The Houseguest (14 page)

“Well, why do they?”

It was a good question. It was a question to which he wasn't sure there was an answer. But he didn't tell her so. Instead, he said, “They're good
because
they're selfish. Because they get selfish pleasure out of selfless actions.”

The worry that had been slowly fading from her face returned. She leaned closer, as though it was the physical distance or the darkness of the night that kept her from seeing into his state of mind as she'd done before. It was not with fear or hostility but with true uncertainty that she asked him then if that was why he had come here. “Are you trying to do good again?”

She said it so earnestly, without a trace of irony or guile. Naïveté became her. It was impossible to take offense.

He shook his head, reached across the arm of his chair for her hand, just as he had thirty years earlier, walking across the cemetery toward their mother's grave. He told her the truth: “I don't know why I'm here.”

10.

G
OD PROVIDES
, HER
mother had said, leaning against their doorframe. Looking at young Ana without seeing her, looking out at the narrow, soot-smeared streets beyond their window.
God provides to those who are willing to accept.
Sometimes upright, sometimes clutching at the edge of the door for support.
If you are not willing to accept, God looks for the next soul in need.
Ana, at the table by the stove for all of these recitations, all these impromptu rehearsals when her mother would forget breakfast, forget bathing and dressing, forget even the tea kettle on the stove until it howled across the apartment, forget everything other than the part, the role, the new person she'd decided to become for a new director whose charm and fame Ana measured by the trill in her mother's voice when she spoke the name. Ana watched her weep and sigh and speak of God and death and love, the God and death and love of Yiddish melodrama, watched her seized by forces unfamiliar and bleak.
If you do accept, you must take what you are given without question.
A supplication like this made so little sense with an actress for a mother. It was always, as the Americans put it, feast or famine. Ricocheting between food, good food, food good enough for a czar, caviar and sturgeon and chocolate and tea, and the gnawing, withering pain of without. Why throw yourself at the feet of a power so inconstant? An actress for a mother. A God with no center who took more than it gave.
If you question what you are given, God
takes what you already had.
Why not find a steady god, a god who wasn't as interested in laughter and light as in good credit and keeping her children clean of lice? Her mother's god toyed with her and her mother let him.
If you can accept without question, you will never be out of the Lord's sight.
What useless
drek.

And yet it was this same Lord, this unreliable, nearsighted, forgetful, wrathful, monomaniacal piece of shit to whom Ana was half-praying that a telegraph promised from Shmuel Spiro might have finally arrived.

She had already made a few, uneasy trips into the Western Union on Genesee Street to see if anything in her name had come, but when the eyes of the boy behind the counter grew a little too narrow, she decided it would have to wait. If it was coming at all. He had promised her he would send word—word of her future, her fate, some rough summation of what would come next. Word was an awful thing to wait for—from God or Shmuel Spiro or anyone else.

The Auers clearly had a more useful god than hers. It was far too efficient to ever draw Ana's adherence, efficient and tidy and regular. These were all traits Ana understood but was repelled from, as if by instinct. Watching Abe and his family, sated, undoubting people, she did not begrudge them their comfort. That was too spiteful. To hell with what they once said in Alexanderplatz but material joys were just fine. What threw her about Abe was how little wonder seemed to infect his life. He was not like the others, but he'd pretended to be like them, to be small and practical and sated, and now he'd lost track of where this pretense ended and reality began. And yet there were things about his life worth having. Regular, American things that Ana didn't remember from her own childhood. The Auers had a pantry. She hardly knew the word when she first heard it. It was an entire room devoted to food, each shelf lined with jars of jam and boxes of shredded wheat and bags of beans and tins of fish. So much food. Not a closet. Not a cabinet. A pantry. An altar to
plenty. Sometimes she stood inside it and ate sardines when no one was home, licking the oil from her fingers, then moving on to a handful of chocolates. A child in this house would not learn to steal food off a cart, would not know the pain that came with a blow to the back, gravel against knees, dirt under nails. There'd be no need for theft, for hoarding, for always wanting more, what was deserved but withheld, always out of reach.

She couldn't say where it came from, this sense she'd always had that what wasn't hers was not forbidden, that nothing was as out of reach as it might seem. She only knew she'd never been without it. Even as a small child, a girl of twelve, a woman of twenty, when she saw plenty, she wanted to make it less. Abundance called out to her for correction. Bins full of sweets at a corner candy shop needed depleting, and she remembered the joy of depleting them, the satisfying feel of the smooth shells as she stuck in her fists and filled her pockets. Later, she discovered that people could be picked up and taken away. Girls from proud homes lured into sins of the flesh. Aging actresses displaced. Faithful husbands unmoored. Audiences craved to be relieved of their worries, their disbelief, their money. This was how it seemed to Ana, not that she plundered others' good fortune, but only that these fortunes begged annihilation. The Auers' home seemed no different from those bins brimming with candy, those aging divas, all the handsome, hopeful men, men like Szymon, who had so much and wanted her to make them less.

The Auers were not rich, but they had so much they took for granted, things they'd long stopped seeing. They had a shiny black Buick with seats soft as bread. Inside the house, two radios, three ottomans, a piano no one played. Judith had a closet crammed with sweaters in every shade of beige. Trinkets, stockings, galoshes, bedspreads, knickknacks, framed photographs, candy dishes, porcelain figurines. But no music. No poetry. No drunken arguments or noises of love drifting down the hallway in the middle of the night. No laughter. It
was the opposite of what she'd known as a girl, a childhood among her mother's people.

Here, it was different.
Tainted,
her father would have said.
The taint of bourgeois tastes, mindless consumption.
She told Abe about her father one night. Her father was a socialist, drawn to the cause after being conscripted. The only objects he had use for were the ones he needed to lure beautiful women, women like Ana's mother.

He never lured me anywhere I wasn't already going,
her mother said to her one morning. She still heard her, more since she'd arrived in this place.

She heard her now, in the Auers' home, their spare bed, her neck stiff and her feet cold. The bedspread was thin but pretty, pale blue, lined along the edges with fleurs-de-lis; the mattress was lumpy. She'd forgotten to close the curtains the night before and now her whole body was swimming in light, shadow and light swaying over her with the rhythm of the trees beyond her window. Yes, her mother was all around her here, inside her, guiding her through what needed doing.

She dressed slowly, to take in what she needed to see in the mirror above the bureau. The cheeks. The breasts. The gaze. America was dulling her, efficiently.

Halfway down the stairs she saw the wife. She was sitting at the dining room table, humming softly, hands inside a shoebox. Ana watched her from the bottom step, watched the careful, focused motion of her arms until she understood what she was doing, polishing the cutlery and serving spoons, picking up each piece, rubbing it inside a felt rag until it lost its tarnish, until it shone to her particular specifications, then setting it out on the cloth. And all the time humming, humming, so happy to be polishing forks and ladles and salt shakers shaped like clovers, so happy to be polishing the silver like an old kitchen maid, to be doing nothing, to be nothing, a wife, a mate, a helpmate. It was an enigma to Ana, as much a mystery to her as the pantry or the logic of dreams or of falling in love. And yet, Irene Auer was not without
a certain country charm. A healthy milkmaid of a woman, was how Jacob would have put it, a simple beauty with a blush in her cheeks and an auburn tint to her hair, a high German Jewess who'd never known Vienna or Berlin, who'd only known small towns like this one, kitchens like this one, lives like her own.

“Good morning,” she called to Ana without turning her head. She must have seen her reflection in the silver. “You're up early today.”

How long had she seen her standing there, staring? “Yes, I forgot to draw the blinds. The light woke me.”

“It's lovely this time of year, isn't it? I love the early light. It's really the darkness of the winters here that bothers me more than the cold. Come sit with me, will you? Have a cup of coffee.”

The pot was already on the table, a cup and saucer, a dish of sugar cubes. Ana approached, took one cube, crunched it between her teeth, let it melt on her tongue, sat down and poured herself a cup. She sat there sipping for a few minutes when it occurred to her she was being rude. “Let me help you with this. Do you have another rag?”

“Don't be silly. You're our guest. Guests don't polish silver. Besides, I like to do it, believe it or not. I find it relaxing.”

Ana picked up a spoon, turned it over in her fingers. “You have lovely things,” she said.

“That's nice of you to say. They all need cleaning, though. That's the problem, isn't it? But I'm so glad you like it here, that you feel at home.”

“How could anyone feel otherwise? A beautiful house. I'm not sure if I've told you so, but it is. I'm grateful for your generosity, your company, too.” She paused, placed the spoon back into the shoebox. “People assume the hardest part of coming here must be the loss, but the loneliness is far worse. It's the loneliness that keeps me awake at night.”

The dense scent of the silver polish filled the room, made Ana think of something indistinctly mechanical: a shed behind a railway platform; an unwound watch on a nightstand.

“This is a horrible place to be lonesome,” said Irene. “I don't just mean Utica.”

“You?” said Ana. “You feel lonely?”

Irene smiled in a way that Ana did not expect. Then it dropped. “No, not so much. I do miss Abe during the days. The junkyard can be a demanding mistress. But I do know. There's a difference.”

“Between missing someone and loneliness,” said Ana.

“That's right.”

“The lonely man has no one to miss.”

“Is that it?” said Irene, scrutinizing a spot on the grip of a fork. “I don't know if I agree with you. That feels wrong. Disagreeing with a houseguest. One . . . like yourself, no less. But I don't know if what you said is right. Loneliness isn't not having anyone to care about, or not having anyone care about you.”

She continued to work the fork. For the first time she took the time to consider her words.

“It's more like looking up and seeing a planet where there is no room for you, looking out and seeing a great wall of people, like the one in China, surrounding the earth. And then, somewhere out on the hills, away from the wall, there's you.”

She put the fork down on the table. When she had stared at it for too long Ana took it and put it in the pile of clean utensils.

“You're very eloquent, Irene. I have known a number of people who thought of themselves that way and few are as well-spoken as you.”

Irene rolled her eyes.

“All practice,” she said.

Ana did not understand the remark.

“Well, Abe's a good listener. It was one of the things that made me fall in love with him, believe it or not. The other boys I knew growing up, no matter how handsome or well-to-do or intelligent, whenever I spoke, me or any girl, I could see a kind of light going off in their eyes, like they already knew what I was going to say and knew
it wouldn't be anything too interesting and now had to wait patiently until I finished saying it. It was like they were already thinking more about what they wanted to say next than about the words coming out of my mouth. It was so common, I thought it must just be the way men were. My father and brothers were the same. Abe was the first man I ever met who was different. I could be telling him about what kind of toast I had for breakfast, and he'd be hanging on every word as though I were reciting a poem. And whatever I told him, he wanted to know more, more, always more. Why did I think what I thought about this or that? How'd I arrived there? If I made some grand statement or pronouncement, he'd ask for an example. He knew when I was contradicting myself or exaggerating even before I did. It made me lose my head, to be listened to like that. Everyone told me to run the other way, said I could find a man with smoother edges. But I saw it different. I thought, handsome men get old and ugly. They go bald and grow hair out their ears and nose. Rich men can go broke. The smartest men can sometimes be the cruelest. But a man who listens. How could that be wrong? Who could ever take that from me?”

“No one,” Ana admitted.

Irene gathered up the silver to be brought back to the cabinet. “Enough of all this,” she said. Then, “Listen, some friends of ours invited us up to Old Forge next weekend. Won't you come with us? There will be swimming, boating. It's so beautiful. We'll all go.”

“I can barely swim,” Ana said. “I don't even own a bathing suit.”

Irene scowled. Ana knew then she was doomed for the lake.

“We'll jump off that bridge when we get there.”

Ana smirked, then frowned.

“Sorry, sorry. I forget everyone everywhere doesn't use the same expressions I do.”

“Do not ever apologize, Irene,” said Ana. “Never. For nothing. I, however, need to go into town, and for that I am sorry because I have truly enjoyed sitting with you.”

“Not to worry,” she said. “I was just on my way to the Boston Store to pick up a few things for myself. The silver's as polished as it's ever going to get. Now where are you off to?”

“The druggist,” said Ana.

“Lutzenkirchen's?” said Irene. “I need to be down the street from his shop in half an hour. Let me drive you. Please.”

As disarming as talking had been, the idea of getting into a car with Irene suggested an intimacy Ana was not prepared for. But Irene was already at the door, her coat on, Ana's in her hand.

And so Ana found herself rolling through Utica in the Auers' Oldsmobile. Irene drove slowly and tentatively, aware of the car's massiveness, its potential for easy destruction. Cars going in the opposite direction veered to the side of the road when they passed, even though Irene stayed well within her side. The car was like an expression not of wealth or tumescence but of one's unending uncertainty of existence. Irene piloted cautiously, cautiously, saying little. As they approached the drugstore, with her eyes fixed on the road, she said, “You've had trouble sleeping? I did hear you leaving the other night. Abe went with you, didn't he?”