Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

She loves her father, but she hardly ever sees him. He comes home late more often than not — her mother explains that he goes to his card games — and then he marches directly into Davina’s room and Rebecca can hear him laughing with her, and tickling her; he tickles her under the chin all the time, he never tickles Rebecca. He is a big man, her father, six feet four inches tall and weighing 220 pounds. Everyone is always mistaking him for a detective. He is very tough, her father. She can remember when she was six years old and a black man came in the store, her grandfather’s dry-goods store, and tried to steal a bolt of cloth, good cloth, too, not a second or anything. Itzik had his eye on the black man from the minute he walked in the store, he wasn’t going to let no shvartzer take from him. But the man was fast, he snatched up the bolt and ran for the doorway, and Rebecca’s father was just coming in to tell Itzik not to forget supper was six o’clock tonight because Sophie had to go to Screeno. He saw the black man running off with the bolt of cloth, and he picked up a broom that was near the doorway, and chased the man all the way over to Third Avenue. When he caught him, the man pulled a knife from his pocket — “You always have to watch those niggers for knives,” her father said later, “they all carry knives” — but he took the knife away from the man and beat him up and told him if he ever came anywhere near the store again, he would be one dead nigger.

Sometimes, her father takes her for a walk on Saturday, and these are the times she likes best, when she is alone with him, and he lets her stop outside the open door of the delicatessen, and allows her to sniff the aromas pouring out onto the sidewalk — the sour pickles in the barrels, the corned beef and the pastrami, the knishes, the fresh rye bread, the kosher hot dogs. For the longest time, she thinks delicatessens are only for sniffing. She later learns that whenever her father takes Davina for a walk, he buys her a knish, or a piece derma, or a nickel-a-shtickel, or some shoe leather, which is dried apricot and delicious. Her father owns a Studebaker with a rumble seat. When they go for a ride in the country, her father, her mother, and her sister sit up front. Rebecca sits in the rumble seat. She does not mind this because she makes up stories about the clouds, sitting with her head back against the leather cushion and watching the sky as the car heads up toward the Catskills — and besides, Davina is just a baby. They keep telling her Davina is just a baby. In the mountains, they stop for lunch at her Aunt Raizel’s kochalayn , which is a bungalow she rents near one of the big hotels. It is only three rooms and a kitchen with a big stove. Her Aunt Raizel has a daughter named Hannah. Hannah has black hair and brown eyes, but Aunt Raizel does her daughter’s hair in the same long Shirley Temple curls. Once, on the way back from the mountains, it begins to rain, and Rebecca pulls the rumble seat closed above her, and then cannot open it again, and is afraid she will not be able to breathe. Her father does not discover that the seat is closed until they stop for gas. He opens it, looks in at her, and says, “Why did you do that, Rebecca? You could have suffocated.” Her face is streaked with tears, her nose is dripping snot. She answers in a very small voice, “It was raining, Daddy.” The only time Davina sits in the rumble seat with her is once coming back from the mountains, when her father stops to help a priest who has a flat tire and no spare. Her mother and Davina get in the rumble seat with Rebecca, and the priest sits up front with her father and the tire. Her father lets the priest out at a filling station near the Washington Bridge. That night, when they are eating supper at home, her father says, “He was an interesting man, the gaylach .”

She is an enormously bright child; her teachers have told her mother that her IQ is 154. She has skipped from 1A to 2A, and again from 4B to 5B, and at the age of ten, she is the youngest child in the sixth grade. But her sister has moved out of kindergarten into the first grade, and some of the teachers Rebecca once had are now beginning to notice Davina, and stopping Rebecca in the hallways to comment on how beautiful her younger sister is. Sometimes, she tries to look at her sister objectively. She studies the green eyes, so like her own, and the blond hair — well, her own hair had been blond when she was a baby, it did not become red and ugly till she was three; perhaps Davina’s hair will change, too. She supposes it is the nose. She stands before the mirror and lifts the end of her nose with her middle finger. Her hand hides her mouth, which she considers her best feature, so she raises her arm above her head, and reaches down for the tip of her nose with her hand upside down. When she exerts the tiniest upward pressure, her nose becomes very much Davina’s nose. She asks her grandfather one day whether she should have her nose cut off.

“Your what ?” Itzik says.

“My nose, Grandpa. Should I get a nose job?”

“What is that , a nose job?”

“They fix your nose,” she says.

“There’s nothing wrong with your nose. That’s your grandmother Rivke’s nose. That’s a beautiful nose.”

“Mm,” Rebecca says, but she does not believe him. If it is such a beautiful nose, why is it that none of the movie stars have it? Or none of the models in the magazines? If it is such a beautiful nose, why does everyone tell Davina she’s a regular Shirley Temple? She is getting very tired of Davina and Shirley Temple. Her mother has encouraged Davina to learn the words to “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” and whenever there is company, Davina sings the song and tap-dances around the living room, and everyone exclaims how beautiful and talented she is, and Rebecca wants to go into the bathroom to throw up. Whenever no one is watching, she hits Davina, who runs screaming into the kitchen. Rebecca is invariably punished for the attack, but she doesn’t care because she would rather be in her own bedroom with her treasured books than in the living room with Davina tap-dancing all over the place. In a book called Ivanhoe , she discovers a woman named Rebecca. Rebecca is the heroine. She reads the description of the fictitious Rebecca over and over again, until she has memorized it:

The figure of Rebecca might indeed have compared with the proudest beauties of England, even though it had been judged by as shrewd a connoisseur as Prince John. Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shewn to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation. Her turban of yellow silk suited well with the darkness of her complexion. The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colours embossed upon a purple ground, permitted to be visible — all these constituted a combination of loveliness, which yielded not to the most beautiful of the maidens who surrounded her. It is true that of the golden and pearl-studded clasps, which closed her vest from the throat to the waist, the three uppermost were left unfastened on account of the heat, which something enlarged the prospect to which we allude. A diamond necklace, with pendants of inestimable value, were by this means also made more conspicuous. The feather of an ostrich, fastened in her turban by an agriffe set with brilliants, was another distinction of the beautiful Jewess, scoffed and sneered at by the proud dames who sat above her, but secretly envied by those who affected to deride them.