Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you’ll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
—Yehuda Amichai
1
Al brushed Faith’s lips with his as he headed for the door.
“So shall we have a bite out tonight, like we said?” Faith asked.
“Sure. When the kids are away, we can play even in the middle of the week! Bye, Seymour,” Al patted the dog, whose black tail was wagging enthusiastically. “Bye, Faithie.”
Faith was almost out the back way through the garage, when she turned around to switch the radio off in the kitchen. It was tuned to 88.5. Dave Bronstetter was interviewing a pundit about the possibility of a fall election.
The phone rang.
She picked up on the third ring. Her heart jolted when she realized it was Bridget Callaghan. Bridget had a kind of throaty hiss that, even if she hadn’t come to dread it, Faith would have easily recognized.
“Why are you calling me at home?” she asked.
“I tried you at the hospital but you wasn’t there.”
“I wasn’t there,” Faith said, “because it’s not even eight o’clock.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“This is ridiculous,” Faith said. “This is harassment.”
“It’s not harassing. I need to get through to somebody. None of youse pay attention. No one wants to help.” She was weeping.
“Has something happened to Sean?”
“Has something happened to Sean?” Bridget stopped mid-sob and did a perfect imitation of Faith’s soothing professional voice, down to its slight Jewish singsong. “Something is always happening to Sean.”
Faith felt her face reddening. Waves of heat began rolling over her. She broke into a sweat.
“I’ll call you from the office.”
“Look,” Bridget said, “I’m trying to tell you something. All youse at the hospital just don’t wanna get it. He isn’t getting better. Not with Ritalin, not with Prozac. He’s started collecting hair from my hairbrush and from Maureen’s hairbrush. He sleeps with it under his pillow. Last week he cut her hair off in her sleep.”
“He cut his sister’s hair off?”
“Yup. Her long beautiful pigtail. He cut a huge chunk off.”
In spite of herself, Faith felt herself being pulled into the story. “Did he say why?”
“Just that he likes it because it’s soft. That’s what he always says.”
“Bridget—I’m going to give Sean’s case some further thought and also brainstorm with my team. I promise to call you from the hospital. But now I’ve got to go.”
“You better come up with something good. I’m at the end of my rope—”
“Yes, I recognize that,” Faith said and replaced the phone in its cradle on the freckled kitchen counter. She turned her back on her beloved kitchen: the hanging spider plants in the bow window overlooking the deck, the light oak cabinets, the island sink. Al had finally capitulated last spring about having it renovated, and it was giving her so much pleasure. She turned swiftly on her heel in her new three-inch sandals. Her pedicured toenails were the exact same shade as its thin mauve straps.
She took the back stairs more quickly than usual. This part of the house was cramped and dark, the risers on the staircase steep and curved. But Faith knew every one of these steps intimately—in the past twenty years she must have negotiated them ten thousand times. The third rung down had been rickety for two years. For some reason—haste? agitation?—her right ankle buckled when she put her weight on it, and she gave a little scream as she pitched forward. Her arm ought to have broken the fall, but it didn’t.
2
Faith lay crumpled on the yellow painted planks of the landing that led to the garage. Seymour licked her face and whinged uneasily. In the meantime Al hummed cheerily to himself in briskly flowing traffic on the Ville Marie Expressway, mapping out in his mind the article he was preparing for next spring’s issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science about the fallout of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution in Ontario. Rhoda snored gently into her pillow, luxuriating in summer vacation’s relaxed schedule. Erica at her computer pored over notes about the roots of Radobice’s Jewish community, in preparation for writing her introduction.
Only Faith’s father, Ziggie Guttman, experienced a frisson of foreboding. On his knees, gently pushing Freda’s left foot into her beige walking shoe, he tenderly caressed the stockinged instep—still high, still after all this time, desirable—and was suddenly assailed by a wave of nausea. Was there an odour escaping from her toes, or shoe, or pantyhose this hot and sticky morning to account for his queasiness? No, no, Ziggie staggered to the living room couch and collapsed on it at the exact moment that Faith—her neck neatly broken—stopped breathing. Later, after the police had come and gone, Ziggie remembered that sixty years ago, as a boy of fifteen in the early days of the ghetto of Radobice, he had felt the selfsame upsurge of malaise, followed by the same exhaustion, at the instant that, unknown to him, his father was felled by a heart attack across town.
How could Ziggie sense death, without knowledge of it? How is it even possible to be alive one moment and be gone the next, without warning, without preparation, without a struggle?
3
When Faith didn’t show up at clinic, it caused a flurry of annoyance. After all, an important element of her many-faceted job was running an efficient clinic. At 9:30, a harried Charles Levitan asked Yvette, the secretary, to call her at home. When there was no answer, he shrugged and looked angry. Appointments were backed up; it was hard to know exactly what to do without Faith directing the flow of patients.
Charles wasn’t a worrier, but at 11 a.m. he told Yvette to find Al’s number for him. It took a while to trace Al, a new phone system having been recently installed at the university. The voicemail bypassed the poli-sci receptionist, who, in any case, was on vacation.
Al picked up the phone reluctantly when it rang. He had just given birth to an excellent sentence excoriating Harris’s cuts to social assistance and predicting the creation of a marginalized and radicalized underclass that would rock Toronto’s public weal down the road.
It was hard to grasp what Levitan was carrying on about. Faith not at work? Not possible. She had to be at work. There was nowhere else for her to be.
4
Nadine Benloulou lived across the street from the Rabinovitches in a split level the mirror image of theirs. She was watering her wax begonias when Al drove up, burning rubber. Shirttail bunching over the belt of his jeans, he tore out of the car, leaving both its door and that of the house flung open.
Nadine took an ardent interest in the doings of her neighbours. She and her husband Jacques were on excellent social terms with Faith and Al. Jacques, a kosher restaurateur, had catered the Rabinovitch children’s bar and bat mitvahs and Faith and Al’s twenty-fifth anniversary party.
When she heard an agonized cry emanate from inside Al’s house, Nadine hesitated the merest interval before crossing the street and letting herself in. The cool, air-conditioned interior was refreshing after the heat of outdoors. The piercing keening grew louder as she mounted the front staircase that led to the living area and kitchen. She followed the sound to the stairwell winding down to the basement. When she saw Al doubled over a mound on the landing and Seymour whimpering next to him, she backtracked to the kitchen and dialled 911.
Word of an accident spread at the speed of tongues clacking. By the time the ambulance arrived, Nadine was in her own home, galvanizing the community. She called Congregation Emunath, where she spoke with Rabbi Kaufman. Then she called The Gazette. She and Jacques were friends with Vikram Mukherjee, the assistant managing editor who also wrote a dining column in which he had lauded their restaurant. Vikram immediately advised Paul, who’d just returned from lunch, and who, moments later, was on the phone with Erica.
Erica was caught off guard. For months now, her interactions with Paul had been strictly professional. Their breakup, ostensibly over the awkwardness of carrying on a love affair in the workplace, had been polite and civilized. Which was not to say that she didn’t draw her breath in sharply when she heard his voice on the line.
“An accident?” she repeated stupidly, staring at her screen where a chapter about Melly’s postwar black-market exploits had begun to float and whirl. “What accident?”
“Something to do with Faith and Al. There’s no details yet. Vikram’s calling the hospitals. I’ll get back to you as soon as I know what’s happening. I’m sorry, but I have the impression it may be bad.”
Erica’s hands shook as she dialled Rhoda. Voicemail kicked in after the first ring: Rhoda must be on the phone. Erica rocked from side to side in her swivel chair, hugging herself in front of the computer. Don’t let it be Faith, please don’t let it be Faith.
A moment later the phone rang. She jumped, then reached for it.
Rhoda’s voice was barely intelligible. “Have you heard?”
5
Erica’s new shortlist of the worst days of her life: today.
This was worse than the day her mother died. Way worse, though she would never say that to her father. Klara had been ill for a long time. They had said their goodbyes. If death wasn’t a blessed relief, it was the full stop to a complete life. This was a tear in the fabric of the world.
Rick’s betrayal compared to this, something mendable. Perhaps.
Cancer? Terrifying, a reminder to get on with things. This, now, this aching void, this is an assault on the natural order.
I shall never see you again, never take another walk with you, never pick you up for shul. You’ll never again tell me what to do, what to wear, whom to trust.
I can’t take this in. It’s unacceptable. Impossible.
6
In the house on Rosedale, Rhoda dragged a lazy boy armchair from Max’s room into Andrea’s. She knew she would be unable to sleep; let her at least sit vigil over Faith’s daughter. Earlier in the day, she and Hershy had driven to Huberdeau in the Laurentians to break the news to her at the Y Country Camp, where Andrea was head counsellor. Max, farther afield at a photography workshop in Banff, had to be briefed by phone. That task had fallen to Ziggie, because Al was prostrate with grief and quite unhinged by guilt. The rookie police officers who turned up at the house at first considered booking him for murder, until they grasped that he was babbling about a wobbly stair.
They had had to trace Andrea to a club in St. Jovite. It was her night off, and they found her on the dance floor, gyrating under the strobe lights to a mechanical techno beat. When she became aware of them, her face—so much like Faith’s at the same age—lit up for an instant, before she turned white and became motionless with dread.
Now she lay breathing deeply and evenly in her narrow bed, the streetlight outside illuminating features smudged with tears and the party makeup she hadn’t bothered to remove. Al’s sister, Debbie, had sedated both her and Al. She would no doubt drug Max too when he arrived home in the morning. Frozen with misery, Rhoda felt this was all wrong. When the worst thing in the world happened, shouldn’t you feel it in every pore of your body? Shouldn’t the pain sear and scald? Wasn’t it your job to suffer unanaesthetized?
She thought back to a night last week. She and Faith and Erica were having coffee together.
For the last time. (How could that have been the last meeting of the Three Graces? And how many Last Times have to be endured in a lifetime?)
They’d been discussing holiday plans. Faith and Al were planning a trip to Banff to visit Max and do a spot of hiking and white water rafting. Rhoda suggested they might want to hook up with her and Hershy in Stratford on their way home. Why didn’t Erica do the same?
Faith began to quiz Erica about the progress of the Melly manuscript. All the while, she was—typically—scoping the room for items of interest. They were at a new place, the Java U café on Sherbrooke West. Everything in Faith’s body language spoke of approbation: the ear to ear smile baring strong white teeth, the sparkle in her brown eyes, the energetic bobbing of her close-cropped head. Recently she had started to wear her hair very short, playing up her finely sculpted Nefertiti profile. She was looking around the cave-like room with its molded stainless steel tables and elegant clientele. To their right, a party of three older women raised martini glasses in a toast.
“I’ve been watching them for some time,” Faith had said in a hushed voice.
“Naturally. We expect nothing less of you,” Rhoda said.
“Aren’t they wonderful?” Erica said. “Every hair in place.”
“I want to be like them when I’m seventy-five,” Faith said. “They’ve got class. They’re here to celebrate the life of a friend who died recently. She loved martinis.”
“How do you know this?” Erica looked disbelieving.
“I’ve been following their conversation. I think it’s really a beautiful thing to just kind of sit around and share memories and raise a glass.”
“I don’t. Assuming you’re right and can read lips that effectively,” Erica said. “I think it would be much better if their friend were still alive and enjoying her martini with them.”
“In our case, we’d have to do it with a shtickel cake,” Rhoda said, pointing to the crumbs of chocolate cake on their plates. She had divvied the one piece into three slices. Faith had actually accepted the sliver without protest about her diet.
Rhoda felt tears burning behind her eyelids, though they refused to shed. She should have had a whole piece of cake. She shouldn’t have deprived herself of anything. She bent over Andrea and was suddenly engulfed by a wave of despair about the profound injustice of everything. A vision of Sean Callaghan, that adorable and exasperating child, floated before her eyes. Why had the universe singled him and his family out for suffering?
Rhoda bit down into the back of her hand, hard. Until the skin broke. I’m crazy. She began sucking at the fang marks she’d etched, then adjusted the light duvet covering Andrea with her other hand. Andrea stirred, snuffled, and turned her face away, leaving a streak of mascara on the pillow.
7
As he turned off the Décarie service road and headed east along Jean-Talon towards Paperman’s, Rabbi Nate felt glad of just one thing. At least he wasn’t in the air on his way to Eretz Israel as he was supposed to be. If this tragedy had occurred even one day later, his vacation would have already begun and he’d have to have come back from Jerusalem to bury Faith. Because there was no way at all that he could have abandoned his community in this demoralizing hour.
In his twenty-odd years with the shul, Nate had witnessed plenty of wrenching life passages. Sheba and Steve Shizgal’s stillborn child. Charlotte Tobin’s stroke at age thirty-seven. The suicide of poor Bernie Kahane last year. He had officiated at umpteen funerals, but never one like this. He would do his utmost to console the bereaved, but he was one of their number as well. As a doctrinaire Reconstructionist, he didn’t actually believe in a supernatural deity, but he felt an irrational urge to shake his fist at the sky.
Driving along in the early afternoon haze, he barely registered the car dealerships, muffler shops, service stations, and wholesale outlets lining this ugly stretch of Jean-Talon. He was still marshalling his thoughts for the eulogy. Perhaps the Book of Lamentations, customarily read at the approaching fast of Tisha b’Av, would make the best introduction. In Hebrew, Lamentations is called Eikhah, from the first word of the book which is “How.”
How?, he shouted to himself in the empty car, gripping the steering wheel with unnecessary force. How could this happen to Faith? She is—was—the epitome of vitality, a woman just bursting with life.
Impossible to begin his eulogy with the accustomed teaching of Rabbi Tarfon from the Ethics of the Fathers, the one about the shortness of the day and the reward of the righteous being a fruit of the world to come. He would instead cry out Eikhah! and quote some of the tragic verses of Lamentations, using his own free translation. The words, attributed by tradition to Jeremiah, mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and the devastation of the Temple, but they would, he thought, also resonate with a terrible aptness today.
Nate scoured his memory for his early impressions of Faith. She and Al were among the first couples to join Congregation Emunath after he took over from Moish. He had attracted a lot of young people back then, being himself so young and energetic. Al had thick sideburns and beetle eyebrows and was skinny as a rake at the time. Nate remembered Faith’s huge smile and her salt and pepper hair. Plump and buxom, she might still have been breastfeeding Andrea. Andrea, in fact, was one of the first baby girls he’d named, a little bundle he’d held aloft on the bimah and rocked back and forth to everyone’s delight.
Faith began showing interest in synagogue life when Max started preparing for his bar mitzvah ten years ago. He’d been an engaging child, bright and inquisitive but also volatile, given to pranks and outbursts. Nate liked to think that Faith was impressed by his handling of Max in the pre-B’nei Mitzvah workshops. At the same time, she got her feet wet in the shul’s Social Action Committee, organizing the sponsorship of a Nicaraguan family immigrating to Montreal. She quickly moved up to the programming committee. (What had she said about her rapid rise in the shul hierarchy? If you get full marks for attendance, they’ll make you chair as your prize.)
God, how he was going to miss her. They had had their differences, but in the end he’d won her over about the new building. He slammed his hand down on the steering wheel in a burst of frustrated rage and accidentally touched off the horn. The guy in the car next to him rolled down his window, waved his arms threateningly, and unleashed a string of invective in French. Nate squirmed and stared ahead, avoiding eye contact. (Anti-Semite? No, no, calm yourself. The idiot’s taken the honking personally.)
Traffic was really heavy east of Lucerne. Maybe he ought to have come by way of Côte-des-Neiges? He glanced at his watch. No need to worry. He’d left himself plenty of time.
He reached into his pocket for a tissue and mopped his forehead. It was a similarly oppressive day last month when Faith chaired the special meeting to approve the revised design. What a trooper she had been as m.c.! Even if she did end up deflating him, she proved herself a staunch ally. In his mind’s eye, he pictured her beaming, and then conjured up her impromptu homily about the sage Honi who planted the carob tree he’d never see bear fruit. A sapling is a commitment to the future, and so is building a shul that will outlast us.
What had possessed her to say this? How thrilled he had been by her words then. But now that cryptic comment made him shiver despite the heat.
Yet no one had even given it a second thought at the time.
The last block on Jean-Talon between the Thrifty car rental and the turnoff for Paperman’s was backed up bumper to bumper. It was dawning on Nate that the reason for the congestion was Faith. Again he checked the time: only ten minutes to spare. Again his stomach clenched. He would have to use the washroom before the service.
Nate knew it was going to take every ounce of his training and self-control to not break down while conducting this ceremony. He and Faith were colleagues rather than friends; he wasn’t even sure she liked him. He smarted at the notion that she scorned him for his ambition, maybe despised his desire to make his shul the biggest and the best. Perhaps he had asked too much of her, taken her for granted? Fuming as the light turned red once more, he was all too aware that he could no longer make it up to her. His eyes stung and the pit of his stomach released a sour tang of guilt.
8
Paperman’s main chapel was packed to capacity, the back and side walls of the hall lined with standing latecomers. Erica’s daughter, Tamara, her eyes bloodshot, jabbed her mother with her elbow. “There’s Dad,” she whispered. Erica snapped her head around. She saw a sea of faces, men’s heads covered by black kipahs, women’s with black lace doilies. Old Moish Stipelman, Noam, the butcher (barely recognizable in a black fedora and without his apron), Marty Riess (in sunglasses), Abigail Rosen, Melly and Bubbles Darwin floated into view, all as unreal as a desert mirage. Ricky was slouching at the very back, the tiniest of skullcaps adorning his silver head. He gave her a limp wave of his hand. Erica nodded and turned away quickly, but not before catching the eye of Helen Stern in the row behind her. Wearing a complacent smile, The Lovely was also surveying the scene.
“Isn’t this something?” Helen said. “Well, of course, we did call everybody.”
Erica gave her a withering look and The Lovely instantly erased the smirk from her face. “If it were up to me,” she added quickly, “I’d be sitting in the last row, but Jeff—” she indicated her husband, seated on the aisle— “is a pallbearer.”
Good God, Erica thought, this can only be happening over Faith’s dead body. What could Al be thinking? Faith had had no use for Jeff Stern.
She turned away wordlessly from Helen, towards her father on her left. It had cost Dr. Tibor Molnar considerable physical and psychic effort to drag himself on his two canes to Paperman’s today. For a man of ninety-one, funeral services were chill reminders. As a good Catholic, he seldom frequented Paperman’s. Like other identifiably Jewish institutions, the place pierced his conscience, stirred up associations that would likely haunt his sleep tonight. Painfully he screwed his great bald head, curved low by osteoporosis, towards Erica. His dark, mournful, intelligent eyes tried to convey encouragement. He reached out one bony hand, pressed hers, then extended his palm beyond Erica, searching for Tamara’s fingers, squeezing them tight with his.
For all his reluctance to be here, Tibor had insisted on coming. Over the years, he had met Faith and her parents many times. The code he lived by dictated the need to pay his respects, as it did to stand by his daughter, who had no man to lean on.
Tibor counted the failure of Erica’s marriage as a misfortune of his old age second only to the death of his beloved Klara, whom he grieved as much today as he did on the day she left him five years ago. That he should have so misjudged his son-in-law of whom he was fond despite his undesirable background was living proof of the necessity for humility that Christian faith prescribed.
Tibor shook his head sadly. Why must passion die? His ardour for Klara had never wavered from the time of their innocent courtship, playing pitch and catch on the Hill of Roses, until he closed her eyes on her deathbed. When Erica first brought Ricky to meet him and Klara, he didn’t disparage the romance as puppy love to be outgrown. “First love, true love,” he said to Klara, patting her cheek. She brushed his hand away. “Is this why we had her baptized? So she could go to Hillel House and bring a bocher home?”
He didn’t put up a fight. Klara never gave up a point easily, least of all about the bane of Jewishness, which, after the war, she had come to equate with the mark of Cain. As for Tibor, in his most private of selves, he had felt a soupçon of satisfaction over Erica’s choice of mate and her eventual conversion to Judaism. It was as if, by reverting to her roots, she righted an imbalance in the universe, repairing a breach that he and Klara had created.
Tibor’s musings were disrupted by a sudden silence amidst the flurry of whispers.
A man in a black suit was entering by the side door.
“Please rise.”
At the sight of the gleaming oak casket rolling into the room, a collective gasp swept the hall. Despite the evidence, the idea that the polished box housed Faith’s compact form seemed entirely ungraspable.
“You may be seated.”
Rabbi Kaufman, accompanied by a cantor, took the podium.
“At last,” Erica muttered. “What’s taken him so long?”
The cantor chanted the Twenty-third Psalm, holding the notes mournfully. Next to him, Nate looked down at the crowd, feeling emptied out, as if it were all over instead of just beginning. When the cantor stopped, Nate began, not as he had planned with an agonized cry, but very softly.
“‘My eyes flow copiously,
My heart is confounded with grief,
My whole being laid waste
Over the ruin of the daughter of my people.’
“This verse from the Book of Lamentations is an outpouring of grief bemoaning the horror that marked the destruction of Jerusalem. In Hebrew the Book of Lamentations is called Eikhah.
“Eikhah means how? Surpassing even the agony of loss we are experiencing, we are overwhelmed by our shock, horror, and disbelief. Eikhah—how could it be that we are here to cry out at the tragic passing of such a keenly alive, such a spirited woman as Faith Guttman Rabinovitch? Eikhah: how could this outstanding leader, this fine and upstanding human being, this beautiful person have left us so abruptly and so meaninglessly in her prime, when she had yet so much to contribute to and draw from life?”
Off to the left of the podium, the bereaved family was seated in an alcove with an excellent view of the rabbi but shielded from the eyes of the public by a screen panelled in dark brown. In the front row Al had his arms around Andrea and Max. All three of them heaved with suppressed sobs. Behind them were Freda and Ziggie, with Faith’s brother and sister-in-law. In the next aisle, Al’s parents, and his sister Debbie huddled with her husband and three children. At the very back of the bay, Rhoda and Hershy were holding hands. Andrea had specifically asked them to sit with the family.
For two nights and three days, from the time she heard the news until the funeral, Rhoda had been unable to sleep or touch food or shed a tear. But once Nate kept on repeating the word Eikhah, Rhoda began to shiver. Her teeth chattered as if she had fever. Hershy wrapped both his arms around her but she kept on shaking. When Nate pronounced Faith’s full name, Faith Guttman Rabinovitch, Rhoda dissolved. Faith never used the two surnames together; she’d always said it was too much of a mouthful. But for Rhoda the name Faith Guttman brought it all back, all the long years of friendship from Moyse Hall on, all the expectations—unspoken, unthought—that friendship is forever, world without end.
Rhoda wept great gulping sobs. It was all, all true. Eikhah—how would she go on without her?
At the cemetery it was only worse. Much worse. Rhoda knew she’d blank on the details afterwards—in fact, even as it was happening, she wanted to shut out the sounds and images. Maxie—in the past couple of days, she had reverted to calling him by the childhood pet name—was shrieking at the grave into which the coffin had just been lowered. “No.… No, no, no, no. No.” Ziggie, his face stamped with sadness beneath an impeccable black fedora, stepped forward, abandoning Freda for a moment. Despite the heat of the sun beating down, he was garbed in heavy dark formal clothes, as if death had to be confronted in full regalia. A picture of stoic dignity, he took his grandson in his arms, rocking him back and forth like a baby. “It’s all right, Maxie,” he crooned. “It’s all right. You will get used to it.”
Nate, more sombre than Rhoda had ever seen him, called on all who wished to participate in the mitzvah of burial to come forward. Al, Max, and Andrea all stepped up in turn and pitched token shovelfuls of earth into the pit. Ziggie followed half-heartedly. Nate again urged the others on. “It’s a way to say your last goodbye.” She thought Nate was crying too, but wasn’t sure. She caught Erica’s eye. They nodded at each other. Yes. They would do it.
Before they had a chance to approach the grave, Daniel, Faith’s brother, strode up to the open trench. A tall, strikingly good-looking man, Daniel Guttman had so far barely said a word to anyone. Now he grabbed the shovel from the pile of earth where Ziggie had stuck it. Like someone possessed, he began hurling spade after spade of dirt on top of the coffin. His eyes gleamed bright with rage, and he seemed determined to finish the task singlehanded. Nate watched him warily for a while, then observed diffidently that Rhoda wanted to partake of the ritual. Without a word Daniel planted the spade into the soil and stalked away, a spot of red burning on each high cheekbone.
A stray breeze lifted the black lace doily off Rhoda’s head as the first heapful of earth she mustered landed in the grave. Erica stepped up to her and, hip to hip, they clutched on to each other.
And then comic relief—how could there be comedy at a time like this? Queenie Maislin, dressed as for a garden party in a broad brimmed straw hat and espadrilles, swept up to her at the graveside. Rhoda had never spoken more than two words to Queenie. Queenie landed a brisk kiss on each of her cheeks.
“If there’s anything I can do to help—with meditation and healing—please don’t hesitate to call.” She whipped out a business card. Rhoda stared at it in disbelief.
Queenie Maislin, Family Therapist
Holistic therapy.
Bereavement counselling.
Reflexology.
By appointment only.
In the meantime, Abigail Rosen, crone-like over her cane, accosted Erica. Erica was standing forlorn and aimless, her arm linked through Tamara’s, wondering if it were time to go yet. Face seamed with wrinkles, flaccid caves beneath her deep-set liquid brown eyes, Abigail fixed Erica with a searching glare and pronounced in her deep, almost masculine voice, “I have never been able to understand why you’ve always rebuffed me, when I’ve only wanted to be your friend.”
Erica gaped at her, mouth open.
“I just want to assure you that I hold no grudges.”
Having imparted this piece of good news with regal serenity, Abigail continued without skipping a beat, “Do you see Marty Riess in this crowd? He’s promised to drive me home.”
9
At 7:25 on the morning after Faith’s funeral, Marty hesitantly let himself in through the unlocked front door of Al’s house. A white sheet hung over the mirror in the hallway and muted female voices and the clatter of crockery came from the nearby kitchen. The air was fragrant with the aroma of coffee.
The first to arrive, he entered the living room, a place he’d frequented a handful of times to attend the odd meeting or drop off documents. He had the eerie expectation that any minute Faith would poke her bobbed head around the corner. Yes, any minute she’d call the meeting to order at the long dining room table in the far end of the room.
Marty unzipped his navy tallis bag, donned his kipah, draped his prayer shawl over his shoulders, and started pulling the phylacteries from his bag. It was years since he’d attended a morning minyan—ten years, to be exact, when his dad died—and whatever knack he ever had for laying tefillin was mostly lost. At least he remembered enough to stand while strapping them on.
The front door creaked open, announcing new arrivals: Daniel Guttman, bringing Freda and Ziggie. Soon Nate, too, appeared, and the room began filling up. Hershy Kaplansky came over to shake Marty’s hand. When he saw Marty entangled in the leather straps, he couldn’t resist a token jab.
“You’re a pro, Marty. I can tell.”
“It’s like this,” said Jeff Stern, already wearing both hand and head pieces, and making the rounds of the room, his chest puffed out. “Once you’ve knotted it around the bicep, like so, and it faces your heart, you say the bracha—”
“I know,” Marty said.
“—and then there’s one twist above the elbow and seven twists between the elbow and your wrist….”
Who today loved God with all his heart and all his soul and with all his might, thought Marty, the words of the Shema whispering through his being. All around the room his co-religionists—the men anyway—were arraying themselves in tribal gear. Not all adhered strictly to the injunction to bind the tefillin as a sign upon the hand and as frontlets between the eyes. Melly Darwin wore only the head bayit, dispensing with the arm straps. (Quite a surprise to see Melly here. He seemed frailer than Marty remembered him, the collar enclosing the bull neck hanging loose. Had he lost weight, was he ill?)
Daniel Guttman put on a tallis, but shook his head when Ziggie, in a broken whisper, asked him if he’d brought phylacteries with him. Marty wondered if, after all that life had dealt him, Ziggie still loved God with all his might? Last night, at the evening service here at the house, Marty overheard Ziggie questioning Nate. In a bewildered voice, his brow furrowed, he asked while he stroked Freda’s hand absentmindedly (she was latched onto his arm, both of them looking spent), “But Rabbi, why do we do all this? Why do we hide the mirrors? Why must shiva be seven days? Tell me how this is all supposed to help?”
And then, after prayers were over, after the rabbi had taken his leave, Marty happened to glance in the direction of Erica, as he too was about to depart. The old man was sitting beside her, sunk into a corner of the sectional couch. Speaking to no one in particular, he observed, “You know, for me, this is like a second Holocaust.”
Now Ziggie’s shel yad and shel rosh were in place just so, the requisite loops and knots on arm and hand, the black box pointing upward from his forehead, the ends of the head straps lying on his chest against his crisp white shirt. Facing east, with his hollowed eyes, stubbled cheeks, and outlandish get up, he was an alarming sight. But then, we all are, thought Marty. What could be weirder than a bunch of unicorned men with zebra-striped arms?
Nate, jumpy with nervous energy this morning, was glancing surreptitiously at his watch. He couldn’t very well start without the immediate family, who were nowhere to be seen. On the other hand, it being a Monday, everybody else was on a tight schedule. Timidly, he edged towards the swing door to the kitchen. Inside, Rhoda and Erica were busy preparing the post-service breakfast. Coffee in a large urn was perking on a side counter. Erica was arranging lox on a platter, Rhoda scooping seeds out of a cantaloupe. When the rabbi explained his predicament, Rhoda laid the spoon aside and said she’d venture upstairs.
A couple of minutes later, Al, Max, and Andrea trooped down. By now, the living room and hallway were crammed. Alienated by the bizarre appearance of their menfolk, the women had exiled themselves to the hall.
Andrea marched past them, dashing tears from her eyes. She had on a tallis, richly embroidered in shades of blue and purple. She and Faith had purchased it in New York eight years ago, for her bat mitzvah.
“You don’t have to stand off to the side, you know,” Andrea said to the women through clenched teeth. “My mother would have hated that.”
Spunky kid, Marty thought.
He tried to avert his eyes from the sight of Al. His shoulders bowed, Al looked a mess, like an old man. Unshaven, as required by the rules of mourning, unkempt, grey, and crumpled, he appeared to have slept in his clothes, the same shirt and black pants as last night. His only concessions to Jewish practice were his black kipah, and the riven black tie, loose at the neck and askew, so that the place where it was slit by the beadle at Paperman’s lay just over his heart.
The service was austere. The dawn blessings, thanking God for our bodies and our souls, enjoining ethical living, praising the Eternal for creating us in His image, for creating us as Jews, for creating us free, for giving us courage. Then came the Shema, the keystone of faith. And so on, and so on, until the Kaddish.
You shouldn’t gape at the face of a mourner, Marty remembered his father telling him. This teaching was stamped into Marty’s skull, so that even now, fifty years later, he could feel the heavy imprint of his father’s hand compelling him to shift his gaze. The first time Simon Reiss took him to shul for a yahrzeit, that of Marty’s Bubbie Rivkah, he couldn’t have been more than six. How was he supposed to know where not to look? His father’s great paw—Marty had those hands now, broad, long-fingered, each nail etched with a neat half-moon at the base—clamped down on his head, forcing his eyes to his shiny penny loafers twitching on the dull wood flooring of Beth David.
Beth David on St. Joseph Boulevard was a dim and shadowy place, a dour place. Scion of a long line of strict and critical patriarchs, his father was a dour, closed man. Marty was never to discover why he and not his two older brothers was chosen for these occasions; Simon Reiss wasn’t much of a shul-goer otherwise. Maybe it was to impress dutiful behaviour. His father’s stern features had never softened in grief. His disapproving pale eyes never filmed over as he raced through the Kaddish at the frenetic orthodox rate.
Heeding the old injunction, Marty now studied the bold square Hebrew lettering of his siddur intently, although of course he knew the words of the Kaddish by rote. (His left arm was going painfully numb, he must have cut off his circulation by winding the straps of the tefillin too tight.) His heart twisted to hear the voices of Max and Andrea. The murmurings of Ziggie, Al, and Daniel were barely audible, but the two young people were barking out the prayer like a harsh manifesto. Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu ve’al kol yisrael…. There was such a disturbing dissonance between the consoling language—“May the One who creates heavenly peace create peace for us and for all Israel”—and the stark reality.
Marty didn’t linger after the service. He unwound the tefillin, massaged the welts on his arm, slipped his tallis and kipah into his tallis bag. It was tempting to stay for breakfast, but he didn’t want to see Erica. And Rhoda gave him the heebie jeebies. He’d caught her observing him from beneath hooded eyes and wondered what she knew about him.
10
Marty had first heard the news about Faith from Helen Stern, who had stepped up to assume the presidency. After the initial heart-stopping shock, his mind leaped to Erica. He saw her and Faith together after the service last Shabbat, doubled over with laughter by the kiddush table. He had no idea what was so funny. At first, when he used to see them laughing like that, he imagined he was the butt of their humour. But as time went by and Faith treated him the same as ever, he calmed down. Perhaps Erica had said nothing to her.
It was three in the afternoon when Helen called. He had a house to show in Hampstead in half an hour. He dialled Erica’s number. He hadn’t spoken to her since the fiasco of his confession, had avoided her as much as possible. But this was different. She couldn’t construe this call as anything but what it was meant to be, an acknowledgement of shared tragedy, an expression of genuine concern.
There was no answer. He thought of leaving a message on her voice mail, but decided against it. He didn’t have any claim on her, and he wasn’t trying to push his way in. It was too late to cancel the appointment in Hampstead. Besides he didn’t know what else to do with himself. The smoked meat sandwich from lunch burned in his chest. He needed to belch but couldn’t.
The house, a five-minute drive from his office on Queen Mary, was on Cressy Road, in the heart of old Hampstead. It was a limestone beauty, with lozenge-shaped leaded windows and gorgeous woodwork. Though it hadn’t been updated in twenty years, it was well kept and fairly priced. His client, for whom he had to wait a few minutes after he let himself into the house, was a vapid woman, a tsatske. She had a helmet of big hair and a big capped smile. She was coming out of a divorce and moving down from Devon Avenue in upper Westmount. So far she hadn’t liked anything he’d showed in her price range.
This house was no exception. It was too small, too dowdy, requiring too much work for her budget. (He assumed she was down to her last couple of million.) By the time he’d finished showing the property, his jaw ached from a surfeit of politeness. She asked him to take another look at his listings. He suggested she think about the possibility of the Circle Road area. Or even—he took a deep breath at his own audacity—Montreal West.
From his car, he tried Erica again, and still only got the recorded message.
At six, the daughter picked up.
“This is Marty Riess. I know your mother from synagogue.”
“Yes?”
“May I speak with her?”
“She’s not here. Something’s happened.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling. I’m terribly sorry.”
There was silence on the other end.
“I just wanted to tell your mother—Do you know when she’ll be home?”
“She’s at the Guttmans’. Faith’s parents. She said she’d be home around eight.”
Trying not to think of Faith, he worked an hour on a closing for the next day. He felt the beginnings of a migraine, closed his eyes, and saw bright flashes. He laid his head on the desk and to his shock was overcome by tears.
At a quarter to eight, he parked in front of Erica’s house. It was a beautiful summer evening, the heat of the day fading, the light still golden. A gentle breeze rustled the pink lilies that encircled the base of a young magnolia tree on the front lawn. A pair of cardinals trilled their four-note song at each other. When he’d been here last winter, he was left with an impression of neatness and order. Now, as he waited—he must be crazy to be coming here; she’d think he was stalking her—he noted that despite the obvious care lavished on the garden, the cream paint of the shutters was peeling and the red bricks needed repointing.
Erica turned into her driveway at a couple of minutes before eight. She got out of her car slowly. When she saw Marty approaching from the street, she dropped her keys.
By the time she straightened up, he had joined her on the lawn. She did not look happy to see him. There was a cross-hatching of little lines beneath her eyes, which looked like oddly matched slits.
“I tried calling you, Erica, to say—to say, I have some small sense of what this loss must mean to you. I don’t have really close friends like you and Faith are. I’ve always admired your friendship, the three of you. I am so very very sorry.”
Erica blinked.
“I won’t keep you. Please don’t think badly of me for coming. If there’s the smallest practical thing I can do—give lifts or do errands. Or anything at all that might be helpful.” His voice trailed away when she made no answer.
He placed a business card in her hand and for an instant closed his big paw around it. Then he turned on his heels.
11
Other than his decision about volunteer work, Dr. Winters disapproved of most of Marty’s recent initiatives. He was icily contemptuous when Marty decided to reciprocate his neighbour Kim’s earlier invitation to dinner. The morning after, he described his labours in the kitchen to Winters. He drew out the details of tossing the mesclun in lime juice and coating the inch-thick rib steaks in Montreal Steak Spice. This way he was left with less time to report on the ignominious bedroom callisthenics that had followed the steaks. Dr. Winters got predictably agitated and, his face purple, gave his patient a brutal tongue-lashing.
Trying to heed the advice he was spending lavishly to acquire, Marty lined up two women whom Winters deemed more appropriate. (It was curious how adamantly he was bent on seeing him fixed up with Jewish women. Marty was tempted to ask him if he thought his urges too gross to visit upon Gentile females. Then he thought better of it.)
So he dutifully squired Millie Brody, a washed out, rather pretty platinum blonde widow a year or two his senior, to the symphony. He wasn’t particularly optimistic about Millie but Stephen Kovacevich was performing Mozart on a rare North American tour, so the evening would at the very least be redeemed by the music. In fact, all the way home Millie was one long gush about the two concertos and invited him in for the inevitable nightcap.
She lived in a small townhouse on Rembrandt Avenue in Côte St. Luc, across from a condo building where he had sold a unit a week earlier. Her place was chock-full of bric-a-brac, antiques, and overstuffed needlepoint cushions she’d been unable to part with when she liquidated her large home a year ago. Now she donned a frilly pink apron and fussed around him with jiggers, ice bucket, and a silver kidney bowl of pistachios. She had clearly refreshed her perfume and smelled like an orchard when she finally alighted beside him on the floral loveseat and tucked her stockinged feet beneath her. Marty sneezed three times.
“Is that strawberries you’re wearing?”
“No,” she smiled. “Coconut.”
She fixed the glass of white wine in her hand with an expression of studied candour. “I like you a lot, Marty,” she said, “but it’s still awfully soon for me after Bernie. But if you’d like to you know, have sex, I think I could cope with that. I mean, while you’re looking around for someone in a serious way. Because I can’t be serious yet. But I actualIy believe it would be helpful for me. Sex, I mean. You know, healing the body as a first step to healing the heart.”
Marty gave his gin and tonic a long stir with a swizzle stick shaped like a rapier. “That’s really good of you, Millie, to offer. I’ll beg off tonight, if you don’t mind. But I’d like to take a rain check on that.”
If she was disappointed, she hid it. He broke the awkward silence by inquiring about the photo of a baby with gargantuan cheeks in a studio portrait on the Louis XV coffee table. While he downed his drink as quickly as decently possible, they compared stilted notes about grandchildren.
The following Saturday, he asked Myra Schachter to Waiting for Godot at the Centaur. He had known Myra forever. She was a few years behind him at Folkshule, and they overlapped by a year at Northmount High. He remembered Myra as a brain; she placed first in the PSBGM’s high-school-leaving examinations in, it must have been ’63, no ’64, the year the Beatles turned up on the Ed Sullivan Show. His mother had passed him her picture in the Star when he got home from work one afternoon. Northmount Girl Leads City, the headline read and there was dumpy little Myra in cap and gown, peering out owlishly from behind a pair of sequined butterfly-shaped glasses.
Now decades later, Myra was still short and stout, though she’d rid herself of glasses. Her eyes were a fine deep blue, and she still had thick sandy lashes. She gazed at him quizzically through them after they adjourned to the Second Cup on Greene Avenue, a stone’s throw from her cottage.
Myra taught cross-cultural studies at McGill and had been married to a colleague of Dr. Winters at the Institute. Marty wasn’t sure what cross-cultural studies were and didn’t think this was the time to ask.
“So Marty, what did you make of the play?” Her tone was playful but her expression stern; he was clearly on trial. She had thin lips. He associated narrow lips with lack of libido. Perhaps even with meanness of spirit, though that was belied by the soulful eyes.
“It was pretty bleak, wasn’t it? I mean the acting was good and the set was well done. Arty, with all that faux exposed brick. But if you really want to know, I prefer Shakespeare to Beckett.”
“But you can’t live on a steady diet of the bard!”
“Well, maybe not a steady diet, but you can go a long way. What I particularly like about Shakespeare is all the activity on stage, the buffoonery, the swordplay, all that stuff. And the huge casts. This modern pared-down business, I can’t make head or tail of it. What was it Estragon said somewhere in the middle tonight? ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.’”
“That was irony. When something does happen, it’s worse than when nothing happens. Beckett was exploring the aesthetics of meaninglessness.”
“I guess I get more out of Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning.”
“You’ve read Frankl? I wouldn’t have thought it was the kind of thing you’d be interested in.”
“I have a psychoanalyst who sets great store by Frankl and meaning and purpose in life.”
“So your interest in Frankl is more utilitarian than pure?”
“Is there something wrong with trying to find—I don’t know—guideposts for living?”
“It’s a bit simplistic to think such guideposts exist. I perceive Victor Frankl as being a kind of highbrow Mitch Albom. You’ve heard of Tuesdays with Morrie?”
“Isn’t that a best-seller? No, I can’t say I’ve read it. Would you like to tell me what I’ve been missing?”
Myra coloured and looked away. She narrowed her fine blue eyes. There were deep circles beneath them, the skin dry and puckered. “In my line of study, I have to keep my finger on the pulse of popular culture, you know.”
Driving home alone, he felt unutterably tired. Rain was pelting down in sheets as he drove uphill on Atwater. This wasn’t what he’d expected of the single life, this feinting and sparring. What had he expected? He didn’t know anymore. It was Winters’s fault for encouraging him to leave Leona. Leading him on to believe he would find a woman of substance to share life with, someone kind and compatible he could hold on to and cherish for whatever time was left.
Someone like Erica. On that date they’d talked about real things, themselves, their failures, their expectations, not about Beckett and Shakespeare. But he’d shot himself in the foot with Erica. Or in the head.
He couldn’t blame that on Winters.
The streetlights on Côte-des-Neiges cast shadows onto the slick road. A fork of lightning zigzagged on the horizon to his right, above the cemetery, and thunder rumbled in great drum rolls. As he turned into the parking lot of the Rockhill, the sky opened up with a vengeance. He ducked out of the car and was instantly drenched. Acknowledging the doorman with a curt nod, he stood waiting for the elevator, dreading the moment he’d step into his apartment. It would echo with emptiness and smell stale. There would be nothing in the fridge but half a loaf of week-old gefilte fish and the dregs of a bottle of Coke. The solitary bed almost made him long for Leona.
No, it didn’t. Her lawyer, that bulvan Rick Aronovitch, had had him served with divorce papers at the office the previous week. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t have the courtesy to warn him that the bailiff was coming. As if he were some deadbeat who’d been shirking his responsibilities, instead of depositing a sizable cheque in her account on the first of every month.
No, he didn’t miss wretched Leona. And he didn’t hanker after Millie or Myra or Kim. Maybe a serious meaningful relationship just wasn’t on the cards. At this particular moment, turning the key in his lock, he didn’t give a fuck any more. What he craved at this particular moment was businesslike and anonymous. He wanted expert professional hands—the hands of a Micheline or a Célèste—to iron the kinks out of his back and neck, to touch him ever so lightly in a few strategic places, and make him come like a geyser.
12
“She needn’t have worried so much about getting Alzheimer’s,” Al said. He and Rhoda were sitting in his dining room on a warm, late summer night. Beyond the open window, the crickets sawed a soothing melody.
“I’ve thought of that, too.” Rhoda laid down five tiles. They clicked gently against each other as they met the T on the board.
R-E-G-R-E-T.
“I hope you realize I’m not making any points off this move at all,” Rhoda said. “I’m selflessly developing the board for you.”
For the month that Andrea and Max were at home, Al bestirred himself to buy groceries and walk Seymour, but once they returned to school and work a couple of weeks ago, he let the dog out the back and cleaned up his mess or not. He didn’t leave the house at all, said he’d get his groove back by the time term began. That was still three weeks away.
Rhoda and Erica took turns dropping by with casseroles and treats, otherwise he forgot to eat. On her watch, Erica washed the day’s accumulation of coffee cups and plates strewn about the living room, and wiped the jam and honey off the kitchen counters. Rhoda didn’t bother with the dishes—a little activity would do him no harm!—but she often stayed on into the evening. Occasionally, she suggested a game of Scrabble.
“You’re a saint,” Erica said to Rhoda when they talked on the phone late every night. Erica was in the throes of the final push of the Melly second draft. Apparently determined to restore their old platonic friendship, Paul still read every word she wrote. He said she was doing a great job. It was going to be a real book, not a puff piece. She hoped he was right.
“I can’t be around Al.” Erica said to Rhoda. “I just can’t bear all his mea culpas. Yes, yes, yes! I agree with him. He should have fixed the stair. Oh how I wish he had! But he did not kill her. It was an accident. It was random. It was senseless. Very true, she managed not to fall all the other times. My heart bleeds for him. For him, for the kids, for you, for me. For her parents! But most of all for her. For Faith. She fell right out of her own life. How many times are we to go around this particular circle?”
“He’s like a wounded animal,” Rhoda said on the phone. “He’s nursing his wounds.”
The wounded animal brushed the tiles off the dining table with a violent swing of his arm. They skittered in every direction on the floor. Seymour yelped from the corner. He trotted over, leaped to Al’s knees, and began licking his hand.
“I can’t do this,” Al said. “How insensitive can you be? Bugger this Regret.”
“Al, I’m sorry,” Rhoda said. “We can’t bring her back.”
“Stop patronizing me.”
“I didn’t mean to patronize you.… I’m not patronizing you.”
“Tell me, are you happy with Hershy?”
“Where does Hershy come into this?”
“You’re not, are you? Well, are you? Faith was my heart, she was my everything. If we hadn’t been so good together, if we hadn’t been so perfect for each other, if we’d been like other couples, it wouldn’t hurt so much. I could manage somehow.”
“You’re managing. You can’t expect—”
“Stop preaching at me! You think you know everything. You know nothing. Not one damn thing!”
13
Melly Darwin hunched over the rosewood table in his home conference room and pulled a pencil from behind his ear. He circled a word, then underlined it, then scowled, then crumpled up the sheet of paper and lobbed it in the corner where it joined at least a dozen similar creased balls.
“Bubbles,” Melly yelled, “Come here. Right now! Please.”
Bubbles appeared with uncharacteristic speed. “What now?”
“I’m not a big reader, Bubbles.”
“You called me here to tell me that?”
“Bubbles, in the very first chapter, she hasn’t said a word about me.”
“I know. I told you before. She’s setting the scene. She’s writing about Radobice, she’s creating a background. Atmosphere. Mood.”
“Yeah, well, she’s describing Sarah’s birth, and some business about Gershon and candies.”
“’Cos Gershon said to her your mother almost died giving birth to her. It’s a miracle you were born at all.”
“I don’t see nothing here about a miracle. You were the one who found her, you and your fancy book club!”
“This is just the first couple of chapters. It’s still rough.”
“Why’s it rough? She’s had all this time. And not a word about me being a war hero! Not a word about mine career in business.”
“She’ll lead up to it. That’s the way books work. You lead up to things.”
“I’m not paying her to lead. I’m paying her to write. About me. Not about Gershon.”
14
Though it was past 11 p.m., Erica was at her computer.
Since Faith’s death, she stayed by her desk longer and longer, putting off going to bed where she knew she would lie with her eyes wide open, her mind like a revved motor, her limbs tensed. In the office it was easier to push away the vision of Faith toppling downstairs, stifle her cry, delete the broken body at the foot of the stairs. For some reason the image of Faith’s dainty mauve toenails—that cute last pedicure—particularly tormented her. To think Faith had gone to her maker wearing that very pretty shade of light purple. But of course she hadn’t. Someone at Paperman’s would have rubbed away the polish with cotton balls and remover.
Erica shuddered and forced herself to focus on the screen.
Melly was breathing down her neck. According to the terms of her contract, she had submitted the first two chapters, for which she was now due payment. He had said that he wanted to see the whole manuscript, but she was unwilling to show it in draft form, particularly since she was still working on the parts that were most problematic for her. The atrocity sections.
And anyway, according to the contract, she only had to submit the rest once he approved the sample material.
Ever since she found out what had happened to Sarah and Gershon, she had become invested in the project in a way she had never been with anything before. She felt a great urgency to craft something really good, at the same time as she was overcome by a choking despair that her words were entirely inadequate, that in fact, all words were inadequate in the face of the enormity of suffering she was called on to write about.
Yet words were all she had. She had spent the whole day combing through her files in search of information on the liquidation, but now late at night the books and notes were stacked in piles on the floor and her desk. She willed the stored information to float from her memory to her fingertips, and began typing with her eyes closed.
Late August 1942.
At the edge of town, near the railway tracks, fields of wheat were fattening for harvest. Out of the blue, a division of German soldiers scythed the crop to the ground. And then the empty freight cars began arriving, manned by unknown guards with unknown insignias.
For weeks, there had only been one topic of conversation in the ghetto: would its inhabitants be sent away, and if so when? “Away” didn’t signify Auschwitz or Treblinka, it was held to be relocation to the east, possibly to Ukraine, where there would be much hardship, but still a chance to survive. Only the odd cynic muttered from time to time, “You fools, you daydreamers, you’re wilfully blind. They’re going to find a way to do away with us. We’re all going to die.”
On Shabbat, the Chief Rabbi preached an exceptional d’var Torah. He was an old man, much venerated, a gentle soul who rarely raised his voice, yet on this day he preached with a feverish intensity. “I see before my eyes a great fire, a conflagration out of all control. I see the bright flames engulfing the gates of the ghetto. Soon, soon, our ghetto will burn, and if we don’t look out for ourselves, we too shall be consumed. In times of the gravest trouble, all rules are suspended. It’s now every man for himself. Save yourselves! You must do whatever it takes to live.” The force of his words was such that it was on the lips of everyone in synagogue that morning and spread throughout the entire population. And then to the consternation of every Jew in Radobice came the news that the Rabbi had been felled by a stroke. He was dead before the following morning.
The years of war had hardened Melly. Living by wits as much as by brawn, he developed a sixth sense for survival, especially since Gershon had been shipped away, God only knew where. If there was a God.
At the age of nineteen, Melly realized that he was to be the head of his family. His father had sunk into apathy long ago, and the fate of his sister had completely demoralized his mother. It was up to him to protect them, and his little brother, Gedalia, but when the Aktion came, he failed them. He would never forget, no matter how hard he drove himself to create an empire, to measure his success by making more and more money. That day would haunt him forever.
They woke to the howling of hounds and the cracking of whips. Hoarse voices barked the order Raus! over and over.
Grabbing whatever came to hand—a crust of bread, a bag of potatoes, an heirloom necklace—the Jews of Radobice streamed out of their homes. His mother took her one remaining piece of jewellery, a gold chain, and kissed it before giving it to him. “This is the only thing I have from my mother. Sell it for food for you and Gedalia.”
Outside, women were rushing with infants in their arms, their older children hanging on to their skirts. The streets thronged with people of every size and shape, herded pell-mell in the direction of the field by the railway tracks. Gedalia trembled from head to toe. Melly grabbed his quivering hand, and Gedalia clung to him, frozen. Their parents, oblivious to everything except the need to follow orders, hurtled ahead, dragging between them an ancient carpet bag of raggedy clothing.
“Raus! Raus!” The staccato commands were reinforced by shots. Melly picked up the terrified child, and began running. The pavement was slippery. It suddenly came to him that he was sliding in blood. He faltered for a moment, stumbling over a head to which a long white beard was attached. “Close your eyes,” he whispered into Gedalia’s ear. “Don’t look.” He scoured the multitude with his eyes, but he could no longer see his parents. They had merged with the formless crowd, which was being driven to the outskirts of town.
By the field of dry stubble where the tall grass had swayed in the wind last week, SS officers wearing skull and crossbones badges on their caps brandished guns and clubs, and stalked amid the cowering crowd. He could see that the majority were being pushed toward the tracks.
An officer strode amid the crowd, snarling.“Hand over the jewels! Hand over the money!” A woman holding a baby protested the loss of her wedding ring.
One efficient bullet dispatched both mother and child.
The lesson took instantly. Trembling fingers ripped watches off wrists. A young woman nearby reached into her pocket and surrendered an amber necklace.
At the same moment, a German poked Melly on the shoulder with the butt of his gun.
“Papieren!”
Melly’s heart sank. He had a pink worker’s ID, but Gedalia, small for his age at twelve, didn’t. The officer had already yanked the child away. Melly took one step towards his brother and the butt of the gun caught him in the face. He—
Erica came out of her trance to the sound of mad rattling at the front door. There was a murmur of voices, then Tamara, in polka-dot boxers and matching T-shirt, poked her head sleepily into the office.
“Do you realize the doorbell’s been ringing for five minutes?”
“No.... Who’s at the door at midnight?”
“Daddy.”
“Daddy? Here? Now? Why?”
“I don’t know. I wish you’d settle your affairs at a decent hour. Or that you’d answer the door when it’s for you. In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve got to be at camp for eight tomorrow.”
When did your kids start to sound like your parents? Also why does your heart start racing in overdrive because your estranged husband has turned up on your doorstep in the middle of the night? You shouldn’t care that you probably look wasted after your recent time travel to Radobice, that you’re not wearing makeup and that the polish on your bare toenails is chipped. After all, it’s only two-timing, smooth-talking Ricky.
15
Rick slouched in the hallway, surveying the living room.
“You’ve rearranged the furniture.”
Erica shrugged.
“That’s a new picture. Aren’t you at least going to ask me in?”
She gestured towards the living room, where he settled into the couch, crossing his legs. She perched gingerly on the arm of the easy chair on the other side of the coffee table. He leaned over it to hand her an envelope.
“Here’s the support cheque for Tammy.”
“It’s an odd time to bring it.”
“I’m a couple of days late. I thought you’d appreciate it if I dropped it by.”
“You could have pushed it through the mail slot.”
“I could have. But then I wouldn’t have seen you. Actually, I’ve been meaning to call ever since I found out about Faith. It’s just a terrible thing.”
Erica nodded.
“Look, this isn’t easy for me. The reason I’ve come so late—I’ve been driving around for hours tonight. I was working late, and then I wasn’t up to going home. So I started driving around, and thinking.… I drove past our first apartment downtown. Don’t you remember being so happy there? And then I went up Côte-des-Neiges to Ridgewood—you remember that’s where we were when I was called to the bar. When Raichie was born. I thought about her birth and how worried I was, and how magnificent you were, and how I loved you more than I could have thought possible for pushing that little person out into the world. And then I drove up the mountain and parked at the lookout, and thought of all the times we went there the two of us, and then with the children. And I thought of seeing you at Paperman’s with your father and Tammy last month…. I miss you, Erica. You’re my family. You’ve been my family for more than half my life. And the situation I’m currently in, it’s not a family situation. And it won’t ever be one.”
“What’s wrong, your heiress isn’t sharing the goodies with you?”
“That comment is beneath you, Erica, and I’ll ignore it. I came to ask if it’s possible to rethink our positions? I know you’ve had a little fling with Paul. So that kind of evens things out between us.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, you’ve made your point. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Or however that expression goes.”
“I hardly think that my relationship with Paul—whatever it is—can be mentioned in the same breath as yours with the used-car queen. I wasn’t cheating on anyone, when Paul and I…. It’s none of your business what Paul and I.… I totally resent you mentioning him in the same breath as that woman.”
“I stand corrected.” In a small voice he added, “But it doesn’t change the matter at hand. I’d like to come home, Erica. Let me come home.”
“Just like that? You leave, and when your hormones have settled, you decide you’re coming home?”
“Do you want me to crawl on my belly? Even if I did, it wouldn’t undo what’s happened. Doesn’t it make more sense to come home and make it up to you? This awful thing that’s happened to Faith, it’s like a sign. A warning about what counts. Who counts. I know who counts now.… Say it isn’t too late.”
Ah, that honeyed tongue of his! He was always so good at pleading, so persuasive, a paragon litigator. And it was so enticing to believe him, to turn back the clock. Forgive, if not forget.
He’d always been adept at cajoling her. And this theatrical emergence from the wings—he’d always had a flair for drama. Right from the beginning, running away from home, jettisoning his past. At a social at Hillel House, he’d latched onto her like a limpet. (Okay, okay, so she’d latched right back.) And just as it said in Genesis, he left his father and his mother and cleaved to her and her family. Yes, Klara had been slow to warm to him, repelled by the stereotypic swarthy complexion, hook nose, and curly hair. But her father had embraced him like a son, perhaps because he’d always yearned for a son, perhaps because his Jewish air was something Tibor actually valued.
To Erica he had had all the exotic grace of a prince of the Orient then. But now the yellow glow cast by the lamp on the coffee table revealed grey stubble on seamed cheeks.
When did he acquire those jowls? He’s definitely beginning to show his age.
But silver curls go really well with dark skin. And he’s still trim around the middle.
So what? It has nothing to do with me!
“You can’t just arrive on my doorstep in the middle of the night and ask to come home.”
He got to his feet. “Can I at least kiss you?”
“No!” she exclaimed. But when he reached out for her she didn’t pull away until an involuntary wave of lust coursed up her belly. Flushing, she pushed him towards the front door.
Why did she have to feel this instant chemical response? Why hadn’t this adrenalin rush and buzz struck with Paul, ever?
“How about dinner tomorrow night at Milos? You always love their snapper.” He was trying to suppress a triumphant little smile by biting his lip.
“No. Good night.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She pushed the door shut behind him and turned off the light in the vestibule so he wouldn’t see her peering after him as he strode away with his characteristic loose-jointed gait.
Once he turned the corner, she opened the door and stepped out on the stoop. The August night already hinted at fall, and the cool air on her arms made the small hairs rise. She took a deep breath and sat down on the top step, hugging her knees and tucking her bare feet under her.
She used to wave him off to work from this spot every morning for years. When had she stopped doing that? Probably after his affair with the tennis-playing architect, after the success of The Shadowed Generations. She remembered the scenes between them at the time—yes, she also had a flair for drama—“You think I’ll always be your good little wifey, no matter what you do? You think I’ll forgive you no matter what you dish out? Who do you think you married, the bloody forgiving Virgin Mary?”
But she had. She forgave him then, or thought she did. Was that the residue of her Catholic upbringing? But maybe it wasn’t forgiveness at all, just a question of being pragmatic, of allowing herself to be wooed back. Not with the yellow roses that he bombarded her with—she was offended he’d even assume unfaithfulness could be papered over with flowers. He won her back with the gift of aptness. The card with the roses read, “And ruin’d love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.”
He swore up and down that his misguided adventure had taught him her true value, had in fact deepened and strengthened his feelings for her. The tennis-playing architect meant nothing to him, she wasn’t about anything real or profound or true.
He also won her back in bed. They had the most electric sex of their marriage in the months after that affair ended. The clinging vestiges of his religious upbringing suddenly dissolved. And she couldn’t get enough of him, turned on—by what? The whiff of another woman on him? His expanded repertoire?
Edgy with arousal now, she asked herself if she was programmed to mate for life with this one particular man, even if she held him in contempt. Was her body teamed with his? How could physical love flourish without trust? How could bodies still meld and mesh and find release, when good sense shouted caution, danger? Maybe quite easily.
A flash of fur brushed her ankle as it streaked by her from behind.
“Cinnamon,” she shrieked. “Bad cat!”
The cat nipped down the stairs and began grazing on the grass beneath the magnolia tree that she and Ricky planted together, after he broke off with the architect. When she tiptoed downstairs towards him, he took off into the neighbouring yard. “Ridiculous animal,” she muttered under her breath, her toes splayed in the cold grass. “Stay out all night then. See if I care.”
But she knew she would care. She’d go in, turn off the computer, brush her teeth, and then come back down again with cold cream on her face. She’d doubtless find him by the rear door by then, meowing balefully at her for the delay. Within minutes he’d barf up mucousy grass onto the kitchen floor. She’d clean up the mess and scold him, then carry him down to his chequered basket in the laundry room.
The anticipation of this banal conclusion to the day steadied her. It was true she didn’t trust herself with Ricky, but she wasn’t obliged to do anything about him either. Tomorrow she might ask Rhoda for advice. Or not. (She had a pretty good idea what Rhoda would say.) Maybe she’d talk to her father instead.
It came to her with a sudden jolt that what she really wanted was to hear Faith’s take on Rick. Right now. Because she couldn’t guess what Faith would say—her opinions were less predictable than Rhoda’s. A sharp longing for Faith seized her, a kind of soul hunger. She was still fixed to her spot in the grass and she shivered as she looked around her and whispered, feeling foolish, “Where are you now?”
A breeze rustled the leaves of the magnolia and, uncannily, the cardinal whom she hadn’t heard for weeks—and never at night—answered in a sweet, clear tremolo.
Just once.