A Grandmother's Secret, set in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, begins when Annie, the narrator, daughter of immigrant Jewish parents, is nineteen years old and forced to marry a stranger twenty years her seniior. He, an Orth odox Jew with rigid views, and she, broad-minded and a dreamer with a passion for literature, imcompatibility marks their marriage from the outset. They have ten children, and as Phillip spends more andmore time at synagogue, spirited and energetic Annie opens a coffee shop in her parlor to support the family. The climax of the story occurs after her husband's brother comes to live with them. The brother brings lightness and laughter to the family and shares Annie's love of literature. What follows is an intense and irresistible love affair between Annie and her brother-in-law, something both consider base and sinful. Yet, they cannot part and finally come to accept that their love is destined.
I was sitting on the parlor floor reading Aunt Fanny’s First Marriage and its Tragical Ending when papa and mama came in themselves looking tragical.
“Nineteen. Time you was wed,” papa said.
“No one’s asking,” I answered.
In a voice barely above a whisper, mama said, “We’ve pledged you. Phillip Gosbert. New in town. Good man.”
“Steady job at the mill. And synagogue every day.” Papa speaking.
“Mature. Maybe in his late thirties.” Mama again.
“Wedding date’s set. Three weeks from tomorrow.”
I knew why they were pushing me. Like so many others, papa had lost his job in the depression that swept Chicago in 1893 and could barely feed the younger ones let alone me, a full grown nineteen-year old daughter. But I was too shocked to control myself. I howled. “No, no, no, no!”
“Enough. It’s settled,” papa said in his slow, emphatic ‘I mean business voice.’
A tear rolled down mama’s cheek as she followed papa from the room.
I’d always wanted to marry, but to the man I reamed about. He was dark and deep and mysterious like Heathcliffe. I read that Heathcliffe book after I left school in the fourth grade. Mama needed me to help at home. I didn’t mind except I couldn’t take books out of the school library any more. But, as if God heard my prayers, not long after I left school, a well-to-do man and his wife in the neighborhood opened a lending library in their parlor. Four hundred books. Brand new. Loaned to girls, too.
I felt silly at my wedding, solemnly vowing eternal love and loyalty to someone I didn’t know and might not even like. He certainly looked strange, like Ichabod rane, tall and so skinny you’d think he might blow away. His nose was long and pointed and his gray eyes had a faraway look even when he was talking to me.
But who was I to complain about Phillip’s looks? I was certainly no beauty, short as a child—fourfeet ten inches—with a birthmark shaped like an hourglass that covered part of my right cheek and neck. I suppose I should have been grateful to Phillip, not only for taking me sight unseen, but for his being so crazy about me, at night that is.
Now, seventeen years later, Phillip and I have ten children, all alive—a miacle when we’ve been so poor. Phillip lost his job at the mill four years after we married and couldn’t find another. Still, we had a horse cart, and though he didn’t know what to use it for, I did. “You can peddle rags,” I told him.
He threw his shoulders back. “Never.”
I understood his resistance. After all, he was a Talmudic scholar, looked up to by all the neighbors. But since we had no choice, I insisted on the rag business until finally he wore down. At night, I gathered rags for him, remnants in or near the barrels in back of tailor shops. And in the days, he rode up and down the streets yelling, “rags for sale, rags for sale.” He hated the business, complained that the yelling was making his throat too raw to sing at prayers at synagogue. And gradually, he spent less and less time at the business and more and more at the synagogue until the day came when it no longer made sense to keep a horse and cart.
My husband the scholar—I should have puffed up with pride, but I shriveled in fear. How were we to get by? I was already wrecking my eyes sitting up half the night sewing skirts and shirtwaists and embroidering pillow slips for a contractor who didn’t always pay me. Our oldest daughter, Minnie, had to leave school to work at a factory sewing buttons on shirtwaists for a half cent a button. Our sons had to scrounge coal that falls from trains at the railroad tracks. But I held my tongue. Talk was useless when, whatever the subject, Phillip responded with quotes from the holy book.
One day, after having served porride for three meals in a row, I sold my hair to a wigmaker. I’d always worn it long, down to the middle of my back, and when I came home with a bob and bangs, my girls screamed—“Mama, what have you done?”
I wondered how Phillip would react, but he didn’t notice the change until his brother Max, who was staying with us, complimented me on my modern hair-do. Max was a welcome guest. He made us laugh, and sometimes cry when he read to us in the evening by the stove. He was a generous man. He was a cloak maker so he wasn’t poor, and seemed to take a great pleasure in buying things for us, the latest a gramophone and disks for the parlor. On this night, sensing my desperation in selling my hair, he slipped into the kitchen after everyone else was gone and put three one-dollar bills on the table.
But generous as he was, I couldn’t continue to count on Max. I had to find a way to bring in more money. I wracked my brain for ideas but drew only a blank until the afternoon Tessie, my second oldest, invited friends over to listen to the gramophone. I watched ten rosy-cheeked kids laugh and sing an dance until they fell to the floor exhausted, only to rise a few minutes later and go at it again. Suddenly I had an image of a gang of kids sitting around little round tables noshing potato chips and drinking cocoa and sarsaparello and whirling around the floor to the tune of Ta Ra- Ra Boom De-Ay.
Phillip was no sooner in the door that evening when I blurted out my plan to open a coffee shop in our parlor. “Bist meshugeh(are you crazy)? You think shekels for a business will rain down from heaven?” He sputtered. “The parlor—a business in the parlor? You’ll shove us out like you shoved…?” He stopped in the middle of a sentence, but I knew what he was about to say—like you shoved me out of your bed. It’s true . I did that. After the birth of our sixth child I made him sleep downstairs, behind the kitchen stove, figuring the heat would put him into a sound sleep. Ha, the joke was on me. Oh, he’d fall asleep fast, but then later I’d hear the dreaded creak on the stairs as he climbed up to my bedroom.
“God commands me to be fruitful and multiply,” he’d say as he crawled in beside me. So alright, if I could bear the pain of childbirth, I could stand having him plunge into me. But no more than once a week. On that I insisted. It was after the birth of our tenth chiold that I put my foot all the way down. “God should give you a medal, Phillip; you’ve been as fruitful as Noah, so it’s enough already, enough.”
Still, I couldn’t ignore Phillip’s objecteion to my plan for a coffee shop. Our house was small and if we used the parlor for the coffee shop, we’d have to cram its furnishings into already overcrowded rooms. But did I have a choice? We had to eat. We had to pay the rent. So I plowed ahead, made lists of what I’d have to buy and how much it wo9uld cost. Again, Max came to the rescure with an offer of five dollars. When I accepted, his eyes shome so bright you’d think he was the one receiving a gift.
It wasn’t surprising that he loved doing things for us. We were now his only family. His son had died and recently his wife Helen was hauled off to an insane asylum. But there was something else, something I learned about in a conversation with him on his return from a visit to his wife.
I was sitting at the kitchen table reading Sister Carrie when he came in and slumped down on the bench across from me.
“How is Helen?” I asked right off.
His mouth opened and closed but no words came out. Then he swalloed a sob and said, “If only…if only I’d been home more, not gone to so many union meetings, I would have seen her slip away into that other world. Were was my brain that I didn’t notice?”
My attempt to console him with a reminder that Helen’s mother was also in asylums only increased his pain. His nose crinkling against tears, he jumped up and rushed from the room. After he left, I wondered if his unfailing generosity with us was a way of making up for what he thinks he didn’t do for Helen.
Speculations aside, with Max’s help, I opened my business. But it didn’t thrive. The country had fallen on hard times. Beggars stood on street corners, and many neighborhood kids lost their after-school jobs and couldn’t afford the five cent charge for admission and for root beer and chips. So I reduced the cost to three cents. Still, few could afford to come in. I let them in anyhow. And worried. Must I end the business? And so soon? No, no. Nothing has ever straightened my shoulders like having my own business. What can I do? Where can I turn?
“I’m closing the coffee shop,” I announced at dinner that evening.
Phillip’s eyes widened in surprise but he remained silent. Not Max, though. He leaned forward on the bench, his elbows on top of the table, and said, “haste makes waste, my dear.”
“I should wait for what? More debts?”
“I want you to try something else first.”
“If only there was something.”
“Reduce the admittance to a penny.”
“That won’t put any money in the cookie jar.”
“No, but I will—a nickel for every penny you take in.”
“But the kids get hungry and thirsty. They’ll want drinks.”
“Sell them for cost.”
I was about to object again when he put his hand on my arm. “Wait and see Annie, that’s all I ask.”
Reluctantly, I agreed. But I was edgy. So was Max, I realized when he began to argue with Phillip, something he rarely did given their opposite views on nearly every subject.
It was hard to believe Max and Phillip were brothers. No physical resemblance. Ma, who was fifteen years younger than Phillip, was a sturdy, muscular man with a square jaw, full lips, and the most penetrating black eyes I’d ever seen. He would have been as handsome as a player in the Nickelodeon if not for his pockmarked cheeks.
Sitting on the ege of his seat, his eyes b urning, his arms waving, he was carrying on about bosses and the depression and the awful conditions of workers in his factory. “They slave sixty hours a week. And for what I ask you? For six dollars. While the bosses’ pockets b ulge.”
Speaking quietly and slowly, Phillip said, “but Max, God has created a world with both rich and poor.”
“And does your God want Minnie drudging from dawn to dark sewing buttons on shirtwaist for a half cent a button?”
“You talk like only work matters, nothing else, like work is more important than praying and studying and finding a pathway to God.”
“What I think Phil is this: A union that protects us is right on God’s path.”
Phillip’s voice rose. “Dumkop, does God want us to mingle with Gentiles.”
Mox’s voice rose to an even higher pitch. “Who’s the dumkop? If we don’t work together, we sink together, Jews and Gentiles.”
“Ech. Your mind is like a fence post.” Phillip’s chin was quivering. He stood abruptly, swept crumbs from the table onto a plate and carried the plate outside to feed the robins that gathered on the tiny patch of grass between our cottage and the street. It was one of the few things Phillip did that wasn’t connected to the synagogue.
Part of me was sorry to see Phillip so upset, but another part cheered Max for shaking him out of his sureness that God knew all the answers.
I had to go to the outhouse under the outside stairs, and when I returned Phillip and Max were again at the table and again calling each other dumkop, but in a game of two-handed pinochle where the same names they used while arguing were now signs of affection. I reminded myself of their devotion, of how, despite the big difference in age, went deeper than any quarrel could uproot.
At first I doubted Max’s advice about keeping the business going, for it was slow, believe me. But after a month business picked up. And after two months, I couldn’t find room in the parlor for all the customers. Word of cheap entertainment at the coffee shop had spread beyond our neighborhood. My business was becoming a local hot spot. I raised the price of admission to three cents, and two weeks later, to the original five cents, for both admission and drinks.
One evening at the dinner table, a grin spread across my face when I told Max my cookie jar no longer needed donations. I was making a profit of five and six dollars a week, and one week—seven dollars. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t hungry either.
I was surprised when Max didn’t react to my good news. There were little frown lines between his eyebrows. “Are you coming down with something?” I asked.
He threw his arms in the air. “Unanimous. The strike vote. We go out on Monday.”
Memories of headlines about strikers being beaten by mobs or cops or Pinkerton thugs flashed before me. Max was a hothead; he was sure to get in trouble. I didn’t realize my hands were shaking until Max, who was sitting beside me, covered them with his big sweaty paws. “Annie, it’s the only way if we want a nine-hour day, a five-day work week, decent wages, union recognition, a closed shop.”
I realized Phillip, too, was worried when he reached across the table and touched Max’s arm. “Maxilla, no need to punch anyone in the face or give lip to the police.” He rose abruptly then, wound his phylactery around his arm for evening prayers, and hurried off to synagogue.
“Are you scared?” I asked Max later when we were sitting together on the front stoop. He put his arm around my shoulder. “Annie, even fish tremble in dirty water.”
“But they die if they can’t swim out of it.”
“Now my dear you understand the strike.”
I understood it all right when, a week later, four men carried Max into the house on a litter, his face bruised and bloody, his left arm twisted and swollen to the size of a melon. My knees turned to water and I fell down. But the sound of Max’s groans brought me to my feet.
“What happened?” I asked the carriers.
“Pinkerton goons. Three of them. Called him a kike agitator. Poked him in the face, shoulders, ribs. Max swung his arms out to ward them off. His picket sign brushed the side of one of their heads. Then boom—they jumped him, fists flying, legs kicking until a gang of us pulled them away. Max couldn’t get up. So here he is. Better call the doc.”
By the time I’d settled Max in bed and cleaned him up, Dr. Goldstein arrived. He shooed me from the room before starting his examination. I waited outside the door, seemed like forever. Finally Dr. Goldstein whizzed past me saying he’d be back shortly. He returned with material for a splint and a sling. “They broke his shoulder blade,” he said. “Bad break. Make sure he keeps it still.”
“For how long?”
“Six, seven weeks.”
With my youngest child now in school and Tessie and Sylvia, my third oldest girl, able to manage the coffee shop, I gave Max my full attention. Good thing, too, for he was too weak and sore to get out of bed for two weeks. One morning in the third week, I was cutting up vegetables for a stew when he lumbered into the kitchen and eased himself down on a bench in front of the table. “I’m as useless as an extra pair of teats on a cow. Please, Annie, give me something to do.”
“You might strain your shoulder. Better wait a while.”
“Either I cut up some vegetables or go crazy. Which will it be, Annie?”
Laughing, I handed him a paraing knive and a stalk of celery.
As he reached for the knife, his hand brushed mine and lingered there. He’d touched me before, but this time waves of heat raced through me. I jerked my hand away. Max stood, and, without a word, left the room.
After that we both kept our distance. Max sat at the far end of the kitchen reading or playing checkers with the children. But when our eyes met, I felt the same hot tingling in my chest and groin. I’d never felt so excited. Or so guilty. Images of Helen locked away in an asylum or of Phillip holding an injured bird in his hand flooded me. I’d leave the room, swearing I’d do something to stop this thing.
At dinner that evening, I was able to put Max from my mind with Phillip‘s welcome announcement. Phillip put his hand in the air to claim attention, an act so rare that every eye and ear turned toward him. “The rabbi has deemed it wise to appoint me as hazzan(cantor).
“Papa, what is hazzan?” asked six-year-old Eddie.
“Ah, hazzan, he sings the prayers.”
“All by himself?”
Phillip’s gray eyes had a green sparkle. “I invite every one to afternoon service tomorrow so you can see your papa”—he hesitated—“on stage.”
Aside from holidays, the children, Max, and I seldom went to Temple, but now, with Phillip a star, we all quickly agreed. And what a surprise it was to see straight-laced Phillip sing the prayers with a spirit and passion he never showed at home. Why couldn’t he be like that at home? Like Max? Stop it!
It was the second month of the strike. I had just finished dressing when I heard Max in the kitchen talking to someone whose voice wasn’t familiar. The visitor left right before I came down. Max was perched on a stool like a stick figure, his body tight and his fists clenches. “We lost!”
Without thinking, I brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen over his eye and ran my hand over his stubbled cheek. A shiver starting in his neck ran up and down his spine. I pulled away. He jumped up and headed for his room. I was scared.
The next day, Dr. Goldstein removed Max’s splint and declared him healed and ready to return to work. Now we could really put some distance between us. Or so I thought. But I found myself thinking about him even more in his absence than his presence. And toward evening, I couldn’t control my eyes from wandering to the window every few minutes watching for his return.
He seemed just as eager to see me. He’d rush into the house looking for me and when he found me, he’d stretch out his arms, then quickly pull them back. We had to break this spell. Maybe talking abut it, bringing everything out in the open would clear the way.
My chance came the next morning. Max stayed home from work with a miserable headache. I waited unil everyone had left the house, then carried a cup of steaming coffee to him. He was propped up in bed, the vein in his brow throbbing, his eyes half closed as if to protect them from the light. Maybe this was the wrong time. No, you can’t put it off any longer.
“Max, we have to talk.” I sat down on the edge of his bed, my heart hitting my chest like a jack hammer, and forced out the words. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
His face flushed and sweat broke out on his forehead. Then, without warning, we found ourselves wrapped around each as as if we were drowning in a rough sea. Theere was no life beyond that moment. The sounds that came from our mouths resembled nothing I’d ever heard. We swayed and rocked together like dances. I tightened my legs around him and then felt a sensation that made me want to howl.
“Did I howl?” I asked, laying limp beside him afterwards. He laughed and ran his tongue across my shoulders and breasts.
I dozed there in his arms and then woke with a start. Max was sleeping, too. I shook him. “Max, Max, what in God’s name have we done?”
He sat up. A look of horror spread across his face like a great dark shadow. He moaned. “Dear God, forgive me. I’ve fowled my own brother; I’ve fouled his wife; I’ve fouled my wife. I am nothing.”
I felt like a worm, a slimy creepy piece of mucuous.
Max grabbed my hand and pinned desperate looking eyes on me. “As long as I live, I’ll never forget this day. And as long as I live, I’ll never repeat it.”
That evening at dinner, Max announced that he’d be moving ut of the house the following day.
“Oh no,” some of the children groaned. They loved having Max around. He read to them and made them laugh with imitations of villains in the Nickolodeon shows. He took them not only to the shows but to museums and the beach and shopping for dill pickles on Maxwell Street, things that Phillip never did. Several times my older girls had said they wished Max was their papa.
Phillip turned white as lime and his voice was hoarse when he spoke. “For God’s sakes, Max, what did I do?”
“Nothing, Phil, nothing. I’s just time for me to move on.”
“You’re not making sense. God has put us under one roof for a reason.”
“I’m so sorry, Phil.”
“Nonsense with the ‘so sorry.’ I’m an old man. I rest in peace knowing you’ll be here to take care of things when I’m gone. Don’t abandon me little brother. I beg you.”
Max was breathing hard; the tears he’d been holding in broke through and rolled down his cheeks and onto his neck. He swiped at them with the back of his hand and drew in a breath so deep it swelled his chest. “Okay, Phil. I’ll stay.”
We went for a walk then, Phillip, Max, me, and some of the children. One by one, the others pealed off, Phillip at the synagogue and the children to play with friends. There we were, Max and me, alone for the first time since the unforgettable day. I put my hand in his. He hook his hand free and turned toward home. I followed, mad at myself for having given in to my urge.
In the following week, there was no danger. Max and I were never alone. But then came the day when he stayed home in bed with another headache. Was it an excuse to be with me? I brought him an aspirin and glass of orange juice and when I turned to leave, he reached out for me.
I could have refused. I should have. But something stronger than my will dropped me down to the side of his bed. His eyes were burning as if from a fever. He grabbed me by the shoulder. “When will this stop? When in God’s name will it stop?”
My senses deserted me. I collapsed in his arms and moments later we were entwined like the braids on Tessie’s hair. Afterwards, we lay together in the sweetest silence I’d ever known. Finally, reason returned. I dressed in a hurry. “This can’t go on, it simply can’t.”
“I should move.”
“No.” The word shot out without thought and was followed by—“I don’t know, oh God, what should we do?”
“Annie, when I dream at night, when I open my eyes in the morning, when I come home after work, I see only you.” He gulped. “So the question is—is it worse to violate Phil or to move away and desert him?”
“Do you think he knows?”
“Sometimes, when you and I are talking together, I see a funny look on his face. I don’t know if it’s because he’s mad or glad to see us so chummy.”
“I can’t tell what he thinks. He’s gone so much and when he’s here he’s wrapped pu in scriptures.”
“I shouldn’t think this, but could it be he’s glad?”
That was a fateful moment. And it made my heart sing, for I realized we’d made an unspoken decision to nourish rather than starve our love. It was wrong. And we were weaklings. But we’d come to see our love as destiny; There was no turning back. And so our illicit, sinful affair became permanent. We stopped agonizing about it. We spent evenings walking together. And every month Max took a day of sick leave when, after we bedded, we went to the beach or park and talked ourselves ragged. Our paradise lasted four years until Max suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack.
And now, many years later, I shake our sin loose from its mothballs and relive it and cherish every moment.
Eight e-books regarding Pathological Narcissism, relationships with abusive
narcissists and psychopaths, and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Eight e-books regarding Pathological Narcissism, relationships with abusive
narcissists and psychopaths, and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Eight e-books regarding Pathological Narcissism, relationships with abusive
narcissists and psychopaths, and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
