203

While taking a class in non-Western music during my junior year at college, I began daydreaming about heading out to the Amazon rainforest with a tape recorder, mosquito netting and all the notebooks I could fit in my backpack, and transcribing the traditional songs of the indigenous peoples of Brazil before they were lost or forgotten. I came to regard it as a calling, in fact, and one that nearly perfectly matched my talents, since I’d become fluent in Portuguese and – after sixteen years of flute lessons – could memorise even dissonant and unusual melodies quickly. To be honest, I also imagined myself imbibing a cup of hallucinogenic ayahuasca and dancing around a grove of palms while wearing only a feathered headdress, and making love to a bronze-skinned shaman while wading in the warm river-water embracing his village, but it was the 1960s and such wild-hearted fantasies seemed perfectly reasonable. Or had I read too much William Burroughs? Very likely. Need I add that none of it came to pass? Although I was accepted during my senior year to music graduate school and was scheduled to begin my PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of California in early September of 1965, my father had a major heart attack about a month before that, which sent my life spiralling off in another direction.

Dad collapsed while walking his wire-haired dachshund, Radley, on Third Avenue, a block from his apartment on East 11th Street. He was then just fifty-two years old.

After getting an early-morning phone call from my father’s upstairs neighbour, Daniela, I flew in to New York from Berkeley 204late that evening. The next morning, when I reached his room in the Intensive Care Unit of New York University Hospital, Dad was asleep. An oxygen mask was clamped over his face, which was gaunt and pale – the colour of cigar ash under the fluorescent lighting.

I leaned against the door frame because I felt as though I were falling inside myself. And I sensed that I wouldn’t hit bottom for a long time.

I took off my coat, folded it neatly over the chair by my father’s cot and sat down. Does a mind seeking solace sometimes stumble instead upon a trauma long forgotten? Of all the things in the world I might have thought of while watching my father snooze, my mind seized on Zencefil, a hook-nosed, yellow-skinned marionette – a witch – whom my father had imbued with a seductively menacing voice in his version of Hansel and Gretel. Even though she got baked in her own oven at the dramatic end of Dad’s performance, Zencefil remained very much alive in my young mind and climbed into my dreams that night. She stood on my chest, hands on her hips, like a victorious general. And then, with meticulous calm, she strangled me in her cords.

All those years before, when I tearfully related my nightmare to my father, he grabbed the marionette and knocked on her ugly nose with the bulb of his pipe and tossed her to the floor to show me she couldn’t hurt me or anyone else. ‘She’s nothing, Teresa,’ he said. ‘She’s just wood and porcelain. She’s only as powerful as you make her.’

But pressing my fingertip to her cool ceramic face – touching her rouged cheek – seemed an encounter with death itself. Since I was unable to put that into words – I was too young for that – I told my father that I hated her.

Dad gave her away that day. To whom? He never said and I never asked. All that was important was that she was gone. ‘You’ve 205taught me something I should have realised sooner,’ my father told me when he served me supper that evening, and when I asked him what it was, he said, ‘That you and I are a lot alike. I’ve always been afraid of witches too!’

So did I think of Zencefil while sitting by my father’s hospital cot so that I could be certain that he and I had a special bond? And had Dad also come to the same conclusion that I had – that Zencefil got her power over me from my equally menacing mother?

So many questions circled around my head that day, but none of them had a definite answer.

Half an hour or so after my arrival, Dad opened his eyes. Slowly, their gooey opacity cleared and he smiled. He signalled for me to help him take off his oxygen mask. ‘Gosh it’s good to see you,’ he said in a croaking whisper. He snatched up my hand. With a grimace, he added, ‘Please tell me that Rad is okay.’

‘He’s just fine,’ I said. ‘He’s with Daniela and Mr Cupcake.’ Mr Cupcake was Daniela’s overweight basset hound.

‘Thank God. That silly mutt is all I’ve been able to think about since waking up in this place.’

I sat back down and questioned him about what had happened to him, and he explained about the shooting pains in his chest and left arm. ‘And then nothing,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Did they tell you I had a heart attack?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied.

He frowned. ‘I wish I had my pipe.’

‘I’m sure you can’t smoke.’

When our eyes met, Dad sensed my worry and told me not to work myself into a tizzy, one of his favourite English expressions, and one that he’d learned while doing odd jobs for a wealthy British family in Salonika throughout high school. ‘There’s enough money in the bank for you to get your PhD. Everything’s going to be okay.’206

On his request, I helped him sit up. I fixed his pillow behind him because his back was sore.

He strained to smile. ‘Listen, Teresa, if the worst happens, I don’t want you being upset for me. Really. I’ve done everything I had to do.’

I glared at him. ‘I won’t be okay if something happens to you! Don’t you dare say that!’

He jiggled his hand like he does to plead for calm. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘I just meant you wouldn’t have to give up school.’

When I sat back down, he told me – slowly, choosing his words carefully, because he could see how upset I was – that he was proud of me for being kind and beautiful and courageous, and he used the Ladino word for beautiful – formosa – so that I’d know he was talking about a great deal more than my appearance. He only began to cry when he asked me to look after my little sister, Evie, though not to ‘crowd her’ – which made both of us laugh through our tears, since she’d snapped at both of us the week before when we’d dared to question her about her new boyfriend.

When he asked about my flight in from San Francisco, I told him about the retired accountant who’d sat next to me. His name was James and he was on his way to Paris. ‘He’d been stationed in Normandy during World War One,’ I said. ‘His best buddy – Claude – had been killed there. He told me that he was nervous to be going back. He sounded real embarrassed about that. He even raised his hand to cover his mouth and said so in whispers. And he also confessed that he was frightened to be flying. While we were descending toward JFK, he groaned and reached out for me, and he held on to me real tight till we landed.’

All through my story, I wondered why I was talking about James, but then I said something that surprised me: ‘His hand was 207gigantic, and it was really warm. It moved me – how this handsome old war veteran with big warm hands trusted me.’

And just like that I was sobbing, and I realised I’d needed to talk about a stranger and the way he had confided in me, and feel all my gratitude, so that I would be free to weep about something other than my father being so frail and helpless, though we both knew that that was what my tears were really about, of course.

Dad motioned me to come to him, and I lay my head across his belly, and he rubbed my head. I was seven years old again, and he a young father wondering how he would be able to raise two little girls all by himself – though he’d kept that from me at the time. When I was finally old enough to understand how terrified he’d been, he told me that whenever he’d thought of telling me that he was scared, he played Beethoven on his piano instead.

‘Did it work?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, most of the time – if there’s anyone who understands terror, it’s Beethoven.’

After I nodded my understanding, he asked, ‘So why was James going back to France?’

‘He said he was seventy-nine years old and he figured it was his last chance to let Claude and his other friends who’d died know that he’d never forgotten them. He kept calling them his buddies. I liked that. It was like he was still eighteen years old. Anyway, the thing is, whenever he talked about the war and his old pals, his eyes … they opened real wide and got all glassy, as if they were reflecting a magical landscape.’

‘Maybe World War One was his Golden Age,’ Dad said, and I said, ‘You think so?’ and he replied, ‘For the men who fought … if you read what they wrote, it was always the war that made them feel most alive.’

‘How about you? When was your Golden Age?’ I asked. 208

‘Me?’ He scratched the whiskers on his chin, and I knew he’d have filled the bowl of his pipe if he’d had it with him. ‘I think it was when you and Evie were little. Just after your mom … after she left. There was always one more emergency around the corner, and there was never enough money, but I never felt more alive. It was wonderful!’

‘I guess it was another kind of war,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I think you’re right,’ he said with a quick laugh.

Dad grew short of breath after that, and I helped him put his oxygen mask back on. He sensed my apprehension and took my hand. I knew what he’d have said if he weren’t wearing the mask, and it was, Everything is going to be okay, I promise, which he’d told me a thousand times after my mom left us. After a while, I felt the world withdraw, and his moist brown eyes told me all I needed to know about the kind of man he was. For a few minutes, it seemed to me that he and I were alone on an island, and that we had always been there even when we thought we were somewhere else.

The sound of people walking in the hallway broke our intimacy, and he took off his oxygen mask again. He said he needed to tell me about his finances.

‘Now?’ I asked, and he shot back, ‘Yeah, do you know a better time?’

While he was listing what he kept in his safety deposit box, I started combing his thick brown hair out of his eyes.

‘Tessa, are you listening?’ he snarled.

‘Of course,’ I lied.

After a while, all his talk of things that didn’t interest me made me want to plead for a coffee break, but I didn’t, because his precise tone told me how important this was to him.

Once he’d finished his list, he asked me to put some of the balm I always kept in my bag on his crusted lips. Then, while I was fixing 209his blanket, his eyes fluttered closed. I planned to tiptoe out, but he awakened the moment I stood up. ‘You still here?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, you okay?’

He nodded. After I helped him drink some water he asked me to go to Daniela’s apartment and bring Radley back home. ‘He must have been terrified when I fell over, so please tell him I’m doing well and that I miss him and that you’ll give him his regular dog food.’

‘I’m not sure his vocabulary is that large.’

‘No, but he’ll sense your relief. And listen, a warning – he might jump in your bed tonight and whine a lot and want to snuggle with you.’

‘As long as he sleeps with his muzzle facing away from me, that’s fine,’ I said.

‘Why, what’s wrong with his muzzle?’ he asked in an offended voice, which was what I’d hoped, since I was eager for a bit more humour.

‘Sorry, Dad, those wholewheat dog biscuits you bake him give him really bad breath!’

My father shook his fist at me, and in his squinting brown eyes I saw a decade of back-and-forth banter, which made me understand that my effort at humour was also about trying to go back to the way things had been before his heart attack. But when I took a last look at him from the doorway, his eyes were closed and he was again making a whistle on every exhale, and I realised that I’d failed to get there.

 

Radley and I did indeed share my bed that night, but he hunted for Dad in the morning – sniffing in every corner of the apartment, and when I got his leash, he dashed into my father’s bathroom and refused to go for a walk, so that I had to pick him up and carry 210him outside. I’d been up most of the night juggling my options – trying in vain to keep a dozen alternatives in the air – but while strolling with him on St Mark’s Place, past a shop with garish, tie-dyed T-shirts in the window, I realised that only one of them was realistic.

Had Dad reached the same conclusion? The moment I walked into his room, he waved me over and said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Teresa, I’ll be furious with you if you put off graduate school!’

When I hesitated to reply, he told me that I’d be a fool to give up my plans. I didn’t dare risk a quarrel, so I told him we’d talk about it later.

‘No, now!’ he ordered.

‘Later!’ I shot back. ‘So how did you sleep?’

‘A lot you care!’ he snapped.

I sat with him and kissed his brow and said – with what I hoped was an encouraging smile – that his unshaved cheeks made him look like his father in one of the photographs he’d brought with him to America, which I thought would please him, but misery crossed his face and made his throat catch when he tried to speak.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, and he whispered, ‘If only Papa could have once held you as a baby. He’d have loved you like crazy.’

Dad cried while I rubbed his frozen hands. Afterward, we sat together without talking for a long time. He slept on and off. When we did speak, it was mostly about Evie and the misfits that she’d had as high-school boyfriends; it was a safe topic, and one that had become part of our family comedy routine.

That afternoon, I spoke to Dr Johnson, the chairman of Berkeley’s Music Department, and he agreed to postpone my enrolment – and my scholarship – to the spring of 1966. Over the next few days, Dad did his best to make me reconsider – even lectured me about being true to myself in a dramatic voice – but 211I’d inherited what he called Sephardic stubbornness, and he began to grudgingly accept my decision.

A week or so later, I was able to sublet my apartment near campus to a graduate student in French literature from Seattle.

My father started walking by himself about three weeks after his heart attack, and he was so grateful for his renewed independence that he would erupt into peals of laughter at Radley’s antics, especially the way he’d gnaw on a carrot while holding it between his paws, and how he’d bark and pounce when the carrot slipped out of his grip. Sometimes Dad laughed so hard that he had to hold himself up on the nearest wall to keep from sliding straight to the floor.

My father’s doctors were pleased by his progress, he and Radley kept each other in high spirits, and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t start smoking again after I left, so in early November I gave notice to the graduate student subletting my apartment that she’d have to move out by January 15th. Meanwhile, my father went back to work part-time at New York University Press, where he managed printing and graphic design. In early December, however, his diabetes created circulation problems in his right leg, and he had to go back into the hospital, and a surgeon called in on his case told me that if the problem continued much longer he’d have to operate.

‘Operate in what way?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to amputate the leg,’ he said.

The choking panic I felt while trying to fit the words amputate the leg in my head reminded me that Dad telling me in the hospital that I was courageous was wishful thinking – perhaps the greatest wish he’d ever had for me, in fact.

Once again, my dad seemed at peace, however. Sitting up in his hospital cot, he told me that he’d be fine in a wheelchair as long as he could still get to work and play electric piano with his 212Dixieland band once every few weeks and watch NBA games on Sunday with Radley. His smile was genuine, but when I came back unexpectedly quickly from getting coffee, I caught him sobbing into his pillow, his knees up by his chest, and his eyes were so red when he looked up at me that I thought they’d been bleeding.

 

Evie had visited us over two weekends by then. She had recently cut her blonde hair into bangs – in imitation of Cher, I guessed – and stopped putting on all the goopy make-up she’d used as a teenager to try to make herself look older. She was tall and willowy and fair – like a girl from the prairies. Just before she’d started college, Dad had remarked that even her shadow now seemed a lesser form of light, and it was true.

Sometimes it seemed to me that Evie and I were different species; like my father, I was olive-skinned and dark-haired. He’d referred to me as his Sephardic princess when I was little.

The day after I caught Dad sobbing, Evie visited us again – it was a Friday – and I took her out to lunch at the Second Avenue Deli so that I could tell her about the possibility of him losing a leg. Dad was convinced that she would come to terms with it more easily without having to speak to him about it in the hospital.

‘Evie likes circling around her troubles,’ he’d told me. ‘She’s like Rad when he’s picking a place to sit.’

‘Next you’ll tell me that she barks at garbage trucks and sheds on the sofa.’

‘No, but she once drank out of a toilet bowl,’ he observed.

I laughed so hard that I began to sneeze – an idiosyncrasy I’d had since I was little. ‘Is that true?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely. It was when we visited Washington DC and stayed at the Mayflower. The hotel sink was too high for her, poor thing.’

Dad spoke as if Evie’s behaviour were admirable, and maybe 213it was, but his serious face only made me laugh again, which gave him a chance to pretend to be angry at me.

At such moments, I knew I’d never find someone as unintentionally funny as my dad.

Just after Evie and I ordered our lunch, and while I was planning my strategy, she engaged me a conversation about the furniture she’d bought for her new apartment, and from there she moved on to her favourite class at Bard College, which was topology. While she was telling me about what she called the uniqueness of manifold spaces, I picked around my stuffed cabbage and realised – astonished – that she’d turned into a mathematician.

After we left the restaurant, we started ambling down Second Avenue, and she began looking over at me – her shoulders hunched, her hands joined behind her neck – as if she were terrified. ‘It’s bad news about Dad, isn’t it?’ she asked timidly.

‘It might be. But let’s not talk on the street.’

We walked to Washington Square Park, where I sat her down on a bench and told her about the complications that diabetes might cause.

She cried in my arms while I rubbed her back, and we held hands on the way home, swinging them between us as if we’d gone back in time a decade and were walking together to school, which is how I re-learned the shape and feel of her.

That afternoon, as we made dinner, she kissed me a couple of times for no reason, like when we were kids.

I checked on her before going to bed. While I stood in the doorway, she made the compressed face she makes when she’s too upset to talk, but she fought to find her voice – a sign of maturity I hadn’t seen before – and promised me, as though speaking a vow, that she’d help me and Dad any way she could, even if it meant quitting college. I sat with her and told her that leaving school was 214out of the question. She nodded, and I nodded back, and silence spread between us, and she yawned real big, and then I did, and we ended up laughing. I was about to stand up and go when she threw her arms around me and buried her head at my neck, and the fresh, warm scent of her was like the answer to a question I hadn’t even known I’d asked – a question about how much Dad and I might still mean to her. And I remembered again what I’d already forgotten a dozen times over the course of my life – that she was as devoted to us as we were to her.

 

Happily, Dad, me and Evie never had to learn how we’d react to his being confined to a wheelchair; blood thinners helped partially restore his circulation a few days later, and after a week he was doing well. Still, to be safe, I decided to postpone my graduate studies to the fall.

‘What’s a few more months?’ I told him.

‘Bunny Rabbit, you don’t understand,’ he said, shaking his head – and using the name he’s had for me since I was a little girl.

‘What don’t I understand?’ I asked.

In a menacing tone, he replied, ‘A few months can last a lifetime.’ Dad often used Ladino as an exclamation point, and he added, ‘Un minuto puede cambiar todo.’

A minute can change everything.

I was too young to consider that what he was telling me wasn’t nearly as glib as it sounded, that it was, in fact, the slender tip of a great mystery – of how we become the person we will one day be, when we could have become so many other people.

I knew that if Mom had been willing to help, I’d have been able to start graduate school, but she had made it clear four years before that she didn’t want any contact with me and Evie and Dad. I’d last spoken to her at the beginning of my freshman year at the 215state university in Binghamton. At that time, I decided to try to restrain my anger at her for abandoning me and Evie when we were little and try to track her down. I soon discovered that she was living in West Hollywood, and although she didn’t hang up on me when I called, she spoke to me in a deeply suspicious tone, as if I were about to start shrieking at her or reveal some terrible ulterior motive for getting back in touch. She told me that she wouldn’t be able to visit me during parents’ week, which I’d used as my pretext for re-establishing contact. In a voice permitting no dissent, she’d said that she was about to fly to Rome with her new boyfriend. He was an Italian-American cameraman named Franco Spinelli, and he was set to start work on a movie being shot by Roberto Rossellini.

Hearing her voice again – after eleven years without speaking – made me feel so fragile and needy that tears rose into my eyes, and I wanted to tell her how much I’d missed her, but I sensed it would only distance her further from me.

‘Going to Rome is my chance to meet some really big European stars!’ she said excitedly.

Once she realised that I wasn’t going to berate her or ask her questions she didn’t want to have to answer, she became a lot more friendly, and despite my disappointment that she wouldn’t be able to visit me at college, we ended up giggling like star-struck teenagers about Anna Magnani, Marcello Mastroianni and all the other Italian actors she might meet. I had hopes that we could be back in touch with each other on a regular basis, and that I might be able to finally tell her how badly she’d hurt Evie and me, but after she returned from Rome, she never called. When I tried to reach her, I discovered that her phone had been disconnected. Evie eventually got a hold of Franco Spinelli’s phone number, and he told her that he and Mom had moved to Santa Monica. ‘We had dinner 216the other night with Warren Beatty!’ he boasted, doing his best to imply they’d become Hollywood A-listers. After I conversed with him for a little while, Mom got on the phone and said that she’d had lunch with Mastroianni at a fashionable trattoria in Rome and that he was ‘incredibly handsome and incomparably charming,’ which seemed so clichéd a remark that I began to wonder if she might not have met him after all.

In any case, Mom told me that she’d secured work as an assistant scriptwriter on Bonanza. When I summoned the courage to ask her why she’d moved without giving me her new phone number, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Teresa, but I’ve had enough of mothering for one lifetime. Basta!’

 

Over my first few months with Dad, my qualms about putting off my studies abated, in large part, I think, because of my need to care for him and do our household errands. Whenever I’d sense myself trapped by circumstance, I’d learn a new piece on my flute or take Radley on a walk or go to a museum with one of my old friends. I’d make dinner for me and my father nearly every night, as well, and I enjoyed shopping at the cramped Asian markets in Chinatown and inventing unusual recipes. My ungenerous and occasionally murderous daydreams about my mother – about how she had always failed me and Evie when we needed her most – ought to have convinced me that something dangerous had taken root in my spirit, but I never stopped to consider what my unspoken desires were trying to tell me.

I thought I knew myself well, but I was just twenty-two years old, after all.

Right after our Hanukkah celebrations, a mist of despair seemed to seep into Dad’s apartment, however. I remember that I was watching a light snowfall out my bedroom window one afternoon 217when I had my first ever panic attack. I felt as if my heart might burst, but I didn’t call out to Dad or dial 911. I suppose I sensed that the true origin of my pain was in my mind. I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, and I listened to ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ in my head, and after a few minutes I was able to get enough air into my lungs. It was while I was staring at my sweaty face in the bathroom mirror that I grew certain that my plans for Brazil had been foolish. And I saw – in my lost eyes, most clearly – that I had no idea what to do with my life. What had made me think that any musicians in Amazonia would trust me? Very possibly, none of them would know enough Portuguese to understand what I was asking them.

After a second panic attack a few days later, the idea of dining out with friends or going to the movies with Dad would start my heart racing. And by the beginning of the new year, playing my flute became nearly impossible; the music itself – all those thousands of notes – started to make me feel as if I were being slowly suffocated.

I was reminded that I wasn’t so different from the shy and moody twelve-year-old girl who refused to attend her elementary-school graduation because her mother wouldn’t be there. And I began to dislike everything I’d loved. I wondered if the ambitious and enthusiastic young woman I’d been had been merely a role I’d adopted to fool myself and everyone else. Even my father’s delight in Radley began to enrage me.

A word of advice: if you become jealous of a dachshund, it’s time to get back to the life you really want.

The only thing I forced myself to do was read the news section in the New York Times, because I was determined to keep myself informed about the Vietnam War. Looking back, I think that the rush of moral outrage that the articles brought out in me made 218me feel as if I was still the same young woman I’d been before I’d postponed my plans for graduate school.

 

My father continued working half-days in January, and I’d do my best to appear alert and cheerful at breakfast, but as soon as he left the apartment, I’d go to my room and watch TV. I’d only leave the apartment to walk Radley and do our food shopping at a neighbourhood market. Whenever Bonanza would come on, I’d imagine my mom writing all the worst lines of dialogue and – to the cringing embarrassment of her boyfriend and his Hollywood buddies – being really proud of them.

In my mind, the mother I pictured was nearly always laughing at me – at the defeated young woman I’d become. If I had been a fan of gothic novels or low-budget horror movies, I’d have said she was haunting me and had used her spells to drain away all my self-assurance.

Once in a while, I’d stop what I was doing and wonder how a mother I hadn’t seen in fifteen years – and whom I’d never trusted – could have so much power over me. And how I’d changed so quickly. But perhaps I hadn’t. Maybe the abandoned little girl inside me had been waiting for a convenient reason to give up on all her plans.

Whenever an old high-school friend wouldn’t take no for an answer and insist on coming over, I’d say that my father had taken a turn for the worse and that we weren’t permitted guests. I was sure that no one would understand my panic attacks or sympathise with my rage at my mother. Maybe, too, I secretly understood already that I didn’t want anyone looking below my surface, because what they’d find there wasn’t particularly formosa.

After a time, my father sensed how despondent I was, and he started telling me I had to go back to Berkeley, but I swore to him that I was fine and asked him to ‘stop hounding me,’ as I put it. He ended up giving me an ultimatum in mid-February – if I didn’t 219go back to California within two months, he’d change the lock on his front door without telling me, and not even my begging or sobbing would convince him to let me back in.

His anger seemed misdirected and cruel. I was furious with him.

‘But my plans for Brazil were silly,’ I finally admitted to him at supper one evening.

He crashed his fork to the tab. ‘Teresa, I won’t permit you to put yourself down! Your mother used to do that all the time, and I hated it! Now listen up … I’ve known since you were seven years old that you were unusually talented. And if you think I’m going to let you waste your life, you’ve got another thing coming!’

‘How could you be so sure I was so talented?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘Don’t you remember?’ and I said, ‘No,’ so he said, ‘You learned to play songs from my collection of seventy-eights when you were this tall.’ He held his hand about two feet from the floor. ‘I remember that one day I came home and slipped Fred Astaire singing ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ on the record player, and afterward you tooted it back for me note for note! Don’t you recall?’

‘No.’

‘You played in perfect syncopated rhythm! Seven years old and you already knew how to swing!’ Dad sang the first verse of the song in a snappy voice he uses to imitate Fred Astaire, and then added in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Your mom and I used to say that she’d given birth to an extraterrestrial!’

Dad burst into delighted laughter. And I burst into tears. In his arms, my fantasies about Brazil drifted back to me, hesitant and shy. In bed that night, gazing out my window at the crescent moon, I discovered that the tropical waters were still soft and warm, and my handsome, bronze-skinned shaman whispered, I’ve been waiting for you for months, hoping you’d come back.

I learned that night that the whispers of a dream lover – even 220one as unlikely as an English-speaking Brazilian shaman – are a disguised form of hope.

The next morning, I took out my flute and tested my ear by playing back jingles I heard on the radio, and when I played ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from memory, I realised that there was a kind of hidden magic working through me, though I had no idea where it had come from.

A few days later, I sat in on a couple of songs with Dad’s Dixieland band – the Black Cats – at a bar mitzvah in Brooklyn, and my high-flying solo on ‘Young at Heart’ – all those bird-like notes at the top of my range – made realise I had nearly become myself again. How had I become such a stranger over so many agonised weeks? It seemed improbable – almost too peculiar to believe.

 

Toward the end of February, when I told Dad I’d go back to Berkeley in April, he raised his hands and started singing Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.

That evening, he took me to our favourite restaurant – Arezzo – to celebrate. Radley came too, and he sat under our table, moaning with delight while gobbling down our pizza crusts. The tingling of the pepperoni on my tongue made me feel as if I’d re-entered my body after a long absence.

Only a few days later, however, my best friend from high school insisted that I meet her and one of her housemates for dinner because she wanted me and other friends to model at a fashion show they were organising, and everything started off in a different direction yet again.

 

Fia Simonetta and I had been inseparable in high school, and after college at NYU, she moved into a dilapidated old apartment in the 221Lower East Side that smelled like cat pee and discarded clothing because one of her flatmates owned six cats, and the other – Margerie ‘Moonlight’ Levitsky – was a hippy fashion designer who kept rolls and rolls of garish, bargain-basement fabrics in the living room.

Moonlight later helped some of the members of the Symbionese Liberation Army flee arrest after they kidnapped Patty Hearst, but that crime was eight years away from happening, and at the time she seemed perfectly harmless to me and Fia.

The three of us agreed to meet at my favourite restaurant, a small Turkish place called the Bosphorus. It was on Bleecker Street, just a block from the Bitter End. I wore a stunning wine-coloured woollen coat – with 1920s-style wide lapels – that Moonlight had made for me, since I knew it would please her. I arrived a few minutes early and stood in front of the panoramic photograph of Istanbul in the window. Droning music was coming from the record player inside.

By six-fifteen, I figured that Fia and Moonlight had been held up, and I was about to go back home and wait for them to call when a short man with shaggy black hair stepped up to me. His big, dark, sad-looking eyes and fancy grey suit made him look like a well-dressed raccoon.

I’d noticed him standing for some time on the other side of the doorway, smoking nervously. I figured he was waiting for his date.

‘This is my favourite restaurant in the whole world,’ he said.

Mine, too, I almost replied, but I didn’t want to give him any hope of picking me up, and simply nodded.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked with an accent I couldn’t identify.

‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘why wouldn’t I be?’

My gruff tone must have unnerved him, because his English grew shaky and he said, ‘You have looked a bit worried. Maybe you wait for someone?’222

‘Old friends,’ I replied, and just to be safe, I added, ‘And my boyfriend is joining us later.’ He flashed a smile that seemed more of a call for help. ‘I’m waiting for a friend too,’ he said. I gazed down, hoping he’d go away.

‘I’m a tailor, and my name is Benjamin,’ he said. ‘I tell you that because your jacket is lovely, but the lapels aren’t sewn correctly. If you want, I could maybe sew them again for you.’

‘Listen, I’m sure you mean well,’ I told him, ‘but I want to wait for my friends by myself.’

I spoke more harshly than I meant to, and his eyes teared up. After he moved back to the other side of the door, he lit another cigarette and gazed away from me as if he’d been punished.

Thankfully, Fia and Moonlight came along a minute or so later and rescued me from my guilt.

 

On March 26th, Dad and I marched in a rally against the Vietnam War with twenty thousand other protestors. The atmosphere was festive and zany, and for a while we walked behind a heavily made-up British cross-dresser impersonating Queen Elizabeth, who held up a sign reading this war is a royal disaster! At one point, Dad and the rest of the Black Cats got him and everybody else around us singing ‘When Our Troops Come Marching Home’ to the tune of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.

As we were passing the Metropolitan Museum, I spotted a short, dark-haired man in a powder-blue suit holding up a sign on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 81st Street, and what it said would give me insomnia over the next several days. In handwritten black letters, it read holocaust survivors against the war. Underneath that slogan was a big yellow Jewish star.

I looked from the sign back to the Metropolitan Museum, then up to two pigeons perched on its rooftop, and when I looked 223behind me, I saw a woman with red hair at her window, observing the protestors and eating what looked like a baked potato, and everything around me – even my father’s questioning smile – seemed to have been staged. Later, I realised it was because I became so aware of the separation between my own self and the rest of the world. And I think that was because I needed to remember exactly where I was when I figured out why reading about the Vietnam War often made me feel physically ill. When my father asked if something was wrong, I pointed out the man in the powder-blue suit.

‘Look what his sign says,’ I said.

From the dispirited way Dad gazed at me afterward, I knew he was thinking of his parents and brother and sister, and his seven aunts and uncles, all of whom had been dragged from their homes in Salonika and sent on transport trains to Auschwitz, and of how there was a hollow in his life where there ought to have been an entire world, and how no one he knew could speak Ladino with him except me and Evie. I took his hand, and we continued walking without saying a word, because there was nothing we could say that was as eloquent or important as Holocaust Survivors Against the War.

That afternoon, I remembered that when I was a girl, I used to fantasise about our relatives in Salonika, and how, if Hitler hadn’t been born, they’d have put me up in their little whitewashed houses by the beach and insisted on fattening me up with moussaka and dried figs, and …

It seemed astonishing and shameful to me that no one until that spring day had had the courage to say, or even think, that America’s bombs and bullets and flamethrowers were creating a Holocaust for the Vietnamese people.

The man holding the sign stood arm and arm with a heavyset elderly woman in a floral dress. They were conversing with an easy 224complicity that made me think she was his grandmother. Only when I got closer to 81st Street did he look familiar, and a little later, after we were already a couple of blocks away, I realised that he looked like the tailor I’d met outside the Bosphorus.

I left the march and walked back to 81st Street, and, from a safe distance away, listened to him talking to the old woman next to him in what sounded like Polish or Russian, and I was soon certain that he was the man I’d met. My shame at having treated him badly made me shiver.

I thought of stepping up to him and apologising, but a slender blonde woman in an unflattering low-cut dress strode up to him and shouted that he was a disgrace to the Jewish people and to all the victims of the Nazis. Benjamin asked her to please leave him be, his voice admirably calm, but she pointed a damning figure at him and snarled that he would go to hell for embarrassing the Jews in front of the goyim, and her enraged face made her look like a demon in a medieval illumination. He must have thought something like that too, because after she rushed away, he fumbled the cigarette he was trying to light and started cursing to himself, and he seemed about to melt into tears. When his grandmother reached for his arm and started whispering to him, I realised my chance to approach him had vanished.

 

A few weeks later – four days before my flight to California – I was moving around the antennas on Dad’s television set to try to get better reception on the Channel 2 news, and when I finally got a decent image, I saw Benjamin the tailor sitting on an outdoor staircase. A reporter I didn’t recognise explained that he’d chained himself to the railing of the military induction centre at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. He was holding in his lap a small version of his sign I’d seen 225him carrying on Fifth Avenue – holocaust survivors against the war.

I shouted for my dad to stop playing Scott Joplin on his piano and come see what was on the news. He rushed in, Radley in his arms, as a reporter asked, ‘Are you really a Holocaust survivor?’

The journalist’s tone was sceptical, but Benjamin replied in that slow and even voice of his – which I now realised wasn’t so much calm as controlled – ‘I spent more than a year in Warsaw ghetto when I was a boy, and then I went into hiding, and at one point I lived for more than eight months in a room not much bigger than a closet, and I could never go outside. The Nazis murdered my parents and all my aunts and uncles. So, do I pass your test, Mr Reporter?’

‘I love that man!’ Dad said, beaming.

The journalist asked, ‘But what do you hope to accomplish, other than getting yourself arrested?’

Benjamin’s eyes narrowed. ‘Have you seen the photographs of Vietnamese men and women and children being burned to death by napalm? I have, and it’s a crime against humanity, and I intend to do what I can to stop it.’

My chest heaved, and I began to sob, which set Dad off, too. ‘I’ve got to find that man and shake his hand,’ he said through his tears, and I wanted to say, I’ve already met him, but I was too ashamed of how I’d behaved to admit it.

 

I flew back to Berkeley at the end of April, and, to my great relief, the professor I’d asked to supervise my thesis – Dickson Applewhite – agreed to work with me. In June, after I’d read and annotated every book and paper that he could find for me about Irish and Scottish traditional music, we flew to Asheville, North Carolina so that he could direct my first experiences in the field. Over the 226previous seventeen years, he’d collected traditional Scots-Irish songs sung by the people of Appalachia.

Dickson had a memory for melodies that far surpassed my own – he called it his music catalogue – and in his pleasantly warbling voice he could sing more than three hundred songs that he’d recorded in Appalachia, Ireland and Scotland. He looked like a television version of a Southern lawyer, sporting an impeccably ironed white shirt, often with the sleeves rolled up, and a colourful bowtie. He had a Piedmont accent that he tended to thicken into a syrupy drawl around young women, and over our first week together he took great pleasure in telling me endless stories about all the mishaps with insects, floods and hunters in his fieldwork, exaggerating his own bumbling nature in an effort to make me laugh. Pity the innocent nitwit I then was; only when he tried to kiss me one evening over the pasta I’d made for our supper did it occur to me that he’d been trying to seduce me from the moment I’d first stepped into his office. I might have even ended up his summer girlfriend, but he was fifty-seven years old, and too paunchy and pale for my liking. Although he kept up a barrage of seductively humorous stories over the next few days, he eventually shifted his attentions to a young waitress working her way through college at the Little Pigs restaurant in Asheville, and she ended up sharing his bedroom at the cramped little house near the Blue Ridge Highway that we’d rented.

What I remember most from my first few weeks in the field was the shocking poverty. That summer, I encountered families living in one-room shacks with dirt floors and foul-smelling outhouses. Most of the adults had never set foot in a schoolhouse or visited a doctor’s office. Mothers cooked on wood-burning stoves, made their kid’s clothing on handmade looms and kept chickens and pigs in makeshift pens. Boys and girls ran around everywhere barefoot, even in town.227

Yes, there were tens of thousands of illiterate men and women in the mountains of North Carolina in 1966.

The insistent mosquitoes and oppressive, sluggish heat made me think that the chills and fevers some of the people suffered from might even be symptoms of malaria, though the doctors I later consulted in New York were dubious. Malaria in America? Of course, they had no idea of the America that was hidden inside the Blue Ridge Mountains. I often wished I could’ve handed out antibiotics and hundred-dollar bills to everyone I came across.

Dickson interviewed all the men who agreed to talk to us, because he said they’d either distrust me or try to get me into bed, so I collected songs exclusively from women.

The woman who most influenced me that summer was Belle, a quick-tongued, wiry, sixty-four-year-old widow, though her dark, sun-toughened hide and deep wrinkles made her look a good deal older. She had long, beautiful hands, and a keen-eyed, intelligent expression that made me certain that she could teach me a great deal of what I hadn’t learned from my mother. I took a roll of photos of her before flying home, and the good-natured humour in her expression – and tolerance for the over-excited graduate student taking the pictures – always reminds me of the generosity of most of the women I interviewed.

On her front door, Belle kept a plastic laurel wreath, and under it was a sign that read all are welcome here, for all of us were once strangers in egypt.

Belle often spoke in such Biblical language. She explained that her father had been a fire-and-brimstone preacher who’d roamed throughout the Carolinas and Tennessee, and that he’d sing verses of Genesis to her in improvised lullabies when she was small.

Belle had had eleven children, but two had died at birth and another three hadn’t lived long enough to start first grade at the 228little wooden schoolhouse – topped by a weathervane of a coyote – four miles to the east. She made stunningly patterned baskets out of oak splints cut by her oldest son, Jeremiah, slept under a thick cotton quilt stitched by her grandmother in every kind of weather and made the most delicious apple sauce I ever tasted in a kind of leveraged press that her ancestors had carried with them from Scotland two hundred years earlier.

Belle confessed to me one day when we were walking to her youngest daughter’s house for lunch that if she’d have had her own money hidden somewhere, she’d have left her late-husband after having her first child. ‘Levon wasn’t much of a likeable man when he was on the juice,’ she confided to me. ‘It made him lazy and downright mean.’

When I inquired where she’d have gone if she’d left him, she said, ‘To the ocean.’ And when I asked why, she said it was because the ocean embraced every beach and shore in the world, and she was certain that those mighty waters would tell her what to do.

Belle was also a clairvoyant and a healer, though it took me months to feel comfortable using those terms. On several occasions, she put a hand of blessing on my head in an effort to ‘join what has been broken inside your soul,’ as she put it, and once, when we were alone, she told me details about my life that were impossible for her to know – for instance that I was nearly always worried about my little sister, because our mother had abandoned her and me when we were too young to understand why. After I told Belle my sister’s name, she looked me straight in the eye and told me what I was most afraid of hearing, that Evie – like me – sometimes blamed herself for our mom’s departure. She also said that my sister had kept a keepsake from our mother. When I called Evie that evening to ask, she said she couldn’t recall holding on to anything of Mom’s, but then she called me back in the morning 229and exclaimed, ‘Yeah, it’s true – I grabbed her lipstick – that dark shade she used to wear. I’d completely forgotten!’

Whenever I’d visit Belle, the first thing she’d do was put my hands in hers and bless me, and I grew certain after a time that I was touching holiness.

‘Everyone should have the chance to know someone as magical as Belle,’ I told my father when I first spoke to him about her.

In my dreams about that summer, Belle and I are often floating around her yard, above the rusted old Ford that had belonged to Levon, and we stay up in the air without any effort, and when I wake up, I’m convinced that it is her love for me – her selfless love – that keeps us aloft. The most important reading of me that she made came after I told her about my dad’s heart attack, and how I’d isolated myself afterward. She was silent for a long time after that, darning a grandson’s socks, and then she told me something you won’t want to know, as she put it.

‘Tell me anyway,’ I said.

‘I’m pretty sure your mom had never liked you from the start.’

It was just before I was set to leave Appalachia for good, and by then, I didn’t need to ask her how she knew what she knew, so I asked her instead why Mom had never taken to me.

‘I don’t know that, child, but you’ll have to figure that out if she ever returns to haunt you.’

Among other songs that Belle taught me that summer was ‘Creeping Dan’, which Dickson discovered to be a variant of ‘Creeping Jane’, a song that he’d collected near Knoxville a decade earlier. In the song, Dan is the Angel of Death, and each verse is about how he creeps up on his victims and tosses the bitter candy of death in their mouth. Belle could no longer hold a tune so well, but she taught me the melody by plucking the top string of a guitar brought to her by her eldest grandson, Luther, who lived just a few hundred yards away. 230

She also surprised me one day by calling Luther’s girlfriend his doney, which seemed related to the Ladino word dona. I was the first person to tell Belle it wasn’t a word in standard English, though she refused to believe me. Later, I learned that the word probably made its way to Scotland with Spaniards taken prisoner during the Armada.

From Belle, I learned that sharing our childhood songs can deepen trust and respect. After teaching me the words to ‘Creeping Dan’, for instance, she whispered something to me that she’d never confessed to her husband or any of her children – how her Uncle Sonny – her father’s brother – had stood her in front of her mother’s mirror when she was eleven years old and put his hand under her dress and told her that she mustn’t ever tell anyone what he was going to do to her or Creeping Dan would come and toss a bitter candy in her mouth.

‘But I’d already seen what men have between their legs,’ Belle told me, ‘and I said that he’d better get away from me or the Lord’d strike him down. That didn’t stop him, of course, and he started puttin’ his big ugly fingers in me, so I told him I wasn’t scared of Creepin’ Dan because the Lord was my shepherd, and I started hollerin’ for Momma, and he clasped his hand over my mouth so tight that I tasted the dirt on his palm. But Momma came running up onto the porch a few seconds later, and Uncle Sonny took his hand back quicker than summer lightning.’

‘Did you tell your momma what he’d done?’

‘No, ’cause she’d have grabbed Daddy’s shotgun and shot him down dead.’

 

In mid-July I flew to New York before returning to Berkeley. By then, my face had tanned to the colour of cinnamon, and I was covered everywhere with little scabs where I’d scratched my 231mosquito bites. I’d also clipped my hair real short in an effort to stay cool. On first seeing me, my father said I looked like a porcupine and smelled like one, too, which gave him the bright, mischievous laugh that always made me think he must have been a terror when he was young.

Over that first blessed week in New York, Dad’s air conditioning seemed like the most important invention of all time, and I stayed up late with him every night, rejoicing in all that chilly air, hugging my sweater around me, telling him about Belle and the other good people I’d met. I realised while answering his questions that the songs their ancestors had brought with them from Scotland, Ireland and northern England seemed a noble heritage. And that transcribing their lyrics and melodies had become a great responsibility.

My plans were to go back to Berkeley in early September, when I’d start teaching music theory to undergraduates. I was also going to study with a fluent speaker of Ticuna – one of the indigenous languages of Brazil – whom Dickson had found for me. Her name was Líria Conti, and she was a graduate student in genetics at Stanford. Líria had spent the first eight years of her life in Amazonia, in her mother’s village, but her father was of Italian heritage, and he’d brought her and her mother to Manaus when Líria was nine. In January, she was returning to her mother’s village for a few months. I’d already spoken to her twice, and she’d agreed to find me a place to live among her kin.

A few days after my arrival, Dad said he’d invited a special guest over for dinner – ‘A Sephardic Jew like me,’ he said.

‘You’re not trying to set me up with someone, are you?’ I asked. ‘Because I spent a month fending off a horny old professor who wears bowties and talks like he’s in a Southern novel.’

‘What a suspicious mind you’ve got!’ Dad said, feigning 232irritation. ‘It’s just somebody I thought you’d like. Besides, he’s over thirty – way too mature and gentlemanly for a little Bunny Rabbit like you,’ he said dismissively.

For supper, my father was making his mother’s couscous with eggplant, carrot and cilantro. As a starter, we were having her zucchini-and-parmesan fritters.

Dad had immigrated to America in 1937, when he was twenty-four years old, carrying only two books with him, and one of them was a handwritten collection of his mother’s recipes. The other was Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, a gift from his French-speaking father. For years, Dad slept with those two books under his pillow, though he kept them now in his safety deposit box.

His parents’ strategy was to get their children to America before the Nazis invaded Greece – which seemed a certainty to them – but they’d only managed to save up enough money to send Dad – their eldest – to safety. His younger sister, Tamara, ended up in Auschwitz and his baby brother, Ari, was shot by the Nazis or Greek police while trying to escape across the border to Turkey near the town of Orestiada.

I recognised our guest the moment I opened the door to his knocks. ‘Oh, my God,’ I said. ‘It’s you.’

Benjamin the tailor took in a quick intake of breath and grimaced. He was dressed like Jay Gatsby, in a pale-pink linen suit, a cream-coloured shirt and a mother-of-pearl bolo tie that I’d later discover to be a representation of the Navajo sun god. In his right hand he carried a showy bouquet of violet-coloured tulips and in his left he secured a shopping bag printed with the name Cagney’s Sporting Goods in big black letters.

‘Didn’t I … didn’t I meet you a few months ago … at the Bosphorus?’ he stammered.

‘Yes, that was me,’ I told him.233

‘You look different.’

‘Because I cut my hair, and I’m all tan.’

‘I don’t understand. Do you live here, in this apartment?’

I nodded. ‘I grew up here. My dad still lives here. I’m visiting him. Did he invite you over?’

Benjamin heaved a sigh. ‘Is your father … is he Maurice Sasportes?’

His reticent, uneasy tone made it clear that he was hoping I’d say that he’d come to the wrong apartment, leaving him free to turn and run back down the stairs. But it was too late to lie. ‘Yes, that’s my dad,’ I said.

‘He and I met the other day,’ Benjamin said. ‘He invited me to dinner. But maybe it would be better if I … you know … if I left.’

Radley was standing next to me, and he was panting as if he’d just run a marathon, since guests – particularly men – put him in a frenzy. I leaned down, grabbed the rhinestone-studded collar I’d brought him from Asheville and told him to shush.

‘That you, Benjamin?’ Dad shouted from the kitchen.

Our guest didn’t reply. He stared at me and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘Yes, it’s him!’ I called back, since my father might come in at any moment and see us.

‘Bring him in here, Tessa!’ Dad called out.

Radley started barking since he wasn’t getting what he wanted. Benjamin squatted down and petted his ears and muzzle, telling him that he was very handsome, which set the mutt moaning and licking at the air in an effort to get a taste of the man’s face.

‘You’d think he was starved for affection, but my father spoils him rotten,’ I said.

‘What’s his name?’ Benjamin asked, standing back up, so I said, ‘Radley,’ which made him squint and ask in surprised tone, ‘Like Boo Radley?’234

My mind did a happy little hop; it seemed that we’d at least be able to talk about books. ‘Yes, my dad loved To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I told him.

I picked up Radley and carried him to his mat in my father’s bedroom. After I’d closed the door behind me, I steered Benjamin into the kitchen. My father had his pipe clamped in his mouth, though he never smoked anymore – at least not in front of me. He beamed at our guest as if he were Mozart, then held up his hands, which were covered in shredded zucchini, took out his pipe and said, ‘I can’t hug you; I’d soil that gorgeous suit.’

I took the tulips from Benjamin with my thanks and, while I was fetching a vase, Dad said, ‘Tessa, honey, this is Benjamin Rosenfeld Zarco – he’s the man we saw holding the sign on the march, the one about Holocaust survivors.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I recognised him.’

‘Wow, what a memory you’ve got!’ To our guest, my father said, ‘I should tell you that my daughter is an extraterrestrial!’

Benjamin did his best to smile. ‘Please just call me Benni. Nobody calls me Benjamin but the mailman.’

While I filled a vase with water, Radley started barking, which set off Mr Cupcake one floor above ours. Dad rushed to his bedroom, opened the door and shouted in Ladino, ‘Kaya la boka!’ – shut up – and though Radley obeyed him, Mr Cupcake didn’t. His shrill barking always drove Dad into a homicidal fury, so he phoned up to his owner, Daniela, but she didn’t answer. On returning to the kitchen, he shook his fists up toward the ceiling and said, ‘One day, I’m going to strangle that little monster!’ In a calmer voice, he said to Benni, ‘My friends call me Morrie.’

Benni handed him the Cagney’s Sporting Goods bag. Inside was a bottle of ouzo.

‘Oooh, I wish my Grandma Vita were here – she lived on ouzo! 235Thank you, Benni. We’ll have some after dinner.’ Dad handed the bottle to me. ‘Do me a favour, Tessa – show our guest around the apartment. And offer him something to drink. And then take Daniela’s spare key from under the phone book in the hallway and go upstairs and poison Mr Cupcake with one of my chocolate bars.’ He turned to our guest. ‘I’ve got some single-malt whiskey. And a bottle of pretty good red wine.’

Dad shooed us off with the wild hand motions he uses when he’s cooking.

Benni sat in the old armchair I suggested for him, with his hands between his legs. I opened Dad’s liquor cabinet. ‘What’ll it be?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘I’ll have what you have,’ so I told him that in the summer I generally had a gin and tonic, and he said, ‘That’s perfect.’

I excused myself to get glasses, ice and tonic water from the kitchen. Where did you meet him? I mouthed at Dad, who was frying his fritters.

He took out his pipe just long enough to whisper irritably, ‘Can’t you see I’m cooking?’

Benni had taken off his suit coat by the time I returned. He sipped his drink with both hands, afraid to spill it – like a schoolboy who’d been punished too many times. I sat on Dad’s old velvet sofa. When he glanced down, I saw that the skin of his eyelids was slightly darker than the rest of his face, so that his eyes looked bruised.

By then, Mr Cupcake had given up barking, so I didn’t have to go upstairs to yell at him.

After I sat down on the sofa, I told Benjamin he could smoke if he wanted. While he lit his cigarette, I noticed how strong his hands were, which reminded me of his profession.

‘So what kind of clothing do you like best to make?’ I asked.236

Benni thought that over. ‘Vests,’ he said.

‘Why vests?’

‘There’s a lot of hidden detail that goes into a vest. It looks simple, but it’s like … it’s like making something really complex … like stitching together a mystery.’

The Tailor Who Stitched Mysteries, I thought, as if it were the title of an opera.

‘Where did you learn to sew?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘I was an apprentice in a town near Łódź – that’s in Poland,’ so I said, ‘I know where it is. Are you from that area of the country?’ and he said, ‘No, I’m not.’

I waited to hear where he was born and raised, but he turned to the side and took a long, pensive drag on his cigarette.

‘Nu, yuhr not going to tell us vare yuhr from?’ I asked with a Yiddish accent, hoping to make him laugh.

He smiled, but just to be friendly. ‘I’m from Warsaw,’ he said, and I told him, ‘I’m sorry I was so rude to you the first time we met,’ and he said, ‘You weren’t rude,’ but he shook his head too definitively for me to believe.

‘No, I was,’ I said.

Benni took a slow sip of his drink, and then another. I pulled a few threads out of the green silk pillows – they always had loose threads because of Radley’s sharp nails. As the silence closed in around us, I decided that our conversation might proceed more smoothly if I were tipsy, so I downed my drink quickly and poured myself another.

He asked if he could look through my father’s bookshelves, and while he was glancing across titles, I chose an album by Patsy Cline to put on the record player. After the first clippity-cloppity verse of ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’, Benni turned and asked me in a 237concerned voice if my father really wanted to poison the dog who lived in the flat above ours.

I laughed. ‘No, he loves Mr Cupcake! Whenever Daniela has to go away – that’s his owner – Dad takes care of him. They’re friends. It’s just my father’s sense of humour.’

Benni considered that while nodding, then asked who was singing. I ended Patsy Cline’s short biography with her plane crash.

‘Gosh, it’s awful that she died so young,’ he said, and I noticed then that he’d grown pale.

To change the mood, I suggested taking him on a tour of the apartment. On reaching my room, Benni noticed my flute on my pillow. ‘Your dad said you’re a great musician. Would you play something?’

I noticed then that Benni’s hands were shaking. A moment later, he hid them behind his back. His nervousness moved me. ‘You want to hear something?’ I asked.

‘Yes, please. I love the flute. It always makes me think of Shakespeare in Yiddish.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘My cousin Shelly was Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was little, and my parents were so proud of him! There must have been a lot of flute music in it, because that’s mostly what I remember.’

His childhood sounded like it had been filled with theatre and opera, which turned out to be wrong, but it intrigued me at the time. I closed the door to muffle the record playing in the living room and considered wowing him with Bach, but I thought a bit of swing might help us relax, so I played the first few phrases of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’.

‘That was great!’ he said. ‘Irving Berlin, right?’238

‘Absolutely. Do you like him?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Sure, who doesn’t! I met him once, you know,’ and I asked him when.

‘He came into my shop about ten years ago. He bought one of my ties – red-and-brown paisley. No one was making paisley ties at the time, but I’d made a few just for the hell of it.’

‘Good for you!’ I exclaimed; an immigrant tailor who liked Irving Berlin and who made things just for the hell of it seemed like someone who could fit in well with my dad’s group of oddballs.

From Benni’s concentrated look, I expected him to tell me something meaningful about ties or tailoring in general, but he looked out the window.

I picked up my drink and stared at his profile, and after a while, he looked over at me curiously, and our thoughts seemed to come together in the air between us, and mine were, What I need to tell you is that I thought you were very brave to hold up your sign, and I wanted to talk to you the moment I saw you on the television news, and his were, I was just doing what I had to do – it wasn’t anything special.

Benni smiled as though to reassure me. We seemed like two little kids standing at the edge of a great ocean, afraid to enter the water. I noticed a slight tremor in his hands again.

‘Do you play an instrument?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘No, but my grandmother does,’ so I asked, ‘Was she the woman I saw you with at the march?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘What instrument does she play?’ and he said, ‘The piano. In fact, she used to teach piano. In Poland. And for a few years after I brought her here.’

‘When did you bring her here?’

‘In 1956, after I started earning decent money.’

Benni looked around the room, then stepped to the wall opposite my bed to study a watercolour of red roses sitting in a transparent vase. I liked the way he leaned forward with his 239hands joined behind his back. He looked like a conductor reading a score.

‘I think the refraction is done really well,’ I said.

‘Refraction?’

‘The sunlight is refracted by the water and makes the stems look … displaced.’

‘Oh, I understand,’ he said.

After he studied the watercolour again, he gazed down and smiled – though it seemed more like an admission of despair. It was my first experience of what I’d come to call the smile.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, and he said, ‘A memory, it snuck up on me. But it’s no big deal.’

‘A memory of flowers?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Of a person I used to know. When I was small. It means nothing.’

Or maybe it means everything, I thought, since I’d already begun to suspect by then that he tended to conceal what was most important to him.

‘A relative?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I was reminded of … well, my mother.’ I was sure he’d say more, but he decided on a diversionary tactic. ‘You know, when I was a boy, I once saw a man and his donkey share an apple. The man took a bite, then the donkey. And so on. Until the apple was finished.’

‘They must have been close,’ I said, hoping he’d laugh, but I only confused him and he asked who I meant.

‘The man and the donkey,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s not so different from what I thought. But you may find this strange … I considered that the donkey might have once been a person. The man’s father or grandfather. They seemed to understand each other very well.’240

‘That sounds reasonable enough to me,’ I said.

‘Does it?’ he asked, and I had the feeling that he was testing me.

By then, the gin had started to make me lightheaded, so I sat on my bed and put my pillow over my lap, which seemed like the right move, because it permitted me to think I was still a little girl and didn’t have any responsibility for the way this conversation meandered.

‘Lots of stranger things have happened than a man turning into a donkey,’ I told him, and he asked, ‘Like what?’ and I replied, ‘Like … like every Passover, Moses parts the Red Sea.’ I stepped my fingers through the air. ‘And you and I, we follow right behind him as if it’s the most reasonable thing in the world.’

‘That’s true enough,’ he said, and he smiled for real.

He looked extraordinarily handsome to me at that instant, and while studying his face, I felt Belle placing her hands in mine and telling me that I had to listen closely to the peculiar things people told me when I interviewed them – because they were letting me know who they’d dare to be if they could be entirely themselves. And asking me to let them become that person.

‘Every conversation is an opportunity to help someone be the person they want to be,’ she’d told me.

Benni, it’s fine with me if you believe that men and women can change into animals, I told him inside my head, but what I actually said was, ‘Thank you for holding up your sign at the rally. It was exactly what needed to be said.’

‘I hope so. But you know, a few days later, a Hasidic old man recognised me on Second Avenue. He told me that what I was doing against the war was wrong because we were guests in America, and we had to agree with the president, and since then I’ve been thinking that maybe … maybe he had a point.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ I said, and he replied, ‘How can you be so sure?’ 241so I said, ‘First of all, everyone is a guest in America except for the Indians. And second of all—’

‘That’s just what my friend George says!’ Benni cut in excitedly. ‘He’s a Navajo.’

‘Well, George is right. And Benni, it’s not gratitude to keep quiet about injustice. Gratitude is something completely different.’

‘But the Hasidic man was worried about the Jews. That we could be killed here. I felt guilty that I’d made him feel more … vulnerable.’

‘So guilty that you’d prefer to be invisible?’

‘No, I guess not, but being invisible could be a good thing under certain circumstances.’ The ash on his cigarette was curling, and he cupped his hand under it and asked me where he could stub it out, so I fetched him my clam shell. We smiled at each other awkwardly after he took a last, greedy drag, and I realised we still hadn’t stepped into the ocean. Shortly after that, something out the window caught his attention and he laughed fondly, and when I looked, I saw three little girls playing jump rope.

In profile, he looked older. And quite distinguished – as if he were an aristocrat. And an irrational possibility gripped me: Maybe his eyes became bruised while he was in the ghetto. Because he’d seen too much.

‘Can we begin again?’ I asked, and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I replied, ‘We got off to a bad start. And it was my fault.’

Benni’s eyes teared up. What I then did would – in years to come – remind me of my dreams of floating, because I did something that I’d never normally do, and with perfect ease: I stepped up to him and caressed his cheek.

Ever since that evening, I have speculated many times about how I could have done something I’d never normally do, and I always come back to the possibility that he was speaking to me at a deep, 242nonverbal level with his odd smile and quivering hands – in the place inside us where we live out the great myths of recognition and homecoming and kinship.

Benni took my hand away from his cheek and brought it to his lips and kissed the tips of my fingers, which no one had ever done before, and which seemed like a gesture out of a foreign film, and while I was looking into his bruised-looking eyes and considering what he was thinking, I stumbled into the silence we made together, and I didn’t try to end it because it made me feel as if I’d stopped running in a race that had already gone on far too long.

Can a necessity become obvious in a single instant? Because for the first time in my life, I realised I could only live with a man who would permit me to get to know him without words.

Benni’s quivering silence … I said that phrase to myself as if it were the start of a poem, and it made me think that his love, if he ever gave it to me, would come from a world he kept hidden from everyone else. And yet, the coarseness of his hand around mine soon made me shiver, because it reminded me that he was a man and I was a woman.

He let my hand go and studied the girls jumping rope. I understood that it was his way of not having to talk about what had just taken place between us. When he turned back to me, he said, ‘I spent too much time alone when I was a boy.’ He spoke as if he’d wanted to confess that to me for some time.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said.

‘Don’t be. I only mentioned it because touching isn’t always easy for me. I’m not very Jewish in that way.’

‘Not very Jewish?’ I asked, and he said, ‘The Jews in New York … They’re often playful with each other – physically. I lost that back in Poland.’

‘Maybe you could get it back,’ I suggested, but he said, ‘I don’t 243want it back,’ and when I asked why, he said, ‘When I’m touching someone else, I sometimes think I know what that other person would like to say or do if no one was watching – or if they dared. And it doesn’t always seem so nice. It’s an illusion, I know that – or a kind of invention. But I don’t always like it.’

‘Now that we’ve touched,’ I said, ‘have you learned what I’d want to say or do if no one was watching?’

‘No, I didn’t feel anything like that with you,’ he replied, ‘Maybe I was too … surprised that you reached up to my cheek.’

‘Well, when you find out, let me know.’

Benni nodded, and he might have spoken as well, but my father shouted, ‘Where the hell are you two?’

I opened my door and called out, ‘In my room.’

‘Well, dinner is ready, so get yourselves back here!’

‘Do you and your father always shout?’ Benni asked.

I laughed. ‘Yeah, I guess we do. It’s part of our comedy routine.’

I didn’t intend to say more about my dad, but as I gestured for Benni to precede me through the doorway, I said, ‘Dad saved me after my mother abandoned us. And my little sister, too – Evie. He spent years taking care of us – cooking, doing the laundry, getting us ready for school …’

I didn’t know why I confessed that. I guess I wanted Benni to know how good a man my father was. And that I wasn’t always mean and insensitive.

Benni took my hand and gripped it hard, and while he was staring at me, his magnificent dark eyes seemed a miracle of honesty, because they told me exactly what he wanted, and he leaned toward me and kissed me, and I found myself kissing him back, and the taste in his mouth of tobacco, tonic water and something peppery I would later identify as uniquely Benni made me feel as if I were easing outside my body and floating above us and looking down at 244a young woman who had no idea where she was headed but who wanted to get there quickly.

 

While Dad served us his fritters, he explained to me that he’d visited Fourth Street Guitars two weeks earlier to ask if they knew anyone who repaired accordions – he was considering getting his fixed – and when he returned outside, Benni was standing next to the door, studying a poster for an Andrés Segovia concert that had been taped to the window.

‘I invited him for coffee, and we hit it off, and that was that,’ Dad said. He raised a finger of warning. ‘Benni, please don’t let me forget to loan you my Segovia album.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ Benni said.

Dad tilted his head like he does when he’s about to say something important and spoke one of his mother’s sayings in Ladino: ‘Necesario no tiene nada a ver com los djestos de l’amistad.’

‘My family was taken from me before I could learn Ladino well,’ Benni said apologetically.

‘Necessary has nothing to do with acts of friendship,’ I translated.

After I’d served the wine, we got onto the subject of the Vietnam War, and Benni told us that for a long time he’d refused to watch the news because he didn’t want to believe that America had such a shameful foreign policy, but when he found out how our bombers were dropping napalm on the Vietnamese, he started writing letters to Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm, and to President Johnson, telling them that they were acting immorally.

‘Ever get any replies?’ I asked.

‘No. But I think I should have asked a friend to correct my English in my letters. Everyone who read them probably thought I was a nutcase.’

‘No, it’s typical,’ Dad sneered, and in an eager, conspiratorial 245voice, he added, ‘Benni, you know what, the next time you chain yourself to the induction centre, I’m going with you!’

‘That would be really good,’ Benni replied gratefully. ‘Because I get a little scared before I go. Though once I’m there, I’m okay.’

‘Dad, that plan sounds really good, but just one question,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to bail you two out of jail? Because we both know Radley is the world’s smartest dachshund, but he isn’t going to be able to sign any documents.’

‘Teresa, the police won’t arrest us,’ Benni said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘The cop who put handcuffs on me told me it would be bad publicity – for the mayor and even for President Johnson. And Americans are nuts for favourable publicity.’

Dad nodded his agreement, but I wasn’t so sure.

‘The only problem I really ever had,’ Benni said, ‘is that some customers who saw me on the news, or who heard about what I’d done … They don’t want me making their clothes anymore.’

‘You see, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s not as safe as you think.’

‘Listen, baby,’ he said, ‘how about you stop worrying and pour our guest more wine.’

After I topped up his glass, and Dad’s too, I asked Benni, ‘What exactly did the police do when they grabbed you at the induction centre?’

He stabbed a piece of fritter with his fork. ‘They yelled at me as if I were a kid that they wanted to … I forget the word.’

‘Bully,’ I suggested, and he said, ‘No, a bigger word,’ so I said, ‘Intimidate.’

‘Not that either,’ he told me, ‘but it’s almost right. Anyhow, a cop named Bianchi was talking rudely to me, so I said, “Look, Mr Policeman, please don’t bother trying to scare me. I survived the Nazis and the Polish anti-Semites, and even when you’re being nasty you’re not anywhere close to how nasty they were, and you’re 246probably an Italian-American, which is almost like being Jewish – if you don’t mind my saying so – and you aren’t allowed to threaten me with a bullet in the head or a death camp, or even a German Shepherd, so I’m very sorry but you’re wasting your time.”’

Benni’s Yiddish rhythms and immigrant politeness made Dad laugh so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. As for me, our guest’s run-on sentences seemed a revelation.

When Dad got up to fetch the couscous, Benni looked over at me, and it was obvious again what he wanted, which set my heart drumming, and I laughed to myself because I’d thought at first that he looked like a raccoon and now I found him extraordinarily handsome.

After dessert and coffee, Dad handed Benni his Andrés Segovia album and suggested that I walk our guest home. After he kissed Benni goodbye – on both cheeks, in proper Sephardic fashion – he whispered something to me that touched me because it was his way of saying that I’d grown all the way up: ‘You don’t have to come home tonight. I won’t worry.’

At that moment, I didn’t think I’d ever love anyone as much as I loved my father.

Benni stopped as we walked down the staircase so he could wipe his forehead with a pink handkerchief he pulled from his breast pocket. He was dripping with sweat, and he looked really pale, too. ‘I need a minute,’ he said.

He sat down on the stairs, so I joined him. ‘Did you drink too much wine?’ I asked.

‘No, it happens occasionally,’ he said. ‘My cousin Shelly says I got cracked in Poland.’ He showed me a disheartened look. ‘Sometimes I leak.’

‘What do you leak?’

‘I’m not sure – I guess everything I can’t put into words.’247

I loosened his tie, and dabbed the sweat from his top lip and chin with his handkerchief, and I held his hand. He asked me about my studies, and I told him about Appalachia, and I sang him a ballad about a race horse that Belle had learned when she was a little girl, which made him close his eyes, and after a while he started breathing more easily.

‘I like you singing to me,’ he told me after I’d helped him back up. ‘It’s like being blessed.’

At his apartment, we tiptoed around and whispered because his grandmother, Ewa, was asleep. He turned off his air conditioner on stepping inside his bedroom because he said it always gave him a cold if he left it on at night.

I tried not to make any noise while he was fucking me, and so did he, but the only way we could do it was to kiss while he was thrusting into me, so that’s what we did, and after a while, I couldn’t get enough air – just like him a little while earlier – and we had to stop.

I began sobbing because I’d spoiled everything, and I was too young to realise that wanting another person so badly could play havoc with your emotions, and his cock was throbbing so hard that it must have been painful, but he scoffed and said, ‘It’s okay, my putz has his needs, and I have mine, and sometimes we agree to disagree,’ which made me laugh with relief. After he drank a glass of seltzer and smoked a cigarette, he spooned up behind me and told me he was sorry if he’d hurt me. ‘It’s just that you make me crazy excited,’ he confessed.

I told him that he hadn’t hurt me at all, but that I’d never felt as naked as I did with him and it frightened me.

We woke at dawn, and we made love as if we’d been hibernating in frozen earth all winter, and he reached someplace so deep inside me that I sobbed afterward, and I had to keep reassuring him that 248I was all right. He held me tight, and he smelled like the Greek yeast cake my dad made for Hanukkah, which seemed a favourable sign, and he became the first man whose kisses after lovemaking didn’t seem an attempt to trap me or convince me to do something I wasn’t ready to do.

While drinking coffee with him that morning, I felt purged of a burden, though I wasn’t sure what it was. In a dream I had a week or so later, however, I imagined Benni floating with me and Belle over a wall separating us from a turbulent sea, and all three of us were laughing, and I awoke feeling as if I were living in an enchanted, shimmering world. Late that morning, I called Belle and told her the dream, and she said that the wall had been around what she called my ascendant heart, which always beats to the rhythm of the great waters, and that it was a very good sign that Benni was floating with the two of us, and she bet that he had dreamed something like that too, because, she said, ‘Important dreams come in pairs to people like you and Benni.’

‘What do you mean, like me and Benni?’

‘The way you speak of him, child – I think he’s the man you’ve been looking for!’

That evening, when I asked Benni if he remembered having floated with me in any dreams, he shrugged and said he didn’t, but that in any case he hardly ever remembered them.

There was a catch in his tone – an apologetic hesitance – that made me doubt his assertion, but I let it go; I was learning not to trespass on territories of his heart that he preferred to keep secret. A couple of mornings later, Benni and I took a shower together after making love, and while I dried off he walked naked and dripping into the kitchen and made us coffee – which for him was an exacting and important ritual – and we sat at his dining table over two steaming New York Mets mugs. He closed those bruised 249eyes of his after each sip, and when I commented that I never saw anyone seem to take such joy from coffee, he told me that it was essential to his sense of well-being, and smoking, too, and drinking wine and beer, and shaving – and having sex, of course – since he had spent years thinking that he would never become an adult and be able to do the things that only grown-ups could do.

In a whisper, he said, ‘You know, Tessa, for twenty years now, I have thought I’ll wake up one day and realise I’m still in Warsaw, and I’ve never stopped being a kid, and I’m still waiting for my parents to come home. And I’ll understand that all my adult life has been a dream.’

‘Do you think of your parents often?’ I asked.

He shook a cigarette from his pack and stuck it in his lips but didn’t light it. He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa, but I don’t know what often means for dead parents.’

He lit his cigarette with his head at an angle, like he always does, and turned away from me.

‘Have I offended you?’ I asked, near tears. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

He shook his head. ‘No, not at all. I’m very sorry if I made you think that.’

His voice – overly reassuring – made me wonder if there were places in him that I’d never be permitted to see. Still, it pleased me to be able to fantasise about him as a little boy wishing he was old enough to shave and drink coffee and smoke.

A little later, he said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I nearly always remember that my parents are dead when something good happens. And I don’t like it, because it spoils things. So I get angry at them, and I want them to go away, though I know it’s not fair.’

‘It seems fair to want to be free of sadness,’ I said.

‘Is it? I think maybe I owe them my sadness and every other feeling I could ever have.’250

He stubbed out his cigarette and finished his coffee. My cup was still nearly full, so I lifted it to his lips for him to sip, and after he did, his hands gripped mine. They were chilled and moist, and when I pointed that out, he said, ‘It happens when I start leaking.’

After I kissed him, he added, ‘Even now, after making love with you, I’m not sure it really happened. I think that maybe this …’ He waved his arm to indicate everything around us. ‘Maybe all I see and hear is an illusion that has been put in my head to protect me from the truth.’

‘And what’s the truth?’

‘That’s just it, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s good.’

I knew I’d have to return to Berkeley in late August, but picturing my goodbye to Benni made me want to run and hide. Why did I have to fall in love now?

I confessed my distress to him one day while we were strolling through Washington Square Park, but he didn’t ask me to stay, as I’d expected. Instead, he reminded me that if I didn’t go back to school, I’d lose my place in my graduate programme.

‘Don’t you think I know that?’ I snapped.

During the quarrel I then started with him, I realised I wanted him to tell me he wouldn’t allow me to go. I didn’t confess that to him, however. Instead, I insisted that he was pushing me away. I realised I was being dishonest, but I wasn’t yet ready to admit the depth of my ambivalence and fear.

By then, I’d told Benni about how I’d pictured my mother laughing at me whenever I was most upset, so he said, ‘Tessa, let me tell you, I know something about what your friend Belle would call a haunting, and I’m pretty sure that your mother is going to start ridiculing you again if you don’t go – and all the time. Because 251you won’t be doing what you need to do. And maybe you’ll even begin to hate me. And that would ruin everything between us.’

 

That night, after making love, I realised that he was right not to ask me to stay with him. I told him that it was a new experience for me to be with a man who respected my independence, and I apologised for provoking an argument with him in the park, and he enfolded me in his arms by way of reply, and his warm, protective strength reassured me that everything would be okay.

When I woke up at just after eight, he’d already left for work, which was a disappointment. But Ewa had made coffee and it smelled heavenly. She was seated on Benni’s rumpled, brick-coloured sofa, and seeing her smile at me made me feel as if I were about to join her on a grand adventure. As usual, Ewa had surrounded herself with the big, colourful silk pillows Benni had sewn for her, and she was reading a novel in Polish that she’d taken out from the 42nd Street library. She and I had almost always conversed through Benni in the past, since her English was so hesitant, though sometimes she had remained in her room on my visits and never come out. Benni had assured me that it wasn’t because she didn’t like me, it was simply that her health wasn’t so good – she had back and hip problems and high blood pressure – and she had to pace herself. This morning, however, we sat together, and she ended up telling me about her farmhouse in Poland, and how Benni used to catch salamanders at her pond, and how once he’d even brought one inside and lost it, and it took them half a day to find it because it had hidden below her clunky old iron stove. We conversed together like old friends, and after I re-filled her coffee cup, she took my hand and pressed her lips to my palm, just like her grandson, and the resemblance between 252the two of them made me cry, and without knowing why, I told her that I was in love with Benni.

‘I know,’ she said with a smile of complicity. And she whispered with great delight, ‘He also love you.’ She nodded with certainty. ‘I see it.’

After I dressed, she asked me to join her at her upright piano, and she showed me an arrangement of ‘Air on the G string’ for piano and violin, and when she smiled at me, her sharp brown eyes seemed full of sweet-natured mischief, and she said, ‘You play violin part with your flute.’ There was so much eager hope in her voice – and she made such an effort to speak English – that I couldn’t disappoint her.

Her hands stopped shaking the moment they touched the keyboard, and her playing was so calm and trusting that I suddenly realised what it was like to make music with someone who has nothing left to prove.

That afternoon, I took Ewa out for lunch at Arezzo, and she ate her pizza slices with a knife and fork – very dignified – and it seemed obvious then that Benni’s aristocratic table manners – the elegant way he held a cup, for instance – had come through her.

Late that evening, before she went to bed, she summoned me away from Benni and the jazz record we were listening to, and asked me into her room. With nervous gestures, she handed me a piece of bluish note paper on which she’d written, Please always take good care of my Benni.

‘Of course, I will,’ I said, and she held her finger to our lips so it would be our secret, which made me tingle, and I embraced her hard. She kissed me on both my cheeks, which kept me up that night long after Benni was asleep, because I had never known my father’s mother and this seemed like a second chance for me.253

On the plane out to Berkeley, however, it occurred to me – with dread spreading through me – that Ewa’s note might have been meant as a request for me to stay in New York.

 

I slept only a few hours a night over my first week in California. Often, I’d see my mother and Evie in my dreams, and once, after I awoke, I was sure that they’d been quarrelling in my living room, and that Mom had a concealed knife behind her back and was planning on murdering my sister. What’s more, I realised it wasn’t the first time I’d had that dream.

I managed to reach Evie late that morning and she assured me that she was fine, but the feeling that she was in dire peril remained with me for days afterward.

It was while I was still under the menacing spell of that dream that I questioned Benni about whether Ewa seemed angry at me for going back to Berkeley.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, and he assured me that she thought I was the cat’s whispers, which he knew was an error but which he regarded as far more poetic and amusing than the original version.

One afternoon, I called him on a whim, but I couldn’t reach him at home or at work. An hour later, I tried again and Ewa answered this time, and she managed to explain to me in her broken English that he’d been invited to a friend’s house for dinner.

I went out to my little garden, and while sniffing at the pink roses my landlord had planted, I surprised myself by picturing Benni with a beautiful young woman.

Thankfully, Ewa had sensed that I’d been upset and had told Benni. He called me at just after midnight, New York time, and he apologised for not telling me about the dinner. He said that the friend he’d been dining with was a professor of Jewish mythology and mysticism. ‘He came into my shop the other day, and he 254wanted me to make him a suit, and we got to talking … Anyhow, he invited me over tonight.’

I was so relieved – and ashamed of my fantasies – that it took me a moment to ask him if the food was any good.

‘Not so hot,’ he replied. ‘But it didn’t matter.’ In an excited voice, he said, ‘Hey, Tessa, did you know that the kabbalists wrote about angels and devils?’

‘No.’

‘The professor, he gave me a book by Gershom Scholem. He writes about all this mystical stuff. You know, some of the kabbalists even believed in a form of reincarnation. So maybe it’s not crazy for me to think that I was here before.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Well, there are times …’ he began hesitantly, ‘when I seem to remember things – from long ago, before I was born. Vague images – places I used to live. I see Alexandria a lot. I think I used to live there and work in the big library, though I wasn’t anybody important. I used to keep the place tidy.’ He laughed heartily. ‘I was just a janitor. But being around all those scrolls … Wow!’

His childlike enthusiasm made me want to embrace him. And yet a moment later, sadness slipped between us, and it prompted me to say something that I’d hoped to keep secret. ‘Benni, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how longer I can stay away from you and continue my studies.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, and I said, ‘Sometimes I get worried about what could happen to the two of us,’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry I worried you – I’ll make sure to call you every evening,’ and I said, ‘It’s not that. It’s that I don’t know what I’m doing here.’

‘You’re getting your degree,’ he said. ‘You’re doing what you want.’

‘What I want is to come back to New York,’ I told him.255

‘No, it’s too big a risk. You have to do what you were meant to do, or else … or your soul will get all confused, and you’ll grow resentful. And you’ll regret it all your life. I know it.’

I confessed then that I’d pictured him with a young woman. He thickened his Yiddish accent and replied, ‘Zere vas vonce a squirrel who ate nossing but peanuts, efen ven he vas offered big valnuts and hazelnuts.’

‘Is this another one of your cousin Shelly’s jokes?’ I asked in a sinking tone.

‘Kind of. But I’m twisting it around. Anyway, ze squirrel’s family thought he vas meshugge. And his kids, wow, did zey make fun of him! Once, he efen turned down ze most beautiful mandelbrot in ze vorld. A mandelbrot more beautiful zan Elizabeth Taylor, and more sexy zan Marilyn Monroe.’

‘A sexy mandelbrot?’

‘Vy not?! You got somezing against cake, Miss Ethnomusicologist? Anyway, ze little squirrel, he just kept eating peanuts. And ven his brothers and sisters asked him vy, he said, “Vy should I give up vot I love for vot I don’t?”’

I wanted to laugh, but I also knew his explanation was too glib. ‘Look, Benni, how do you know you von’t start looking for peanuts elsewhere?’ I asked. ‘You might decide that a piece of mandelbrot would taste pretty damn good after a supper alone.’

‘Teresa, I’m pretty certain you missed the point of the story,’ he said with what he hoped was an amusing groan.

‘Maybe. But you’re sure to get angry at me sometimes – for being so far away.’

‘For better or worse, the Nazis … they taught me how to wait. I’m world class at it, in fact. All my customers, they say I could win Olympic gold.’

*

256A few weeks later, when I began studying Ticuna with Líria, my daydreams about escaping to the Tropics returned to me, and my fears about Benni finding another woman eased off, especially after he flew out to San Francisco and stayed with me for a week in mid-October. One night while he was sleeping, I traced on his back with my fingertip, I love you, and everything is going to be okay.

Two days after he returned to New York, however, he called at eleven in the evening, and he told me that Ewa had collapsed at home a few hours before, after eating the spaghetti-with-eggplant dinner he’d made, and she’d died on the way to the hospital. When he said in a whisper that he wasn’t sure he could go on without her, I thought, I was wrong, nothing ever works out like it should.

Benni’s voice was dull and hopeless, and I realised that Ewa had asked me to take care of him for the day when he would sound like this – for right now. Maybe she’d learned from her doctors – or had some terrible intuition – that she was nearing the end.

I said I’d fly to New York on the first plane the next morning, but he replied, ‘No, no, no, keep teaching – there’s nothing you can do here,’ but I said, ‘I want to be with you. I can help you.’

‘It’s not necessary,’ he replied, so I reminded him, ‘Necesario no tiene nada a ver com los djestos de l’amistad.’

 

Benni cried most of the first night we spent together, and even though the weather was muggy, he couldn’t get warm, so I piled blankets on top of him and made him drink cup after cup of hot tea. I called my father early the next morning to help me get aspirin and liquids into him, because he refused to do anything to help himself, and he had scheduled the funeral for early that afternoon.

Benni was so exhausted and lost that Dad had to help him dress. He looked handsome in his slate-grey suit and pale-blue shirt, but I wasn’t sure about the crimson tie he chose. ‘Ewa always 257liked bright colours,’ he explained, ‘though she was afraid to wear them herself.’

Benni added a shot of schnapps to his second cup of coffee that morning, and he drizzled in a bit more when he thought I wasn’t looking; he seemed to regard staying sober as a betrayal of all he’d felt for his grandmother – which might have been all right, but it also made him morose and weepy. And he was smoking too much, too. I feared he’d make himself ill.

Out of solidarity with Benni, Dad poured schnapps in his own coffee too, and when I gave him a resentful look, he said, ‘Tessa, it seems there are things you don’t understand yet about men.’

‘I’m not sure I like this men-versus-women way of seeing things,’ I replied.

He lifted the bottle of schnapps. ‘You’re absolutely right. Have a shot.’

I accepted his offer, but the drink only sapped what was left of my flagging energy.

Just before we went out to the limousine that Dad had hired to take us to the cemetery, Ewa’s doctor called to tell us what he’d discovered about her sudden death. Benni didn’t understand the explanation, however, so I took the phone. ‘It appears to have been an aortic aneurism,’ the physician – Dr Martins – told me, and when I explained to Benni, he burst into tears and said, ‘Then it wasn’t the spaghetti with eggplant I made? I’d never have forgiven myself if it was.’

 

Ewa’s funeral was held on Wednesday, October 26th at a Jewish cemetery on Long Island, which seemed odd to me because she’d always worn a tiny silver cross around her neck, and I had assumed that she had converted to Catholicism, probably when she’d understood that the Nazi’s were about to occupy Poland.258

‘No, Ewa wasn’t a Catholic or a Jew or anything else,’ Benni told me as we trudged across the cemetery to the grave. It had showered the evening before and the walkways were muddy. ‘She had no interest in religion. Or even mysticism.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘She thought that I was nuts for reading about reincarnation.’

‘And the cross?’ I asked, and he said, ‘It was a gift from her mother,’ so I asked if her mother was Catholic, and he replied, ‘Yes. But Ewa only believed in Bach and Handel and Mozart, and what they could teach us.’

‘And what can they teach us?’ I asked.

He stopped walking and looked down, examining the mud on his shoes. At length, he said, ‘To be very gentle with one another, because we break very easily.’

I believed that conclusion said more about Benni and the Nazis than Bach or Handel or Mozart, of course, but I accepted it as an important lesson to learn from whatever source we could.

Benni had organised a graveside ceremony, and his cousin Shelly and his wife, Julie, had flown down from Montreal and driven out to the cemetery in a rental car.

After the gaunt young rabbi that Shelly had hired had told us about the selfless love of grandparents, Benni picked up the shovel the cemetery had provided and sprinkled dirt onto the grave, but he didn’t return to me afterward. Instead, he stood by himself, letting his shadow fall over the grave, as if that were how he would try to protect Ewa now. Something about his rigid stance and closed eyes … I grew terrified that her death had ended our chance for a life together.

Right then and there, while studying Benni’s purposeful shadow, I knew I would marry him – that is, if he’d accept a somewhat crazy and conflicted young woman as his wife.

After Shelly and Julie had shovelled dirt onto the casket, it was 259my dad’s turn, and he spoke a Sephardic prayer for the peace of Ewa’s soul, before finally it was my turn. After I sprinkled dirt on Ewa’s casket with my hand – I’d wanted to grip the earth as hard as I could before letting it go – I started to sing. I hadn’t planned to – I just did. And what came out of me was a lullaby that my father had taught me.

Durme, durme, querida hijica

durme sin ansia y dolor

cerra tus lindos ojicos

durme, durme con savor.

Cerra tus lindos ojicos

durme, durme con savor

Sleep, sleep beloved daughter

sleep with no worry or pain

close your beautiful eyes

sleep, sleep restfully.

Close your beautiful little eyes

sleep, sleep restfully

I sang softly and slowly, and after the first couple of lines I became a melody floating above the six of us, and there, in the air, indifferent to the renewed drizzle soaking into the hair and clothes of the woman I’d been a minute before, I also became aware that a deep force had chosen me to sing at that moment – and it seemed a kind of volition that came and went without regard to my preferences, one that couldn’t be summoned or predicted.

Benni came over to me and kissed me, and we walked arm and arm to the limousine. Along the way, he turned to Shelly and Julie 260and said, ‘Come back to my apartment until you have to leave for the airport.’

At the car, my father told us that he would pick up some Turkish food and a couple bottles of good wine. ‘Is that all right, son?’ he asked Benni, and he used Ladino word for son – fíjo – and when Benni embraced my father, I realised that he and Dad and I had become family.

 

That evening, as soon as Benni and I went to bed, he turned toward me and said in a confessional voice, ‘Please, Tessa, don’t be angry with me if I say something you won’t like.’

I closed my book. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

He gazed down shamefully. ‘Ewa wasn’t my grandmother – not by blood, I mean.’

I was too shocked to reply.

‘She hid me in her home near the end of the war – she was the piano teacher,’ he continued.

‘But then why did you tell me she was your grandmother?’ I asked.

‘That’s how I thought of her. And that’s what I told the immigration officials. I had to say that or she wouldn’t have been permitted to stay with me in New York.’

Though the irritation I felt seemed unfair, I accused him of not trusting me enough. I might have explained my feelings further, but he began moaning and pulling at his air. When I embraced him, he said, ‘Ewa and I, we never told anyone because we were so afraid that if someone found out, they’d send her back to Poland!’

 

I stayed in New York for a week, and I never left Benni’s side. He was quiet almost all the time, even after making love, which had previously been the only occasions when he dared to return to 261Poland and tell me of his past. Before I left for Berkeley, I had a presentiment of his death, and I made him promise not to hurt himself. ‘No, I wouldn’t do anything like that – not now,’ he said, as if there were many past times when he had, in fact, considered suicide.

I told him to call me anytime – day or night – and that there was nothing he couldn’t discuss with me, and I almost asked if he would marry me, but his diffidence – in particular, the cool watchfulness in his eyes whenever he spotted me looking at him – gave me to believe that he might turn me down, either because it was the wrong time or maybe even to punish himself.

Benni stopped answering the phone at home, so when I wanted to speak to him, I called him at work. He said that he wouldn’t talk to anyone except me and Shelly and my father.

On my request, Dad checked up on him a couple of times a week, observing Benni from afar as he worked in his tiny shop on First Avenue.

And then, the unexpected intervened …

I missed my period two weeks after returning to Berkeley, in mid-November, and again the next month. After a gynaecologist at the student health clinic confirmed that I was pregnant, I flew back to New York for the weekend. It was only late afternoon when I got home, but Dad opened the door in his pyjamas. He was sweating hard, and his hair was plastered to his forehead. ‘You been dancing with Radley?’ I asked.

‘No, I was playing Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue. But what are you doing here?’

‘Don’t worry – it’s good news,’ I told him.

He helped me out of my coat and took my bag. ‘So, tell me what’s up,’ he prompted.

‘I’m pregnant.’262

He missed the hook while hanging my coat and it dropped to the floor. He squinted at me. ‘Pregnant as in … a baby?’ he questioned as if he were sneaking up on a hoped-for miracle.

‘Do you know another meaning?’ I asked, laughing.

‘Dio Mio!’ he exclaimed, and his jaw dropped open. ‘Thank God I didn’t wake up dead after my heart attack!’ He looked up to heaven and cried out, ‘Un inyéto!’ – a grandchild.

Dad put on a record by Astor Piazzolla, and while he tangoed me around the living room, Radley began chasing around us and Mr Cupcake started barking upstairs, and just like that we were back inside the frenzied New York comedy that had been my childhood.

After Dad had retreated – panting – to his armchair, he asked if Benni knew the good news yet, and when I said he didn’t, he replied, ‘You know what, Bunny Rabbit, invite him over for dinner and tell him here! Get on the phone – quick! I’ll get dressed and pick up some champagne.’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I think Benni and I ought to be alone when I tell him.’

‘How about this – Rad and I will go to the kitchen when you give him the news. We’ll only come out if I hear shouting. Or if Benni faints.’

I was too worried about how Benni would receive my news to understand that Dad was joking. I sat down on the arm of his chair, suddenly in terror. ‘You think he’s going to be upset?’ I asked.

‘Of course not!’ Radley had climbed up on me by then and started licking my face, so Dad circled him in his arms and pulled him back. ‘What a silly Bunny Rabbit you are! Benni is a Holocaust survivor.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Listen, the one thing I had to do for my parents and grandparents, and for everyone else who was murdered, was to have 263kids. I could feel the Jews of Salonika counting on me. It became an obsession. Which wasn’t so good. Because it made me rush into things that I should have taken at a much slower tempo. Andante, andante …! I found out too late that I was a slow movement in a long and gentle sonata, not a big thundering presto.’

‘What things should you have taken slower?’

He snorted. ‘You really want to hear ancient history right now?’

I nodded.

‘Well, I had maybe six good months with your mother. After that, I began to see that she wasn’t the right person for me, and that I wasn’t right for her either.’ He looked at me knowingly and patted my hand. ‘She was young and didn’t know who she was or what she really wanted. And I think that maybe I fooled her into thinking I was someone who was going to give her access to really famous people – which was important to her. I knew some big musicians back then – Herbie Steward, Lester Young, Stan Getz … Anyway, I went ahead and proposed to her, because that’s what she expected. And I got her pregnant one-two-three because that’s what I had to do. We had a good half-year, like I said, and after that the Titanic hit an iceberg!’

‘Was that what you meant when you told me once that a few months can last a lifetime?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. But I should have said that a few months can last three lifetimes – you, me and Evie.’

 

Benni came over that evening for dinner. I made him a really strong gin and tonic, and after he’d taken a sip and complimented me on my new recipe, I took a step back from him and said, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ and his expression grew dark and he took his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and said, ‘I’m not so good with surprises, they usually end up with someone who dies,’ and I said, 264‘But this one is good,’ and he said, ‘It is?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have a baby.’

His eyes opened wide and he raised a hand to his cheek. ‘You’re pregnant?’

‘Yeah, I checked with my doctor to be sure. You’re not angry, are you?’

‘And I’m the father?’ he asked, and I snapped, ‘Of course, you’re the father!’ and my father shouted from the kitchen, where he was making dinner, ‘Teresa, it’s a perfectly reasonable question!’ so I yelled back, ‘Dad, if you don’t keep quiet, you’re going to be in big trouble!’

He turned the blender on, but only at low speed; he was still trying to eavesdrop.

Benni closed his eyes and whispered, ‘Give me a minute,’ and after mouthing what must have been a prayer, he came to me and kneeled down, and he spoke softly in Yiddish into my belly, and then he whispered something else in Ladino that I couldn’t catch, and when he stood up, I asked what he’d said, and he told me that he’d first thanked the baby for choosing the two of us.

‘And the second thing?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I thanked you for falling in love with the nervous raccoon who tried to pick you up outside a Turkish restaurant.’

 

After supper, while Dad was in the kitchen checking on his baked apples, Benni and I agreed to have our wedding right away because I’d have to fly back to Berkeley in two days for my final classes before the Christmas break. But by the time we walked to his apartment, the constriction in my chest made me fear that I was about to have a panic attack, so I asked him if we might put off the wedding for a week or two. ‘Benni, I know I’m being difficult, 265but things are happening so fast. I need to get used to the idea of the baby before I can do anything else.’

‘Sure, it’s not a problem,’ he said, and his smile was genuine.

But when I awakened in the middle of the night, he was seated next to me, his legs crossed, and the light was on, and he was holding a book by Gershom Scholem, and he was weeping.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Everything was so good, and now you don’t want to marry me.’

I sat up and rubbed his back. ‘I do want to marry you. I just need a little time.’

‘Listen, Tessa, I was wrong, I’m not Olympic gold, because I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘We’ll be separated and I’ll never find you again, and the baby won’t have a father, and everything will go wrong!’ He jumped up and threw his book against the wall.

I went to him, but he pushed me away when I tried to hold him.

‘Benni, this isn’t Poland during the war,’ I said. ‘Nothing terrible is going to happen.’

‘Teresa, where we are on the map doesn’t change the laws! Don’t you know that?’

‘What laws?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘The laws that govern things,’ and I said, ‘Benni, what are you talking about?’ and he replied, ‘I’m talking about how things work down here – and maybe in the Upper Realms, too.’

‘Benni, please don’t take this the wrong way,’ I said gently, ‘but I think you’re reading too much kabbalah.’

He gazed at me, and I could see he was about to yell at me, so I held up my hands like he does to imitate a cornered bank robber in a Western, which – thankfully – made him reconsider.

‘I may read too much kabbalah,’ he admitted in a calm and 266friendly tone, ‘but I still want to get married right away. Do I have to beg?’

‘That might help,’ I said playfully, and as he kneeled down to do so, I saw my mother gazing at me inside my mind, hoping I’d say no, so after Benni had asked for me to marry him, I squatted down next to him and said yes, and that one simple word seemed the greatest triumph I’d ever had.

 

The next morning was Saturday, and Benni woke me with lots of popping kisses, dressed in his olive-green suit – my favourite – and his crimson silk tie. He’d combed his hair back with water, which he never did, and it made him look like a Jewish gangster from the 1930s – or a slightly smaller and darker version of his cousin Shelly. He was so excited to be going to the marriage bureau to pick up our licence that he couldn’t eat breakfast.

I phoned Evie right away and told her that Benni and I were getting married in a few hours and that she had to meet us at the synagogue, because I wasn’t doing this without her. Though I’d woken her up, she shrieked with glee and promised she’d drive carefully.

While I was making myself toast, Benni asked me to close my eyes and put out my hand, and he slipped a ring on my finger.

When I opened them, I saw a deep-red ruby surrounded by tiny diamonds, in a squarish, art-nouveau setting. It made me think of a stylised hibiscus flower, and it looked like something that Isadora Duncan might have worn, which is why I twirled around and unfurled my hands to him.

‘I know it’s small,’ he said, ‘but it’s an antique – from Budapest, the jeweller told me.’ He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the art deco-style diamond breastpin – shaped like a crescent moon – that her father had given her for her high-school graduation. ‘And it’ll go perfectly with your favourite brooch.’267

‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, Benni!’ I assured him. ‘But I’ve got no ring for you.’ In an embarrassed voice, I added, ‘Or any present at all – not even a tie.’

‘You’ll buy me something on our honeymoon,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Are we having a honeymoon?’

‘Sure, I’ll come out to Berkeley for a few days. Maybe we’ll drive somewhere up the coast.’

Two hours later, Benni and I had the licence in our hands, and after picking up my dad – who’d just purchased our wedding bands in the Diamond District – we took our taxi to the Rodeph Sholom synagogue on West 83rd Street, and we asked for Rabbi Simon, the painfully skinny young man who’d overseen Ewa’s burial. He came to our pew holding a white-satin yarmulke in his hand. ‘You always forget to bring one,’ he told Benni.

Benni put it on and thanked him, then told him that we wanted him to marry us.

‘Now?’ he asked, and Benni said, ‘As soon as Tessa’s little sister gets here. It shouldn’t be much longer. Is that a problem?’

‘No, it’s wonderful news!’ He took my hand and Benni’s and squeezed them tight, and he asked Dad to join our little chain, and then he turned the four of us in a slow circle. On a second gyration, he sang a high, nasal, Arabic-sounding melody. Benni, Dad and I looked at each other because we had no idea what was happening.

‘Just something I picked up while working in Istanbul,’ Simon said after we’d stopped turning. ‘The dervishes – their whirling – is very moving. Did it seem meshugge?’

‘Maybe just a bissel,’ Benni told him with an apologetic shrug.

 

Evie arrived a half hour later, and I hadn’t seen her in a dress in maybe five years, and I was so happy to see her looking gorgeous 268and confident that we jumped up and down together, giggling, just like we used to when we were schoolkids.

After the wedding ceremony, nervous exhaustion overwhelmed Benni, and he sat down in one of the pews with his head between his legs. Dad kept his hand on his shoulder and called him fíjo in his whispered encouragements, and I couldn’t take my eyes from the two of them because they were so handsome together. If I were a composer, I told myself, I’d write a piano concerto about men who support each other at their most difficult times, because there seemed nothing more moving, and whenever I’d listen to it, it would remind me of what good luck I’ve had all my life.

Over the next couple of days, Benni seemed to be hopping and skipping through his days, and he laughed at nothing and everything, and while he was cooking, he sang Polish songs that Ewa had taught him, and we held hands nearly all the time when we were together, every one of his smiles genuine. But curiously, he never once mentioned the baby.

Whenever I’d ask how he was feeling about having a child, he would whisper, ‘Super-duper!’ in the voice of an advertising pitchman, and then change the subject. After a while, I began to suspect that there was a great tangle of emotions below his surface – a knot that he didn’t dare undo – so on the evening before I was scheduled to go back to Berkeley, I sat him down and said that he had to tell me if he was having second thoughts about the baby. He took my arm and stood me up, led me into our bedroom and eased the door closed, and drew all the curtains and turned off the lights.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

He sat me on the bed and whispered that he didn’t want to risk bringing attention to me and what he called our insignificant gift, because something terrible might happen to us – ‘Something catastropic!’ he said with a grimace.269

I reminded him that catastrophic had an ‘h’ after the ‘p’, but said he’d left out the letter on purpose, because words spoken aloud had what he called an arcane power, and he didn’t want to pronounce it correctly in connection with our ‘insignificant gift’. He also made me promise to always refer to what was growing in my belly as ‘the little nothing’ or something equally innocuous, since that would keep the baby safe.

His pleas left me feeling trapped by all he’d suffered in his childhood. ‘Benni, what exactly are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘Tessa, if we draw attention to what’s coming into our life, somebody is sure to take it away!’

 

Benni and I decided that I’d go on teaching as long as I could and then return to New York so that he and my dad could look after me. He seemed happy with that solution, and we made plans for him to come out to Berkeley a few days later, but as I entered the tunnel to walk toward my plane, I turned to wave, and I expected to see him standing where we’d kissed goodbye, but instead there was a group of people looking down at the ground. I rushed back and found him lying on the floor with his hand over his eyes and a young black woman kneeling next to him. ‘Do you have any pain?’ she asked him.

‘No, I’m okay,’ he replied.

‘That’s my husband,’ I told her. ‘Benni, are you all right?’

‘Teresa?’ He took away his hand and looked at me with grateful eyes. With a grunt, he fought to sit up. ‘I got dizzy while saying goodbye to you. But why aren’t you on the plane?’

His face was puffy-looking and sweaty. I kneeled next to him. To the people gathered around us, I said, ‘He’s all right now. You can go. Everything’s fine.’ As they dispersed, the woman who’d come to his aid said, ‘I’m a nurse – I’m happy to help.’270

‘Thank you,’ I told her. ‘But he’ll be okay now.’ I was about to say, He gets faint when he leaks, but that wouldn’t have made any sense to her.

After she left, I felt Benni’s forehead, and he was cold. ‘You need to drink something hot,’ I ordered, and he said, ‘I’ll get some coffee once you go,’ but after I helped him to his feet, I realised I didn’t want to leave and said, ‘Let’s go back home.’

‘Tessa, please,’ he said, taking my hands, ‘if you stop what you need to do every time I get dizzy, you’ll never do anything. It’s no big deal. I’m used to it.’

‘No, I can’t leave you,’ I said.

‘You have to. You’ve no choice. I won’t let a little dizziness hold us back. I can’t.’

We argued a little longer, but he was insistent that I go. I helped him dust off his jacket, and he smiled his smile that wasn’t really a smile, then shooed me off with whirling hands, so I went.

 

I worried about him over the next few days nearly all the time, but when I picked him up at San Francisco Airport in my old Ford, he was relaxed and happy. I think that those few days we had together in Berkeley were the true start of our marriage, because everywhere we walked I felt a third, very solid presence between us, and I realised that it was what we were building together. Whenever I was teaching or studying, Benni would go for long walks on the hills above the campus – he’d never lived anywhere but on flatlands – or sit with the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle at the Caffè Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue and drink espresso coffee and smoke and read the news. I hadn’t considered until then how hard he brooded over the world’s events – the war in Vietnam, especially. At that time, he started underlining words and expressions he didn’t understand and would ask me to explain them to him.271

Cajole.

Fingerpicking.

Pellucid.

Flunky.

I stashed one of the New York Times Arts sections that Benni had underlined in my closet because it reminded me of the enormous effort he always made to speak English, and how proud he was that he could occasionally fool a cab driver or waitress into thinking that he was, as he called it, a native-born American.

Benni in his olive-green suit and his sun-god bolo tie, hunched over the News section of the Times, wearing the burgundy-coloured beret I’d found for him at the Macy’s in San Francisco … He looked like a French intellectual among all the scruffy students, and I was proud of his difference.

Over our honeymoon together, I also discovered that he was a talented mimic, especially when it came to animals. Alone in my apartment, he would imitate perfectly the fixed and defiant stare of the opossums that were always rummaging in the back garden.

I also discovered that he adored making me breakfast and serving me in bed, and one morning, as he was carrying a tray of blueberry pancakes, coffee and orange juice, he tripped over a book about Sufi mysticism that he’d left on the floor and everything went flying. The hot coffee splashed over our sheets and the wall, and one of the cups shattered against my bedside table, and I was sure he’d be upset, but after he showed me an astonished face, he erupted into such gleeful laughter that he had to grope his way along the wall back to me, and he said through his merry tears, ‘Who knew that screwing up so completely could be such a relief!’ He caught a drop of coffee sliding down the wall on his fingertip, and he licked at it luxuriously, like a cat, and then he took the pot of warm milk from the dining table and twirled around and around and said 272that he had been reading about the whirling dervishes ever since Rabbi Simon had mentioned them. The milk sprayed around him, creating Jackson Pollock streaks across my bookshelves and floor, and I shouted ‘No!’ and held my hands over my eyes, but soon the pot was empty, and he stumbled around, enjoying the dizzy circles he was tracing, and then he jumped on me, his mouth warm and peppery, just like it nearly always is. As I pulled him into me, he shut his eyes tight and began to sing softly in Polish, and whatever it was made him cry silently. I held him tightly, and he kissed my ears and nose and eyes, and his sudden peals of childlike laughter made me understand that he had found his missing playfulness in the astonishing way our bodies fit together.

 

Benni flew back to New York on January 2nd, and it soon became clear that the little nothing in my womb had re-energised his personal anti-war campaign. He and Dad began standing out in front of Dow Chemical’s Midtown offices every Friday before Sabbath, holding up a sign saying holocaust survivors against the war and shouting, ‘No more napalm!’ More often than not, passers-by were disapproving; some hateful people even threw whatever garbage they had handy at the two of them, and a brawny construction worker in a yellow hard hat once marched right up to them and threatened to clobber them if they didn’t, as he put it, shut the fuck up. Dad later told me that Benni asked the man if he was a Holocaust survivor, and the worker sneered at him and replied, ‘What the hell does the Holocaust have to do with anything?’ and Benni told him in his slow, controlled voice, ‘It has to do with everything – even with you, as it happens. Because my parents were murdered by the Nazis, and my aunts and uncles, too, and I was a little boy then, so I couldn’t defend them. But if you attack me or my father-in-law, I guarantee you 273that I will find a way to hurt you very badly, if not today, then one day very soon.’

The construction worker must have thought that the immigrant with the bruised eyes in the powder-blue suit wasn’t in his right mind, and after calling him an asshole, he walked away.

Dad and Benni also had an occasional triumph. One clear and bright evening in early February, in fact, they got a crowd of about a hundred people chanting anti-war slogans along with them in front of Dow’s offices. About ten days later, on Friday the 17th, Benni conscripted me and my sister into his campaign on one of my quick trips to New York, and the four of us chained ourselves to railing leading up to the front door of the military induction centre. I was four months pregnant at the time, and already shaped like a pear, and Benni had brought along a brown-and-black woollen poncho that he’d just made for me and a thermos of coffee. I thought I might feel trapped when we were locked to the railing, but instead I was eerily calm, perhaps because I sensed I was finally doing something not just for the Vietnamese, but also for Dad’s and Benni’s parents and other relations.

When the police came, they clipped our chains, and a balding, surly cop led me and Evie away from Benni and Dad. He turned out to be from New Rochelle, which was where our mother had been born, and when we were alone, he confessed that he thought that sending our soldiers to Vietnam was a gigantic mistake.

As for my father and Benni, a handful of policemen dragged them into a van and a mean-spirited old officer shouted at them for what he called making adolescent mischief at your age! A little while later, at the station, a squat, no-nonsense lieutenant told them that two ‘God-fearing Jews,’ as he put it, ought to be ashamed of themselves, especially for bringing a pregnant woman into their silly scheme, and on a freezing morning in February no less. 274According to Dad, who later recounted the episode to me and Evie and Daniela – who’d heard us giggling with relief in the hallway of our apartment building and come down to investigate – Benni replied that his wife did whatever she wanted, and what she wanted was to end the war in Vietnam. My father told me later that he’d detected Jew hatred in the man’s bullying voice, and especially when he asked them if they were commies. Dad was sure they were about to be arrested, but in the end, the lieutenant escorted them out of the station and told them that they ought to go to their temple and repent, because they were sinning against the Lord by opposing the war, since the Vietnamese weren’t Christians or even what he called mule-headed Jews.

 

I kept up my teaching duties and my study of the Ticuna language until late March. By then, my belly was huge, and Dickson told me what I already knew – that my plans for Amazonia would have to wait. I’d been preparing myself to give up my graduate work for weeks, but after my goodbye to him, desolation started trailing me everywhere I went. And alongside that desolation roamed a question I knew I’d never voice aloud: Did Mom feel the same sense of despair when she got pregnant with me and had to quit her master’s programme in English literature at Columbia?

 

As soon as I returned to New York, Benni cheered me up by assuring me that he wanted me to return to my studies after the baby was born – if not in Berkeley, then at City College or NYU.

‘You really want me to go back to school?’ I asked.

He gave me an irritated look. ‘Tessa, I’ll only answer your question if you tell me why you’re so generous with everyone else, but so stingy with yourself?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.275

Benni rolled his eyes. ‘You let me work at the shop on Sunday and leave my books and newspapers all over the floor, and you eat the dinners I make even if they’re not so hot, and you don’t make fun of me for dressing like I’m Jay Gatsby, and you—’

‘I love how you dress!’ I exclaimed.

‘That’s what I’m trying to say. None of us can do any wrong in your eyes.’

‘Who’s us?’

‘Your dad and Evie and me. But you … It’s like you’re always not good enough. And waiting for someone to punish you.’

His insight was like a slap across my face. But there was an even greater truth hiding below that stinging insight that only occurred to me in bed that night: It’s as if I think that I deserve to be abandoned if I’m not perfect.

 

Did lack of sleep contribute to the heavy sense of hopelessness that soon took possession of me? After a night when I couldn’t find any comfortable position in bed, I grew convinced that my first field experiences in Appalachia would be my last – that my child would tether me to home for many years, and I’d never again find the courage to take up my studies.

One morning in mid-April, after looking at my photographs of Belle, I grew desperate to hear her comforting voice. I’d last spoken to her just after my wedding. I told her right away that I was pregnant, of course, and after she said how pleased she was for me, she asked me how I felt about becoming a mother, and I said I was often still surprised – that I’d figured I’d be in my thirties before I’d have a child. She detected something downhearted in my tone and told me she needed to hear the truth from the people she loved, so after some nervous hesitation, I told her how worried and sad it sometimes made me to have to give up graduate school.276

‘Listen, baby, you’ve no reason be so upset,’ she told me. ‘That music in you is going to take you places you ain’t even dreamt of yet. I’m sure of it! And wherever you go, you’ll bring your child with you. You’ve got options I never had, Teresa. You just gotta grab hold of ’em!’

Belle’s faith in me made me shiver, but not entirely with relief; I sensed that there was still far too much about myself that I didn’t understand. And maybe never would. I went on to tell her about how happy Benni was, but when we detoured onto the subject of how his family had been sent to the death camps, she let an unnerving silence fall between us. ‘You need to be very careful,’ she ended up telling me, and when I asked her why, she said, ‘Sooner or later, your baby is gonna need you to protect him from all them ghosts in his family and yours.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Benni’s kin and yours – that died in them Nazi camps. They got expectations of you. All ghosts do. So you gotta be very careful and watch for any sign that the baby ain’t doin’ so well – that he’s scared of comin’ into the world.’

 

Belle’s warning sounded a bit kooky and melodramatic to me, so I didn’t tell Benni about it, but it might have ended up saving my life and the life of my unborn child; during my twenty-eighth week, I came down with chills one afternoon, and my legs gave way when I was washing my face with hot water. After I lay down, I felt a little better, and I decided not to call my doctor or husband, but then I heard her telling me that my baby needed me to protect him, so I phoned Benni at work, and he rushed me to my gynaecologist’s office. Dr Marsden discovered that my blood pressure was dangerously high and that I had pre-eclampsia. ‘Good thing you came in right away,’ he said in a grave tone.277

He gave me medications for my condition, but my body rhythms must have already been badly compromised, because I went into labour after only thirty-three weeks, on Saturday, June 3rd.

Then, after my emergency caesarean, my blood pressure crashed.

In one of the dreams I had while drifting in and out of consciousness, Benni led me by the hand up a steep burial mound. After we climbed to the top, we looked out over a city that was on fire, and we started to sing, and it was our voices that put out the flames.

The moment I regained consciousness, I asked Benni about the baby, and he told me we’d had a boy, and that he was in an incubator, and that the doctors were doing all they could for him.

Benni’s voice was frail and desolate. I forced myself not to cry. And through some alchemy I didn’t understand, my thoughts turned hard and resilient and defiant; I decided that because Benni was a Holocaust survivor, our baby would fight so hard to live that no illness in the world would be able to overcome him.

I was aware that I was counting on wishful thinking, but it seemed my only option at the time. After Benni and I talked about the ward where our baby was, I remembered my dream of saving a city in flames, and I started to teach him the melody I’d learned. I figured that maybe it had been given to me for a reason, and that if he sang it to our son, it would help him remain with us. But after the first few notes, Benni stunned me by joining me an octave below.

When I asked him how he knew it, he showed me an astonished look and said, ‘I’ve done nothing but sing it to you all the time you’ve been ill!’

Benni told me that when I was close to death, he remembered a melody that Berekiah Zarco had taught to Ewa and started to sing it to me.278

‘How did Berekiah teach it to Ewa?’ I asked.

‘He appeared to her in a vision – a long time ago, during the war. I know it seems strange. But anyway, when the doctors told me you might die, my heart seemed to explode, and all I could think of was singing to you – that the melody would reach you wherever you were and keep you from leaving me and the baby. I held your hand and I sang it to you for hours, but then my throat got sore, and I could hardly even whisper, so your father took over.’

I knew at that moment that the possibility that our son might die had deepened Benni’s belief in magic. And mine, too.

When I asked him to tell me what our baby looked like, he took my shoulder and confessed to me that the first time he saw him, he was so scrawny that he feared he’d die before I’d had a chance to hold him.

‘But he’s not dead, is he?’ I asked fearfully. ‘Oh, God, tell me the truth, Benni!’

From the urgent way my heart was beating, I knew that my entire future depended on his reply.

‘No, he’s hanging on,’ Benni told me. ‘He’s got soft brown hair just like you and a sweet little mouth and … and you know what, he’s got the most beautiful hands you ever saw.’ He started to weep silently. ‘I keep thinking of his lungs,’ he continued, ‘because the doctor told me they’re really fragile and tiny, and I sometimes I think that maybe he can’t get enough air to go on living, because he inherited that from me, the not getting enough air, and I know that he cries so hard because he’s scared of suffocating. And that’s my fault, because that’s what I felt so often when I was in hiding and couldn’t go outside and thought I was going to die.’

While I kissed and comforted Benni, I realised that I was drawn to people who believed in nearly impossible connections between everything that we see and hear and feel – between our 279own experiences and even people we’ve never met. Benni later told me that he’d concluded that such linkages were made by what he called the Incandescent Threads, and that he had sensed them since he was little and even seen them twice. They were filaments of cause and effect, he said, and they linked people across centuries and millennia, and their light was caused by the heat that was generated at the time of Creation. There was nothing they couldn’t bring together. He was pretty sure, in fact, that he and I had met because one of them was stretched between the two of us, or maybe between one of his ancestors and my father. ‘We both went to the Bosphorus that night because of one,’ he told me. ‘I sensed it linking us securely – otherwise I wouldn’t have found the courage to talk to you.’

 

We called the baby Ethan. The name had come to Benni one morning at work, while he was fixing the seams on a pair of my father’s trousers, though he didn’t tell anyone, not even me. Characteristically, he’d decided that if he kept it a secret, our child would have a chance at life.

The name sounded perfect to me, especially since no one in my family or his had ever had it – at least, to our knowledge – so it didn’t come burdened by our past.

Ethan spent nine days in his incubator before the doctors told us he was out of danger. Holding him in my arms, caressing his dark, downy hair, seemed proof that occasionally, and despite all the odds, our greatest hopes can come true.

Once we got him home, I told Benni what Belle had said about the danger that the ghosts of his ancestors had posed to me and Ethan. I was pretty certain he’d react angrily, but he told me instead she was right, that it had often seemed as if his ancestors wanted too much from him.280

Maybe even my life, he didn’t admit to me, but I could see that worry in his eyes.

Ethan’s pale complexion deepened and his cheeks turned rosy shortly after I started to breastfeed him, and his frenzied fidgeting ceased. Still, Benni and I were up many nights calming his tears. Once, he and I tried singing Ewa’s melody to him, but it only made him scream louder.

A surprise … My closeness to Ethan seemed to sharpen all my senses, so that everyone I saw or spoke to – even just the mailman or a delivery boy – became charged with a delicate and abiding love. It was as if I could sense each person’s heroism for simply being able to carry on amid all the torments and disappointments of a normal life. Belle told me that the same change had come over her after giving birth for the first time. ‘It’s the crown of a great truth,’ she told me, ‘though it doesn’t always make things easy,’ and I asked, ‘Why’s that?’ and she said, ‘Because you’ll never again be able to make believe that other people aren’t as real and important as you are.’

 

Evie was staying with Dad for the summer, so she came over every morning to help me. The two of us would go for long walks with Ethan, and we’d always find our way to Benni’s shop in the end, and his face would glow with Ethan in his arms, and even the bruised shadows around his eyes would vanish.

After a few weeks, I started shopping in the Asian markets in Chinatown again, and I’d buy coconut milk, dried mushrooms and all sorts of peculiar ingredients, and I began making exotic curries and noodles for our suppers. Sometimes, too, I’d make a recipe from the cookbook Dad had inherited from his mother. In hindsight, I think I needed a way to express my gratitude toward my husband and father and sister – and to the world itself for 281permitting my baby to live. Benni in particular grew to love those banquets. They may have even become a form of theatre for him – a reproduction of the chaotic, noisy, big-hearted childhood that he had lost. Sometimes I’d watch the way he’d fold Ethan over his shoulder while he conversed with my father – and while spooning up whatever custardy or gooey dessert I’d made to satisfy his sweet tooth – and I’d know that he was exactly where he’d hoped he’d one day be.

If Shelly and Julie were visiting with their daughters, we’d also play charades and drink a lot of Portuguese red wine, and after they’d gone off to their hotel, Benni and I would head to our bedroom and make love amid the extravagant flower bouquets that they’d always bring us.

Playing my flute to Ethan in the warmed, perfumed air of the kitchen – after I’d made one of my exotic suppers – was my most secret pleasure. He’d clap his hands and giggle, and all of him would become laughter.

Sometimes I was struck by the notion that Ethan made time stand still for me, most usually in the night, when I’d listen to Benni’s soft breathing and the merciful quiet that surrounded every voice coming from the street, and I was sure that all the universe wished me well, and for the first time in my life, I think, I was not afraid of death.

At the very least, Benni and I have contributed something beautiful to the world, I would think.

And if the worst happens, he and my father and Evie will make sure that Ethan is loved.

Often now, while making love with Benni, I’d feel a soft humming inside me – a subtle energy that I hadn’t been still enough to hear before – and it seemed a product of our union.

For months, I gave everything I was to my husband and son. 282I held nothing back. And in so doing, I found myself. It seemed my Golden Age.

 

It would be misleading to claim that my transition to motherhood went completely smoothly, however. Over Ethan’s first weeks of life, I found caring for him terrifying, and I even found myself fantasising on occasion about how freer – and more engaged in the world – I’d have felt if I were in Brazil and studying the music of the Ticuna. He was so tiny and fragile, and I didn’t ever seem to know what I was doing. Even though Dad taught me how to carry him and change his diapers, I imagined that there was a set of directions to motherhood that my mom ought to have handed down to me and never did. So I was sure that sooner or later I’d make an error that would put his little life at risk, and it took me four or five months to stop panicking every time he developed a cough or soiled himself with diarrhoea. And it took me even longer to realise the obvious – that Ethan’s fussing and whining were his ways of teaching me when to give him my breast or his bottle, and how I could make him more comfortable. In short, I didn’t need any manual to motherhood, because my son would tell me what he needed in his own eloquent ways.

 

And then, on the first Sunday in February, everything came undone …

Benni was at his shop, doing some alterations for an important customer, when the intercom buzzed. ‘Who’s there?’ I asked.

‘Is that you, Teresa?’ a woman’s voice asked brightly, and I answered, ‘Yes, who is it?’ and the voice said, ‘It’s your mother. I’ve come without calling first. I hope that’s okay.’

The skin of my face began to tingle. And a small, terrified part of me – way below my surface – whispered, Don’t say a word! She’ll go away if you don’t speak.283

‘Teresa?’ my mother said. ‘Are you there?’

My finger pressed the button to let her in without my willing it to do so.

I wrung my hands while I waited for her. And I realised how cluttered our bookcases looked – and how tattered our Oriental rug. When I opened the door, Mom smiled. Her eyes were lively and friendly, enhanced by a light dusting of blue eyeshadow. Her hair was brown with blonde highlights. She looked a bit like Jane Fonda.

‘Wow, you’ve grown up!’ she said with a pleased smile. She opened her arms.

I didn’t move. So she came to me and hugged me. She felt as though she were made of something hard and cold – porcelain, it seemed to me.

While I was gazing at her clear blue eyes, I felt the perilous urge to throw my arms around her and confess how much I’d missed her, and hiding behind that urge was the hope that she’d have an overwhelmingly sensible reason for never calling or writing after she abandoned us: I was very ill, Teresa, and I didn’t want you and Evie to see me after my radiation treatments, and the cancer made me depressed for years, so I …

I crouched deep down in my mind and invited her into the living room and asked if she wanted something to drink.

‘Yes, some hot tea would be great,’ she said. ‘With a little milk.’

I put the kettle on. When I returned to the living room with our teacups, Mom was wriggling out of her winter coat, and the way she did was just like Evie, which made me think, I’ll never not want to know anything as much as I don’t want to know that she and my sister are so alike.

I hung her coat on one of the hooks by the door. ‘How did you find me?’ I asked.284

‘Evie found me. She told me you’d had a baby.’

That seemed unlikely, but my scepticism withered into a flatsounding ‘Oh.’

Mom laughed and shrugged – at what, I had no idea – then undid the floral-patterned silk scarf around her neck, but she kept it in her hand, telling me in a confiding voice – as if we were close friends – that she froze in New York now that she was used to Los Angeles.

I returned to the kitchen to prepare our tea while Mom looked around the living room. I kept close track of the creaks she made on the parquet floor as if she might be tempted to steal one of the paintings Benni had bought from his old friend George. Or more to the point, as if she might ease open the door and slip away.

Just after I brought the teapot to the living room, Ethan stirred. He’d been sleeping in his room.

‘Is that your son?’ Mom asked, and when I said it was, she asked in a cheerful voice, ‘Should we go see what’s bothering him?’

I brought Ethan out to her. He was wearing a blue woollen beanie that Belle had crocheted for him. I’d folded him in his favourite yellow blanket.

‘My God, he’s beautiful,’ Mom said, and she gazed at me affectionately.

Her eyes were keenly aware and intelligent. I hadn’t remembered that. And for the first time in my life, I could see why Dad had fallen for her.

When she reached out for Ethan, I handed him to her as if I’d been hypnotised. She cradled the baby in her arms and smiled. ‘Hello, my gorgeous grandson!’ she exulted.

I wanted to shout at her that she hadn’t earned that role, but when she looked up at me, her eyes were dripping tears. I felt as if this was how my life would end – with my baby stolen 285from me by my mother. And that there was nothing I could do about it.

‘How old is he now?’ she asked, and I said, ‘Eight-and-a-half months,’ and she said, ‘He has your mouth and hair,’ and as if I were making a move at chess, I replied, ‘But Benni’s nose and dark eyes.’

I poured us tea. Mom sat with Ethan on our sofa. I dropped down in the black velvet armchair where Benni read the newspaper. I felt years distant from the person I’d been just a few minutes earlier.

Benni’s cigarettes were on the low table between us. ‘Do you smoke now?’ Mom asked, and I said, ‘No, Benni does,’ and she said proudly, ‘I stopped, you know.’

I hadn’t remembered she’d smoked. How do you forget something like that?

She asked me about Ethan’s sleep habits. I found I was talking too shrilly and at some point stopped in mid-sentence. I studied my mother. She was shorter than I remembered. And her tense and wrinkled hands surprised me. They didn’t seem to fit with the rest of her.

‘When did Evie tell you I’d had a baby?’ I asked.

‘A couple of months ago. Franco and I had already made plans to come to New York, so the timing seemed right for me to come see you.’

‘You’re still with Franco?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, we got married,’ she said, shrugging as if the results had been mixed. She brushed the back of her hand against Ethan’s cheek. ‘He’s such a cutie!’ she gushed.

As I studied the careful way she moved a corner of Ethan’s blanket over his feet, she stopped being my mother for an instant. She was a lonely woman who’d been tugged in two directions when she was too young to know that whichever path she chose would 286be the wrong one. I leaned forward in my seat and said, ‘I think I understand you better now that I’ve had a child.’

‘Understand me in what way?’ she said.

Her tone was curious, friendly, eager – which encouraged me. ‘I sometimes wish I’d stayed in graduate school,’ I told her. ‘So I think I may have some idea now about why you abandoned me and Evie.’

‘Did I abandon you?’ She pulled her head in like a hen and showed me an arched glare.

‘You left without warning. I was seven and Evie was five, and you went away.’

She put Ethan down on the sofa. ‘Let me tell you something, Teresa,’ she said with a firmness that seemed a warning of worse to come, ‘you left me long before I left you!’

That accusation gripped me so hard that I couldn’t move. It was as if she’d bewitched me. But then Ethan reached out with his hands, and I found myself standing up and rushing to him. Having him in my arms gave me back my confidence. ‘Mom, what are you talking about?’ I asked as I sat back down with the baby. ‘You know you left us. We all know.’

‘Teresa, you couldn’t get enough of your father. For me … You never felt anything for me. I’d try to hold you and you’d push me away.’

‘That can’t be true,’ I said, and she said, ‘Of course, it’s true! Ask your father.’

‘But why didn’t I want to be with you?’ I inquired.

‘How the hell should I know?’ she said scornfully. She showed me a haughty look. ‘If you think you can always figure out your kids, you’re wrong.’

‘So you’re blaming your seven-year-old daughter for why you abandoned us? Do you really mean for me to believe that I was responsible for your decisions?’287

‘Believe whatever you want. It makes absolutely no difference to me. But look,’ she said in a conciliatory tone, fighting to smile. ‘I didn’t come here to argue. That’s all in the past.’

‘Yes, but is what I believe about you really of absolutely no interest to you?’ I questioned.

‘Look, Teresa, I can’t control what you think. I’ve learned the hard way to let all of that go.’

‘What does let all of that go mean?’ I asked.

‘To move on,’ she said as if it were obvious, so I asked, ‘Does a mother ever move on from having children?’ and she said, ‘Kids grow up and you move on. That’s the way life works.’

I paused while suppressing a shout of protest. ‘Evie and I needed you,’ I finally said, and I hated my desperate, pleading manner, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She was only five. She used to cry all the time. Dad had to carry her to his bed or she couldn’t sleep. We never even knew where you’d gone.’

‘Your father knew where I was well enough,’ she said, and I asked, ‘Did he?’ and she said, ‘Sure,’ so I replied, ‘In any case, you made no attempt to see us.’

She laughed scornfully. ‘What would have been the point? I wasn’t going to stay, so it would just be worse for you if you thought I would.’

Could that be true? I wondered, and I felt all my energy leaving me – sucked out of me as if by black magic. ‘This conversation, Mom … I can’t talk about these things. It does me no good.’

Mom’s face turned patronising, and she started to reply, but the key turned in our front door. Benni came in carrying the New York Times. To see his face – his deeply loving eyes – was like being rescued from a shipwreck. The foyer wall prevented him from seeing my mother at first. ‘I brought you the paper,’ he said. He stepped into the living room. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said to Mom.288

‘It’s my mother,’ I told him.

She stood up. Benni walked to her and shook her hand. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said.

‘And it’s great to finally meet you.’

Benni turned to me, and I saw the concern in his expression for how dazed and disoriented I must have looked. He came to me and kissed me, then leaned down and tousled Ethan’s hair.

‘Your son is gorgeous!’ Mom told him excitedly.

‘Thank you. Now, if I remember correctly, you’re living in Phoenix these days. So what brings you all the way to New York?’

Benni knew very well that my mother lived in Los Angeles. I was certain that this was his way of making it clear that she hadn’t earned the right to be included in our family.

‘No, I live in Santa Monica,’ Mom said. ‘I write for TV. Have you ever seen Bonanza?’

‘No, I’m sorry. TV Westerns … They seem to be made just for kids.’

The phone rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Benni said, but it was probably Evie and I was anxious to know why she’d told Mom about my baby. I handed Ethan to Benni. ‘I’ll get it in the bedroom.’

The call was from Rabbi Simon, who’d gotten into the habit of checking in with me every few weeks.

A couple of minutes later, Ethan erupted into whooping cries. I told Simon I’d have to call him back and rushed to the living room. Benni had turned his back to my mother and was trying to calm our son with whispered endearments and caresses.

‘I haven’t done anything!’ Mom cut in as if she’d been wronged. ‘It’s this husband of yours – he seems to be imagining things.’

Benni whipped around. His eyes were blazing with rage. ‘Mrs Sasportes, I’ve asked you to leave,’ he said with deadly calm. ‘And I’d be grateful if you did what I ask.’289

‘I haven’t been Mrs Sasportes in twenty years!’ my mother told him in a superior voice.

‘Well, whoever you are, you have to go!’

‘Benni, what happened?’ I asked. I tried to take Ethan from him, but he turned away from me and said in a voice admitting no dissent, ‘No, I’ll hold Ethan until your mother is gone.’

‘Teresa, if I go now, I’ll never come back,’ Mom told me. ‘And I’ll never phone or write. And if you try to get in touch with me, I won’t answer.’ Her eyes – cold and threatening – were those of an old enemy.

‘Are you really asking me to choose between you and Benni?’ I asked in disbelief.

My mother took her coat from the hook by the door. She never said goodbye and neither did I.

When she eased the door closed, I felt as if my heart had stopped. I imagined the unhappy girl that I’d been, and I heard her shrieking for help. And I knew that there was nothing I could now do to come to her aid.

After Benni managed to calm Ethan down, he wiped the boy’s puffy, red, tear-stained cheeks with his handkerchief.

I was still standing by the door. ‘What did she do?’ I asked.

‘She said she wanted some more milk for her tea, so I handed Ethan to her. While I was in the kitchen, she began to whisper, and I went to the doorway, and she told Ethan that she could tell you were a bad mother. She said you’d rejected her and were sure to reject him sooner or later.’

‘Those were her exact words? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. She wanted me to hear them. It was her way of getting revenge on me for saying that she lived in Phoenix. Though more likely, she was already angry when she first came here. I don’t know. And I don’t care. I ran in and took Ethan from her, 290and she tried to hold onto him, and he got scared, and I looked into her eyes, and what I saw there was … I’m not sure what it was exactly, but it was dangerous – like something in a nightmare – and I told her to leave.’

I embraced Benni and thanked him. My relief was like wading into a warm ocean. And it was mixed with gratitude and a host of other emotions I couldn’t have put into words, most likely because lonely seven-year-olds don’t have the vocabulary to express all they feel.

 

Later that day, I called Evie and asked her why she’d told our mother about Ethan, but she didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Why in God’s name would I try to find Mom?’ she demanded in a disgruntled voice, and I said, ‘So then how did she find me?’ and she replied, ‘Well, you’re in the phone book as Teresa Sasportes, so anyone with half a brain could find you.’

I went to see Dad after that. He had a bad cold and was in bed with Radley and a big box of Kleenex tissues. Elis Regina was singing ‘Corcovado’ on the record player.

‘Have you spoken to Mom lately, by any chance?’ I asked.

‘Are you nuts? I’m sick but I ain’t delirious!’

I explained about her finding me and what she had let Benni overhear, and how he’d rescued Ethan from her. His face grew tense and upset. ‘Your mother is toxic,’ he told me. ‘She’s just lucky I wasn’t there when she showed up.’

‘But did I really abandon her before she abandoned us?’ I asked.

‘In a way, but you need to know the reason why.’ He patted the bed, so I sat with him. ‘Whenever you didn’t do what she wanted, she’d say you were selfish and mean-spirited. She used to belittle you, and at some point she started calling you a little wretch all the time, and sometimes, if I wasn’t home, she’d whack you on the behind – and really hard.’291

‘She did? How did you find out?’

Dad took a steadying breath. ‘Once, I saw the marks on you when I was bathing you.’

‘How old was I?’

‘Four or five.’ He sneezed, and I handed him a tissue. ‘I warned her that if she hit you again, I’d grab you and Evie and leave,’ he said. ‘And she seemed genuinely remorseful for a while – and kind. But then she started up again on you – calling you names when she didn’t like what you were doing. I realised then that we couldn’t stay together, though I waited too long to make that decision. I kept telling myself that she could change. One good thing I did do was buy you a flute, because I sensed you needed something to block out that awful, belligerent voice of hers.’

‘Why did you decide on a flute?’

My father’s eyes twinkled and he reached for his pipe. ‘Even a tiny Bunny Rabbit can carry a flute around with her anywhere she wants!’ he said, and the joy in his voice made me laugh. ‘Frank Wess helped me pick out your first instrument,’ he continued. ‘And it became your shield.’ He wiped his hand back through his hair, troubled again. ‘If you want to know the truth,’ he said, ‘your mother was in competition with you. She sensed that you were more intelligent than her, and more talented, too, and she hated that. You know, baby, when your mother called you an extraterrestrial … She meant it as great praise at first. She said it with pride – just like me. But then, when you were maybe six or seven and started getting such glowing evaluations from your teachers, she began to say it resentfully – with a sneer. For her, it stopped being a compliment.’

‘And did you find out where she went after she left us?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘I thought maybe she was with her brother, but I never called him and he never called me,’ and I said, ‘Mom sounded 292so believable when she told me I’d abandoned her,’ and in an authoritative and angry voice, he said, ‘Let me tell you something. Your mother lies with perfect ease and without any sense of guilt, because she’s certain she’s not lying.’

 

Shortly after Mom’s visit, the finality of her threat against me – of my never being able to see her again – sent me into a panic on two successive days, and from that point on, leaving my home – even just to buy the newspaper – would set my heart battering against my ribcage. An imminent and overwhelming sense of danger gripped me whenever I was on the street, and I was constantly compelled to look over my shoulder for someone who might be stalking me.

Do men and women who were abandoned as kids eventually come to believe that the world wants them dead?

That question recurred to me all the time, because it seemed clear now that I might have been in peril as a little girl – that my mother might have indeed harboured murderous thoughts about me. And about Evie, too, of course. In fact, I came to believe that my dreams of Mom concealing a blade behind her back and readying to attack my sister were – metaphorically, at least – accurate.

I forced myself to go food shopping every morning and take Ethan for long, serpentine walks in the afternoon, and I’d feign serenity if Benni or my father came with us, but in truth every step was a struggle against my instinct to run back home.

Worse, as the days passed, my fears didn’t diminish.

I never told Benni about them, or confessed my shame and confusion either, but he sensed that I was lost in deep water, and in danger of drowning, and he would hold hands with me nearly all the time, and kiss me for no reason, and clown around for me and Ethan. Occasionally, he’d ask if I wanted to talk about what I was feeling, but I couldn’t think of what to say other than what 293was already obvious. At night, after our son was asleep, he’d read excerpts to me from his kabbalah books, and once – probably hoping to show me a pathway out of my predicament – he told me how the Jewish mystics would repeat prayers to themselves as quickly as they could to escape their usual ways of thinking. ‘They were trying to give themselves brand new eyes to see themselves and the whole universe,’ he told me.

Benni also taught me a Hebrew prayer that his great-grandmother had given him, and he made me promise that I’d say it to myself when I sensed myself in danger, and I did, but it didn’t ever ease my racing heartbeat.

On weekends, he’d plead with me to take a ride with them on the Staten Island Ferry, or hop in a cab with them and go to the Cloisters, and I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t. Once, after I’d declined to join him and Ethan on another one of their adventures, he brought my hands to his lips and – with unfallen tears in his eyes – asked if I was dissatisfied with him. ‘Do you regret marrying me?’ he questioned in a trembling voice.

‘No, of course, not,’ I rushed to reply, and I embraced him hard, and my reply seemed true at the time, yet I realised long after midnight that night, unable to sleep, that I had begun to find his encouragement – and even his affection – intrusive. And why? Because they drew attention to my limitations and difficulties, and I only wanted to be left alone.

Occasionally, I’d put an interview with Belle on my tape player and close my eyes and imagine that I was sitting with her on her creaky porch. The exquisite pain that would spread through me when I heard her telling me about the ocean she’d always wanted to see – and never had – made me certain of what I needed to do, but I knew I could never admit to Benni or my father that I wanted to return to my university studies so soon after Ethan’s birth.294

I was so ashamed that motherhood wasn’t enough for me that it would make me shudder.

And then a powerful insight came to me while I was listening to Belle telling me about the poverty and hunger she’d experienced as a girl: what I feared most was turning into my mom – that I would one day abandon Ethan and Benni.

Was I going mad? If so, then I grew to learn that madness is only a short distance from the place where each of us usually lives.

Other than my tapes of the singers I’d recorded in Appalachia, my only other solace became reading. I remember lying on the sofa with The Brothers Karamazov one afternoon in mid-March of 1968 and hoping the story would go on forever. But then Ethan started to cry, and so I threw the book at the wall, hitting a Japanese rice-paper lamp that Benni had bought in Montreal. The lamp crashed to the floor, and I didn’t bother picking it up. When Benni came home, he said ‘What happened, Tessa?’ and I said in a mean-spirited voice, ‘The lamp must have tripped on one of the books you left on the floor,’ which gave him a frightened little laugh, so I laughed too. But afterward, when we looked in each other’s eyes, we both knew that he was scared of the person I’d become. And that I was as well.

 

A week or so later, Benni came home from his shop in the afternoon and held out an envelope to me. ‘Open it,’ he said.

Inside it were plane tickets to Lisbon for me and him and Ethan. We were scheduled to leave in a week. ‘What’s this?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘We’re going to Portugal,’ and when I asked what was in Portugal, he said, ‘My ancestors lived there – and yours. I figured it was time we went there. I’ve been studying Portuguese, too.’ He snapped his fingers as if to summon a waiter. In his proudest Portuguese accent, he said, ‘Quero um café, por favor. E um—’

‘But Ethan can’t come,’ I cut in. ‘He’s too small.’295

Benni grinned mischievously. ‘I called Dr Allen, and he cleared Ethan for lift-off. He can go anywhere we want to go. The kid is as strong as an ox – just like your father!’

‘Dad isn’t as strong as an ox,’ I said, and he replied, ‘Well, he raised you and Evie alone – that’s pretty damn strong,’ and because he was right, I showed him a resentful look and said, ‘I can’t just go to Europe like it was nothing,’ and his dark eyes grew menacing and he said, ‘Teresa, we have to go!’

‘But why … why do we have to go?’ I stuttered.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’

He gave me a hard look and pinched a cigarette from his pack. Then, without warning, he made a desperate, choking sound, and he thrust his hand over his eyes, and I was certain he was about to burst into tears, but he turned away from me instead and walked to our bedroom and eased the door closed behind him. My heart told me to go to him and confess the truth, but I stayed where I was and started thinking of all the ways I could sabotage our trip.

While I was lying in the dark that night, I realised I wanted Benni to be as unhappy as I was. I’d even been hoping he’d lose interest in making love with me.

It’s amazing that a person can live for weeks without being aware of the downward trajectory of all her thoughts – and the devastating effect she has been having on the people who love her. In the end, I agreed to go to Lisbon because I didn’t want to become a vengeful and deceitful woman – in other words, my mother – but I resented Benni for forcing me to go.

My father came with us to the airport. We spoke Ladino together in the taxi, and he started to cry when he said goodbye to me, which scared me.

‘Dad, is there some problem with your health you’re not telling me about?’ I asked.296

‘No, I just want you to be back the way you were – when you were happy.’

I wanted to tell him, That Teresa is gone for good and I’m all that’s left, which shocked me, but it also seemed perfectly accurate.

 

On our first morning in Lisbon, it was pouring with rain. Benni suggested that we spend the day inside, and he was keen on seeing the Museum of Ancient Art, so the taxi dropped us there. Just after we got our tickets, Benni told me that a friend of a friend was waiting for us in the auditorium, and it seemed bizarre that he hadn’t told me earlier, but I decided not to quarrel. A young woman with long curly hair was seated at a desk in front of the auditorium doors, with name tags spread in front of her. Benni went to her and said in English, ‘Hi, I’d like the tag for my wife, Teresa Sasportes.’ The woman found it quickly, and she handed him a cloth bag, as well, and he came back to me. Inside the bag – which was stamped Colóquio de Estudos Sefarditas – Março 1968 in black letters – I discovered brochures about Sephardic music and culture.

Benni took Ethan from me very gently, without waking him, and after he’d secured his yellow blanket around him, he said, ‘Your place is inside the auditorium.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘Apparently, the old songs are still sung in places like Morocco and Turkey. And people study them. Isn’t that amazing?’

‘I don’t understand,’ I told him, and he replied, ‘Teresa, you need to do what you were meant to do,’ and I asked, ‘Which means?’ and he said, ‘There’s a vibration inside you, a kind of singing, even when you’re silent, even when you don’t know it’s there.’

His words seemed to be spoken to the deepest and most hidden part of me, but they also made me uncomfortable, as if he had 297learned too much about me. ‘Just how long have you known about this conference?’ I demanded.

‘Your dad found out a while back through his Sephardic contacts.’

‘And you two decided I should be here?’

‘I guess that one thing just led to another.’ He made an imploring gesture with his hands. ‘Tessa, Morrie told me that he’s known what you needed to do since you were seven years old.’

‘So you both think that I wasn’t meant to be a mother?’ I asked, and inside that one simple question was every wrong idea I’d ever had about them or myself.

‘No, you’re a great mom! Our little nothing adores you. This is something else.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Tessa, when we first had dinner together, you told me to tell you when I knew what it is you really wanted.’ His bruised eyes grew deadly serious. ‘So I’m telling you now. You need to study music – Sephardic music. That’s why you took your classes in Portuguese. And why you started fantasising about Brazil. And if you don’t mind my saying so—’

‘I fantasised about the Indians in Brazil,’ I cut in.

‘Yeah, you got that a bit wrong,’ he said with a merry laugh. ‘Maybe the truth needed to come disguised – like angels. Did you know that angels put on clothing so that their light … so it doesn’t blind us?’

‘Benni, I’m sorry,’ I said with a big theatrical sigh, ‘but this is insane.’

‘You’ve told me about the hollow inside you when you picture all the cousins you’d have in Greece if Hitler didn’t come along. So, what kind of music did they sing?’ he asked defiantly.

I didn’t give him any reply because I sensed that he was steering 298me in the right direction, and I didn’t want to go there. My fears apparently had their own perverse gravity.

‘Exactly, Ladino songs,’ he announced. ‘But you know what, we can’t go back into the past – at least not little people like you and me. So the way I see it, you’ve only got one option, and that option is waiting for you inside the auditorium.’

I held out my hands for Ethan, because I was going to return to the hotel with him, but Benni gripped my wrist. ‘Months ago, your father and I went to see one of the organisers of this conference, a big-shot professor in New York. He’s really nice. His name is William Armer. I got in touch with him again just before we left. He’s expecting you.’ In a gentler tone, releasing me, he said, ‘Today is the first day of the conference. You haven’t missed anything.’

‘Benni, I know you mean well,’ I said, smiling falsely, ‘but I can’t just start over. I can’t just barge in on a meeting of specialists. They’ll think I’m an idiot.’

‘You’re not starting over! You were raised on Sephardic music. And Armer says he needs someone who speaks Ladino and Portuguese, and who has a great ear. He’s expecting you.’

The terror in me was like a crow flapping around in my chest. Where does all this fear of revealing the truth come from? I wondered, and I only noticed I’d started crying when I tasted the salt on my lips. ‘Benni, what have you done to me?’ I said with a moan, though as soon as that cry of distress came out of my mouth, I realised – cringing – that I sounded like a line my mom might have written for Bonanza.

‘You seem to have forgotten that I’m on your side,’ he said. ‘And so is Ethan. And by the way, you can stop trying to conceal what you’re feeling from me. I’m not a dummy. I know how to detect a fake smile far better than you do!’ In a whisper, he added, ‘And I know you listen to your tapes of Belle when I’m not there.’299

‘And … and you’re not mad at me?’ I asked in disbelief, and he said, ‘Why would I be mad?’ and I said, ‘Because it means that I miss my fieldwork.’

‘Look, Tessa, it’s time you told Zencefil the Witch to go strangle herself, don’t you think?’

‘Zencefil?’

‘Your mom.’

‘My mom?’

‘Yeah. After the day she visited us and said such insulting things about you to Eti, I put two and two together. I mean, I saw what a menacing woman she was. And that she wanted to punish you. I realised that that damn doll your dad put in his puppet show must have seemed like her to you when you were a little girl. So it’s time you cut her strings and told her that she can’t insult you any longer. And that you never liked marionettes in the first place!’

I shivered. And my feet felt rooted to the stone floor, because I knew he was right about Mom’s mesmerising power over me – over even my dreams.

‘I’m scared,’ I confessed. And it seemed the most honest thing I’d said in a long, long time.

‘So be scared!’ Benni said without sympathy. ‘When you’re perfectly safe, being scared isn’t such a terrible thing. For Christ’s sake, I’m scared every day.’

‘You are?’

‘Sure! When I think of my childhood, I sometimes want to run and hide. You think you’re the only one who looks over her shoulder on the street? And I have to get a little tipsy before I can chain myself to the induction centre. And half the time, I live on pancakes and toast because I don’t think I can keep down anything else. So be scared! And then do what you were meant to do!’

I then told him what I never thought I would: ‘Benni, I’m most 300scared of abandoning you and Ethan – like my mom. At night sometimes, it makes me want to shed my skin.’

‘No, you’d never abandon us,’ he said confidently.

‘But maybe I’m not so different from my mother. Maybe she wanted things that she was afraid to tell my dad. So she left.’

‘Sorry, I don’t buy it! And anyhow, what your mother wanted back then … it has nothing to do with you. You need to live out your dreams. Everything will be okay if you do that.’ He flapped his hand at me. ‘Besides, you’re nothing like your mother. You’re like Morrie.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Are you kidding me? You and your dad are like peas in a pod!’

Benni kneeled and set Ethan down gently on a chair at the side of the room, and after he returned to me, he kissed me on the lips, and he didn’t permit me to back away, and I kissed him back, and I re-discovered the wonderful, intimate taste of tobacco and coffee and pepper in his mouth. And I realised that he was right when he said that he could win an Olympic gold medal at waiting, because he had shown me only devotion and kindness over the last two months, and I said to myself, It’s true that he attracts all that’s unlikely to him, because here we are in Lisbon, and I’m about to do what I didn’t think I’d ever do.

He went back to Ethan and picked him up. The boy stirred but didn’t awaken. ‘There’s a Hieronymus Bosch triptych of Saint Anthony in the museum,’ Benni told me as I joined him. ‘And my mom once showed me a photograph of it when I was kid back in Poland. So I’m really excited that Eti and I are going to finally get to see it. We’ll catch up with you at the hotel in the evening. If there’s a dinner for the participants tonight, go. Don’t worry about us. The little nothing and I will be fine. I know how to prepare his bottle.’ Ethan chose that moment to yawn and stretch his arms 301and legs, and Benni combed his soft dark hair into bangs. ‘Right, Eti?’ he said to the boy, and Ethan reached out his hand for his father’s nose, which he liked to squeeze, because Benni would make a honking sound.

This time, however, Benni licked Ethan’s palm like Radley and barked, which made the baby open his big black eyes – his father’s eyes – and shake with laughter.

‘See you later,’ Benni told me, waving to me with Ethan’s hand, and after a few moments, he and our son – a bit confused, just like his mom – walked down the hallway and turned right into one of the exhibition rooms, and just like that, they were gone.

What came into my mind then was one of Belle’s songs, ‘Lost at the Fair’, and how she had told me that there comes a point in nearly everyone’s life when they had to pay attention to the voice inside their own heart – a voice they’d denied for a long time. They had to obey what it told them to do or they would never find their way back to themselves. So I eased the door to the auditorium open and slipped inside.

About thirty people were in the audience, and a plump, round-faced young woman at a podium – wearing a long white peasant skirt and a loose, amber-coloured sweater – was talking in English about her fieldwork in Morocco, and showing slides of grizzled old men and women, many of them smiling with concealed amusement, a few of them caught with their mouths open and arms apart, as if they were belting out their greatest hits. She said that they were some of the very kind people from whom she had collected songs, and when I realised that a few of them might have had ancestors in Salonika, way too many emotions started rising into my chest, and too quickly, so I took a seat at the back where no one would see me give way to them.

Near the end of her talk, the speaker explained that the 302melodies of the Sephardic Jews have always adapted to the scales and harmonies of the countries in which they’ve made their homes.

‘But the lyrics rarely change,’ she added. ‘No matter where the Sephardim go, they take their words with them.’

That conclusion seemed like it had been searching for me for years. Indeed, it was as if I’d been waiting to hear that one affirmation all my life, and it was obvious at that moment that I’d inherited the ancient and holy words of the Portuguese and Spanish Jews, even if I hadn’t been aware of it. They’d helped to make me the person I was, in fact, because the first songs I’d ever learned were the Ladino lullabies that my grandmother and grandfather had sung to my dad.

Everything seemed to make sense that day. Over our entire stay in Portugal, in fact, I felt as if I’d happened on a world where only positive things could happen to me and Benni and Ethan. I was aware, of course, that that was an illusion, but I was also beginning to understand – in the slow, surreptitious way that insights come to young and nervous mothers – that human beings invented the world they wished to live in, and the most sensible among them populated it with only the people they wanted with them.

While breastfeeding Ethan on our lumpy hotel bed, I observed Benni sitting on the balcony, doing his best to decipher the news of the Vietnam War in the Portuguese newspapers, and maybe I had acquired those new eyes the kabbalists wanted, because he had never been so benevolent and handsome and genuine to me, and when I looked down at our hungry baby, I sensed that my mother no longer had any power over me – that her abandonment of me and Evie would no longer be able to stop me from doing what I most wanted to do. Something had changed since we’d come to Lisbon. Maybe because I was certain now that I was journeying every day farther and farther from the lonely and wounded little 303girl I’d been, alongside a man who held my hand nearly all the time and a small, tender and needy little creature whom he and I had created, and I said to myself, Everything is okay now, because everything that’s happened to me – even the loneliness and guilt, even my moments of madness – has led me to this place.304