Jill Emerson
A Week as Andrea Benstock
FOR
JOSEPH ROSENBERG AND IN MEMORY
OF PEGGY ROTH
Sunday
May 12, 1963
On the second Sunday in May, 1963, Andrea Beth Kleinman awoke to the sound of rain on her bedroom window. It was a comforting sound, and after she had looked around long enough to establish that it was light outside, she closed her eyes again and settled.her head on her pillow. Soon enough it would be time to get out of bed and shower and dress for what was supposed to be the most important day of her life. But first she would steal a few moments of that day for herself, lying snug in her own warmth and listening to the rain.
It occurred to her, after a few moments, that this would be a day of doing things for the last time. The process had already begun; this was the last morning she would wake up alone. Tomorrow she would be in Puerto Rico, a married woman, and Mark would be beside her. She would not be Andrea Kleinman but Andrea Benstock, and that seemed as vast a difference as between Buffalo and Puerto Rico.
Of course they would return to Buffalo. But she would not sleep again in this bed, in this house.
The house was a square brick structure on Admiral Road four doors from Starin Avenue. It was on the north side of Buffalo Just a few blocks from the Kenmore line. The house had been built shortly after the conclusion of the First World War, and had been occupied by the Kleinman family since midway through the Second World War. Her father had purchased it in 1942 for eighty-seven hundred dollars. A year later the real estate market went crazy and realtors offered David Kleinman as much as fifteen thousand. He had not considered selling then, nor did he consider it in the late fifties, when the exodus of Jewish families from that neighborhood to smaller houses in the suburbs began in earnest.
It was the only home Andrea remembered. She had been four years old when they moved in, and had previously lived in an apartment on Amherst near Elmwood and the upper half of a two-family house on Norwalk. She had the usual complement of amorphous memories of those first four years, but there was no sense of place to them. Home to her had always been this house on Admiral Road, and, within that house, this bedroom of hers.
For thirteen years she had lived here with no interruption beyond family vacations and a few summers at Canadian camps. During the years at Bryn Mawr, even during the years in New York, this had remained her home if only because she had had no other. Whenever she came home on a visit her room was waiting for her, her own room in the house in which she had grown up, and it was only in retrospect that she realized how much this pleased her.
Now she recalled a telephone conversation which had taken place on another Sunday a few years ago. She was in New York at the time, newly settled in her apartment on Jane Street. Her parents called for the traditional Sunday morning conversation, her father on the sun-room extension, her mother at the wall phone in the kitchen. They had looked at a house the day before, her mother said, and it was perfect in every way. A ranch house, small and easy to care for, all built-ins in the kitchen, and on a very good street in Snyder.
“Much closer to the club for his golf. Fifteen minutes shorter each way. And no stairs to climb. I thought if I could finally get him to look at a house, and this was just perfect for our needs.”
“It was a nice little house,” her father agreed.
“So it’s nice, and it’ll go on being nice, and somebody else will buy it and live in it. He won’t move.”
“It suits me here, Andrea. It’s closer to my office, which I still go to more often than I play golf, but even if it wasn’t. Maybe I’m crazy but I’m comfortable here. I don’t want to go get used to someplace else.”
At the time she had sympathized more with her mother’s position. The neighborhood was declining, in property value if not in physical appearance. They were alone, the two of them. They didn’t need all that space, nor did they need a staircase to go up and down a dozen times a day.
Then eight months ago she had returned to this house, to this room. And how glad she had been for her father’s stubbornness. Of course there would have been a room for her in whatever house they might have bought, but it would not have been her room, nor would any new house have been her house.
This was her neighborhood, each house on the block well remembered, its familiarity precious however many of the old neighbors were gone. School 66 was still around the corner, and its presence was no less reassuring for all that her teachers were retired or dead. In the fall, before she began seeing Mark, she had spent some time almost every day walking slowly through these streets. She would not have walked like that in Snyder.
Now she listened to the rain on her window and put off getting out of her own bed for the final time. Suddenly the thought touched her in a way she had not anticipated, and she began to cry. She felt unutterably foolish but still the tears flowed. She put her face in her pillow and wept.
After her shower she put on a blouse and a pair of jeans and went downstairs. Her mother was at the breakfast table with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette. She said, “You certainly picked a fine day for a wedding. It’s supposed to be like this all day.”
“It’s good we didn’t decide on an outdoor ceremony.”
“You weren’t thinking of it, were you? You never said anything about it.”
“I was just joking.”
“Because I never liked the whole idea of outdoor weddings. I suppose I’m old-fashioned. I went to one two years ago that you wouldn’t believe. Did I tell you about it? Sylvia Friedkin’s daughter Margie. I don’t know if you knew her. She’s a few years younger than you.”
“Everybody’s a few years younger than I am.”
“It was one for the books. The groom was a non-Jewish boy, so the service was nondenominational. Fine. But they held it in Delaware Park.”
“It’s beautiful in the park.”
“It’s lovely, but this was the middle of August and the temperature was over ninety for a week solid. And the lake there has no drainage, and you haven’t been around much in the past few years, but you no longer have to be right in the middle of the lake to realize that there’s no drainage. And the particular place they picked, for some nondenominational reason I’m sure, was close enough to Delaware Avenue so that you had a spectacular view of Forest Lawn with tombstones rising in the distance.”
“Oh.”
“Someone said this would be very convenient if the father of the bride had a stroke. You remember Joe Friedkin. He always looks as though he’s about to have a stroke, with that red face of his, and between the heat and his new son-in-law no one was too sure that he could last the day. The groom had grown a beard, which I suppose is all right, except in this particular case he wasn’t that good at growing beards, nebbish, and there were great hairless areas on his face as if he’d been struck by some form of blight. Your father thought possibly ringworm. You’re laughing, but you didn’t have to stand there in the heat and put up with all of this. You didn’t, have to listen to the nondenominational clergyman talk about living in harmony with Nature. God knows where they found him. He was barefoot, incidentally, like the bride and groom. I somehow forgot to mention that. They wanted to be able to absorb the essence of the planet through their toes. There used to be a bridle path there, bridle as in horses, not weddings, and your father said they stood a fairly good chance of absorbing the essence of hookworm between their toes. Ringworm and hookworm, that was the sort of thing that came to mind. Sit down and I’ll get your breakfast. What do you want?”
“I’m not very hungry.”