Anna in Chains Read online

  “What is Wendy doing?” the child asked, looking up at Anna as she drew little red x‘s to the edge of the paper.

  “She’s giving you a hundred kisses,” Anna said. “Like this.” She lowered her head and kissed the boy on his forehead, next to the silver circle. “She wants to be your sweetheart.”

  “Thank you,” the boy’s mother said. “Thank you very much.”

  From down the hall, someone called Donny’s name.

  “Here we go, Donny boy,” his father said. Both parents stood. The father hoisted the boy to his hip.

  “Good luck,” Anna said. “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  Anna still had the pad and pencils in her lap. She began to draw a house. It was a child’s version of a house, one-dimensional, with a door and two windows, and a chimney on the roof which had a spiral of smoke spilling from it into the sky. Inside was a happy family. She drew the sun and birds flying. She made the birds into little black notes and drew telephone wires for them to perch on.

  Then, as if by magic, Anna saw the pastel chalk drawing of a cottage in the country materialize before her eyes. At the edge of the cottage a stream flowed by under a weathered wooden bridge. The season was fall, and the leaves lay in brilliant shifting hills along the road. Dr. Pincus from Brooklyn was drawing the picture, sitting on the edge of the bed of Anna’s oldest girl, Janet. He had just told them Janet had pneumonia again. The snowflakes which had fallen from his coat were melting on the rug at his feet. Janet had already had her painful injection and lay limp, tears on her cheeks; every December since she had started school she had been too sick to attend or take part in the Christmas play. On this day she seemed to take little comfort from the doctor’s reassuring voice telling her that her fever would fall, her chest would stop hurting, her cough would subside. Dr. Pincus had looked around the room and asked Anna if she wouldn’t mind bringing to the bedside Janet’s blackboard, mounted on a rickety easel. The doctor had stayed there with Janet for a long time, sitting on the edge of her bed, drawing the landscape very carefully in pastel chalks: a woodfire sending smoke from the chimney, a chipmunk on a fencepost, a high and distant formation of geese honking across the sky. When last of all he had drawn a graceful young girl with swinging braids—unmistakably Janet—skipping rope on the wooden bridge, Janet had laughed weakly, and Dr. Pincus had said, “That’s my girl. That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear.”

  Janet, that winter, had again missed being in the Christmas play at school, but she had healed. She had lived to grow up and have money troubles. It was Dr. Pincus who had urged Anna and Abram to move with their children out of the bitter winters of New York. Twenty years ago Abram had died in California of leukemia. Doctor Pincus was surely dead by now. Doctors had stopped making house calls, and Anna was about to have her eyes pierced by laser beams.

  “Here’s a joke for you,” Dr. Rifkin said in the operating room. “A middle-aged woman comes home from the doctor and says to her husband, ‘The doctor tells me I have breasts like a twenty-five year old.’ The husband answers, ‘And what did he say about your fifty-year old ass?’ ‘Oh,’ says the wife, ‘he didn’t mention you at all!’ “

  Dr. Rifkin guffawed. Anna sat like a block of ice while the nurse strapped her head into a contraption.

  “Hold your head very still now,” the doctor said. “Here we go.”

  Meteors flew into Anna’s old eyes, deep into her brain, where she felt her precious memories hiding their faces. Again and again the doctor fired flaming star showers at her, in the shapes of her husband and children holding out their arms to her, and in the forms of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes. She waited for a whole note to come flying to her.

  “That’s it, Mrs. Goldman,” the doctor said. “Go home and no jumping rope this afternoon. Come back in one week. No—make it two, I’ll be in Hawaii. Happy holidays, and don’t worry. Worry never did anyone any good and never changed the outcome of anything.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Anna said.

  When Anna got home, she fell back on her bed in gratitude and relief that she was alive and still had her vision. She turned on the television on her nighttable and saw a great throng of people looking heavenward, their mouths wide open, like baby birds about to receive nourishment. The conductor was on a high podium; the young and the old in the great auditorium had open songbooks in their hands. Their faces were aglow as they sang:

  For unto us a Child is born,

  Unto us a Son is given….

  The words flashed across the screen as they sang; the eyes of the singers sparkled with light while the camera moved slowly from face to face. Anna was about to switch channels—what did she need this Christmas junk for?—when the camera stopped and held fast upon the face of a very old woman. She was older than Anna, her features no longer unique, but sunken into a mask of great age. Yet her mouth quivered with passionate energy, and her eyes reflected light as bright as laser beams. Anna sank back on her pillows and attended with half her mind until she heard the soprano sing some words about “the Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

  She stiffened—the same old thing. Anna could feel her father’s angry gaze upon her: Turn that off! Hold your breath. Move only your lips. Don’t sing! Clasp your mouth shut! Never say those words! With an exasperated flap of her hand, Anna held her father off. She felt a flare of fury blaze up in her. She was only interested in the music, didn’t he know that? He had bought her her first piano. He had taken her to hear Caruso sing at the Metropolitan Opera house. He, of all people, should know that music was music and nothing was going to change her at this point in her life.

  What fascinated Anna was the evidence of pure happiness which shone on the faces of the singers. There wasn’t a mean streak showing anywhere. The camera presented her with an intimate, almost embarrassing, close-up view. She could see pock marks on some faces, little beauty marks and dimples on others. She was much closer than she ever could have been in person—only an inch away from a fat woman; squeezed in with a crowd of young people wearing sweatshirts adorned with the words “Sing Along Messiah”; almost touching a handsome bearded man who looked like Christ Himself. She was right there beside a pregnant woman, brushing arms with a father bending over to point out to his son the correct place in the score—she was with husbands and wives and children, and they were all as happy as Anna had ever seen anyone in her life. The conductor waving his wand was happy. The violinists in the orchestra were smiling as they played, the trumpets shot rainbows of light into the air, the harpsichord strings vibrated and caused a shimmering high above in the great vaulted ceiling of the hall. The soprano sang:

  Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion...

  Anna, a Jew, was definitely a daughter of Zion. If she wasn’t, who was? It was too late to discuss this with her father. Anna had lived a long time, and all her life, without question, she had turned her eyes away from the steeples of churches, away from paintings of Jesus in museums, away from gold crosses on the necks of men and women in the street. Anna’s eyes burned as she studied the rapt singers. She listened, unthreatened, with the ears of her natural skepticism:

  Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.

  Suddenly slapping her bed with the palm of her hand, Anna addressed her father: Papa, listen to the music! Something was causing happiness to shine on those faces. Something made that old man on the bus give out his candy canes, made Dr. Rifkin, for all his joking, sit there behind his magic machine-gun to do what he could do to keep Anna seeing the world. Someone had invented that one-eyed silver electrode to shine in the middle of Donny’s forehead.

  Anna felt, without doubt, that every one of the singers was beautiful. It was not like her, it was not her way. Normally she would have made private notations to herself about this one’s fake blonde hair with dark roots showing, or that one’s bad skin, or the mora
ls of the careless young that the world turned out these days—those braless sloppy girls and the boys with green hair and gold studs in their ears. Old women with scarves around their turkey-skin necks could never fool her. She always had ready, in neat bars of music, a song of many ungenerous verses waiting to be sung. But the music in her head had modulated. She wondered if the surgery had changed her vision in some profound way. She felt like putting her arms around each person in the singing throng—the scarred, the fat, the heavily made-up, the too pretty to be true. When the chorus sang:

  Surely he hath borne our griefs...

  Anna thought she would buy her daughters presents. Maybe she would ask them to buy her a present. What did she want? A record of Handel’s Messiah? Her father had his hand up, ready to hit. Leave me alone! she told him. So what if I don’t hold my breath when those words come around! You’ve made a big mistake. You worry too much.

  She felt funny, a little like laughing. A little like singing. She wasn’t much of a laugher or a singer. She hadn’t sung in perhaps seventy years. But she lived alone in a little apartment—who was going to judge her? Sitting up straight in her bed, she smoothed back her hair as if she were about to take her place in the crowd and be shown on television, her eyes twinkling with light. Nervously, she began to sing along as the words appeared on the screen. It took a while for her to get used to the sound of her own thin, wavering voice rising in her darkened bedroom, but soon she gained volume and strength, and finally, with confidence, she brought herself in tune with the others.

  TICKETS TO DONAHUE

  A truck driver with an extremely important mustache (also with muscles like braids poking out the sleeves of his T-shirt) stared straight at Anna, dared her with his eyes to keep staring at him. He sat high in his shiny red rig and, for an instant, when he turned his head around to reach for a cigarette, she could see the points of his mustache sticking out from behind his ears. He’d parked his truck directly in front of the NBC Studios on Alameda Street, leaving it there to belch diesel fumes into Anna and Gert’s faces while they stood on line for the Donahue show. He showed no signs of moving on. Anna knew his breed—the kind of man who tried to stare you down, who thought if he tried long enough he could get you to think the way he was thinking. She’d worked on Wall Street in the thirties and had enough of those stares from men on subway platforms who were forever trying to get a look at her ankles.

  Anna noticed with satisfaction that Gert was watching the way the truckdriver was staring at her. Men had always been after Anna (her ankles were still elegant), and Gert had always been shocked. Gert didn’t understand the power of sex. To this day she bragged about having been a virgin at thirty-nine when she married the first of her two old husbands. A sister so backward was an embarrassment to Anna. Barney had bowled Gert over with a few bouquets of wilted flowers stolen from a neighbor’s garden. Anna had tried to set Gert straight; she had known at once Barney was an opportunist, a taker. He had children he was going to look out for first—all he wanted from Gert was someone to cook his dinners and iron his shirts. Anna understood human nature, but Gert was willing to be fooled. She had prayed for a trousseau all her life, and for one red lace nightgown she was willing to take on a man who, as part of the agreement, insisted on dragging his teenaged daughter to live with them. This was a girl who slept, snoring, on a cot in the living room. This was a girl who ate sardines with her fingers. Even when Gert learned (from Anna, who had done plenty of detective work) that Barney was giving most of his company’s profits to his sons and crying poor to Gert, Gert was willing to forgive him. The sons had families, she explained to Anna—they needed more.

  That was the kind of fool she was. Anna wondered how she and Gert had ever come to be sisters, born in the same family, from the same mother and father, in the same house, only two years apart. Even now—as the two of them stood reflected in the truck’s gleaming side—their resemblance ended with their white hair. Gert was dolled up in a ruffled pink-flowered dress and wearing a necklace of arthritic coral sticks, which were jabbing her neck, while Anna wore a simple tailored beige blouse and brown skirt. Gert liked to wear a lot of makeup, and Anna wore none. They looked accidentally thrown together: a hillbilly and a woman from a list of the year’s Ten Best Dressed. Anna noticed her frown reflected in the truck’s side and immediately let her face relax. Their mother used to threaten them with dire results: one day their ugly expressions would freeze that way forever. Gert had always taken the warning seriously—she kept a cow-like smile on her face. If she saw babies, old ladies, dogs in the street, she’d greet them with soft, sympathetic cow eyes. She’d never figured out that babies grew up to be like anyone else who robbed you, but a person couldn’t explain such things to Gert. Gert was the original Pollyanna.

  The stink from the cloud of black exhaust was getting to be too much. Anna caught the eye of the driver and coughed. He lifted his pinky and twirled his mustache. She swung her head the other way. She’d leave the line this minute if it wouldn’t mean losing their places—pressed as they were against a wooden fence with hundreds of other people waiting to get inside to see the show.

  “Stop looking at him like that,” Gert said, poking Anna in the side.

  “Like what?”

  “With your glamor-girl look,” Gert said.

  “You’re crazy,” Anna said.

  “You just tossed your hair. Someday you won’t get away with that. Men used to follow you home from the subway for that look. So don’t act so innocent. That look of yours fooled Abram into marrying you, and then you made him beg for love all his life.”

  “You’re crazy,” Anna said, and then a rock of fear crept into her mind. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Gert said. She adjusted her eyeglasses on their fake pearl chain. “You know—if it hadn’t been for me Abram never would have had his rightful rewards…”

  “What rightful rewards?”

  “You know what I mean, his wedding night rights.”

  Anna felt a momentary dizziness. Gert was crazy. The fumes were whirling around her head—she swayed and leaned back against the wall of the building.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s that stink.”

  “Cover your nose right away with your handkerchief, Anna. Norman Cousins breathed in fumes from an airplane and he got a fatal disease.”

  “It wasn’t fatal,” Anna corrected her. “He cured it by laughing at old movies.”

  “If you got it, it would be fatal,” Gert warned her. “You never laugh at low humor, so don’t imagine you could start now. I remember when you were a girl you got nauseous from Groucho Marx, from Jack Benny, even from Eddie Cantor. So cover your nose.”

  “It’s impossible that I got nauseous from Groucho Marx,” Anna said. “…and the word is nauseated. I never could bear him, the man disgusted me.”

  “Exactly,” Gert agreed. “You were always too good for everything.”

  “Why do you make things up?” Anna demanded. “You’re always telling me things from the old days that never happened.”

  “They happened,” Gert said. “It’s just convenient for you not to remember.”

  “I never tell you ridiculous things about yourself!” Anna said.

  “That’s right—you never paid attention to me, you never gave me a thought. You were too busy looking in the mirror, combing your crowning glory.”

  “I thought it was Ava who never paid attention to you.”

  “She’s another sister for the books. When it comes to sisters God wasn’t good to me. I always wished we could be like the Andrews Sisters. But at least I don’t have to deal with Ava now—let her stay in Miami Beach till the cows come home.”

  “Let’s not get into how much you hate Ava,” Anna said, “or I’ll be sorry I invited you along.”

  “I’m sorry I came already,” Gert said.

  The truck blurped three shots of black smoke into the air and tooted its horn. Anna looked up. The driver le
aned forward toward the windshield and made a fish-mouth kiss at Anna as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Disgusting,” Gert said as they watched his tail end merge into traffic. “The world is a sewer these days. Whatever happened to parties and wholesome hayrides?”

  “Hayrides!” Anna echoed.

  “You can be sure what kind of guest Donahue’s having on today,” Gert went on.

  “What kind?” Anna asked.

  “A sex guest,” Gert said. “Donahue always has sex on his show.”

  “I thought you never watch Donahue.”

  “I click by him fast on the dial.”

  “Look,” Anna said, “since sex is a fact of life, since you’re a woman who’s had two husbands by now, why can’t you finally face it? If you paid a little attention to what’s going on in the world these days, you might come out of the fog of the old days and learn something.”

  “You should talk! You’re the one who doesn’t have any understanding of these things. You don’t have animal appetites, Anna. You were born with some kind of cotton stuffing inside you instead of flesh.”

  “I was! What about you, the famous virgin at thirty-nine?”

  “You weren’t a virgin on your wedding night?”

  “Of course I was. But I was young! I was still a girl!”

  “I know some girls who aren’t virgins,” Gert said ominously.

  “Who?”

  “Your granddaughters,” Gert said.

  “What have they got to do with anything? What do you know about them anyway? They don’t tell me about their private lives! I’m sure they don’t tell you! They probably don’t even tell their mother!”

  “They’re college girls,” Gert said, “and I know what college girls are up to these days. They live in co-ed dorms. They share the same bathrooms with men!”

  “You know everything, don’t you?” Anna said in disgust. “If you listened to Donahue like I do, you’d be more understanding of the way the world is today. You could learn something.”