is getting better, but he has a big job in Brooklyn. I kept it up for nearly two weeks.

I stopped because one night I came home from work and Olga pulled me aside and said, “The butcher took me to the back room, with the sink.”

“What?” I figured, Oh, God, now we’re in for it. It’s bad enough with three fourths of the neighbors. Now the butcher’s going on about my mother’s being a drunk. Maybe she took off her panties again.

“He feels bad about you.”

“About
me?
The butcher?”

“About you and that George Armbruster.”

“What about George Armbruster?”

Olga kept her head down. She chopped an onion. She muttered, “About that he’s married.”

“Married?”

“Ten years.” She chopped. “Right after school. He got married then. When everybody else did.”

Olga died the next year. Her heart gave out. So many times in those two years since she’d been gone, I’d thought: Maybe she would have managed to hang on if she’d just had SHINING THROUGH / 45

George Armbruster to believe in. She could have been alive, believing in me and George, except for that damn big-mouth butcher.

Instead, she left me alone with the mop and my mother.

3

J
ohn Berringer could hardly bear the loss of his wife. He looked terrible, and boy, did that make me feel good. Dark gray circles appeared under his eyes, and their glorious deep blue glint died.

His glow faded. It’s not that he wasn’t still gorgeous, but he was now gorgeous and in pain; you could see it. His skin was chalky. His lips were almost white. And you know what I thought, watching him suffering? Wonderful.

I know I sound like a monster, but I really wasn’t that bad. I think I was just hoping that as John got closer to the end of his rope, he’d need someone to grab on to. And who better than me? There I was, only four feet away, in my good white blouse with the soft, floppy bow at the neck.

He rubbed his face. “We have about another hour,” he said.

“Can you manage?”

“Yes, Mr. Berringer.”

It was after seven, dark, silent. Nothing is deader than Wall Street at night and—sure, corny—it was as if we were the only two people left in the world. He’d loosened his tie a little, so I got a bonus: a couple of extra inches of neck, the smooth part, where he didn’t have to shave. I would have loved to kiss him right there. I smiled; if I was the only girl left in the world, maybe he’d let me.

He saw me smiling.
So
embarrassing. I couldn’t decide whether to pass it off as a cooperative smile or, because it may have looked something more than cooperative, to make up a boyfriend: Sorry, Mr. Berringer, just thinking about, 46

SHINING THROUGH / 47

um, Joseph. Everyone calls him Big Joe. We’re kind of engaged to be engaged, and…

“All right,” he said, “let’s get to work.” I could have taken out my teeth and strung them on a necklace in a permanent grin; he wouldn’t have noticed. “We still have the Hayn matter and…”

His voice faded. For a second, he looked at the papers spread out all over his desk. He looked more than sad; he looked desperate, as if he knew his mind was somewhere in the room and his job was to find it.

That’s how I knew what bad shape he was in. John’s mind was always under control, whirring away like a perfect machine—even when all the other lawyers were sitting around looking like some lower, dopey form of animal life.

“We have Grunberg to take care of,” I said, trying to help him.

“And we’re a little behind on the Schaaf matter too.” He looked at me. His shadowed eyes looked empty, like the eye holes in the tragedy mask at the Roxy.

The work! It was too much. I felt as lousy as he looked. We came in before seven every morning and stayed late just trying to stop the clients’ fright from turning into panic. It wasn’t easy.

There was no one terrible event that March 1940, but each night the world grew worse. Turn on the radio, pick up a paper, and the only names on earth seemed to be Hitler and Mussolini.

One evil, one deranged, and they grew huge, thriving as Europe sickened. And as their blight spread, the clients wouldn’t leave us alone. Those beady little corporation eyes that had been gleaming at the thought of the rich fascist war machine the month before were suddenly blinky, nervous; now all they wanted was to see their way out: Can you tell us what the situation is? What they really wanted to know was: Will everything be all right? And their only hope was that John Berringer—brilliant, calm, masterful—would tell them, Don’t worry. What they all wanted to hear was, Everything’s going to be just fine.

They probably would have paid him double to hear it, but he wouldn’t have taken their money. He was too ethical. He was the best kind of international lawyer. He didn’t just 48 / SUSAN ISAACS

come up with a solid contract. He had the patience and the brains to explain to his big corporate clients how the German system worked. He didn’t just speak its language. He understood its laws, its ways of doing business, its people. But every day John was making transatlantic calls that didn’t get through. He was writing letters to people who no longer answered. Then he had to go back to the clients and say the words nobody wants to hear from a lawyer: I can’t help you.

“Mr. Berringer?” I said softly. He jumped, as though I’d just come into the room and yelled Boo! “If you have a lot of prepar-ation, I could come in real early tomorrow and we could finish the dictation then.” Maybe I was no diplomat, but it was better than saying, Hey, listen, you’d better get a good night’s sleep or you’re gonna find yourself on a funny farm.

If a man has some pleasure in one half of his life—home, work—he can usually take pretty much what the other half has to dish out. But in those weeks, what did he have? Hysterical bankers weeping on his desk in the office—and a lot of extra closet space at home. No wonder he looked like Boris Karloff’s first cousin.

And he just sat there, helpless. This had never been a helpless man. His face tilted upward, as if he was looking past me, at the door or beyond. Oh, how I could have kissed that neck, slipped my hand under the shirt and rubbed his shoulders, his chest.

“Mr. Berringer?” I whispered. Nothing. He’d forgotten he was handsome. He didn’t remember he was charming. He closed his eyes and exhaled a sigh, not even trying to cover up how loud it was. He simply didn’t know what he was doing. “About six tomorrow morning,” I said. Nothing. “Six, Mr. Berringer?”

“Six,” he repeated, but I wasn’t sure if he got me.

“In the morning.”

“Of course,” he said at last. “Of course, Miss Voss.”

SHINING THROUGH / 49

Gladys smiled, but to me, Friday night did not signal freedom or fun. All it meant was the beginning of two days of being overwhelmed by the ordinary, two days without John to make my life come alive. So what the hell: I took a gulp of my whiskey sour, but since I’d spent lunch hour filing, the alcohol went straight north. Not that it made me silly. I didn’t leap up on the cocktail table and begin a soft-shoe routine. The liquor just made the sides of my head sensitive; I was suddenly aware of the weight of my ears. It was the kind of feeling that signaled: You should be home.

So why was I sitting in the Blue Elephant, a cocktail lounge for third-rate lawyers and washed-up stockbrokers, a place so dark you couldn’t see the last guy’s greasy lip-prints on your glass, even though you just knew they were there? To get whatever highly sensitive, top-secret information Gladys Slade had picked up on John or Nan or Mr. Leland. And also to keep her company.

The only company Gladys had at home was a radio and the
Reader’s Digest
. A couple of times I’d been up to the third-floor room she rented in an area of Brooklyn with no name, south of Greenpoint. The wallpaper was so old the roses had turned brown. Even on Christmas, her landlady never once said, Come on, have a cup of eggnog with my family; Gladys had to mail her rent check because the family that lived in the rest of the house wanted “privacy.”