Keeping Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

grade when he couldn’t take the taunting anymore: “J-J-J-Jake, wh-wh-what’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
    He could rattle on in Yiddish just as well as the next one, but when he had tried to wrap his tongue around this new language it twisted and turned.
    At home he told tales about the weekend trip to Coney Island, the rides, the roller coaster, the beach, the daring with which he had jumped into the mammoth waves— that big. He bragged in the kitchen to his mother and his favorite redheaded sister Ruth until they threatened to toss him out.
    But his father insisted. “He’s got to speak English, Riva, if he wants to get ahead.” So his mother tried her best to practice the little English she had with Jake, but late at night, after Isidore had gone to bed, it was in Yiddish that they whispered.
    Those nights couldn’t last forever, though, and as Jake grew and the family shrank, he became more silent. As long as he said nothing, no one could laugh. He sought out jobs in the back of a grocery store, in a cannery, a cleaner’s, jobs that he could hold with no education, jobs where he could keep his mouth shut.
    Long days of work ran one into the other until one of the Goldberg boys said, “Come on, Jake, let’s go see the world.” Why not? That’s what the Navy promised. And for three years he was a real man, a sailor in San Diego. He went home with tattoos blue as the Pacific on both his forearms. The heart, the flowers, the cowgirl, Mom—they were on special, he told his mother proudly, a bargain twenty-five cents apiece. Back home in New Haven, Isidore frowned: Jews don’t have tattoos.
    Isidore had frowned at him more and more after his return, so he hadn’t settled back into the family house but moved into Manhattan. There eight, ten, twelve years had slipped by, the days all the same at one job or another, the evenings brightened by picture shows and vaudeville.
    Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny were on stages just minutes away on Broadway. The movies were a quarter, and dime novels, especially his favorite detectives, filled the stands. These were enough for Jake. So the twenties, the thirties, his twenties and thirties, passed; except for the visits to his family’s homes, he lived his life quietly and alone.
    Until Helen. At first he hadn’t seen her in the dark hallway of his rooming house on upper Broadway and had bumped into her coming out of the room next door.
    “Sorry,” he’d muttered and then flushed. He was always bumbling, he thought, always putting his foot in it.
    “Oh no,” she’d said in a soft Southern drawl that prolonged and multiplied every word until it sounded like three. “It’s my fault. I should have looked where I was going.”
    And then he looked at her. She was tall for a woman, an armful, with soft brown hair and a pretty smile.
    He’d thought about her for days after, listening in hopes of hearing her through the wall. He found himself racing home from work in the evenings, taking a quick shower in the bathroom down the hall and dressing in his best pleated pants, a fresh shirt. Then he sat and listened. When he heard her radio go off, he grabbed his coat and ran out the door. They almost collided once again.
    She’d smiled. “Well, isn’t this a coincidence? Neighbors back home run into each other all the time, but here in New York it seems like everyone’s just strangers. Doesn’t it?”
    Jake nodded and ducked his head. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, how he wanted to talk with her. But what to say? And how to make his tongue do his bidding?
    Goddamn you, stutter, behave! he shouted inside his head.
    “Yes, b-b-b-bu…” He couldn’t get it out. Goddammit, he couldn’t. He wheeled away.
    “But what?” she asked softly. Was she laughing at him? “But you aren’t a stranger, are you, even though I don’t know your name.”
    “Jake,” he’d managed. Quick, he’d outtricked his tongue. “Jake Fine.”
    “Helen Kaplan.” She’d