The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel Read online

  The Girl with the Glass Heart

  A Novel

  Daniel Stern

  This book is for RUTH

  who had courage, confidence and faith

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  PART SIX

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  IT SEEMED THAT THE small cubicle could hold no more sound. The voluptuous wave of music filled every corner and washed over Elly, drenching her with loveliness, the sounds of violins and woodwinds made abnormally piercing by the enormous volume at which the phonograph was operating.

  Elly lay on the small sofa, her feet sticking out over the edge and, eyes closed, listened languorously. It was a small room, the smallest in the three-room apartment, and with the door shut and only the window open to the September coolness it was like an artificial amplifier launching the music through the open window across the tree-spotted vacant lot to the row of apartment houses on the adjacent block. The room was in almost total darkness with only the hazy reflection of a street lamp outlining the dim figure on the sofa: the dark complexion, the eyes set wide apart in her face, the ash-blond hair falling, it seemed, everywhere—her shoulders, her breasts (quite full for a fifteen-year-old girl), a few strands falling over the side of the bed—and the long, long brown legs, all of her caught in the hypnosis of the sound-world, deep in the darkness of dreams.

  Max Kaufman opened the door and stood, the dinning in his ears stilled by the sight of his daughter lying on the sofa, her eyes shut. It was one of the times when the sudden sight of Elly caught his breath, and he felt gross and ungainly, amazed that he and Rose had produced this fragility. She is beautiful, he thought, forgetting for the moment his errand, the silencing of the blaring phonograph. His brother Alec had been like this, lying and listening to music for hours at a time, inevitably provoking their parents’ anger. Why aren’t you like Max! Go out and work, even in your spare time. And to Max they would say: Be like your brother Harry. Don’t just work. Study at night, go to school. No, Elly wasn’t like Max. If there was anyone in the family she took after, it was Alec.

  A shout came from the kitchen: “Elly!” Max moved quickly away from the door as Elly rose and turned down the phonograph. “All right, Mom.”

  “For God’s sake. So loud! What’s the matter with you? It’s dark already. You can’t play music—it’s Erev Yom Tov.”

  “All right, Mom.” Elly rubbed her eyes and stretched. She was a tall girl. As she raised her long arms above her head and groaned with satisfaction she saw the pencil marks her father had placed on the wall to measure her growth. She wished she had a cigarette.

  Rosh Hashana, she thought. What a hypocrite her mother was! This wasn’t New Year’s in September. New Year’s was a freezing wind and the party at Uncle Harry’s house when Dad got a little drunk and danced with Aunt Sarah. She liked going to synagogue twice a year as the family did, but it annoyed her to have her music-listening curtailed, just so the neighbors would know that Rose Kaufman’s family observed every Jewish holiday. She sat down at her desk pushing her hair into place and took from beneath a pile of papers in the center drawer a small book. Written in a large, bold hand on the first page was MY JOURNAL—Elly Kaufman. She began to write.

  In the kitchen Rose prepared the holiday dinner. Max sat down and lighted the cold ashes in his pipe. “Not here, please, Max,” Rose complained. “The smell gets in the food and besides it’s a holiday and the neighbors might be able to smell the smoke.”

  “Rose, Rose. In the first place, who cares if they can smell it or what they think? And in the second place, how many times do I have to tell you, on Rosh Hashana you’re allowed to smoke.”

  “I know. Some do and some don’t. My father never smoked on any holiday, whether you were allowed to or not.”

  “Very intelligent.”

  “All right, Max.” Rose bent over and opened the stove. The chicken was almost done and the thick gravy smell permeated the air in a moment. She straightened up. Her tall body was fattening out, had been for the last two years. You had to expect that with change of life coming on, Mrs. Klein had told her. She pulled her house dress closer around her hips.

  “My Queen,” she said, gesturing in the general direction of her daughter’s room. “Boiled chicken isn’t good enough for the princess—it has to be roasted.”

  “Why not? Besides it’s a holiday. Let it be roast chicken.”

  “It’s the same to me.” She turned to him suddenly and determinedly and sat down opposite him, tossing the dish towel over her shoulder, where it lay like a reserve weapon.

  “Well,” she said, “have you decided?”

  “I don’t know, Rose. It’s an awful lot of money to borrow.”

  “And an awful lot to be made, if you do it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “That’s you all your life. Afraid to take a chance. You’ll throw money around everywhere, send it to your no-good brother in California every month.”

  “Leave Alec alone. He’s my brother.”

  “So, he’s Harry’s brother, too. Does Harry send him?”

  “That’s Harry’s business.”

  “No, it’s probably Sarah’s business. I’ll bet she doesn’t let him.”

  “Enough about my brother already. The business is doing fine now. Why is it so necessary to expand now? Later when I have more.”

  “You said yourself, the other night, if you don’t meet these new orders you won’t have more. And you can’t meet them here.”

  “You want to move to Colchester? You’re so anxious?”

  “What’s the big fuss? Fifty minutes on the bus is not so far. The important thing, Max, is that it could mean big things for us. Two factories and two sets of offices.”

  “One office is all I need,” he interpolated automatically. “Even if I were to build in Colchester, I wouldn’t have to expand the office staff. I’ve been thinking about it. Don’t you think I want to send Elly to a good school? It’ll take money. I was telling Harry last night: I’m a businessman without capital.”

  “So let’s get capital. I mean, my God, we’ve got what every other spare-parts manufacturer would sell his soul for! We’ve got the orders. It’s just a question of being able to deliver.”

  To deliver, he thought wryly. A few years back it hadn’t been a question of deliveries but just a question of no business. Max Kaufman’s little manufacturing organization (spare parts for tractors) blossomed almost overnight during the war. He began to expand, to employ members of his and his wife’s family; began to relax a little for the first time in fifteen years.

  He was twenty years old when he arrived in New York from Hungary. Equipped with the addresses of relatives in Indianapolis, he had, without a second glance at New York, made the journey to the Midwest and, having nothing of the wanderer in him, settled in Indianapolis immediately, taking a job with a second cousin who was now his Chicago representative. He married Rose Hyman three years later.

  Years afterward it seemed to him that everything had been perfect, that nothing had gone wrong up until he decided to go into business for himself. Time and again he would blame all difficulty, date all misfortunes from that period. It was a convenient mechanism in his fear for his daughter, his feeling of alienation from his wife.

  To compensate he turned more and more to Elly as a manner of turning from Rose, who, on perceiving this, without perhaps understanding it, redoubled her efforts to gain control of the girl, making an issue of any convenient problem that came to hand, from the sudden enormous importance of
piano lessons for every young girl to the horror of her daughter being seen necking in some high-school boy’s car.

  Rose was saying, “Why, even Harry would help if—”

  “If what?” Max returned. “If you were nice to him, maybe? Last night at his house. I could tell as soon as you walked in. You always get that sort of set look about the mouth, as if you’re going to endure it but from a distance. I don’t know why. Harry and Sarah have always been crazy about you.”

  “Yeah, also from a distance. If he wasn’t so superior.”

  “That’s your imagination. Just because he’s educated is no reason. You sit there in a corner by yourself with that fixed look on your mouth, like a half-smile, but not a real one. Everybody knows. They all notice.”

  “I don’t know why. I try. My God, the chicken’s burning!” She snatched the dish towel from her shoulder, wrenched open the stove and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s all right. I better chop the eggs.”

  “You shouldn’t have to try. Rose, Rose, Rose! Just be natural. Be yourself. You can’t remember all your life that Harry got the education and I didn’t. Are we going to hold it against my mother—she should rest in peace—that she could afford to send only one son to college and Harry was the oldest son, so he got it? That would be crazy. What happened, happened. I don’t want Harry’s money or his education.”

  “Who wants it? I just want right now he should lend you part of the money for the new factory and the rest you can get from a bank with him cosigning for you. I want you to ask him, Max.” She waved a ladle threateningly.

  “I’ve dropped it a thousand times, waiting for him to say something. Maybe he’ll bring it up himself.”

  “If he doesn’t you’ll ask. What else? Are you going to send Alec a wire in Hollywood for the money? You’ve given him enough in the last five years to build ten factories.”

  “You exaggerate slightly,” Max said with a careful dignity.

  “All right.” She seemed to unwind. “I’m sorry. But, Max, let’s build and move away from Indianapolis and the streets here. Let Elly see a tree for a change. Then she won’t hang around with these kids like Jerry Wilson. I worry. A small town is better for a child.”

  “A child she’s not. Have you looked at your daughter lately?”

  “You’re right, you’re right. She looks like a woman already. That’s what worries me. Boys like Jerry Wilson and the ones that hang out at the corner there.”

  “She doesn’t really hang around with them.”

  “She goes to school with the Wilson boy. That’s bad enough. Anyway, Max, take a plunge.” She put one large hand on his shoulder. “Everything we really need to live I could put in one box and carry it on my shoulders. Really. I mean, what have we got?” A moving hand embraced the kitchen. “So we’ll gamble and, someday, maybe a house like Harry and Sarah have.”

  Max scooped a pudgy finger into the chopped-egg salad and licked some of the thick yellow mixture. “Where would I be without you, Rose?”

  “Without me you would have gone to school at night and become a lawyer like your brother Harry or an actor bum like your brother Alec. But you’ve got me, so let’s try to make the best of it. Call Harry tonight. All he can do is say no.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Call!”

  “We’ll see.”

  Elly sat at her little polished desk and sucked reflectively on a pencil, blackening her tongue slightly. Her diary, or journal, as she chose to call it, had become increasingly more important to her. Here were recorded the details of each encounter with Jerry—the first tentative explorations of kissing, the feeling of superiority (You haven’t read “Ode on a Grecian Urn”?), the feeling of power when she suddenly opened her mouth while they were kissing in the deep center of the park and she could feel him trembling with excitement—all this, and more, had gone into the little leather-covered book. At the back of her mind as she wrote was always the thought that someday she would meet someone who would understand everything she had written, someone who would read, make no comments but completely understand. It was to this person that she addressed each entry.

  She leaned back in her chair and heard from somewhere the faint sound of a radio playing dance music. She took from her shirt pocket a tiny piece of paper folded over many times. It was Uncle Alec’s last letter. She glanced through it quickly, knowing it by now almost entirely by heart. Dear Pasquale, it was headed. He always called her Pasquale and she addressed him as Tony. It was a joke, a charade: Alec, always the actor. She remembered, beneath the muffled sound of the distant radio, his low, harsh, piercing, raucous voice that somehow made the simplest utterance meaningful and convincing. She imagined his voice saying, abstractly, I love you. It was only on holidays that she ever saw him, returning, his tall, skinny body seeming more fatigued than ever by whatever wanderings were implied in his warm smile bright with the realization that homesickness was at worst a temporary malady, that all that was needed as cure was a home.

  Somehow Elly didn’t think he would be coming back to Indianapolis for the High Holy Days this year as in past times. Last year the fighting between him and Rose had been awful. Oh, why couldn’t Mother go away for a vacation over the holidays as she was always threatening! Then Alec could come and go to synagogue with Dad and herself.

  She began to write:

  September 20th, 1946

  Sometimes you may wonder how it is with me on a holiday when I’m all alone in my room and I want someone to call me on the phone and hear them say, Hello—how are you?—I love you. With me it’s always a desire for snow on the ground, thick as fur, and the sound of bells ringing, the way they used to when I first went to school.

  Snow and bells and the desire for someone to call me to say they love me. It doesn’t matter if the holiday is Christmas, Passover or New Year’s. Always snow and love.

  Perhaps you wonder sometimes whether holidays are full of nostalgia for me and whether I remember all sorts of things then. With me there are always two pictures that come to mind.

  In the first, I am walking along a street downtown. It is snowing heavily and the bells of a near-by church have begun to ring. With me is a boy; his face at the moment is turned away from me and from the observer (which is you, I guess). I am wearing a coat of dark cloth and I float my eyes in and out of the shop windows gaily decorated with the frills of whatever holiday season it may be (just between you and me I’m pretty sure it’s Christmas).

  It is a side street on which we walk arm in arm and we turn, the sound of the bells still with us, onto the large avenue and approach the great church. There is a tremendous excitement in the air and my heart is in my mouth for no reason at all and I’m all aroused and happy.

  In the picture I can see the boy’s face now (I guess that means you can too) and he is fine. His face, like mine, is wet with snowflakes and his smile lies on his lips like an unspoken thought. We change our minds and as we turn away from the church (we hadn’t wanted to pray, only to hear the music of the Mass) he is half sad because he is not sure he loves me and I’m half sad because I am sure that I love him, but I think it may be only for tonight that I do.

  The sky is clear, the breeze is sharp and we both wear heavy coats. I look like a doll dressed up as a present. As I look now, the figures turn a corner eastward and are out of sight (mine and yours, I guess), always in that gentle, half-sad state of indecision I guess you’d call love.

  That’s one way it is with me on holidays, in case you’ve ever wondered.

  Another picture that takes shape when I think of holidays is quite different. It is not cold, but cool-chilly, like today. Perhaps early or middle September. I wonder whether to wear a coat or not as I accompany my father to synagogue. The holiday quality is different now. The air is heavy with dignity. Everyone we pass on the street is dressed very carefully and neatly. I enter the synagogue with a silly feeling of doing something proper, something I should do. The chanting of the cantor sounds strang
e. In this picture, no matter when it takes place, I am younger than I was in the other one. I am a little girl. (I cannot estimate my size in the picture too clearly.)

  At first as I watch this picture I am annoyed because there is no breathless half-sadness like there was before. My father prays. I am lonely. I grow more lonely as time passes. My father explains the meaning of the various prayers. I become restless, irritated at having things explained to me. But when we reach one particular prayer I take notice.

  “This,” my father tells me, “is Al Tashlechanu, in which we ask God for things, mostly help. It is one of the high points of the service.” I am surprised at my father’s tone of voice. It is intense. I am surprised because my father has told me many times that he does not believe in a God but goes to synagogue at the New Year’s and on The Day of Atonement only because other Jews go and he wants to be like them.

  We continue praying. My father explains further. His voice is raucous. He sounds a little like Uncle Alec. “Al Tashlechanu. In this we ask—” and he sing-songs in English—“Do not turn from me in mine old age nor desert me when my strength is gone and I am as a child.” I look at my father. This picture is now as sad as the first one I told you about. I try to imagine my father, Max Kaufman, as a child. The picture loses its intensity, becomes vague, blurred. The other one joins it in my mind.

  Is it a boy and a girl who walk on the Christmas snow at night holding hands? Or is it my father and I who walk while a boy and a girl sit in synagogue saying to God, Do not desert me in my old age when my strength is gone and I am as a child?

  That’s how it is with me on holidays, in case you’ve ever wondered. I may be young or old, certain of love or afraid of it, but on holidays it’s always snow and love and the sound of bells and hearing the phone ring and answering and wanting to hear someone say, Hello—how are you?—I love you.

  Elly closed the book carefully and placed it under a pile of papers in the drawer. She was embraced by a sadness that was focusless and objectless, a velvet-soft cloud of melancholy that she could almost localize as a heavy, thick feeling in the chest and throat.