April 15, 2006--Saturday Story Concluded: "The Bloombergers"

The Bloombergers

There were the Mooneys, an immigrant family who left Poland in the second decade of the Twentieth Century to escape the relentless pogroms and to seek the opportunities that America represented. Then there were the Zwerlings, a proud, self-made Austrian-American family who emigrated to America during the 1880s, also to seek a better life, but trailing no residual feelings of persecution and thus in all ways feeling superior to and resentful of those later comers whose shtetl-minded Jewishness elicited a taint of nativist American anti-Semitism that covered all from that faith, including the Zwerlings, even though they had rejected it, along with their Austro-German language, as soon as they stepped off Ellis Island, scuttling to neighborhoods of their own, as far away as possible from the Lower Eastside where the shtetl had been reproduced and the Mooney settled.

Being the product of both of these families, an incongruous mix (my father the Zwerling; my mother the Mooney), when I finally began to strike a responsive note with a girl, I was usually as interested in the parents as in the daughter, particularly if they were alluringly different than either of my own. I was so good at finding these surrogate families that I often was embraced considerably more warmly by them than by the daughters, where anything resembling physical embracing was not in the picture.

What I looked for in girls, beyond the fantasies that attracted me to those who were totally unattainable, even the possibility of a date to see a movie at the Rugby Theater, these truly desirable girls would not want to be on the same side of the street with me much less walking together along Church Avenue to the Rugby, what I looked for in a girl was almost anyone willing to go out with me. Especially if they came from a family which allowed me to imagine, by association, that I was also entering into a world different from the ones I had grown up in—between the poles of the Mooneys and Zwerlings.

Thus the Bloombergers.

I have previously mentioned daughter Dorothy, of my feeble walks home from the movies with her where all that might be considered thrilling was the opportunity to sense beneath her blooming blouse, where it tucked into her well-below-the knees skirt, further armored with crinolines, where that blouse hem suggested the adult delights that lay within.

Contrary to the ways of meeting at the time, Dorothy took the first step. We found ourselves in the country, up in a Catskill Mountain village called Tannersville, named for the leather tanneries situated there during the 19th century that passed into oblivion before the 20th began, only to be supplanted by rundown hotels that catered to Eastern European immigrants and World War Two refugees who there sought respite from the heat and humidity of New York City and the threat of polio, which was said to strike with particular virulence during the summer months. So any family that could scrape together the few dollars needed to check into hotels with hopeful names such as The Rose Garden, where there were never any flowers much less roses, more typically just an invasion of thistle and burrs, for those families there was at least a chance to feel expansive and safe. Though these displaced Jews were never fully capable of feeling safe, especially in a place so dark and full of threat since most light at night came from the stars. Our native habitat had become by then places with noise and congestion.

The Bloombergers, with Dorothy and older sister Eve, came to Tannersville regularly since they owned a home there, a rambling place with broad porches that previously had been inhabited by the only member of the town gentry, it was that small and impoverished a place, who when the Jews began to arrive packed up and left, selling at a below market price, as if there was a market for such a white elephant, heading for a sanctuary further north in the mountains that had the good sense still to be restricted—with lawn signs proclaiming, “No Jews. No dogs.”

Owning this house, rather than needing to pack four or five family members into two beds stuffed into an airless room at the Rose Garden set them so far apart from the rest of us that they, if they had so chosen, could have considered themselves gentiles. This of course would have required a change in surname and considerable plastic surgery, the latter at the time was still a rarity.

They were so assimilated that Dorothy played tennis. The rest of us, stoop and punch ball. So when the grocer’s wife, Mrs. Greenblatt, who know about Dorothy’s tennis and that there were no other Jews who knew the game much less had a backhand, thought that since I was tall for my age, was rumored to be “a natural athlete.” and from the look of me was fully genetically Jewish, for all of these good reasons Mrs. Greenblatt encouraged Dorothy to ask me if I played.

Which she did one day when we were both in the store shopping for our mothers. Dorothy had a basket full of Birdseye frozen foods, so new to the market that they sold for a premium and thereby demarked her status more than the fact that she was going to college, a private college, in September; while in mine there was a loaf of Bond white bread and a half-pound box of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. All of which Dorothy was generous enough not to notice when she came up to me in the canned vegetable aisle, “Mrs. Greenblatt tells me you play tennis. I do too. At the high school. How would you like to meet me there one morning?”

I had never held a racket in my hand and had not even ever witnessed a match, but I was so smitten by her and her offer and so desperate to meet any girl, much less one as round and apparently pert as Dorothy, that I said, in the first of what would turn out to be a series of ruinous deceptions, I was that desperate, “Sure, I play, but I left my racket in the City” (deception number two since I of course didn’t own one).

That will be no problem I was told since her sister Eve was taking summer courses at her college and I could therefore use hers. This caused an immediate surge of panic because, in my total tennis ignorance, I assumed I would be stigmatized by playing with a girl’s racket, if anyone was there to witness, just as I would be if I had shown up on a girl’s bicycle. But before I could back out of the date, Dorothy skipped off with her bag of now defrosting frozen peas, saying over her shoulder, “See you there tomorrow at 10:30.”

I was thinking, How would I learn to play tennis before tomorrow morning?

* * *

Needless to say I did not wake up Jack Kramer or Rod Laver. But once on the Tannersville High School tennis court with Dorothy, sufficiently secluded that I did not face public humiliation because of my clunky black Ked basketball sneakers or dungaree pants that dragged in the clay, I learned that I was enough of that natural athlete to be able to get the ball back over the net if I hit everything with something she called a “forehand.” Dorothy quickly sensed both this capacity of mine and my total inability to even nick the ball with Eve’s racket (it wasn’t pink or anything else that distinguished is as a “girls’”) if it came to my “backhand” side. I also learned that Dorothy’s roundedness and pertness masked her competitiveness since she was not at all reluctant to take advantage of my one-sidedness. She worked my backhand so successfully that I was soon playing from a position well off the court, and from that remote position was susceptible to anything she hit to even the center of the court. Thus, I spent most of the morning retrieving the dozens of balls that landed in the center of the court but scooted by me. My inability to give her a good game did not seem to disturb her; in fact, Dorothy seemed to be taking great pleasure in dominating me and having me serve as her ball-boy. I did not know it at the time but this reversal of traditional gender roles would soon characterize the rest of our relationship.

On the walk back to her house Dorothy mentioned that the movie Lili was playing in town at the Orpheum and asked if I would go with her Thursday evening. She said she had wanted to be a ballet dancer and that Leslie Caron, who was starring in it was a wonderful ballerina. I asked if this meant that we would be going out on a date—I had never be on one before—thinking if it was I would have to pay for the tickets which meant that I would have to ask my mother for the money. With a smile that I can only characterize as sly, Dorothy said, “If you would like it to be.”

“I would. I really would,” I stammered, in truth not really knowing what either she or I meant. I only knew that whatever that was I wanted to partake of it.

We reached her house, and she hopped up onto the porch, still smiling, saying over her shoulder as she was disappearing through the front door, “Meet me there at 7:00. After the movie you can walk me home and meet my parents. I already told them about you.” The screen door swung shut behind her and I stood there for a moment surveying the full expanse of that Victorian mansion, because that’s what it looked like to me, a mansion with its broad porches, shutters, and gables. Thinking that somehow Dorothy was inviting me into her world. One that was unfamiliar to me, but which I craved to enter.

While returning to the Rose Garden, which I traversed in record time since I skipped most of the way, as I thought back over the meaning of what was happening, with some emerging anxiety I wondered what it was that she might have told her parents about me—that I didn’t have a tennis racket and bought white bread and cream cheese? Why would they be interested in meeting anyone based on that? In fact, considering their obvious station in life, I wondered why they would have any interest at all in someone like me.

Thus I thought that before the movie I had better become more interesting or the Bloombergers would probably tell their daughter to find someone more suitable with whom to go out on dates.

And I did. During the half hour we needed to wait for Lili to begin (my mother had given me enough money to pay for both of us), since Dorothy had mentioned that she was going to Douglass College in New Jersey in September I told her I would be starting Columbia in New York City. She was so excited by this that she reached across to me and squeezed my hand, letting hers linger there for an intoxicating moment. “We’ll be just across the river from each other. I plan to join a sorority and maybe you will be able to come to New Brunswick when we have mixers.” I had no idea what they were. Something to do with cocktails? “Will you be pledging a fraternity? I know they have some frats at Columbia for Jews.”

“I haven’t decided that.”

“Oh you must and you should also go out for the basketball team. Columbia plays against Rutgers, Douglass you know is Rutgers’ sister school, and it would be so much fun to go to the games and watch you play.”

“I haven’t decided that either. I’m tall but I’m not really that good.”

“But you’re such a natural athlete. I could see that when we were playing tennis.” Though this talk about college was making me nervous, to hear her say that, and to have her squeeze my hand again, excited me. “What do you plan to study at Columbia? Have you decided what you’ll be majoring in?”

At this I began to experience more than just nervousness because I need now to confess that I was lying about college—I was not going to Columbia in the fall.

In fact, I would be returning to my high school where I would still be just a junior. I was at least two years younger than Dorothy, my true age masked by my unnatural height and premature wisps of a mustache.

I had no idea why I so easily slipped into these lies. Was it her nearness? My desperate attraction to someone who clearly came from such a fine family, whose parents and grandparents had all been born in America? To thus become “interesting”?

Clearly out of control, I said, “I’m not sure yet but I think I’ll be studying Chemistry.”

“That’s amazing,” she gushed, “My father’s a chemist. When you meet him later you’ll have lots to talk about!”

* * *

As you might imagine it was then impossible to concentrate on the movie. All I could think about was meeting Dr. Bloomberger and having to talk with him about chemistry, which incidentally I was scheduled to take for the first time in September. So I was lying about that too. All I knew about chemistry was what I had learned in French class. Yes French class because my high school, which emphasized science studies, taught French by using a chemistry text in French—even though none of us in the class had as yet taken chemistry in English. I didn’t know anything about chemistry from that and thus was quaking in my seat, not from Dorothy’s excitedly holding onto my sweaty hand all through the movie. It was from fear of my soon-to-be unmaking and certain humiliation and exclusion from anything having to do with the family Bloomberger.

I did though remember one thing from the movie, Leslie Caron’s tragic rendition of the title song, Lili Hi Lo:

The song of love is a sad song
Hi Lili Hi Lili Hi Lo
The song of love is a sound of woe
Don't ask me why I know

For me that seemed a foreshadowing—just how sad and woeful love was about to be.

* * *

After the movie was over, as a strategy to avoid the inevitable, I suggested that maybe we should go to Warms for some homemade pie and ice cream. I had just enough money for that and that would make it late enough so I could avoid having to meet Dorothy’s parents. I needed to escape from the web of lies I had woven and in which I had ensnared myself. I would simply drop her off as I had after tennis, maybe be allowed to kiss her goodnight in reward for all the money I had spent on our date, and then run away from Tannersville and home, and the Bloomberger fantasy, hitchhiking back to Brooklyn where I would join the army and get sent to Korea. I was tall enough to perhaps pass for eighteen.

But that was not to be. Dorothy insisted that I take her right home, “I love Warms’ pies, they’re my favorites, but my father is so eager to meet you. To talk with you about your plans.”

“Well to tell you the truth I want to do that but it’s getting late and I promised my mother I’d be home before 10:00.” I was so desperate to just disappear that I was even willing to make myself look like someone who had a curfew.

“It’s just 9:15 now and if we walk fast we can get to my house in ten minutes, you can meet him, have half an hour to get to know each other, and then have enough time to get back to the Rose Garden by 10:00.”

I was thus trapped in her logic; and since I had begun to accept the idea that I would have to pay for my transgressions, that I deserved to be exposed as an imposter in front of Dorothy and her American family, I slumped even more than usual and turned to catch up with her as she had raced ahead in her eagerness to bring home her prize date who was about to attend Columbia. She now was the one who was skipping.

It took even fewer than ten minutes to wind our way up the hill from which their house dominated that forlorn village that had seen so many better days. This felt like the appropriate setting for my comeuppance.

“Daddy, we’re here,” Dorothy sang as we together stood at the door. She was waiting to be admitted as if she too were a nervous visitor.

Their maid, Ella, all in crisp whites, stood back as she opened the polished door. “Welcome back Miss Dorothy, I hope you enjoyed the movie.” And with a radiant smile directed at me, “And he is just as tall as you said he is.” While Ella was glowing I was hoping to be slip into inconspicuousness since I couldn’t make myself invisible no matter how tight a corkscrew I twisted myself into. It’s that hard to disappear at six-four.

“It was wonderful. Leslie Caron ran off with a carnival and then joined a show where she sang the saddest songs and danced with all the puppets. I couldn’t stop crying. I wish I could do that, but I have to go to college in September.”

Turning to me, teary again from recalling the scenes with the puppeteer, Dorothy took my hand and pulled me into the grand parlor room where Dr. Bloomberger stood, still dressing in a gray pinstriped double breasted suit. He even had a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. With one arm behind his back he approached me with his other extended in welcome, “It is so good to meet you. Dorothy has told me so much about you. What a good athlete you are and what a fine family you come from.”

Averting my eyes and shuffling my feet I took his hand and shook it limply, “She told me a lot about you too.”

“Are you off to college too?” I stopped breathing and sensed my heart had stopped as well.

“I plan to.” I managed to be sufficiently ambiguous so as not to compound my lies, feeling I had committed enough sins for one evening.

Dorothy chirped, “He’s going to Columbia in the fall, and can you believe it he’s going to major in chemistry.” She clapped her hands joyously while I felt doom closing in on me.

I stammered, “It’s been very nice to meet you, Dr. Bloomberger. It’s getting late and I should probably be leaving,” thinking that unless I got out of there right away there wouldn’t be any cars on the road that would pick me up and drive me back to Brooklyn.

I began to inch backwards toward the door where Ella still stood guard. “But it’s only 9:30 now. You can stay a little longer I’m sure,” Dorothy again. If I could only manage to get away I would even forego the possibility of that kiss. It no longer mattered how much I had spent on her.

Dr. Bloomberger intercepted my retreat, “I’m into dyes myself. Aniline dyes. Among the first to be synthesized from coal tar. Have you gotten to them yet?”

“Uh, not really. Not yet,” I was contemplating an untimely death. Maybe I would be lucky enough to die right there in that magnificent place and wouldn’t have to worry about hitchhiking--my mother had told me many times how dangerous it was to ride with strangers.

“Well, when you do I think you’ll find them very interesting—they’re some of the best dyes around. But enough about that.” Enough? I thought in terror that we were just getting started talking about chemistry, that he would be asking me about benzene rings or titration and other stuff I had translated from French. “Dorothy also tells me that you are a gifted athlete.”

I was shifting on my feet thinking maybe, just maybe I would get out of there alive, “Not really, I’m just tall for my age,” what was wrong with me—why was I drawing attention to my age? Was I being suicidal? “So I can play basketball pretty well. But that’s about it.”

“But what about tennis? I heard you have a pretty good forehand.” As he said this he swept his right arm across his body in the perfect motion of a devastating forehand—that much I had learned the other day from observing Dorothy’s version. “And baseball; you’re from Brooklyn I understand and you must see the Dodgers play all the time.”

I resumed breathing. “Sometimes. Ebbets Field is not too far from where I live. I always sit in the bleachers.” I had lifted my head to half mast and could see him warming to the subject.

“I’ll bet you enjoy seeing Jackie Robinson play?”

I too was rising to a cherished subject, but above all was sensing my escape, “And Duke Snider and Gil Hodges too. Hodges actually is my favorite. No one pays that much attention to him but he gets the job done in the field and at bat every day.” I was beginning to sound to myself like the Dodgers’ radio announcer, Red Barber.

“I agree. That an excellent observation. I suspect you’ll do very well both in sports and in college.” I began to again fold in upon myself as the subject turned back toward school. “But I must be boring you. You youngsters should go out and sit on the porch before you go home. It’s such a beautiful night.” He peered at me with his chemist’s eyes as if I were a long-sought precipitate, “It was a great pleasure to meet you.” He extended his hand for a second handshake, “I hope to see you again before Labor Day. All the best to you. Mrs. Bloomberger is not feeling that well but I’m sure she too would be pleased to know you.” And with that he turned to go up the sweeping mahogany staircase, up which he bounded with athletic grace.

* * *

Dorothy ran over to me. It was obvious how pleased she was by how I had been received and comported myself. I was simply happy to be able to resume regular breathing. She took hold of both my hands and brought them to her chest, actually close to her chest, not in anyway touching even the billowing fabric of her blouse--remember the era. “My daddy is right, it’s beautiful out. The moon is almost full. Do you have the time to sit on the porch before you need to leave?’

Of course I did. I was euphoric that I survived and wouldn’t have to go to Korea but even more because of where my hands had almost been.

So we sat side-by-side on the glider, just touching. Dorothy held my hand again. I felt her fingers stroking mine. We watched the clouds stream across the face of the moon. Gliding back and forth, not inhibited by its rusty squeaking and what that might signal to the Bloombergers in their room right above the porch. I knew it was past 10:00, but after what I had just survived, getting back to the hotel late and what would thus await me, my mother’s hand wringing, hardly concerned me. I had descended that low.

“Do you want to kiss me goodnight?” Dorothy whispered, leaning toward me. I could feel her breasts pressing into my shoulder. I attempted for the second time in less in an hour to keep my heart beating, but it stopped again. I was becoming as adept at defying death as some of the carnival high wire artists in Lili. And I was hoping to receive that kiss before passing out.

Before I could say “Yes” I felt her lips on mine. And saw the clouds clear the moon’s surface as an owl began its plaintive mating call.

“I think it may now be time for you to leave. Your mother will be so worried.” Dorothy was so thoughtful. So good, while I, such a thoughtless son, was thinking only about a second kiss. Which I attempted to initiate but managed to plant on the top of her head since she had turned away in the darkness.

“Can we play tennis again on Tuesday? After that it will be Labor Day weekend and the whole family will be here—Eve with her fiancé Ted—and my aunts and uncles and cousins. I don’t think there will be time to see you again until we return to New Jersey and you to Brooklyn.”

It was ending. There would be no mixers, no frat parties—just Dorothy in college and me stuck, in spite of my new moustache, in high school.

There was just enough light now to see Dorothy turn to me again. She had my hands in hers just like earlier when I told her about Columbia. “It’s OK for you to come to our dances. One of my girlfriends, Brenda, is also going to be a freshman and she too has a boyfriend who still goes to high school. She already invited him to Homecoming.”

For the third and final time I could not sense a heartbeat. I managed though to find Dorothy’s lips. For the last time that night. And forever. We never saw each other again after tennis on Tuesday.

Without another word I slipped out of the glider and walked home through that deserted town, not thinking about the time or what the future would bring. Just remembering something Leslie Caron had said as Lili Daurier in Lili, “We don’t learn. We get older, and we know.”

It took me at least another twenty years to know.