The Five Towns: A Novel by Leslie Tonner | eBook

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The Five Towns

A Novel

By Leslie Tonner

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

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 during 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 1/2 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.

They stood in the yellow-orange dirt of the makeshift road and stared at the model house, Freundlich dreaming of security and comfort, Dora Freundlich thinking that she'd imagined they'd get more for their money, Evelyn Freundlich worrying what you'd do with no neighbors and who knew what problems lurking in the nearby woods that were threats to little girls playing outside, and Amy fretting over the lack of sidewalks, already close to tears because she might have to give up hopscotch, jump rope, and roller skating.

The house faced them, implacably new, its shingles painted white, shutters framing the windows colored a light gray, everything brand-new and cheerless, still wreathed in sawdust, spackled with bits of plaster and paint, and shiny with disuse. "Shall we?" Susskind said, sweeping out his hand and indicating to the ladies that they should pass.

They obediently trooped up the quavering wood planks, Dora Freundlich inching along behind her daughter-in-law. "Not what I expected," she said to Evelyn, who ignored her as they moved toward the front door. The front stoop was in, a poured concrete square that seemed to have tilted and cracked already. Evelyn stopped, drew up her courage, and called out to Susskind, telling him the house was falling down.

He laughed. "We're building on marshy ground here, right on top of water, really. The houses are built on pilings sunk right into the ground, so it will take some settling in. But it's not Venice, you know. You'll need a Ford to get around, not a gondola."

Evelyn stared at the concrete skeptically as her mother-in-law stepped in front of the door, stared, and pointed curiously at the doorframe. "You suppose that has some purpose?" she said to Evelyn.

Evelyn stared. Right over the doorbell, built into the little metal enclosure, was a tiny light, like the sort of light the doctor shines in your eyes, only here it was planted right over the bell, and although it was broad daylight, it shone steadily on. "Waste of electricity," Dora said, clucking her tongue. Evelyn could see that she was settling in for a fight. She sighed, and waited for the men to come, Arthur with Amy in his arms, Susskind following close behind, talking quickly as he pointed out mysterious, complicated things about crawl spaces, septic tanks, and utility wires. Evelyn noticed the telephone poles placed at regular intervals where the lines would be strung, and then she wondered why the builders hadn't left any trees. Judging from the nearby woods, there had been plenty of trees in the area. Why not leave a few behind? She opened her mouth to ask Susskind, but he shouldered past her, popped a key in the lock, and pushed open the door.

"Ladies," he said. And they stepped inside the house, ready to see what the suburbs had to offer.

Sunlight streamed, unimpeded, through the panes of glass which still bore the marks of the adhesive labels the builders had only partly scraped off. The front door led into a square foyer with a floor covered in white tiles with a gold fleur-de-lis pattern. There were footprints all over the tile where the workmen had carelessly tracked in mud. Extending from the foyer into the living room was wall-to-wall carpeting, protected by long plastic runners.

Evelyn peered into the living room. The model furniture was French, one of the Louis eras, Evelyn wasn't sure which, painted antique white with gold accents. There were scenes of classical antiquity in elaborate frames hanging on the walls. Evelyn had to close her eyes to imagine away the furniture and concentrate on the room's good points. There was a large picture window extending across the back, giving a full view of the dirt mounds in the backyard. Someday, with landscaping and trees, the vista would be pleasant.

Off the rear of the living room was the dining room, a smaller, square room with more windows, and through that, toward the front of the house and accessible from the foyer as well, was the kitchen. It was there that Evelyn found Dora, inspecting the refrigerator and stove and making clucking noises with her tongue.

"No pilot light," she said to Evelyn.

"It's electric, mother," Evelyn said patiently.

"What? How do you know when it's on? What kind of cooking is it, no flame?"

"Very clean," came Susskind's voice. He'd just come through the foyer and was jovially eager to point out the up-to-date features of everything in this house. He'd sell them the stove, and then the refrigerator, which Dora called the icebox, and then the hookups in the rear of the garage for a washer and dryer.

"And wait, I've even forgotten about the dishwasher." He gestured at a door next to the sink, which he opened and pulled down. Inside were wire baskets. "Hotpoint," he said proudly. "One of the best in the business."

Dora stared dubiously. She washed everything at the sink in scalding water and could never believe the gowned hostesses on TV telling her about the joys of letting the machines do it.

A wail came from the foyer where Amy, who had been trying to skid on her slippery shoe soles, had fallen down and scraped both knees. Arthur brought the little girl in to her mother, who scolded her as she wet a handkerchief to apply to the bruises.

"An apartment child," Susskind remarked as he offered Amy one of the Charms from the package he always kept in his pocket. "My own kids were the same. They didn't understand playing on the lawn. They thought if it wasn't pavement, if it didn't scrape them up good, it wasn't really playing. I had to chase them off the driveway for months." He gave Evelyn a careful look. "All through? How about a gander at the powder room?"

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Five Towns by Leslie Tonner. Copyright © 1980 Leslie Tonner. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The Five Towns: A Novel

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