LEXI BLUM

Her father’s weeping undid her. Lexi couldn’t remember ever seeing either of her parents cry. When his sobs subsided into hiccups, she got him a glass of water. He drank it quickly and left the living room without speaking. She wanted to follow him and demand that he talk to her, but she didn’t. That wasn’t how their family operated, even in a crisis. Of course, they’d never had a crisis anything like this before. Instead, she opened the heavy curtains her mom insisted be closed to protect the upholstered furniture. It was just as dark outside, with dusk coming and the rain on their doorstep.

Maybe you never get to understand your parents’ marriage. If she had a sibling and could have observed her parents interact with another kid, perhaps she would have more insight into what made their more than sixty years together work. Seemed like it mostly did work for them, even without the benefit of her understanding, at least until very recently. Now with her mother missing it felt critical to figure out something about their marriage that would help Lexi find her.

Lexi’s relationship with her parents had always been perplexing. For one thing, they would never tell her about when they were young, no matter how many times she asked. She could understand that more with her dad. He grew up in Europe during the war and lost most of his family to the Nazis. Maybe that’s what made him so secretive and opaque, even when it didn’t make sense. Like with her name. It was old-fashioned and formal, and she had asked over and over where it came from. Her mother said, “Ask your father,” but he wouldn’t say. Finally, he told Lexi she was named for all the Alexanders and Alexandras who were gone, killed in eastern Europe.

“But which one, most of all?” she asked, wanting a face and a story. He wouldn’t say any more.

As far as she knew, her mother didn’t have a good reason to be secretive about her childhood. When Lexi was a girl she begged to visit the island where her mom grew up. Islands were romantic, at least in books like Anne of Green Gables. Mom said her island family didn’t like Asher and they’d never go back there. As Lexi grew up, she wished her mother was different, that she had a career or something important to do with her days. She knew the importance of context, and that women had fewer options in the 1950s. But Lexi always hated the way her mom looked to her husband for validation, expecting him to make all the important decisions affecting their family.

They wouldn’t talk about being Jewish either. Did that have something to do with the Nazis too, and fear? Her mother made challah and lit candles on Friday evenings but never attended a synagogue. Matzoh at Passover and the menorah at Hanukkah, but no God. No one would answer Lexi’s questions about religion either. Sometimes Lexi wondered what the three of them had discussed at the dinner table all those years, and she couldn’t remember any of it.

After she found that old photo of that woman with her mother, Lexi had spent hours fantasizing about Harriet. Dad said Harriet led Mom into danger, so maybe Harriet was an independent woman. Maybe she was a leader, not interested in following a man. What would it have been like to have Harriet as her mother? Lexi asked her mom about Harriet one time, obliquely, on a visit home her freshman year of college. She was feeling lonely at school, hadn’t made any good friends. She and her mom were in the kitchen. Mom was making her own mother’s prune nut cake recipe and Lexi was pretending to read a book at the table.

“Mom,” she asked, “who was your best friend, growing up?”

Mom’s face lit up. “Harriet.” Her lips smiled around the syllables of the name. “We grew up together in Maine.”

“Tell me about her?”

Then just as quickly, the light went out, and her mother looked down at the dark brown cake batter and started beating. “Nothing to tell. We lost track of each other years ago.”

Now Lexi had to talk to her father, had to understand what was happening in the family. She called out to him but there was no answer. Walking down the hallway, she saw a sliver of light under the door of his study. She hesitated, then opened the door. Asher was at his paper-and-book-strewn desk, hunched over a large green notebook holding his old-fashioned fountain pen, the kind you have to fill from a bottle of ink.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Working on my book,” he said without looking up. “You know, Pliny Earle was a fascinating man, way ahead of his time. Other nineteenth century psychiatrists were claiming they could cure insanity, but he faced the truth. Even more amazing, he wrote the truth.”

Lexi wanted to scream. Or shake him. Moments ago, he was weeping into his missing wife’s knitting basket and now he’s writing? How could he even be thinking about a shrink who died over a hundred years ago when his wife could be in awful danger right now, and maybe it was his fault? How could he talk about facing the truth when he’d been hiding it for decades? Whatever it was.

She felt her cheeks begin to burn with anger. There wasn’t even an extra chair in his study, no place for her mom to sit with him and discuss his work. No place for her either. Fuming, she pushed a pile of papers from his desk onto the floor and sat on his desk.

“Forget Pliny Earle. Talk about our family.”