Vida (3 page)

2

Putting her pack on her back and her glasses on her nose, Vida set out for the BMT, keeping to the blocks of the trim row houses and away from Montague itself. An unclean filmy rain flattened her new brown curls. She wore the blue challis dress, her last pantyhose and her boots, with a Peruvian poncho over it all. Warily she walked the neat tree-lined streets, wishing she had an umbrella, to keep her dry and partially conceal her face. From 1965 to 1971 she had lived in New York and lived publicly. A dozen lovers, two hundred friends, thousands who had heard Vida Asch speak at rallies, millions who had seen her photograph in the newspapers or on television were spread in an invisible web. She felt the tingle of casual danger brushing her elbows and finger ends as she walked.

Saturday morning shoppers. Her foot was soaked, and as she climbed down the subway stairs, her boot squished. She had a fifteen-minute wait for a train. When it arrived, she walked back several cars to the end, sat down, watched. Was anyone coming after her? Leigh had told her he need not be back until Monday morning, for he had invented a cover story about an interview in Chicago. Whenever she was going to meet somebody from the old life, one of her own people, she felt helpless. She was utterly dependent on their caution, their honed paranoia, their will to be vigilant, but with Leigh it was heresy to suspect he would not be on guard. After all, in 1974 when she had been living in Philadelphia, he had commuted back and forth sharing her life until she had been recognized and had to run.

At Fulton, she changed to the Flatbush line and once again walked through the cars, on guard. Then she sat in the second-to-last car in the last seat and finally permitted herself to space out for the long journey to Sheepshead Bay. How much time she wasted traveling to and from meetings, trekking the long way around, taking buses to the ends of lines, standing on random corners in the cold wind. If there was anything her life demanded, it was endless patience. She could never rush but must ooze circumspectly toward the rendezvous, as Leigh was tediously maneuvering toward her.

She imagined his face, the nose sharp as an urgent question, the brows bristling like shaggy exclamation points, turned toward her. Yawning, showing his purple tongue, he was waking in the queen-size bed in their apartment. Did he still have the featherbed from his grandmother.? She had dragged it on the subway down to Orchard Street to have it repaired and covered with new ticking. Over the bed she saw the Cretan wall hanging embroidered on coarse red wool that was one of the few mementos from her first, her Greek marriage. Leigh had never minded its origins: the embroidery was beautiful work and never had hung in the house of Vasos’ family.

The Kalakopouloses disdained peasant work. They had a Degas ballet dancer from an Athens furniture store in their living room across from the icon of Agios Giorgos. She shook her head angrily: why was she drifting off to Vasos? Little pleasure in remembering that mess. Her romantic marriage: she had married Greece; she had married the dark stranger; she had married classical studies, the famous Mediterranean light, three thousand years of culture. Unfortunately for everybody, she had also married Vasos Kalakopoulos, civil engineer whose parents ran a Honda dealership on the edge of Heraclion, on the road toward Agios Nicolaos.

Okay, she was nervous about seeing Leigh after much too long. Why hadn’t he managed to come West since she had been here in April? During their scheduled phone calls the first Tuesday of every month, pay phone to pay phone, always he had said “Soon. Soon.” Her busy husband. When she had escaped from the dead end with Vasos, she had told her sister Natalie she would never marry again, never! Then Natalie had married Daniel Brooks, and six months later Vida married Leigh Pfeiffer … Leigh had worn an embroidered white shirt open at the throat, a deep V down to his curly chest. Around his head he had bound a red scarf. His pants, loose and flowing, tied at the waist. Purple, she thought. Many things were purple that year: purple tights, purple dresses, purple lights, purple walls, even purple boots. Had she worn one of her crotch-length minis? No, she had been married in a leaf-green Mexican wedding dress, tiers of floating puckered cotton separated by bands of open lace. Nothing under it but a green bikini. She stared at herself across the years, amazed. Of course, she no longer dressed with that flash and dazzle—she could not afford on any level to call attention to herself—but she would not have walked a block in a minidress now. What such clothing proclaimed was availability. Yet she had not felt that then. She had loved the glory and speed of miniskirts; she had felt like an emissary from a saner, jollier future, one of the crew from
Star Trek
beamed down to a primitive troubled world for a brief bumpy mission.

Natalie had found the green dress for her in the Village at Fred Leighton’s. “If you’re going through with this, why not wear something special?” Natalie didn’t like minis as much as Vida did. “You look smashing in them. I look dumpy. I’m bowlegged” Only a little. Natalie had worn a red Mexican dress cut low, with her breasts swelling out of it like rising bread. What had Daniel worn? Natalie’s husband was missing from the wedding pictures in her head. Vida could not remember her brother-in-law.

Leigh and Vida had a June wedding on a farm some antiwar activists had rented in New Jersey, a ramshackle white house inundated by ivy on the north and a rambling rose on the south. The mole-tunneled lawn sloped down to a stream lined with weeping willows. Torches were planted in the lawn. The Holy Rollers, a band who played all the Movement bashes that year, made raucous sound. And food! Anything Leigh was connected with featured splendid food. A whole roast suckling pig. Had Lohania cooked that.? No, they had not met her until the year after. It was an old Puerto Rican girlfriend of Leigh’s who had married a friend. Mrs. Pfeiffer, Leigh’s mother, whom Vida had never been able to call “Stella” or “Mama” without translating that from an originally thought “Mrs. Pfeiffer” had cooked stuffed cabbage, a spicy pot roast, stuffed derma. Natalie had come through with a pâté en croute and a two-foot-high chocolate cake with a red flag and a black flag on top.

On the riverbank, the hippest rabbi in New York, Meyer who went to jail for ten days in ‘69, married them in a double-ring ceremony by the splashing waters. She remembered his severe face and her own twinge of guilt, for he had made a fuss that he married only people he knew, and they had persuaded him. She had never told him she was only half Jewish; that her real father was Tom Whippletree and she had taken the name of her mother Ruby’s second husband, Sanford Asch, because—because—it sounded better and she hated her own name, Davida Whippletree, because— because—she was unfaithful, just like her mother, and she preferred Sandy to her own dad. Her mother had married Sandy, and she had taken Natalie to be her own flesh-and-blood sister out of daydream. Now Natalie walked ahead of her, married herself and already pregnant, her belly not yet overreaching her breasts, but growing, growing with Sam.

This time it’s got to work, she had thought, gripping the roses cut from the rambler and then Leigh’s hand. I want him so bad! He was perfect for her, her own sweet-and-sour. How he had danced that afternoon, leaping and prancing. “I picked you out of that first meeting for spring mobilization” Leigh said. “You were the best of the crop”

”Like cabbages? What crop?”

“Girls new in the Movement that spring. You were the best looking, and when you opened your mouth, real words came out. You spoke up loud and clear.”

With her hands shaking so hard she had to clasp them behind her. She had felt a failure at twenty-three: a botched marriage, not even a degree, a false start, older than the college students around her. She had set out to succeed in the Movement in New York, and she was going to succeed with Leigh. “We won’t box each other,” Leigh said. “I don’t expect to own you.” And don’t you expect to own me! She didn’t. It was right: they would give each other room to grow, to change, and they would grow wiser and more wonderful together.

Yet the night of their wedding Leigh had angered her. They sat at a big table inside with the friends still left who had not yet gone back to the city after a full day of eating, drinking, getting stoned, dancing and more eating. Mrs. Pfeiffer was presiding. Leigh’s father had died of a heart attack the year before, down in the garment district where he was a cutter. One of the things Vida trusted in Leigh was that unlike many of their friends, he loved and respected his mother. He didn’t see a lot of her, but they talked to each other as friends, the way she and Ruby did. Vida put faith in that. That his parents were both Communists, although they had left the party years before, fascinated her too. It seemed glamorous, clandestine. Vida asked Mrs. Pfeiffer how the wedding party differed from the Communist festivities of her youth, and Mrs. Pfeiffer answered that nowadays the kids didn’t listen to as many speeches and there was a lot more rock-and-roll.

Leigh shouted down the table, “We’ll do this again next month, when Vida and I get divorced!”

Although Leigh was four years older than Vida, he had never before married, and he’d been surprised how angry his joke made her. Mrs. Pfeiffer pursed her lips. “Is that why you’re keeping your name, Davida? Because you’re getting divorced next month?”

“I’m keeping my name because it’s my name. Leigh can have it if he wants.” She wasn’t changing her name any more times.

Coming back to the train clattering above Brooklyn, she snorted. Never change her name, huh? She’d had six identities since she’d become a fugitive, beyond her political nom de guerre. Peregrine. Her current I.D. was in the name Vinnie Rappaport, a dead baby from 1946, four years younger than Vida; but she knew objectively, as she had to, that she looked in her twenties still and could have passed for younger than Vinnie’s age of thirty-two. Eyes. She felt eyes. A man staring, he was holding up a newspaper and staring from it to her. Why? Her spine gave her an electrical shock. The train stood in the Kings Highway station. At once she rose and bolted from the car, jamming the doors open enough to hop out. She ran along the platform, then swung back. No one else had got out of her car. The train pulled away. She stood trembling, embarrassed. Should she run for it? But she had acted on blind impulse. After all, men frequently stared at women on the subway. Why would he look at the newspaper and then stare at her? She sat down nervously to wait for the next train. She’d be a little late.

At last she reached the stop. Paused to see who else got off, then lowly descended the steps. Green here, leafy. Gradually she circled around past small shops and apartment houses to Emmons and the block-sized tan stucco mass of Lundy’s. Its red-striped awnings spanked smartly as sails in the brisk wind off the narrow bay, where sportfishing boats were huddled.

The rain still insinuated from the air, a fine clinging drizzle with a salt tang. None of the cars suggested a stakeout to her. She did not sense anything amiss. Slowly she walked into the dim interior, letting her eyes accustom to the bluish light from the diamond-paned windows with their red escutcheons before she proceeded. At a few minutes past twelve, the huge room was only half full. Wandering the forest of tables, she spotted Leigh sitting against a wall. Sometimes she could wish he were less striking in appearance. Tall and stoop-shouldered, he was holding his reading glasses out to scan the menu, but not putting them on because he was farsighted and wanted to watch the entrance. Still he did not see her until she was upon him. His hair was a curly tan stippled with occasional silver, silver glinting in his thick rabbinical beard, in his bushy brows. He had something elegant about him, a care in his dressing, an awareness of posture, even in khakis or jeans; he sat as someone sits who is used to being watched, talked about, admired.

She took a chair across from him, her heart annoyingly thudding. She took off the silly glasses and set them on the table next to his real ones. He put out his hands, and they touched over the table. Her hands felt cold and clammy in his warm dry palms. “Leigh, so long this time, so long! You won’t believe how I’ve missed you!”

“Hey, honey … ah?”

She had to strain to hear him over the room acoustics, which magnified noise—the roar of diners chatting, the clash of dinnerware meeting plate, unidentifiable music which played as if underwater. She did not want to shout. “Vinnie Rappaport”

”Good Jewish name. I have some rotten news for you. Talked to the station this morning—I think it’s in the later papers?”

“What?” She felt bloated with shyness. Feelings stormed though her, while she must sit politely and merely stare at him. His light hazel eyes watched her through their long, long lashes. He had beautiful eyes. A touch of purple in the full lids. He wasn’t the best-looking man in New York, yet women always pursued him. Hearing him on the radio, women fell in love with his butterscotch voice. Then he looked into their eyes and he had them. She touched his hands, hairy on the backs. Hair grew even on the first joints of his fingers. He was a lean bear with studious shoulders. “What news?”

He was watching her carefully, but not entirely with sympathy. A steely curiosity probed her. “They got Kevin.”

“Kevin? When?” Immediately she saw the man on the subway and felt faint.

“Picked him up last night on West 4th.”

“Manhattan. Nobody should ever go into the city,’ she said automatically, seeing Kevin fall, crumpling to the pavement, Jimmy’s face forming in death grimace. “Did they shoot?”

The waiter was over them. “Two plates of cherrystones. Then we’ll have lobster. Boiled for me.” Leigh turned to her. “Want yours boiled or baked and stuffed?”