The Houseguest (18 page)

“Apparently,” his father repeated. “Apparently, Max. We have the accounts of a few frenzied refugees and some knock-kneed Brits. This does not constitute Armageddon. Besides, I'm only using the lingua franca of our trusted news sources.”

He waved a hand at the pile of newspapers beside him. Max could have pored over every item and would have found only passing
references to
stateless persons, displaced persons, refugees.
Not once would Jews be mentioned.

“Stop carrying the weight of the world around your neck and have a drink. Do you need to ruin our one lunch of the Roosevelt administration before you've even started the meal?”

No matter how many times he studied the old man's face, he could never find in it the faintest resemblance to his own. It was an oval face with oval eyes the color of algae. He'd been bald for as long as Max remembered, bespectacled and slightly fat, but strong-seeming in the back and neck and forearms. With an average-sized nose and average-sized ears, it was his lips that betrayed him, thick and fleshy and more vertical than expected, the shape and color of wild tubers, but still manly somehow—they claimed their stake on his face even before words escaped them.

“I think a lot was accomplished this week,” he said to his father. “I think we made a lot of progress toward bringing together a lot of very differing groups into a common cause.”

His father swallowed his food and nodded.

“And what about bringing a unified front to our family? Any progress there?”

“Utica is home now,” he said, looking at a plate of scalloped potatoes, speaking a little more slowly than he would have liked to.

“This is a beautiful city,” his father said.

“I know it is.”

“This is a beautiful city that made you, that's watched you run halfway across the planet to devote your brilliant life to the scruffiest errata and that will still take you back. It's a generosity no woman—or barely even a parent—would extend. But here it does.”

“You speak more poetically than you want to, Papa.”

He meant it affectionately, he felt, after his father's imprecation, the smallest spark of affection, but his father's expression had devolved to full-fledged scowl, even with a mouthful of food.

“There are people in Utica who need me and I won't leave them. I hope you recognize a commitment.”

“What I recognize is someone who makes a life out of running from one place to the next. I'd honestly rather have had you rob banks if that were going to be your way of being.”

Max didn't answer. He held his chin in his left hand and looked away from his father. Gray light pooled at the window. He was aware of the clenched noise, the muffled action that took place in restaurants like these. It brought back the ache of the El seats, the pain seizing his body. He tried conjuring the memory of Hirschler as a palliative but he'd already faded into a frazzled murk with the conference.

“I remember,” said his father, “that stinking, dim cheder my uncle dragged me into each week and those foul old men whose existence was spelled out in a gibberish alphabet and the meaning of acrostics. You were meant to be so much more than that.”

He had forgotten that beyond the blunt instrument of his father's face there was grossly deformed love, wretched, misbegotten, with its mangled arms always open. This love that only expressed itself with scorn. It was too much for Max. Had always been but now went past the limit of what could be carried.

“I am going to eat,” he said. “I have a train to catch soon and I don't know when my next decent meal might be. So I'm going to eat now.”

He was certain his father wouldn't remember—why would he?—but this was precisely what his father had instructed him to do some thirty years earlier on a punishingly cold day at Rosehill Cemetery, as they'd stood over the open grave of Max's mother and Max had allowed the first sobs to escape. As wretchedly sad as he was at the loss of his mother, he feared crying in front of his father almost as much as he grieved for her. It would be an unforgivable lapse, as far as his father thought, a further concession by the living to the lazy menace of death. The morning and the graveside service had been a series of sighs and clenched lips and tightly squeezed eyes but finally, with the cold
bearing down and the simple wooden casket laid with awful delicacy into the ground, a whole world of absence opened up before Max, a feeling of loss as an energy, a swirling force, what he would later recognize in Heidegger's
das Nichts,
nothing as a real and true and living thing, and this empty power ripped the sobs from his chest. He hugged himself and trembled, unable to stop the tears, aware that his father could not let this go unnoticed. All he said was, “You need to eat now.” It was a deeply confusing response, inapt and illogical (where was he going to find food in a graveyard?), enough so that Max gathered himself, and then a train roaring past allowed him to look away from his father while the wind burned his raw cheeks.

He looked up at his father for signs of recognition and saw only the familiar, patient disdain.

“Your next decent meal would be in about five hours if you'd put your head back where it belonged and just came home.”

Max ate. He ate a far bigger meal than he needed, one he would pay for on the train, but one he felt he had to in his father's presence. He stuffed himself with meats and potatoes and vegetables drenched in creams; foods of density and volume. He had wine and brandy and ice cream. He made noises and stains. As long as he did not need to look at his father, he ate.

When he decided he was finished he stood up and said thank you.

“You won't be missed,” said his father. “You were once but we've learned. We've adapted. I'm sorry to say. Life here progresses fine without you, Max.”

14.

W
ELL, IT WAS
true; she was getting the thing she'd always wanted—a wedding to a man she loved, an apartment she could make her own, and a one-way ticket out of her parents' home and the Siberian backwater that was Utica, New York. Judith knew her life was full of blessings and good fortune and all the rest, and yet still, at this moment, she wanted to scream. The cause was simple: staring into the drab abyss of her bedroom closet, she realized that, with an important evening before her, maybe the most important evening of her life, she had nothing, absolutely nothing, to wear.

True, she'd uttered the words to herself at least a thousand times before, but they had never seemed as urgent and unbearable as they did now as she stood before her bureau mirror in her newly hemmed skirt, her darkest red lipstick, her tightest sweater. Plain, she thought. Bland. A schoolteacher dressed for a night on the town. There was no getting around it: all her shoes were too flat and too scuffed; her jewelry consisted of a few small pendants she'd received as birthday gifts from her parents, a single strand of pearls her mother had lent her for a dance and never asked her to return, the silver-plated trinkets she bought from the department store. There was not a single dress left to pull out of her closet. No other vibrant belts or sashes. No sleights of hand to fall back on. This seemed to her at that moment the great struggle of her life: to fool people into thinking she was something other than
what she was—an immigrant's daughter, a junkman's daughter, a dull as dishwater Jewish girl from too far upstate. Oh, it was awful, so awful that in a moment of not caring, she let out a sharp, shrill scream. It was not a bloodcurdling scream and not a scared-for-her-life scream, but it was a scream nonetheless, loud enough for her mother, who was cleaning downstairs, to call up, “Was that you, Judith?”

“No, mother. It wasn't me.”

There was a pause, and then the sound of the sink running again. Judith picked up a pillow from her bed and screamed again, this time muffling it. Then she threw the pillow at the wall and walked to the windowsill where she kept her cigarettes in a small ivory box her father had given her on her thirteenth birthday, a box he'd bought from the rummage shop where he worked before he bought the yard. She lit the cigarette while staring down at the empty street, waiting for Sam to arrive.

In less than thirty minutes, he was going to pull into the Auers' driveway in his new Buick to take Judith to the finest French restaurant in Utica—the only French restaurant in Utica—and then they were going to the Hotel Utica and make love. They'd decided it would be best this way, one month before the wedding. Judith had decided. It was the first time for her but not for him. She didn't want to lose her virginity on her wedding night—it seemed too old-fashioned. They were engaged, after all, and they loved each other, so why not? Do you hear me, mother, she said to herself. Why the hell not? Her mother would of course pretend to be appalled if she knew. She would spend a day giving her the silent treatment, acting scandalized. Irene had a talent for thinking one thing and behaving as though she thought another. She supposed it came from growing up in such a stuffy household—her grandmother was lodged in Judith's memory as a powdered old matriarch who could issue commands without opening her mouth, her grandfather a clenched, silent, haughty old German. To escape their judgment, to become American, her mother had become as much
a performer as the flamboyant diva currently living in their home. As Ana Beidler passed across her thoughts, Judith's mood, which had been weighed down by her dreary wardrobe, suddenly lifted. Of course, she thought. She would borrow a dress from Ana Beidler. After two months of eating their food and using up all the hot water and gazing at Judith's father across the dinner table, it was the least the woman could do.

THE MOMENT THEIR
houseguest descended the stairs that first night, Judith had felt a deep uneasiness, an almost instinctual suspicion of this woman who defied her every expectation about what a Jewish refugee would be. And yet, despite the dinner monologues and nocturnal walks, there was a part of Judith that thought, if I have to grow old (or at least, older) and I have to one day become what I know I must—a middle-aged Jewish woman—let me be like this one. Let other people look at me the way they look at her, as though my face contains a mystery. No one ever looked at Judith's mother that way, or her aunts or her cousins or her mother's friends. Sometimes Sam looked at Judith with that same intensity for a moment here or there, but then it faded and she'd go back to being just her usual self, dear to him, yes, but dear in a familiar way—dear as in dependable, sweet, and common. Still, she was his and he was hers, and the simply symmetry of this pairing had made her feel for the first time in her life as though all was well with the world.

He was finishing law school at Hamilton and would graduate that spring, a few months after the wedding. The ceremony would take place at the synagogue, and then a wedding luncheon at the Auers' home. A lovely winter wedding. Not too big or too small. Her dress would blend with the snow. She also had an idea about a white fur stole, something she'd seen in a magazine. She had another idea about taking the dining room door off its hinges so that she could make an appearance, walk down the long hallway from the back door to the
parlor, and so a few days earlier, she'd stood and watched as her father unscrewed the hinges from the frame, trying, as he always did, to appease her while letting her know through his slightly pained expression just how ludicrous these whims in fact were.

“Perhaps,” he said, getting down on his knees beside his toolbox, “we could suspend you by wires from the ceiling. And then you could fly down the aisle.”

“You're hilarious, Papa. A riot.”

“It was only an idea.” He paused.

“What's wrong now?”

“I'm wondering if the door will be easier to get off than it will be to get back on. You're sure about this?”

“Let's wait and see how it looks. Come on, it's not so hard.”

He sighed deeply, opened the box, and examined his tools. Perhaps it was the droop of his head or the curve in his back. Perhaps it was the way the late light through the window hit him, casting half his face in shadow, but for some reason, at that moment, he seemed old to Judith, worn down, defeated. How sad it was, but at the same time, infuriating, because he wasn't old or sick or feeble. He was the same old Papa who'd carried her around on his shoulders well past the age when it was appropriate, only for weeks now he hadn't been sleeping. From her bedroom she could hear him, rising in the middle of the night, turning on the sink, skulking up and down the stairwell, talking to himself. Worrying, probably, about nothing and everything. And so on her wedding day, he'd appear like a tired old man instead of the man she knew him to be. She imagined it, and for a brief moment her cheeks flushed with anger.

“Papa,” she said, as he tried one size screwdriver, then another. “I have a question for you. Will Ana Beidler be here for the wedding?”

He continued trying to force in the screw.

“Papa?”

“Can you hand me the other screwdriver? The smaller one.”

She passed it to him. “Well?”

“I have no part in any of this. Your mother is sovereign over the wedding. I'm a humble laborer is all.”

“I'm only wondering if you think she'll still be here.”

“Judith, do I work for the refugee agency? How am I to know these things?”

“You're not, I suppose. I thought though that maybe she would have shared her plans with you.”

He turned to glare at her.

“Why is that something she would do?”

“I don't know, Papa.” She held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I saw the two of you speaking on the porch. You seemed very close, like people who confided in one another. That's why I didn't think it so far-fetched to ask if you knew her plans.”

He tossed the screwdriver back into his toolbox, reached for a hammer, put it down beside him, and inched on his back along the floor to find a better angle. “The porch,” he said, “when am I on the porch?” He said it as though she'd claimed to have spotted them on the surface of the moon. “Oh,” he said. “I remember. We were talking about a theater troupe she was in for a short time that came through Grodno. We were discussing the town hall where I used to go with my family.”

There was a time when this mention of his past would have made her lean forward, ask for more detail, more stories. What had the town looked like? What were his parents, her grandparents like? His brother, Shayke, who she knew had died young? Was it a loving family, a warm home? She knew his life had been difficult, but had there been any happiness or joy? And what had he, her father, been like as a small boy, a teenager, a young man? As a child, she'd felt an insatiable curiosity to know about the life her father had left in Russia. But month after month, year after year, she'd faced only reticence and coldness, a blank discomfort spreading across his face with each question. Gradually, his reluctance to talk about life before America had worn down her
curiosity until nothing was left of it. When she imagined her father's childhood now, she saw a gray sky, a barren field, punishing snow, and a pot of thin soup.

He had only begun to speak when she interrupted him.

“We'll need to know one way or the other if she'll be at the wedding. No surprise guests. And Papa, what if I said I didn't want her there? Would you think I'm a terrible person? I can picture it. She'll wear that heavy black gown and drink too much wine and make a speech about some actor she bedded.”

“You've made your point. I'm sorry you don't like her, but she's our guest.”

“It's not that I don't like her. She can be very charming and all; that's the problem. I can never tell what's real, what's put on. Her accent changes, I think. She'll talk about her life on the stage and it sounds so lovely, so exotic, but it's hard to know if any of it's true. I mean, the great Jacob Adler, my elbow. Sometimes I think she was more likely a barmaid. A chiseling little clerk in a customs office. A secretary.”

“Keep your voice down, Judith.”

“Why? She's sleeping . . . or doing whatever she does in the guest room all day. Does she have supernatural hearing in addition to all her other talents? Besides, even if she were listening, it wouldn't matter. The woman never hears a word anyone says. She listens only to her own monologues.”

“So we should gossip at will?”

“Oh, Papa. You're such a bore when you moralize.”

“Who was moralizing? I asked a question. Tell me, what if she was a barmaid or a clerk? You'd hold it against her?” The screwdriver slipped from his hand, the rust from the frame cutting his finger.

“Don't get ruffled. I'm not out to get her. Of course I don't care what she was in Europe. I don't care in the least. What I can't tolerate is people putting on airs. If she was a barmaid, let her say she was a
barmaid. When someone asks me, I tell them plainly who I am. The day that Sam came into the store, I didn't prance around pretending to be Judy Garland. A diva of the Yiddish stage. It's too much. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Mama said the same.”

“Not to me, she didn't.”

“Of course not to you. In case you haven't noticed these past twenty years, my mother is allergic to conflict. Swatting a fly sends the woman to bed.”

He gave up on the hinge, pushed himself up to sitting, then tapped the door with his knuckles. “Judith, dear, if you want to make an entrance down the hallway at the wedding, you're going to have to walk through the wall.”

She looked at him as though this were a challenge. “You're really admitting defeat so easy?”

“The door frame's about to buckle. It's an old house.”

“Maybe Ana Beidler put a curse on it.”

Slowly, he opened his mouth to speak.

“Whatever you're about to say, Papa: Don't. I'm not trying to be mean. I don't hate Ana Beidler and I'm well aware we don't know what the woman's been through, the particulars of it. I'm only telling you that you shouldn't take everything she says as fact. We can't let ourselves be taken advantage of.” She paused for a moment then added, “I see the way she looks at you.”

Abe laughed a little louder than was called for. “And how is that?” he asked. “How does the diva of the Yiddish stage look at Abe Auer, the local junkman, her humble host?”

The smile was gone now, her expression determined. “Knowingly,” she said. “Like she's trying to sell you something.”

IT WAS ALMOST
five now, and Sam would be arriving any moment. Judith pulled off the sweater she was wearing, dropped it onto her bed. The least she could do, she repeated to herself. When she entered
Ana's room, it was not the mess she'd expected it to be. There were no silk slips strewn across the floor, no garden of perfume droppers and atomizers on the tabletops or bureau. The room was tidy—the bed made. On top of the bedspread was a book lain facedown to mark the page—a book by someone with a name she couldn't pronounce. The desk was covered with newspapers, stationery, small notebooks, novels, all so boring. Where were the love letters and diaries and scripts and journals, Judith wondered. After a moment of looking, she gave up, crossed to the closet, opened it quietly. Inside hung dresses of every shade and style—silk shifts and graceful A-lines, full-length gowns with plunging necklines and tailored black suits, beaded blouses and translucent scarves with Japanese prints. The one she took out was blue-gray, the color of storm clouds or tarnished silver. It was knee-length and full around the skirt, but it seemed to weigh nothing. The fabric was lined in silk and intricately pleated. It felt softer than her own skin. At the waist there was a navy sash lighter in color than the rest of the dress, gray but more like mist than metal, with dark beads sewn into it, a design embroidered in black thread. She returned the dress to the closet, couldn't quite work up the nerve. But then, on her way back to her room, she noticed a cigarette case on the nightstand. She walked over, opened it, and took out a slim, mentholated cigarette. There was a lighter on the nightstand. She picked it up and sparked the flame and only then did she realize it was her father's, his large, silver lighter, smudged with thumbprints and tarnished a little on the bottom corner. She turned it over in her hand, held it up so it reflected the rounded, blurry edge of her forehead, put it down on the nightstand, then picked it up again, then put it in her pocket. She imagined her father standing where she was now, the lighter in his hand. She imagined him sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward, elbows resting on knees, the way she'd seen him sit countless times before. A shadow moved across the floor. It was the door opening, Ana Beidler standing in the doorway.