“Henry,” his mother is telling him, “I thought the rabbi was very well spoken.” He will have to go back. He will have to find a way. “Henry,” Rose says, “is that a police car? Is he chasing us?” Somehow he will support art. In the private sector, if he must. He will go back. He will rededicate himself to beauty. Not to the dealing, not the business, but to art itself. He will leave, will leave, and he won’t look back over his shoulder. He will leave, and he won’t look back. He is already trying to remember the name of his brother’s friend in Short Hills.
ORAL HISTORY
Rose volunteers once a week for the Venice Oral History project. They send her a girl, Alma, on Mondays, and Rose tells her the details of her life. It can be tedious, but it is important that it be done. “The irony is not lost on me,” she tells her son Edward when he calls.
She is an attractive girl, though she walks around in rags. They all wear them, of course. Rose sees them advertised in the catalogs. She gets them all. Ninety-nine percent schlock for twice the money. The bargains, so-called, are the worst. You could take the prices, but for that merchandise! Rose sits and waits every week and she can never predict what Alma will wear. Never the same rags twice; she doesn’t iron. A divorcee, of course, is what she is. She told Rose herself. Last time she wore earrings made out of scrap metal. She has two holes pierced in each ear. But really, apart from that and her hair, she would be a nice-looking girl. No raving beauty, but she has feminine hands, and Rose is very particular about hands.
It was the one thing Rose disliked about her own Ed’s wife. Even in the wedding pictures, she had the most ungainly, thick-fingered hands. The photographs are all away in boxes except for the pair on the secretary. Those were the boys in their angelic days. Two and five. She took out the old pictures of the family for the research project. The other things left from the old house are the sofa and the Chinese carpet, green. The carpet was the first thing she bought when she worked in Macy’s Ladies’ Dresses, her job before she got the position at Tiffany. The second thing was the beveled-glass mirror, which broke. The mounting was loose, and it fell one night with such a smash Rose was trembling for a week. The dining-room table and the six chairs Ed forced her to leave behind, because in Venice she got a studio at the senior citizens’ residence. But the nesting Chinese tables came as a set with the wing chair and the cloisonné lamps. Rose’s other son, Henry, wanted them, but Rose wouldn’t let him have them when he moved to England. He had uprooted her from Washington Heights so she could be near him in California, and then he moved to New Jersey and then to England within three years of her coming. She told him when he left her he wasn’t taking the lamps back with him. Rose put them on the chifforobe beside the bed. For reading she bought a seventy-five-watt lamp.
Alma saunters in with her hair windblown. “Sit, sit,” Rose urges, and she sinks down, folders denting cushions. It annoys and fascinates Rose, the way she flings herself about. If you asked her, she would tell you Alma doesn’t know what manners are. But Rose enjoys disapproving of her. She always loved an impossible child. Even now that Henry’s grown and only impossible, he is her favorite.
The girl shuffles the files about and rewinds something in the tape recorder before she even asks “How are you?”
Rose considers the question. “I feel fragile. And you?”
“Great.” They look at each other for a moment. Wrinkled again, Rose observes mildly. She turns down the volume on the radio, miniaturizing an Ives symphony. Alma watches, squinting. The white afternoon sun still burns in her eyes, blinding her to the shadowy contours of the apartment.
“You look ill, dear,” Rose says. “You look flushed.”
“Sunburn. Not to worry.”
“I was always so very fair,” says Rose.
Alma breaks in. “At our last session, you spoke about your childhood. Maybe we can pick up from there. Back before World War I. How did you manage to survive, domestically, under the great oppression?”
Rose settles back in her chair, revealing the knee bands of her tan stockings. “I’ll tell you about the Depression. That was when we lived in the Brooklyn house. Thank God we had the house.” She waves her hand mystically over the maze of furniture. The secretary especially was an agony to move. They had to take out the louvers and hoist it through the window. Rose had a time of it. She was wringing her hands waiting for it to come through, and she was certain the men wouldn’t see the finials on the top.
“Before the Depression,” Alma urges. “I want to talk about prewar oppression. How did your mother bear up? Where did you live?”
“Well, the war was dirty and dangerous. I would never go back to Vienna. Never, never. I was sent to England and became very English. All I can remember of Vienna is filth.”
Alma leans forward. “Can you be more specific? This is very important for the project.”
“Alma,” Rose murmurs, “I said I would help you, but some things should be forgotten.”
“Try to remember. You’re like a witness to those times—to that suffering.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Rose scoffs. Even so, she smiles, touched by Alma’s interest in her life.
“I need your cooperation.”
“Well,” Rose says sweetly, “we’ll make something up, dear. The university will never know.”
“Mrs. Markowitz!” There is something in Rose that baffles Alma. Something blithe and cunningly oblivious. She tries again. “All right, I’d like to rephrase my first question in a less technical way. When I speak of the oppression, here’s what I mean. As a member of the European, rising bourgeoisie and as a woman, did you feel that your ambition was stifled in Vienna?”
“I was a little girl!” Rose protests. “This is before the first war, remember. Don’t make me out a completely desiccated old fool. Besides, we were Jewish. That’s why we came here.”
“So you were really part of the Jewish intellectual elite. Is that a good description of the family?”
“I had six brothers,” Rose says thoughtfully. “Some were smart, some weren’t. Joseph, yes. Joel, yes.” She ticks them off on her fingers. “Saul, no. Mendel, yes. Nachum—died too young. Chaim, smart? Definitely not—may he rest in peace. He had a heart of gold. Maybe half the family was elite, the rest, not.”
“Well, I meant economically. Anyway, let’s move on.”
“Economically, we had the house,” Rose supplies. “That was what saved the family.”
“In Vienna?”
“No, here. In America. The city. Brooklyn. I was the baby. They sent me to Hunter College, but fortunately I married Ben halfway through. A horrendous place. You see, I never knew any mathematics. Couldn’t add two numbers together. It was because of the way I was brought up.”
“Ah,” murmurs Alma. “As a woman, you were socialized to be afraid of numbers.”
“Well, they tried to teach me, but they gave up because I was so stupid.”
“You thought you were stupid?”
“No. Artistic. I sewed dresses. My life goal was to go on a transatlantic cruise. Which I did. Several times.”
“So you aspired to the upper classes,” Alma concludes.
“Oh, we were upper-class. My brother was a teacher. We went to college. My sister-in-law painted, played the piano. We spoke German and French. We were very cultured people. Our home in Vienna was a beautiful work of art. In Brooklyn we lived even better.”
“Whoa,” cries Alma. “In my notes from last session you said you only knew poverty and hunger.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“You’ve changed your mind since last week?”
Rose lifts her chin. “Are you saying I can’t remember what I said a week ago?”
“No,” Alma says. “I’m trying to compile a consistent record.”
“I am consistent.”
“Well, which is the truth?” Alma demands. “Were you poor and ignorant or were you cultured?”
Rose folds her hands. “We were cultured at heart.”
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—
Starting the car, Alma glares at the Venice Vista condominiums, their avocado-green walls and cement paths under date palms. Every week Rose changes her mind about when she left Vienna. They all have their tricks, of course, the women of Venice and Mar Vista, the retired piano teacher in the valley. But the others trail their gambits more predictably: Eileen with her great-grandchildren, Simone and her long recipes. Rose is more subtle than this, more eloquently inconsistent.
Alma drives past Venice Beach and thinks how the old ladies on park benches used to inspire her. She went to see Venice People while still in Romance languages at Berkeley, and it struck her then that this was what she wanted. She was tired of insinuating meaning from fiction. She needed to read lives, not texts. She needed to hear real voices. Her adviser tried to talk her out of switching programs. “You’re doing brilliant work here!” Professor Garvey protested. “You’ll write a publishable dissertation.” But Alma had decided by this time that he was a fatuous, exploitative swine. So she left Garvey and his department, and now field work replaces MLA computer searches. People replace books. Her mother is distressed by all this. She is distressed by Alma’s graduate work in general. She pleads softly on the telephone from Palos Verdes, “Alma, why do you drive yourself like this? You don’t have to go to school all over again. You’re thirty-one years old, and if you don’t like your program you can just leave. There’s no shame in that. Or take a year off and see how you feel.”
“What would I do with a year off?” Alma demanded after one such speech.
“You don’t need to do anything,” her mother answered. “You could just come home and rest. Or we could travel together, just the two of us. You don’t take care of yourself working like this.” She didn’t say anything about Alma’s boyfriend, which was how Alma knew he was on her mind. Mom met him once and talked to him briefly, but she never speaks of him, never utters his alliterative, flat Jewish name, Ron Rosenblatt.
Ignoring her mother’s offer, Alma moved to Venice and bought the Toyota. She drives across Los Angeles interviewing. But work with live characters has its own frustrations. Alma’s women never provide quite the testimony she is looking for. They record scant evidence about their time and instead fill cassettes with soap-opera reviews, reports of gastrointestinal symptoms, readings of their letters. Here, again, Rose is the most dramatic, unfolding yellowed papers from her secretary, holding them close to the light as if some great historical record were at hand—all to reveal a thank-you note from her oldest brother’s bride or, in last week’s interview, a copy of her surreal letter to the IRS. “My dear husband was a Maoist. Please excuse the lapse in taxes.” Rose is the worst.
—
The apartment is almost as hot as the car. Alma’s cocker spaniel, Flush, sprawls, ears drooping, on the couch. The dog is recovering from a virus. At the round table Ron works under the blast of a three-speed fan. He is writing a scholarly work on the folksinger John Jacob Niles, but lately he’s been helping Alma with her data analysis. She wonders sometimes whether either project will ever get done. Though he loves gathering material, Ron has a laconic way of writing. He knows hundreds of ballads, but was already bored with writing about Niles when he and Alma met. The year before, he had wanted to take his sabbatical in Appalachia and check Niles’s sources, but Alma told him it was a ridiculous waste of time and she wasn’t going to sacrifice her project for it. He grumbled for a while and wrote a chapter.
Now, Ron sits with Alma’s transcripts weighted down against the fan’s narrow breeze with ashtrays and glass coasters. “Darling,” he says, “I don’t think this stuff is usable.”
Alma slams the door. “Don’t darling me.”
“Ms. Renquist,” Ron says, “this data is shitty.”
“It’s not my fault!” She sinks down next to Flush. “You should see what I have to work with. The way they change their stories. Rose Markowitz doesn’t even seem to know whether she was rich or poor.”
“But I can’t see,” says Ron. “That’s the problem. I have no idea what these women are like. All I’ve got here are your interruptions. You’ve been asking all kinds of biased, leading questions.”
“I’m just trying to guide the discussion,” Alma retorts. “You want me to listen to them babble about constipation?”
“Guiding?” Ron asks. “Look at these transcripts. Every other question is about class struggle. Come on, this is supposed to be a federally funded grant. This should be very straightforward: the lives of women before and after the wars.”
“Are you telling me how to run my study?” She bristles.
“Alma,” he says, “use your head. These women don’t know what you’re talking about. First of all, stop trying to indoctrinate them. What does Eileen Meeker know about patriarchal power structures?”
“Plenty.”
“But not by that name.”
She stamps into the kitchen. “It’s my thesis,” she says. “It’s my idea. You think you can do a better job, you interview them.”
“Yeah, why not,” Ron growls from the other room. “Why not the interviews, too?”
“Come in here if you want to talk to me.” She pours herself a glass of Chablis and feels some remorse, partly because Ron is right; she has been interrupting too much. It’s an old habit. She’s always worked to get a jump on arguments, to press her own conclusions. Even in high school Alma wouldn’t let a statement lie unchallenged. She interrogated her classmates in discussion. After class, teachers would lecture her apologetically. They gestured with exhausted hands in front of the cloudy blackboards. “I know you’re very bright, Alma. But you shouldn’t act so dogmatic.” Ron doesn’t flare up the way she does. She dances around him in their arguments, and he watches, infuriating her as if he were holding her by the wrists. It’s better to back off than play his games. “Ron?” She leans in the kitchen doorway. “It’s just so hard to sit there and listen to them. I get punchy.”
“I know,” he says. “Tell you what; I’m starving. Order a pizza.”
She phones for a pizza with everything—anchovies on her half—and cannoli for dessert. They clear off the table and Alma folds her printouts back into her rolling file cabinet. Ron complains that the apartment looks like a suite of offices, but Alma loves office furniture, the wall systems and built-in cabinets. She’s attached corner fittings to the bookcases and nested drawers under the bed. She’s installed folding tables, armless chairs, a layered printer stand, every kind of space saver. She indulges in the minimal. Ron’s sprawling reel-to-reel tape player (needed for research) and his shaggy ferns look like loose cargo next to Alma’s modules.
The pizza comes with double cheese, olives, mushrooms, onions, green peppers, and eggplant. Ron surveys the crust for Alma’s anchovies and slices her a piece, which she cuts neatly with a fork and knife. He lifts a long curling piece straight to his mouth trailing cheese. But the doorbell interrupts him. The delivery boy is back, standing in the doorway. “Can I use your phone?” he asks.
They can hear him talking in the kitchen. “Hi. It’s John. Dad there? Hi. Fine. Two more. I, uh, locked the keys in the car. I’m on Elk.” A long pause and then he reappears, avoiding their eyes. Silently he walks down to wait in the parking lot.
“God,” Ron says, “how embarrassing. Poor kid. You forget what it’s like to get an earful like that.”
“I don’t,” says Alma.
“Well,” he teases, “if you hate interviewing so much, go back to Cervantes.”
She sighs. “But I want to work with people!”
“As opposed to the rest of us?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. It’s just Rose who gets to me. The woman is driving me crazy. One session tears and suffering. The next week she laughs and laughs.”
“Maybe she’s senile,” Ron suggests.
“No,” says Alma. “She’s too damn manipulative.”
“Poor kid.” He stakes out another piece. “You’ve just never had an Aunt Rose,
that’s all. You don’t have the background for old Jewish ladies. Caroling at rest homes in Palos Verdes just won’t do it.”
“Very funny,” says Alma. “I did not go caroling.”
“It was a metaphor. Let me tell you, though, you’ve got to fight Rose on her own ground. She gets emotional, play on her emotions. Don’t analyze out loud, sit there and cry with her. She’ll pour out her heart.”
Alma looks at him.
“Trust me,” Ron says.
—
At the next session Alma tries. “We’ve been skipping around a lot,” she tells Rose. “So I’d like to go back to your childhood. This time I’m going to try to talk less and let you talk more. Where did you live as a child?”
Rose picks off a dead leaf from her African violet. “We lived outside Vienna in a little house on the grounds of a castle. When the soldiers came, all us children and women were locked in the castle, and one soldier had my mother roast them a pig! A whole pig! And then they left. Can you imagine?”