The five towns, p.1
The Five Towns, page 1
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The Five Towns
A Novel
Leslie Tonner
For Richard
Preface: 1980
The 747 swung in low and dipped over the trees, its body so close to the ground that you could see the passengers peering through the portholes. The roar as it made its final approach over Lawrence to runway 31 Right at Kennedy Airport was deafening, and all conversation in the genteel library at the Rockaway Hunting Club ceased until the noise died away. Two men seated in the corner exchanged hard looks as they waited for the sound to fade, looks that spoke of a long, communal past and of change, the kind of change that shatters calm as jumbo jets do with their thunder.
“Goddamn shame,” said Peter Griswold as he peered at his martini. “If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have done just what Dodge is doing right now. Sell out and retire to Bimini, float my capital on a yacht.”
“Change,” said Arlen Reed, “it’s the old stink bomb again. And now the Jews getting ready to kill each other over that ritual bath. Ah, Brighton Beach comes to Reynolds Channel. To hell in a handbasket, I say.”
“He’s got a lot of nerve selling to Bryant. Worst developer I know,” Griswold said. “Cruddy little houses, tear out the trees. They’re pulling down the estate, you know, only salvaging the gatekeeper’s house. Think it’ll make a charming entryway to Dodge City, or whatever in blazes they intend to call this little monument.”
“Fuck them,” said Reed. “Dodge turning tail for a fast buck, what does he know that we don’t know? Every damn board of directors in every community organization has to kiss my ass to get me to take on his responsibility. And look at how he’s leaving this place. He’s the one who talked up renovating. He’s the one who started the fund. Taking a walk for cold cash? What’s this place coming to anyway?”
“It used to be a nice place to live.”
“Yeah, before they started settling every corner. Now you can’t park your ass without a Hebrew or two staring you in the face. The black coats aren’t necessary to recognize them, either. All you have to do is see their cars.”
“Or her handbag.”
“Or his watch.”
“Or her nose.”
They laughed. They liked pretending things were the same as ever, the cozy feeling of sitting in a bastion protected from time and change by committee decree, rules, regulations. But this was 1980, and the fact of life in the Five Towns was that things would never be quite the same as before.
“Taking the boat down to Boca this year?” asked Reed.
“Nope. Too expensive.”
“Hits us all. Food, gas, the taxes don’t quit. You think they’d realize around here that their damn public schools stink anyway.”
“Not like it used to be. Even the private schools let in the Jews. Got to send them out of town these days. And that’s as bad as paying for Yale. Do you know what they’re getting at Miss Porter’s?”
“Did you ever think it’d come to this?” Reed said, standing up and shaking his pants down, so that the crease fell neatly over his cordovan Weejuns. They’d been his Sunday loafing shoes since high school. No point in changing anything midstream, that was his philosophy.
“Nope,” said Griswold, draining the last of his drink. “I thought we’d still be safe back here. At least another ten years or so. But we’re on the fringe of the fringe now, fellow, and I’m not sure how long anything’s going to last.”
“Oh, it’ll last, I’ve no doubt of that. But would you want your daughter to marry in a mikvah?”
“You don’t marry in them, you wash in them. It’s a bathing place.”
They laughed as another jet swooped in over their heads and drowned out the final snorts of derision.
“You could ask Dodge about that sort of thing, before he takes off. Remember, his son almost married one of them.”
“That’s not so uncommon anymore,” Reed said. “We’ve got plenty of members whose kids—”
“Yeah,” said Griswold. “And none of them believe in anything anymore. We just went to a goddamn wedding where the couple was married by a priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk. Now tell me, what the fuck is going on?”
“Meet you for racquet this week?”
“Sure. We’ll stay in the city that night, catch a late dinner.”
“Well, I’ll shove off now. Want to work with the jigsaw a bit before Helen shows up and starts screaming about the noise,” said Reed.
“What’re you building now? The Colossus of Rhodes?”
“The Colossus of Rhode Island. Early American breakfront. Chippendale.”
Griswold whistled. “People of our persuasion certainly know how to use their damn hands. You ought to go into business.”
“I have. Been furnishing Laurie’s house. Her husband doesn’t earn shit clerking for that federal judge. They’ll store their family heirlooms in it. They have a full set of Melmac. Helen won’t trust them with the good stuff until they’re settled in a proper house, says she.”
“Well, Wednesday for racquet, old man, and we’ve got to set up a meeting about what to do with Dodge’s place. Who’ll take the damn slot?”
“Not me,” said Reed, backing away.
“You want hacksaw time for your damn woodcarving.”
“And you’d like the martini slot,” Reed pointed out.
Griswold just grinned.
Reed walked out into the cool air and saw yet another plane bellying its way toward the back of Lawrence. He reached up as if he had a bow and arrow, aimed, and took an imaginary shot. Then he thought about his work on the breakfront, about the pleasure of the wood chips and sawdust flying about, and he took off down the road, walking at a rapid rate, hoping to get home before Helen returned. He hated Helen and didn’t much like his daughter, Laurie, either, but he sure as hell loved woodworking and he loved his clubs and he loved the quiet, leafy back roads where he made his home on Long Island. He used to think there was no better place to live; in fact, they all did, until Dodge began to sour and started talking about selling out and leaving. You weren’t supposed to do that, but Dodge said he’d had enough. Battling Jews, SSTs, Gucci this and Pucci that, and everything shot to hell on wheels.
But the streets of Lawrence, in the back curled up close to the water, were as placid as ever despite the noise overhead and the headlines in the local papers. Reed knew he’d stick around to see what happened. It would be interesting to see if yet another identity crisis swept the area, one that might again change the face of the community. It really was an all right place if you could accept the mixture of people. Lots of Jews, a bunch of diehard Christians, blacks and Italians stuck across the tracks in Inwood and sprinkled through Cedarhurst, serious expenditures of money in Hewlett Bay Park. What the hell? This was life, a microcosm askew, and they’d all lived with it for so long, why bother to move? Where could you go anymore that didn’t have some group pressing in at the front gates—Arabs, or blacks, or, for Christ’s sake, American Indians asking for their goddamn land back. Well, this land had been in his family quite long enough and he wasn’t about to give it up, not even for frock coats and beards.
So that was decided, he was staying. He retreated to his workshop and spent a pleasant afternoon and part of an evening, unaware when he went to bed that over in Woodmere, five minutes away, someone burned a swastika on a plastic surgeon’s front lawn.
Part One: The Pioneers
1950
CHAPTER ONE
The Long Island Railroad train approached the crossing at Cedarhurst Avenue and the little man came out of the gatehouse to lower the black-and-white-striped wooden barriers that stopped traffic on either side of the railroad tracks. The 10:36 from Pennsylvania Station (change at Jamaica) slowed a bit as it pulled into the Cedarhurst station and the Freundlich family got a good look at the line of cars waiting behind the barriers. In each car there were families riding together, fathers, mothers and children, the back seats of the vehicles laden with parcels and bundles of Saturday purchases. In the Five Towns, Cedarhurst was the town most synonymous with shopping but the Freundlichs were not yet aware of this fact. They had never been to Cedarhurst before; in fact, they had had little experience with this new phenomenon known as the suburbs. They were city people, and had made their way closer to Nassau County, Long Island, by moving to Forest Hills in Queens.
Arthur Freundlich had brought his family out on the train because life in the Forest Hills apartment building had grown impossibly close. There was hardly enough room to move around their small, square living room, what with the armchairs, couch, and breakfront, to say nothing of the fact that the couch became his mother’s bed at night and he and his wife, Evelyn, were evicted from their living room. Amy, their three-year-old daughter, occupied the second small bedroom, but Evelyn was pregnant again and it was obvious that they had to move. He’d heard friends discussing Long Island—its green vistas, its convenient shopping, its accessibility to New York City, which was important since Evelyn insisted that she remain close to things cultural. But, more than this, he’d heard that it was possible to live the good life in a place just recently open to more and more Jewish families.
The Five Towns had by no means been a restricted community; there had been Jewish families living there both permanently and d uring the summers for at least several decades. Still, there had never been an influx of Jewish families quite like what was occurring in these post–World War II years, and Freundlich was conscious that he might at last have found a place where he could settle permanently and belong to a community in a way that he could not in Forest Hills. He’d been raised as an apartment child, become for a brief time a college commuter, then an enlisted GI in an army barracks, an interloper in his in-laws’ home following the disarray after the war, and now a renter on his own. He wanted to own something at last, and land, and a home built on that land, was his investment of choice. Could this be the place? Judging from what he’d heard and from what he saw outside the train’s dusty windows, the Five Towns might have possibilities.
He had a little money put aside, a few dollars saved since the last years of the Forties when his TV-table business had begun to show a profit. Then too, his mother had offered to invest a small amount she’d put aside, in view of the fact that she’d be living with them. He didn’t say no. He’d never felt he was the favored son in his family; that distinction belonged to his long-lost older brother, Edward. It was about time his mother thought him worthy of a financial investment, so he took her money and added it to his small pile and decided he had enough for a down payment.
The real-estate agent he’d called turned out to be Jewish. His name was Morris Susskind. Freundlich had been relieved at the sound of Susskind’s voice. He’d been afraid they’d end up with some proper gentile showing them this new place to live, and then they’d never have been able to ask the right questions, the important questions. You couldn’t raise your child in a solidly gentile environment. What if there weren’t very many other Jews on the block, or enough synagogues, or even, God forbid, if there were anti-Semitism? Who knew? This Susskind obviously would; he said he’d lived out there for seven years.
Susskind had told him to look for a large black car when they arrived at the Cedarhurst station, and as Freundlich scanned the automobiles pulled up near the small wooden station house he noticed an enormous Cadillac sitting to one side, pointed in the direction of the small park across the way. A stocky man in a dark suit waved, and Freundlich stepped down from the train carrying Amy, followed by his wife and then his mother, who negotiated the steps slowly, planting both feet firmly on each step, as she groaned and muttered her way to the platform below.
“Take it easy, Momma,” Evelyn urged as she extended her hand to help her. Evelyn hoped what she was wearing was right for coming out to the suburbs. She’d wondered if her city best would look correct in the country, a dark blue dress with a jacket, her good pearls, white gloves, and matching navy blue handbag and shoes. She looked swiftly around the station. No one was staring at her. She took her mother-in-law’s arm and guided her toward the car.
“Have a pleasant trip?” Susskind asked as he opened the car doors and gestured for them to get in. The upholstery was dark and as Evelyn Freundlich slid over she felt the late-summer heat against her nylon stockings and through the back of her linen dress. The pressing she’d given it would be ruined in only a few minutes. She reached out her arms for Amy, who was clad in a pink smocked dress with puffed sleeves and a little white collar already smudged with traces of grime. Amy’s patent leather shoes were dusty from the train ride and her face looked cross and uncomfortable in the heat. But just when Evelyn thought the weather was impossible and why wasn’t it cooler in the country, a breeze blew through the automobile carrying a scent of salt and water, the ocean, and Evelyn raised her face and closed her eyes and decided that if she would be able to smell the sea and feel the cool draft, she would be just fine in the Five Towns.
“Some weather, huh?” Susskind said pleasantly as he got in behind the wheel. Freundlich was sitting next to the agent in the front. The car moved down Cedarhurst Avenue and made a right turn at the corner of West Broadway. Susskind drove quickly but he stopped the car badly, slamming on the brakes and causing the occupants of the back seat to lurch forward uncomfortably.
Freundlich, who disliked machinery and knew little about how anything mechanical worked, fished around in his mind for some technical reference he could throw out about automobiles. “Some transmission, eh?” was all he finally said as the car passed the sheltering trees bending over the large homes located close to the street.
Susskind shrugged. He raised his voice so Mrs. Freundlich, Evelyn, and Amy might hear him. “You’ll notice that this area has quite a few of the older style of homes built before the war, some back even further. There’s no representative sort of house here, not like what they’re doing in Levittown,” he said, pressing down on the brakes, hard, and turning around to look at his audience in the rear. “Of course, these would be more money than we discussed, close to five figures for your down payment alone.”
The Freundlichs nodded obediently. It was a wild enough dream for them to consider owning their own home, let alone in an area where other people had houses like this.
“And,” Susskind continued, “this is only Cedarhurst. Later on, we’ll go for a drive through some of Lawrence. I want to show you how people can really live out here.”
The car sped by several small, adjoining stores, a tiny grocery, a Chinese laundry, a shabby store with a Coca-Cola “luncheonette” sign over the door. Evelyn Freundlich stared at them and wondered about where she would shop, wondered how she would learn to drive, because it was apparent that in this community you had to have a car. She’d seen no buses, taxis, or anything resembling public transportation since she’d stepped off the train.
“We’re in Woodmere now,” Susskind said cheerfully. “I suppose you might’ve come in at the Woodmere station, but I’m so close to Cedarhurst at the office, you know, every extra minute there I may get another call. The housing market’s really booming now.” He slammed on the brakes and they made a left turn onto a newly paved street. Tiny pebbles crunched and popped up beneath the wheels of the car. Several flew up and hit the hood. Amy laughed delightedly. The houses on the street looked newer, fresher, and smaller than the ones on the main artery.
“This is Highland Avenue,” Susskind said. “It’s not where the houses I’m going to show you are, but the street we’re going to doesn’t go through to West Broadway. It’s a lot newer, too, so don’t expect too much in the way of progress right now.”
As they rode down the street, they could see the plots of land on which the houses sat shrink perceptibly as the houses grew newer.
“These are mostly splits,” Susskind pointed out, “somewhat like the ones we’ll be looking at.” They turned at the next corner and the car moved from a paved surface onto a rutted dirt road that was covered with fresh, deep tire tracks and diagonal slashes of dirt pushed aside by bulldozers. The car’s occupants held their breath as the Cadillac bounced dangerously over the torn-up road and turned onto another street, where they were greeted by the sight of one finished house, three half-finished houses, and one skeletal wooden frame of a fifth. “This is it,” piped Susskind. “All out.”
He had stopped the car in front of the finished house, which had no front lawn, no trees, no shrubbery. A large wooden sign was planted in the dirt next to a path of wooden planks that had been laid across several gaping holes filled with stagnant rainwater. “Model Home,” the sign read, “Deluxe new community, 3 Bedrooms, 1 and ½ baths, all-electric kitchen, garage, easy access to schools and shopping.”
Evelyn Freundlich, reading the sign from the back of the car, wondered where the schools and shopping might be. There was no sign of anything beyond the lots cleared for the five houses, only a line of trees that indicated the start of a fairly dense patch of woods and the sight of the tops of the houses on Highland Avenue, where they’d just driven.
“What’s the name of this street?” Evelyn asked.
“Bush Road,” Susskind said, opening the car doors.
“That’s a joke,” Dora Freundlich put in. “You can’t see any bushes around here. Just a lot of dirt.” Her “dirt” came out sounding a bit like “doit,” and for a brief moment her son was slightly embarrassed. He wasn’t sure why he was disconcerted in the presence of this Jewish real-estate agent, but he had the feeling that the Jews of the Five Towns had left all their Bronx-and-Brooklynese behind them when they made the move to the suburbs. He was tired of the relentless, old-time Judaism he’d been exposed to throughout his youth and hoped there would be something more modern available. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be Jewish; it was simply that he didn’t want to constantly think Jewish. He would like to be able to take it for granted.
