The Houseguest (32 page)

After that, the Auer home became a graveyard. His mother never stopped mourning. His father retreated into himself, went days without speaking. His sister escaped as soon as she could through marriage, wedding a baker's son in a neighboring town who moved with her to Israel a few years later. And Abe, week by week, month by month, planned his own escape.

In addition to working as an apprentice in his father's shop, he took a second job sewing costumes for a Yiddish theater group. Entire weekends he passed sewing capes and robes and gowns and peasant frocks. Every ruble they gave him he stashed away, saving for a ticket.

In the meantime, he wrote to his uncle who'd been living in New York for nearly twenty years. He was so eager to meet his family in America, to see the world, but mostly, to work. If he should ever be so lucky as to find a place for himself across the sea, he'd work six days a week, dawn until dusk, anything to earn his keep.

After three or so of these letters, he finally received a reply.

Dearest Abraham,

Please know you are welcome here. We are a modest family, but there is always work to be done. We would be honored and humbled to have you.

Love,

Uncle Moshe

Two months later, he traveled by wagon to Lithuania, and there he boarded a Southampton-bound steamer. In Southampton, he boarded another ship, this one bound for New York.

The crossing took three and a half weeks, and during those weeks, in addition to thinking about the new life that awaited him, the new city, the new family, the almost infinite expanse of possibility and danger, he thought of Shayke. He lay alone at night, painfully alone and seasick but thankful for the third-class cabin he'd been able to afford, avoiding the infamous stench and throb of steerage. Alone on a sea voyage, he heard his thoughts with more clarity then ever before and he learned for the first time how to turn them off, how to turn away from his memory, toward the future. At last he could be away from his brother and his brother's absence. He could be away from his parents' constant gnawing fear and grief, away from the shadow of uncertainty that defined life for Jews under the czar. He could start over—he could pretend he was a different man.

HIS CONCEPTION OF
New York's geography was faded enough that finding the address Feinman gave him proved a lengthy task that involved an overlong subway ride, several sets of contradictory directions from equally ornery looking businessman, and finally the merciful intervention of an Irish cop atop a black horse. He pointed Abe
from Broadway down toward Riverside Avenue. The sun behind it was dipping into the New Jersey distance. Great craggy shadows fell from the Palisades. The Hudson was ablaze in the early arrival of the day. The building Abe found was narrow, far smaller than the ones that surrounded it. A humble brick construction between stuccoed behemoths. He approached quietly, climbed to the fourth floor. In the middle of the staircase his foot stumbled on something soft, likely a rodent. He kicked it away, climbed faster.

At the door, he knocked loudly. No one answered. He knocked again and this time called out her name. “Ana,” he said. He waited another moment then pounded harder. Through the crack beneath, a light came on. Footsteps. He took a step backward, realized that, strangely, all the way there he'd been calm, determined but calm. Now his heart pounded.

He heard footsteps. The door opened slowly. It was not her, but a man, slight of stature, hesitant. “What is it?” he said in an accent Abe didn't recognize. He let the door open a few more inches. He had fair hair, a blond mustache.

“I'm sorry, I . . . Maybe I have the wrong address.”

Abe began to walk away, but the man called out to him. “You're looking for Ana Beidler, aren't you? You're the gentleman from upstate?” There was resignation in his voice that made Abe very uncomfortable.

He turned back to the door, squinted into the dark. “Yes. Do you know where she is? I need to see her. Please.” He recognized in his own voice his father's pleading.

The man didn't answer right away. “Why don't you come in for a moment?”

The man made tea for himself then urged Abe to have a seat in the apartment's only chair. There was an old dinner dish on the desk, a typewriter and an overfull ashtray. The apartment smelled faintly of
aftershave and rotting fruit. The man introduced himself as Shmuel Spiro. He did not ask Abe his name. There was a newspaper on the floor with an ad for the Jewish army. Abe reached down and picked it up.

“How do you know Ana?” Abe said. “Does that mean she's here?”

Spiro did something terrible then. It seemed terrible to Abe. He smiled. Quickly. Faintly. More a fluttering than a full expression, and yet, everything Abe had hoped for vanished in it.

He knew by the smile, by the silence that followed, what the answer would be. All his hopes fled as the man smiled across the dim light.

“She's a colleague, in a manner of speaking,” said Spiro.

“Is she here?” Abe said, urgently. His voice was the only weapon he had at his disposal against Spiro. Physically, he towered over the man, but he could tell Spiro feared neither threats nor fists. All he could do was impress his need—and that too seemed to carry little weight.

Spiro took a sip of tea and gestured down the hallway that ran as an artery through the flat.

“Search for her. You're welcome to.”

“Can you tell me please where she is?” Abe's tone was now pleading. He did not want to sound desperate, but he did not know what other language to speak.

Spiro sat, drinking. “Do you want to know how I first met her?” Spiro asked. “The Committee was brand-new, so new it hardly existed. It was more a feeling in my gut than an actual organization. But the few supporters I had, the few people who wanted in, were all Americans. Some of them weren't even Jews! And the idea of this movement was that it would not be an American movement, but a Jewish one. The Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless Jews. There was only one problem. We had no stateless Jews to speak of. The stateless Jews who might support us were strewn across Italy, Greece, Poland, France. But one day I read about a temporary center set up right here in New York for a few hundred refugees, recent arrivals from all across Europe. I had the idea that I'd go there, hand out some pamphlets, talk to people
who would have more reason than any to be sympathetic to the cause. I had very high hopes for this venture, and as usually happens when such is the case, was deeply and immediately disappointed.

“The refugees I met there, the real refugees, had no interest in a Jewish army or any other kind. They were physically and emotionally exhausted, hungry, beaten down. Many were in mourning. They wanted to sleep and eat and heal. These were their concerns. That's where I found Ana Beidler.”

“So you took advantage of her loneliness,” Abe said. “You exploited it for your cause. You recruited her.”

Spiro stood, paced. “Me? Exploit
her
? If there was any exploiting, it was the other way around.”

Abe stood, crossed to the window. The heat emanating out from the radiator was unbearable. He tried to open the window but couldn't budge it. He leaned against the wall, tried to slow his breath. “You were lovers?” he asked.

“One evening, as we were closing down the office, I invited her to dinner, and after that to my apartment. We were lovers for a few weeks, but it became clear to me that she was more useful as a colleague, so I stopped inviting her to my apartment and she never seemed to mind. She kept coming to meetings, recruiting new blood. You see, she has a real talent for inflaming people.”

Abe didn't move or speak for a long time. Instead of tea, Spiro lifted a bottle of gin from the corner of his desk, poured an inch of it into a fingerprinted glass. He raised it to Abe. “Here, this will help.”

He took the glass and drank it down. When the burning faded he said, “Why us? Why Utica?”

“As a place to bide time it had many good qualities.”

“She's gone?” Abe said, a question at first, and then a statement. “Gone.”

“Keeping her here was no longer tenable. The movement found a location where she could be relocated permanently.”

“The movement,” Abe said. He thought of Irene folding old bed linens, stacking the even squares on top of the bedspread, how thin they'd be, the lint rough against her fingers. Everything real was thin and faded. There was no depth or luster left to life, no danger, no struggle, no joy.

The small man sipped from his tea. On the street below, another man was sweeping refuse into the gutter. Spiro was speaking. His voice felt far away. “A woman like Ana,” he was saying.

Abe had no patience to hear what came next. What did Shmuel Spiro know about him, his story, or hers?

He closed his ears to him, listened to the sound like static inside his head, this emptiness. When Spiro's voice broke through, he was saying, “She did tell me about you. She told me to tell you that she'd never forget your nighttime walks, that she'd remember them always.”

There was a wistfulness to his tone, the way
remember them always
seemed to drift upward like smoke. Abe realized this was how Ana spoke. It was her inflection. Had Spiro rubbed off on her or had she changed him? What did it matter: they were liars, all of them, an army of liars. He looked down at the newspaper on the ground. Another ad. It was one he hadn't seen before. K
EEP
T
HREE
M
ILLION
J
EWS
F
ROM
B
ECOMING
G
HOSTS.
Shayke appeared behind him briefly, a flickering, anguished presence. He read over his shoulder, then skulked back into the nothingness from which he'd come.

BY THE TIME
Abe returned to the guesthouse and retrieved the key to his room from the ancient doorman, it was late morning. He spent a few hours sleeping on top of the covers, his eyes dry and throat soar. The window faced a brick wall, so there was no sun to wake him, just the ticking of a small clock on a nightstand beside the bed.

The whole next day he wandered the streets of the Lower East Side without any strategy or plan, stepping inside old theaters, cafes,
tobacco shops, shoe stores, and luncheonettes. He sat in a tea house for two hours, moving a cube of sugar around on his plate. He was sitting there when an idea occurred to him, an idea so exquisitely painful that he had to laugh it away. The idea was this: She was nothing. No one. Nobody special. She was the same as everyone. Just a woman trying to figure out how to live, what to do, what to want. A person like him, like Max, like Irene.

Irene. Judith and Irene. The weight of their names pushed down on him, pressed against his chest, his breath. How could he ever go home to them after what he'd done? He was sitting on a leather chair in the lobby of his hotel when the door swung open and an old man called out to the clerk behind the counter, to Abe and the woman by the window and everyone who could hear. “Turn on the radio. Turn it on.”

No one moved at first. No one understood. They were all silent, leaning forward in their chairs. Then the clerk walked to the radio. Outside, too, there was a change in volume, crowding along the sidewalk.

“What's happened?” the clerk asked softly, turning the knob through the static.

Abe felt he knew before the man had spoken.

“They've done it,” he said.

“Who has done what?” the woman by the window asked. “The Germans are coming?”

“The Japanese. They've bombed us. Early this morning. It's happening. It's happening here.”

AFTER SHAYKE WAS
sent away to a prison camp in the East, before Abe left for America, he met with Sonia one last time in their usual place beneath the bridge. She seemed different then. She'd bought a new shirt dress, combed and parted her hair. No makeup now. No careless runs in her stockings. She was going to Palestine as Shayke would have wanted. She was going to start her life again. A new life.

“I won't be needing these,” she told him. She removed the strand of pearls from her purse, his mother's pearls. Abe took them from her, felt the smooth weight of them in his hands. He could not look at her. The pearls were cool against his fingers, pretty, useless things. He flung them into the river. It was so quiet before the plink. Peaceful. Then again after. He listened to her walk away without a good-bye.

“Please,” he said, once she had gone. “Come back.” But really, what did it matter? What else could she give him? All that was around him, the river and the land and the town and the sky, seemed awash in pain and shame. Shayke was gone. He was here and Shayke was gone and there was no reason for this state of being, no fairness, no reason. He covered his face with his hands. He wanted so badly to go after her, to say more. He wanted to go on and on and un-remember, to make it right. But it was already too late; he'd lost the thread.

30.

I
RENE WAS SITTING
at the kitchen table when Abe arrived home from the city. He walked up the steps as though it were any afternoon. The house was the same; it was he who was changed, his feet heavy, his legs slow. He left his suitcase below the coat rack, stood there waiting. Music played in Judith's room. A schoolgirl's ballad. A trail of slush on the foyer grout. The smell of cinnamon, warm apples. In the kitchen, the table was covered in white lilacs. Irene sat before them, staring off, a scissors in her hands. “It's like you died,” she said. “The flowers. They just keep coming.” She was snipping the stems. There was a vase in the middle of the table. A simple glass vase, half-filled. The tender green pieces fell into her lap, onto the floor. She didn't look up at him, not even as he approached, just kept snipping, dropping each blossom into the drink. There was a hum of static in the living room. The radio was on. A soft, electric drone. The late afternoon sun poured in through the window, as though it were still summer, shattering over her arms, her face. “I've already boxed up all your clothes, if that's what you've come for. If you don't want them, you could do me the kindness of giving them away.”

It was true, he thought. He could give them all away, everything that was his, everything that had made him feel safe, loved. But what good would it do? He would still be where he was, inside himself. Wherever he looked now, the world would seem dull, devoid of light
and life. He approached Irene slowly. He walked to where she was sitting, kneeled down, taking her hands. “I don't know anything,” he told her. He squeezed her hands because he wanted to remember how it had been before. She didn't squeeze back but she didn't withdraw. “Can you help me remember?” he asked.

“Remember what, Abe?”

“How to forget.”

She sighed. She had no time for such requests. “You didn't find what you were looking for in New York?” A small smile played across her mouth. How absurd he would seem to her, to any reasonable person. He wanted to hide from her, from everyone. At the same time, he wanted to say something loving, something beautiful and impossibly kind. He longed to tell her she was everything, that he would try to be better, to be new. He would have liked to beg her forgiveness, to claim that he'd been lured from his senses by . . . he didn't even know what it was. He wanted to make some sort of speech, the kind Jacob Feinman might make, but he couldn't manage it. Whatever poetry was in him, Ana had taken it, snuffed it out. “Can you ever forgive me?” he asked. It was all he could summon.

She laughed out loud. She laughed as she had laughed standing before the wedding altar, after their most ecstatic couplings, and also the small, close minutes after Judith was born. That was Irene. She laughed when others were solemn or quiet. He remembered now; it was something he'd loved about her.

“Ever,” she repeated. “How can I think about ever when I don't know what I'm making for dinner, or what tomorrow will bring, or tonight, or one minute from now? The future is a mystery. Don't you know that, Abe?”

He lowered himself to the floor. Her skirt was cotton, cool against his face. He gathered it up in his hands. He kissed her through the fabric, kissed her knees, one and then the other, again and again.

Not long after, she told him that no, she wouldn't forgive him, but she would try to move forward, if he thought he could do the same. First, though, she needed to shower. She needed to put away the laundry and peel the potatoes for dinner. She needed to address invitations for the wedding and drop off Abe's coat at the tailor because he'd been catching it in the car door again. Reconciliation would come later if it came at all. Now was Judith's time. The boy she loved would surely join up, the Army, maybe the Navy. So now perhaps their sweet girl, always so lucky and protected, wouldn't be so lucky anymore.

Irene went upstairs. He listened to the hiss of the pipes as she showered. Later, he turned on the radio and learned of other horrors: bullets raining down on sinking ships in the Pacific, an island of fire, charred corpses floating like driftwood across a blackened sea, a crippled fleet that would not go unavenged. He stood there and listened to the news without letting it in. Then he did something he'd never done before. He turned it off.