Rose and Barnet (c. 1916)

Hilda and the girls 1945 (me and my little sister)

Max and the Ford 1945 (Salinas, California)

THE PROMISE

Think of that industrial town, and then, think of that cleaning store. How did they ever expect to make it? That surfeit of optimism, where did it come from? How different an age, following that war, the yet-to-be acknowledged/publicized Holocaust? Their parents came here from the old country (four different ones to be sure, but collectively identified as “the old country”), across the sea, on what manner of streaming steaming steamer? Away from pogroms, poverty, conscription, a peddler-scholar and a craftswoman-seamstress, a laborer-scholar and an illiterate housewife.            

Look at them, what a cute couple, the Americans, an angry sprite and a detached scientist barely thirty, with two children in tow, ready to move halfway back across the country, still thousands of miles away from any family member, thousands of miles, that is, unless you want to count the bigamist, the laborer-scholar and his rumored Chicago family (or was it the other way around?) only 150 miles away, a real city, not this godforsaken hole, Peoria.            

This abandoned family’s youngest daughter stole away with the oldest son of this failed scholar’s family, the favored prince, given to bouts of mania/melancholia so severe he was hospitalized at 18 for buying his sister an ice cream cone, and as proof of his illness, he let them take his glasses away. Who can understand a family mobilized to hospitalize a son whose uncharacteristic behavior consisted of buying an ice cream cone for his younger sister?           

Hilda and the girls are staying with her mother and eldest sister in Boston. Max is already in Peoria, it is late 1945, the war has been over for months, and Max has been transferred to a laboratory in the midwest where he can be close to the soybeans that the government continues to test and develop and chemically process to make plastic, now for peacetime, but no Tupper here, here there are Caterpillar tractors and pigs. Middle America.           

There is no housing anywhere. But Max is resourceful, a doer. He finds a place to bring his wife and children back from Boston, with a fellow chemist, a generous man who will loan him the basement of his large, pre-war ranch house (California style, it must make Max feel at home) for the family until they can find an apartment, a house in this bustling smelly (malt, barley, steel, the miasma from the river blankets the bluffs in the humid, hot, hot summertime) boom town that has barely switched from wartime manufacturing, prosperity and returning servicemen reclaiming their jobs and women pushed out of the workforce to become the archetypal ‘50’s woman, wearing the “new look” and full makeup, housecleaning. Betty Friedan is from Peoria.            

It’s still the ‘40’s, the devastating strikes that will undermine the local economy, the graft and corruption that reach to the core have not yet been uncovered, still a full decade away.           

Does Hilda want to come? Her family and his both have urged her to return to him, to overlook his what? temper? womanizing? moodiness? uncommunicativeness? all or none of the above? This must be the time his mother begged Hilda, made her promise she would never leave him, a promise as much an excuse as a pledge. Maybe Hilda invented the promise out of whole cloth. She was not a seamstress, but she could sew.            

Imagine that scene - Rose, oh, maybe 47 at the time, also a scamp, she recognizes Hilda. One of the few extant photos I have in my possession shows Rose playing on the roof with her youngest daughters Beatie and Beverly, barely older than her grandchildren, just about to heft a huge washtub onto her head to hide from the camera.            

Rose takes Hilda into her kitchen, sits her down at the kitchen table, the huge kitchen with the Bendix running all the time, the sudsy garments mesmerizing, tumbling round and round, Hilda keeps her eyes on the clothing visible through the glass porthole, while Rose, far more modern than Hilda’s own mother, for one thing, she is literate, for another, she has raised her family of eight virtually on her own, from her own labors, sewing far into the night, costumes for grand opera, jewelry of intricate beads, sequins, metallic threads, bridal gowns, ball gowns, clothing and adornment she never could have afforded nor would she have wanted them for herself, she was down-to-earth, noisy, fulsome, a handsome woman with wiry steel gray hair escaping from every pin known to woman, tells Hilda Matis needs her.           

Hilda’s mother is also a skilled seamstress, like Rose. But Anna has never made anyone’s living, she has relied on her oldest daughter to support the family, she has taught her girls (four of them, just like Rose) that they were special, that every Jewish man would want them, support them, (even though her husband did not support her, even though Dora is a highly regarded legal secretary who has sacrificed her youth and marriage chances to support her mother and younger sisters and the princeling baby brother and will never marry), Anna believes that marriage is the main and only chance for a poor Jewish girl who has only her beauty, her wits, her cute ways, marriage is the only way for Jewish daughters to survive, and Anna extracts a promise, not such a difficult promise to extract from Hilda - “You must stay with Max no matter what. You must go back to him, take the children back to him. Max will always support you. He is a good boy, he just gets a little upset sometimes.”  Rose says the same. Or maybe it’s Hilda who has said these things.           

So Hilda reconsiders, she has denied to the world, to herself, that there is any problem, she has said nothing about what Prince Max expects from her in the way of sex, one never spoke of that in those days, about how antisocial he is, nothing about the other women he has had, nothing about his physical abuse. Oh no, Hilda would never tell mama that, mama would just have to guess at what he had done to send her away from California flying across the country by train with her two little daughters, on the train for days and days, tossed among the soldiers returning from the war, the old-young men in uniform, let the little girls play with their brass insignia, let them run up and down the aisles wearing snowy white sailor hats creased just so, khaki private’s caps, major’s caps with gold braid - skipping and tumbling from the upper berths, flirting with Hilda, everyone flirts, and everyone flirts with Hilda, from her little girls to the youngest cutest demobbed sailor to the deferent, wrinkled, soft black Pullman conductor to the cooks in the kitchens, they bring her sweetmeats, everyone watches her eat, wants to see that hidden dimple flash.            

Oh no, mama will just have to guess about his temper has made him do, that he has no place for them to live in some godforsaken town in the middle of the great unknown, the middle of the corn fields, there are pigs and farm implements, for god’s sake.   

“Yes, Hilda,” Rose tells her, “you must return to him and help him and never leave him. Matis needs you.” This, his mother tells her at the kitchen table. Or maybe it is on her deathbed twenty years later. Maybe Hilda has said this herself, conjured up a promise to her mother, her mother-in-law, that she will show, like a preserved rose, half hidden, to her daughters, is it real? Is it “max”?           

And Anna, what does Anna tell her? She, like Rose, has no husband, she, like Rose, has just a picture lovingly placed on the coffee table whenever the camera is pointed at the family gathered for a party, a wedding, a holiday. Just like Rose, a picture instead of a husband. Anna tells her to go back. Dora does not want to support her sister again, and certainly, not her two nieces in addition. “Go back to him,” they tell her. “A wife’s place is with her husband.” “No Jewish woman gets a divorce.” “He’s a nice Jewish boy, a chemist.” “Go back to him.”            

And they do. He has made her extravagant promises. No more women. A good life. A beautiful home. A fur coat. A business of their own as soon as he has made enough money to buy a cleaning store.            

So Hilda takes the train once more. The train from Boston to Chicago. Max picks them up at Union Station in a borrowed car, what a wonderful friend Gooddale is. But before they are even out of the city, onto the roads that Max one day will modernize, an adult student, unheard of in 1955 unless you were a returning Korean Conflict veteran much younger than Max, they are quarreling again. “You knew there was no housing! I told you we had no other place to stay. Do you think money grows on trees?”            

Money, always money. They quarrel. Hilda knows something. She knows something she does not tell her mother, her mother-in-law. Max gambles. He gambles money he does not have. He gambles the food money, the rent money, the clothing money.           

Hilda has a cache of letters from another man left for her daughters to find. A man who loves her. Loves her daughters. “How lovely that day was,” he writes, “you were so beautiful and your girls were so pretty.” Looks count.           

How did they stay together?            

He was handsome, slender, tall, strong, intelligent, professional, clever, black-haired, steel-rimmed glasses, sensitive mouth, with a shy, no sly, no shy grin lurking at the corners. His upper lip was shapely, full, lower lip was petulant, lush, moist.            

She was short, round, cute, a dimple deeply creasing her cheek when she smiled. She was an actress, a coy, provocative, hidden, promising more, more, more actress. A schemer. A businesswoman, able to find a hidden value under every adversity, to probe beneath the surface, push, wheedle, cajole, connive, plan, steal, hide, hide, hide. Hide her motives, hide her steel trap mind, her manipulations, her skill, her divinations.

I think it was their looks. They looked so cute together. Or maybe a surfeit of optimism?