If I Told You Once: A Novel (18 page)

I treasured the letters from my brothers more than ever. Those letters were far more eloquent company than my mother, though they arrived infrequently and were brief and sloppy.

My brothers were fighting in Europe. Somewhere over there. Even they could not say where exactly. Wolf and Eli both complained bitterly over the fact that they were not together, in the same company. Brothers were always separated, as a rule, but mine had never been apart before and it affected them. Each wrote, in their separate letters, that he did not feel like a complete person without his brother.

Eli wrote: I’m forgetting what I look like without him around. I need to see his ugly mug.

Wolf wrote: I talk to him like he’s here. I hear gunfire and I shout, Eli, look out! The guys think I’m nuts.

They missed each other, I think, almost as much as they missed me.

I knew they missed me, though their letters were addressed to my parents.

Wolf wrote: I know mother can’t read this, so you must tell her I love her.

Eli wrote: Knowing her, she won’t believe it.

Wolf wrote: Tell it to her anyway.

I
did
read the letters to her, or at least I tried. But as soon as she saw the thin envelopes she would push me away.

Don’t you care about them? I said. Don’t you want to hear what they have to say?

They’re dead, she said, you know that.

I said: How can they be dead if they’re sending us letters?

Lies, all lies, she said. How can you be so foolish? How can you be so easily duped?

She
was the foolish one.
She
was the one who mourned my father and my brothers equally, treated their memories exactly the same. As if my brothers really were dead, or as if my father really were not.

She was secretive, always tinkering in the kitchen, lighting candles and brewing herbs into tea. I did not like to go out in the street with her, she did not look like other women. She wore her skirts long, dragging on the ground, no brassiere or girdle. Thick woolen stockings all year round. It was as if she had never left the old country at all.

Even the women in our neighborhood, who were her age and came from the same place, had taken to plucking their eyebrows, trimming their hair, wearing modern clothes that were only a few years behind the fashions.

My mother did not care, or did not notice, she kept to herself. She held photos of my brothers in her hands, staring at them for hours. The few clothes they had left behind she sniffed and smoothed and folded over and over. She ran her fingers across the dark marks on the wall where Eli had kicked his heels; it had been his favorite spot to stand on his head. The marks rose up the wall, marking his growth with the years.

The way she spoke of them as dead, it was almost as if she wanted it to happen. As if she were trying to kill them.

She seemed to wallow in her sorrow, as if she almost enjoyed it.

When I wrote to my brothers I wrote: Dear William. And: Dear Edward.

These names suited them better, I thought.

Every time they wrote they asked about the madwoman from downstairs, the one with the white hair who had been found hanging behind a door with her tongue out.

I did not like the way they asked about her.

They never asked about me in their letters.

They asked if she was healthy, if her hair was still white, if she had stopped pulling at her dress the way she used to, pulling as if it choked her.

It was
inappropriate
for them to ask.

That was a word I had recently learned.

I wrote to them saying that it had turned out her missing husband was not dead after all, he had reappeared and taken her away with him to a house in the countryside. I wrote that she had gotten fat from all that sugar.

When my father died I wondered how to tell them.

I asked my mother and she said: You don’t need to tell Wolf and Eli. They already know, they are with their father, the three of them are all together now.

She was no help at all.

In the end I could not bear to tell them either. In the end I wrote simply: Father has a cold. He loves you. Mother misses you terribly.

It was all true, in a way.

*   *   *

This time when the news came it was in the shape of an official-looking letter.

Two letters, actually, that arrived on the same day.

My brothers were both dead.

I wanted to scream but could get no air.

I told my mother.

But I know that, she said. I’ve been telling you, all this time.

She was calm, resigned. She had accepted it long ago.

She held me as I cried and I felt how hard and strong her shoulders were, beneath her rough clothes.

The letters were identical, typed with a fancy seal at the bottom. The writer praised Eli and Wolf highly, said they had been killed in action, had died courageously while fighting for God and freedom and justice for all.

I read the letters to my mother.

But I know all that, she said. I don’t need a letter to tell me.

To her they were trash. But I treasured those letters. They meant something to me.

My brothers had died hundreds of miles apart, on different battlefields, on the same day.

It was not until the war was over that we got the other letters.

One came from a man named Jimmy, somewhere in the Midwest. He had been a buddy of Wolf’s, he wrote, and had been near him when he died. He described how in the thick of fighting, Wolf had suddenly jerked and cried out and clutched his side, and a little blood had dribbled from his mouth.

Yet he had not been hit, there was not a mark on him. Some strange thing, Jimmy wrote, a near miss, a phantom bullet maybe.

Jimmy wrote: Odd things happen in a war, incredible things. Things you would not believe if I told you.

He recalled the look that had come over Wolf’s face then, a look of despair, as if he had just lost the one person he loved in the world and no longer wanted to go on living. Wolf had let out a great yell then and dashed out into the open with his mouth gaping wide, and he killed several of the enemy before being torn by bullets, and even then he kept running forward, running impossibly on shredded legs, surging forward with his arms outstretched as if to embrace them.

Wolf had been a swell guy, Jimmy wrote. The best.

The second letter came from a Nicholas in New England, a comrade of Eli’s.

The strange thing was that his letter’s tale was nearly identical to Jimmy’s. He wrote: It’s like this. We’re in some thick stuff. All of a sudden barn Eli gets knocked clean off his feet. Goes down. We think he’s a goner. But then he gets up. Not a scratch. He’s laughing, feels lucky I guess, but then he gets this thinking look on his face. Like he’s realized something. His face just breaks like a plate dropped on the floor. My brother’s dead, he says. Then he lets out this whoop and breaks cover and goes running right at them like a mad dog. Gets all ripped up then.

Neither Jimmy nor Nicholas could tell me the exact times of their deaths.

I read both letters to my mother.

Usually she was loudly scornful of letters, didn’t trust a word. But this time she sat musing, her face dreamy, after I’d finished.

We never knew which was the oldest, she said finally. You see, there was such confusion when they were born, they both fought so hard to be first, and no one saw when it happened. Always racing, those two. One always right on the heels of the other. They could never leave each other behind. They bore each other up.

I remember, I said.

*   *   *

I remembered a time years before. The one time I went with my mother to watch my father perform.

It was something she had always done alone. She had never invited us children to go along. Not inviting my brothers I could understand, they were wild, rambunctious, always causing havoc with slingshots and wolf whistles.

But I could not fathom her reasons for excluding me.

I knew how to behave in public.

I think I knew how to behave better than she did.

Something mysterious happened during her evenings out; she would come home with her eyes alight, shaking her hair out of its tight braids, and when my father arrived later they would he unusually tender with one another.

She never told me the plots of the plays. Or what part my father played. Or even the titles.

Of course her exclusion of me made me all the more eager to go.

So I cornered her one evening as she was slipping out, and I begged to go with her.

You won’t like it, she said, you won’t understand it.

Oh
please,
I said. I had never been to a theater but I had heard they were like palaces, filled with chandeliers; the seats were red velvet like the insides of jewel boxes and the ushers wore white gloves. At the end people threw roses and stood and shouted Encore! I wanted to sit in the balcony, I had never even seen a balcony but I imagined sitting in one and looking down would be the absolute height of elegance.

I wheedled, and my mother gave in because she was already late and an argument would delay her even more. I snatched my coat and followed her out into the dark of an early winter evening.

To my surprise she headed downtown, rather than northward where all the big theaters were located.

Aren’t you going the wrong way? I said.

She did not answer.

I tagged behind her. My mother could walk faster than anyone I knew. She could walk more swiftly than my brothers could run. I had never seen her legs; sometimes I wondered if she had wheels and a little steam engine beneath her long skirts.

She waited for me in a doorway, then led me inside and down some narrow stairs.

I smelled snuff, mildew, wet wool.

This
was a theater?

We were in a low-ceilinged basement room, impossibly packed already with women in head scarves, men with untrimmed beards. It was uncomfortably warm, people’s faces were already slick with sweat, they were like oily sardines in a can. The noise was overwhelming: a hundred tongues wagging in the language of the old country. The harsh gutturals filled the air with saliva.

I knew a word here or there, of course, for my parents still spoke that language at times, usually moments when they forgot themselves, when they were excited or angry.

I knew the words but I felt like a foreigner, I honestly felt like an explorer in some distant land standing among the natives. I was conscious suddenly of the few inches of leg that showed between my hem and high shoes, and I blushed.

No one noticed. They were too engaged in their conversations, their gesticulations. I saw women nursing babies, right there in the open.

We found seats near the back and I was pressed in on all sides by scratchy wool cloth and damp arms and the smells of cabbage and yellowed prayer books.

The play began and the audience did not cease their gossip but simply lowered their voices a notch. Consequently the actors had to raise their voices, practically scream.

Not that I understood much of what they said. The lines were in the old language.

I could follow it easily enough, because it was the worst kind of melodrama, the sort of predictable story everyone knows, with people contorting their faces like clowns, bawling at the tops of their lungs, gnashing their teeth. Everything was played at full tilt, top volume. True love, utter hatred. The simplest hand gestures originated in the shoulder, so that they became athletic feats.

The story had all the usual ingredients: innocent love, hopeful promises, ill-fated seduction; all followed by betrayal, sword fights, murders, impassioned speeches, and endless moaning death scenes.

All that excessive emotion, it was embarrassing to watch. They seemed so naked, the actors, with the emotions spilling out of them sloppy and embarrassing as vomit, loud as a belch. Pure uninhibited feeling, raw as a wound.

The people in the audience all around me were leaning forward, thoroughly engrossed. The action on the stage elicited laughs and gasps, and sniffling perfectly on cue. The people in the audience spoke loudly, and often, they commented on the action, they spoke directly to the characters on stage as if they were old friends, offering them advice or insults.

I saw my father on the stage but hardly recognized him. My dignified father had the role of the fool, a dim-witted and drunken lout. He staggered and rolled about the stage, eyes unfocused, trousers unfastened. When the lovers’ romantic declarations grew tedious he burst in with bawdy songs, he relieved tense moments with a smirk or hiccough.

The audience loved him, they laughed till they wept.

I did not want to laugh like the rest of them, it did not seem proper.

But I did, I couldn’t help it.

As the tension escalated and the audience leaned even closer, the pale anguished hero seemed on the verge of collapse but the audience’s hot breath buoyed him up, it was all that kept him on his feet.

And later, after the hero had died an anguished writhing death, he returned as a ghost and drifted across the stage and his feet seemed not to touch the boards. He truly levitated, for a minute or more, I saw the empty space beneath his feet. Then the villainous rival appeared and our hero flew across the stage and landed on the man’s back and seized his ears and twisted his head completely around. The audience gasped at the flight, and gasped louder at the loud cracking sounds the villain’s neck made. Red gouts of blood bloomed on his costume, and then the vengeful ghost twisted his head completely off and dropped it with a dull thud on the stage, where the eyes continued to blink and the mouth still issued protests.

I must have dozed off. I must have imagined that part.

I grew tired of straining my neck to see the stage so I watched my mother instead.

Her hands were clasped, her scarf had slipped unnoticed from her head and lay on the floor behind her. She had her gaze fixed on the stage, not just on my father but on all of it, all the gaudy spectacle.

There were tears glittering at the inner corners of her eyes.