Broken for You (34 page)

Wanda felt her cheeks go hot.

"He's been very helpful in the past few months."

Wanda grunted. She was starting to feel dizzy.

"He was the one who did all the remodeling in the bathroom, did he tell you?"

Margaret strolled toward the bathroom door as she spoke. "I mentioned something at the hospital to him—about wanting to make this room more serviceable and so forth—and the very next day, before I had time to call a contractor, Troy brought sketches and a supply list and volunteered to do the job! I still don't know how he managed, all by himself."

Wanda's heart was pumping in triple time.
It must be the caffeine,
she thought.
Or
—
saints be praised!
—
maybe it's a massive myocardial infarction.
She set her coffee cup aside and tried to think how to begin. Finally, she picked up her legal pad and wrote, "Can't stay here."

"Why not?" Margaret answered sharply. She was no longer smiling. "Why not?" she repeated, her voice angry, accusatory.

Wanda hadn't expected this kind of reaction. It caught her off-guard. She felt like a shamed, ungrateful child. Inside her body, something was happening. A kind of unnatural loosening had commenced. A breakdown of engineering and design, a failure of inner centrifugal force, with Ferris wheel parts hurtling into space and the atmosphere of her skin unable to contain them. Orthopedic hardware could do only so much. Steel screws and rods and plates and pins couldn't hold her together, and even her shameful attempt at therapeutic fucking had failed. There was too much collateral damage, so that finally and now she was truly coming unstuck and how funny, really, when you thought about it, when she'd held herself together for years and years and quite successfully, too, but with what? How had she done it? Where did it go?

She needed Margaret to leave. She needed to find her Percocet. She scanned the place on the floor where the pills should have been, but they were gone, gone, gone.

Shit!
she cried inwardly.
Troy. He must have picked them up.
She gripped her pencil. When she was sure she could write legibly, she printed, "No one is this kind to someone who isn't kin."

Margaret drew close. "I see. You think I'm some kind of saint? You think I don't expect anything in return?" She spoke gently. "You've got me all wrong. My motives are nothing but selfish. Here."

Margaret handed her an envelope and then sat down on the bed. She reached toward the nearest bedside table and picked up the vase, with its decorative family of swans. Margaret began polishing them with a corner of her cardigan sweater.

"Read that," Margaret said. "It will help you understand what I'm going to ask you to do. And why."

The envelope was made of expensive paper, a blend of linen and pulp. It was old, and looked as though it had been handled frequently. Wanda pulled out the letter within, a single sheet of yellowed paper. Again, she was struck by its exquisite texture. It had the feel of a finely laundered handkerchief.

"'Dear Oscar,'"
the letter began. The words had been written with a fountain pen in a flamboyant script. The letterhead was in a foreign language; Wanda guessed it to be Dutch.
"'It will be a damn bloody shame if this lot doesn't arrive in brilliant condition. You will find several nice tableware pieces of Worcester, a Sevres jardiniere, a couple of Delft plates, a Meissen coffeepot, a pair of apothecaries from Capodimonte (I had to give my left nut for these, you bastard!), some Minton novelties, and several of those appallingly tasteless figurines the Popov factory is so fond of putting out: Pie Seller, Hunter with Rabbit, Balalaika Player, etc. Ah, these kikes and their tchotchkes! The whole lot came from the Paris apartment of a French professor named Lazar, and the details, as always, you will find on the attached inventory. Business is good, my friend. Very good. Sincerely yours, Edvard Krabbe.'"
The letter was dated 5 May 1942.

Wanda looked up. Margaret's eyes were full of tears.

"That letter was written to my father."

Wanda remembered the day of her arrival. The odd, expressionless manner in which Margaret had catalogued her possessions during the house tour: Capodimonte. Meissen. Popov. Sevres. She thought about Margaret's fluent French, about the section of books in the library on World War II. She suddenly saw the whole of Margaret's life, tending these things, not going anywhere, living a life apart.

Margaret wiped at her eyes. She took the letter from Wanda and replaced it in the envelope. "My father was well-connected and wealthy, even before the war. When the Nazis began their work, he saw a great opportunity. He was skilled that way, really gifted—a kind of diviner when it came to money. So he began a new business: as a broker of fine antique European china and porcelain." Margaret massaged her forehead. She stood up, walked over to the window, and looked out toward the carriage house. "I took over after e died in '46.1 was twenty-four years old. And still so stupid. One day, I as showing a piece of soft-paste Capodimonte to a client—I'll never forget it, it was a Recumbent Slave. I was explaining how Capodimonte is prized for its translucence, its warm, milky-white color—some idiotic art dealer nonsense like that—when a man burst in. His face was awful. Haunted-looking. Skeletal. He was wearing a black wool coat and yarmulke. He started yelling at me. His English was very broken. 'You’re standing on the dead!' he shouted. 'On the bodies of the six million you make your fortune! I curse you! I curse your family!'" Margaret stopped speaking for a few moments. She was shaking. "I thought he was crazy. Then I started going through my father's account books, his correspondence, his personal papers. I asked questions. I looked where I hadn't wanted to look before, and I found the unthinkable."

Margaret began pacing erratically around the perimeter of the room, pausing now and then to lean against a wall or a piece of furniture, absentmindedly picking up and replacing figurines of birds as she went. She spoke quickly. "I closed the shop after that, packed up everything and moved it all here, into the house. I thought that would be enough, you see. I thought that would make it right. To not sell any of it, to not profit y it. I thought that was payment enough and that I could have a life." "You married," Wanda whispered.

Margaret nodded. "We had a child—Daniel—and then when my husband found out—as he was bound to, of course, I can't imagine how stupid I was, how wrong, to think I could hide it—he . . ." Margaret stopped. She slowed her pace and her speech. "Stephen was—is—a good person, and it was too awful for him to have been deceived, and about something so horrible."

She'd completed her circle of the room. She stared at another pair of adult swans adorning a bud vase, surrounded by reeds and water lilies, nuzzling their cygnet, frozen in time.

"Our son died," she announced blandly. "After that, there was really nothing to bind us to one another."
Wanda forced herself to speak. "I'm so sorry, Margaret." "It was all a very long time ago." Margaret picked up the vase. "The point is, there's never been atonement. People I love have been punished. I won't have it anymore." She sat on the bed and stared at the swan family in her cupped hands. "The right action, of course, would be to return these things to their owners, or their surviving kin. I've placed ads in art and antique journals, that sort of thing, but these objects, they're not like paintings or bank accounts. Rare as they are, they are hard to trace. Much of the documentation was lost. Or destroyed." Margaret placed the swan vase in Wanda's hand. "You've heard of Kristallnacht?" Wanda nodded.

"Then you know what it means: 'The night of broken glass.'" Wanda nodded again. Where was Margaret going with this? "That poor man," said Margaret, and her eyes no longer focused on anything in the room. "I never knew his story, never knew his name. I've wondered ever since, what could I do? How could I repay it? These things have outlived their time, it seems to me. If all they do is sit on a shelf, no one will ever know their worth. I think it's time for them to die."

Wanda shook her head. She didn't understand.

Margaret turned sharply, her eyes like lamps. "They should all be broken. I want you to do it."

Wanda was trying to take in what Margaret was saying; at the same time she was imagining the next few minutes after Margaret's imminent departure. She was playing out a couple of possible scenarios in her head, working things through.

And then Margaret did something surprising: She leaned in close, smoothed a slow hand across Wanda's hair, brow, and temples, and kissed her warmly on the cheek. It wasn't a series of gestures a person would expect from a landlady. "There's more, you know," she said, in a light, conspiring voice. "Pieces that aren't on display, that are still in storage. There are boxes of it. Boxes and boxes. There's so much here that needs doing. You're going to be very busy."

After Margaret left, Wanda pondered her options. They were fairly straightforward, really: She could either kill herself in one of several ways or she could break things. She could do both, actually, but that would be messy and Margaret had done enough; she didn't want to stick
her with the expense of carpet cleaning on top of everything else. Maybe she could do this for a while, especially if Margaret wanted it so much. There would always be time to off herself. It wasn't as if she was going anywhere.

She looked at the swan vase Margaret had placed in her hands. She didn't especially like its style—it was too excessively pretty—but she could appreciate its artistry and the fact that it had survived intact for centuries. That would have been the extent of her knowledge before today; but now she knew that its perfect appearance was propaganda, the worst kind of lie, a campaign of misinformation and denial. Margaret was right: This flawless thing could never tell its most important story, not the way it looked now, not without help. Who had this vase belonged to? A child? A young bride? A maiden aunt?

Wanda became aware of the other residents of this room: hundreds of exquisite porcelain birds. She stared at them. They stared back.

T
wenty-five

W
h
at Is Woven

T
he members of the household all but gave up on Wanda's ever emerging from her self-imposed exile. It was as if she weren't there. She became the madwoman in the shuttered room, the resident invalid of whom no one dared speak. She admitted access to only two people: her physical therapist (an avuncular former wrestler named Nestor; he came to the house four days a week), and Margaret, who delivered her meals in hotel room-service manner— wheeling a serving cart into Wanda's room, taking her leave, and retrieving the cart from the foyer later.

During their few minutes of face-to-face contact, Wanda did not speak, a state of affairs which didn't bother Margaret in the least. Since the girl hadn't been a chatty confiding sort of person before the accident—except when powder rooms were involved—Margaret wasn't about to press her for confessional heart-to-hearts now. Margaret knew she was considering her proposal. She was such a complicated soul, so independent in her way, and now the only privacy she had, the only place she could be alone really, was within her own silence.

The others were concerned, of course, and curious, but Margaret— ever the best of secret-keepers—invoked landlady-patient privilege. She wouldn't allow Wanda to be treated as the object of gossip or speculation, and any mealtime conversation which inclined in that direction
was abruptly—and firmly—squelched. It was not for anyone to talk about Wanda when she wasn't ready to talk about herself. And it was not Margaret's place to discuss what she was up to.

Not that she knew, not exactly. She only suspected. Her suspicions derived from Wanda's eating habits.

Bruce put special care into all of Wanda's meals; every plate was a work of art. At first the dishes came out looking much as they did when they went in—as if Wanda were not only disinclined to eat, but loath to disturb Bruce's masterfully composed presentations of color and texture. Eventually, though, Margaret detected subtle changes: One of the plates was lighter; teeth marks indented a piece of linguini; linen napkins were rumpled and striped with sauce. And then came a morning when cream cheese and mandarin clownfish romped in shoals of blueberry syrup. An afternoon when baby peas, pimentos, and pearled onions formed a pointillist face. On the evening Wanda's mashed potatoes, homemade herbed croutons, and white chocolate mousse came back as a miniature replica of the Taj Mahal, Margaret knew she was getting better.

Two weeks after Wanda's return, they had just sat down to eggs Florentine, crumpets, and glazed fruit when she appeared in the dining room entrance, leaning on her walker. Her chest was conspicuously free of signage.

"I'd like another tour of the house," she announced.

Margaret restrained her glee and spoke levelly. "The whole house," she inquired, "or just the first floor?"

"All of it, of course. I've been practicing with this. I can manage the stairs."

"Don't be ridiculous!" Margaret shot back. "I'll make some phone calls and see about putting in an escalator." She pushed away from the table and shook a finger at Wanda. "And don't you dare pull a face!"