‘What’s the difference between a duck?’ he asked.
There was a pause while the children waited for him to continue.
‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked disingenuously, already beginning to giggle. Addie stared out the window.
Jake was first to respond.
‘That’s stupid. You can’t answer that . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘You didn’t say, the difference between a duck and a . . . what!’
Ben allowed a little time to coagulate in the smoky air. Becca leaned forwards: That was really smart of Jake!
He half-turned from the driver’s seat and looked at each of the children, wisely.
‘I’m not giving any hints,’ he said, and burst into laughter so protracted that the car began to drift across the lane. Drivers honked furiously. He pulled himself together, straightened their trajectory, wiped his eyes, laughed some more. From the back, you could see his shoulders shaking.
‘That’s not fair!’ said Becca.
‘That’s not funny!’ said Jake.
‘Grossman slays Grossman!’ said Ben, proudly.
‘Again!’ said Addie. Ben was unusually animated; it didn’t ring true, all this fun. What the hell was there to have fun about? She looked at him sharply. Something was up, he looked shifty and evasive.
‘I spy with my little eye,’ she said tersely, as the kids began to scan the unfolding countryside, the orange and yellow and brown cars, two-tones, with their chrome and white-walls, the billboards on the side of the road pimping boisterously for Nabisco Oreo Cookies and CANvenient 7Up. More intelligence and wit went into them than into the governance of the whole nation.
‘Something beginning with A.’
Jake, reflexively competitive and four years older, looked round the car. Unwilling to miss out, but only just competent, Becca looked wherever he did, in the vain hope that he might miss an A and then she could name it.
‘An arm!’ he shouted.
‘Nope.’
‘An ankle!’
Becca scanned her body anxiously.
‘Not that either.’
Unwilling to be drawn further into this dangerous body parts inventory, guessing all too easily which one Addie had in mind, Ben joined in.
‘There,’ he shouted, pointing across the road. ‘Amattababy!’
There was a snort of derision from the rear.
‘Ben, you can’t just make things up!’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Did so! What’s a mattababy?’
His shoulders started to shake.
‘Nothin’, baby. What’s a matta with you?’
It was a brocheh, Perle reminded herself, such a blessing to have Addie and the children coming, and that Frankie and Michelle and their little ones had settled in Huntington after the war.
‘It’s a brocheh,’ she said firmly.
Maurice put down his coffee cup, paused to light his filter-tipped Kent cigarette and place it in the ashtray on the dining table, let enough time go by to suggest unexpressed disagreement, as if he needed to consider whether it was such a blessing after all. You could get brochehed half to death during a hot summer with a tiny house full of needy, squabbling, overheated and over-entitled family.
He could hardly have admitted it to his wife, nor entirely to himself, but he was anxious about their imminent arrival, the invasion of a home hardly big enough for the two of them, stuffed for the summer with Addie and her kids, Frankie and Michelle with an uncertain number of babies popping in as fast as they popped out, Die Schwarze moping in the tiny maid’s room next to the bathroom. The children would be put into the guest room, and Addie – and later in the month Ben, when he joined them in a couple of weeks – would sleep in the back area, which had screens separating it from the porch, and a glass door that could be closed at night, a curtain drawn across. Hardly private, hardly comfortable. A thin partition wall separating the cramped space from the parents’ bedroom. He wondered how they ever managed to do it; they gave rare sign of having done so. No noises in the night, no sly smiles in the morning.
No guest ever leaves too early. A month, no, seven weeks this year, of Addie and the kids! They’d be arriving in a few hours, and he was already apprehensive. She was spiky and difficult, had been since her childhood, or at least from those early days when she was supplanted by the arrival of baby Frankie. Perle had adored her son since he first peeked into the world and her recalcitrant displaced daughter had never recovered.
He would make himself scarce. Go into the garage to his workbench, find things to make, or to fix. The fence round the back of the house needed new slats, do the undercoat and painting, put them up next week. There was always something to do at the bungalow. He quite liked Harbor Heights Park, the trip from the city on Grand Central Parkway and Northern State, the slow retreat from his beloved concrete to the occasional pleasures of grass and trees, the mildly alarming rural peacefulness. No horns honking, no traffic, no crowds. It was fine with him, so long as it didn’t last too long.
A post-First World War development of summer homes for New Yorkers, the simple bungalows formed a self-enclosed community just ten minutes’ walk from Huntington Harbor. It was a promising wooded site, bounded by roads on three sides, unimaginatively divided into lettered lanes. By 1925 seventy units had been sold to city lawyers, engineers, architects, professors, civil servants, builders and small businessmen, anxious to get away from the oppressive heat of the city, to enjoy days on the local beach with their children. Brown’s Beach, it was called locally, and brown it certainly was.
Only a few years later, the residents, who had not been warned of the menace of the local waters, signed a petition for an immediate amelioration of their parlous state, complaining of ‘a polluted harbor, constituting a menace to health and life . . . with sewage and other disease-breeding material continuously distributed into the waters of the harbor, including the effluvia from cesspools and toilets, making the harbor unfit for bathing purposes or for the cultivation of shellfish’.
Not many of the residents, most of whom kept kosher homes, gave a hoot about shellfish, but the pollution was disgusting, the smell at low tide noxious. The waters were only negotiable at high tide, and grandparents warned of the dangers of getting your head in the water. The children went on frolicking, splashing and ducking. None of them died. The adults donned their swimsuits and paddled. Now and again one of them, swimming in the deeper waters, would encounter an itinerant floating turd, like an organic grenade. Ben called it Perle Harbor.
Becca fought for territory in the back seat, was bored quickly and kvetched, got carsick if she read or ate too much junk. She worried incessantly that they would get lost, particularly if Ben turned off the highway for one reason or another.
‘How will we find our way back?’ asked the little one, increasingly anxious. ‘Is it on the map?’ She had a lot of faith in maps, but only Ben could read them. If Addie started unfolding, peering and muttering, tracing various lines with her finger, Becca knew there was going to be trouble and they would end up in fairyland.
‘Ben!’ she ordered. ‘Stop the car! Then you can look at the map.’
‘I am looking at it just fine,’ said Addie, peering down intently, trying to get the damn map to hold still.
‘Do you know where we are?’
Addie pointed randomly. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘And we are going – there!’ She pointed at a place higher up. ‘Towards the North!’