“How ungrateful would it make us look, Sol, after Cantor Kleiner has worked so hard with Sidney on his stutter?”
A silence came from Sol—a silence in which Florence could hear all her father’s grievances with organized religion in general, and with the fancy Midwood congregation in particular. As an actuary who had spent his years tabulating the most meaningful occurrences in people’s lives—their births and marriages, their children, their accidents, their sicknesses, and, in the end, their deaths—Sol no more believed in the God of Abraham than in a God that behaved like a blackjack dealer. But the atheist Jew was, nonetheless, a Jew, and so he answered, “Only until April, Zelda.”
—
ZELDA LET SISSY GO just before the Christmas holiday. To Florence her mother gave a shoebox of items Sissy had left behind and asked her to send it by post. The box was shockingly light and contained little: a pair of Bakelite hair combs, a pocket Bible stamped with the “Active Service” seal of 1914, and a square headscarf of crepe de chine. Perhaps it was the air of hermitry these items radiated, or the odor of Sissy’s bergamot hair oil still lingering in the scarf—the smell of Florence’s own recent childhood—that kept her from sending it back immediately. But what Florence now felt, as she gathered these orphaned objects in her hands, was a sense of such astonished guilt and solidarity that she could barely breathe. Her parents were away, visiting Harry in Riverdale, while Sidney was getting dressed for Haftorah class. Adjusting his collar, he followed Florence from room to room, talking about the Cardinals’ new roster. “They shouldn’ta traded Grimes to the Cubs,” he complained with his amateur’s astuteness. Ever since the Yankees had hammered his beloved Dodgers, he believed it was time for them to pay. The only team in the league with a shot at beating the Yanks were the Cardinals, but they were pursuing a bad strategy. “They’re picking off veteran players from the minors and raiding old guys from the clubs. It’ll give ’em a few easy wins. But it’s no way to build a team.” He trotted after Florence down the stairs, his hair molded to his head like a cornhusk. Her brother’s nonstop talking normally entertained her; talking and thinking were not, for Sidney, separate acts, just one revolving mechanism. But this morning his chatter was like the noise of a foghorn in her ear. She placed Sissy’s package in her book bag and strapped it shut.
“Where are you going?”
“To mail Sissy’s things back to her.”
“Why can’t she take them herself when she comes back?”
Florence paused long enough to turn and stare at him. Had their mother not told him? “Where have you been, Sidney? She’s not coming back.”
“What do you mean, not coming…?”
“Mom fired her. Why do you think she hasn’t been around?”
“I thought she was on vacation, like us.”
“Vacation?” She rummaged her bag for the scrap with the Harlem address.
“Did she do something to make Mom mad?”
“Don’t you have to get ready for Hebrew school?”
But he wouldn’t quit. “Did she steal something?”
“No, idiot! Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. Why did Mom fire her?”
“Because we can’t afford house help right now, capisci? Or haven’t you noticed? Harry is unemployed, and we have to pay dues at the synagogue for the rest of the year so you can stand in front of everyone for ten minutes and stutter your way through three verses of Torah.”
The distress on his face was out of proportion to what she’d expected. The green-brown of his eyes seemed to shatter like the glass of a medicine bottle. “It’s not my f-f-fault! I don’t even want to d-do it!”
He was nearly shouting at her.
“Too late, lemming. You’ll be made a man whether you like it or not, even if we have to eat turnips all year round.”
Maybe it was rotten to break it to him like that, but he deserved the truth. “I’ve got to work today. I’ll be back by dinner,” she said, and placed her gloved fingers on his head in a way she hoped was affectionate. When he didn’t move, she had no choice but to leave him, like a collapsed puppet, and let herself out into the cold February morning.
—
SHE UNLOCKED HER BOSS’S office, expecting solitude, and instead found Scoop with his feet up on his desk, turning the fresh pages of a new Daily Worker.
“You’re back early!”
“It appears so.”
He had been gone all week, traveling through the Middle West by Pullman and brokering deals with steel manufacturers. Now he removed his buckskins from the corner of his desk and said, “You know what I love about America?” He smiled up at the ceiling fan and quoted Whitman: “?‘I am large! I contain multitudes!’?” Stopped at a station somewhere in Ohio, he told Florence, he’d watched as a woman and child emerged from a tent camp across the tracks. The woman led the boy carefully across the planks so the child could crouch and do his business. Then, with a glance at the train car, she lifted up her own dress and squatted nearby, offering the passengers a defiant view of her bony bottom. Florence could hear in Scoop’s retelling an exuberance for the bountiful contempt his beloved America had brought upon itself.
He tossed down the Daily Worker and steepled his fingers. “Florence, I have a proposition,” he said. A group of Soviet engineers were journeying to Cleveland for eight weeks, to receive training in the construction of steel plants by the engineering firm McKee and Co. The delegation was due to arrive in mid-June. The men were in need of a translator and intermediary. “We both know you’re tired of being just a secretary.”
“You’re asking me to go to Cleveland?”
“You’d have a new title, sweetheart.” He framed his fingers as if around a banner. “Commerce Liaison.”
“But, Scoop, I don’t know anything about steel mills. And my Russian is only so-so.”
“Some of the guys speak English. And they don’t need another engineer—just someone to assist them in the more practical aspects of American life, keep ’em out of trouble.”
She wondered how exactly she was meant to keep a group of grown Russian men out of trouble, but she didn’t want to disturb Scoop’s faith in her by asking. Instead, she said, “Where would I live?”
“We’ll set you up in a place of your own.”
“An apartment?”
“Sure, if that’s what you’d like.”
“I’m not sure my parents would approve. Living so far away and all.”
Scoop turned up his hands. “Florie, we both know this Trade Mission won’t have its doors open forever. It’s only a matter of time before they open up a real embassy in Washington. Roosevelt’s no Hoover. He knows the Bolsheviks aren’t going away. And a smart girl with field experience in diplomacy…” His eyebrows lifted suggestively. “She could be a useful asset. A real contender for an embassy job.”