The First Desire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  PART ONE - Niagara

  CHAPTER 1 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 2 - Jo

  CHAPTER 3 - Irving

  CHAPTER 4 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 5 - Goldie

  II. FIRST ARRIVAL

  III. DANIEL

  CHAPTER 6 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 7 - Lillian

  CHAPTER 8 - Goldie

  PART TWO - Beyond Lancaster

  CHAPTER 9 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 10 - Goldie

  CHAPTER 11 - Irving

  CHAPTER 12 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 13 - Jo

  CHAPTER 14 - Lillian

  CHAPTER 15 - Goldie

  PART THREE - Winter Stars

  CHAPTER 16 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 17 - Lillian

  CHAPTER 18 - Goldie

  CHAPTER 19 - Jo

  CHAPTER 20 - Irving

  PART FOUR - Harbor Walks

  CHAPTER 21 - Jo

  CHAPTER 22 - Goldie

  CHAPTER 23 - Lillian

  CHAPTER 24 - Irving

  CHAPTER 25 - Sadie

  CHAPTER 26 - Goldie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY NANCY REISMAN

  Copyright Page

  for Rena and Robert,

  for Janet and Lo,

  and for all of our loved ones

  My island seemed to be a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s left-over clouds arrived and hung above . . .

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP,

  “Crusoe in England”

  Acclaim for Nancy Reisman’s

  The First Desire

  “A book of rhythms and reveries . . . rich in atmosphere. . . . The First Desire is a mystery story, left unsolved because the mystery is identity itself.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A continuing testament to the paradoxical ease with which family ties unravel. . . . Intensely affecting and thought-provoking.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “Nancy Reisman has written a book in which the sentences are so lush, the characters are so vivid, and the story is so compelling, I felt I had stepped inside the world she created and had taken up residence. I want to tell you how much I loved it there. The First Desire is not a book to be merely read. It is a book to be lived.” —Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

  “A triumph. . . . [Reisman] proves herself Virginia Woolf’s equal in sketching how interior vistas can collide with exterior limits in women’s lives. The First Desire is a marvelous testament to how family can both sustain and destroy us, a delicate dance through the family minefields, written in language both limpid and wise. . . . We will not have room to say enough [about] the wonder of Reisman’s prose.” —Detroit Free Press

  “Intense and moving. . . . Aside from the grace of the writing, The First Desire astonishes most in the intimacy it grants us with five fully realized characters.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Accomplished. . . . Reisman’s sumptuous prose, and her canny knowledge of the corrosive ways an average family can come apart, make The First Desire a lovely, absorbing companion.” —Entertainment Weekly (editor’s choice)

  “Reisman writes beautifully, a prose of restraint and grace. The achievement of this novel is that you are completely inside it from the moment you begin. . . . This is a story that has the shape of life as it is truly lived.” —Anna Quindlen, Book-of-the-Month Club News

  “This is a stealth novel. The characters creep up on you, and before you know it you are inhabiting their world, attuned to intimate details, desires and desperate measures invisible to outside eyes. A lovely read.” —Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies

  “A superb new writer. . . . Reisman, whose sensually charged, often outright stunning style strongly evokes Virginia Woolf . . . proves herself a rare master of internal drama, able to isolate the moment that effects a sea of change within a lifetime of compromise.” —Vogue

  “Reisman’s hypnotic prose makes her . . . characters live. And her sympathy and wealth of detail make the Cohens’ world our own: specific, inescapably flawed, unpredictably meaningful and very, very real.” — People

  “There is not a false move in Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire , one of the best tales I have ever read both about belonging to a family and about what the book calls ‘the second desire,’ the wish to be invisible, to disappear from that family, and to vanish into the American landscape.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

  PART ONE

  Niagara

  Late 1920s

  CHAPTER 1

  Sadie

  1929

  July, the air grassy and mild, the sort of morning Sadie waits for through the deep of Buffalo winters—mornings when it seems the city has surrendered to pleasure, to color and light. The harsh seasons are unimaginable. It’s as if this is how all of life is meant to be; as if drinking coffee and reading, gardening and casual piano playing, are her true occupations; as if cardinals flashing through the yards and the lush green of lawns and the maple’s fat leaves signal a permanent arrival. There are dahlias on the dining table, yellow and red, late strawberries. It’s still early, and Sadie has an hour, maybe two, before the day’s obligations intrude. The easy time, she thinks, the garden time. It’s something she associates with marriage—not the image of a couple in the garden, but the luxury of time alone at her own house. A luxury apparent only after her mother’s death, for which of course there is no compensation; but here is the second summer of such mornings, a time not yet occluded by children. She is twenty-four years old. Here is her coffee, the morning paper; in the back hall there are red geraniums to plant in a window box. The day is already bright, and she opens the living room drapes to the grass and pansies and oaks, and stops. There’s a man on her lawn: light brown suit, cigar in hand, facing away from her. Slim and coltish, an impatience in his stance, a lack of definition she usually associates with faces but here sees even in the posture, the lines of his shoulders. It’s Irving, her baby brother.

  She glances at the new aqua-colored divan. The smallest of diversions, the look away. Close the curtains, she thinks, try again later. As if he will vanish. As if in ten minutes or an hour she’ll open the curtains onto a lawn empty of everything but border pansies and white petunias. Pretend the man on the lawn is instead a strolling neighbor pausing to relight his cigar. Because the cigar is out. But Irving makes no gesture to relight it, and he is in fact Irving: Sadie has only one brother and there is no mistaking him. Irving, whom she did not expect to see at all today, let alone at this hour, miles from the family house, dampening his shoes in the grass.

  She wishes it were noon. She wishes he were standing in a coffee shop: she is often happy to see him in coffee shops, in the company of pastry. They could eat Danish and argue about new pictures, and Irving could imitate Chaplin, walking with fast small steps and tipping his hat to make her laugh. Irving on the lawn cannot be a good thing.

  In her nightgown and robe she opens the front door. A spread of bright petunias hems the grass. “Irving?”

  He turns, ashes the burnt-out cigar, checks the bottom of his shoes, as if he has stepped in something unpleasant. For an instant he’s a puzzled tan flamingo. And then he is Irving again, but he doesn’t look her in the eye. What? A death? He’d have spoken by now if it were, and no one’s been ill; there’s evasion in his manner, but not the air of drowning. That half-embarrassed staring at his shoe—it’s more than a small gambling debt. A girl in trouble? Which would be dreadful, of course, more than a little shocking, but not out of character.

  “Have s
ome coffee,” Sadie says. And now he glances at her— still the puzzled look—crosses the thick grass, wipes his shoes on the front mat, and follows her voice through the hall to the dining room. She seats him at the head of the table, makes a ritual of pouring the coffee, stirring in the sugar and cream. He could be like this when he was a boy, couldn’t he? Quiet, half-elsewhere until he’d had his breakfast, though at her table he fidgets, toying with his spoon until she sits down next to him.

  “Haven’t seen Goldie, have you?” he says.

  Goldie, their oldest sister. Goldie, who lives with him, with their father and the others. “Goldie?”

  “Hasn’t been home for a while. Three days, actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She went out—to shop, I think, or Celia thinks. She had a shopping bag with her, Celia said.”

  “But Celia doesn’t know.”

  “No. Celia doesn’t.”

  “But she thinks Goldie went shopping.”

  “Went shopping and didn’t come back.”

  “Three days ago.”

  “Well, two or three days.”

  “Three days ago was Sunday. Where does she shop on Sunday? She’s never shopped on Sunday.”

  “She went somewhere then. Maybe”—and here Irving hesitates—“maybe to the Falls.”

  “And didn’t come back,” Sadie says.

  “No.”

  “She often does go to the Falls,” Sadie says. “Often has.”

  She pours more coffee, and focuses on the burgundy rings edging the saucers, the lips of the cups. One teaspoon of sugar for Irving. “Did she go to the Falls alone, or go shopping alone, whatever it is she did?”

  He shrugs.

  “No one called? No one came by for her?”

  He fiddles with the unlit cigar. “I was out. I wasn’t there.”

  “For three days you were out.”

  “More or less,” he says. “Asleep when I was there.”

  “But you must have noticed.”

  “Goldie harps,” he says. “I avoid her.”

  OTHER MEMBERS of the family are prone to disappearing, usually in absurd ways. Celia’s age means nothing—she’s twenty-seven but impulsive—and she turns up on docked streetcars and in speakeasies and sometimes at barbershops after following men. When Irving disappears, he returns whiskey-soaked. But Goldie’s smart, the oldest, the responsible one, thank God uncrazy: she does not disappear. Maybe she told Celia she’d visit a friend and Celia forgot. Or Celia changed the story, blending it with other stories, as is her habit. And anyway what does shopping mean? On a Sunday in a city bursting with Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, a city bound to Sunday as the Lord’s day. True, Goldie might have gone to a Jewish shop, or to the bakery: Celia could mean bakery by shopping. Sometimes you have to unravel Celia’s code. Last year she called Goldie’s piano lessons harbor walks.

  Sadie hesitates. The crisis has begun and will be with them now. But she can stir the sugar in slowly, she can wait and drink coffee and slowly dress and then the control of speed will end, all control will end. She’ll have to give over to this thing, this disappearance and its ripple effects, to the strangeness of her other sisters, to her father’s strong will or denial—you never know which it will be—to Irving wandering and returning, with rumor and inebriation. Give over and do what must be done. Do not speculate.

  So she delays. The two of them, Sadie and Irving, sit leisurely over coffee, suspend the moment, as if nothing is happening and someone else is actually in charge. July. There’s a brief ease that feels lifted from childhood, when she and Irving seemed a family within the family—a relaxed, affectionate little clan apart from their older sisters. Yet even as Sadie recognizes the sensation it fades, and she offers him jam and toast, the newspaper to read while she dresses for the day.

  Alone in her bedroom, she senses that the morning has already become brittle and opaque, as if coated with burned milk. There’s a bright fast ribbon of glee at the thought of canceling dinner with her mother-in-law, then the brittleness again.

  IT’S A COUPLE of miles to the family house on Lancaster, far enough to be another neighborhood, another set of shops and parks and schools if not a distinctly separate life. But often returning to Lancaster causes time to slip, and she needs to be mindful: she needs the linen dress and gold clip earrings, the lipstick and heels and whatever else she can summon. From the outside, the Lancaster house is disarming, a solid, well-kept wood-frame, off-white, surrounded by clipped green lawn and old elms, the shade of maples and oaks and the clean-swept front porch suggesting restful lives. Today the house is quiet, the foyer, the hallway and front parlor slightly disordered, but only that. The smell of burnt coffee wafts in from the kitchen; the house is alive with the smell. Her sisters always seem to drink coffee burnt, as if there is no other way. As Sadie passes the shaded dining room, the dark woodwork and table and cabinets hushing the place into a season other than summer, Irving hangs behind her and it seems—is she imagining this?—that she might turn and find herself alone.

  “Where are they?” she says.

  Irving’s examining his wing tips again. “The store. Papa’s at the store.”

  She pictures her father—impeccable in a wheat brown suit, his dark shoes and spectacles and pale forehead shining in the heat, salt-and-pepper mustache exactingly trimmed—checking velvet-lined jewelry cases for dust, squinting at smudges on the glass. “For how long?”

  “He expects me there later.”

  “He opened for the day?” But her father has done as much at other times, worse times, leaving a pale gray blur in his place. From the parlor there’s a glint of orange, which travels in Sadie’s direction: Celia’s cat, slinking through the hall, now sniffing at Sadie’s pumps. “And Jo? What happened to Jo?”

  Irving doesn’t answer. The orange cat presses against Sadie, rubbing itself across her shin, turning, rubbing itself the other way. This is distracting: a tingling runs up Sadie’s leg to the rest of her, pleasant and more pleasant and then unnerving, that strong tingling and the cat rubbing itself and loudly purring.

  From the kitchen there’s a clinking sound and the plash of water pouring into water. “Celia?” Sadie calls. She makes her way past the closets to the back stairwell and the kitchen, the cat closely escorting her. There are white daisies in a water glass on the enamel tabletop, squares of light through thick-paned windows, a trail of garden soil along the floor to the back entry and the porch. Celia’s at the sink, scrubbing a saucepan, flecks of oatmeal sticking to her wrists. Her face is a clear white oval, eyes hazel and unrevealing, her dress pink cotton, unfamiliar, oddly girlish. Today she’s combed her hair.

  “Jo’s at work,” Celia says.

  “When did she leave?” Sadie says.

  “The usual time.”

  Both of them, then, Jo off to her secretarial job, their father to the jewelry store, as if nothing is wrong, and Goldie will reappear any moment, ready to look after the house and check in with Celia. It’s tempting, she admits, to take their behavior as reassurance and assume that Irving has misread the signs, but she knows better: this is not the sort of thing Irving misreads.

  “Let’s sort this out,” Sadie says. “Let’s sit down and sort this out.”

  Celia dries her hands, picks up the orange cat. Vera, she calls it. She is unnerved, you can see by the way she clings to the cat, the way she sidles up to Sadie and eyes the kitchen door.

  “What’s this about Goldie shopping?” Sadie says.

  Celia talks at the windows and the door—or maybe it’s to the yard beyond, the garden where she spends her summer. “She went shopping.”

  “On Sunday?”

  Yes. Probably. Or Monday. No, Celia can’t pinpoint the day for sure, it’s possible that she saw Goldie again after the shopping, but that’s not what she remembers. She does not know what Goldie shopped for. And she does not know where else Goldie might go— but here Celia refocuses on the floor.

  An
d Sadie knows better than to expect answers from Celia now, with that look and the cat purring against her chest. She’s too distracted, and even when she isn’t she’s still ruled by impulse, a tendency to lie. But you have to make the effort.

  “What was she wearing?” Sadie says.

  “Brown skirt, white blouse.”

  “She was wearing a brown skirt and a white blouse?”

  “When she went shopping.”

  And now Sadie is imagining a cigarette, the moment of inhaling and the way everything in a room eases back a step; and the instant you exhale, with the smoke, the harsh pressure that’s accumulated in your temples. “And Sunday? Celia, what was she wearing Sunday?”

  “What?”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “She forgot her hat. I know she forgot her hat.”

  “Goldie hates wearing hats,” Sadie says. “Almost never wears hats.”

  “That’s how I know.”

  SADIE STARTS with Goldie’s room—which is neatly made up and at a glance unrevealing—and riffles through the plain dresses in the closet, most of them blue or brown or white. The dun-brown skirt and white blouse hang on the back of the door. In the wide oak bureau there’s costume jewelry—blue glass beads and paste pearls— an old cosmetics puff, an empty compact, a used red lipstick, darned stockings. The blouses are mostly mended, overwashed, none of them new. Beige and white and beige, despite the bright beads. Sadie can’t tell if there’s anything missing. Goldie’s underclothes are ragged at the hems, graying and stained—embarrassing, she’ll have to talk to Goldie about this, really Goldie must buy new—but the drawer is full. The dust motes seem thicker than usual—or is she imagining this also? As if it’s been longer than two days since Goldie stayed here, certainly since she cleaned the room. Sadie pulls back the bedspread, fingers the linens, which have been slept in. It occurs to her she can’t name what she’s checking for. Blood? Stains from a man? There is the light, talc-speckled musk of Goldie herself, faint wrinkles in the sheets.

  She is here but not here, which means what? Best if it means nothing, if you can stay suspended in the blankness of not answering. Yet there is somewhere an answer, disagreeable if not disastrous. Maybe she did stay at a friend’s. But if not? Illness? A hospital? There’s a history of hospital visits, their mother’s, no one likes hospitals, but a hospital would call to let them know. The pillowcase tells her nothing: one long brown hair curves across a seam. Sadie does not want to consider the worst scenarios—one mustn’t dwell—but the worst is always possible; there’s a low beating fear, isn’t there, just below the surface when you simply cross the street, or your husband crosses the street, that threat of slipping away altogether? And what of visits to Niagara Falls alone, after months of moodiness and low-grade secrecy, after mourning your mother, and not marrying, and joining reading groups with women who are most likely Socialists? “Missing” and “Niagara Falls” ought never to appear in the same sentence, though here, now, they have, and Sadie can’t dodge the image of the rapids off Goat Island, the Niagara River wild; or the image of Goldie in her plain blue dress, dropping into the great stream, bobbing through the white water and careening over the Falls, smashing up at the bottom, frayed underwear surfacing downstream.