The Houseguest (19 page)

Judith tried to think of a lie, spoke the first words that came to mind. “I came in to see if you needed anything. More linens?”

Ana smiled and walked closer. “No, my dear. No, thank you. You brought me some yesterday, don't you remember?”

“Oh, yes. I do now. Well, good. Perfect. I'll be off then. I won't see you at dinner tonight.”

“No? Do you have exciting plans?”

“Just going out with Sam.”

“I see,” she said. “That is exciting.” She paused. It was in her pauses, her moments of stillness, when Judith thought maybe she really was who she claimed to be. She didn't fidget or shuffle her feet or slouch. She knew how to wait, how to listen. “Are you and this boy of yours very much in love?” she asked.

The question took Judith aback. She'd been asked by friends if she really liked Sam, if she adored him, if she trusted him, if they'd “done it yet,” as her best friend Lynne put it. But she'd never been asked if she loved him. Until now. “Of course,” she said. “He's wonderful.”

Ana Beidler nodded. “For a wonderful man you need a wonderful dress. Why don't you pick one out of my closet to borrow? We're about the same size, aren't we? Surprise him with something unfamiliar.”

“Oh, I couldn't.”

“Of course you can. It's easy. Just go and pick one. Any one you like. Do you not like my dresses?”

“I love them, but . . .”

“A woman has to believe that she deserves the things she wants. It's one of the most important lessons I've learned in life. Wherever you go, my dear, whatever you do, there will be people to tell you your desires are silly or foolish or impossible or even depraved. But you mustn't believe them. The world runs smoother when women don't want much—but smoothness isn't everything, is it?”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not.”

“So go to the closet and choose a dress.”

Judith walked to the closet, slipped the silver dress off the hanger.

Ana nodded. “It's just what I would pick for such an occasion. Now try it on. Don't be shy. Remember, I've spent most of my years around shrieking, half-naked chorus girls.”

Judith angled her body toward the closet, then unbuttoned. She slipped out of her blouse, handed it over to Ana who folded it and placed it on the dresser. Then she did the same with her skirt and bra.

“Here, let me help you,” Ana said, holding the dress as Judith stepped in. “Now, sit over here and let me fix your hair. You can tell me your worries about this evening, about this boy. I can see the worry in your face. And you know, I can listen from time to time, as well as talk.”

Judith sat down in front of the mirror, watched her reflection as Ana gathered up her hair. “It's nothing serious,” she said. “Probably just wedding jitters.” But through all the stammering and half-truths, Ana Beidler looked at her as though she were waiting patiently for the real story to follow. And so Judith tried to tell her. “I love him,” she said. “I do. It's only that when I was younger, I always had this feeling that—it's so hard to describe—but I had this sense that I would do something wonderful one day, live someplace beautiful and be surrounded by beautiful people and have great adventures and have a different sort of life than my parents, different from the one they expected for me. When I was little, I used to go around saying I wanted to be a princess when I grew up. Then one day, I said it to my father, and he leaned close and squeezed my chin and said, ‘Listen to me, little girl. I come from a place where there were princesses, and those princesses weren't so nice.'” She laughed out loud at the memory. Then in the middle of the laughing, her eyes welled up. “It must sound childish, I know.”

Ana, smiled slightly, eyes shining. “It doesn't sound childish at all. I was that girl you're describing, my dear. And not only was I that girl myself, I've played her many times. It's a familiar script. The cherished
but overprotected daughter of a kind but fearful patriarch. A forbidden attraction to the romance offered by the wider world. The young maiden escapes her provincial family for a more fanciful life. You're living inside a Yiddish melodrama. The only thing missing is an alluring stranger on horseback.”

“You make it all sound so common and childish.”

“Not at all. I played many parts over the years, and I can tell you that as far as Yiddish dramas go, there are worse ones you could be living. A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a Polish friend who was able to escape to Switzerland, an actor I worked with in Warsaw. He described a scene that took place a few weeks before he was smuggled out of the ghetto. A man and woman were walking side-by-side toward a ration line, a young couple holding hands. The woman was pregnant. Even strolling through hell, they appeared to be in love. A German officer noticed this and found it repulsive. He called them out to the front of the line and asked them if each loved the other. They didn't answer. They stood there frozen, too terrified to move or speak. He told them that as Jews they had no right to hold hands in public, or to participate in any other display of affection. He told them to turn their back on one another and to walk in opposite directions and to never approach each other again. He told them that he patrolled the quarter every afternoon, and that if he ever saw them near one another, he would shoot them both without hesitation.”

“That's a terrible story.”

“Only it's not a story. Though I understand what you mean. I, too, read this account and began seeing it onstage. I thought, this is how love stories will go from now on. No more nineteenth-century melodramas. No more lovelorn maidens. Now the great love stories will be played against machine gun fire and barbed wire, against the rumbling of tanks.” She said all this as though in a trance, then looked up, quite suddenly, at Judith's reflection. “Look at you. What a vision you are. Be careful with the dress, though, won't you? My husband gave it
to me during our honeymoon in Argentina. Every time I wear it, I'm dancing with him again on the steps of the Plaza Dorrego.”

“I'll be careful,” Judith said. Ana smiled, placed her hands on Judith's shoulders, and at that moment, Judith felt an unexpected warmth for the woman. She felt bad for all the unkind things she'd said about her over the weeks, the warning she'd issued to her father. At that moment, she wanted to be wrong, wanted Ana Beidler to be a good person. She wanted her magic to be real. She was how the past should be: elegant and faded and beautiful and sad. She turned away from Ana, gave herself one last glance in the full-length mirror beside the door.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Like the world will bend at the knee for you.”

Outside, the sound of an engine, Sam's car pulling into the driveway, idling for a moment before it cut off.

THEIR DINNER WAS
everything she'd hoped: they ate snails in butter. They ate bread with their snails and then moved to oysters and then to boeuf bourguignon, which had to be eaten with a good Burgundy wine. They drank two bottles of it. The waiter refilled her glass before it was empty. They ate crème brûlée for dessert, which tasted to Judith like something she'd loved as a child but couldn't quite remember now—salted caramels, taffy? Somewhere between the crème brûlée and the coffee she agreed it was time for the room at the Hotel Utica.

In the lobby, she hovered behind while he checked them in. The elevator man was at least ninety, seemed to see nothing but the buttons before him, maybe not even those. They rode the elevator up to their room without talking. The hallway was all burgundy carpet, brass doorknobs, dusty wall sconces. Sam fumbled with the key while Judith leaned against the wall, watching him. Inside, she took off her sweater, stepped out of her shoes. She went to turn on the lights but before she could he was behind her, holding her. She turned to face him. The lights were low and she could hardly see.

“My Judith,” he said. “You're mine, aren't you?” He ran his hands along her arms, the seams of Ana Beidler's silver dress. “You've never worn this before.”

“Do you like it?”

“I don't know. . . . You don't look like yourself.”

“No? Who do I look like?” She turned in a slow circle, put her hands on her hips.

“A czarina. A princess.”

“A princess,” she repeated.

There was a pale blue glow to the room, an airless pallor. She thought of her father on the porch with Ana Beidler, how closely and intensely they'd been speaking, his lighter on her dresser. She saw so clearly at that moment what had eluded her before.

“What is it?” he asked. “You seem nervous. Did you change your mind?”

She shook her head.

“Because it's fine if you did.”

“I didn't,” she said.

He walked closer, ran his hands down the length of her arms, laced his fingers through hers. “Something's wrong,” he said. “You can tell me.”

“Nothing's wrong,” she said. “Now kiss me.”

He did as he was told. She kissed him back, and instead of simply letting the kiss linger the way she usually did, she drew his hands under the fabric of the dress, over her hips, her stomach. He reached behind her to unzip the dress, but she stopped him. “Not like that,” she said. “Just tear it.”

He acted like he hadn't heard, kept unzipping, kept kissing, kept whispering things into her ear. But she said it again and again.

“It's too nice.”

“I don't care how nice it is. Tear it.” He stepped back from her, looked her in the eyes once more, as though to see if it was really okay.
Then he took the front of the dress, one hand on each front panel of the silver-blue fabric, and pulled in opposite directions until the dress ripped open at the seam with a sound that caused a pleasant cramping in her legs, a lightness in her head, a flush all along her neck and chest, and a thrumming magnetic warmth between her thighs. She saw then how easy it was to let herself be carried away by urges she hardly understood; she saw then that she was weak like her father.

15.

T
HE SLIP APPEARED
one morning in the branches of the elm tree that stood on the eastern edge of Abe's lawn. He noticed it as he was returning from the junkyard: a patch of whiteness in the otherwise unbroken expanse of green that the tree became in summer. When he saw it, halfway between the Oldsmobile and the front door, he stopped to watch it. Initially he couldn't tell what it was; it flapped in the breeze and just looked like something cloth and whitish and angular, turning and slapping like a wind sock or prayer flag. There were a million things that it might have been. As he got closer he made out the lace patterns, the pallor of the silk. His immediate reaction was to look away.

It certainly wasn't Irene's. He knew by the size and the sheer nature of the thing—it was a slip that was meant, at some point, to be seen, whereas his wife, whose legs were nothing to be ashamed of, only chose underthings whose primary characteristic was invisibility. They were not supposed to exist anywhere but in the closet and the laundry.

He doubted it was Judith's. It took a painful, almost mournful thought-inspection to make the determination, but when viewed closely, when placed with his eyes closed on the body of his girl, the size was all wrong, and the shape. It simply didn't feel right.

That just left Ana.

He tried imagining what kind of event might culminate with him now standing a few feet beneath this strip of silk that hung like obscene fruit and then whipped out violently when the wind started. It was possible that there was nothing indecent about it. The past few days had been full of wind and rain. A loose article, dropped from a basket of wash or left to dry on a windowsill (is that fully decent? no matter), gets yanked away by the breeze and catches in a branch. By that logic it might not have even belonged to someone in his house.

Otherwise. Otherwise.

He had left earlier than usual that morning, even before the summer light had broken in the east. He had gone to the yard to accept a shipment of scrap iron that had come from Massachusetts and before that the Maritimes and before that he didn't dare ponder. He knew that fragments of the war in Europe had been known to wash up on far Canadian shores. Or maybe it wasn't. Scrap at giveaway prices was scrap at giveaway prices. You got no greater discount for acknowledging your conscience. He paid the driver, a lanky Quebecois who kept smiling mischievously.

“If your country gets into the war,” he said finally, “your army gonna come and take all this.”

Abe felt an enormous hatred swelling for the smile. It looked like it had been applied to his face with a hacksaw.

“Then I'll be a very rich man.”

“You might.”

After he had finished unloading and what passed for surveying the inventory, he drove back home. He would have breakfast, see Judith and Irene before their wedding preparations carried them off. He would have the proper beginning to his day that the early delivery had delayed. It was conceivable that he would see Ana. He did not dwell on the possibility long. It was impossible to know when she would appear and when she wouldn't. Planning for either eventuality made him uneasy in ways that had no business in his head.

And he hadn't encountered either, Ana or the absence of Ana. There was a token of her body, a few feet over his head.

He was used to incongruities from the yard. The physical misplacement of things. A cash register filled with forks. A decapitated mannequin resting in a three-legged crib. He worked in a place beyond the meaning of objects. It was the end, or an end; nothing was required to play by the rules it was bound by in the world.

The slip in the tree, though, did not fit this system of discarded meanings. For one, it was on his lawn, not his junkyard. And also the thing in the wrong place still had an owner, a place where it was meant to be, a place Abe could not stand to think about steps from his house.

He went inside. Irene and Judith were gone. He did not call to see if Ana was home. He found a broom and went back out to the elm. Holding it by the bristles he jumped up and down, trying both to dislodge the slip from the branches but also to snare it on the broomstick—the sight of Abe leaping with a broom at a lady's undergarment in a tree was troubling enough. He did not want anyone to see him chasing after it as the wind carried it up the street.

The jumps clattered his back and knees. Bristles broke off into his palm. The tree did not want to give up the slip. The twigs had found their way into the stitching, the lace; leaves held the hem. Finally he was able to batter it free. Half a branch fell with it. It now looked the way he had hoped never to see it: like it had been tossed away deliberately. He picked it up, took the whole of it into his hand, breathing deeply, attuned to the softness, to the memory of the body it held. He clutched it tightly and as he moved toward his house, turning and squeezing with doing his best to hold all of it inside his fist, not to hide it but to devour it.

And then he walked inside. The house was dark, cool in spite of the heat. It was unusual to feel such stillness in his home where Judith or Irene or now Ana was usually creating some sort of low-grade havoc. He stopped at the foot of the stairs, his breath still heaving. The slip fell
from his hand while he looked up, and he walked quickly back outside to his car.

It was only halfway up the block that he looked into his rearview mirror and saw the broomstick and branch, dead together on the lawn.

HE FOUND MAX
Hoffman in his office at the temple. His desk was covered with an array of newspapers in a number of different languages. Abe saw English, Yiddish, Polish, something in Cyrillic that wasn't Russian. Open books, loose pieces of paper. A Greyhound schedule. Max seemed to govern over it all in a very haphazard way; if there was anything systematic about his mess it wasn't readily apparent to Abe, who knew all about the proper governance of messes.

It had been noted by quite a few members of the congregation that Max had seemed tired or distracted since his return from Chicago. Abe had only seen him once and nothing struck him as unusual. Men get weary, thought Abe. It is a right. The murmurings took on a harsher note seeing Max now. He was immersed in what appeared to be a conversation between two of the newspapers. He went back and forth between them, making little dots and lines with a pencil. He had greeted Abe but done nothing more than that before going back to the papers.

“How are things, Max,” said Abe.

“Things are things,” Max said.

“All recovered from Chicago? It's a devil of a place from what I understand.”

“You understand well.”

“Irene said you missed the Hadassah meeting Friday.”

“Yes. I went to the movies.”

“Oh. What did you see?”

“I don't know. I left after the short.”

He looked up for the first time, not at Abe but in his direction.

“Do you know who we should send to fight the Germans?”

“Who's that?” said Abe.

“Bugs Bunny. He's indestructible and has no moral center. He'd finish the
Wehrmacht
before his second carrot.”

He went back to his papers.

“Max, listen, I apologize to trouble you about this but I'd like to ask about Miss Beidler.”

“What about her?”

“Considering what she has been through, and what the Torah has to say about guests in the home, this is a little not easy.”

“Are you planning to turn her out to the Sodomites like Lot did to the angels? I would advise against that, Abe. Your wife would make a miserable pillar of salt. Especially with the wedding coming up.”

He had never seen Max this way. There was nothing present about him. His present was the paper wreckage on his desk. Abe felt like he was a transmission from someplace far off that Max could only hear in bits and pieces.

“You mention the wedding, Max. This is the thing. Irene, Judith as well, that is where their attentions are. This is no small undertaking. And Miss Beidler. She, I don't think, it doesn't seem as though she is comfortable with all that is going on.”

Abe paused for Max but Max did not say anything.

“I came to see if we might move her out of the house and into a hotel. A hotel fitting for her. Where she might have her own space and feel less a sense of intrusion.”

Max made a small movement of his neck and shoulders whose meaning evaded Abe.

“I was thinking the Hotel Utica,” Abe went on. “I'd pay for it, naturally. I wanted to ask, first of all because the refugee agency may have rules or regulations about where its people are put up. But also to inquire at the place where you operate, if I may be violating something by asking her to leave my home. Even if I'm giving her someplace else to stay.”

“It's fine, Max. Send her wherever you want.”

“Like I said, I think the Hotel Utica for her. Nothing less.”

“Have you thought about the Salvation Army instead?”

“Pardon?”

Max looked up again, this time directly at Abe. His eyes were alert in a needless way. They drove into something that wasn't in this room.

“Do you realize, Abe, if we get into the war your entire livelihood could be endangered. Scrap materials of all sorts would be requisitioned by the government.”

“I haven't given it a lot of thought,” Abe said. “You're the second person who's mentioned that today.”

“I wonder if the other fellow was at the conference too. There was a whole afternoon dedicated to the issue. At the conference on Jewish refugees.”

“I doubt he was there.”

“Well,” said Max, lifting his arms to stretch. His shirt was untucked and lifted over his stomach, revealing a line of soft brown hairs. “It may all be moot anyway if we keep to ourselves in this quiet little corner of the earth.”

He exhaled and let his body droop. He took a quick glance at his desk, and something familiar, a sad seriousness that Abe always recognized in Max, returned to him.

“You've got a beautiful daughter whose day of joy needs your attention. Get back to it. Once Miss Beidler is checked in let me know the room number. You've done more than enough already.” Max shook his head slightly. “Honestly, if you didn't make the first move these things might linger on forever.”

IT WAS RAINING
when Abe left the temple. He ran to the Buick and wiped the damp hair from his forehead. He sensed at once, enormous relief and also hollowing disappointment. This was simply the way life was, he reasoned. Nothing without its opposite. Forces and forces against forces. Wants and obligations. Nothing easy and nothing
damning. You bore the brunt standing upright and that was how you managed decently. He drove toward the Hotel Utica as the rain continued to lash the city and the people within it.