The Houseguest (24 page)

He put his fingers against the slip again, as though it might convince him to change his mind.

NEAR MIDNIGHT, THEY
walked once again through the city's darkness. As they walked, she spoke of her life as though it were a fairy tale. “Once upon a time,” she said, “There was a beautiful Yiddish actress named Celia Epstein.”

“A friend of yours?”

“In a sense. She died ten years ago, but I talk to her occasionally, ask her for advice. Forty years ago, she was the most glamorous, the most mysterious figure of the Yiddish stage. But she didn't begin that way. She began with nothing, drew her first breath in a cold cellar in Warsaw, the daughter of half-starved factory workers. Her parents were so poor they had to swaddle her in newspapers and potato sacks to keep her from freezing. One day the landlord who owned the cellar mistook her for a food delivery and sent her to his cook's kitchen to be added to the soup. When she opened the burlap and found a child, she was so horrified that she ran away that day and returned to her native country with the girl in tow. After a few months, her Austrian relatives were able to find her work as a nanny on a wealthy estate outside Vienna. She spent her girlhood there, materially provided for but basically unloved. She grew up in limbo, not quite a servant, not a member of the family. She was forbidden from playing with the other children, but because she couldn't play or speak, she began to sing. She sang to soothe herself, to amuse herself, no one else. Her voice was not what anyone could have expected. The tone . . . the range. No one ever told her to be quiet when she was singing.

“At sixteen, she ran away to London, landed a part in the chorus of an East End production. As legend has it, she spent eleven hours preparing for her first performance. She curled her eyelashes and crimped her hair with stones heated in the fire. She painted her face and lips with a crimson tint. She tried on eight costumes, and happy with none, she tore three different ones apart and sewed together the choicest parts. All the chorus girls laughed at the time and care she took. Didn't she know she was only one of twenty, that her job was not to be noticed but to fade in with all the others? But they were jealous. They saw how beautiful she was. And they weren't laughing when the show was over.”

“Let me guess. She landed the lead.”

“No, there was no time for that. Even before Celia left the stage, an Indian prince who'd come to see the performance sent his servant backstage to fetch her, then swept her away by carriage, absconding with young Celia across the sea to his palace in Bombay. No one heard news of her for four years. They assumed she'd been sold into white slavery, or had fallen ill and died. But they were wrong.

“One day, a theater on Second Avenue called the Orpheum announced her return to the stage as the star of
I Am Singing.
Opening night, she stepped before an audience of thousands, more radiant, more beautiful, more exotic then before. Her voice, always melodic and sweet, now sounded low and enchanting. It brought to mind the wind of the desert, water lapping on the banks of the Nile, nightingales rustling the fronds of fig trees. Also, her appearance had changed. She'd brought back so many trunkfuls of glittering gowns and exotic saris that people bought tickets to her shows simply to see what she would wear. A year after returning, every Yiddish-speaking Jew in New York had come to see the show. People close to her described how that first year, she never really stepped foot in the city because her fans carried her wherever she needed to go. After the show at the Orpheum ended, all the other theaters fought for her. Directors and producers wooed her with gemstones, private carriages, Italian dressmakers, and French perfume. Gordin dedicated three plays to her. Other playwrights competed for the honor. There was a rumor that Thomashefsky once came to her dressing room, lovelorn beyond reason, and begged her just to let him sit there while she prepared herself for the show. He sat on the floor watching her comb her hair, and when she was finished, she glanced at him in the mirror and said, ‘Very well then. Now you can write a play for my hair.'

“A few months later they were married. But one man could never hold her attention for long. She seduced actors, directors, poets, revolutionaries. She toured all the great cities of Europe, her charm and glamour transforming the hotel rooms she occupied into salons for
the Yiddish intelligentsia. On one of these trips, she married a Russian journalist who followed her back to New York and made her pregnant. By the time the children were born, she'd left him for another. And then there was another. And still another. But none of them pleased her for very long. None of her men, none of her admirers or friends, not even her children, could fill the space that needed filling, the pain of those years in that mansion in Vienna when she'd been invisible, when no one had seen her or loved her. Their devotion couldn't reach back far enough, and so the more fervently they loved her, the less she felt their affection, the less she was able to let it in. The only time she was truly happy was when she was on stage. The only love that mattered to her was the love of her audience, the love of strangers. But audiences, as any actor will tell you, make the worst lovers. They can swear eternal devotion to a star, but the years pass, the star ages, her shows begin to flop, and suddenly they have nothing to give her. The love dries up. The actor is left with nothing. Only then did Celia turn back empty-handed to those who had tried to love her in earnest, the husbands and friends and children. Only then did she try to rekindle what they'd once felt for her. But by then it was too late. She was a stranger to them . . . to us. So over the years, her name grew fainter on Second Avenue and the stages of Europe. The woman who'd been carried across the Lower East Side in the arms of her fans died alone in her apartment, cold and uncared for, just as she'd been at the beginning in that cellar in Warsaw.”

“Did you ever meet her?” he asked. “This Celia Epstein.”

She laughed without shyness, without fear of being heard. “Of course,” she said. “She was my mother.”

THEY WENT TO
bed early. The sky in the window a cobalt screen. All those nights, when he'd imagined how it would be, what he'd come upon was a single, ecstatic moment stretched out through the night. But in reality, their hours together were full of interruptions. After
their first, brief experience of each other, Ana slept an hour, then woke abruptly, stood, paced. She couldn't settle. She wanted to make love, to smoke, to drink, to plot her departure from Utica. She walked the circumference of the room like a trapped animal, threw herself across the bed, flipped from her back to her chest to her side. He imagined Irene sleeping peacefully in the guest room of her cousin's house, felt a pang of longing and remorse, but then Ana drew him back out of himself with the immediacy and warmth of her body, her voice. Her shoulders and hips were finely curved; her calves were strong like an acrobat's. Once, as he was about to finish, she pushed off of him, stood naked before him and began to dance. In her negligee and stockings, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, she reminded Abe of Sonia.

In the morning, as the sun rose in the window, she finally slept. When he tried to rouse her, she told him to go home and gather what they'd need for their voyage, but would not open her eyes. He dressed quickly and clumsily, hurried through the lobby, down the street.

He still had her slip.

The house, when he stepped inside, was empty and silent. It had never seemed so lonely. He had the feeling of being watched, though no one was home. He kept checking the door, expecting to see Irene. He showered beneath a near-scalding stream, scoured and scrubbed every part of his body. After he'd dressed, he tended to the small chores around the house, the ones he knew Irene would expect of him; he took out the garbage, mowed the lawn, cleaned leaves out of the gutters, doing it all in half the time it would normally take.

Then he returned to his bedroom, removed a small suitcase out of the closet, a suitcase Irene had bought him years before that he'd never used. He stuffed it with a change of clothes, a bottle of cologne, a toothbrush, and nail clippers. He packed his checkbook. He packed the three hundred dollars he kept in a coffee can in the pantry. Then he turned off the lights in every room as though he were going to work on any normal day. He would go to the yard and make the necessary
phone calls. He would sell everything he'd worked for to whomever had made the most recent offer. He locked the door behind him and got in his car and decided that for once he would behave as though his life was his own, as though he could do with it as he pleased, without fear or remorse.

21.

H
E WENT TO
his room, stared out the window for a few minutes at the Atlantic coast, almost as if he stared hard enough he might see the
St. Louis
out there on the water. He then rode the elevator down seventeen floors to a lobby King Louis XIV would not have sniffed at. Smack in the center of it hung a chandelier the size of an automobile. Around this centerpiece sat velvet chairs with bronzed feet, crystal vases bursting with lilies, stiff-spined doormen in tasseled jackets rushing trunks and suitcases onto luggage carts, lounging women in large white hats, men in Bermuda shorts, and honeymooning couples laughing and sipping colorful cocktails out of tall-stemmed glasses. He thought he might sink into one of these chairs for the remainder of the day but now the prospect of sitting here among such people, people in couples, people going about their business while the refugee ship drifted ten miles out at sea, filled him with dread. He was deciding what to do when Hirschler appeared before him and said, “Hey, want to go see the races?”

Max thought he was kidding at first and laughed.

“Hialeah Park. It's supposed to be something. A big new grandstand. It has a Renaissance Revival Clubhouse.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Neither do I, but who cares? The architect built a goddamned lake on the infield and it's crammed full of flamingoes. Hundreds of them.”

“What do flamingoes have to do with horse racing?”

“What the fuck do phony belle époque mob-owned hotels have to do with refugee ships? Come on. I get a kick out of watching people lose money.”

“I don't know.”

“Come on, Max. It'll be easier to talk there.”

“It's hot outside.”

The look Hirschler gave him was again imploring; he no longer had the brute, mechanical force that slung Max all over Chicago. If he had wanted to he could have commanded Max to his room, had his way with him and said whatever he needed to say. Max was too pummeled by the morning's meeting to fend that off. The fact that he was asking rather than dictating and wanting to go someplace as odd as a racetrack implied a wariness or even desperation on his part. Max saw him surveying the lobby, gnawing his lip.

A few minutes later a doorman in full livery was helping them into a cab.

THE BLEACHERS AT
Hialeah were so high and the crowd so dense and the cheering so loud that Max could hardly make out anything on the track below. From where they sat, the flamingoes on the lake in the middle of the track were not flamingoes but a swath of pink. Everyone around them was well-dressed and sweating—sweating into their Panama hats and sundresses, fanning themselves with newspapers, holding cold glasses against their faces. Hirschler bought two bottles of beer and slouched, his hat tilted so far forward there was no way he could see anything but the brim and his feet.

“That was a hell of a way to make an introduction,” Hirschler said, “going down in flames.”

“I said what I needed to say.”

Hirschler took a swig of beer and grinned under his hat. He wasn't going to let Max get away with anything sanctimonious, even if it was sincere.

“You said all you
could
say. I'm guessing Spiro could have given you a little more ammunition if he'd wanted to.”

It seemed like he was on the verge of saying more but he stopped and finished his beer in one long draught.

“What race is this? Guy in the gents' at the hotel told me to keep an eye on a filly called Superia in the fifth.”

“Why didn't Spiro tell me anything more?”

In one clean motion, Hirschler lowered his beer bottle to the grandstand floor and put his hand on Max's knee. It wasn't a touch that was meant to be hidden. A fella slaps his pal's knee. Its meaning was unknown, the length and the firmness of the touch visibly innocuous but transmitting a heat deeper than the day's.

“You want to go put every cent we have on Superia? If we win, I don't know, maybe we start talking to the Haitians. The port in Port-au-Prince is part-owned by a bunch of Americans. If they'll cozy up to the jigs maybe they'll be friends with Jews too.”

That eyeless smile. Nothing but the umbra of his hat and the slant of his lips.

“This whole conference is just going to be reaching in the dark, isn't it?”

“It's all we've ever done, Max. It's all we ever will do.”

The hand inched a little higher up his leg.

“Seeing who doesn't hang up the phone first,” said Max. “Who can be bribed the most easily. Who's got the most valuable favor.”

“You're a doomed literalist, Max. It's a charming quality. We can't truck in anything that definite. Do you know what had to be exhausted to get Dickstein on the horn? These are one-shot deals and we don't even know where the target is.”

Slowly, Hirschler removed his hand and lifted up his hat. He sat up, elbows on knees. He was the same Hirschler who had appeared to him in the flophouse, only now with sagging shoulders and a halo of sweat on his brow. The re-apparition did not startle or unsettle Max.
Everything was beginning to unwind, had already started, was sagging toward an incomprehensible rift Max now knew he had been looking into for as long as he had been running.

As if sensing Max's despondency, Hirschler said, “You're right.”

“About what?”

“That everyone on that ship is already dead. No port is taking it.”

A bugle sounded and a roar of cheers went up. Hirschler turned to a man in front of him and asked which race this was.

“Fifth.”

“Shit,” said Hirschler. “So much for Superia saving the Jews.”

The man gave Hirschler, and then Max, a confounded, disdainful stare.

“Look around,” said Hirschler beneath the noise. “Do you think anyone wants to risk any of this?” The horses and the flamingos and the beer and the women in frilled dresses and the men with their skin searing joyful pink and the lake that God didn't create and the sky and the sky and the sky. “Nobody wants a war. And nothing is happening without a war.”

He took advantage of the race-entranced crowd to find a free vendor and buy two more bottles of beer. “Maybe if Hitler hadn't fouled up at Dunkirk and the Brits weren't still alive and kicking, we'd have no choice. Maybe Hitler gets far enough into Russia that Roosevelt decides it's time. But this is months, we're talking. Years. And it has nothing to do with Jews. We'll stand up and muster everything we can and scream till our throats bleed and die still roaring and no one's going to hear it over the clamor here.”

Hirschler drank and so did Max. The noise in the crowd undulated as the horses circled, the sound following their brutal motion around the oval, and as they approached the finish it became total again, overtaking everything in the park except Max and Hirschler, who drank their beers and stared at the sweat-blotched shirt backs of the men in front of them.

Superia finished in second by a nose. Hirschler let out a long, mournful laugh when the result was announced. He looked to Max. Laugh along. Laugh.

Everything died down as the park entered the lazy interregnum between races. A confetti of loser bet slips rained down from the upper reaches of the stands. It floated in corkscrews and thermal-driven zig-zags as crude planes and wadded up shells. It landed on heads and hats, meant solely to be stepped on, ground underfoot, a burial rite for dead schemes, never-had-and-lost fortunes, blown nights, blown lives.

“No matter the outcome of the conference,” said Hirschler, looking at the mess. “My wife and boys are coming down here when it's done. They want a few days at the beach before school starts up again.” He was looking directly at his feet now. “Ten and eight, in case you were going to ask.”

Max kept his eyes ahead, gazing out at the racetrack, which now seemed suspended in that moment of stillness, of pure anticipation right before the start, even though the next race wasn't close to starting. A hush had come over the crowd, as though a collective moment were needed, to exhale, to look at the time, to wonder, to forget something, to reach over and gently elbow the person sitting next to you, hey buddy how's tricks, to make note of the heat on this day, to recognize where in space you stood; and then the crack of a gun and its instant echo, then a bright burst of dust and animal strength beneath a dizzying sun.