“Jeanette
Girot, he-he, ooh! She was hot in love with seven men at the same time, yes”
grandpa told me, nearly in a boast, “one for each day a the week.”
He slowly
unfurled seven leathery fingers at me, not the normal way but split into four
and three, no thumbs. I wondered if that was European or elderly, it was
difficult to tell with him…but the realization struck me: grandpa has an accent even in sign language.
“Were you one of them?” I asked.
“I was.” He folded his fingers back into a ball, but slowly, not all at
the same time.
“How…is that possible?”
“Ahh” said grandpa triumphantly, like I had fallen into his trap. “You
don’t know Jeanette Girot!” And a great smirk cracked onto his face which meant
that I had to admit he was right, I didn’t know Jeanette Girot.
Grandpa told an incredible number of stories, though in all other
things he was stingy and sparse. He’d give up a limb sooner than overpay you a
cent, and die before tipping an extra dollar. Measured and meticulous! For him
that was part nature and part necessity, working close to fifty years as a
furrier. The bodies of women from Madison and Park Avenues, from Tribeca and
Newark and Long Island, needed to be measured exactly – though their shapes,
lumps, and curves shifted almost from breath to breath, like clouds.
He earned a remarkable reputation among these women, who paid
handsomely. They spoke of his fine craftsmanship in mink, his gift with rabbit
and fox, and how he could make a coat for a woman which so naturally suited her
you’d think she was born a chinchilla. In the 80’s, however, when all those
women and loyal customers began to die and, unexpectedly, left no wills asking
to be buried in new fur, grandpa went out of business and retired.
“Can you tell me about her, grandpa?” I prodded. Because while he was
indeed generous with these things, a semi-philanthropist of stories, he would
always wait to be asked (unlike some great philanthropic foundations, as I
would learn later in life when I had graduated college and law school for a
career in non-profit work, who bestow their cash upon those who never wished it
or asked…any more than the peaceful, eerie moon asked to be pricked with an
American flagstick…).
“Sure, sure, ahh.”
I could tell from his eyes and how he began to rub his bulky knees –
both hands and knees trembled, so when he rubbed them together they resembled
two pairs of dragonflies mating, side by side – that he was pleased to think of
her. And also pleased to tell me.
.
“They put me down there in New Orleans,” he began. “Down there in eh,
how do you call it? Next to New Orleans, you know forty five minutes, an hour
away, by car.”
“At the army base?” I asked, knowing he’d served in the army during the
war.
“The navy,” he corrected me. “Every Sunday we would go to New Orleans.
A nice city, very nice city, it’s like New York – on the water. There
was another Jewish person with me, Abe Segal – he was from Staten Island, and
American born. Ooh-ah! He used to rail on me, the way I spoke, and all the
American things I didn’t know. Abe was loud and sharp, a very sharp boy. He
loved to make trouble and whenever he got the chance, he’d be the first one to
New Orleans and the last one back to the base. And then he’d make sure everyone
in the base, including the sergeants, and me especially, knew exactly what sort
a mess he’d been up to.
“Well, Abe…”And
grandpa, pausing, flashed a sudden deep frown. “Come one Monday morning and Abe
was nowhere around. He didn’t show up a whole week! He-he! And all that week
everyone was looking at me asking, Where’s Abe? Where’s Abe? because they knew
that we were the only Jewish people down there. Even the sergeant screamed at me
a little. And a week later Abe snuck back into the base just like nothing had
happened, and boy did the sergeant give him hell! He had to clean every-little-bitty-thing
on the base a hundred times, a million times! Ooh!
“But he was
very quiet, not a word about nothing. So finally I asked him. I went over to him
and I said, ‘Abe, where in the hell were ya out to all this time, eh?’
‘What’s it to
you?’ he said. And ptew! He spit on the ground by my boots.
“So I just said
to him, ‘So now you are not talking, eh?’
“You see, I
realized that if he didn’t want to talk about it, this was something out of the
ordinary. You know, something very lunatic. So I said to him, ‘Where could you
have been, Abe? What, did you stay with a girl the whole week?’
“He was always
talking talking talking about this girl and that girl, only girls. But he was
never quiet about it, and this time he was dead quiet. It was unusual. And then
slowly, very seriously, Abe nodded at me…” (Grandpa nods his head the way he
remembers Abe’s, with a frozen face, like a statue forced to nod its head but
trying not to rupture or disintegrate.)
‘Yeah? A girl?’
I asked him again.
‘Yeah , a girl,”
he said.
“Ooh-ah! How I
laughed at him! He was standing there like he had a tail between his legs! So I
said to him, ‘What did she do to you, Abe? Did she tie you to the bed with
chains or something for a week? Come on! Did she hit you with the voodoo and
poke some pins in you, eh? She go and pin your putz to the bed, eh?’ Because
you know down there in New Orleans they are all voodoo, from the Caribbean
Islands. He-he!
“But I’ll never
forget it. He looked me dead in the eye like a snake and said, ‘Worse.’
“Ah! That was
Abe Segal, the loudest boy on the base, who would give you a whole megillah
about anything in the world, and not once in his life answered with even a
simple Yes sir. And all he had to say was that, and then he just
walked away!”
Grandpa seemed
exasperated even now by the curtness of Abe Segal’s reply. He was getting
worked up, bouncing in his musty green armchair. But his agitation lasted only
a moment; he quickly turned easygoing, back to being comfortably old, like a
calm Buddha. And he grinned.
“And you know
who that girl was, yes?” grandpa said to me. I did and I didn’t. He bellowed
her name.
“Jeanette
Girot!”
