The Houseguest (27 page)

27.

A
FTER SHE LEFT
, Abe slept. In truth, it was a half-sleep, a kind of hovering above himself, his household, the business of putting his life back in order now that she was gone, trying to understand what had happened. From certain sturdy perches in his junkyard he might look out and survey what wreckage he had to peddle. Often, though, his eyes wound up on the city beyond his padlocked fence, at the scabby bungalows and warped A-frames sighing out past the highway and into the hills. From this somnolent perch all he saw was his own inert body, a pale and shapeless thing, like something that might have washed up on the shore of an ocean.

On the second day, in the middle of the night, his brother appeared to him again, a skulking shadow presence hovering near but also distant, impenetrable. Then, after days of hardly leaving his bedroom, claiming a flu, he opened his eyes to the sound of voices down below, Irene's voice and another woman's, pleasant but not familiar, not a neighbor or a friend. He pulled himself out of bed, pulled on his trousers, walked to the sink, splashed cold water on his face, and went downstairs. A schoolteacher. Someone from a relief agency. Her face carried a practiced kindness, a goodwill that came with the territory, not the spirit. That was his first thought. There was something familiar about the face as well. The unease in the eyes. The hapless mouth. She was sitting on the sofa where Ana used to sit, leaning over a cup of tea
she held in both hands. Irene didn't look angry but perturbed, shaken. Perhaps she was here about Judith. Trouble at work. A relation of Sam's. “Can we help you?” Abe said from the stairs.

It was Irene and not the woman who answered.

“Abe,” she said. “This is Elsie Greene. She is Max Hoffman's sister. She's come in from Chicago.”

He came all the way down the steps. At the bottom, he saw the woman was crying, her eyes raw. The resemblance now became sick-eningly clear. He had never seen Max cry and now considered himself grateful that he hadn't. Whatever had made him and his sister had not given them faces meant to withstand tears. She had no control over her own face, no grip on the movements, no hand on the sounds. Irene was crying as well, blotting her eyes with a crumpled tissue.

“What's happened?” Abe said.

“Oh, Abe,” Irene said. “It's terrible news.” The words caught in her throat.

Elsie looked squarely at him and Abe forced himself not to look away.

“He was found on a beach in Florida, a little ways south of Miami.”

Abe could read his own expression of bafflement in the way the women looked at him.

“That's where he was, Abe,” Irene said softly. “He'd gone to some kind of conference.” She turned to Elsie. “About refugees.”

She'd been called a few days earlier, his sister told them. The body was sent home by train and buried immediately. Home to Chicago.

“Some of the people at his conference noticed he was missing and the hotel phoned the police,” Elsie said. “Somehow they pieced together the body that washed up and . . .” She stopped, not to cry but to contemplate something far off.

“I'm told one of the men at the conference identified him. He knew Max was from Chicago. The Miami police were able to contact my father,” and she broke down again.

It was difficult for Abe, picturing Max someplace as
warm
as Miami, or the Miami that Abe imagined from the movies. That was the idea that he became snagged on. Max beneath a resplendent sun. It somehow made less sense than Max's wandering off. Max on the beach. Max in the ocean. Abe couldn't summon it. Not at all.

He hadn't known Max had a sister. Or maybe he knew without knowing. Like so much about his friend, the fact hadn't penetrated or added up to anything. Then again, had he ever asked? All his terseness and erudition and counsel aside, Max had been a person. A person with a sister and flesh and aches who dreamt in his sleep. Everything about his presence resisted these human traits but they were there, waiting for Abe to ask.

“He could hardly swim,” Elsie said, as though Abe were broadcasting his thoughts. “Our father wanted him so desperately to learn. We grew up on the shores of one of the world's largest lakes. Max tried. It just didn't take with him.”

With Irene supporting her, Elsie managed to compose herself a bit. She was larger than Max, pretty in a very unadorned way. In her worry there was grace and fullness of spirit, and Abe in a burst of understanding knew that she and Max had been very close.

“I wanted to let you know before the funeral,” she said. “It seemed wrong, burying him before anyone in his hometown knew. But as you know we had to have the funeral as soon as we could. Still, I wanted to be here. To tell someone. To let them know.” She remembered Max mentioning the Auers, dinners, card games, all mentioned fondly, all making the bedrock of his life in Utica.

“Has the
shiva
passed?” Abe said.

“Oh, the hell with all that,” Elsie said, followed by a giggle within a sob. “Our father can sit in a dark house and not take a bath. I wanted to be in a place that mattered to Max, and I think this was it.”

Abe sat down on the bottom step, taking himself out of the hushed conversation that continued between the women. He wanted words,
words to console himself, words that would allow him to comprehend, that would give course to the sadness that now moved through him in all directions; words to gather the facts and what he felt and pile them high like scrap so that he could climb and look out and see where he was. Words were the only thing that could help, but words failed Abe. Abe failed words.

His friend was gone and all he could muster, standing there at the foot of the stairs, was a simple, awful sentence. “Max is dead,” he said.

ABE AND ELSIE
drove to the house without speaking. Only when they pulled into the driveway did she begin to cry again and to talk, describing what had happened, the shock of it.

“It was only a month ago he was visiting. That's the part I can't make sense of. I keep seeing him sitting at our dinner table or on the porch beside me. He was upset. I tried to get him to open up to me. But Max was upset a lot of the time about one thing or another. I tried to ask him . . . I tried. You were a good friend, though, I know. He talked about you. Your family. You must have meant a lot to him. You see, Max never had very many friends, not even as a boy. He was the sweetest, kindest soul I've ever known, but there was something not quite . . .” The windows had fogged over. She pressed her finger to the glass, gazing at the streak it made while she spoke. “He was different was all. Sensitive. Boys didn't know how to be around him. They were cruel. And truth be told, our father was no better. I did the best I could to protect him, but there were times when I couldn't. He turned to his studies and his work for distraction.” She shook her head, shook away some thought. It had begun to rain lightly. Small drops appeared against the gray windshield. He wanted desperately to be out of the car, to put space between himself and her grief.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She shivered slightly. “Let's get out,” he told her.

He opened the door for her. He helped her out of the Buick. The sturdiness of her body seemed like an illusion now. She was weightless, frail; he couldn't imagine how she'd negotiated the train from Chicago by herself. In front of Max's house, a pair of branches, each about the size of a grown man, lay aslant across the walkway. Their ends were jagged, like the torn stalks of a vegetable. The tree they had fallen from was a drooping elm, halfway denuded of leaves. Its remaining branches were thin, mealy; they made Abe uneasy. The trunk showed scars of lightning strikes. The entire thing needed to come down. Abe tried to remind himself to remember.

“My brother. I knew him all his life. We lost our mother young and we were everything to each other. He was a good man but he was quiet. Reserved. When he was twenty-five, he got in his head that he'd go to Spain and join with the Republicans there and he never made it past France, ended up coming back after three months and enrolling in rabbinical school in New York. It wasn't a surprise. He wasn't meant to be a soldier. That just wasn't who he was. A man doesn't change overnight. I believe that—that we are who we are.”

She paused for a moment, swallowed hard. Her hands were trembling again, her whole body. “A woman found him on the beach, a woman out for a walk. His body. My baby brother. I keep trying to imagine. We used to swim in Lake Michigan as little kids, the beach near 31st Street. Really, he'd just wade in up to his shins and then go back to the beach. He hated when he got sand in his face. I used to have him close his eyes and then I'd fill a bucket with lake water and rinse it off slowly. I can just see it now, the sand and sun on his skin. His poor body.” She wiped her eyes roughly, smiled at Abe through her tears. He wanted to do something, to say something comforting. But what?

“And what is this tree trunk doing in the middle of his porch?” she said at last. He set Elsie against the car and hauled each of the branches out of the way, onto the lawn.

THE HOUSE WAS
as it had been left. There were dishes drying on the counter. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter on his desk. A book with a marker in it on the bedside table. It was a bachelor's home, tidy, but not homey. Bare walls. A bareness and coldness all around, no flowers or knickknacks or small touches.

In spite of her state, Elsie was brutally efficient with her brother's things. She went into the bedroom and within what seemed to Abe like a few minutes had all of his clothes sorted and began loading them into bags and suitcases. This was what she had prepared herself for, Abe thought. This act. This tangible and thought-free act. She could blast through it with little more reflection than she gave to the chores in her own house in Chicago. She moved with such swiftness, such deliberation, that Abe eventually removed himself from the room, fearing he was only in the way. Elsie did not seem to notice. He took a few plates and bowls out of the kitchen cabinets, stacked books from the shelves, but nothing he did felt as mechanically precise as Elsie's efforts. She worked as though she were alone in the flat. So he went and sat on the sofa. He had been over a few times, invited by Max for lunch once, occasions when a radiator or pipe needed fixing. In a sense he had felt as superfluous then as he did now. Max had no need for company—his world was outside, elsewhere, and that was where he could be joined—just as his sister had no need for help.

What sort of man makes something so lifeless his home? Warmth was needed, as were color, feeling; reminders that no one was going wanting. It was an instinct that probably dated back to caves but that never brooked any quarter with Max. No doubt there was something rabbinical about it.

While Elise kept up her work there was a knock at the door. It was the widow who lived upstairs. Abe ushered her outside, and then, remembering what Max had told him about her, her relationship with the Canadian naval man, the fatally somber nature of that pairing (Max giggling and turning red, telling Abe about the array of
sounds they could produce together), led her down the street, before delivering the news. He did not want Elsie to hear her wailing. He would not let her offer her condolences in person. Tell me, Abe said, his hands gripping her trembling shoulders. Tell me and I will tell them to her.

AFTER THE PACKING
there was the matter of selling the house, dealing with Max's accounts, something about a life insurance policy that the synagogue had taken out on Max and required Elsie's attention. She had booked herself into one of the murky hotels on the fringes of downtown but Max insisted she stay with them.

“It won't be an inconvenience,” he said, and added without thinking, “we've just had a guest for some time so it won't be unusual for us at all.”

It was dark when he pulled up, the light on in the kitchen. As he took off his coat and his boots in the foyer, he could hear Judith upstairs. Irene was cleaning up from the dinner he hadn't eaten, standing before the sink, her arms submerged in water. She didn't turn to face him when he approached.

“Irene, Elsie is going to stay with us while she finishes settling Max's affairs.”

Irene turned and Abe noticed Elsie smiling sincerely for the first time all day. Any traces of the warmth Irene had shown that morning were gone.

“Of course,” she said. “Will you carry her bags for her?”

They led her upstairs. Judith poked her head out of the room and then darted back in, like a kind of frightened animal. The guest room showed no signs of its previous inhabitant. It had reverted to its agreeably stale, deliberately homely natural state. The lingering commotion of Ana had faded. Her smells, her tenacious shadows, her breathy echoes, all gone. Elsie appraised the room with a relieved fatigue; without even removing her shoes she fell backward onto the bed.

“Forgive me,” she said, looking at the ceiling light. “I've only now realized . . .”

“Say nothing, darling,” Irene said. “No one has any more right to be run-down than you.”

“Can we get you anything?” said Abe.

“If there is . . . perhaps I . . . I . . .”

Her thoughts were fraying. The day and its weight had finally brought her down, like one of Max's dead branches. The light in the room took on a very relaxed cast. For a moment, Abe felt like he was watching Judith as a baby falling asleep.

“Rest,” said Irene. “We'll leave towels at the door. If you need anything—”

Elsie sat up suddenly. With an odd scowl she began patting the bed. She ran her hand over the blanket, looking for something. She reached under the sheets, just above the mattress. Abe watched with growing dread as she produced a vast, elaborate necklace of brass seed pods, a clanging lattice Elsie let hang from her finger.