The Houseguest (28 page)

“I'm sorry,” Elsie said. “I felt it as soon as I lay down. Does it belong to your daughter? It's lovely.”

“No,” said Irene, accepting it delicately. “It must have been forgotten by our last guest.” She smiled. “Rest now. We're here if you need us.”

ELSIE STAYED THREE
days, settling up whatever remained of Max's material life. With each closed transaction, another bit of Max seemed to be scoured away. Abe felt his friend's presence receding deeper and deeper from the world as he ferried Elsie across Utica, to a savings and thrift, a lawyer, the synagogue. Elsie had no time for rote sympathies or gentle negotiation. She dealt sternly with these men who were often used to grief as an unfortunate but unavoidable source of leverage: the benefit of a life insurance policy converted to an investment; the title to a car sold for far less than market value.
Some of them who knew Abe gave him looks imploring for help but he did nothing. Elsie disposed of each one and moved on to the next. “I apologize if I seem a little gruff,” she said after one such meeting. “Our father is an attorney and a very harsh operator. I seem to have inherited more of him than I realized.” Everything she did, everything she was, Abe saw through the lens of Max. It wasn't fair, not to Elsie, not to Max, whatever he was now. But he kept searching her for signs of her brother, overlaying her actions on memories of him. At times they fit, or matched; at moments he could not believe they were related. She wiped Max away until he was purely theoretical. Everything physical gone but for a name on a headstone somewhere in Chicago.

Irene accompanied Abe on their drive to the train station. “You've both been beyond kind,” Elsie said. “I hope you'll come see us in Chicago someday. It would mean a great deal.”

She cried for a moment, the first time she had done so since her arrival.

“We would be delighted,” said Irene, putting a hand on Elsie's arm.

Abe stared down the length of the track, which vanished beneath a heavy, obliterating fog. The train would no doubt be delayed.

“We've always wanted to visit the Midwest. Haven't we, Abe?”

“Of course,” he said, his gaze still focused on the opacity where the track wasn't.

And cities, he wanted to add. I have always enjoyed being in new cities.

THE NEW RABBI
arrived the day of the first snow of the season, which began as drizzle, then turned to sleet, and finally, at nightfall, became the sharp, gritty powder that would rest on the city and everything around it for months to come. The rabbi was young, barely out of JTS, pudgy and aggressively jocular. He was either unaware of the circumstances leading to his appointment or was determined not to let
them blot out his presence. His sermons were laced with jokes, puns, odd asides that he and only a few staunchly polite people laughed at.

“I don't mean to be choosy but I would prefer it if my wedding wasn't treated like a Porky Pig cartoon,” said Judith, following a meeting about her impending wedding. The rabbi, who was just about Judith's age, cackled his way through the talk. It would be this new rabbi officiating, not Max.

“Be as choosy as you want,” said Abe, “you're still stuck with him.”

Judith's face had a harsh cast—the summer color all gone, her hair desiccated by the weather, the autumn shadows falling across her like streaks of black paint. She looked lovely all the same and Abe took her entreaty as an opportunity to admire her.

“Would you speak to him please? Would you try to impress upon him that I'd like my wedding to be taken seriously?”

He said he would. And he drove to the synagogue on several occasions. And each time could not bring himself to go inside. He stayed in the Buick, not letting go of the wheel. What could he say to this boy, for that's what he was, that wouldn't come across as a threat, as a condemnation of his ministering? What could he say that wasn't simply cursing the boy for not being Max?

THE WEDDING HUNG
before them in the distance as the autumn deepened. Irene and Judith became more and more preoccupied with the details, leaving Abe out of their orbit, deliberately or no. He began feeling unexpected bursts of loneliness, regardless of whom he was with. It wasn't a feeling he was accustomed to, the sense of a space that followed him, cordoned him off from the rest of the world. He left the yard to watch movies: German troops marched through the streets of French cities and curses and boos rose up from the audience. A woman, roughly Irene's age, stood in the doorway to some business, watching the march, weeping. This giantess, this woman the
size of a screen, a wife and mother, her head wrapped in a kerchief, bracketed by the entranceway to whatever the shop behind her was, a grocery or tailor, sobbing. He kept going back to the movies just to see her. When the newsreel changed, he stopped going. He felt hemmed, unseen. Especially at home. He kept an eye out for Shayke. His angry dead brother was better for company than no one.

Business was lively, as it often was when the weather turned. Certain needs became much more apparent to people who could ignore what they lacked in the warmer months. Abe turned no one away, gave no heed to the origin of what was lugged into his yard, paid pennies on the pound, kept a wad of bills handy for any cops who happened by.

“Tell me something,” said one, an ancient Italian who'd never risen past a uniform and a squad car, settling into Abe's office for a chat after pocketing his fin. “You people have always been so good with business. How come you didn't just buy off Hitler?”

“I have no idea,” said Abe.

Snow swirled outside. Canvas tarps shook violently in the wind.

“It's something you could have done. It's something I think you'll regret.”

The cop spoke with genuine concern in his voice, sincere enough to penetrate the numbness that had taken hold of Abe.

THAT NIGHT, HE
sat down at the kitchen table, sat heavily in the small chair and, for no reason, removed a single napkin from the napkin holder, spreading it out over his hand like a shroud. Irene was at the sink, scrubbing dishes. “I'm leaving. Tomorrow,” he said. “There's something I have to do.”

He was expecting questions, incomprehension, but instead she turned off the sink, wiped her hands on a dish towel. She turned to him and said in a voice as calm as any, “You're going to look for her?”

He didn't answer.

She turned back to the sink, as though to continue washing, but instead lowered her head, braced against the counter. “Good,” she said softly.

“Irene . . .”

“It's fine, Abe. But you could do me the dignity of saying it out loud instead of skulking off. Say it.”

Tears formed in his eyes, two large tears. They formed without his consent, rolled coldly down his cheeks onto the napkin. He looked down at the wet paper. More tears came, leaked down onto the yellowed linoleum. He shredded the napkin without using it to wipe his eyes. “Please,” he said.

“Please what? Please beg you not to go?” She pulled up the plug, draining the basin, then turned to face him. “What do you want, exactly? You want me to pretend I don't know what happened, that I'm some sort of idiot and didn't see what was taking place?” She laughed. “Well, no thank you. I'm not a great actress like our houseguest. I couldn't pull it off. And honestly, at this point, it feels as though you've been gone for months. All summer you were gone. It's cold and you stalk around the city like a dumb ghost who doesn't know where to go. I talk to you and you don't hear. I touch you and you turn to stone. She's in your head. For months you've been gone. Even here with me, you're with her.”

“Irene.”

She looked around. “This kitchen,” she said. “How many hours of my life have I . . .” The thought left her. The dregs of the water gurgled as it drained. She picked up a coffee cup, held it up, then let it drop to the floor where it shattered. She didn't throw it at him. It was a gesture of hopelessness, not anger. She simply opened her hands. The shards of porcelain spun and scattered wall to wall. She walked across them, toward him slowly, sitting on the floor beside his chair the way a child might.

“Listen to me now,” she whispered. “Listen to what I'm about to tell you. I want you to go. At this point, it's a relief, and not only because of what happened. I don't want you to think that it's because of what happened.” Then she stood again and shouted at him a single word. “Go!”

Before he could answer, she was hurrying out of the kitchen. He followed her up the stairs, down the hallway to their bedroom. He sat down on the foot of the bed and watched her, unable to move, unable to speak.

She pulled a suitcase out of his closet, pulled clothes out of his drawers and dropped them in as she said, “I am your wife and the mother of your child and I know that deep down you still love me, so show me the respect of accepting that I knew. I don't think I could bear it if you thought me such a fool not to know, not to notice. Believe me when I tell you that it's not because of what happened with you and her. I can't have you thinking it's because of that. It's because it hasn't helped.”

“Helped? What are you saying?”

“For months, Abe, for months and months, I've lived with a corpse. Do you realize that? Do you not see it? Perhaps it's a corpse that gets up in the morning to go to work and comes home at a reasonable hour and sits at the dinner table and tolerates our daughter well enough, but it's a corpse nonetheless, and I can't do it anymore. Whatever's got ahold of you—I've stopped believing it can be cured. Not by me. When she came here, and you looked at her the way you looked at her, I thought, well, maybe it would help. I knew she wouldn't be here long and I thought maybe it would jolt some life into you. For a while, it did, but the moment she left, you crawled into this bed, went back to being a corpse. Well, I'm forty-two years old, Abe. I don't want to be married to a corpse. Not for the rest of my life. I don't want to sit around the dinner table in the evening and talk about synagogues being
burned and children being shot and men and women gassed and all the other horrible, unspeakable, unimaginable cruelty taking place as we speak, things that make you not even want to be human, things that you can't do a damn thing about. That's enough. Now, I want to be happy. I want to think about my lucky, beautiful life. I want to think about how nice it is this time of year by Lake George, and how lovely the leaves are when they turn, and what Judith will look like in her wedding dress, and how precious her babies will be when she makes them. I want to think about the fact that my own baby is beautiful and healthy and safe. I want to play bridge. I want to take baths with you the way we used to and do crossword puzzles in my warm bed and make love and go to the movies. I don't want to go to bed at night thinking of corpses and mass graves and Nazis and murder and hate. I don't want a husband who's a corpse himself, consumed by dread. Maybe that makes me a small person, a bad person, but it's the person I am. So when you find the strength and will to leave this room, here's what I want you to do. Get dressed and take this suitcase and go find her. You think she can make you better, that she has the answer? Go. I wouldn't keep you from her if that's what you need. Judith and I will survive. We have family. We have the business, the house. Go and find her and be happy, or be miserable together which I guess is a way of being happy. But don't come back here until you can come back completely, a whole person. Not a walking corpse. Not a ghost.”

She collapsed onto the bed beside where he sat, pressed her face into the blanket. He moved toward her slowly, lowered his head onto her hair. “I'm sorry,” he whispered to her as she sobbed.

28.

A
FTER THE CALL
came from Harold Sacks of the Refugee Committee, informing him of Max's death, Spiro went into a homemade
shiva.
He had little idea of the actual rules but a general notion, memories rattling around in his head from Jaffa. He didn't eat or sleep or shower. He sat in his dim closet office for an entire day. He was supposed to rip his clothes but most of them were in poor enough shape already. Max.

Goddamn Max. Goddamn belief.

There was a general pain in his head, dulling sometimes and then piercing his consciousness. His only relief had been that he had been spared the body but once that thought entered his head an image came with it: Max's face, pale and bloated, the eyes terrified at the last, unseeing. He could file it away now with the image of the girl at the cafe. He could build his own menagerie of ghosts. You did this, he heard his father say. This was why Devorah had left him. He was careless. He was not in control of things as he pretended to be. History slipped away from him, spun out from his grasp.

His whole body hurt. He was sickened by his own odor, too, the staleness of his breath and his clothes. He went back to his apartment, showered, shaved. The next day he went into the office but couldn't bring himself to do more than sharpen pencils at his desk or read the Yiddish papers. The news out of Europe was worse than ever. But
instead of buoying his resolve, it weighed him. Death, he realized, had its own inertia. There would come a point when there were too many bodies to break free of. Failure would beget failure until there was no use in trying.

Goddamn Max.

Goddamn Max in the goddamned ocean.

This was his state of mind when the letter arrived at the Committee headquarters, a letter from Stephen Field. It was addressed to Spiro personally. He turned the envelope over in his hands then tore it open. It was a check made out to the Committee for one hundred dollars. And behind the check was a small, handwritten note with two words printed in an old man's shaky script.
You win,
it said.

Spiro folded up the check, put it in his pocket, and tried not to think about it for the rest of the day. He had the two non-thoughts warring for his inattention: Max's death and Field's check. A drowned idealist and the minder of a ruined synagogue. Neither made sense. The oceans were calm, Sacks had said. Quiet as a mill pond. Maybe Max was too Northern, too much of cities to understand the ocean, its subsurface system of currents and forces. That was the best Spiro could explain that. Field's check. It was an object of pure mystery. He looked at it again. The handwriting showing the usual quakes of the aged. Drawn from the Chemical Bank. One hundred and xx/100. What do I win? he thought. Bodies. Ideas I cannot carry in my own head. That's what's my victory. Gestures that make no sense and any sense they might make, any possible reasoning that existed behind either action frightened or numbed or simply punished Spiro.

At six o'clock, he rode the subway north, faced his own reflection in the glass. The glare of the tunnel walls wavered then flashed to black as the lights went off and on. The subway rattled and groaned, giving up speed. He emerged on the east side of the park, an unfamiliar and disorienting sensation. The city's geography could impose rigidity to your thoughts, your perception. It was plotted
with a definitiveness that was usually left to the Fates or other such unreal, hyper-powered beings. To bend against their strictures was to feel your own nature torquing, contorting. He stood contemplating the limestone facade of Field's building and was deeply uneasy. The doorman didn't ask him his business there. He stood pillar-stiff, waiting for Spiro to announce it.

“I've come to see Rabbi Field,” he said.

“Is he expecting you?” the doorman asked.

“Not in the usual sense.”

“I'll have to call up. Who should I say is here?”

“Say it's the leader of the Jewish army.”

The man narrowed his eyes.

“Shmuel Spiro.”

He called up, spoke softly into the phone. As he waited, Spiro became conscious of his own wet shoes, his wet pant legs, the plushness of the rug beneath his feet as he stood there dripping mud.

“You can go up,” the doorman said, gesturing with his head toward the elevators.

The elevator man didn't bother to level the lift with the hallway, and Spiro tripped a little as he stepped out into the corridor. He made his way to 12F, but what he entered when he arrived there was not really an apartment but three apartments merged into a single home. The door was ajar. He knocked softly, then waited.

“You can come in, Mr. Spiro,” a voice called from deeper inside.

He stepped into the foyer, stood there for a moment while he tried to get his bearings. A few feet from where he stood, the hallway went dim. Unlit sconces lined the walls, casting bird-sized shadows across the hardwood floor.

“This way, Mr. Spiro,” the rabbi called. Spiro followed his voice. It was an old voice but not an unpleasant one.

He passed through a long hall, passed a library with the door flung open, books from floor to ceiling, rolling ladders and armchairs and a
cart with crystal stemware, highballs and decanters filled with brandy. He passed a room with a billiard table, three closed doors he took to be other bedrooms, guest rooms. At the end of the hall he came to another room, an office. Only in America could he see what he was seeing, a Jew living like aristocracy, a Manhattan apartment dressed up like a country estate. Field was at the far end of the hallway, sitting beside a desk. Behind him, windows. Floor to ceiling windows framing a dark expanse Spiro knew was Central Park.

“Mr. Spiro,” he said, looking up. “I've been wondering when you might come. My donation arrived?”

The rabbi wasn't what he'd expected. He'd seen him deliver a sermon two years earlier when Spiro felt lost and homesick and had been invited to the Free Synagogue for Yom Kippur. At the time, Field still appeared vital. Now, that vitality had left him, up into ashes with the rest of his temple. Spiro watched the way he carried himself as he stood, crossed to the liquor cart in the corner. He was a sliver of a man but he moved as though his limbs were led. His hands trembled as he poured the whiskey. He turned around and handed Spiro a glass then sipped from his own.

“Will you have a seat?” he asked, gesturing to a wide, upholstered chair beside the fireplace. Spiro walked to it, sank into the dark leather cushions. A few moments passed when neither man spoke. Spiro began to wonder if this was a mistake, if he simply should have cashed the check and been done with it. He was about to say as much when Field placed his glass on a marble coaster and said it for him.

He leaned forward, wishing suddenly that he had never sat down. “I came to thank you,” he said simply.

A smile curled across the old man's lips. “To thank me,” he repeated.

“For your donation. Also . . . my condolences. For your synagogue. It's past time I extended them.”

The smile spread.

“I don't see what's so amusing.”

“Your condolences. Don't insult us, Mr. Spiro. The time for that was months ago. You've come to gloat over the ashes. Nothing less and nothing more. You've come to show off your new position to the man you've dethroned.”

“Is that what it's about to you? Who's in charge?”

“That's what our world is about. Why should you and I be any different?”

Spiro rose, placed his glass down on the windowsill. Then he took the check out of his pocket, held it between his fingers and tore it in half.

“It's not necessary for you to do that.”

“Rabbi Field, there are fronts open now in Russia and in France and the Low Countries, across Indochina and North Africa. Do you know what the open front in this country is?”

Field leaned back in his chair. “Attention,” he said.

Spiro threw down the torn check emphatically. “Eyes and minds and fingers that write checks and letters to officials. That's the battle in this country. We are engaging in rear guard actions against each other when we could be putting together a united front to help the people
who are being butchered.
A terrible thing happened to you, Rabbi, and as a result people are coming to us. That doesn't have to be your loss. You don't need to lose any more than you already have. Work with us. Help us. We will help you.”

“What you've just described is the ideal blueprint for a fifth column. Those looking to hate us will have even more excuses to do so.”

“What does it matter what people like that think? They'll hate us no matter what we do. Don't you know that?”

“I'll tell you what I know, Mr. Spiro. I know that an innocent old woman is dead, and that someone was willing to kill her to burn down my temple. I know that this person is still free, and that whoever he is, there are dozens more like him. I know that if it had been a church that
had burned down, it would not be three FBI agents who came to see me about it but three dozen. I know that we're not as safe in this country as you think we are.”

Spiro tried to interrupt, but Field shushed him, raised his voice even louder. “Listen to me,” he said. “You and your comrades are so good at talking and talking and talking. Now I'm telling you to listen.”

“I shouldn't have come,” Spiro said. He was about to walk back into the hallway when Field stopped him.

“You and your people, you don't like us. You don't respect us.”

“It's not a matter of respect. We don't understand. I don't understand how you can accuse me of behaving dangerously when across the ocean . . .”

“Yes, I know what's happening across the ocean. You don't have to tell me. But I know something about this country, too, which might not be so obvious. I know that the Jews of this country have accomplished something here that no other Jews in the history of the world have been able to accomplish. To live here in this republic, not only as Jews, but as citizens, citizens like everyone else. Tell me where else, at what other time in our long history, has that been accomplished? Not in Poland and not in France. Not across the steppes of Ukraine or the Russian Pale. Not in Spain nor Portugal. Not in South America or Shanghai. The Jews of Germany were very proud of their Germanness, but where did it get them? The reality is that nowhere, on no place on earth besides the place we now stand, have Jews ever achieved what we have achieved, to live as Jews, yes, but as Americans first. And you, you and your Committee, screaming across newspapers about your Jewish army and your Jewish state and your struggle to save and unite the Jews of the world, you want to take it all away.”

“We don't. We don't want to take anything away. You give us far more credit than we deserve. We want to save people. We want to give Jews the dignity to defend themselves. Our people are being slaughtered, and we want to help them.”

“You think I don't? You think I'm not haunted day and night by their letters, their desperate voices?”

“I think you are. I think you're a good man, a compassionate man, and that if, instead of opposing each other . . .” He moved closer, held out his hand. “Listen. We don't have the organization; you do. We don't have the history, the infrastructure, the support.”

“You don't have the money.”

“That too. That's exactly why we should merge your history and organization with our energy and momentum, then we could really make a difference . . . with rescue operations, with the army resolution before Congress, with everything.”

“But why? Why would you want our help? You look at us, and you think we have so much power. Rich American Jews. You watch us at our fundraisers and galas and board meetings and luncheons, and you think, how trivial, how indulgent.”

“Sometimes I think everything we do is indulgent, that just enjoying a nice meal or going for a walk or admiring a woman is indulgent. Sometimes I think we should be fighting all the time, that our lives should be nothing but fury.”

“So you run your ads to make others furious.”

“We run the ads because we think they might help. Because we think, how can we begin to stop what's happening if people don't even know what's happening.”

The old man let out a slow, heavy sigh. “Your metaphorical fronts, Mr. Spiro, for attention. They may be real but, I hope you know, they are meaningless. They are a little boy with a pellet gun standing before a Panzer.” It was late and Field appeared exhausted. “The only front that might mean anything for us and the people we are trying to save is a real one, here.”

A terrible sadness came over Spiro then; it seemed to come over the entire room. The sadness he felt arose not from Field's stubbornness, but from the sense Spiro had that beneath the resentment and spite,
there was a part of Field, a small part of him, that wanted to reach out. That was what the donation had been about—a jab, yes, but also a plea. He was trying to reach out and failing and trying despite the failure, despite the hopelessness. It reminded him of his own father, of the days when Spiro was still at university, and then in the militia, all the years he'd spent trying to convince him that building a Jewish nation would take more than faith and prayer, that it would take ideas buoyed by acts of strength. He would sit in his father's study and try to explain it to him and the old man would lean forward just as Field was doing now and, because he loved his son, he would try to understand, would try and fail to see what his son saw. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them, and it was terribly sad.

“I'll make you a deal,” Field said, and for a moment, Spiro thought that he'd gotten through. “You and your friends on the Committee, the ones sending guns and dynamite to Palestine, you and these brave Jewish hoodlums, you take a few weeks away from your activities and help me find the monster who burned down my temple. You do things the way your friend Jabotinsky did them and string the killer up to the mast of one of your smuggled ships, and then we can work together. Then we can be friends.”