Home In The Morning (9 page)

Jackson didn’t even have to think about it.

Oh, I don’t believe so. I believe he probably had an acquaintance with humiliation already.

He lay with his head on her breast, their legs entwined. She played with his hair and smoothed his brow. After a minute or two, he picked his head up and twisted to look in her eyes. All the hard, clear honesty of a young man in love for the first time was in his voice, his features, an intimacy that will devastate a woman’s heart every time, and he said: I know it was cruel, but at the time I was a boy with the attention span of a newt, there was a lot of excitement around me, and it was just normal that Li’l Bokay would stand out there, it was just normal that he didn’t knock on the front door like the other boys. I didn’t understand the “have to” part. It was just normal. Same as me learning Christmas carols and the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t see anything incongruous in it. It was just normal. Either way, I hate to think I’m in the middle of his anger. I know later on when push came to shove, I couldn’t help him, and he was depending on me. But it wasn’t my fault. Just like when we were children, there were powers at work stronger than me. So maybe I’m on the outskirts of his anger, but not smack dab in the middle.

Still, Stella the uncompromising said. Still.

Jackson fell to a miserable meditation then, recounting the various failings of his young life, when Stella sat up suddenly and said: My! We forgot to tell them we’re engaged. Let’s wake them up now and do it!

Her fiancé cringed. No, no. Let’s wait ‘til I get you a ring. It’s just not right to make an announcement without a ring, and I don’t think I can bear more opprobrium tonight. Let’s get through the weekend. When I buy you a ring, we’ll tell them.

Her face fell, her lower lip jutted out.

Please, darlin’, please? he begged, and counted his blessings that for the price of ten minutes of attention to her most excitable parts, she relented.

Fall, 1963

J
UST AFTER FOUR A.M.,
S
TELLA
slipped down the hall barefoot with her back against the wallpaper to go sleep in her own bed. Around seven a.m. there was a persistent cat’s scratch at Jackson’s door. Who’s that? he asked, groggy and confused, unsure where he was or whether what woke him represented animal advance, a branch set against a window, or human interruption. A female voice that was neither Stella’s nor Mrs. Godwin’s answered: Mr. Godwin wants you to know he’ll be ready to leave for services at eight fifteen. Dang, Jackson muttered, understanding immediately the implications of the announcement. He thanked the messenger and hauled his poorly rested limbs from bed with effort, calling up a vision of Stella in her most stimulating poses of the night to supply him strength for washing up and getting dressed at an uncivilized Saturday-morning hour. The more he thought of his fiancée the lighter, the more determined his spirit became. Jackson decided that if he and her daddy had started out badly, it was his duty
to improve things. He would rise to the occasion to prove he held nothing but respect for Leonard Godwin despite his rudeness. Thankfully, he’d packed his blazer and a good pair of pants in case Stella wanted to step out in the city. He put these on, ransacked his mind for proper sabbath greetings, and descended the stairs.

He found Mrs. Godwin and Stella in their robes in the kitchen pouring glasses of juice and arranging thick cut slices of babka on a china platter. You’re up early, honey, Stella said, pointedly going up to him, knife in hand, to peck him on the lips. Morning, Stella. In light of her mother’s presence, he resisted an urge to kiss her back. Keeping his spine straight, stoic as a military-school graduate, he nodded over her head. Mrs. Godwin. She nodded back. Irene! she called out with a gravedigger’s gaze fixed on Jackson and in a voice loud enough to startle. A robust Irish woman put her head through the pantry door. Plug in the coffee, please. For our guest. I’m going with your daddy to services, Jackson told his girl, who rolled her eyes at him.

Mrs. Godwin gave the couple a variant of Stella’s straight, secret smile. I don’t know why I’m asking this, but will you accompany your friend to shul, dear? I’m astounded he’s going, her daughter answered, causing Jackson to wonder if he’d got himself tangled with her unawares by showing her father a son’s respect. He tried to catch her eye, but she’d turned from him to get cups and saucers from a cupboard.

Leonard Godwin and Seth came to the kitchen in topcoats and fedoras. Mr. Godwin drank juice and ate babka with one hand, the other clutched a tallis bag close to his chest. Neither Godwin spoke but chewed and slurped mechanically like men on the run. Irene brought Jackson a black silk yarmulke, which he dropped on his head then patted with the flat of his hand to nestle it firmly in his hair.

Are we waiting for the ladies to dress?

Mrs. Godwin laughed. No, no. Usually I do attend, but today I want to stay here and catch up with my daughter, who won’t go to one of the happiest places of her childhood without a bribe.

The men set off on foot. Mr. Godwin informed Jackson they were three blocks from the temple, he wouldn’t live any farther away. Some of the local Jews, he informed, drove to shul, but he just couldn’t do it. Jackson changed the subject. You have another son, I believe, sir. Will I meet him there?

My son Aaron is in, um, New York this week. On business. He met the, um, finance secretary of Mombasa Cooper’s party last year, you know. Jackson took Mr. Godwin’s confidence as an attempt at apology. Really, he remarked as if fascinated. Then Seth, who did not seem to Jackson to be such a bad sort, took over to explain the nature of Aaron’s trip to the garment district, a subject in which Jackson feigned more interest, complimenting Stella’s brother by asking intelligent questions about the quality and quantity of dry goods the ancestral factory produced.

Other early rising Jews walked briskly by them as they talked, wishing the Godwin family and their guest a good Shabbos, which wishes were returned as they passed. By setting the pace, Mr. Godwin managed to show off Jackson as the beau of a daughter the entire congregation thought too sharp a specimen to land any man at all. Jackson, of course, was not aware of his intent, but neither could he miss the stares that swept over him from head to toe. He checked his buttons, shirttails, and zipper several times in puzzlement over their attentions.

After a block and a half, two black men in somber suits much like those worn by colored funeral directors back home approached. Leonard and Seth Godwin immediately turned their heads toward each other and their conversation took on an odd intensity while they asked each other questions about minute details of Aaron’s contacts along Fourteenth Street. Jackson gave the passersby a pleasant, down-home
glance and wished them a good day. They were a few steps beyond them when Leonard and Seth Godwin stopped short.

Seth said: We don’t speak to them. You shouldn’t speak to them.

Why?

Jackson wondered if this was some arcane Yankee rudeness that refused to extend pleasantries to respectable-looking men of color on the street.

They’re real-estate brokers!

Seth spoke in a contemptuous manner as if real-estate brokers were kin to murderers and thieves.

The trio walked the rest of the way in a grave silence Jackson could not decipher. But then he’d felt a traveler in a foreign land from the moment he’d stepped into the Godwin foyer. He tried to seize snippets of events to hold in his mind awhile ‘til he could analyze them like those common phrases in an unknown language one picks up touring overseas.

He did pretty well during services. Inside the temple, seating was divided between men and women, the latter housed in a balcony facing the men on either side of the Ark. For Jackson, the Reform Jew of infrequent appearances in any house of worship, it was an alien arrangement. He raised his neck in amazement to regard the women, dressed in their Sabbath finest, perched like so many well-feathered birds up there behind a decorative grillwork, yes, altogether like birds in a cage. Seth elbowed him. With a jerk of his head, Stella’s brother gestured toward their father to inform Jackson of the impropriety of his curiosity. Then the chazzan began the morning chants, and Jackson was able to demonstrate in his sterling tenor the lessons Perry Nussbaum taught him nearly a decade before. The Hebrew he flubbed here and there—Yankee Jews used so much of it—but where the chants were different from what he was accustomed to, Jackson employed the fine musical sensibility Mama had instilled in him. He absorbed just a
few bars of melody, was able to anticipate the notes coming up, and let them out con brio. Stella’s father and brother were suitably impressed.

After services, the congregation trooped downstairs to the basement function room to bless wine and bread and take a snack from an array of herring salad, egg salad, challah, and kichel laid out by the Sisterhood. Introductions to several congregants were made, but after the initial once-over, no one was sufficiently interested in the conundrum represented by a Mississippi Jew who could not see the difficulties inherent in a liaison with that Godwin girl. There were more pressing matters to discuss.

Leonard. Leonard. The Fassbinders put a For Sale sign up. And the Greens, both the father and his three sons! That’s six signs in four blocks! You have to talk to them. They’ll listen to you, Leonard. Or everything, all this, will be gone. It will be theirs, Gott in himmel. The shvartzes! Tell them what you told me when I was wavering. How we owe it to our parents and grandparents of blessed memory. That if no one sells, there’s nothing to worry about. Tell them about nothing to fear but fear itself and how we stand together or we all fall down.

While he had no idea what everyone discussed passionately all around him, Jackson noted that Leonard Godwin appeared a leader of his community, a man armored with detailed knowledge and persuasive arguments about the subject at hand. He tried to follow the conversation so that he might reference it politely to Mr. Godwin later on, but there was too much Yiddish and Yankee slang bandied about for him to do so, and his mind wandered. It was far more entertaining to study his surrounds and imagine Stella at age four like that little darling over there clutching her mama by the leg, or twelve like that poor gawky child who looked so serious nearby, or seventeen like any one of that group eyeing the boys talking baseball across the room. This is where she grew up, he thought, this is where she first let go of her mother’s skirts, where she first found that pure and generous ethos
that drives her, where she first flirted with young men too shy to stop her in her tracks, which freed her to find her way to Connecticut and to me. I guess that makes this a holy place for me, Ark or no Ark. And he gave thanks.

When the men returned home, Mrs. Godwin and Stella were still not dressed. They huddled, heads together, at the kitchen table, which was spread over with open magazines. A bottle of champagne sat in a silver bucket on the countertop. The women held aloft empty flutes to salute their men. Their color was high, their voices loud. They made jokes to each other the men did not catch. Then Mrs. Godwin squealed: Stella told me your news, Jackson! and rose on unsteady feet to rush over to embrace him knocking herself into cabinetry along the way. She deposited a loud, sloppy kiss on his cheek while her frozen-in-place husband and son looked on with perplexed, open mouths. They’re getting married! Mrs. Godwin told them over Jackson’s shoulder. Can you believe it? Our Stella, getting married! Then she erupted into a loopy chain of chuckles, whispering into Jackson’s ear so that he and he alone could hear her joyous claim: She’s your problem now, son. All yours.

Seth rushed forward to clap him on the back. Brave man, he said. Brave man.

Leonard Godwin held his arms up as if to welcome Jackson to his bosom, but when he stepped up to receive that blessing, Godwin dropped them to his sides. I would have expected a Southern boy to ask my permission first, he said. It’s the way we do things up here. Jackson turned forty shades of red and apologized. I am so sorry, sir. I meant to do so, he stuttered, gallantly taking all the blame for offending him until Stella’s father reached out and clapped him to his chest anyway. It’s alright, son, he said. Just do what you can to make her happy.

On their drive home the next morning, Jackson complained to Stella that she’d ignored his wishes completely on the matter of informing the parents before a ring had been purchased. You compromised me
in your daddy’s eyes, darlin’. And you’d promised me, you’d promised me to wait. It turned out alright, she told him. They’re over the moon to get rid of me. I don’t see what you can complain about. He had no argument there, only the nagging premonition that not to argue with her on this point constituted a dangerous precedent, one that would come back to haunt him. But as he began to expound on this to assure he had the authority men expected in those days over their wives, she gave him an upwards look of big-lashed brown eyes set above a wheedling pout. He found Stella’s pose adorable, and thus put all misgivings aside.