The Houseguest (10 page)

“Ana,” he called out to her, though he had nothing to add, nothing to ask. He'd simply wanted to speak her name.

From the doorway, she looked at him over her shoulder. “Tomorrow,” she said.

7.

S
OMEWHERE IN PENNSYLVANIA
, the train carrying Max Hoffman from Utica to Chicago killed a man. One minute they were barreling along, chasing the low-slung sun southwest across the dairy farms and prairie grass, past splintered, wind-burnt barns and slow-going trucks hauling hay or displaced migrants below the summer sky; the next minute, the train was breaking sharply, metal grinding metal, until it stopped without a station or city in sight.

The passengers seemed more wearied than disturbed by the incident. Across from Max sat a wide-waisted man in a brown coat—a retailer or factory foreman or grocer; he could easily have been one of Max's congregants. Next to the man sat a thin woman with a pinched nose and nervous eyes, and across the aisle from the pair sat a few more men in suits and a well-heeled family who looked as though they'd been squeezed out of first class. They all sat in silence. Eventually a gaunt conductor walked through the carriage, asking for patience, adding under his breath, “You'd think these folks in Pennsylvania might learn how to put a pistol in their mouths.” Half an hour later they were moving again, the unseen suicide sinking into the farmland behind them while through the wide panes of glass the sunlight turned brass and the factories outside Philadelphia rose up like medieval cities unto themselves.

Max shook himself free from his own thoughts, noticed that the passenger across the aisle, a heavy man with the thin wife, seemed bothered by the return to silence. “A shame,” he said. “Doesn't happen as much as it used to. I've been riding this route twice a year since '32. Used to be as many jumpers as stops. What do you think it feels like, to step in front of a train?”

“Carl,” the woman said. “You're being morbid.”

“It's a long trip. Longer when we have to stop to scrape someone off the tracks.”

“So read the paper like everyone else. Smoke a cigarette. Take a nap.”

“I beg your pardon, but I prefer to talk now and then, not sit in holy silence like some monk. It passes the time.” He turned to Max. “You don't mind, do you?”

Max gave something between a shrug and a shake of the head.

“See, he doesn't mind.”

“Or he's too polite to say so.”

“Eh,” the man said, waving the suggestion away. “Is it so perverse to wonder what compels a man to step in front of a speeding train? I mean, I've seen some miserable human beings in my time, but they still stayed clear of the tracks. What does a fellow have to be feeling to actually jump?”

Max had the strange sensation of restarting a conversation that had been going on sporadically for years. What was it like, Max wondered, to take this wish for nothingness and make it real, to take the step, to make one's last act on earth a negation? He pondered the question often, usually in a moment of personal darkness, turned over possible answers, whittled them into abstractions and waited for the updraft that would cause his mood to rise.

Plenty of people, he thought, at one point or another, stared the question down—desperation or rage or a feeling that, somehow, the world would be a better place with one less person in it, that it was at least as meaningful to die as to live. They experienced, essentially,
exactly what he did. But how did some of them miss or avoid or fend off the upward movement, remain in the depths for so long that action became possible? Max refused to be theological in his thinking. These were questions strictly for the earth.

“People just feel sorry for themselves,” the wife said. “I'm sorry, but that's all it is.”

“You're a cold woman, Helen.”

“Clear-sighted,” she corrected. “People shouldn't be coddled. All over the world men and women are dying, sick as can be, killed in wars, in accidents, in tragedies. And then some folks have a perfectly good life and throw it away. For what?”

The husband had no answer. He turned back to the other passengers. “I'll tell you the other thing that's strange,” he said. “If we were walking down the street and someone stepped in front of a bus, every one of us, everyone who saw or heard what had happened, would be shaking, cursing, wailing, puking, hugging each other. Maybe some would say Kaddish or cross themselves or give a look to the sky. But because we're on a train, and there are three inches of steel between us and the poor schmuck out there on the tracks, we all sit around drinking coffee or napping or reading
Look
while they clean up the bits and pieces. We act like nothing happened.”

“You want to say Kaddish, say Kaddish,” said the woman.

The man lit a cigarette instead.

“What can we do? Will fussing and weeping bring the poor soul back to life?”

No one answered.

“And even if it did,” she continued, “who's to say he wouldn't try again? Some people don't know how to live.”

Max sat across the aisle, listening to his fellow passengers' musings and trying to understand, not just accept but really understand, human beings' general lack of compassion for one another. These people beside him, these regular just-riding-on-a-train people, the way
they talked astounded him, like it was nothing, like a suicide was a thing to be joked about and bantered over, like they were discussing a picture they'd seen or the outcome of a baseball game. His sister and father had always called him
sensitive.
Sensitive beyond reason was the implication. Emotional. Soft. And maybe they were right. But was this a weakness? Since he'd begun working as a rabbi, he'd seen the consequences day after day of people's lack of feeling to each other, the consequences of selfishness and cynicism and a dearth of understanding. Parents chastised and humiliated their children. Children scorned and disrespected their parents. Men slept with other men's wives. Women despised their husbands. And in all of these instances when he'd tried to help his congregants untangle the messes they'd made over the years, the thing he learned that he wanted to say but never could bring himself to actually convey, whether through weakness or mislaid politeness or a belief far into his core that said it was futile, was that all of this breast-clutching and hand-wringing and investment into one's own woe added up to absolutely nothing. An utter nullity. A turning of the back on the world. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” as Isaiah had the Lord putting it, but that wasn't an invitation to act like garbage, or to cry blindness as a defense. Here he wasn't above thinking rabbinically. This was the business of souls. You had to pull away from yourself and into the world. It was only when you set aside the slings and arrows of your own experience that emptiness began to recede and that something else might be allowed in.

They're a mystery to me.
That was how Ana Beidler had said it to Max, in a quiet park in Utica, the moment when Max realized he would have to board this train. That was the refugee's view of the world he lived in. A mystery.

The day he'd met with her, he'd arrived early at the restaurant on the top floor of the Boston Store, found a seat at a small round table. He sat alone, drinking weak coffee, cup after cup. The diners
around him all seemed to know each other, or to be a part of a single cast. Their chatter reminded him of seagulls, a littered beach, the bleachers of a ball game. They crowded into the other small round tables, ordered their coffee and egg salad sandwiches and pie, ate, paid at the till, and still he sat and waited, alone. He wondered if she'd really come. There was a large ceiling fan directly above the place he sat, inlaid in a domed, plaster roof. It spun slowly, stirred the air without cooling it. A waitress with a large bosom kept writing different types of pie on the chalkboard above the entrance to the kitchen, standing on tiptoes to erase. Blueberry became lemon meringue; lemon meringue became peach. Her fingers were yellow from the chalk. The waitress's hair was two-toned, platinum with an inch of brown. She was flirting with the cook, whose face he couldn't see. There were two young mothers at the table beside him. One chided a boy and pushed a buggy with one hand, back and forth. The other blotted lipstick from the corners of her mouth. The boy was making funny faces at Max. He folded his napkin into a paper plane and launched it toward his table. The mother looked up from her buggy then back at her friend. This was what he'd wanted when he left New York. All around him life was pleasant, easy and full. And it made no difference, it made him no less out of place. There was an exceptionality to his loneliness. It followed him wherever he went. It was a raft tailored to his exact proportions that both guided and contained him.

He drank the dregs of his coffee, picked a bit of grounds from his tongue, and when he looked up, a woman stood before him, a woman he almost didn't recognize as the displaced person he'd met that night at the Auers'. Gone were the elaborate plaits in her hair, gone was the heavy makeup and costume jewels. It was almost as if she'd gone back to Europe and fled yet again. In place of the velvet dress she'd worn that evening, the woman before him wore a simple gray skirt and blouse. She stood very still, arms at her side, as though her main
concern was that she not take up too much space. She didn't smile exactly when she saw him. It was more like a loosening of her frown. She walked toward him slowly, as though she were afraid. It was so strange—she was now the refugee he'd been expecting that first evening, the one who had never shown up.

“Miss Beidler,” he said, standing as she approached the table. “I'm so glad you came. Will you have a seat? Order something to eat. The tomato soup is delicious.”

“Tomato soup?”

“Or . . . anything you like. Have you eaten lunch?”

She sat down, unfolded her napkin delicately, opened the menu with care. When the girl came to see what they wanted, Ana began what seemed more a monologue than a lunch order. She'd like to try this here, she said, pointing, this tuna melt. She didn't know what it was but she'd like to try it. It sounded wonderful. She hadn't realized one could melt a fish. And could she also have a bowl of soup? A Coca-Cola. Also, the French-fried potatoes. And after that, a hot-fudge sundae.

“Hungry?” Hoffman said, smiling. “The Auers have been feeding you, haven't they?”

“Oh, of course, of course. Mrs. Auer is a wonderful cook. But this American food—I don't understand how or why, but the more I eat of it, the more I want to eat. It's not like food in Poland,” she said, then added, “what we could get of it.”

“I'm sure it's not,” he said, remembering now that it was Poland she'd fled, not Germany. Her accent seemed to fall someplace in between. He couldn't quite pin it down. At some point, in the great redrawing of borders and flushing of bodies that constantly took place in what once was Austro-Hungary, she had probably lived in many different countries without ever even moving.

“How is everything going there?” he asked.

She nodded and smiled.

“I feel awfully bad that it's taken us so long to meet. You're not the easiest woman to track down, Miss Beidler.”

“I know. I am sorry,” she said. “I try to keep myself busy, even in a new place. Too much idle time and my mind gets away from me. You understand, don't you?”

“Of course.”

“I sense it is the same with you.”

“I've never thought of it that way, exactly. But I suppose it's true.”

He knew the food was arriving by her smile. The girl placed the dishes between them. The sundae was farthest from Ana but she reached for it first, dipping her spoon tentatively into the pile of whipped cream, pushing aside the cherry the way a child might, then tasting slowly, savoring, her face melting with the sweetness. “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” she said.

He laughed. There was a childishness to her that had been absent that first night, an innocence and timid curiosity.

“You're looking at me strangely,” she said. “Am I doing something wrong?”

He hesitated, then smiled. “It seems we've come a long way since that first night off the train.”

She looked down at her food. “I wasn't myself that evening. I'm sorry. I find myself thinking about this again and again. To be here . . . I feel like once every third or fourth day I am reborn. I wake up and I am new. I apologize but I do not mean this in a way that's in every sense good. Of course, you know what must happen first in order to be reborn.”

Max gave her a solemn nod he had practiced many times.

She tapped her fork lightly on the table. “To be here,” she said again. “Wherever I went, people shared daydreams about this precise sort of moment. Of proud, big-bellied America and being in it. But none of us knew . . . none of us understood any longer what it means to belong to a place. Do you understand? Once we were evicted, we were
no longer German or Polish or Austrian. Our country was an unreal place. I heard stories of exit visas being stamped with
Traumland
as the destination.”

“Dream land,” said Max.

“It most likely never happened, it is simply a joke that people on a ship could laugh at. But now I am not on a ship and find it makes much more sense than I would like it to.”

“And yet it's entirely logical,” said Max. “You have probably seen things that defy our ideas of what should make sense. Everything is distorted. Nothing looks right.”

She tapped the fork again, looking at the table. “I would . . .” She paused and her face grew taut. She gave a small shake of the head and took a bite of sundae, no longer bothering to go on.

“I don't mean to probe,” said Max. “I can only imagine what you've been through, what it must have been like, and now, having to start over. That's why I wanted to see you, to let you know that the synagogue, and, well, me in particular, that I'm here to help. I want to help you in any way I might.”

She moved from the sundae to the sandwich, the sandwich to the soup, back and forth without any logical progression. Then all at once, she put down her fork and spoon and looked at Hoffman intently.