Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Her daily walks became longer. She began on Fifth, turned onto Broadway at Union Square, stayed on its sunny side. In half an hour she was among the émigrés. She would not enter the cafeterias, where forgotten journalists argued all afternoon. But there was a café run by a sly man with a twirled mustache, and that place she did patronize. He was Bulgarian, she thought — her work at Camp Gruenwasser had made her adept at guessing nationalities. At the Bulgarian’s were newspapers, chess games, waiters in discolored white jackets. Soon Sonya had her own table by the window, and she could order her omelet by raising an index finger. The coat lay on its side across the other chair. Hat and gloves and scarf nestled under the sleeping arm. Keys and wallet reposed in her trousers.

She went to art-gallery openings, which were free, as were the canapés and champagne. She went to noontime concerts in churches, also free, though lacking refreshments. Warmly she stood in the unimproved area behind the library and fed pigeons. She went to a Saturday-morning service at a Reform temple — Roland always slept late on weekends. She went to a big Conservative synagogue. She went to an old shul, and sat downstairs.

She did not think of the coat as lawfully hers, oh no. But in its illicit protection she became a personage. Immigrant men hoping to adapt to the New World were buying fedoras and secondhand broad-shouldered suits. Unwittingly they looked like gangsters. In print dresses their wives resembled charladies. Sonya, American by birth, graduate of a teacher’s college and an accounting course, never out of the country until she was past fifty … Sonya was preserving the Old World of Ringstraßen , universities, coffeehouses, salons, museums, bunds and diets and parliaments and banks. She walked and walked. Truck drivers shouted coarse phrases to one another. Shopgirls out for lunch wore glistening lipstick. Sometimes she paused at a department store window and bowed at her reflection.

ONE MARCH WEDNESDAY she went to a student recital at a private school. It was an Episcopalian establishment, but some German-Jewish families had been sending children there for a few generations. The school occupied a block of brownstones whose shared walls had been removed, so that behind the burghers’ facade was a surprising interior: hallways hung with kindergarten art, an aquarium, the buzz of hopeful activity. A little auditorium was embedded within the whole. Sonya found a seat in the middle of a middle row. She saw from the program that she was to be treated to recitations, musical performances, a ballet …

“Your grandchild is performing?” said the person next to her: a hammered pageboy under a beret, a badly reconstructed nose.

“Yes … she will dance.”

“Ah,” the woman said, slightly friendly. “What is her name?”

“She is my daughter’s child,” said the barren Sonya. “ My name is …”

The headmaster mounted the stairs to the stage, and Sonya’s neighbor turned her worshipful gaze toward him, so Sonya had to be content with the botched rhinoplasty of the profile.

“… Gruenwasser,” she finished.

But the woman was no longer listening. Who wanted to listen to a refugee from God knows where? Delicate voices on the stage were singing Stephen Foster. The children’s chorus at the camp had managed Berlioz; well, they’d been directed by a once-notable baritone from Dresden. He was in Argentina now. She wondered how he was faring among the gauchos.

The recital ended. Half an hour later, stepping out of the elevator, Sonya heard the telephone ringing in the apartment.

“Mrs. Rosenberg? This is Dr. Katz at the Montefiore hospital …” She threw keys and wallet onto the telephone table. “… has sustained a heart attack, he’s very much alive …” She unbuttoned the coat and allowed it to drop to the floor. “… and conscious. His condition is stable …” She stepped away from the fallen coat, kicked it, got the room number, hung up, grabbed her raincoat from the closet — really, spring had come at last — and retrieved wallet and keys from the table. She snatched up a square of challis, and ran down the five flights of stairs and hailed a taxi. In the cab she slid the challis over her head and tied it under her chin. Roland had given it to her for her birthday, to wear as a scarf around her neck — paisley, it was all the rage. Oh, let her have another birthday gift from him next year; let him buy her another babushka. Let him live.

“THANK YOU FOR COMING.”

“Thank you for inviting us.” Where should they sit? Sonya wondered. She watched Roland settle himself in his customary chair, and so she took her own. Their hostess sat at ease on the sofa.

She was not the curly daughter, she was the one with full lips. The lips were still full — she could not be more than thirty-five, after all — and the long hair was still blond. “I want to meet you,” she’d said on the telephone, in a husky voice that she must have been told many times was irresistible. Well, maybe it was irresistible; they hadn’t resisted. “You left me a nicer apartment than the one I left you,” she’d gone on. “Nothing out of place; and those improvements!” The spice rack, Sonya supposed; the ironing board, a chair leg that no longer wobbled, added plants … the button? “Besides,” she’d chuckled. “You forgot your tuxedo.”

Now Madame Schumacher—“Can’t I be Erika?” she’d requested — poured generous tots of sherry. “You’re living on the West Side?” she asked.

In their new building the elevator always clanged. They had no second bedroom. On Roland’s bad nights he sat up reading and Sonya slept on the living room couch. There she dreamed of London and the bombs. But the place caught afternoon sun. They had purchased cotton rugs and secondhand furniture. Then they had splurged on a Finnish chest painted with stylized flowers. They used it as a coffee table.

“The West Side, yes,” Sonya said.

“An easy bus ride to Carnegie Hall,” Roland said. They talked of music, and of the mayor, and of films.

“Were you in Hollywood?” Sonya asked. Direct questions were not her habit; but she was a quarter century older than this beautiful woman, and her navy shirtwaist gave her the modest authority of a nanny. She had abandoned the Mary Martin hairstyle. Her straight white hair just grazed the shirtwaist’s collar.

“The whole family is in the movie business, none of us in front of the camera. I did some translations, this and that … I was divorcing when I left New York and I am thoroughly divorced now.” She gave a graceful shudder. Her accent was light, not at all guttural, just a sometime transposition of W s and V s, as in “diworced.” The sisters had all learned English from their tutor, she said; and she, Erika, had worked on French during a summer spent with an aunt, such a beautiful apartment, you could see the Seine. Sonya thought of ailing Paris, the oily river, the bridge.

More conversation, then silence. They would not see each other again: the woman of the world, the pair of pensioners. When Sonya and Roland got up to say good-bye, Erika stood also and left the room and came back with the tuxedo over her arm. “I didn’t notice it when I first came home. It was hiding behind Franz’s old coat.”

“Oh Yes The Coat,” Sonya said.

“My ex-husband’s. I kept it out of malice, he loved it so. I think I’ll give it to the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop.”

“Our organization distributes clothing to the needy.”

“I’ll remember that,” Erika said. She’d forget it before the elevator reached the lobby.

On the sidewalk, Roland pointed to the tuxedo, which Sonya carried over her arm. “I’ll never wear that thing again.”