61

1

When Dr Lai told me that Shelly had collapsed in the stockroom of his shop because he’d had a stroke, I felt the blood shooting up through the top of my head like a missile. Soon after that, sweat began pouring from my neck and the hospital corridor started gyrating around me. My daughters led me to a chair, and I lowered my head between my legs. Sometime afterward, without knowing exactly how I’d gotten there, I was seated next to my husband and I had a paper cup filled with water in my hand. Shelly was asleep. He had an IV in his arm and had kicked off his blanket, so I stood up to cover him. He was wearing a loose-fitting blue smock that made him look like a schoolboy in art class. A television monitor to the side of his bed tracked the jagged line of his heartbeat, which oscillated between fifty-five and sixty beats per minute. That seemed slow, but Dr Lai assured me that the medications that Shelly had been given were keeping him calm and that his heart didn’t need to pump any faster.

I rubbed Shelly’s hand for a time, moving my fingertip over the calluses on his palm, because they meant he was a lot tougher than he looked and could withstand more than his fair share of troubles. His thick brown hair was tufted at wild angles, so I stood up and smoothed all of it down, then made two greying wings extending back over his ears – just as he likes it.

None of our marriage difficulties mattered while I was sitting with him – not even his affairs. My grievances and doubts were 62still there, but they seemed to belong to a woman standing behind me, observing me from the doorway while I whispered to the wonderful, big-hearted man with whom I’d been travelling for the last twenty-five years.

Do other women ever consider that it would be best not to love their husbands or boyfriends quite as much as they did?

When Shelly woke up, he spoke to me in drowsy Yiddish. He kept licking his lips, so I lifted up his water cup and put the straw in his mouth and he sucked away contentedly. I had the feeling that he thought he was a little kid. Maybe he imagined that I was his mother.

Shelly’s face is more expressive – more pliable – when he speaks Yiddish. And he makes more exuberant hand gestures, as if he’s the lead in a silent movie. I kept nodding as if I understood him, figuring – wrongly, as it turned out – that he’d switch to French or English at some point.

Among other words, I learned one for sleepy – farshlofn – that seemed soft and fuzzy in my mouth, like a word invented by the broken-hearted Jewish angels that had roamed the Warsaw Ghetto in his youth and that his cousin Benni had once told me about.

When he nodded off again, his mouth remained open. I stood up to cover him with his blanket and noticed I could see nearly all his fillings – even the two gold ones in his molars that Uncle Abraham had given him back in Poland.

I didn’t want to leave, but when Dr Lai came back in, he told me that Shelly was stable and that it was a good sign that he’d been rambling away in Yiddish. With a reassuring nod, he added that it was only natural that he’d be confused after his stroke, but that he was certain that it was just a minor one. ‘He’ll be mostly himself again soon,’ he said.

‘Mostly himself?’ I asked.63

‘Well, it’ll take him a while to get all his powers back.’

Dr Lai’s use of the word powers made it sound as if Shelly were a comic-book superhero, which seemed perfectly in keeping with my sense of having awakened in a universe that wasn’t the usual one I lived in. An hour or so later, still holding Shelly’s hand, I let my daughters talk me into having them escort me home, since he didn’t look as if he might wake up anytime soon.

I wrote him a note on a napkin I took from my bag: See you in the morning. Kisses big and kisses small, Jules. I left it next to his plastic water cup.

Diane drove my ancient Ford Fairlane because I didn’t trust myself. Margot crumpled into sobs beside her. I leaned forward from the back seat and rubbed her slender shoulders and assured her that her father would be fine. And yet the whole time I was comforting her, I was asking myself, When in God’s name will I ever be able to stop pretending that I’m a cheerful person?

At home, Diane heated up the lentil soup I’d made the day before and Margot chopped up tomatoes for a salad. The banging of cupboards and clanging of plates confirmed that they’d inherited my strategy of survival-through-frenzy.

I started up to my bedroom to change into my pyjamas, but each step seemed to be taking me further and further from anywhere I wanted to be, so I stopped on the landing and contemplated the painting by Shelly’s old friend George that we’d hung there a decade earlier. And for the first time, I saw what it was really about.

How do you live ten years with a painting and never notice anything below its brushstrokes? At the centre of the composition is a youthful bride and groom clinging together, panicked, cornered by a thick forest of trees that are growing upside down. Their tangled roots climb and spread through mud-coloured clouds, and their sparse, pale-green, diseased canopies are pressed to the barren 64ground. The young man wears a giant, hand-me-down coat, and his trousers are too short, revealing pale, needle-thin ankles. His white yarmulke covers unruly black hair – the hair of a young rebel. The young woman wears a billowy rose-coloured dress with golden bells at its hem. She has a beaky nose and is balanced on one slender leg, so that she seems part flamingo or egret. The couple stands in the angular shadow of their chuppah, the ceremonial canopy used in Jewish marriage ceremonies. At the left of the painting, obscured by the woods, are the turrets and garlic-bulb towers of Warsaw.

Here is the revelation that I had while peering at the disquieted couple: they and their city are about to be overcome – strangled, in fact – by the upside-down trees. They will be killed by something that makes no logical sense – that seems impossible – just as Shelly’s parents and little sister, Esther, were murdered by a machinery of death that had once seemed beyond belief.

But I wasn’t about to let that happen – not in Montreal in 1977. At least, not in my own mind. In the daring escape I scripted for the bride and groom, they raced through the murderous woodlands, hid aboard a night-time train for Gdansk and stowed-away on a ship to New York.

I decided that George’s painting was about the need to flee at the right moment. And about believing that the unthinkable can happen at any time.

I also realised that he had painted for those of us who would see it in the future, to tell us: You must work to make sure that all those who are being persecuted find safety.

After I pressed my hand to the bride and groom – to thank them for making me understand – I tiptoed back down the stairs, wishing to see how silent I could become. In the kitchen, I grabbed a bottle of Portuguese red wine from our pantry. Shelly had bought a case the previous week.65

‘If only Rosa were here to drink a bissel of wine with us,’ he’d told me after he showed me the label, which indicated that it had been made in the Douro region, upriver from Porto. He said that because he could trace his ancestry through his great-grandmother to Lisbon. Shelly’s last name was Zarco, and back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Zarcos had been manuscript illuminators and mystics.

Diane called me to the dining table and handed me a bowl of lentil soup. I ate it without looking up because I couldn’t face my daughters’ expectations. Margot then served the salad. The girls must’ve found the silence oppressive; Diane jumped up and showed us how her father had imitated a rabbit while playing charades – when she was a teenager, she said. It was while she was hopping around the dining table that I decided that my best option would be to go to my bedroom and bury my head in Shelly’s pillow so that I’d always remember the earthy scent of him.

Yet I didn’t leave; the girls might regard my absence as a betrayal of their needs and I was not up to having a quarrel.

Diane nibbling a make-believe carrot and rubbing her nose with her paw … Her gestures seemed all wrong, like the upside-down trees in George’s painting. But such determination lit her long-lashed brown eyes that I didn’t ask her to stop. It was as if she were fighting on the front line of a war.

How is it that our children inherit our worst traumas, even when we do everything we can to raise them as confident and happy?

‘Dad looked just like that!’ Diane exclaimed to me and Margot, and she laughed too loudly. My own attempt to giggle sounded so false that it made me cringe.

I poured myself a second glass of wine, hoping for its deep-red amnesia to overwhelm me. A little while later, I started shivering, and it was then that I realised why Diane’s imitation of Shelly 66imitating a rabbit seemed so inappropriate to me; it was an elegy she ought to have given her father only after his death.

Margot noticed my trembling.

‘Mom, are you cold?’ she asked, as if it weren’t obvious.

‘I’ve fallen into a snowbank in my mind,’ I replied. It was a line of Shelly’s, though he used it to mean that he was at a loss for words.

Shelly loved the word snowbank in English. He said it sounded noble to him.

Grapefruit, loaf, roundabout, broomstick, knapsack … Shelly kept a list of his favourite English words in the notebook where he wrote down memories of his life in Warsaw and Algiers.

Sophie, Carole, Robert, Denis, Rosalie, Sharif 1, Sharif 2 … The back page of the notebook lists his lovers in Algiers. It used to always fill me with envy. My goodness, what would it have been like to have the freedom of a man when I was twenty years old!

Margot fetched the shawl my mom had knitted for me when I graduated from high school and draped it across my shoulders, and because of that, everything we said to each other that evening now seems filtered by the warmth and weight of old black wool.

I picked around the lettuce and spinach with my fork but managed to eat the cherry tomatoes. Shelly’s absence seemed like a rope around my neck, tugging me toward hopelessness. At some point, my eyes settled on the portrait of him hanging over the fireplace. George had done it in oil pastel, and the romantic glow in his emerald eyes – and the generous spread of his arms – reminded me of all the magical evenings that George, me and Shelly had spent together in the Utah desert, when my husband and I were young and didn’t yet know about how quickly a stroke could change everything …

Margot stirred me from my trance by asking if I wanted more tomatoes – and just like that a scream was again embedded in my 67chest. We should never have moved to the fucking suburbs! That was what I would have shouted if I could have.

Isn’t it odd how a panicked mind will seek out a circumstance of life that is of little importance and ascribe cataclysmic meaning to it?

Would I have managed my frustrations and fears more successfully if we’d stayed in the city?

‘Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur,’ Diane said as if it were an announcement.

‘I don’t understand,’ I told her.

‘That was the name of the movie that Dad tried to communicate to us – when we were playing charades, I mean.’

She told me that he’d imitated a lapin – a rabbit – in the hopes of giving her Lupin.

‘So we were playing in French?’ I asked.

Margot reached for my hand. In a worried tone, she said, ‘Dad preferred French to English when we played. It gave him an advantage. Don’t you remember?’

‘Of course, I remember,’ I replied in a resentful tone. But I didn’t; I was convinced, in fact, that Shelly had insisted that we play more often in English so that our daughters could show off.

Was it possible that we devoted so many evenings to charades because it was Shelly’s way of telling us that we would have to guess things about him that he could never openly reveal?

To take my daughters’ inquisitive looks from me, I asked Diane how long ago we’d played the game of charades in which her father had imitated a rabbit. She leaned her head back just like Shelly does when he’s working out a puzzle in his head and told me she’d probably been eleven years old.

‘So I was fourteen,’ said Margot, and she shook her head as if it were an impossibly long time ago.68

‘So I was thirty-seven,’ I added. For no reason I could think of, I also said, ‘I must have just started working again as a nurse.’

Only when Diane told us that she had lifted up her cousin Tom onto her lap did I remember that he had been with us as well. He was just four at the time and he was on Shelly’s team.

‘I need Tommy on my team,’ he’d announced, grabbing the little boy’s hand, and when I asked why, he said he had to have another man with him, which was just like Shelly, since he always grumbled that he was outnumbered by the women in his life.

The truth was very different, of course. In the company of an attractive woman, Shelly’s eyes would light up and his hands would begin to shake. He was like some wild beast out of the Old Testament – sniffing at the air, making ready to pounce. Though to be fair, his interest wasn’t uniquely sexual; he also adored gossiping with my fussy, French-speaking, lavender-scented aunts, for instance. He’d ask them about their best recipes for tarts and cobblers, and his sweet-natured, insistent eagerness – peering over their shoulders while they were baking – was enough to convince them that he was the most charming man in the world. He never seemed to trust men, however, especially the salesmen he dealt with at work. Though his cousin Benni and Benni’s son, Ethan, were exceptions; those two could do no wrong. And George, too. To Shelly, George would always be the man who had saved him from a spare, lonely, pointless life.

Benni and Shelly … When they were talking together in Yiddish, imitating their nutty relatives back in Poland, giggling mischievously, they became the stars of their own black-and-white comedy – one that they’d started filming in Warsaw before the war.

When anyone asked my husband about his parents and the rest of his family, he would say, ‘Everyone died in the camps except my cousin Benni, and he’s of the thirty-six righteous men who keep God from destroying this meshugge world of ours.’69

Deference always deepened his voice when he spoke of Benni to people who’d never met him.

In Jewish lore, the Lamed Vav Tzadikim – the Thirty-Six Righteous Ones – are chosen by the Almighty to sustain both the physical universe and the world of spirit. By fighting for what is virtuous and beautiful in their daily lives, without any thought of earthly or heavenly reward – and without calling attention to their works – they guarantee the continuation of Creation. They never speak of their crucial role, and it’s not even clear that they know how important they are.

Benni’s son, Ethan, once told me that his father was a mystical clown, and I think that’s true. Maybe that’s characteristic of some of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim.

Even if other people didn’t grasp the depth of Shelly’s esteem for Benni, I did. And I am convinced that Shelly would have taken his own life if his cousin hadn’t survived the war. If for no other reason than to complete the family tragedy. Yes, my husband regards his own life – and probably mine too – with that sort of theatrical breadth and scope. In fact, it’s one of the things that I find so exceptional and courageous about him.

He never told me that he ever considered suicide, but I saw it in his self-incrimination and manic despair when, early in our marriage, Benni had to be rushed to New York University Hospital with a burst appendix. Even after his cousin recovered, Shelly suffered terrible insomnia for weeks afterward. He told me, ‘The thought of never being able to hug Benni again or hear his voice … Jules, I just couldn’t go on.’

Once, shortly after our first vacation in New York with Benni, I dreamed of a wicked old Pulcinella with long, crusted fingernails and cruel yellow eyes pushing my husband from the roof of a wooden synagogue covered in snow, and when he slipped off the 70eave, he became a little boy, and he began falling through darkness. I don’t know how, but I found myself falling next to him, and I thought we’d never reach the bottom, but Benni caught us as if we weighed nothing – one in each arm – and he giggled at our astonishment.

In the dream, snow was falling over us – cold but invigorating. Those tens of thousands of white flakes – that resplendent and ordered whiteness – seemed to have a grand purpose, to be summoning us toward a realisation, and it seemed to be: No matter what happened in our past, we have a chance to start over. On waking, that wondrous feeling made me start to cry.

When I told the dream to Benni, he shrugged and said that it was all backwards, since Shelly had saved him. Then, a couple of months later, he called me early one Saturday and said, ‘Listen, Jules, I’ve been thinking about that dream of yours, of Shelly falling, and I think that it was his grief that was nearly bottomless. But after he and George found me, I became a kind of bottom. I was the ground that kept him from falling further.’

‘And the Pulcinella with the crusty fingernails?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’m afraid the world played an evil trick on us, didn’t it?’ he replied.

After that phone call in which he interpreted my dream, Benni became my confidant, though it took me a few more years to realise that. He helped me survive Shelly’s betrayals by letting me rant on about my humiliation and anger in our phone conversations. And by making me laugh.

Once, after Shelly had disappeared for a weekend, Benni said, ‘It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s him – he has always had way too many hormones.’ And he told me an old Yiddish joke to explain:

A ten-year-old boy is bathing and his mom comes in, and he lifts his pee-pee out of the soapy water and says, ‘Mom, is this my brain?’ 71

‘No, sweetie,’ she says with a put-upon sigh, ‘not yet.’

Benni sometimes made me laugh until I cried. Maybe it was because I always see his wish to please me in his sharp, black, little-boy eyes … Even today, all these years after first meeting him, when I catch his glance, the effect of his seeing me and not turning away goes straight to the deepest part of me.

That power to reach down into my unseen life and hold me motionless is something the two cousins have in common. Perhaps their Zarco heritage has given them that gift.

Margot and Diane drew me out of my daydreams of Shelly and Benni when they started pestering me to take more salad or have some fruit. I told them I’d already eaten more than I’d wanted to and – to divert their attention – asked them tell me more about our long-ago game of charades.

Diane said she’d guessed lapin right away. Shelly had swooped her up into his arms and given her what we call his boa-constrictor hug, though she remembered that he was unable to convey to her and Tom the film’s full title and they had been forced to give up in the end. She said, ‘How could anyone expect us to guess the word gentleman in English when the rest of the title was in French?’

She pretended to be outraged by the injustice until I said – as was expected of me – ‘Well, you know as well as I do, your father loved to play games with you two girls. You two were the only people on earth he didn’t mind losing to.’

One thing I’ve noticed over the years: Margot’s complaints to her father are nearly always a form of jousting – a way for the girl to safely test her limits – while Diane’s are born of true anger.

Now, Diane wrinkled her nose in that fussy way that she has had since she was a baby and said, ‘Dad smelled of rum when he gave me his boa-constrictor hug.’

She sounded resentful, but I realised a few minutes later that 72maybe she only meant to imply to me that we were playing on a Friday evening; Shelly drank a big, icy piña colada during our Sabbath dinner and never touched anything but wine during the rest of the week. It also occurred to me that Diane may have inherited her father’s oversensitivity to smells, though Shelly always claimed that he never paid any attention to the deeper meaning of scents until he began to make his way through Polish woodlands and farms to Kraków, walking always at night, often just one step ahead of his German pursuers.

On our first date, Shelly gripped my hand tightly and said, ‘Those bastards could track me as silently as they wanted, but I still smelled their tobacco and their food. And I learned to trust the crows and pigeons and sparrows. They’d fly off at the first sign of Germans. I’m telling you, Julie, Polish birds hate Nazis as much as I do!’

2

I saw Shelly for the first time when I walked into his shop, Cagney’s Sporting Goods, to pick up the sneakers my little brother had ordered a week earlier. It was the spring of 1952. I was nineteen years old, and I’d been walking around heartbroken that my beloved Montreal Canadiens had lost the Stanley Cup Finals for the second straight year.

Imagine being so youthful and innocent that your biggest problem is a hockey puck that ends up in the wrong goal too often!

Shelly was standing at the counter, writing a receipt, and when he looked up at me, he squinted from the smoke curling up from his cigarette, and his handsome, menacing eyes told me exactly what he wanted.

His short black hair was slicked back, and he’d let the whiskers 73on his cheeks and chin grow for a couple of days. He wore a snazzy grey suit and his vest was white silk. He looked like he’d stepped out of Guys and Dolls, which my parents and I had seen on Broadway about a year earlier.

I named him Guido in my mind. I still call him it on occasion. It never fails to make him grin like a devil.

On the wall behind him – inside a gold frame – was a signed picture of James Cagney dancing down a long staircase. On our first date, Shelly told me that he’d named his store after him. He said, ‘An Irish-American movie star who can dance like an angel and speak Yiddish like a pickle peddler – now that’s a mensch!’

I pretended I was studying the women’s sneakers in the window so I could glance back at him without being noticed. He was telling an old woman with a knot of white hair atop her head what she should buy her grandson for a present. They were speaking French, which I understood quite well because my mother was French Canadian, though I spoke it only when I was forced to, because my accent was appalling. Listening to his patient voice, I felt as if a clock inside me had finally stopped ticking. And I was such an inexperienced and optimistic young woman that it seemed inevitable to me that sooner or later I’d find my Guido.

I must have not only seen too many hockey games but also read too many private eye novels, because I longed for a tough-guy lover who would take my virginity and use me any way he wanted – a handsome, no-nonsense sexual professor, of sorts. Now, more than two decades later, I can finally admit that that was what I wanted without any embarrassment – proof, I suppose, that becoming middle-aged can be liberating for timid souls like me.

Shelly was only thirty-two years old, but he looked like he had done everything with a woman that a private detective posing as the owner of a sporting goods store could ever hope to do.74

I handed him the receipt for my brother’s sneakers and spoke to him in the best French I could muster, but he answered in English. His accent wasn’t Quebecois. He told me he’d lived in Algiers during the war but had been born in Warsaw.

After he came back from the storeroom with a shoebox containing the sneakers, he walked me to the door and said that he hoped he would see me again because he’d have a really nice surprise for me next time I visited him.

‘I think I know what your belle surprise is,’ I told him, trying to imitate Lauren Bacall’s husky, knowing voice.

‘Do you really?’ he asked with a sly laugh.

He came outside with me. He grinned because he understood he’d enchanted me. I turned and headed down the street toward home, feeling his dark stare on me, hoping my trembling legs wouldn’t buckle.

3

Our first date was at Enrico’s, a Sicilian restaurant and bar owned by an elderly couple who were always snapping at each other. It was the only place in town where he could eat his beloved arancini, fried rice balls stuffed with peas and tomato sauce.

My heart started pounding the moment he waved to me from his booth. I’ve always suffered from low blood pressure and thought I might pass out as I walked to him. He stood up to greet me. He held his hat in his hand – a black trilby with a silver band. He asked me to sit next to him. ‘We’ll be cosier that way,’ he said while standing up to let me slip past him.

I have no idea what we talked about over our first few minutes together. All I can recall is Shelly pouring me too big a glass of red wine, and when I protested, taking my hand and kissing it. With a 75confident smile, he told me then it was time for my belle surprise and moved my hand below the table and pressed it into something hard and warm, and it took me a moment to realise he’d taken his cock out of his pants.

I pulled my hand back as if I’d been burned, which made him grin.

‘I know I’m vulgar,’ he said in an apologetic tone. ‘But I want you to see how hard you make me. Are you angry?’

I shook my head; my thoughts were turning somersaults.

He summoned the waiter and asked me what I wanted for an appetiser. ‘Just … a bit of water,’ I croaked.

‘For an appetiser?’ Shelly asked, laughing generously.

I nodded. After he ordered us a big bottle of mineral water, he chose two appetisers – Sicilian sausages and grilled octopus.

The big black flashlight Mom kept in our broom closet … I thought of the perfect way it always fit in my hand as I wrapped my curious fingers around Shelly’s cock again.

Where had I found the courage to do that? It seemed as if I’d become someone else.

Shelly closed his eyes and bit his lip as I squeezed him. When I eased off, he sighed as though he’d been through a battle and said, ‘Mon Dieu, I can see that my life is in danger.’

He had us toast my brother’s sneakers, since they had brought us together. Then he flinched and said, ‘Oh, shit, I hope you’re not kosher! Or vegetarian! I ordered all that tref.’

‘No, it’s okay, I’m not Jewish and I eat meat,’ I replied.

‘Maybe you feel that I am,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Jewish, I mean.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He leaned close to me. ‘I’m circumcised,’ he whispered.

‘Right,’ I said, as if I knew what he was talking about; his was the first erect cock I’d ever touched.76

Shelly told me that night that he’d wanted me to know he was Jewish right away because he’d discovered that many French Canadians believed all the worst stereotypes about Jews. When he asked about my background, I explained that my dad was an English Quaker and professor of genetics, and my mom a French-speaking Catholic and history teacher. ‘But she thinks all religions are pretty much rubbish,’ I added.

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘Me, I think I’m an atheist – and I’m studying to be a nurse.’

His eyes brightened. ‘I lucked out – a nursing student who doesn’t believe in God!’

‘So that’s a good thing?’ I asked with a laugh.

‘Well, it’s always very good when a woman knows her own anatomy,’ he said. ‘Makes finding things for her boyfriend much easier.’ He leaned toward me and whispered confidentially, ‘And it’s good that you won’t be worrying about what God might think of you when you climb on top of ma belle surprise.’

At that, I risked squeezing his cock again, which made him close his eyes and take a hesitant, tormented breath. I felt as if I’d chanced upon some very powerful magic.

As our appetisers arrived, he lifted my hand off of him gently and gave each of my fingers a little kiss. ‘Let’s eat, kiddo,’ he said, and he wiggled around a bit while inserting his cock back in his pants.

He forked octopus and pieces of sausage into my mouth. I thought about telling him to stop, since I didn’t want to appear helpless, but I’d already drunk half my red wine and couldn’t come up with a single good reason why I wouldn’t want a handsome and charming man with a large penis to feed me tasty Sicilian appetisers for the rest of my life.

After our pasta was served, we got onto the subject of Poland, and he told me how he used to hang out with the actors at the 77Yiddish theatres. ‘I wanted to go on stage,’ he said. ‘I wanted to make people laugh and cry. I wanted to take long bows in front of cheering audiences. I was such a dummkopf!’

During that first meal together, he told me that all of nature was on the side of the Jews in the war – every bird and tree and stream – and yet his whole family except for his cousin Benni had been wiped out. He spoke of his past with a kind of lopsided, ironic smile that made me uncomfortable. Later, when I met Benni, I realised that he and Shelly hid behind nearly the same counterfeit grin when they talked about all they’d lost.

I was too jittery to eat more than a few mouthfuls of my linguini with clam sauce, so Shelly insisted I take it home to my parents in a doggy bag.

As he encouraged me out the door of Enrico’s, he patted my behind. A minute later, when we kissed under the awning of a nearby stationery shop, he held me tightly and told me I was extraordinarily beautiful. I eased my head against his chest so I could catch my breath, and when he placed a delicate kiss on my brow, I felt a knot coming undone inside me, and I was pretty sure that now that it was open, I’d never get it tied again.

4

How much of our destiny – both good and bad – is determined by our physical appearance? It’s a question that most women married to handsome men must ask themselves on occasion – though, if they’re anything like me, they already know the answer before they ask it.

To catch my husband’s eye, women in restaurants would cross their legs suggestively or fiddle with the fabric of their blouse or take their lipstick and hand mirror out of their bag. Back in the 781950s, when nearly every adult in Montreal seemed to smoke, youthful femme fatales would ask him for a light right in front of me. And although almost nobody was out of the closet back then, I’d notice guys giving Shelly suggestive glances whenever we’d eat souvlaki at Apollo’s, which was on St Catherine Street and close to a few of the gay clubs.

Just before I moved into his apartment, Shelly told me – when he was a little bit drunk and in one of his playful moods – that he’d slept with a number of Arab men in Algiers, in part because their women were unavailable and he didn’t like going to prostitutes.

‘How many is a number?’ I’d asked.

‘I don’t know, maybe thirty,’ he told me, adding as an afterthought – to set the record straight, it seemed – ‘Though, of course, that number does not include mes petits amis français.’ When he noticed my stunned expression, he shrugged as if his adventures in North Africa were just a boyish lark and said, ‘It would have been a crime to turn down all those lonely young men!’

Was he just kidding? It seemed likely, because I thought that homosexual men were rare and invariably effeminate. And it had never occurred to me that anyone could be bisexual. When he assured me he was serious, however, I decided that he was exaggerating, that he might have slept with a couple of men over the years – to avoid having to pay prostitutes, like he’d said – but that he was trying to shock me. Or test me. Maybe he’d wanted to see if I’d be horrified.

Later, I came to believe that back in the ghetto he’d vowed that if he ever survived the war, he would find love anywhere and anyhow it came to him. Also, I figured out that sex had taken on a life-affirming – and mystical – significance for him. Once, while we were driving to Toronto for a weekend, to visit his old friend George, he told me that for many years, he thought that l’infinie 79beauté de risquer la fusion avec un inconnu – the infinite beauty of risking union with a stranger – was just about the only blessing of God he could find in our world. Such poetic directness was unusual for Shelly, however – mostly he claimed that he simply had no willpower when it came to a good-looking woman or man.

After I’d managed to incorporate Shelly’s unabashed bisexuality into my internal image of him, it made him seem even more worldly and adventurous to me – and more powerfully masculine, too. I was too embarrassed to reveal my fantasies to him at the time, but I was sure that he would have been tickled to learn they included a host of equally bisexual, tough-talking French stevedores and Arab sheiks who couldn’t get enough of me.

The only person I told about Shelly’s fondness for both men and women was my father, who was close friends with the only out-of-the-closet gay man I’d ever met, a theatrical director from Toronto named Martin Jay. After I’d revealed exactly what Shelly had told me, the only question that my father asked was, ‘But does he love you, and do you love him?’

The answer was yes in both cases.

And yet, over the next few months, when Shelly began disappearing for a day or two at a time, I began to doubt that what we had together was love. At first, I believed what Shelly told me – that he was going fishing or hiking with his buddies – but I learned the truth when I cornered Benni on one of his frequent visits to Montreal and demanded that he tell me what was going on with his cousin.

To his credit, Benni didn’t try to lie to me. And when I confronted Shelly, he didn’t either. At the time, we were spending most of our evenings together, though I still slept every night in my old bedroom in my parents’ apartment.

I began to weep when he confessed that he occasionally slept with someone else.80

‘Men or women?’ I asked.

‘Both,’ he said. ‘I know I should have more willpower – I wish I did – but I don’t.’

I pushed him away when he tried to embrace me. He said, ‘Listen, Jules, I know it’s hard for you, but there are times when I’ve just got to be with someone. I start thinking I’m going to die if I don’t have sex right away, and if you’re not there, then what am I supposed to do?’

‘If you really loved me, you’d never want anyone else!’ I told him harshly.

‘I love you something crazy. Even just holding your hand is exciting! And whenever we kiss, it feels like I’ve come home after being away for far too long. But it’s not in my nature to be with one person. This big need just grabs me and … and I can’t stop.’

‘Nature? You have no fucking nature!’ I shrieked, and I ran out of his apartment and didn’t come back for two days. When I did, he rushed to me as I opened the door and threw his arms around me. He began to sob so hard that he shook. In a quavering voice, he said, ‘I was sure I’d lost you forever.’

When I told him I still loved him, Shelly kissed my hands and face as if we’d been a winter apart. A little later, while I was in the bathroom washing my tearful face, he kneeled down and asked me to marry him.

 

After we were wed, Shelly still craved his sexual adventures, but he also didn’t want to lie to me, so he started pleading with me to join him in threesomes on occasion. I suspected that amorous triangles weren’t going to work for me, but I regarded his effort to include me as honourable, and I was too young and inexperienced to simply say no. Our first escapade was with a sweet-natured young waitress who worked at the Sheraton Hotel downtown, 81but when Shelly buried his head between her legs and she started moaning, I turned to ice. A few weeks later, we decided to see if I wouldn’t be more comfortable with a second man, and Shelly invited a buddy of his named Gilles to spend an evening with us. He was a muscular little carpenter and amateur hockey referee with salt-and-pepper hair. My heart started banging against my ribs when Shelly took his cock down his throat, but after my husband had swallowed all that Gilles could give him, our guest came to me and started kissing my nipples, and Shelly was watching me with rapt eyes, and I felt like a monkey in a zoo, and I had to make a quick exit from our bedroom to keep from getting sick.

My husband rushed out after me and said he hoped I wasn’t upset or angry at him. I gave him a quick kiss and said, ‘I’m sorry, I guess I’m just no good in groups.’

‘Hey, nobody’s perfect!’ he shot back, which irritated me at the time, but in years since it has often made me laugh with greater and greater admiration for Shelly’s unstoppable delight in sex.

 

Shortly after Shelly and I were married, I missed my period, though I didn’t become certain I was pregnant until few weeks later. When I told him, he danced me around our kitchen as if he were his beloved Jimmy Cagney. And he made love to me insatiably – at all hours of the day and night – right up until I went into labour, nearly seven months later.

My being pregnant turned him on like nothing had before; he’d push me on my side and curl up behind me and caress my gigantic belly and in a few seconds – bang! like birds mating – it was over.

We used to laugh about how quick a trigger he’d developed.

‘I can’t help it – I love you so much,’ he used to tell me, and his 82eyes – endlessly tender – convinced me I’d never heard anyone say anything so true.

The relief in me was like flying, I told Benni, since I could see a clear and tranquil landscape spreading before me and seeming to go on forever.

While I was pregnant, Shelly came home after work every evening, and he didn’t even glance at anyone else when we were out at one of our neighbourhood restaurants. He couldn’t pass by me without giving me a kiss, and every time he helped me out of bed in the morning, he’d caress his hand over my belly, needing to know the exact shape of me and the baby. Once, he told me, ‘I’m only completely at ease with two people in the entire world – you and Benni. Christ, even the smell of you … it goes straight to my heart.’

When Shelly discovered that I craved Italian food, he learned how to make pasta with all sorts of homemade sauces, and my favourite dish soon became what we called Shelly’s Leeky Pasta – Portobello mushrooms, peas and leeks over fettuccini.

Shelly also brought me breakfast in bed when I was too lazy to get up. Benni pitched in too, and made me two stunning maternity dresses out of vibrantly coloured cotton prints from India, with extra fabric at the seams so that Shelly – who had learned how to sew when he was a kid – could let them out every couple of weeks. I started to think that there was nothing those two couldn’t do together. The Warsaw Wizards, I began to call them.

I also realised that Shelly and I had started a new journey together the moment I got pregnant. And I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to do more than have children with him.

Shortly after I gave birth to Margot, he confided in me that he had promised himself while dashing frantically through a Polish forest at night – just a mile or so ahead of the Germans who were hunting him – that he would have at least two children.83

‘If I survived, I’d do my part to keep the Jews from perishing from the face of the earth,’ he told me in a tense, hushed voice, as if his Nazi pursuers might still hear us.

After Margot was born, Shelly proved himself a playful and attentive father, as well. Then, three years later, Diane came along, and neither of the girls could get enough of him. What he loved most was reading to them. He’d sit with his legs crossed on our bed and impersonate all the different characters in Charlotte’s Web and the Dr Dolittle books.

Shelly as Charlotte, spinning her web up the wall and down the dresser and across the Persian rug in our bedroom … Margot’s jaw would drop open as her father spider-walked around the room, and Diane would talk to him in her tiny voice as if he really were Charlotte.

‘How do I know you won’t bite me?’ she asked him once.

‘You don’t!’ he growled, and he attacked her arms and neck while she shrieked with delight.

Benni always told me that if the Nazis hadn’t occupied Poland, his cousin would have become an acclaimed actor, but I only began to believe him after the girls were born. Though perhaps all his monumental, wild-hearted gestures – his eccentric passion – might only have worked on stage and not on film.

And yet, I can see now that the girls required far more than their father’s playfulness. They needed him to tell where he’d grown up in Warsaw, and what his school had been like, and who his friends had been, and what their beloved Uncle Benni had been like when he was a kid. But most of all, I think, they needed to know how their brave and handsome dad had outwitted the Nazis and come to live in Montreal. But Shelly never invited them into his past. And so – perhaps without intending to – he turned all that happened before his coming to Canada 84into an unmentionable secret. And a dangerous one, too. That become clear when Margot was in eighth grade. Over dinner one evening, she gathered up her courage and told her father that her history class was studying the Holocaust, and her teacher – Mr Muller – wanted him to come and talk to the students about his experiences.

I’d just served the girls their spaghetti and meatballs, and Shelly was holding out his plate for his portion. His face turned pale, and his lips drew together into an angry slit, and I was certain he was going to explode at Margot, but instead he put down his plate and stood up and walked to our bedroom. And he didn’t come out until the morning.

Margot blamed herself, of course, and she sobbed in my arms.

In such ways, our daughters learned never to question their father about his life in Poland, and though I told them what I knew, their impatience with me made me realise that it wasn’t just the names of their grandparents and other details that they needed, but their father’s confidence in them. He doesn’t trust us with his deepest self. That’s what they grew up thinking, even if they couldn’t have put it into words until they were much older.

 

Around the time Diane started kindergarten, Shelly’s need for sexual experiences outside our bedroom returned, and my bouts of rage and resentment – and our quarrels – would send me on long, sulking walks. Once, I grew so angry at him that I threw my Montreal Canadiens mug at his head, and I would’ve been glad to have knocked him out, but I missed.

Of course, I occasionally had the chance to sleep with another man, and early on in our marriage, before I got pregnant a second time, a number of good-looking physicians made their interest in me explicit. But the guilt churning in my gut when I permitted one 85of them to give me a kiss in his office made it clear that infidelity was never going to be an option.

Thankfully, my daughters became a deep source of comfort to me, and Benni – bless him – always listened to my complaints about Shelly without passing judgment on me or my marriage.

And then, a last affront made me realise how ashamed of him I was – and that I had reached a limit. When the girls were seven and ten, he came home one night pretty smashed, and I could smell another woman’s perfume on him. After he undressed, he collapsed on our bed and fell fast asleep. Him lying there, oblivious to the world and indifferent to my feelings seemed so insulting that I began to tremble with rage and frustration. And I felt dirty, too – as if soiled by our life together. I grabbed my pillow and moved to the couch, and the next morning, before he woke up, I dressed Margot and Diane and drove off to my parents’ house in Toronto. I phoned Shelly late that night and told him we weren’t coming back, and I could tell from his choking voice – while he pleaded for me to come home – that he was in dire despair.

After I refused to return to Montreal, he asked me to permit him see me in Toronto, and he flew in early the next morning. When he arrived at my parents’ house, he looked as if he hadn’t slept. My mom took the girls outside, and Shelly and I sat opposite each other in the living room, amid Dad’s piles of books and records, and he started to tell me why he’d come home drunk, but I told him I didn’t need or want any more explanations for his behaviour, because I could no longer share him with anyone else. ‘Not ever,’ I told him. ‘And under no circumstances.’

‘So you haven’t … haven’t fallen out of love with me?’ he asked timidly.

‘No, but I see clearly now that if this goes on, I will. And I can’t permit that to happen.’86

I think he understood at that moment what our marriage required of him, and he gave me his word that he’d never again have sex with anyone else.

Did he live up to his vow? I could never be entirely sure. But I grew convinced that he fought as hard as he could against his mad urges and never came home again with anyone else’s scent on him.

I’ll say this for Shelly – even at our worst times, he never blamed me for our difficulties or tried to undermine my confidence. Quite the contrary – when I wasn’t sure if I should resume my nursing career after so many years away from work, he called in some favours and got me a job in the Obstetrics ward at the McGill Health Centre.

 

When Margot was in her last year of high school and we felt comfortable leaving her in the care of her sister for a few days, Shelly and I would fly to New York once every few weeks to visit Benni and his wife, Tessa, over a weekend. On one of those stays, we found ourselves alone in an elevator at Macy’s, and he brought my hands to his lips and kissed them and started to cry. ‘I hate it that I used to make you unhappy,’ he said. ‘And that I lied to you sometimes. I’m sorry – more sorry than you can ever imagine.’

‘It’s all right,’ I told him, trying to sound casual, but his confession – and the scent of distress on him – moved me deeply. While we were hugging, he said that he was looking forward to another twenty-five years of trying to figure out why a woman as intelligent as me had fallen for a nudnik like him, and we laughed with the easy complicity of old friends, and a moment later, I discovered that I could no longer find any residual anger at him inside me.

As he dried his eyes with his thumbs, Shelly said, ‘You know, the most exciting thing that ever happened to me was you walking into my shop.’87

That stunned me because I was sure that the pivotal moment around which his entire life had turned was finding Benni after the war, and when I said so, he replied, ‘Maybe that’s true, but things with Benni are different.’

‘Why are they different?’

The doors opened on the housewares floor, and we stepped together out into all that glaring light. After a reflective pause, he said, ‘I already knew Benni and loved him. And at some level … It’s like Benni and I are the same person. So finding him sometimes seems like it was another way of finding myself.’

‘And with me?’

Shelly wrinkled his nose like he does when he’s thinking hard. ‘With you, it was like I’d been swimming in the sea for twenty years, really far from shore, and it was exhausting,’ he said. ‘And now I could come back to land and finally rest – and be with you.’

Shelly also told me on another of our trips to New York – with such good humour that it didn’t seem vulgar – that my pussy was the absolute greatest thing since the invention of writing. And a few months later, while we were making love inside our freezing tent in Algonquin Provincial Park, he told me that he could imagine fighting to the death over me. ‘Christ, Jules, your ass alone could start World War Three!’

Shelly made me laugh till I cried when he said such things in that overly serious way of his – as if fucking was a form of philosophy. Once, when Benni and I were discussing my husband’s successes with young men and women in North Africa, I told him what Shelly had said about me and the invention of writing. By then, we’d both had a couple glasses of wine, and I expected to set him shaking with merry laughter, but instead his eyes grew glassy and he began to sniffle.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.88

‘It’s just that Shelly has so much good in him … such a big desire to express his love through his body that he can’t contain it. That’s why he says those things to you – things no other really good man would say in a million years. You know, Jules, sometimes I think he’s the one who’s a member of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim.’

‘Oh, Benni, you can’t be serious!’ I said as if it were impossible.

‘Why not? After all, if sex and love don’t sustain the universe, then what the hell does?’

While considering that possibility, I examined my highs and lows with Shelly from a different angle. Maybe having an oversexed husband – one who got hard every time he saw me in the shower or even just pictured my breasts – was wonderfully good fortune.

Our daughters understood without my ever mentioning it that they’d been born to a Jewish Don Juan – which was one of the reasons they’d laughed so hard when he hopped across our living room while imitating a rabbit. That’s another thing I’ll give Shelly – despite his good looks, he wasn’t fussy about his appearance and never worried about looking silly on occasion.

5

I mention all this about our sexual escapades and difficulties because of the nagging problem that Shelly’s stroke would soon cause him, though at first we were both simply overjoyed that he was still alive, of course.

‘I never thought I’d make it here again,’ he whispered to me when my daughters and I finally got him home from the hospital.

Once he’d sobbed with relief on the sofa in our living room, he grew ravenous. ‘That hospital food wasn’t fit for a dog!’ he growled.

I’d made stuffed zucchini for lunch because it was his favourite 89meal, but he wanted to go out to Schwartz’s Deli. In a pleading, little-boy tone, he said, ‘I need to be somewhere that’s full of life. Please, Jules, we’ll have your zucchini for dinner.’

He was as frail as a kitten, and his left side had been weakened by the stroke, so he leaned on me as we walked to my car. It turned out that he’d been craving cheesecake, so he ate two gigantic pieces with a cup of coffee.

Marianne, his store manager, came by just before supper and assured us that there was no reason for him to rush back to work – sales were brisk, in fact. To celebrate the good news, we invited her to stay, and we polished off a bottle of Portuguese red wine along with my zucchini.

The next day, the doorbell rang in the late afternoon and I opened the door to find Benni and Teresa standing on the stoop. Benni held a big pink box tied around with twine. He’d come up to see Shelly in the hospital and stayed in our guestroom for two days, so I didn’t expect him to return so soon.

‘How’s Shel?’ he asked even before we kissed.

‘He’s good,’ I said. ‘You’ll see.’

After Teresa and I hugged, I led them both into the kitchen, where Shelly was sitting in the spring sun cutting in through the open windows. When my husband saw his cousin, he started to quake and fought to stand up.

‘Just stay where you are!’ Benni called out, and he kneeled next to Shelly.

After they’d kissed and cried, Shelly opened the big pink box and discovered a shimmering chocolate mandelbrot. ‘Mein Gott, it’s absolutely gorgeous!’ he said in a reverent voice, and he cut off such a big piece with the knife I handed him that I thought he’d share it with Benni or Teresa, but I was wrong.

Shelly snorted when I told him he was being rude and said, 90‘Just give them plates, and take one for yourself, and try not to interrupt me when I’m eating!’

Everything was easy over the three days that the four of us had together, and we made one another laugh all the time, and often too wildly, like people who’d been through hell. I was sure that everything was about to return to normal and that I could go back to work, but then – just after Benni and Teresa returned to New York – Shelly stopped getting dressed and shaving. He watched old movies on the small television in our bedroom and started re-reading the Willa Cather novels George had sent him years before. He lost his appetite, too; he wouldn’t even eat the poppy seed hamantaschen I made him.

‘It’s weird, kiddo – I’m tired all the time,’ he told me.

‘It’s not weird,’ I told him. ‘You had a stroke.’

But it wasn’t his fatigue that was truly preoccupying him. I found that out the next Saturday afternoon when I overhead him talking to Benni on the phone, and though he spoke mostly in Yiddish, at one point he yelled in English, ‘Yeah, my putz is dead! Kaput! We’ll pay a rabbi to say kaddish for it when you visit.’

To whatever Benni replied, Shelly snapped something that had to do with his cousin being a dummkopf and crashed the receiver down.

After he was asleep that night, I crawled under the covers and took him in my mouth.

‘Hey, what d’ya think you’re doing down there?’ he snarled, and he tapped me on my head.

‘Getting you hard,’ I replied.

‘Christ, not now, baby. I’m exhausted.’

I sat up and turned on the light. In a gentle tone, I said, ‘Listen, Shelly, maybe you need to talk to someone.’

He blocked out the glare of the lamp with his hand. ‘About what?’ he asked in a falsely innocent voice.91

‘About your cock,’ I said.

‘What about it?’

‘I overheard you talking to Benni.’

‘You … you little traitor!’ he sputtered. He looked up toward the ceiling and, as though speaking to God, snarled something in Yiddish.

In the confident voice I decided to use, I said, ‘I’m sure this sort of thing is normal. Your erections are bound to come back in a few weeks.’

He sat up and reached for the cigarettes on his night table. He placed one between his lips, sneered and said, ‘So you’re a penis expert now?’

‘I’ve had yours in me a few thousand times,’ I replied, trying not to raise my voice. ‘So, yeah, I know a little something about the way they work.’

He lit his cigarette, stood up and hobbled out of the room.

‘For Christ’s sake, Shel, take it easy on yourself,’ I called after him.

He came back into the doorway. ‘Tell me, Jules, what the hell could be normal about a dead putz? I’m only fifty-seven.’

‘Did you ask Dr Lai about it?’

He glared at me as if hanging might be too good for me and said, ‘You think he cares about my penis? And what’s this got to do with you, anyway?’

‘Remember me? I’m your wife,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but not everything is about you, you know.’

‘Jesus, Shelly, you must be watching too many American sitcoms to come up with a line like that.’

He chewed the inside of his cheek, like he does when he is about to start yelling. ‘You know something, Jules, you’ve always been too clever for your own good.’92

‘So you’d rather have married a dummkopf?’

An ugly frown creased his face, and he told me to shut up, which set rage pulsing through me. I said, ‘Listen up, you asshole! One thing I could always count on was your cock. It’s been good to me even when you’ve been a total schmuck.’

‘Well, the party’s over, baby,’ he said. ‘I’m like your beloved Montreal Canadiens – I wilt in the second period.’

 

That night, Shelly began whimpering in bed. I curled up behind him.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he whispered.

‘Nothing’s going to happen to you, you silly boy. Nothing’s changed. We’ll figure this out together.’ I pinched his behind. ‘Listen, Guido, I’ll put you back in working order if it’s the last thing I do!’

When he turned to me, he said in a grave voice, ‘You might as well just pack me off on a cattle car to Auschwitz.’

I made no reply to that; his words formed a fist around my throat. I had to sit up to breathe.

‘Try to sleep,’ I told him. And after a while he did. But I was up all night.

 

The next morning, while Shelly was eating breakfast, I made a call to Dr Lai’s office from our bedroom. He assured me that impotence among stroke patients of my husband’s age rarely lasted more than a few weeks. Then, he told me something important: ‘Julie, listen, you and Shelly will spare yourself a month or so of sleepless nights if you’ll just have a little faith in the miraculous design of the human body and the healing that Shelly is now experiencing.’

The wisdom in his voice made me start to cry, but Shelly scoffed when I repeated the advice. ‘It’s easy for a thirty-year-old hot-shot 93doctor to talk about the miraculous design of my body – he doesn’t have a dead dick!’

Shelly moped around in his bare feet for the next couple of days and watched black-and-white movies in our bedroom. On the third morning – as a way of forcing him to spend some time outside the house – I convinced him to drop me at work and pick me up that evening.

As I would later learn, he walked a couple of miles through downtown Montreal that afternoon. When exhaustion overwhelmed him, he called a cab and went to the Museum of Fine Arts and ended up sitting on a bench in front of a bird-headed god from ancient Nimrud for a half hour. He told me that he understood for the first time that the Assyrians wanted their gods to be as sensitive and good-natured as birds so that they could alert them to the approach of enemies.

I didn’t understand a lot of the other conclusions he came to about the gods of Nimrud and Persepolis that he told me that evening, but I didn’t mind because he was so cheerful.

While I chopped up shallots for potato soup, Shelly snuck up behind me and threw his arms around me. ‘Montreal in the spring is beautiful,’ he whispered, and in the warm weight of his head on my shoulder, I felt his gratitude for Canada having given him refuge after the war.

At such times, it has always seemed to me that Shelly was overjoyed that he’d fallen for a girl from his adopted country.

‘I have to take you to smell the lilac bushes in La Fontaine Park!’ he told me as I served him dinner. His eyes seemed to glow and he faked a swoon. ‘Mon Dieu, quel parfum!’

The next evening, Shelly rushed to me as I got home from work, holding a landscape painted in bright, crazy colours that he’d found in a dumpster on the Avenue des Pins. It showed a cockeyed row 94of Montreal’s plex houses. Their outdoor staircases were twisted and curved, and one of them – painted silver – led straight into a pink sky. On the top rung stood a tall, painfully slender man with his arms open, as if to say, All this is mine!

When I agreed that it seemed to be about the world’s peculiar and difficult-to-fathom beauty, he kissed me and said, ‘I’ll have it framed and we’ll put it in our bedroom – behind our heads. I want to sleep under a painting I found in a Montreal dumpster. And this guy will be our guardian angel,’ he added, pointing to the wire-thin man on the silver staircase.

‘I’m all for guardian angels,’ I replied. ‘But what were you doing hunting in a dumpster on the Avenue des Pins?’

‘Jules, don’t you occasionally pick over trash for what might be useful?’ he asked in a dumbfounded voice.

‘No, never.’

He shrugged as if I were hopeless and said, ‘Then I’m afraid you’ll never find what you’re not already looking for.’

 

At the time, my shift in Obstetrics ended at seven in the evening, and over the next two weeks, Shelly would pick me up in his clunky old Saab at the entrance to McGill Health Centre and take me out to dinner. He was generous and playful, and the only difference in our lives was that we never had sex, but I had decided to take Dr Lai’s advice and allow myself a bit of faith for a change.

Shelly went back to work a month after his stroke. By then, he was able to walk without a limp and his left hand had regained his usual firm grip.

Two days later, however, I caught him sobbing at the kitchen table in the early morning. I had just come downstairs and there he was, curled over himself. Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

‘What happened?’ I asked.95

‘I had a dream. Except it wasn’t a dream.’

When I came to him, he grabbed my hand and pressed it into his cheek. ‘What did you see?’ I asked.

‘She came back to me.’

‘Who?’

He looked up at me with despairing eyes. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he whispered.

‘An … old girlfriend?’

‘Are you nuts? You’re my only girlfriend.’

He let go of my hand and stood up. After he looked around the room, he went to the refrigerator and opened the door.

‘Shel,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough of this secrecy of yours.’

He took out the carton of milk and took a long sip.

‘Tell me,’ I repeated.

‘You’ll think I’ve lost my marbles,’ he said, wiping off his milk moustache.

‘I was never convinced you had any to begin with,’ I shot back, grinning and hoping he’d do the same.

Instead, he trudged upstairs to our bedroom and closed the door behind him and called Benni. I pressed my ear to the door, but he spoke only Yiddish. That night he didn’t come to bed. He sat slumped on the sofa and guzzled down half a bottle of Bacardi rum and passed out in his clothes.

He complained of a hangover the next morning, so I made him oatmeal and a pot of strong coffee before we both headed off to work. He still refused to tell me about the dream that wasn’t a dream.

Apparently, Shelly didn’t go to his store that day, and Benni arrived from New York just before lunch, and the two of them went out to Schwartz’s Deli. Benni had a smoked meat sandwich and a 96glass of red wine; Shelly had a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a decaf coffee. Just before leaving, they spotted a local celebrity at the counter – the singer Leonard Cohen – and Benni found the courage to thank him for ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, one of his favourite songs. When Cohen complimented Benni on the sleek cut of his blue linen shirt, Benni told him proudly that he’d made it himself, and they ended up conversing about tailoring for a little while.

I found all that out that evening after I discovered Benni in our living room, sitting in the armchair by the window, reading a recent issue of Paris Match that I’d pilfered from my dentist’s office. On the cover was an ancient-looking, downhearted, misty-eyed Jean Gabin. He seemed a perfect match for my mood.

After we hugged and talked about how he’d spoken to Leonard Cohen at Schwartz’s, Benni told me that Shelly had sobbed on and off all afternoon. He’d ended up exhausting himself, and Benni had just put him to bed.

‘Do you know what’s going on with him?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I understand he’s upset that his putz isn’t working right, but all this frustration and anger …’

Benni put his finger to his lips and motioned me into the den, then closed the door behind us.

‘The problem is Esther,’ he said.

‘Who’s Esther?’ I asked, but a second later I knew exactly what had happened. The great big careless schmuck has gotten some poor young girl pregnant! I told myself.

But Benni had a different surprise in store. He grimaced to make it clear I ought to expect something bad and said, ‘Esther – his little sister.’

‘What about her?’

‘You have to understand, Jules, All That never really ended for Shelly.’97

All That was Benni’s code for the Holocaust.

‘I understand, but why is Shelly—’

‘Esther’s come back to him,’ he cut in. I must have made a sceptical face, because he said, ‘And she’s still just sixteen years old. It seems that the dead don’t age.’

‘Come back to him how?’ I asked.

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Benni, just tell me what the hell is going on or I’m going to scream!’

He patted at the air to have me stay calm, then lit a cigarette and stared out the window at our back garden. Without turning back to me, he said, ‘It sounds too crazy in English.’

‘Sometimes I think crazy is all I’ve got,’ I told him.

He nodded as if he understood me perfectly, but didn’t reply. He smoked thoughtfully. I decided not to interrupt, but the silence soon began to throb all around me, so I said, ‘Look, Benni, why don’t you say what you need to say in Yiddish and then translate for me?’

He grunted. ‘That’s the point – it’s untranslatable.’

Tears of frustration welled in my eyes. ‘Benni, honey,’ I said, ‘I’m losing my mind. The two of you … it’s like two against one sometimes. I can’t win.’

‘I’m sorry it seems like that. Listen, Jules, it’s like this … Shelly says that he always worried that Esther was wandering the earth as a dybbuk. You know what a dybbuk is?

‘A Jewish ghost, right?’

He drew in hard on his cigarette. I had the feeling he was about to reveal perilous secrets to me. ‘More or less,’ he said. ‘It’s a spirit without a body. Shelly thinks that while he was unconscious in his shop, after his stroke, Esther found him and kind of went … went into him.’98

I felt as if I were no longer where I was meant to be – that I’d gotten lost somewhere between Shelly’s stay in the hospital and this moment. In a hesitant voice, I asked, ‘Esther went into him how?’

Benni stared out the window again and mouthed something to himself in Yiddish. In profile, he looked like a little boy anticipating disaster. I could easily see him as the kid who’d gazed for months out of a window on Koszykowa Street in Warsaw, waiting for his parents to return home.

When I called his name, he turned to me with a startled face.

‘How did Esther get into Shelly?’ I repeated.

‘In old Jewish stories, dybbuks do pretty much what they want,’ he told me, adding in a menacing whisper, ‘They can even get into bed with you.’ He shook his head disapprovingly and said, ‘All kinds of spirits used to hang around Warsaw. Mom said that we had one who lived on the roof of our building in summer. She used to warn me against doubting God’s existence, too, because an evil dybbuk would take me over as punishment as soon as I fell asleep.’

My thoughts seemed to slide slowly away from me. Benni sat me down on the sofa. ‘You want a cigarette?’ he asked.

When I nodded, he lit one for me, and though it tasted filthy, I didn’t put it out. He remained standing, observing me worriedly.

‘What does Esther want from him?’ I asked.

‘To share his life. You’ve got to understand, she lost her whole family except for Shel. And she was just a teenager.’

I swirled my foot around a bald spot in the old kilim that Shelly had told me he’d bought at a flea market a few years after we were married, but it occurred to me just then that he might really have found it rolled up by the curb in front of some scuzzy tenement, waiting for a garbage truck. I looked around the room at the Rembrandt and Cézanne posters he’d framed and hung 99proudly on the walls, suspecting now that he might have rescued them from the dumpsters behind some art gallery. The image of him hunting through piles of trash set me crying, and to keep from giving in further to despair, I tried to be amusing. ‘Your cousin is part raccoon,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Benni replied.

I dried my eyes. ‘He scrounges around in garbage heaps. He brought home a painting the other day that he found in a dumpster on the Avenue des Pins.’

Benni laughed affectionately. ‘Was it any good?’

‘Yeah, but everything in it is cockeyed.’

‘Cockeyed?’

‘Crooked. At a weird angle.’ My throat was suddenly dry. ‘Listen, Benni, there’s a bottle of Gewürztraminer in the fridge. Could you get it?’

He rushed away and returned with the wine and two glasses. ‘Esther, she talks to Shelly,’ he told me as he poured.

I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘So what’s Esther say?’

‘For one thing, she tells him about all the places she’s been.’

‘Hasn’t she been in heaven?’

He lifted his wine glass, so I did too. ‘L’chaim,’ we said as we chinked them together.

‘Esther said that after she was killed in Treblinka, she wandered around Poland, looking for her family,’ Benni told me. ‘That lasted years, she thinks. She’s not sure – she’s not so good at time. I guess she’s … oh, what’s the word?’

‘Disoriented.’

‘Yeah, but more permanent than that,’ he said. He made a frustrated, clucking sound with his tongue.

I patted the sofa and said, ‘How about sitting next to me? You standing there, looking so nervous – it scares the hell out of me.’100

He did as I asked, and when I smiled my approval, he smiled back in the same fond way. Had our love for the same man turned us into mirrors?

I leaned back, crossed my arms over my chest and said, ‘So does only Shelly hear Esther or do you do too?’

‘No, I can’t hear her. He tells me what she says.’

‘And you don’t see her, right? After all, she’s inside Shelly.’

‘That’s right, she’s inside him.’

‘Did she say how she got to Montreal?’

‘She told him she woke up one morning in a strange city, and snow was on the ground, and people were speaking English and French, but she understood them, though she didn’t know how. Sometime later, she spotted Shelly. He was going into a store downtown, and—’

‘Hold it!’ I said, cutting him off. ‘How the hell could Esther recognise her brother after not seeing him for thirty-five years? My voice surged with triumph because I’d found a logical flaw in his story – which meant that Esther was really only a product of Shelly’s disturbed mind.

Benni searched for a reply. ‘I guess … guess she recognised his soul,’ he said.

‘Are you telling me that dybbuks can see souls?’

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows – his signal for an esoteric subject that was beyond his understanding – then said, ‘Look, Jules, I’ve read quite a lot about dybbuks but this is the first one I’ve … actually met.’

I moaned and said, ‘Benni, you do realise that we sound like we’ve lost our minds.’

‘Only in English. In Yiddish translation, all we’ve said makes perfect sense. Anyway, Shelly said that Esther came to him a little less than four years ago. He told me that she’s been with him all 101the time since then, but she only snuck inside him when he passed out. I guess that he left his door unlocked, so to speak.’

‘So he actually thinks she’s been hanging around him for four years?’ I asked with an increasing sense of dread.

‘On and off. He didn’t think much about it because he didn’t think she was real. He thought she was a kind of hallucination produced by his feelings – by the slow accumulation of sadness.’

The Slow Accumulation of Sadness seemed like the right title for the book someone – not me – might write about the hidden lives of Holocaust survivors.

‘Benni, do you really believe that Esther has come back as a spirit and that she’s inside him?’ I looked him straight in the eye because I needed him to see that his answer would determine the path our lives would now have to take.

He took a last quick drag on his cigarette while considering how to reply. While crushing it out, he said, ‘I don’t know. Really strange things happen sometimes. And me and Shelly … I sometimes think that I attract things that are odd and improbable. Who could ever imagine I’d be living in New York and that Shelly would be in Montreal? When I was a kid, I’d never have believed it possible!’

His look told me that it was now my turn to reply with something meaningful, so I said, ‘You two did great to get out of Poland. And I feel blessed to know you both – to have become part of your lives. But this is something different – something that has to do with … with the soundness of Shelly’s mind.’

He made his counterfeit smile and took another cigarette from his pack. ‘Your husband was going to be a great actor,’ he said. ‘And Esther was going to be a concert pianist. And me, I was going to be an archaeologist.’ He gave a sad little laugh. ‘It’s like I told you once, when you dreamt of that Pulcinella – life had some dirty tricks in store for us.’102

‘So did you want to go to Egypt?’ I asked, because he’d told me once that he had lived in Alexandria in a previous life.

‘That’s right. My dad had told me about the Library of Alexandria. And I think I’d already seen a mummy at some museum. But you know what, our cousin Abe was the one who had a real chance of making his dreams come true.’ Benni let his cigarette dangle from his lips. ‘Everybody knew he’d be a chess champion.’

After he lit his cigarette, he stood up and opened the window all the way. ‘Sorry about all this smoke,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried to stop but I can’t.’

‘It’s okay, I don’t mind.’

‘I think of Abe a lot,’ he said, and his eyes grew remote. At length, he added, ‘I keep a list in my head of all the things he and Esther didn’t get to do. And I always find new things to add.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ I said, since I seemed to be in danger of losing him to his never-ending list.

‘It sure doesn’t seem so’. He sat down next to me again. ‘Though I know you’re right in terms of years,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, ‘because here I am, a tailor living in New York, and I’ve got a kid of my own. And Shelly … He sells sneakers and tennis rackets to little pishers, and he’s got you and the girls and this beautiful house.’

I knew from the way his hands were shaking that he was fighting back tears. To distract him, I pointed out a male cardinal – scarlet red with a black mask – that had just alighted on the lowest branch of our cherry tree.

‘Beautiful!’ he said with renewed cheer. ‘We’ve got lots of them in New York. And blue jays. America and Canada have really good birds. Poland’s birds kind of suck.’

I poured us both more wine and said, ‘Shelly thinks God might have the head of a bird. Like those sculptures from Nimrud in the Museum of Fine Arts.’103

‘Good for Shelly – and God, too,’ he said, and he flapped his arms. ‘I’m pretty sure that wings and a beak could prove useful if the Nazis come back.’

‘Benni, honey, does Shelly’s little sister have something to do with his impotence? I don’t seem to get what’s going on.’

‘Shelly thinks that Esther doesn’t want him to … be with you. Apparently, it upsets her.’

As my stomach clenched, I asked in a resentful tone, ‘She wants him all to herself?’

‘I think that’s the general idea.’

I felt as if I’d just enlisted in an undeclared war, though it seemed to me that I’d have little chance against an hallucination of a frightened little sister who’d perished thirty-five years ago in a death camp. ‘Can this really be happening?’ I asked.

Benni sipped his wine and said, ‘I told Shel that he probably needed to see a psychiatrist.’

‘We both know that that’s not going to happen. He’s only going to talk to you. And maybe me, if I can convince him that I’m on his side.’

‘And George,’ he said. ‘He called him yesterday to tell him about Esther.’

‘Did it do any good?’

‘I’m not sure. But he needed to speak to another man and he couldn’t reach me. He’s too embarrassed to talk to you. I thought if he spoke to a psychiatrist in French he might remember that he lives in Quebec, and that the war has been over a long time. You see, he speaks to Esther in Yiddish. And it’s bad for him. Thinking in Yiddish … It’s reassuring for a few minutes, but then he starts remembering everybody he used to talk to back in Poland, and pretty soon he can’t get enough air in his lungs.’

Benni and I looked at each other, and this time we seemed to 104reflect each other’s apprehension. For a moment, I imagined us alone on the deck of too large and too fast-moving a ship, and we had no idea where it was headed.

‘Does Shelly know anything about dybbuks?’ I asked. ‘How to get rid of them, I mean.’

‘Maybe, but the thing is, he doesn’t want Esther to go. Now that she’s come back, he’s hoping to keep her around.’

6

Shelly camped out on the couch again that night. Benni talked with him for nearly three hours the following morning behind the locked door of our den. I’d taken another sick day, so I was home, doing laundry and ironing to keep myself busy.

When Benni finally emerged for lunch, he joined me in the kitchen. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

‘It turns out that Esther remembers me well.’ He took himself a glass of water and gulped it down. ‘And she doesn’t mind my being with Shelly, so things are calm at the moment.’

That seemed a bit of good news, but despair shook me when I considered that she was being reasonable just to gain Shelly’s confidence. Maybe she was going to order him to leave me.

Half a croissant was sitting on my breakfast plate. Benni pointed to it. ‘You going to finish that?’ he asked.

He was famous at our family dinners for eating leftovers. ‘Be my guest,’ I told him.

He began to eat it with those mouse-like bites he took when he wanted to savour a pleasure. My expression must have given away the question I wanted to ask, because he said, ‘Esther asked me about what I’ve been doing these last thirty-five years, so I told her. She especially wanted to know how I made it out of Warsaw. 105I suspect she’s considering how she might have survived instead of me. It’s like she’s trying to redo her past and give it a happy ending. I mean, there’s no rational reason why I should be here and she should be dead.’

‘You believe that’s what she thinks?’ I asked.

‘That’s pretty much what all survivors think. And I’m beginning to believe that the dead think so too.’

 

Benni had to return to New York late that evening because his son, Eti, had a baseball game the next day, and he’d promised to be there. He said he’d come back as soon as possible. I didn’t drive him to the airport because neither of us thought it was a good idea to leave Shelly alone. Instead, I called our regular taxi driver.

Just before he left for the airport, Benni said, ‘This afternoon I phoned a couple of religious friends who live in Brooklyn. They say they know an old Jew – a healer – who was born in Danzig and who might be able to help. His name is Levi – Mordechai Levi.’

‘Shelly won’t talk to any rabbi,’ I said in a warning tone.

‘Levi isn’t a rabbi. He’s an expert in this sort of thing.’

‘But what if this expert turns out to be a nutcase?’

‘I guess we’ll just have to improvise.’

‘Oh, great,’ I said glumly.

Benni took my hand. ‘Don’t you worry, Jules, All That made me damn good at improvising.’

 

Over the next few days, Shelly barricaded himself in the den while I was at home. What he did while I was at work, I have no idea.

Every evening, at supper time, I’d knock on the den door and ask if he wanted me to bring him some food, but he would tell me that he wasn’t hungry and needed to be alone. His rancorous, resentful voice was like a knife at my throat.106

Once, I summoned my courage and came downstairs while he was making ready to go to sleep on the couch. I asked him what he did all day long while I was working. He gazed right through me and said that there were lots of forgotten details about his life in Poland that he had started to remember. When I reached out to his arm, he flinched and took a step back, and from the way he looked away, I understood that Esther had told him not to touch me.

My next few days were full of fear and self-recrimination, and dizziness occasionally overwhelmed me at work. Once, when I was close to fainting, I had another nurse take my blood pressure, and we discovered that it was dangerously low. I’d had that problem before and had solved it by drinking an extra coffee every morning and afternoon, and I tried that strategy again, but it didn’t help this time. I thought it was a bad idea for me to start taking medication while under such an emotional strain, so whenever possible, I’d lie down for a half hour in the supply room near the Cardiac Centre where the staff maintained a couple of cots.

At night, during my frequent bouts with insomnia, my mind would travel downstairs to Shelly sleeping in our living room. I would tell him we’d get through this together, but in my imagination he often refused to even look at me.

Sometimes, while Shelly slept, I’d sneak into the den to open all the windows to clear out the stink of sweat and cigarettes. I’d sit at the desk where I pay our house bills, switch on the lamp and read my French thesaurus for hours, improving my vocabulary. I kept thinking that if I could memorise enough key words, I’d be able to tell Shelly exactly what was in my heart in the language he most loved, and he’d learn to trust me.

But maybe the truth behind my obsessive behaviour lay somewhere else – perhaps I’d needed to give myself a task that was nearly as impossible as fighting a ghost.107

The realisation that I was most afraid to tell Benni or anyone else was that what had happened to Shelly had revealed that he has always had a hollow inside him in the exact shape of Esther.

It seemed sometimes that it was inevitable that he and I would get lost in the tangle of all he had refused to tell me or anyone else about his family.

Every morning when I left for work, I worried that he’d take his own life. I’d picture him in the bathtub, covered in blood, his eyes closed, his right hand still holding his Swiss Army knife.

The ambulance medics were French-speaking in my fantasies. I’d tell them, ‘C’était sa soeur qui l’a tué.’

‘Sa soeur? Où est elle?’ they’d ask.

‘Morte en Polonie il y a trente-cinq ans.’

They’d look at each other and start making a list in their heads of all the synonyms for crazy that I’d recently learned: dingue, folingue, maboul, foldingue, désaxé, cinglé, azimuté …

I imagined Shelly killing himself because Esther would tell him that his death would ensure that they’d remain together forever.

I knew he’d use his old Swiss Army knife, because it was the only thing that he managed to save from his life in Poland. And I became convinced that he’d want to decide on the exact time and place of his death. That seemed obvious now – a consequence of everything that Shelly had ever told me about himself.

 

Benni and I spoke on the phone every evening, and five days after he returned to New York, he said that he’d finally managed to get Mordechai Levi on the phone. The old Jewish healer had a calm, confidant voice and seemed to be deeply knowledgeable about what Benni called practical kabbalah, meaning magic. He and Benni would be coming up to Montreal in a few days.

I hadn’t told our daughters anything about their father’s troubles 108with Esther, since they’d have insisted on Shelly consulting a psychiatrist, and he’d have ended up shouting rebukes at them. Instead, I told them that going back to work had exhausted him, and in the evenings he wanted to be alone. I said that he sent them all his love.

Had Shelly ever spoken to our girls about his sister? I thought not. In more than two decades of marriage, he’d spent no more than ten minutes telling me about her. Here is all I knew: she had been an unrepentant tomboy as a girl, but during her fourteenth year – in 1940 – she had grown five inches and become a willowy young lady. Still, she detested sewing and knitting and all the other activities considered proper for middle-class Jewish girls. She would play Beethoven sonatas for hours on end in the family living room, often in a kind of trance, humming to herself, as though unable to contain the ceaseless flow of music in her head. In the evenings, she’d sometimes go dancing with Shelly and his friends, and in winter she’d go ice skating with her parents. Her idol was the Norwegian figure skating champion and actress, Sonja Henie, and her favourite author was Julian Tuwim, a Jewish-Polish poet from Łódź; when she was eleven, she’d met Tuwim at a reading that Shelly had taken her to, and the famous author had taken a liking to the excitable little girl and exchanged letters with her. For a couple of years, she’d slept with his correspondence under her pillow.

My work at the McGill Health Centre became my refuge. I remember a frightened young mother from Eritrea giving birth one afternoon after seven painful hours of labour. Her gaunt, harried, sweat-soaked face shone with otherworldly light when I placed her wrinkled little son in her arms. She kissed his shiny black hair and sobbed, and I stood before the two of them as before a landscape as wide and deep and noble as the Grand Canyon, and I decided 109to speak as little as I could over the rest of the day and to keep repeating in my head a prayer for their safety: Please let nothing bad ever happen to her and her son.

Although I didn’t believe in any traditional conception of God, I sent those words out to whoever or whatever was able to hear them, which was how I knew I’d started to believe in Benni’s practical kabbalah. And that I’d come to accept that Esther was every bit as real as the slow accumulation of Shelly’s sadness.

Two days before Benni was scheduled to fly up to Montreal with Mordechai Levi, Diane called and pleaded to see her father. She told me she no longer believed my excuses. ‘I’m really worried about him – and you,’ she said.

I told her that her father wasn’t home, that he’d begun putting in a lot of overtime to make up for the month he’d missed. Some hesitance in my voice must have given away my lie, and she demanded to know what was really going on, so I told her that I was just worried about him taking too many risks with his health. ‘I really wish he’d spend more time at home,’ I said, which proved a mistake.

‘I take that to mean he’s already cheating on you again!’ Diane snarled.

‘No, that’s not what this is about,’ I said.

‘Mom, how can I believe you?’ she asked.

‘Look, all I can do is tell you how things stand. And what’s in my heart. If that’s not good enough for you, then there’s nothing I can do.’

My desperate tone convinced her that her suspicions were unfounded, but she went to Cagney’s Sporting Goods the next day to see how her father was doing, and when his store manager, Marianne, told her that he hadn’t been going to work, she sped over to the house and accused me of hiding what she called Dad’s monstrous behaviour!110

Her face was so distorted by rage that it chilled me. And all I could think of to defend myself was the truth, so I told her that Shelly’s stroke had started him thinking too much about his dead family and that he’d hidden himself in the den. ‘His past has finally caught up with him,’ I said.

She apologised for yelling at me and reached for my hand. It was such a relief to see her fondness for me in her eyes that I shivered.

‘Mom, shouldn’t he see a psychiatrist or some sort of therapist?’ Diane asked in a gentle tone.

‘Maybe, but he wouldn’t go. It seems to me that your father is having a mid-life crisis. He needs some time by himself – to go over all that’s happened to him. It’ll probably take a few months, so please just be patient.’

She accepted my explanation, probably because it sounded eminently normal for Canada in 1977 – and curable. Despite my warning, however, she walked to the den a few minutes later, knocked on the locked door and asked her father to let her in.

Shelly told her in a gruff voice to leave him alone.

‘Dad, it’s just me,’ she said in her little-girl voice, which seemed like a tactic that might at least get him to open the door a crack, but then she added in a motherly tone, ‘You’re being silly.’

‘Go away!’ he yelled, and so loudly that my heart jumped inside my chest.

Diane ended up pounding on the door and telling him he was being selfish. I stood up and was about to go to her – to plead with her to stop making herself miserable – when she marched into the kitchen. She was holding the brass door handle. ‘It came off in my hand!’ she snarled.

She held it up and shook it at me as if I were responsible.

Her self-righteous pose seemed symbolic of the wayward direction of my life, and I was about to give way to tears, but 111I gathered my forces and made light of what had happened. I even managed a brief laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Unfortunately, that deepened her irritation at me and her father, and she crashed the door handle down onto the kitchen table.

‘You married a very selfish man!’ she shouted, and she targeted me with such contemptuous eyes that I realised that I must have represented to her just about everything a woman ought not to be – forgiving of a cheating husband, most of all.

‘I know you don’t understand, but trust me when I say that I’m doing the best I can,’ I replied, which made her scoff.

‘Just tell me this – why do you always defend him?’ she asked.

‘Do I always defend him?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I recall a number of times when I admitted to you and your sister that he’d hurt me badly. But before his stroke, our life together was really good. He doesn’t have affairs anymore. Your father isn’t the same man he was.’

‘If he’s changed so much, then why doesn’t he come out of the den and talk to me?’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, that hasn’t changed – he’s still holding on to his secrets. But you need to see things from his point of view. He has always wanted to protect you and Margot.’

‘Protect us from what?’

‘From all that happened to him in Europe. He didn’t want you burdened with so much sadness and loss and—’

‘So he burdened us with other things!’ Diane cut in. ‘We lived with way too much silence, you know!’

‘Yes, I’m very much aware of that. I guess it seemed the lesser of two evils to him. Maybe it still does. I don’t know. Maybe after this crisis, he’ll talk to you more openly. I hope so.’

‘Mom, I can’t stay here right now, this is too much for me,’ she 112said, and she picked up her bag from the kitchen table and dashed out of the room.

I was fairly certain that she’d slam the front door closed, but I heard only a delicate click. My mind grasped on to that small concession, and I began to hope that Diane might one day understand and forgive her father.

 

Benni came back the next day. It was a Sunday, exactly nine days after he’d last seen Shelly. I answered his knocks carrying salad tongs because I’d been polishing all our silverware. He held up his hands as if to surrender and said, ‘I’ve been mistaken for lettuce in the past, but I’m actually Jewish.’

When I didn’t laugh, he nodded and said, ‘You’re right, Jules, my timing was off.’ After I explained what I was doing with the tongs, I asked where Mr Levi was.

‘He didn’t come! The son of a bitch screwed me! Give me some orange juice, I’m dying of thirst, and I’ll tell you the whole story.’

As I led Benni to the kitchen, he whispered, ‘Is Shel still barricaded in the den?’

‘Yeah, unfortunately.’

While I went to the refrigerator, Benni dropped down at the kitchen table. ‘Get this, Jules, Levi told me that his friends called him Rikhter, which should have set alarm bells ringing in my head, but sometimes I’m pretty dumb.’

I poured him his juice. ‘Why? I don’t understand.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the glass from me. ‘Rikhter means judge. Judge Levi, that’s what he liked being called! Pretty ominous, don’t you think?’ He took a greedy and breathless sip of juice. ‘But he seduced me with his crazy stories about flying rabbis and chickens that lay golden eggs and brides coming back from the dead. And he told me about a demon that he pulled out of a German soprano 113while she was on tour in Kraków in 1933. That was what convinced me that he could help Shelly. He wrote out a list of what we’d need to get for the exorcism, and I—’

‘The exorcism!’ I cried out. I nearly choked on the word.

‘Well, that’s kind of what we’ve got to do.’

‘You make my life sound like a horror movie.’

‘Sorry about that. But listen, everything was set – I bought a first-class plane ticket for Levi and booked him a room at a fancy hotel, and then, this morning, he spoiled everything. Or nearly did. In the end, we came up with a plan that I could carry out alone.’

‘How did he nearly spoil everything?’

Benni downed the last of his drink, so I poured him more. ‘He’d already told me that Shel would have to start eating kosher food and going to schul, and that it would be best if he started showing a little fear of God and saying the right prayers over meals, and all the rest. So, you know me, I lied and said none of that would be any problem, and maybe I went a little overboard and told him that Shelly never intended to become a secular Jew, that it just happened, kind of somebody waking up one day and finding out he’s become a little bald. But this morning, when he asked about you and found out you weren’t Jewish, he went berserk. He screamed at me for what he called withholding pertinent information, like he was from the FBI – and anyway, it wasn’t true, because he hadn’t asked before about your religion or what you looked like or anything else.’

‘Does it matter I’m not Jewish? I’m not the dybbuk, Esther is.’

‘Wait, this is the best part!’ Benni exclaimed triumphantly. ‘He called you a shiksa from the North Pole! And he told me that Shel would have to divorce you. “Divorce Julie?!” I said. “Are you nuts?” But he said Shelly had to do what he said or he couldn’t work his magic, so before I was tempted to kill him, I told him I 114was very sorry, but that he and the other FBI agents he worked with would have to look elsewhere for someone’s life to ruin and that he was fired!’

‘So what did you do?’ I asked, and I sat down opposite Benni at the table and played with the silver candle holder that Shelly had bought me shortly after we were married.

Benni patted his belly and said, ‘Listen, Jules, I didn’t eat lunch today. Can you make me an omelette or something? I’ll tell you what happened while you’re cooking.’

‘Sure.’

I took the carton of eggs and some cheddar out of the refrigerator.

‘Levi had memorised all of Deuteronomy,’ Benni continued. ‘When I found that out, I should’ve known that he was going to give me some trouble.’

‘Benni, honey, I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t read the Old Testament in thirty years.’

‘Deuteronomy is like God’s book of baseball rules. Every last regulation is written out.’ He sighed. ‘But I probably shouldn’t make fun of it. I guess I should try harder to be a good Jew.’

‘I think you’re a good Jew,’ I said, cracking open an egg.

‘That’s because you’re too sweet for your own good. But I’m only kosher because I’m mostly vegetarian, and I haven’t been to schul since Ethan was born, and I’m not sure I even believe in God, which is rule number one.’

‘But you love Jewish history.’

‘And mythology,’ he said gratefully. ‘And kabbalah, too. I guess I love nearly everything except the rules.’

I cracked open a second egg. ‘All right, Benni, so what did you do?’ I asked.

‘As I was leaving Levi’s place, he called out to me and told me 115to wait a minute, then got a piece of paper and ended up writing out a list of things we’ll need to convince Esther to leave Shelly. I was suspicious at first, but he apologised for being so rude to me. He took my hand and said that it was his obligation to help Shelly because he was a Holocaust survivor, even if he didn’t go to synagogue and was married to a shiksa. I wasn’t sure what to do – I got a little confused. But he told me that our only hope was performing the ceremony he had in mind. He seemed to know what he was talking about. And he said he was sorry again. Anyway, I accepted the list. I’ve got it in my wallet. So after I eat a quick lunch, we’ll go to a good antique store.’

‘Why an antique store?’

‘They’ve always got a lot of old mirrors. And we’ll need ten.’

7

As Benni ate his omelette, he explained why we’d need mirrors. He said that Esther – looking out of Shelly’s eyes – would expect to see a reflection of herself in them, but that instead she’d see a middle-aged man. That would disorient and upset her. ‘So, with any luck, we’ll be able to convince her to leave Shelly without a fight,’ he told me.

In an excited voice, he added that Levi had discovered the mirror trick in the writings of Isaac Luria.

‘Who’s Isaac Luria?’ I asked.

Benni stared at me with shocked eyes and said, ‘He’s one of the most powerful kabbalists of all time! Haven’t you looked at those books I’ve sent you and Shelly?’

‘Benni, I’m sorry, but when I read about Judaism I just get sleepy.’

He sighed as if I were hopeless. ‘Luria lived in the sixteenth 116century, and he was good friends with Berekiah Zarco. You remember who Berekiah is, I hope.’

‘How could I forget? Whenever Shelly wants to establish his pedigree, he talks about your illustrious ancestor and what an important mystic he was.’

‘I’ll tell you a secret, Jules – I think about Berekiah a lot. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed, I wish I could get in touch with him.’

‘Why? What would you tell him?’

Benni forked up his last bit of omelette. ‘I’d say, “Send me back to my family’s apartment in the ghetto, in the fall of 1940, but only for a minute, because I’m not planning on staying, and help me bring everybody back with me to New York.”’

‘Benni, there really is a Mordechai Levi, isn’t there? You’re not making all this up to make me think that you know how to help Shelly?’

‘Of course I’m not making it up!’ He stood up and took a folded-up piece of paper from his wallet and handed it to me. ‘Look for yourself. That’s Levi’s list of things we’ll need.’

I unfolded it and found a page of jagged Hebrew script. All those words I’d never be able to read seemed a message from a place and time I didn’t want to know anything about. I handed the note back to him and sat at the table opposite him.

Benni put the note between us and pointed to a word. ‘That’s how you write “mirror” in Yiddish,’ he said in a voice of rescue. ‘And see there?’ he said, moving his finger. ‘That’s the number ten. In short, we need ten mirrors. One for each of the sefirot.’

‘Do I want to know what the sefirot are?’ I asked.

‘All you need to know,’ he said authoritatively, ‘is that Levi told me that no dybbuk is able to turn away from a circle of mirrors. And when Esther looks into them, she’s going to realise that Shelly 117has been made in the Lord’s image, and that she has been … oh, I forget what it’s called in English.’

‘Creating bad problems for us.’

‘That’ll do.’

Benni had finished his meal, so he wiped his mouth and blew his nose.

‘You seem like a little kid sometimes,’ I told him.

‘I feel like I’m back at Ewa’s house whenever I eat eggs. She got them fresh sometimes from nearby farms.’

Ewa was the Christian woman who’d hidden him toward the end of the war.

Benni took his plate to the sink and started washing it, and I asked him if he’d said anything special to Levi to win his sympathy.

‘I told him that Shelly’s parents and sister were murdered by the Nazis, and my parents, too, and every last one of our cousins and aunts and uncles. And you know what, as a peace offering, he gave me a cinnamon donut he had in his pocket, but it was old and hard, and once I was on the street, I threw it in the trash.’

I laughed in a burst because of his comic grimace, then covered my eyes with my hands because a surge of tears was spilling out of me. In a lost voice, I said, ‘I’m losing my mind, and so is Shelly, and here I am laughing.’

Benni hugged me. ‘Sorry, Jules. I shouldn’t have tried to be funny. It’s a personality flaw. But it’s true that Levi gave me a donut. He goes every morning to a Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown Brooklyn.’

‘This is all just too much for me,’ I confessed. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve wandered into an old Yiddish play and need to get off the stage because I’m the wrong woman for the part.’

‘Of course you do. You’re a smart-as-can-be Quaker girl from Canada who fell in love with a Holocaust survivor who never 118learned to keep his putz in his pants. None of us needed a crystal ball to know that it wasn’t always going to be such a smooth ride.’

 

My brother’s son, Johnny, was an architect, so I called him to ask where I could pick up some large, sturdy mirrors, and he told me about a wholesale dealer named Kauffman on the Rue Notre-Dame who cut his own but who also kept some fancy ones around for special customers.

While I was getting ready to drive there, Benni came to me and said that it was time that he went in to see Shelly. ‘He must have heard me arrive and is wondering what happened to me.’

‘So I have to buy the mirrors alone?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, that would be for the best. But you’ll do fine. Just make sure you get ten.’

 

I chose eight new mirrors and two gorgeous antiques in gilded, acanthus-leaf frames. Mr Kauffman’s Vietnamese assistants stood them up in his truck, and they drove behind me all the way home, then carried them into the house.

‘Wow, beautiful!’ Benni said when he saw the fancy ones. ‘I’ve convinced Shelly and Esther to go with me for a bite to eat, and while we’re gone, you put them around the den. They’re not too heavy, are they?’

‘No, I’ll manage. But what are you going to say when you come back and he sees them?’

‘I’ll explain that he needs to look at himself in them.’

‘And Esther?’

‘I’ll tell her that only when she leaves him will she be able to join her family on the Other Side. I think that the really hard part will be convincing Shelly that it would be selfish to hold on to his sister – that she needs to be with Rosa and the rest of our relatives.’119

8

Benni and Shelly returned while I was reading about dybbuks in one of the Gershom Scholem books that Benni had sent us. I was sitting in the kitchen and had closed the door, so I didn’t see them enter, but I heard their steps in the hallway and a brief conversation in Yiddish, and then the squeal and click of the den door being pulled open and locked behind them. About ten minutes later, Benni came to see me.

As if he were showing his mom an unexpected treasure, he held a clear plastic bag filled with water, and a small orange-and-white goldfish with bulging eyes was swimming around in it. The contours of the fish – elongated and squashed by the water – made me think of the strangely endearing painting that Shelly had found in a dumpster and hung over our bed.

Benni smiled and said, ‘Be an angel and get me a glass bowl.’

After I fetched one, he spilled the goldfish and water inside.

‘How’s my husband?’ I asked.

‘Not so hot. While we were starting on our egg rolls, Esther told him she doesn’t want to ever leave him. He hardly ate a thing.’

‘Swell. So what’s the goldfish for?’

‘Dybbuks and other spirits have no power over fish.’

‘Benni, what exactly is that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, picturing myself cornered by all the things I’d never understand about his way of thinking.

‘I’m not sure, but it’s what Mordechai Levi told me.’

‘So what are you going to do with him?’

‘You’ll see,’ he said confidently.

‘I will? Can I watch what you do?’

‘Sure. I want Esther to meet you. I want her to see that Shelly’s in good hands. I wouldn’t want her to leave us without knowing that.’120

Just before he turned the handle I’d re-screwed to the den door, Benni told me in a warning tone, ‘Even if Shelly snaps at you, try not to speak to him.’

We found Shelly sitting forward on the sofa with his head angled down. He was naked. The blinds had been drawn. Benni had lit ten candles and placed them around the room. They gave the mirrors surrounding us a yellowish glow.

Benni eased the goldfish bowl down on the coffee table.

Shelly’s eyes were hooded and fearful when he gazed up at me. We’re all back in the Warsaw of his youth, I said to myself. And when I spotted myself in the mirror across the room from me, I added with resentment, because that’s where Esther has taken us.

While studying my husband’s sunken cheeks and the grim pouches under his eyes, I realised he was in a place where I could not reach him.

Benni told me to sit at the old desk in the corner. I envisaged myself crossing a bridge as I stepped there. My breaths came shallow and hesitant.

Benni spoke a sentence in Yiddish that included my husband’s name, then raised his hand over his head and muttered what must have been a prayer, because I heard the familiar words Baruch Adonai, which meant ‘Blessed is the Lord’. Shelly stood up and closed his eyes tight, as if he might not ever open them again.

Successive reflections of Benni and Shelly extended – ever smaller – into the endless depths of the mirrors. The candlelit figures seemed a metaphor, but for what, I didn’t know – maybe for survival against all odds. Gazing at them, it occurred to me that the three of us had been brought here by all that my husband had failed to tell me and his daughters and maybe even Benni.

When Benni spoke again, it was in a trembling chant. And yet when our eyes met in one of the antique mirrors, I saw what 121looked to me like confidence. Had he witnessed such a ceremony as a boy?

After Shelly raised both his arms above his head, Benni scooped the goldfish out of his bowl, clasping it securely in his fist, so that only the wriggling tip of its tail was visible. He touched his dripping hand first to Shelly’s forehead, then to his hands, his chest, his belly, his sex, his legs and his feet. He spoke at the same time, in an abrupt and determined mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew.

I distinguished only one word clearly – keter – which I later discovered to mean ‘crown’ in Hebrew. Benni pronounced it as he touched Shelly’s forehead.

After he dropped the fish back in the bowl, he spoke what I presumed to be a command, because my husband shuffled toward the larger of the antique mirrors and grasped it firmly, one hand on each side of the golden frame. A moment later, Benni stepped behind him and closed his eyes and spoke a few words in a whisper.

After letting silence surround us once more, he spoke Esther’s name softly, followed by what sounded like a fervent payer. When his eyes opened, he repeated her name six more times, each time louder and more defiantly. I had the feeling he was groping his way ahead – ever closer to her – with his own voice.

And then he called out Rosa’s name, and I sensed he was pleading with Esther to go to her.

Did she? It seemed not, because Benni began to speak to her beseechingly. He pointed with his index finger toward Shelly’s reflection as though to compel her to gaze at him.

But my husband gazed down instead. Benni – angry now – stepped behind him and gripped his shoulders. He shouted Esther’s name and some words in Yiddish, and so loudly that I jumped to my feet. While continuing to shout, he pounded on Shelly’s back. It seemed like a scene out of the Old Testament.122

Slowly, hesitantly, fearfully, Shelly lifted his gaze and studied his own reflection. Tears slid down his cheeks. As he wiped them away, a morbid chill crept through me, making me shiver, and I thrust my hands over my mouth, because I thought I might call out for help.

I next remember Benni staring at me, his eyes filled with worry, and it took me a moment to remember where I was. I’d later wonder if Esther might not have left my husband and entered me for a moment. Had the chill I’d felt signalled her passing through me? In my more rational moments, I decided that I’d simply experienced a shudder of panic.

Shelly’s eyes were now closed and he’d covered his ears with his hands. Had Esther told him not to look again into the mirror?

The need to protect Shelly drew me forward, but Benni told me to stay where I was. He took down my husband’s hands from his ears and spoke to him in Yiddish, ending with the name Rosa, which he pronounced with reverence, and I came to believe that he was telling Esther that their great-grandmother expected her to leave her brother and go to her.

My husband began to weep, and he shook his head as if in physical torment. Benni came to me and reached out for my hand. ‘I need you to grab a hold of Shelly,’ he said, adding with an encouraging smile, ‘Don’t worry, Jules. You’ll do fine.’

Benni moved my hands to where he wanted them on Shelly’s shoulders.

I was convinced at that moment that Shelly was right: Benni was one of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim. How else could he know how to help his cousin?

Benni scooped up his goldfish and touched his dripping hand to my lips and said, ‘Speak to Esther. Tell her Shelly will be safe with you.’123

The tenderness in Benni’s eyes suddenly made me realise that this ceremony was about love more than anything else – about the need to do whatever it asks of us.

He returned the fish to his bowl while whispering a quick blessing.

Shelly had begun to shiver by then. While watching him, I grew certain that nothing that happened to me mattered any longer. As long as I could save him from any more terror in his life, I’d be all right.

Do I need to add that it made no difference to me whether or not my husband’s terror had taken on an illusory form?

‘Tell Esther about you and Shelly,’ Benni told me. ‘You can be honest – even about your difficulties. Levi told me that dybbuks can hear all our lies.’

What I remember most of the next few minutes was my self-doubt. I felt as if it were all I was. Yet as I spoke, I realised that I was making a second marriage vow – a far deeper pledge than the one I’d made at my wedding, when I’d understood so little of what that love would ask of me.

Did I tell Esther that nothing could ever be as important to me as her brother? Mostly I remember talking about the journey he and I had been on for twenty-five years, and that it was the measure of the person I had become. I said that I didn’t want it to ever end – not even with death. I remember that at some point, I noticed the mirrors around us, and the endless repetition of our candlelit reflections. Looking between myself and Shelly, I had the feeling that we had become one person. When I turned to Benni, he was watching me with admiration in his eyes, and an overwhelming sense of well-being and belonging came over me, and I said to myself, Everything makes sense now, even all those terrible moments of anger and loneliness.124

And then the feeling of belonging was gone, and I hugged my hands around Shelly and lay my head against his back. I began to cry, but not because I was sad, but because I’d finally told him what I’d needed to say for a very long time.

Benni came to me and took my hand and led me to back to my desk.

Shelly was studying himself in the mirror when I looked at him, and he began to speak in Yiddish. From the sad, hesitant rhythm in his voice, I came to believe that he was saying goodbye to Esther. After he drew silent, he nodded in reply to something she must have told him. A moment later, his eyes opened wide with excitement and he laughed sweetly. He spoke then to Benni, who tucked his lips inside his mouth like he does when he wants to keep from crying.

Shelly gazed at his reflection again, though I imagined that it was Esther he was seeing. Was Rosa there as well? He spoke both their names, using gentle, reassuring gestures with his hands to emphasise whatever he was telling them.

As I would later learn, he taught Esther the protective prayer that Rosa had entrusted to him before he made his escape from the Warsaw ghetto.

When Shelly closed his eyes, Benni led me outside and closed the door behind us. He whispered, ‘He needs to be alone to say goodbye to his sister.’

‘So she’s agreed to go?’ I asked.

Benni kissed my cheek. ‘Yes, you convinced her.’

I shivered.

‘I knew you’d be able to do it,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘Who else has as much power as you do over Shelly? Jules, you’re the one. You’ve always been the one. Don’t you know that?’125

Benni’s affirmation left me sobbing. Because I hadn’t known.

He led me to the kitchen, and I asked him what had moved him close to tears near the end of the ceremony.

‘Esther told Shelly that she hoped that wherever she was going with Rosa … that there’d be a piano. She couldn’t remember the last time she had played, and her fingers ached something terrible from not being able to give voice to all that she had lived – to all that was inside her.’

9

Shelly came to bed that night after I was already asleep. He must have crawled under the covers without making a sound because only after three in the morning did I notice that he had curled up behind me. His arm over my hip grew too heavy, but I didn’t dare take it off me or turn around for fear of waking him.

I awoke again at dawn and felt Shelly’s penis stiffening in the crack of my behind, and when he bit my neck and growled, I felt myself falling toward a place where I had no power, and had to trust him, and I let myself fall – gratefully, blissfully – because I was sure now that there was no bottom to what I felt for him.

Afterward, while we were cuddling, I said, ‘You’re back, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m here now. I’m sorry I was so mean to you, but I wasn’t in control of myself. Can you forgive me?’

‘Of course I forgive you.’ I combed his beautiful wings of hair over his ears and said, ‘When you’re ready, I want you to tell me all about Esther.’

‘You want to hear about my sister?’ he asked apprehensively.

‘Yes, she wanted desperately to be remembered. She deserves me knowing who she was, and what you felt for her. And I think you need to tell the girls, too.’126

‘You really think they should know?’

‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Will you tell them?’

‘If you want me to, yes.’

We kissed again – softly, like the old married couple that we were – and Shelly looked as if he wanted to say more about what had happened to him, but then he curled into me like a tired little boy and closed his eyes. A minute or so later, he was asleep again.

I watched him for a long time. He never once even stirred. It was as if he’d been drugged.

When I tiptoed downstairs, I found Benni seated at the kitchen table. He was wearing a pyjama bottom but no top. I noticed that his chest hairs were turning grey and found it moving that he didn’t try to hide how he was ageing from me – that he felt so at ease with me. He was huddled over his steaming coffee cup as if it were a treasure. He’d opened the back door to let in some air, which was sweetened by the lilac bushes I’d planted years before, and I breathed in appreciatively on their heartening scent.

Benni and I kissed good morning. His eyes were red and tender – probably like mine. Something clenched in my gut as I poured myself cereal, and I realised then how badly I needed his reassurance that his cousin would be all right. And yet I wasn’t ready to speak of what had happened. I put the radio on at a low volume. Stevie Wonder was singing ‘Sir Duke’.

I sat down opposite Benni. My apprehension must have been obvious, because he said, ‘He’ll be all right now, you’ll see,’ but I could tell he was trying to convince himself as much as me.

‘Did you know Esther well?’ I asked.

‘Not really. I was just a kid when everybody vanished.’ He tapped the kitchen table with his fingertip as if he’d just made a discovery. ‘You know what, I’m going to tell you something I never told anyone but Teresa.’127

‘You never told Shelly?’

‘Nope, not even him.’ He gazed away. At length, he said, ‘When I get depressed, everything I’ve ever done seems covered with a kind of dye. It wipes out all the colour in my memories. Nothing escapes. Even the most wonderful times, like Tessa giving birth to Eti, or being found by George and Shelly. They go all grey in my mind. And nothing seems to mean anything anymore. Even the best moments don’t seem important.’

‘Does that happen a lot, Benni?’

‘Not as much since falling in love with Tessa. But I get worried sometimes that my depressions will come back one day. And be worse than ever. And if that happens, I think I might not be strong enough to withstand them for very long, and it scares me.’

When Benni turned to me, he showed me his counterfeit smile, and a kind of wild courage surged inside me. I squeezed his hand, and I forced him to promise me that if the grey dye ever returned – and robbed him of colour again – he’d let me know. ‘Because I’ll grab Shelly,’ I told him, ‘and we’ll come to you wherever you are, and we won’t leave you until you tell us that you’re okay.’

Benni looked away from me and rubbed a hand back through his hair to keep from ceding to too much emotion, and I didn’t want to intrude on his feelings, so I went and took myself an orange from the counter. I peeled it back at the table, giving him a section and taking one for myself, and we ate the whole orange together. The sharing became a kind of ritual – even the stickiness on our fingers was a part of it – and when he smiled at me for real, the trust between us became a third presence in the room, and I knew that he and I would be linked forever.

 

It was just after noon when I heard my husband pounding around on the upstairs landing. I met him at the bottom of the stairs with 128a welcoming hug. He was wearing a pair of pale-blue boxer shorts and was still heavy with sleep. With a moan, he told me that he was dying of hunger.

Benni had been out weeding in the garden, and he shuffled in while Shelly was devouring a lox-and-tomato sandwich he’d thrown together.

‘You okay now, Shel?’ Benni asked.

‘Yeah, just starving,’ my husband replied, and he yawned like a cat.

Benni pulled off one of his gloves. ‘Hey, how about some pancakes?’ he asked excitedly.

‘If you pour on lots of maple syrup,’ Shelly told him.

‘You, Jules?’

I wasn’t very fond of pancakes, but I didn’t want to disappoint him. ‘Sure, why not?’ I said.

I noticed then that I was still in my bathrobe, and that it looked terribly shabby, so I headed to my bedroom to get dressed. By the time I returned to the kitchen, Benni had already made the batter and was heating up the oil in a pan, and he asked me to wash some blueberries for him. While I was at the sink, the crazy Jew I’d married snuck up behind me and bit me again on the neck, and I knew from the way his warm hands circled my waist exactly what he was planning for us later that afternoon.

Toward evening, my husband finally got dressed and we all drove to La Fontaine Park and dropped Benni’s goldfish – Shelly had nicknamed him Poseidon – in one of the ponds. It was a relief to see him swim happily away into the depths of the murky water, and I thanked him for his help. And then I whispered aloud to Esther. ‘A dank,’ I said in Yiddish – thank you, followed by, ‘Tell everyone that Shelly and I will be all right now.’

After my husband hooked his arm in mine, the reflection of 129broad maples on the surface of the pond rippled in a breeze. All those trees growing downward seemed to reveal another secret to me. ‘The world is always as upside down as in George’s painting,’ I told Benni and Shelly. ‘At least, if you know where to look.’

10

Maybe Esther truly was a dybbuk. Or the summation of everything that Shelly refused to say about All That. Or simply a childhood that had caught up to him. But whatever she was, she was now where she was meant to be, which is what counted most.

Several days after she left us, I was at work, taking blood from a young mother, and I gazed out the window at the gold-and-russet sunset, and I remembered the pond in La Fontaine Park as if I had dreamed of it throughout my whole life. Right away, its murky water seemed to conceal my future, and its surface was a mirror, and Poseidon and I were one and the same, swimming toward a distant horizon. Then, everything in and around me seemed to clear and become transparently beautiful. And for a timeless moment, the world shed its usual meaning, and I saw that it was much more open and wider than I’d ever imagined, an unfolding narrative in which all the characters were linked, and I was eager to know more about my place in the story. But the young mother asked me when her blood tests would come back, and just like that, everything returned to the way it had always been.130