March 14, 1974
Julie knew how to drive, had picked it up when she was only thirteen, but she had never bothered to get a license. Andrea had driven them to Baltimore and they had only the one car and then Julie fell in love with Felix. And because she didn’t have a car, he drove her home one night and came inside the little apartment she shared with Andrea. That led to him finding her a better apartment, in Horizon House, this new high-rise with a rooftop pool, although the view from the pool included the jail, which amused Felix greatly. Of course, getting a license wouldn’t keep Felix from driving her home and coming inside her apartment, but if she got a license, Felix might buy her a car. He had said as much. An Alfa Romeo. But Julie knew what the car would be—her going-away gift.
No license, no car.
No car, no going away.
She knew it was silly and yet—sometimes, silliness worked. Look at Susie, propped up on a telephone book in her boyfriend’s absurdly large Cadillac, piloting them toward Washington, D.C. She had already made four wrong turns and they weren’t even on the Capital Beltway yet. Julie had built in extra time for Susie’s waywardness, so she wasn’t concerned about being late. She just remained amazed at how well life worked out for Susie, who didn’t have a care in the world or a thought in her head.
Perhaps those two things were connected.
“What do they do, again?” Susie asked. The whole thing was really over her head. It was as if the literal overheadedness of life allowed her to let everything else fly by her, too.
“Well, you strip down—”
“Like we do?” Teasing. Susie wasn’t stupid, just not willing to make an effort. Thought Julie was crazy, going for her GED and then starting classes at community college.
“No, I get to wear a bathing suit.”
“And that’s it? You just put on your bathing suit and do, like, a cannonball off the side?”
“There are questions first.”
“Like a test.”
“Sort of.”
“Do I have to be there for that?” Worried, as if she didn’t even want to be in the same room as a test.
“No, you don’t have to come inside at all.”
“I don’t want to sit in the car, though. Tubby says it’s bad to run the heater and the radio off the battery and I’ll go crazy, alone with my own thoughts.”
Yes, it would be crazy-making to be alone with Susie’s thoughts. Lonely, too.
“There are restaurants nearby. You can go have a cup of coffee or something.”
“Okey-dokey.” Susie used such phrases with complete ease. She was only four foot eleven, although she claimed five feet, and her popularity as a performer might have been disturbing if it were not for her enormous chest and wasp waist. She was a pocket Venus with a natural tumble of honey-gold curls and saucer eyes, and Julie would have quite disliked her, except for the fact that Felix never looked at her twice. In fact, he called her “my little freak” in private and thought the men who flocked to see her were pervy. But Felix hadn’t become a rich man by making judgments on what people wanted. Sure, he had standards. He was strict about drugs at the club, strict about drugs in general, but that’s because that enterprise generated more heat from the authorities. He was also rather straitlaced about sex—girls got fired if they got caught doing any kind of play-for-pay. That was the by-product of having two daughters.
Three, Julie reminded herself. He had three now. Michelle had been born almost a year ago, less than ten months after her relationship with Felix began. She still had a hard time believing that Felix had a baby daughter.
She pulled out a compact and studied herself in the mirror, even as Susie made the mistake of taking the Connecticut Avenue exit and had to circle back to the Beltway, saying cheerfully: “Well, I knew I was looking for a state.” As if that was a rarity in D.C., a street named after a state. Julie’s makeup was conservative for this occasion, her hair pulled back into a smooth ponytail. She was less sure of the outfit. Short—but everything was either short or long these days, and she hated the maxi look. The shift dress barely skimmed her knees, although the sleeves went past the elbows, and she had paired it with boots and a trench coat. She looked—what did she look like? A young mother, someone who played tennis and kept up with fashion. Cool, but conservative.
Not unlike Bambi Brewer, whom Julie had seen shopping at the little grocery store in Cross Keys after a morning at the indoor tennis barn.
Julie pointed out the various places where Susie could wait for her on Wisconsin Avenue, but Susie fretted that she could never parallel park this huge boat of a Cadillac. At almost three hundred pounds, Tubby, Susie’s boyfriend, needed a big car. But even with the seat pulled all the way up, Susie could barely see over the wheel. It probably would be hard for her to put the car in reverse, or see out the rear window.
“I’ll just go round and round,” she decided.
“It might be a while,” Julie warned.
“I don’t mind.” The amazing thing about Susie was that she didn’t. Chances were, she would end up getting lost just making a circle. She wouldn’t mind that, either. Julie didn’t want to look like Susie, but she wouldn’t mind being like her. Free as the breeze, not a care in the world.
She took a deep breath and walked inside the synagogue, trying not to let it intimidate her. It was just a building, like any other. She had a right to be here. Or would have the right, soon enough.
“Thank you,” she said to the one man she knew among the three who sat in judgment of her. “I appreciate you getting this on the schedule so swiftly.”
“You were very diligent in your study,” he said. “Besides, we needed to get this done before the holiday.”
“St. Patrick’s Day?” she asked in wonder, then corrected herself. “Oh, Easter, of course.”
She wasn’t swift enough to cover the second mistake and he winced. “You mean Passover, Julie.”
“Sure, right, because the Last Supper was a seder.” See what a good student I am, Rabbi Tasmin? “I just got confused, because I didn’t see how Easter could be a problem, but I thought because we’re in D.C. and it’s a federal holiday—”
“It’s not, actually,” said one of the two rabbis she didn’t know. She hadn’t been able to focus on their names when they were introduced, but maybe she could get by with calling him rabbi, or even rebbe, although it might sound funny, coming from her. Felix laughed whenever she tried to say a Yiddish word.
The rabbi said: “Easter doesn’t have to be designated a federal holiday because it always falls on a Sunday. But it’s treated like a holiday for all. This is part of the life you are choosing. You’re used to being mainstream, of having your ways seen as ‘normal.’ Are you really ready to have a life that is otherwise? Of having to ask for holidays that your work doesn’t grant?”
“Yes,” she said, trying not to smile at the idea of asking for Yom Kippur off at the Variety. “This is what I want to do.”
“Why do you wish to become a Jew?”
“I’m in love,” she said. “The man I love cannot marry me if I don’t convert.”
“Has he said he will marry you if you do convert?”
Julie had anticipated that question. “We are not officially engaged, no. I’m not the type of person to give ultimatums. And I don’t want my conversion to appear to be a condition, or even a ploy. Religion must be deeply felt. My conversion guarantees nothing when it comes to the love of this man. He doesn’t even know I’m pursuing it.”
“Really?” asked the third rabbi.
“I thought I should want this, for myself, and that would be the proof that I was making the right choice. It doesn’t hinge on anything, any man. It’s for me.”
But, of course, it would make a difference, she thought. How could it not? Felix had entrusted her with a secret, one he had shared with no one. He cared about Judaism, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. So she must care, too.
“So you would want to be a Jew even without this man in your life?”
“Yes,” Julie said. “It feels right to me.”
“You were raised—?”
“Protestant. Baptist.”
“Was your family religious?”
She had to stop and think about this. “My mother went to church and insisted that the kids go, too, but my father didn’t. I think my . . . dissatisfaction with religion started there—how could it be meaningful if my father didn’t take part?” She was making things up now, trying to say the right things, but suddenly her fibs felt true. There had been a little worm of discontent. Her father had refused to attend church. But then, so had her mother. Also that was good, saying she had been dissatisfied. Made her sound deep.
“What do you do, Miss Saxony?” asked Rabbi Tasmin, the closest thing she had to a friend here.
“I’m a hostess.”
“A hostess?”
“In the Coffee Pot Shoppe. I tell people where to go. Where to sit.”
“Ah.” The second rabbi now. “Like a hostess.”
“Yes.” Hadn’t she said that?
“Have you thought about Christmas?”
She had, in fact. It had occurred to her to keep the secret from Felix until then and present it as a gift, but—oh, no. They were asking her something very different.
“It will no longer be part of my life.”
“Are your parents alive?”
They were, but she preferred to close any line of inquiry she could. “No.”
“There are siblings?”
“We’re not close.” They had been once. Two giggling girls, on their own. But Felix didn’t want a girl who lived with her sister, so Julie had moved out. She had told Andrea about what she planned today and they had quarreled. They were always quarreling, though, especially about Felix. It wasn’t a big deal.
The rabbis did not trust her, she could tell. They did not want her. But she had put in the time, done what was required. She continued to answer all their questions in a calm, thoughtful manner. Eventually they led her downstairs to a room that smelled, disappointingly, like the indoor pool at the Y where she had worked at the front desk one summer.
“Make sure every inch is covered,” one rabbi advised, and Julie had a strange flashback, her first time dancing, the lecture about the pasties, what the law allowed. A lecture delivered by Felix, who pretended to be all gruff indifference, but she understood that the mere fact that he was tutoring her was indicative of his interest. There had been no jealousy among the other girls. They assumed she would fade, as they all had. Felix had a wife and two daughters, and he claimed he wanted a son, although it seemed to Julie that ship must have sailed. Surely his wife was too old to have more children? “I can’t name him Felix Junior because of the Jewish tradition,” Felix told Julie the second time they slept together. “But see if I don’t. Not that I would do that to a kid, but I don’t like rules. Just because my father was a cantor doesn’t mean I have to do everything by the book.”
“Your father was Eddie Cantor?”
“Oh, my sweet little shiksa, the things I have to teach you. That’s a secret, between us, by the way. No one knows about my dad, not even my wife.”
That had been two years ago. Two years.
She took a deep breath and submerged. She wasn’t scared of water, but she had never learned to swim properly, just knew a paddling kind of motion, the better to keep her hair above the water.
When she came up, she was surprised at how beautiful the singing was, how it really did make her feel holy and changed. The rabbis’ eyes were on the ceiling, as if they didn’t want to catch a glimpse of her in her bathing suit, modest as it was. I’m a Jew, she thought in the locker room, as she combed her hair back into its ponytail, changed into her clothes, and went to collect Susie. “Drinks on me,” she said. “Gampy’s.” It was a place all the dancers favored because it stayed open late. Felix came here a lot. She had a cheeseburger, which was pretty funny, not that Susie picked up on the joke. Felix didn’t come in, but she didn’t really expect him to. She and Susie went to the Hippo and danced until 2:00 A.M. Then she went back to her apartment, which, like the pool, also overlooked the prison, and stared at her phone until 4:00 A.M., wishing she dared to call him at home. She knew the number, of course. Knew the number, knew the house. Back when she was living with Andrea, she would take the VW in the middle of the night and drive by it, risking so much—Andrea’s wrath, Felix’s discovery. It was a lovely house. Felix had such good taste. That’s why he would choose her, eventually.
She had hoped to make a ceremony out of telling him about her conversion, turn it into something special. But it happened that several days went by without her seeing him, and when he stopped by the club in the early evening, the news had been too pent up and she blurted out: “Hey, I’m a Jew!”
He laughed. “You’re not a Jew. You order the lean corned beef at Jack’s.”
“No, seriously,” she said, lowering her voice. “I converted. Susie was there and everything. She was, like, a witness.”
Not exactly true, but she knew Susie would cheerfully lie for her. Susie believed women had to stick together. Another way in which she was na?ve.
“Really,” he said, as if she had commented on the weather. A few minutes later, he had gone upstairs to his office. She didn’t see him for a week. Oh, she saw him, but there were no late-night coffees at the Coffee Pot Shoppe, no visits to her apartment. Well, it was Passover now. He had to be with his family. After the holidays, they started up again, as if there had never been a break at all.
A few weeks later, she was window-shopping at an antiques store on Howard Street when she saw an interesting plate. She was pretty sure she knew what it was, but she asked the owner to be sure.
“It’s an old seder plate, very rare. There’s a place for all the things that matter during the ritual—the lamb shank, the bitter herbs.”
“I know,” she said, although she had not yet sat at anyone’s seder table.
“It’s made in France,” he said, showing her the unmarked back, as if that proved it was made in France.
She knew she was being sold, but that was okay. She was in sales herself, helping to move the weak drinks at the Variety. The plate was $65, no small sum, but she bought it and put it in an old trunk at the foot of her bed. There, the plate joined china and silverware she had begun to assemble, piece by piece. There was a large serving dish that dated to Revolutionary War times, the kind of item one would expect to find in a house such as the Brewer home in Sudbrook Park, although, of course, Julie would never live there. Mount Washington, maybe. Guilford if the divorce didn’t leave Felix too strapped. But not that house, that neighborhood, through which she had driven far too many times. At any rate her things kept accumulating in this small wooden trunk, eighteenth-century English, also discovered on Howard Street. Julie never called this trunk a hope chest, but that didn’t keep it from being one.
One night, in her English class at CCB, she was struck by a particular F. Scott Fitzgerald quote shared by the teacher, about the test of a first-rate intellect being the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts without going insane. She carried it back to Felix, another tribute to drop at his feet, like a house cat with a mouse.
“So you must have a first-rate mind,” she said. “If you think you can really love two women at the same time.”
She assumed he would at least have the courtesy to say that he loved her best but couldn’t leave his wife while the children were young. Or that Bambi wouldn’t give him a divorce under any circumstances. Once he had told her he could never marry a shiksa, but she had fixed that problem. So what was holding him up?
“Yes siree,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. “You and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two first-rate intellects for the ages.”
“Who says I’m not crazy?” Felix said, kissing the top of her head.