The Auerbach Will Read online

  The three men in the room, who were dressed in dark business suits and vests, stood up when Essie was presented to them. The woman remained seated. The men, she thought, were very formal, and somewhat curt and frosty, in their greetings to her. Only Jake’s father, who was tall, plump and bespectacled, smiled when he took her hand. The uncles were both short, heavy, and bald. Jake had once described them to her as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and, indeed, they might almost have been indistinguishable, except for the fact that Uncle Mort had a handlebar mustache, and Uncle Sol was clean-shaven. Jake’s mother was a tall, thin, fair-haired, nervous-seeming woman with blue eyes—years later, in Essie’s own daughter Joan, Essie would see echoes of Joan’s paternal grandmother, Lily Auerbach—and Essie could see why, to those who named her, she might have called to mind a lily. She wore a simple long dress of watered black moiré with long sleeves, and her only ornamentation was a triple strand of pearls at her throat and a large bright stone on her ring finger.

  “Here, come sit by me,” Lily Auerbach said, patting the seat of the long red damask sofa, and Essie knew instantly that she looked all wrong, in her green party dress, in that crimson room. “Jake tells me that you live on Norfolk Street,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me—where is that?”

  “Near Grand Street,” she said. Surely everyone knew Grand Street. It was one of the widest streets in the neighborhood.

  “Grand … I’m afraid I really don’t know that part of town at all. What an interesting dress,” she said, and then added, “Very pretty.”

  Jake Auerbach cleared his throat. “Mother—” he began.

  His mother raised her left index finger slightly. At that moment the butler had reappeared, now wearing a white coat, carrying a large silver tea tray which held a heavy silver teapot, a silver covered pitcher of hot water, a silver creamer and sugar bowl, silver teaspoons, and teacups of the thinnest white porcelain Essie had ever seen. He placed the tray on a low table in front of Mrs. Auerbach.

  “Thank you, Marks.”

  As she lifted the pot to pour, the polished silver cast paler reflections on Lily Auerbach’s pale face.

  “One lump or two, Miss Litsky?”

  “One, thank you.”

  “Lemon or milk?”

  “Lemon, please.”

  Lily Auerbach handed her a teacup with its spoon in the saucer and, under the saucer, a small, lace-edged napkin. Essie, whose hand shook slightly, accepted the teacup and placed it on the small table in front of her.

  “I was so happy that you could come today, Miss Litsky,” Lily Auerbach said. “Tomorrow, you see, we leave for a few days at the shore.”

  A maid appeared in a gray starched uniform with starched white collar and cuffs, a little white cap pinned in her hair, with another silver tray. She offered it to Mrs. Auerbach first, and then to Essie. The tray was arranged with a number of little sandwiches on the thinnest of white bread. Essie accepted a sandwich, saw that it contained what appeared to be a thin slice of turkey. She also noticed that both slices of trimmed bread were spread with butter. Without even looking at Jake, she took a bite of her sandwich, thereby breaking for the first time in her life the dietary laws. Somehow this deed gave her a sudden small burst of confidence, and she lifted her teacup in its saucer, with the napkin underneath, lifted the spoon and, with hands that didn’t shake at all, stirred her tea, replaced the spoon in its saucer, lifted the cup and took a sip, all the while feeling Lily Auerbach’s blue eyes upon her.

  Throughout the tea, Lily Auerbach guided the conversation, and kept it on a level of trivialities and current events. She talked of the family’s summer plans—in addition to the seashore, there was to be a holiday in the Adirondacks. She spoke of Elberon, and Saranac Lake. And wasn’t it dreadful to read about the terrible earthquake and fire in San Francisco? But wasn’t it exciting to think of the new canal that was finally going to be dug in Panama? How did everyone feel about President Roosevelt being the first President in history to leave the United States during his term of office to go to Panama for the groundbreaking? What sort of precedent might that set? How did Essie feel about all the suffragettes who were popping up everywhere campaigning for votes for women? What would women do if they had the vote? In Lily’s opinion, if women had the vote, there would be no difference in the outcome of elections, because women would simply vote the way their husbands did. All it would do would add another burden to the taxpayers, because there would be double the number of ballots to be counted. The men answered her light questions with grunts and monosyllables. What did they think of this woman, Emma Goldman? Was she really for complete anarchy? How silly … more tea?

  And in the middle of this deliberately idle chatter, Essie had a sudden insight. It was not Uncle Sol and Uncle Mort who ran the show. Uncle Sol might be the president of his company, and Uncle Mort might be the vice-president, and Jake’s father might toil away in a little office wearing a green eyeshade and going over his ledger sheets. But the person who ran the show was Lily Auerbach. Jake was wrong.

  Only once did Lily bring up the subject of marriage, even obliquely, when she said, “Jake tells me that your father feels that it is time for you to marry, Miss Litsky. But he tells me that you are only sixteen. Isn’t that terribly young?”

  “My school is finished,” Essie said. “And unless I marry, or go to work, I will become a burden.”

  “I see.”

  When tea was finished, and after the tea things had been removed by the servants, Lily Auerbach turned to her son and said, “Jake, dear, I think you will understand if we say that the rest of us would like to have a few words with Miss Litsky alone.”

  “Of course, Mother.” He stood up and left the room through the double doors.

  There was a little silence, and then Lily Auerbach leaned forward in the red damask sofa. “Miss Litsky—” she began, “let us be frank—it seems to us a very strange thing that our son wants to do.” She spoke of our son in such a way as to imply that his uncles also shared his parentage. Clearly, in some way, there was a feeling that he belonged to all of them.

  “Yes, strange,” said Uncle Mort, speaking up for the first time. “Even in a lifetime of wanting to do strange things.”

  Lily ignored this, and continued, “There is the great difference in your backgrounds, for one thing—socially, economically, and culturally. Jake has been brought up in a world of certain privilege. Your background is—let us be frank—more humble. These vast differences—”

  “If you think you’re marrying him for his money, you’re wrong,” Uncle Sol said. “He hasn’t any.”

  “Now, Sol,” Lily said, “we agreed to take up these matters one at a time.”

  Somehow, knowing that her principal adversary was another woman made Essie feel emboldened, even daring. She sat forward in her chair and said, “Yes, Mrs. Auerbach, I know what you mean. By your standards, we are a poor family. I was born in Russia, in a little town I don’t remember because I was less than a year old when my parents brought me to America. But by our standards, we are a very fortunate family. My father is an intellectual and a scholar of the Talmud, and my mother has worked very hard to give my brother and myself the things we have. Because of this, I have been able to have much more education than other girls my age in our neighborhood. My family sets great store by education. In my neighborhood, other girls go to work in factories when they are twelve or thirteen. I have never had to go to work, other than to help my mother when she needs me. It is true that we live in a small apartment, so small—” She looked about her. “So small that it would not even take up one tiny corner of this big room, and you must climb four narrow flights of stairs to reach it, and there are only two rooms, and we share a bathroom with a neighbor on the floor below. Our idea of luxury is—a Victrola. You may think of us as poor, Mrs. Auerbach, but we do not think of ourselves that way. We have always paid all our bills, and we have never had to accept a penny’s worth of charity from any
one, as others do, all the time. You may think of me as a humble person, Mrs. Auerbach, but I do not think of myself that way. I think of myself as privileged—and proud.”

  Her eyelids lowered, Lily Auerbach nodded. “Then there is another matter, a cultural matter. Your family practices an Orthodox form of our religion that is still practiced in the Old World, in countries where Jews have—let us be frank—been held backward, and repressed. We practice what we consider a more enlightened form, more suited to America, and we have practiced this in this country for three generations of our family. For two young people who wish to marry, these cultural differences can be very difficult to reconcile.”

  “I think,” said Essie, “that in our discussions Jake and I have already reconciled those differences.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Get down to brass tacks, Lily!” Uncle Sol said sharply.

  “Yes,” she said. “Miss Litsky, has Jake told you that he has seen an alienist?”

  “An alienist?” When Essie thought of aliens, she thought of Castle Garden and Ellis Island, and all the aliens who were streaming into New York Harbor, day after day.

  “A doctor. A specialist. A doctor who specializes in treating diseases of the mind. In New York, we have Doctor Edmund Bergler, who has studied in Vienna with Doctor Sigmund Freud, of whom you may have heard. But even Doctor Bergler is at a loss to explain our son’s problems, or to find a way to deal with them.”

  “What are his problems?”

  Lily Auerbach studied her pale fingernails. “A certain—indifference. A lack of motivation, a lack of direction, a lack of ambition. A habit of going from one enthusiasm, getting all involved in it, then dropping it, and going on to another. An inability to apply himself, to stick to any one thing. You mentioned the importance of hard work, which I agree with. But our son won’t work.” She shrugged her shoulders and threw up her hands. “What more can I say?”

  It was such a Jewish gesture, the little shrug, the hands, a gesture Essie had seen her own mother make hundreds of times, that Essie almost laughed at her sudden discovery that this strange, pale woman was Jewish after all. After all! Ah, the eternal, the universal Jew!

  “His current enthusiasm,” said Uncle Sol, “which I might add he has only been indulging in for about the last six months, is social welfare programs. The settlement houses. Uplifting the poor. Teaching classes for the poor children of the Lower East Side. This sort of thing seems to excite him now. How long it will last, who knows? What would you say, Miss Litsky, if we told you that this idea of marrying you—of taking a poor girl out of the Lower East Side, and elevating her, through marriage with, if I may say so, a family of some prominence and position—that we believe that this notion of marrying you is just another expression of a passing obsession? What would you say if we told you that we believe that you are being used—cruelly used, in my opinion—as part of some sort of social-betterment experiment? That you are being used as a guinea pig in a test that has currently taken his fancy? What would you say to that?”

  “If I believed that for a minute, I wouldn’t marry him,” Essie said. “And I don’t believe that.”

  “And meanwhile, he has no occupation, and no income. We do not intend to feed and house and support him forever, make sure of that. How do you propose to eat? Where do you propose to live?”

  “Mr. Rosenthal—”

  “You can’t live here, mind you. That’s out of the question.”

  “Mr. Rosenthal,” she said, “he may not have ambition now, but I do. I’ll be his ambition. We’ll work together. I’ll help him. I’m young, I’m strong—”

  “Now, see here young lady!”

  “Sol, let her finish what she has to say,” Lily said.

  “I mean it. I can help him. There are some things about Jake which I know, which I think you don’t. He has a brilliant mind. He has become a marvelous teacher. He has had a fine education at Columbia University. If you want my opinion, I think he has had too much privilege. Jake and I don’t need privilege. All we need is each other! I’ll help him and—you’ll see—he’ll be a great success at what he finally does, because we’ll do it together—wait and see!”

  “Are you saying,” Lily Auerbach said carefully, “that you think you can accomplish something which even Doctor Bergler has been unable to do?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well,” said Lily, “I suppose we should say that we’d be willing to try anything. As Jake is always saying, it’s a free country. But, dear child, please give us time to think about all these things.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, young lady,” said Uncle Sol. “If you marry him, you’ll be getting the runt of the litter.”

  “Sol, what an unpleasant thing to say about our son,” Lily said, but from her tone of calm reproach Essie was certain that Lily had heard this expression often before.

  “The runt of the litter,” Uncle Sol repeated. “The boy has absolutely no head for business.”

  “I wouldn’t say he has no head for business, Sol,” Jake’s father said. “I’d say he has no head for figures, yes, but not no head for business.” These were the only sentences Essie had heard Louis Auerbach utter all afternoon. He had sat there, through it all, nodding and smiling—smiling even during moments when there was nothing to smile about—and Essie had begun to wonder whether Jake’s father might be simple-minded. At least, she thought, he had a tongue in his head, even though he was clearly at the bottom of their pecking order. It was he, not Jake, who struck her as the runt of the litter.

  “And tell me one more thing,” Lily said. “How do your parents feel about all this?”

  “I haven’t told them yet.”

  “Is that what you’ll do—just tell them? Not ask?”

  “Tell them. Because our minds are made up.”

  “Their reaction,” said Lily, “will be very interesting.” She rose slowly from the red sofa where she sat. “And now,” she said, “would you like to refresh yourself before you leave?”

  “Yes,” said Essie, though she wasn’t quite sure what Lily meant by the expression.

  Lily moved to a smaller door at the corner of the red room, opened it, and said, “Down this little hall, the first door on your right.”

  Essie followed Jake’s mother’s directions, and turned the handle on the indicated door. It led into a bathroom, but it was like no bathroom she had ever seen, stranger than anything else she had encountered in this strange household. It was all done in shiny black marble—floor, ceiling, walls—and it was not one room, but three. In the central room was a huge marble washbasin, with golden spigots. On either side were stacks of fresh white towels, folded, monogrammed with L.R.A. in gold threads. On a golden soap dish reposed an enormous cake of fresh, sweet-smelling transparent soap. Behind the soap dish were arrayed large crystal bottles of perfumes, and over the basin hung a mirror in a golden frame. In a separate room, on one side, was the toilet with a caned seat and back and, on the other side, in the third room, was a huge bathtub set in more black marble, and placed so high above the floor that two short steps and a railing were required to reach it. She closed the outer door, and found herself facing a full-length mirror.

  Looking at her reflection in the tall glass, she found herself smiling, thinking: Jake Auerbach’s mother had called her “dear child.” Think of it!

  Seven

  “They liked you,” he said.

  “Yes, I think they did.”

  “Uncle Sol said, ‘She’s got spunk.’ Coming from him, that’s high praise. And what did you think of them?”

  She thought for a moment of how to put it. “They’re dealers, aren’t they,” she said at last. “Traders. Merchants.”

  “Have been for three generations, right back to Great-Grandpa R. B. Rosenthal himself in eighteen fifty.”

  “And I have a feeling that some sort of deal is going to be offered,” she said. “Some sort of bargain is going to have to be struck with t
hem. You’re going to be asked to give up something, in return for me—a trade.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Just a feeling. And I think, when it happens, that we ought to accept it, Jake—whatever it is—even though we may not like it all that much at first.”

  He whistled. “Well, let’s wait and see.”

  “Your mother dominates your father, doesn’t she, Jake.”

  “Oh, yes. She’s the Rosenthal, you see. The Auerbachs were considered nobodies. Years ago, when she married Pop, it was supposed to be a great mesalliance. Want to know a family secret—why she did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “Let’s see,” Essie said. “She had a domineering father—like mine. She did it to show her independence.”

  “I wish it were as dramatic as that. No, I’m afraid it was a much more basic reason.” Against the rattle of the approaching streetcar, he bent and whispered something in her ear which at first she did not hear, and asked him to repeat it. “She was pregnant—with me,” he whispered.

  “Really?”

  The downtown streetcar was crowded at that time of day, but they managed to find two seats together. “It was quite a scandal,” he said, still whispering. “I’m not supposed to know anything about it, by the way. But a nurse told me, when I was growing up. Why do she and Pop never celebrate their wedding anniversary? Because if I knew the date, I might put two and two together. I’m the product of a shameful union. Now you know it.”

  All at once she began to laugh, was laughing so hard she could not stop, and several passengers turned around to look at her. “Oh … oh … oh …” she laughed, doubling over and hugging her elbows to her sides.