Blackjack, p.1
Blackjack, page 1
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I put off the unveiling of my daughter’s headstone as long as I could. We didn’t do it until the eleventh month after she died, when the yahrzeit was in sight and I couldn’t stall any longer. I made all kinds of excuses—my grandchildren weren’t ready; I was too busy getting them settled in with me and Phil to organize it; it was too cold for us all to stand outdoors. Finally my sister Sadie called me up and told me it had to be done, it had to be done soon, and she would organize everything. Sadie is my older sister. My other two sisters are younger than me, not that any of us are young anymore. Betty was the youngest of us, the baby of the family, but she died of cancer twenty years ago during the war, so it’s just the four of us left.
Sadie took care of everything—she got in touch with the rabbi at my shul, she sent out the invitations, she had our other two sisters, Millie and Rose, put together some food and desserts and bring them to my and Phil’s apartment for afterward. I didn’t have to do a thing. I just told her to send any bills to Phil, and he would take care of them. And he did, without a word. He’s good like that. Reliable.
So all I had to do was show up on Phil’s arm, with my daughter’s children, Elsie and Danny, in tow, all of us dressed soberly and formally. That I could do, down to Elsie’s white gloves. Only twelve years old, and already her hands were too big to borrow a pair of mine. But I made sure she had her own.
I don’t remember what the rabbi said about Myra after reading from Psalms. He didn’t know her too well, anyway. He was the rabbi from my synagogue near Sutton Place. Myra and the kids had lived out in Midwood. Instead of listening, I thought about the last message she ever sent me, and wondered if it was my fault she was dead.
I didn’t listen to the Kaddish, either. Instead I looked at the chanting men through Myra’s eyes and saw what she would have seen, what would’ve mattered to her. Her father was missing.
Of course, he’d been missing for a long time by then.
I’d married Harry in 1927, and I’d married him for love, and my, weren’t we in love? We used to go out drinking and dancing together in smoky speakeasies. I’d line my eyes all dark with kohl—they used to call me Cleopatra—and he’d play the ukulele. In the summer, we’d take the trolley out to Coney Island and lie on the beach together and stroll on the boardwalk and stop to smooch each other every few minutes.
Love.
Harry, he was so handsome. Even after I knew he was no good, I couldn’t keep my hands off him. He had thick, dark, curly hair and sparkling dark eyes, and a knowing, cynical smile that just made me weak. A nice sharp jawline. Phil, now, he never really set my blood pounding like that, but on the other hand, he’s never raised his voice, either, to me or to Myra, not even to his own boys. Harry had a mean streak. Myra got that from him.
We loved each other so much, we got married and kept up the smooching, and in 1929 I had a little girl. I had Myra. He named her that.
Then a few years later, I got sick, real sick. Women’s problems, they called it, though I blame it on Harry’s whoring around. That’s love for you. First I had to stay in bed and I only got up when Myra needed me. Then I had to take Myra and go to my mother’s so she could take care of us both. Harry was working too hard to do it, I told her. Pfft. As if Harry was ever a working man. He was a gangster, that’s what he did, and he wasn’t very good at it. Sure, we got a warm reception at all the joints he supplied liquor to during Prohibition, but it turns out that doesn’t matter so much when you’ve got a kid you’re trying to feed.
Anyway, where was I? Right, I took Myra and went to Mama’s so she could take care of us, and then things got even worse, and Myra had to stay with Mama and Papa and Betty, who was still living at home, while I went to the hospital.
Poor Myra didn’t like that. Mama said she cried and cried after the ambulance had taken me away. Poor kindele. Mama always thought maybe that was why Myra was the way she was, the ambulance taking me away, and her not being allowed to visit on account of her being a child. But I don’t think it was that. After all, I came back, didn’t I?
But we didn’t know you would at the time, Mama would always say when I said that. And she was right. Things looked real bad for me for a while. We didn’t know if I was going to make it. And Harry, well, I guess he didn’t relish the thought of being a widower with a small child the way things were—this was just thirty years ago, 1932, the Depression—and sometime in there he just … left. Didn’t turn up one Friday night to have Shabbos with Myra—Mama always kept the sabbath at her home—and we didn’t hear from him after that.
So there was Mama with Betty and Myra at home and Harry had vanished, and things didn’t look so good for me. Mama didn’t know what to do, maybe change my name again, like when I was little and had scarlet fever and I went from Henrietta to Josephine. But then Mama remembered that wasn’t what had helped. What had helped was when she talked to a woman who had just come over from the old country, a witch, I guess you’d call her, and the witch had made me a broth and an amulet both. So Mama went to the witch again. Tante Deborah, I call her.
Mama left Myra with Betty and brought Tante Deborah to visit me in the hospital, and I remember sipping something that tasted terrible, and Tante Deborah slipping a pouch under my pillow and chanting some words I was too sick to hear well or follow—Hebrew, I think. And after that I started to get better. The doctors at the hospital, they couldn’t believe it, and the nurses told me later that they’d never seen someone so sick get well again. And finally I could go home.
Harry had been gone for weeks by then.
Myra was never the same after her beloved Papa left … I think she never got over it. She cried more easily than ever, and even when she wasn’t crying, she was mostly unhappy. I don’t know, those were bad years. Hard years. I worked at Gimbels, a window dresser, and Myra and I lived with Mama and Papa and Betty. I’d go without dinner sometimes so there would be enough for Mama and Papa and Myra. Our other sisters couldn’t help, nobody was any better off. For years, this went on. It was no way to live.
I couldn’t stand it, I told Mama. “We can’t go on like this,” I told her. “Papa out of work, Betty and I don’t bring enough home.”
“Well, what else is there to do?” asked Mama.
I thought about Gimbels. “I’m gonna catch myself a rich man,” I told her. “The very next one who comes into the shop. I am.”
And I did. Spotted Phil when he came in looking for clothing for his sons. A respectable widower, his wife had been gone for a couple years, and I could tell that he was looking around again. He seemed gentle, and he seemed kind enough, and he had money. You can’t ask better than that. He came back to shop now and then—for shirts, ties, gloves, this and that, and finally he asked for a date. It took maybe … a year after that until he proposed. I said yes, but only if we moved into Manhattan, because I didn’t want to live in Brooklyn no more, even at his very fancy house in Crown Heights. They wouldn’t sell to Jews on Fifth Avenue in those days, or even near it, so that’s how we ended up on Sutton Place, a co-op in a real fancy building, with a white-gloved doorman downstairs. And we’ve been all over together, on cruises, to resorts—all very nice. And I never went without dinner again, even on Yom Kippur, because I’d had enough of fasting. And Myra slept in a real bed, not a hammock.
Love. Well, I learned to love him.
His boys never did like me much, though. I think they thought I was a gold-digger. Maybe I was, but what else was I supposed to do to take care of myself and Myra? And Phil’s been happy. I can count the number of fights we’ve had on one hand. I pay attention to his favorite colors, and get my dresses made up in them. I pay attention to what he likes to eat and make sure it’s always on the table. He tells me where he wants to go for vacation, and I set everything up. I didn’t do all that with Harry. But I’ve kept Phil happy for almost twenty-five years and counting, and that’s not nothing, either.
Myra never took to him. He wasn’t unkind to her, but he never made much of an effort, either. What man does, when it comes to children? Especially children that aren’t his. For Myra, nobody could replace her adored father. She remembered dancing with him while she was little, she remembered that he was handsome. I’d be surprised if she remembered anything else. She thought she remembered why Harry left, though. She blamed me for it, for driving Harry away. I was sick at the time, so sick. It didn’t make any sense, but she blamed me anyway.
Never mind Harry. It was Phil who paid for he
* * *
Phil wasn’t there on Myra’s yahrzeit, a month later, though. He had a business dinner that evening, but I didn’t mind. There was something I had to do that night, besides lighting the candle, and I didn’t want to explain it.
After the kids were in bed, I opened my jewelry box in the bedroom I shared with Phil and took out the envelope with the last note from Myra. I hadn’t told anybody about it, not my sisters, not Phil. He knew it existed, of course, but what it said? No. I couldn’t. I didn’t tell anybody.
I read it one more time, read the accusations about me, the way she blamed her daughter for ruining her life. Then I took it to the living room and held the corner of it in the flame of the candle until it caught. I held it for a few moments more, until it was well and truly aflame, and then I dropped it into an ashtray and watched it burn.
* * *
It was a couple months later that I was playing canasta with my sisters, and Sadie had the idea for us to go to Vegas. The grandkids hadn’t come home from school yet, but the seven-layer cookies were out on the table already, and we were munching on them.
“Phil’s gonna be out of town on business for two weeks next month,” I said, as I rearranged my cards and laid down a set of nines. “And the kids are going to visit their father in Philadelphia for one of those weeks, you know. It’ll just be me here.”
All three of my sisters exchanged looks. They thought I didn’t see, but I did.
“That’s lonely,” sympathized Rose. “Maybe one of us should come stay with you.”
“That’s a break,” corrected Sadie. She was my partner in the game. She put down a canasta of aces and smirked.
“Nice,” I said. Sadie is better at canasta than me, but I’m better than Millie or Rose.
“You should go somewhere,” Sadie continued. “Why let them have all the fun? Lock up the apartment and you take a trip also.”
I wasn’t sure my grandkids, Elsie and Danny, would describe visits to their father’s house with his new family as fun, but I didn’t say that. Well, I say “new,” but he and his wife have a three-year-old, and I hear she’s expecting again.
“Ach, where would I go?” I said absently. I was watching Millie rearrange her cards, trying to figure out what she had in her hand.
Sadie rolled her eyes. “Vegas, of course! You love Vegas.”
I do like Vegas. We’d been there a few times and while I enjoy canasta with the girls, blackjack is really my game. When I say “we,” I mean me and Phil, of course. Harry and me, we never had money to go anywhere farther than the speakeasy on Ludlow Street.
Millie drew a card and discarded another. I eyed the discard pile, but decided against picking the pack. I didn’t want to get saddled with that many cards this late in the game.
“Vegas alone,” I said, “is not necessarily a fun time.” I drew a card. It was the three of hearts, so I smiled and put it down with the two other red threes I had.
“So, who says you’ll be alone?” countered Sadie. “Take me with you. Your Phil can afford it.”
I had done the best of all of us. My Phil certainly could afford for Sadie and me to go to Las Vegas on his dime. Our dime, I should say. Haven’t we been married long enough for me to say that?
“We-e-e-e-ell,” I said. “Why not? Only what if Elsie and Danny need to come home early? I’m not going to go for the whole break.”
Elsie and Danny don’t like their stepmother, and I don’t think she much likes them. She wants to pretend that Siggy came to her fresh and new, no previous family at all, certainly no kids hanging around after they’re no longer wanted, kids from a marriage she helped break up. I don’t know how many more visits to Philadelphia are in the cards for Elsie and Danny.
Speaking of cards, Millie laid out what remained of her hand. “I’m out, girls,” she said. “Time to count up your points.”
* * *
So the next month, Phil packed for Montreal, Elsie and Danny packed for Philadelphia, and I packed for Las Vegas. After I’d said good-bye to Phil and he’d headed off to Canada and after I’d kissed Elsie and Danny good-bye and they’d driven off in the backseat of their father’s car, I picked Sadie up in a taxi and we got on a plane to Nevada. We took a taxi from the airport to the Stardust Resort and Casino. It was very nice in there, all red and brown velvet, very plush. Anyway, when we got there we each went to our own room and unpacked. Our rooms were in the Venus building. Love again.
You gotta understand how fancy Vegas was back then. It was adults only, not like porn, but like a fancy restaurant. I’d packed my fanciest gowns, and even bought a couple new ones for Sadie so she wouldn’t feel outclassed. Sure, we knew the place was mobbed up and had been since the ’40s, but so what? To tell the truth, it made me feel a little more at home, because the mob there was mostly our guys—Yidn, you know? And it made the place very safe—you never had to worry about anything violent happening, because the boys didn’t want to give authorities any excuse to take a closer look at what they were doing. All you really had to worry about was one of the boys getting too handsy, but where don’t you have to worry about that?
Sadie and me, after a late lunch at the Polynesian restaurant they had there—I don’t know what that had to do with the outer space theme, but that was the restaurant they had—we went straight to the casino in our very nice dresses, faces all made up. Sadie, she played around at the slot machines, the roulette wheel. I went straight to the blackjack tables. I picked one at random and just stood and watched for a few hands.
Then I placed a few small bets, nothing crazy, just feeling out the game and the players, and I did all right. Before long, I took a chair myself. I won a few hands, lost a few, but I was doing better than breaking even. Just a little better, but that’s what you go for in blackjack. Watching the cards, I forgot to think about Myra for a little while. At some point I looked up and saw that Sadie had floated over and was watching me.
I caught Sadie’s eye and jerked my head slightly. She floated a little nearer.
I threw the next hand and busted. Then I looked at the little gold wristwatch on my left arm. With my eyes, I can’t actually read it, but I didn’t have to.
“Sadie, hon,” I said. “I’m getting hungry. It must be dinnertime, don’t you think?”
A few older gentlemen offered to take us to dinner and the evening show—Sadie and me, we weren’t young anymore, not by a long shot, but we were still pretty good-looking for our age. We waved them off, politely of course, no hard feelings, but we were planning a quiet night. Well, I was.
Sadie had different ideas. “Whaddaya mean, a quiet night? It’s not every week we get to Vegas!”
“I get tired early these days,” I told her. “With Elsie and Danny, I’m raising kids all over again, but I’m not so young this time.” Honestly, I’d been tired ever since losing Myra.
So we split the difference. We had dinner in my room—room service—and after some coffee so I wouldn’t doze off, we went back down to the evening floor show.
First, though, I placed a long-distance call to Siggy’s in Philadelphia. He picked up.
“Siggy, it’s Josie. How are the kids doing?”
“They’re doing fine,” he said, but he didn’t sound so sure. “Having the time of their lives.”
“Yeah?” I said. “That’s good. Get Elsie. I wanna say hi.”
After half a minute, Elsie got on the phone. “Hi, Nana.”
“Hi, darling,” I said. “Are you having fun?”
Elsie paused just a little too long before answering. “Yeah.”
“What’ve you and your brother been doing?” I asked.
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing?”
“We all went for ice cream.”
Ice cream. I could get her ice cream in New York.
