Read Online Broadway Baby by Alan Shapiro - Free Book Online Page B

and Mrs. we use with neighbors and Mommy and Daddy’s friends. You call Melba, Melba, okay? Th at’s what her name is.”
    T HEIR NEIGHBOR DOWN the street, Sigrid Rosenberg, showed up one afternoon to welcome Miriam to the neighborhood. Sigrid was a short woman with a pageboy haircut that gave her broad face and small mouth a pixieish air, like a middle-aged, slightly overweight Peter Pan. She wore a floral house dress with long sleeves even when the weather was warm. She lived by herself. She spoke with a faint German accent. She nodded approvingly at everything that Miriam had done to the house. Everything, she said, was “interesting, so very interesting.”
    “So drab before,” she said, as they sat at the kitchen table, the two of them smoking. “Mrs. Gould, the widow, she didn’t care about how things looked; she really let the place run down. Who can blame her though, given everything she went through, and then, you know, what happened to her husband, I’m sure they told you.”
    “No,” Miriam said. “No one told me anything. Th e realtor said Mrs. Gould had just gotten too old to care for herself. Th at’s why the family put the house up for sale.”
    “ Th e two of them,” Sigrid said, sighing, her right hand resting on the cuff of her left sleeve, “like me, survivors, though I don’t know from what camp, one of the Polish ones I think. Anyway, he worked in Zelda’s Bakery, near the synagogue. Not a friendly man, just quiet, minded his own business, didn’t bother anybody, and didn’t want to be bothered, either. One day, just like any other day, he comes home after work except he hasn’t even taken off his apron, still covered in flour and powdered sugar all over his hair and face, and he hangs himself in the cellar. No note, no nothing, just dead, caput.”
    “Oh goodness,” Miriam said. “ Th e poor woman.”
    Sigrid lit another cigarette even though the first one was still burning in the ashtray. She smiled more widely now, as if she’d proven something, though Miriam couldn’t say what it was.
    “ Th at’s how it is sometimes,” she said. “Too much to remember, you can’t sleep, not even with the pills; what you won’t do to sleep—you have no idea. Anything not to think about how stupid it is you’re here, just you and no one else. Only you, but not your husband, not your brilliant son or daughter. Just you. What’s the good of that? What could that possibly mean?”
    She was smiling at Miriam as she stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and said, “I should be going. Th e house—may you live and be well here! It’s so wonderful to have some little ones in the neighborhood again.”
    Miriam sat at the kitchen table for a long time after Sigrid left and tried not to think about what she had said. She tried not to think about poor Mrs. Gould and her dead husband and what all of them, Sigrid included, had suffered during the war. She wanted to push the thoughts away, but they felt, just then, immovable. She looked at the kitchen; she tried to feel the stable weight of the house around her. Surely nothing like what had happened to Sigrid and the Goulds, so far away in time, in another world, would happen here. Surely the new house would be her haven, her safe place. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow Sigrid had tainted that. How could she keep herself from remembering this conversation?
    Sitting there amid her decorations and designs, she felt exposed, found out, as if a window she wanted to keep shut had been suddenly thrown open and anything now might blow in.
    From that day on, she tried to be busy and not available whenever Sigrid called. She never told the family what had happened in the cellar. And she herself never stepped foot down there.

Scene IV
    At ages seven and four, the boys still wet the bed. Most mornings, they came downstairs to their parents’ room where Ethan would get in bed next to Curly while Sam would slip into the crack between the two