The Vagabonds (15 page)

“You opened the window, and influenza”—that was a chant of the time. It was as simple as that. It had seemed complicated but was simple, really: she had been deluded, seduced into believing the world could be a happy place when all was pain and loss.

For that first year, however, she had been deluded: the war would be over and all would be well and she and her beautiful baby would live together forever. She gave him a bath every morning and loved the way he loved his bath, the way he splashed and cackled and the scrubbed pink folds of baby fat at Harold’s wrists and knees. She made plans for him, great plans; she would take him to Paris, she promised, and take him to London to visit the queen, and she read him fairy tales and nursery rhymes until he fell asleep. She loved the way he fell asleep, the way he heaved and tumbled out of wakefulness—just shutting his eyes with a great noiseless crash and putting his thumb in his mouth. Elizabeth was optimistic that whole year. Then, when the war was over and they declared an armistice and there was dancing in the streets and a new day dawning, what came to her instead of happiness was influenza—a headache, a cough, nothing serious really—and then it did get serious and the world went dark.

To begin with she tried to ignore it. At first she believed it was only a cold, only an indisposition, and even at its worst, her worst, it wasn’t all that terrible; she was young and strong and hopeful and she nursed Harold all week. He had seemed well enough—impatient a little, querulous even—but she blamed herself for disappointing him, for making him stay in the house all day long because she couldn’t walk. She would get better soon. “You opened the window, and influenza,” and then you closed the window and kept your child inside.

And sure enough, after two or three days and three or four nights—she wasn’t certain, she stopped counting—she did indeed improve. The fever went away. She had been foolish, a little, believing herself back in Barclay’s arms and believing herself his companion aboard some oceangoing yacht or in a grand hotel with marble floors and staircases, dancing her way down the deck or the stairs. She imagined in her foolishness that he cared for her and was concerned and she wanted to tell him to not be concerned, she and Harold would be fine. Then the fever broke and she knew she had been only dreaming and then she understood that Harold too was sick, had caught it, and it was a nightmare, not dream.

Those days were the worst of her life. Those nights were unthinkable nights. Upstairs, in the bed they shared, the narrow single bed beneath the sloping west-facing eaves, she held her child and kissed and rocked and soothed him and dried his dear face when he sweated and wept and wet it with a washcloth when he shivered, needing water. She had wanted to die for him, die in his place, but that would have been too easy, and the world was hard. While she had been enraptured, dancing with her partner down broad marble stairs, her son—their son—was dying, and she could do nothing to help. She tried everything to succor him, to make a difference and be of some use, but everything amounted to nothing and there had been nothing to do.

The doctor came. He arrived too late, of course, and of course was helpless and in any case exhausted, but what he said—first gently and then not so gently and then finally impatient and summoning her parents—was that Harold was past saving, dead, and had been dead for hours and she had to give him up. “He isn’t breathing, Lizzie,” said her mother, “he can’t be alive if he isn’t breathing,” and the doctor collected her beautiful baby and took him from her, away.

Then everything went dark again, and what they called the Roaring Twenties passed her by. “You’re young,” they said, “you’ve your whole life to live,” except that was the problem; she had nothing left to live for and didn’t want to try. The seasons succeeded each other, the years succeeded each other, and she helped her parents with the farm and, when they stopped farming, the chores. “You should take some pride in your appearance,” said her mother, and so Elizabeth took pride in her appearance, and when she was twenty-eight their neighbor Aaron Freedman noticed and asked her to go walking and riding and then he proposed.

She wanted to refuse. Aaron was cautious to a fault, respectable down to his wing tips, and he said he did not know or care what had happened to her earlier; he was twenty years her senior and had considered the matter. She was a beautiful woman, he said, and as far as Aaron was concerned he would be the luckiest man in Saratoga if she would consent to be his wife. He took her hand and requested a kiss and gave her two weeks to decide; he hoped she would view his proposal in a favorable light. He believed it was his duty to confess his failings to her: he had, he confessed, a terrible temper, but for her sake would govern it; he had, from time to time, been envious, but he would envy no one if she became his spouse.

In this fashion their courtship proceeded. He worked as a bank teller, and he was Jewish, practical and frugal and an atheist; on their second promenade together he announced that, although he did not entirely accept the
Communist Manifesto,
it had some valuable insights and religion was, he informed her, the people’s opiate.

“You’re not a socialist, are you?” she asked.

“No, not at all. A freethinking person is how I describe myself. A person who thinks for himself.”

In truth she liked it that Aaron was Jewish; it made her imagine him some sort of renegade, not living on rich bottomland and farming it by birthright. Her family, the Danceys, had been bottomland farmers since time out of mind and soldiers for generations, and all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. That was what the Frenchman said, Monsieur Voltaire, and her father shared the opinion, but Aaron said No, not a bit, he wrote it tongue-in-cheek. Her father recited a Robert Browning poem, declaring all’s right with the world. But all was not right; God was not in his heaven, and she wasn’t Pippa passing by in that poem by Robert Browning. When she accepted his engagement ring, Elizabeth made certain Aaron understood her history; she told him she had had a son and that her son was dead.

He knew all about it, he said, and wasn’t shocked. In Saratoga Springs you hear about your neighbors, and the boy she had married went off to fight and died a hero in the Battle of Belleau Wood—so he had heard—and he was proud to think he had proposed to the widow of a hero and that a decade afterward she would allow herself to be by him consoled. He did not think her spoiled, he said, not soiled and—though you believe you are damaged—not damaged goods at all.

This amused her. At some point her parents had made up a story and spread it around and this seemed amusing to Elizabeth; she left the lie alone. If her new husband wanted to think she’d been married before, and needed to think she was somebody’s widow, well, why not, she asked herself, what possible harm could there be? There had been a passionate encounter, a single night with Barclay, and as though she was a character in a bad romantic novel strict retribution followed: disorder, early sorrow, a love child come to grief. She had not felt that way to begin with; there had been no damage and nothing to regret; there was neither grief nor harm. The harm came in 1918. That was when the world went dark; that was when the great joke of existence came clear, the celebration that was not a celebration and armistice that brought with it no peace. Once her baby expired beside her, in the narrow single bed they shared, it was a matter of indifference—a joke, a bad joke, a burlesque—if people lied or told the truth, and the tale her parents told was just another piece of foolishness about a wartime hero dead in a ditch in France. When she and Aaron married, Elizabeth wore black.

They were married by a justice of the peace. Because she was not Jewish they could not be married by a rabbi, and in any case it would have been unseemly to wear white and have bridesmaids and throw a bouquet. The service was a quiet one: upstairs, in an office where they signed documents. The JP who married them was sparse-haired and incompetent; he kept losing his place in the service, and he explained to her parents that he’d lost his spectacles and needed spectacles to read the text, which, although he knew it off by heart, he wanted to make certain he got right. He got it wrong. He said, for example, “worthly goods,” when he meant “worldly goods,” and when he said, “You may kiss the bride” he did so, first, himself. “In sickness or in health,” he said, “in poverty or wealth.”

On their wedding night Aaron took off his jacket and shoes and placed them in the hotel closet and when he touched her touched her as though she were ready to break. This too was a source of amusement. She satisfied him, it appeared, and he was appreciative and grateful and soon fell asleep. For their first wedding anniversary he took her to the cottage where she’d been romanced when sixteen years old and said, guess what, you’ll never guess, I bought this from your parents and it will be our new house. It was your grandmother’s, wasn’t it, once? You’ve always loved it, haven’t you—and now it’s yours, it’s ours!

Her husband seemed to think she would be happy in the gabled house: it held—or so he seemed to think—glad memories of childhood and the innocent frolics of youth. He had no idea at all, she knew, of how she’d been with Barclay, how animal her appetite before the world went dark. Aaron showed her the cottage room by room, with a proprietary air, as though she had not been there nakedly and rutting on the very bed he said would be their bed. Elizabeth was shocked, was speechless, and her husband took that as a compliment until finally she taught herself to think of this as funny also, a joke played by the vengeful God that neither of them believed in, and rearranged the furniture and called the cottage home.

Years before, the year she turned eighteen, a man had called her to the bank and said, Miss Elizabeth Dancey, there’s something you should know. He talked about a gift of stock allocated to her child, and that a period of waiting—two calendar years—had elapsed and therefore he was now at liberty to inform her of the trust account. He ushered her into his office with a great show of courtesy, and made a point of pulling out her chair. When she told him Harold died, the man offered his condolences and said the trust will nonetheless accrue. He smiled at her. She had been wearing her blue dress, the one with white lace piping, and she tried to tell him while he failed to listen—nodding, smiling, tapping his pencil against his front teeth—that none of this mattered, nothing mattered; in a world without her son it made no difference to her if there was or wasn’t money, and she didn’t care about the shares of General Electric and he was welcome to watch them—what was the word?—accrue. What Edison and Ford and Firestone had done for her was by Harold’s death undone; there had been an epidemic, a pandemic of increase and plenty, and none of it mattered at all. It isn’t so simple, he said, it’s never that simple, you might well have another child, and Elizabeth said thank you, sir, and left the bank and never spoke to the trust officer again.

Her parents died. Aaron’s parents too had died, though in New Jersey and an old people’s home; they had been dying for years. Aaron continued to work at the bank and was promoted and did well and then, in 1931, he lost his job. On that day he came home early, saying the bank had closed its doors, saying it would surely reopen for business at some point in the future but until that time times would be hard. Elizabeth said she also had a piece of news and had been planning to announce it at dinnertime—there was a casserole, chicken and carrots—and hoped he would be pleased. She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t been paying attention, but she was two months pregnant and hoped he wouldn’t mind.

The truth was she was terrified and could not let him know. She herself was thirty-one years old and alone in the world and everything went dark once more; it made her hate this body that was loved by men and made to thicken, quicken with life in the presence of death, that dominion of ashes and dust. She was afraid to bear another child and did not want to gain what she feared again to lose. All through the pregnancy Elizabeth lay terrified in the back bedroom of the cottage or downstairs on the sofa or, for the final weeks and days, in the rocking chair on their screened porch; fresh air will do you good, said Aaron, and she heard the echo whisper:
air, share, despair, there, where . . .

The doctor came. But he arrived too late, of course, because by now she was in labor, and the great fist of her body held and squeezed and wrung her dry. Her contractions were impossible; it was impossible to govern them, and she bit her hand and bit the washcloth Aaron offered, first hot and then cold like the washcloth with Harold, bucking in the sweat-wet sheets the way she had with Barclay and screaming shamelessly until the doctor told her husband to step outside and take a walk and try to enjoy the spring air.
Air, there, despair,
she was shouting, but nobody was listening, and she danced down marble stairs to an orchestra no one could hear. By the time her second child was born—a daughter this time, Alice—she was begging for deliverance, an end to all her suffering and asking the doctor to please let her die.

“What nonsense, child,” Dr. Jacobsen said. “You’re fine. She’s fine. She’s a beautiful baby. You two will be just fine.”

And Aaron was elated and called himself the most fortunate man and, later, when Lou Gehrig called himself, in his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Aaron folded the newspaper with satisfaction and said, “The second luckiest, he means.”

He was devoted to his wife and daughter, telling Elizabeth they would inherit what he had so carefully put aside, keeping them solvent throughout the Depression, though barely, and making do with what they had and scrimping and saving on clothes. He would not scrimp on Alice, however, would not hear of corner- or cost-cutting, since nothing but the best was good enough for his little darling, his princess. No toy was too expensive, no item of clothing too fine. He took odd jobs all over the county, doing bookkeeping or accounting for whatever payment was offered, and often he did so gratis. He worked hard and uncomplainingly and was gentle with her, always, and did not lose his temper. Through the worst of it he stayed, he said, an optimist, and Elizabeth respected this and tried to share his good humor, his boundless optimism.