In the Absence of Angels (22 page)

In this room, Hester and Clara always went to the dresser first, passing from the etched-crystal tray, with its kaleidoscopic row of perfume bottles, whose number and style varied with Mrs. Braggiotti’s admirers, to the rosy pincushions, where, among hat daggers and florists’ pins, sometimes lay two great dinner rings, with rows of huge diamonds in pavements of smaller ones. These, Clara said, had been the Reuters’ gift to her mother on her marriage. Who or what Mr. Braggiotti was or had been, Hester had never been told. If she conceived of him at all, it was as an alien, a kind of slim, Italianate poniard that had once got embedded mistakenly in the firm dough of the Reuter household.

What drew Hester most in this room was the shoes. Clara would ostentatiously swing open the closet door, and there, in the soft cretonne pockets that covered it from base to top, were her mother’s thirty pairs of small, high-arched shoes, some in leathers of special kinds — snake or piped kidskin — but most of them dyed in pale costume shades that resembled in their gradations of color the row of sewing silks on a drygoods counter. Looking at them, Hester could see Mrs. Braggiotti, who, with her tilted nose, masses of true-blond hair, and bud mouth, was what every shag-haired girl staring into the Narcissus pools of adolescence hoped to see. Hester thought of her as she had often met her, riding down serenely in the elevator, a pale, wide hat just matching the flowers in her chiffon dress, a long puff of fur held carelessly against the faintly florid hips. Mixed with this image was a more perplexing vision, of Mrs. Braggiotti at the piano, where she played Chopin with much ripple and style but wearing a pince-nez that mercilessly puckered the flesh between her brows, giving her the appearance of a doll that had been asked to cope with human problems. Hester preferred to think of her as endlessly floating from one assignation to another in an endless palette of costumes that matched.

It was toward Mrs. Braggiotti’s dresser, then, that Clara pulled Hester, pointing out the huge bottle that stood on the tray, eclipsing all the others. “George gave it to her, just now!” said Clara.

“Who’s he?”

“He’s
in love
with her.”

It was only recently that Hester had learned not to giggle at the term. Now the phrase fell on her ear like something dropping softly, momentously, from a tree.

“Is
she
in love with
him
?”

“How should I know?” Clara stared down her nose at her. Apparently, Hester had again made one of the major errors that were always emphasizing the age gap between them. Obviously, to Clara’s way of thinking (which must also be the adult one), the important thing was to
be
loved and to enjoy all the gestures thereof.

Without stopping to inspect the rest of the room, the girls went back along the hall and edged into the overheated living room. Mrs. Reuter was with a group near the door, and on the far side Mrs. Braggiotti, this time without the pince-nez, was playing the piano for a number of gentlemen gathered around her. “How pretty your dress is, my dear! Did your mother make it?” panted Mrs. Reuter, her glance approving Hester’s cleanliness, one hand blotting the drops of sweat from her hot face and just preventing them from falling on her gray satin prow.

“She did the flowers.” Hester looked down doubtfully at the lavender voile, its color harsh against her olive-brown hands. All over its skirt and sleeves, unsuccessfully tiered to hide her lankness, large bunches of multicolored flowers were worked at careful equidistance. It had been the tenant of her mother’s workbasket all the preceding summer.

“My, she does beautiful work!” Mrs. Reuter fingered the dress tenderly. “Did you have some Nesselrode?” She nodded to Hester and left her.

“That’s him,” Clara whispered, at Hester’s elbow.

“Where?”

“By the window,” said Clara. She left Hester and went over to her mother.

Looking, Hester saw a man somewhat under middle height standing near Mrs. Enke. Against the Wagnerian proportions of the others, he appeared unobtrusive but not negligible, as if their fleshy tide might flow past but not engulf him. There was something about his pleasant, even-featured face that was as firm and self-contained as a nut. He crossed the room to speak to Mrs. Braggiotti, whose head and neck made a pretty arc as she inclined upward toward him, her circlet of crystal beads shining in the afternoon sun. Clara pranced over to Hester again. “Guess what!” she said. “George is going to take you and me and Mama for a soda!”

“Maybe I better not go.”

“Oh, sure. It’s just to a drugstore, silly. He
owns
it — a nice one, not like the one downstairs. Over on Madison Avenue. You needn’t even tell your family you’re going. I’ll lend you a coat, and we can take turns on my skates. Come
on
!”

They walked the few blocks over to Madison Avenue, George and Mrs. Braggiotti far ahead, linked as sedately as any married couple. Combined with the cold thrill of the brilliant afternoon Hester felt the lovely unease of wearing someone else’s clothes. As they walked, they could glimpse the frozen brown fronds of the park between the tall buildings, on which the hard, white winter sun struck, audible as a gong.

Set discreetly into the limestone corner of a block of private houses, Sunday-quiet behind their fretworks of iron, the ruby urns of the Town Pharmacy sent out a message of mystery and warmth. George unlocked the door and let them in to the aromatic smells of the pharmacopoeia and vanilla. Rising from the long expanse of tiled floor, the glass shelves, serried with pomades and panaceas, looked housewifely and knowledgeable, as if filled with the lore of the ages. Clara rushed to the small marble counter near the door and balanced on one of the high, curved metal chairs.

“A sundae, George, with everything.”

“I don’t open until four, Madam,” he said, sliding off his coat and standing revealed in his suspenders and full, white shirtsleeves before he slipped on an alpaca jacket. Hester thought that he looked very intimate, but Mrs. Braggiotti, sitting formally on another chair, one pale-blue heel hooked over the rung, seemed not to notice. She refused a sundae, saying, “Oh, no, George, thanks. You know Mama’s dinners!,” in her high, untimbred voice.

After the sundaes, Hester and Clara went outside. Clara put on her skates and, promising not to take too long a turn, went grinding down the empty asphalt, rounded a corner, and was gone. Hester grew chilly waiting, and the sundae was cold inside her. Tiptoeing back around the half-open door into the store, she crouched down on a wooden box behind the marble counter and fingered the levers that controlled the soda water and syrups. Warm and hemmed in, she felt that it would be good to spend one’s life in this shadowy store, away from the airless routine of an apartment but suspended a step above the rough street — like being on a little island, with faucets for running water and a bathroom at the back. There was a movement at the darker end of the store.

“Etta!” George’s voice said pleadingly. “Etta!”

Hester peered out cautiously. Mrs. Braggiotti, hatless now, was pressed back against the prescription counter, leaning away from George, who stood in front of her with his hands against her waist.

“No, George.” She reached along the counter to her hat, but he caught at her hand. They looked awkward, as if they were about to begin dancing but were not sure of the steps.

“We’re not young enough to go on like this,” he said. “Courting, like a couple of kids.” Mrs. Braggiotti looked back at him woodenly, between her brows the same perplexed groove that she wore at the piano. She looked stilted, like an actress unsure of her lines. “Sometimes I think that’s all you want,” George said. “Someone hanging around.” His voice sank.

Mrs. Braggiotti worked her blue shoe on the tiled floor, like a child enduring a familiar reproof.

“Why do you always” — he gripped her shoulders — “do you always ...” He dropped his hands. “You can’t go on forever being the pretty Reuter girl. Not even you.”

She reached along the counter again, her rings chipping the light, her hand smoothing the hat expertly, assuredly. The hand wandered to the nape of her neck, patting the smooth hair, outlining, reassuring. He seized her with a kiss that grew, his face deep red, his hand kneading around and around on her back, one dark, tailored thigh thrust forward against the watery design of her dress. Inside Hester, a buried pleasure turned over, and vague, ill-gotten rumors and confirmations chased in her head.

Mrs. Braggiotti pushed George away sharply. “My shoe! Oh, you’ve got dirt all over my shoe!” She bent down to brush it, real distress on her face.

“What is it you
do
want, Etta?”

Mrs. Braggiotti tilted her face up at him, her eyes clear, her forehead unfurrowed. “Why, I don’t want anything, George,” she said, in the same tone with which she had refused the sundae.

Hester crept out of her niche and slid carefully around the door. Across the street, the other limestone houses were still there, withdrawn, giving out none of their meaning. Behind her, the dim island of the store no longer drew her with its promise of suspension, of retreat. Looking down at her hands, she thought suddenly that they were a good color; it was the lavender voile that was wrong. She wavered against the blind hush of the street, wishing it full of people she could jostle, buffet, and embrace. Down the block she saw Clara coming back, her skates clashing and chiming. She drew a long breath and stepped further out into the seminal sunlight.

T
HE TRAIN CREAKED
through the soft, heat-promising morning like an elderly, ambulatory sofa. Nosing along, it pushed its corridor of paper-spattered floors and old plush seats through towns whose names — Crystal Run, Mamakating — were as soft as the morning, and whose dusty little central hearts — all livery stable, freight depot, and yard buildings with bricked-up windows and faded sides that said “Purina Chows” — were as down-at-the-heel as the train that strung them together.

Hester, feeling the rocking stir of the journey between her thighs, hanging her head out of the window with her face snubbed against the hot breeze, tried to seize and fix each picture as it passed. At fifteen, everything she watched and heard seemed like a footprint on the trail of some eventuality she rode to meet, which never resolved but filled her world with a verve of waiting.

Opposite her, her mother sat with the shuttered, conscious look she always assumed in public places. Today there was that added look Hester also knew well, that prim display of extra restraint her mother always wore in the presence of other Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them. Today the train rang with their mobile gestures, and at each station crowds of them got off — great-breasted, starched mothers trailing mincing children and shopping bags stuffed with food, gawky couples digging each other in the side with their elbows, girls in beach pajamas, already making the farthest use of their smiles and great, effulgent eyes. At each station, they were met by the battered Fords and wagons that serviced the farms which would accommodate them, where for a week or two they would litter the tight Catskill towns with their swooping gaiety and their weary, rapacious hope.

“Wild!” said Mrs. Elkin, sotto voce, pursing her mouth and tucking her chin in her neck. “Your hair and that getup! Always so wild.” Hester, injured, understood that the indictment was as much for the rest of the train as for herself. Each summer for the past three years, ever since Mr. Elkin’s business had been doing poorly and the family had been unable to afford the summer rental in Westchester, Mrs. Elkin had resisted the idea of Old Corner Farm, and each year she had given in, for they were still of a status which made it unthinkable that they would not leave New York for some part of the season. This year and last, they had not been able to manage it until September, with its lowered rates, but it would have been a confession of defeat for Mr. Elkin had he not been able to say during the week to casual business acquaintances, “Family’s up in the country. I go up weekends.” Once at the farm — although the guests there were of a somewhat different class from the people in this train, most of them arriving in their own cars and one or two with nursegirls for the children — Mrs. Elkin would hold herself aloof at first, bending over her embroidery hoop on the veranda, receiving the complimentary “What gorgeous work you do!” with a
moue
of distaste for the flamboyant word that was a hallmark of what she hated in her own race, politely refusing proffered rides to the village, finally settling the delicate choice of summer intimacy on some cowed spinster or recessive widow whom life had dampened to the necessary refinement. For Mrs. Elkin walked through the world swinging the twangy words “refined,” “refinement,” like a purifying censer before her. Hester, roused momentarily from her dream of the towns, looked idly across at her mother’s neat navy-and-white version of the late-summer uniform of the unadventurous and the well bred. Under any hat, in any setting, her mother always looked enviably right, and her face, purged of those youthful exoticisms it once might well have had, had at last attained a welcomed anonymity, so that now it was like a medallion whose blurred handsomeness bore no denomination other than the patent, accessible one of “lady.” Recently, Hester had begun to doubt the very gentility of her mother’s exorcistic term itself, but she was still afraid to say so, to put a finger on this one of the many ambiguities that confronted her on every side. For nowadays it seemed to her that she was like someone forming a piece of crude statuary which had to be reshaped each day — that it was not her own character which was being formed but that she was putting together, from whatever clues people would let her have, the shifty, elusive character of the world.

“Summitville!” the conductor called, poking his head into the car.

Hester and her mother got off the train with a crowd of others. Their feet crunched in the cinders of the path. The shabby snake of the train moved forward through its rut in the checkerboard hills. Several men who had been leaning on battered Chevvies ran forward, hawking persistently, but Mrs. Elkin shook her head. “There’s Mr. Smith!” She waved daintily at an old man standing beside a truck. They were repeat visitors. They were being met.