"No. We'll produce the show."
"What makes you think he'll go along?" she asked.
"He knows what's gonna happen if he doesn't — which is that he's gonna lose a vice president."
"And a son?" she asked. "I still say, maybe I should have done it. Maybe I should go back in there and do it now."
"No," said Bat firmly.
"You trying to save my feelings or my dignity?" Glenda asked. "You should know my dignity doesn't amount to much. Golda Graustein did some undignified things scrambling to become Glenda Grayson."
17
1
"Shiksa!"
The first time she heard the word spat, it was not directed at her but toward her Aunt Leia, her mother's younger sister. That would have been — Oh, she had been seven or eight years old. Aunt Leia had been twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time.
The occasion was that Leia had broken the Shabbat that morning. While the men of the house were at worship, Leia had discovered that someone had forgotten to buy the extra bag of bagels that should have been in the house because they had four guests. Leia had slipped out of the house, first carefully covering her head with a scarf, as a modest Jewish girl did before she went out on the street. She had walked eight blocks to the market run by goyim on Eighty-seventh Street in Ozone Park. There she had made a purchase. She had touched money on the Shabbat. Someone saw, and someone brought the word to Rabbi Mordecai Graustein.
"Shiksa!"
It was not Leia's first transgression. She had broken the law before. What the family held most against her, though, was that Leia had reached the age of twenty-six or -seven and was not yet a wife and mother.
Nor was she finished with offending. When she was twenty-eight she would marry a young man from New Jersey and move with him to a town there. He was a member of a Reform congregation. They reared three sons in Reform Judaism. Rabbi Graustein forbade his wife ever to see those children, or ever again to speak to her sister. (She did see them, as he probably suspected, but husband and wife avoided confrontation by pretending she obeyed his injunction.)
Rabbi Mordecai Graustein was the father of Golda Graustein — Glenda Grayson. He was a formidable man. If not for her certainty that he loved her, little Golda would have been afraid of him. He was a bigger man than most: broad-shouldered, bulky inside his long black coats. He wore starched white shirts with collars buttoned tightly to his throat, without neckties. His beard usually covered his throat in any event. He wore his black hats set squarely on his head. He was a respected man in his Queens neighborhood. Many people spoke of him as holy. Men came to the house seeking the benefit of his wisdom and learning. Men came to him to hear him elucidate the law. Worried men came to the house to hear his opinion of the frightful things happening in Middle Europe.
Golda listened respectfully sometimes, and one day she heard him rule that the law proscribed the making of fire on the Shabbat and therefore light switches should not be moved on that day. Flipping a switch caused fire to appear inside an electric light bulb, he reasoned; therefore the switches should be set before the Shabbat and not touched until the Shabbat was over. A yeshiva student gravely but humbly argued the question, and the rabbi patiently overwhelmed his argument with citations to holy books.
The student then asked if it was lawful to allow a gentile servant to turn lights on and off during the Shabbat. The rabbi pondered for a moment and ruled that it was.
Golda learned to speak and read Hebrew and Yiddish. That was a necessity for her brothers but not for her, and that she took the trouble to learn earned her a measure of respect not earned by her sisters. She learned many things besides: to speak quietly and carry herself modestly, to light the Shabbat candles at the proper hour, to make the proper responses as her father led the family prayers, to keep the meat dishware separate from the milk dishware, not even to wash them at the same time.
She always knew — she couldn't remember when she had not been aware of it — that she and her family were very much like most of their neighbors and very different from other neighbors. The men who came to see her father dressed exactly as he did. They wore beards as he did and kept their heads covered, if not by hats then by yarmulkes. The women, too, dressed much alike, very modestly, and covered their heads before they left their houses. They shopped only in selected stores, where things suitable for their use were sold. They shared a body of special knowledge, and they shared customs and traditions that seemed foreordained and inescapable.
Yet, she knew from an early age that not everyone lived as her family did. She learned, too, very soon, that some people hated her people. Her brother Elihu came home one day from school when he was nine, bloody and bruised. He had been set upon by other boys and beaten. "Irländers," her father had grumbled. "Italianers. Katholisch. Sturmabteilungers." It never happened again, but Golda heard them yell sometimes — "Jew-boy! Kikey!"
She understood why those boys hated her brother. They were jealous of him because he was far brighter than they were and had a much better future ahead. He might become a rabbi like her father or a diamond merchant like her Uncle Isaac, while they were headed for toil on assembly lines in factories or greasy labor in automobile repair shops.
If they could get even such jobs. The Great Depression, which touched her family little, reduced many of their families to penury. Envy was the source of their hatred. Those whom G-d did not favor hated those whom He did. Throughout history, it had always been so, her father explained.
2
When she was seven her family took her to a street fair, and there for the first time she saw people dancing. Dancing! They moved their bodies, especially their legs, in rhythm to music and laughed and shouted in happy exuberance. The men danced first, then the women. Golda was ecstatic. She tried to do the steps. Her mother had to restrain her from trying to mimic the men's dancing, which would have been unseemly; but when the women danced she allowed the little girl to try the steps.
Golda could dance. Before her first experience with it was over she discovered something even more exhilarating than the dancing itself: that it made her the focus of attention. People close to her turned away from the women's dance to watch the little girl. That very first time she responded to them by mugging — grinning and rolling her eyes — and discovered they liked that, too.
Dancing was not a transgression. It should be done decorously, with appropriate modesty, but to enjoy it, even conspicuously enjoy it, did not offend. Nothing in the law, her father said, forbade people from enjoying themselves. Indeed, he had no objection to her mother enrolling her in a dance class, where she studied ballet. Her only problem with that was that her father judged tutus immodest and insisted she must dance in a knee-length skirt. But he never came to the dancing classes. He only supposed she would wear a tutu. He never dreamed that what she really wore was tights — leotards.
In this little friction over what she would wear in her dancing classes, Golda for the first time felt a tinge of resentment about separateness. She was the only girl in her classes asked by her family not to wear what the others wore; and if she had done it, it would have embarrassed her, not to say humiliated her. She didn't want to be different. She didn't want to be identified as someone unusual, peculiar.
She wondered then why her father dressed eccentrically, why she was supposed to keep her head covered outside the house, why they were obsessed about keeping the meat and milk apart, why their family and nearby friendly families were so different from all the other people she saw as she rode the bus to her dancing classes. She ventured to ask her mother, not her father, and was told that they obeyed the law and followed tradition, which was what G-d wanted them to do.