The Houseguest (16 page)

He was leaning against the building, smoking again, and this time Max came up beside him.

“It's a mess, isn't it?”

“A mess? My bathroom is a mess. What John Ford did to
The Grapes of Wrath
is a mess. That conference in there? That is a disaster. It's a hippo trying to fuck a rattlesnake. But you know what I've just now realized?” He took a final drag on the cigarette and dropped it to the pavement. “It's not for me to fix. That's the thing to remember. You do what you can do, but there has to be a limit. Otherwise you go off the edge.” He paused, then shrugged. “Still, I would have been a mensch to spare you a useless morning.”

“I took the train here from Utica. I'd feel like an ass coming all that way to Chicago to wander around the wrong hotel.”

“Utica? That
is
a schlep. Who're you with? I don't think I've seen you before.”

“Because you haven't.”

“So on whose behalf have you materialized?”

Max hesitated. He hung back.

“Well?”

“I'm mostly here to listen.”

“Are you a spook?” said Hirschler. “A spy?”

“Sent by John Edgar Hoover himself.”

Hirschler didn't smile and he instantly wished he could take it back. He felt himself being moved by forces beyond his control, beyond his own consciousness. He was expecting Hirschler to push for more, but instead he lit another cigarette.

“Want to take a break from spying and get a late lunch? Failure stimulates my appetite. Where do people eat around here?”

He held out the package of Luckys. Max hadn't had a smoke in years and accepted one immediately.

EIGHT STEPS DOWN
. Lit with dim-wattage bulbs and occasional, unwanted flashes of daylight. The waiters all ancient Slovaks. Built halfway into the underneath of Chicago, at some point in the strata between the sewage and the subway. It was a place for teamsters who needed to be in the loop, men with long delays between trains, lawyers who didn't want to be seen. Max didn't know if Hirschler had known about this place or had just wandered them into it. But he ordered them sweet German lagers and tongue sandwiches as though they were mother's milk.

“First time in Chicago?” Hirschler asked.

“No, born and raised. But it's my first time back in years.”

He must have read a subtle change in Max's face. “It can be tough. Coming back to a place, it can throw you off balance. The places change; we change. Hard to tell one thing from the other. I can't go
back to Brooklyn without feeling seasick almost. You go home and no matter how much you've grown, your younger self, whoever you were before you left, is there waiting to haunt you like some stupid unemployed ghost.”

They ordered another round, then another. There were certain things about Hirschler Max couldn't help notice. He chalked it up to the poor light, the way it made him lean more closely than he normally would have. The smallness of his hands, the creases on either side of his lips, the murky green of his eyes. His voice. The same one that had come scything through the ballroom earlier, softer, eased, but still of a very strong caliber.

For nearly two hours they ate and drank. Hirschler did most of the speaking. He seemed more comfortable that way. He talked about his contacts in various Resistance movements throughout Europe; at a certain point, after a certain number of beers, the details began to collide for Max, and he could not remember if it was the French who had dynamited the grounded Stuka or the Ukrainians who had left the door unlocked on the cattle car bound for a transit camp or the other way around. It didn't matter. It didn't, because Hirschler said so. More than once he threw up his hands, those surprisingly tiny hands. Spitting into the wind, he said.

Max's head was heavy with beer and excitement. Hirschler excited him, he could at least acknowledge that to himself. He knew things. He was in possession of truths. What he could carry into the air, facts and numbers and stories that were hidden to Max and nearly everyone else in this blinkered nation, seized Max tightly.

“Lord,” Hirschler said suddenly, leaning back from the table. “I haven't let you get a word in.”

“I don't mind. Remember, I'm a rabbi. This is what I do.”

Hirschler smiled and, for the first time, seemed to size Max up.

“Bushwah,” he said. “There is a story in you dying to get out. Tell me. Let it out before it bursts through your guts.”

Max leaned back as well.

“I could tell you, I could give you the details, I could get you from there to here, but . . .” A jolt of sobriety hit him. His words needed to be right. “Compared to many of the people you've dealt with I don't amount to much, and I'd feel pretty silly talking about myself after them.”

Max looked up from the table to see Hirschler smirking.

“Do you always have such a high opinion of yourself?”

Max smiled. He gestured to the table, the plates, the emptied steins. “I'm sorry,” he said. “This I'm not used to.”

“Getting tight before 3
PM
?”

“Well, yes, that. What I meant though was having someone ask me about myself.”

They had reached a point where they could retreat back into congenial, casual amiability, irrespective of the topic that brought them together in the first place, or they would have to continue forward into a deeper, more binding closeness. They apprehended each other for a moment in the poor light, trying to tease out of the other's face whatever each man wanted to see.

“Listen,” Hirschler said, taking a mug from the table and draining the last few drops. “We're both far too drunk to be helpful to Europe's Jews. So why don't we get drunker and you answer the stupid question.”

And so Max told him. He started with the day he left Chicago, which he liked to imagine was the beginning of his consciously lived life, and pulled this stranger along beside him, recounting his years at JTS, his studies in Heidelberg, the few months in France when he'd thought he'd convinced himself he'd go to fight in Spain, the failure and shame he'd felt returning to the States, then his years working with the refugee agency in New York, the exhaustion and frustration and loneliness and uselessness that he felt, that took him over until he walked out of the city and into the hinterlands, an act of cowardice
and self-preservation and one he was ashamed to say he never doubted. There was good to be done in Utica. It was modest and small. He thought that if he couldn't save Jewish lives, maybe he could change them, help make sense of them despite the indecipherable heap of his own. He could be sturdy there. He could be constant. Unlike New York, where he felt like a molecule flitting through infinite space.

When he was finished, Hirschler said, “Sounds like you've chosen the more difficult path.”

“How's that?”

“If you go to a congressman in Washington or a rabbi in Philadelphia, you can say, look at what's happening. This is an emergency. A crisis. A pogrom of unprecedented proportions. Temples are burning all over Europe and now, even in Manhattan. When people are faced with an emergency, they act. Or they try to act. Or they convince themselves that they will act. And what you've done has borne something out. But when it's a man's own life that's rotten and crumbling from the inside out, month-by-month, day-by-day, how do you convince him he's imperiled? This is a Jewish problem, maybe. We don't believe in sin. We haven't got a redeemer. We believe in God and ourselves and when God's not there as an earthquake or an army of Philistines or a cancer of the liver, that leaves just one. And you, Max in Utica, you've got to coax those
machers
through it. How do you do it? We're all so fucking on our own in the end.”

“Be prepared,” said Max.

Hirschler screwed up his face.

“It's what God said to Moses. Well in advance. But still. Sound advice.”

“What do you mean, really?”

“I mean, you have to acknowledge that pain is inevitable and aloneness is the condition we're born and die in. Once you've got those in hand, walking a fellow through his darkest isn't quite as daunting as it sounds.”

Hirschler cocked his head from side to side at Max, the green eyes flashing when the light hit them. Then he pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket and dropped them on the table. He put on his hat and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

“Come on,” he said. “I need to get you out of here.”

THE PLATFORM RUMBLED
as a train approached. The car they entered was nearly empty. They sat side by side on the cool metal seats.

“An elevated train,” Hirschler said. “This is the only way to travel. Who is it who decided it better to dig into the ground and make people ride with the rats?”

“They would have here, but the ground was no good. It's a city built on quicksand.”

He couldn't remember where he'd heard this, if it was true or imagined. But Hirschler didn't probe. He was humming something faintly, his face obscured in light and shadow. The light poured into the car from every angle, through every window. It seemed not to come from the sky but from some secret, interior source. The warmth was liquid, honeyed, all-encompassing. The humming had stopped. For minutes, Max sat there with the weight of the silence, the non-knowing, the painful anticipation. And then, just as he felt he might be crushed beneath it, just as the train turned a sharp corner at Addison and the metal frame rumbled and barreled forward with what felt like reckless speed, Max felt something, a pressure, and when he looked down Hirschler's hand was touching his, the side of his hand only, resting on his own knee but touching Max's palm and wrist. He didn't move. His stillness seemed to take up all the space inside his body, inside the car, the city. The rooftops slid by beyond the glass. The mortar and brick pulled along like a ribbon. Max closed them out, released his breath, opened his eyes.

“Let's get off here,” Hirschler said.

After that, it was he who did the leading, urging Max forward, off the train and along the platform, down the stairs and down the
sidewalk, across the street and up three blocks, a narrow alley entry-way into a lobby, into an elevator, down a thickly-carpeted hallway and through the door to a room and onto a bed there. He let himself let go, be drawn forward. Another's body: pressure and breath and being stilled and moved and stilled again and yes, this was life, what he'd sworn he would do without. He'd sworn it and he'd meant it and now here it was.

WALKING HOME THAT
evening, the city streets seemed darker, more menacing. A car sped past him, the driver cursing out the window. A brunette in teetering heels and a low-cut blouse sat on the curb smearing lipstick. A bum leaned over a trashcan, picking out bottles and relieving them of their last drops. The smell of piss and smoke and cooking rose from the gutter. A man stinking of shit and sweat stopped him just north of Lawrence to tell him that next Tuesday would bring the end of the world.

Elsie was sitting on the porch again when he reached her house.

“Max. So late. Is everything all right? Did it go as you expected?”

“Worse,” he said.

“Well, then. Stay outside with me for a while. Sit and talk.”

She went inside and came out with a pitcher of lemonade she spiked with gin and a bowl of cashews. “Now tell me,” she said, once they were settled.

He didn't speak right away. He couldn't answer.

“Max?”

“I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have come.”

“Why in the world not? You have as much right to be at that conference as anyone, with all you've done.”

“I don't. I don't belong there. These men, these old Jews. They're exactly like our father. They have their ideas about how things are done and nothing will ever change them. Certainly not me. The man who sent me here . . . he's called Shmuel Spiro, he does things differently
from them, less conventionally, and so they call him a Jewish fascist and an imposter and try to have him deported. That's how they view the world. You're either one of them or you're nobody.”

She looked off in the distance. He could sense her sizing up this speech—was this just self-pity or something else? She was waiting for the image to resolve, measuring her words.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “It was a difficult day.”

“But it sounds just like all the others, Max. That's the thing I don't understand. You can't sit here and act as though it's news to you what creations people can be, how small-minded and selfish. You've known it since you worked with them in New York.”

“Well, maybe I'm tired of knowing it. I'm tired, Elsie.” The truth of the statement descended on him. Exhaustion. Hirschler had told him about a ship full of refugees that capsized off the coast of Turkey. Someone on the rescue vessel had described how the passengers who'd drowned were the lucky ones. Less fortunate were the ones who found some scrap of debris and floated along the surface of the Mediterranean for a day or two, the life leaking out of them slowly, drop by drop.
They die of thirst. They die of sun. They die of sharks. Sometimes, they die simply of exhaustion.
“A man can only take what he can take,” said Hirschler. Max had had enough of such reports. The world's vast stores of human misery had exhausted him, drained him dry. He didn't want to know any more. He wanted to stay in that room with the light coming through the curtains, playing across David's chest. The smell of his cologne. The pile of clothes on the floor. The feeling of knowing another person, of being known.

He turned his face away from his sister.

“Max?” she said. But it was too late. He wept openly, without restraint.

12.

T
HE CAR WAS
packed with enough provisions for a cross-country migration, a crossing of the Rockies or the great, dusty plains. This level of preparation for a simple day at Old Forge was beyond him. What did they actually need? If it were up to Abe, just a sandwich and a bucket of Utica Club beer. But no, it was only, according to them, his lack of sophistication that made things seem simple. In truth, the outing required sun hats, swim costumes, dresses to cover up these costumes, baby oil, two picnic baskets, magazines, enough books to fill a small library, towels, bathing caps, swim goggles, and blankets. Also, four umbrellas in case it rained.

“In case it rains,” he repeated. “I don't understand. If it rains, we'll come home.”

He said so standing by the front door while Irene and Judith piled equipment around him to be carried to the car. They didn't respond, but looked at him as though he'd asked why the lake was filled with water.

“I thought you were loading,” Irene said.

“I am loading.”

“You're standing.”

He picked up another bag, carried it out. Picked up the picnic baskets, carried them out. The trunk was packed nearly to capacity, the car already smelling of coconuts. “That's it,” he said, coming back into the house. “All finished.” But it was not just Irene and Judith standing
there to hear his pronouncement. Ana Beidler was leaning against the banister near the bottom of the stairs.

“I believe I am ready,” she said. “Is it time to depart?”

He wasn't sure if it was the swimsuit she was wearing or the proximity of her and Irene's partially bare bodies paired so close together, but the site of them standing there made him lighter on his feet. Irene, her hair loose over her shoulders, arms freckled, a swimsuit that had once been black and sleek, now rough with small knits and faded to something less than black, navy or rainstorm gray. He could recall seeing her crawl out of the Jones Beach surf in the same suit, laughing, sopping. It was days with some friends or another who had long since passed into afterthought; Abe had been laid out by an unimpressive malady—sinusitis? infected toe?—that kept him from getting in the water, but Irene had not given a second thought to bolting into the water while he sat in the sand. The day was scorching; one of the people they accompanied was convinced the seawater had aphrodisiac properties. Something about saline coming up to the tender organs. Saline, saltwater, and the initial life fluids (this forgotten friend explained) were close relations. Reimmersing ourselves in it was experiencing birth backwards, culminating with the moment of conception. All of them laughed at this hogwash but Abe, sand-bound and hot, seeing his new wife emerge from the water, the seminal bath, was filled with desire for her. She had fallen asleep on the train home, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her body, urging the train deeper into the city until he could have that body to himself. Seeing his wife in this burnished light took no effort of memory.

Ana's costume was elaborate and new. It was all white, a bright, satiny fabric around her thighs and breasts. A white, translucent scarf holding back her hair. Sunglasses white around the rim and as dark and opaque in the middle as the glacier lake to which they were driving. She stood in the foyer, watching him as he hoisted the remaining bags.

“I think it's time,” he said.

“
HAVE YOU EVER
been to Old Forge?” Judith said as they set out onto Route 5, the city growing small behind them.

It was a Saturday morning and so not much traffic. They rolled down the windows to let in the breeze. It was a cool breeze, yet still, four human bodies inside a cube of black steel-generated heat. Abe could feel the sweat collection on his collar, his elbows, the inside of his shoes. “It's one of my favorite summer places,” Judith continued. “Not as lively as Lake George but a lot prettier, more peaceful.”

Abe let his eyes alternate between the road before him, the wife beside him, the sliver of Ana Beidler behind his head, the only part of her he could see in his rearview mirror. Judith was nothing but a disembodied voice, chattering away at Ana and her mother and sometimes at no one in particular. His daughter had a running monologue that she altered and expanded according to the occasion, but never really abandoned entirely. It had been this way since she'd learned to talk. People had two ways of responding to this style of conversation. Either they allowed themselves to be swept up in it, became equally effusive, mirroring her enthusiasm, or they shut down completely, grew limp against the force of her thoughts. Ana seemed to be choosing the second tack. She was still and silent as Judith talked about her friends, her soon-to-be husband, her wardrobe, her wedding. Abe wondered if Ana was listening at all or if the look of concentration on her face, the firm set of her mouth, was masking some inner dialogue. As Judith talked on, Ana's body emitted stillness. Her eyes remained hidden behind her sunglasses, just two dark lenses flashing back the sun. Her lips, richly painted, didn't budge or tremble. She didn't shift as the car maneuvered around a corner or over a bump. She looked like a woman being carried off to serve a sentence.

“Judith,” Irene interrupted at one point. “When would Ana have gone to Old Forge? Did you forget where she comes from? You have to pardon her, Ana.”

“No pardon necessary. To answer your question, I have not been to this lake, my dear, but I have been to many lakes in years past, mostly
around Northern Italy in the Lombardy region. A few in Switzerland. I knew a man once, a Hungarian cellist, who suffered a spell of bad luck and decided to drink himself to death on the shores of Lake Garda. He invited me to come along. It was a glorious summer of dancing and romance.”

“And suicide,” said Irene. “What set him so low?”

“He was in love with me. Though typically he preferred young boys. He saw me in a production of
The Lost Daughter in Odessa
and something about my performance captured his imagination. He convinced himself that I would be the woman to save him. He was a stubborn man, as great musicians often are. It was very hard to unconvince him of what he thought he knew.”

“Did he really kill himself?” asked Judith.

“Of course not, dear. For about a week, he sat at a little table on a stone beach on the shore of Lake Garda, drinking cognac until his eyes turned orange. Then one day a waiter took pity on him and offered to accompany him to a spa in the Tyrols—a kind of luxurious sanatorium. They returned a few days later and he was a new man.”

“That sounds like quite a summer,” said Irene. “I could use a few days at a sanatorium in the Tyrols, myself.”

“You and everyone I know,” said Abe.

“How old were you that summer?” Judith asked.

“Oh, not much older than yourself. But I left home when I was twelve, ran away with a troupe of actors and never returned. So by the time I was twenty I felt like an old soul.”

“It must have been exciting, to be free like that. To be on your own and have all kinds of adventures.”

“Yes,” she said, her sunglasses flashing in the mirror. “I suppose it was. But then, everything is exciting in the beginning.”

A streak of black whizzed past his face. “Abe!” Irene screamed. He jerked the wheel hard to the right, than back to the left, the horn
blast tapering off behind them. “Sorry,” he said, setting his eyes back to the road.

“Well, it was a nice life,” Irene said. “I truly enjoyed it.”

“I said I was sorry.”

Irene looked away from him, leaned her face against the window, pressed her hand to her forehead. Abe kept his eyes focused on the road after that. The highway narrowed as it rose in elevation. They merged onto Route 28, followed the winding road up into the Adirondacks where it became a river in a vast sea of pine and spruce. The sun had felt abundant when they'd left Utica but now, not yet risen above the treetops, they drove through deep shadow, a lush, low-lit summer day.

“How long until we're there?” Judith asked. “I have to pee.”

“Judith, are you seven years old?” Irene said. “You couldn't go before we left?”

“I drank three cups of coffee this morning. I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were in a hurry.”

“I'm honestly not sure how you're going to make it down the aisle without a rest stop.”

“Thank you for your compassion, mother. I really appreciate it.”

“Could the two of you hush and enjoy the scenery?” said Abe.

“It's hard to enjoy anything when your bladder's about to burst.”

“God almighty.”

“Look, a gas station. Pull off, Papa.”

Irene, it turned out, needed a break as well. The two of them stepped out of the car, still bickering, went into the small shop beside the station to relieve themselves and maybe buy some cigarettes and candy. Beside the car, a Negro in a navy cap approached with the pump. A Packard convertible pulled up on the other side of the station, a yacht of a car with a handsome couple at the helm. The woman's hair was tied back and covered with a cherry-patterned scarf. The man was tall,
lean, the picture of vitality and health. Abe cleared his throat and for the first time since swerving, let his eyes return to the rearview mirror.

He didn't know how Ana did it, but her lipstick was still fresh, her hair un-mussed. And she still held the same look of resignation, of a woman who's detached herself from her surroundings and sits slightly above them, gazing down.
Say something,
he thought. But nothing came to mind. His silence seemed to amuse her. Even wearing her sunglasses, he sensed she was laughing at him with her eyes.

“Comfortable back there?” he said. “Sorry for that bump in the road.”

“Please, Abe, I've been within an eyelash's length of death so many times, I'm no longer fazed by close encounters. When it happens, it happens. That's how I view my own mortality. Valuing one's own life so greatly seems a bit absurd, doesn't it?”

“What else are you supposed to value if not your life?”

“Surely it's better to prize art or love or some lofty ideal above a skeleton with some flesh slung across it.”

He grunted. “A skeleton's a beautiful thing when it's your own.”

“Oh, of course it is. Ignore me, Abe. Ignore everything I say. I feel myself slipping into a state.”

“Carsick?”

“No, a state of despair. It happens sometimes when I'm confined in close quarters with others. I'm reminded of my ordeal.”

“Let's get out then. Take a walk. There's no reason for you to be uncomfortable.”

He reached to open the door but she stopped him. “Please, no. I'll feel better when we get there. When I can take in the open air, feel the water on my skin.”

“I thought you didn't swim.”

“I don't, but I still like to wade.”

The passenger doors opened. Irene and Judith stepped in.

“Much better,” Judith said as they pulled back onto the road.

They drove for the next half-hour in silence. Only as they passed through the town of Old Forge with its festive atmosphere, its vendors and cheerful throng of leisure-goers, did the mood in the car seem to lift.

“This lake,” Judith said as they drove through the thickening traffic. “Is it similar to Lake Como?”

Ana said, “More like Biarritz.”

“It's lovely,” Irene said. “A nice family spot. The water's cold but clean.”

“I'd sink to the bottom like a bag of rocks. But I'll enjoy myself all the same.”

“We could teach you to swim,” Abe suggested. “You kick your legs and move your arms. Nothing to it. We threw Judith in when she was three and now she could cross the English Channel.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“Maybe you'll change your mind when you get there.”

“Don't pressure the woman,” said Irene. Then, turning around, “Ana, no one's going to force you to do anything you don't want to do.”

“Except,” said Judith, “listen to Myrtle Greenberg go on about her chiropodist son, what an eligible bachelor he is. That conversation is mandatory for all. It's an annual tradition.”

“You have a hard life, Judith,” Irene said. “I don't know how you stand it.”

“It's a miracle, mother. A miracle.”

IT WAS NOT
yet noon when they arrived at Old Forge, but already the beach and the piers extending into the lake were crowded with bodies—old bodies and young bodies, shapely and bulging and broiling in the sun. Irene led the way to a cluster of blue chairs on the less-crowded, southern side of the lake. Abe dumped their bags into the sand, then stepped away, as though to say, I have no idea what to do with this. Irene and Judith immediately began setting up camp: towels unfurled, chairs brushed clean, baby oil applied to limbs, magazines
opened, snacks unpacked, their own little island of leisure, while Abe and Ana looked on from opposite sides. Within three minutes of setting up camp, a woman was calling Irene's name. And a minute after that, a half-dozen other women were hurrying over.
You made it, wonderful, so glad you're here, gorgeous weather, what a day.
Irene seemed to forget about her family for a moment, then looked back at them, held her hand out toward Ana. “Come meet some of my other friends, Ana.”

“Ana was about to go for a walk,” Abe said. “She was feeling a little carsick.”

She looked at him with a gratitude close to love. “Yes, a walk, to . . . what is the saying in English? Stretch my legs?” She placed her own belongings down beside Abe and then hurried off in the less populated direction. Abe sat down, dug his heels into the sand, watched Irene and Judith settle in. Two beauties, one fair, one dark, surrounded by other Jewish women, a circle of well-groomed legs, polished toes, swimsuits in every color. All of them gabbing, dozing, drunk on sun. They'd lived upstate so long the rays had this effect on them, knocking them out as abruptly as ether. He watched as it skimmed the surface of the water, shimmered like tinfoil behind the dark green needles of high, swaying evergreens and pines. It even tried to penetrate the mass of Ana's black hair as she grew smaller, walking away into the distance, tried and failed, flickering purple in a spot or two then moving on to lighter matter. Abe sank into the sand and watched the bathers and swimmers. He liked to watch them, even if he felt outside of them. The sand was cool beneath his fingers.