The Houseguest (33 page)

31.

A
FTER THE ATTACK
on Pearl Harbor, the city was browned out, its usual glittering muted to the hue of old embers. Ana overheard the rumors, businessmen huddled around newsstands, women in line at the grocer. Here were some of the things she overheard: the Germans had developed long-range aircraft or high-speed submarines. They had devised a plan to do to New York what they were doing to London. Pearl Harbor was first. No one knew what might come next, if the Eastern seaboard was such a great leap. It would be hard to imagine this if anything were still hard to imagine. Because everything now seemed possible, people moved more quickly, crouched in and out of cabs with greater haste, fleeing not only the brittle January days but also the uncertainty of open spaces. Doors were held but not for long. Commuters huddled inside their coats as they scurried to work, to home. The whole city was wound tight as a watch and waiting, a general holding of breaths, the usual brightness and exuberance of people's lives dimmed down as noticeably as the browned-out skyline. Ana recognized it more than most, coming from where she'd been. She could see the aura of fear that hung over them. She could hear the tightening in their voices when they talked, and in Abe's, too, that night he came to find her when she'd sat crouched in the bathroom of Shmuel's apartment, listening, wanting to go to him but unable. It was better to hold back, to be ruthless and unsentimental in such matters.

Sitting on the floor, trying both to make out his words and not to hear them, not to let them penetrate, a thought occurred to her. Before she saw it coming, it had her by the throat. The idea was that all these men who fell in love with her throughout her life, knocking into each other like dominoes and landing at her feet, all these men claiming desire and devotion, didn't really love her at all. Not even a bit. Not the way Abe loved his wife, or Shmuel his army, or Jacob his art. What they thought they loved was nothing more than the way she saw them, or pretended to see them, for a few years, a few months, a few breathless moments. The thing they loved was not her, not Ana, but this gift she gave them that was also a curse—the ability to make believe in the luster and substance of their own small lives. She gave them this gift and then she took it away. She could hear it leaving Abe as he listened to Shmuel. She could hear it in the hollowness of his voice.

“He's gone now,” Shmuel called to her at last. “You can come out.”

After he left, there was another day of indecision. Ships in general weren't easy to come by. But then the news came in from Hawaii, and all at once it occurred to her that now she didn't have to do anything. She could go anywhere she wanted or nowhere at all. She was safe now, no longer in need of hiding or protection. No one was worrying about a synagogue fire now that they had a war to fight. No one was looking for her—or at her. The one thing she couldn't bear.

AT NIGHT, SHE
went for long walks up and down Second Avenue, just as she'd done as a woman of twenty with Jacob by her side. One evening she found herself strolling later than usual. It was cold, even for December. A light snow was falling. It dampened her hair, her lips, but not the street or the steps of the old theaters. A Monday night, nothing was playing, and yet the avenue still felt alive to Ana. It sang to her as she walked north. She felt carried by it through the cold. At the corner of 29th Street, she came upon the Orpheum, or what had been the Orpheum. It was something else now, a movie house, but
from the outside, all the old trappings remained. She pushed through the heavy doors. Inside, the noise of the traffic softened. A movie was playing, its noise also muffled. The carpet beneath her feet was rich red, an oriental maze of golden swirls and waves, walls chiseled plaster, the corners adorned with electric lanterns dimmed to look like old gas lamps, bulbs encased in pleated, translucent fabric. Across the lobby rose a winding staircase with a brass railing. The stairs widened at the bottom like the skirt of an evening gown, and, in the crevices between the bottom step and the floor, discarded tickets and kernels of stale popcorn, some dampened, some pristine, littered the carpet. Still, if she closed her eyes, it was the same place she'd known as a child.

SHE TUCKED HER
hat under her arm and unwound her scarf. How wonderfully warm it was inside, how welcoming. She moved further into the interior, down a long hallway, toward the theater itself. The voices from the screen grew louder. She tried not to hear. Just before the entrance, there was a narrow corridor, a dark space where it was possible to stand without seeing the show itself or being seen by those watching. This was where she stood. She wanted to stand inside the theater, of whatever was left of it, one last time. She wanted to curl up inside the quiet, lovely darkness, close her eyes, and see in her mind the stage as it had been. The stage. A floating raft, a still cloud pierced by a spotlight in the shape of a moon. This was how she had imagined it as a girl, sitting in the front row. This was what she had thought, watching her mother sing and faint and whisper to her lovers inside the glow. How beautiful she was, the great Celia Epstein. How lovely to behold. And yet her light carried neither warmth nor love. It was a dead light—an illusion. Still, Ana had loved to watch her, had longed for her to become the person she was when she stood inside that light. Sitting out in the audience as a girl, she'd thought how wonderful it would be if only the show would never end, if only the spotlight would
never dim and the curtain never rise. As a girl, she had believed if she wanted it badly enough, she could make it happen. Her longing had felt strong enough to bend and shape the world around her. She supposed it still did.

A FEW DAYS
after Christmas, she packed a single suitcase. The one advantage to the itinerant life was that there were never many loose ends to tie up. She went alone to the station, purchased a one-way ticket on the Twentieth Century Limited to California. It didn't leave until six, but at five o'clock exactly a sturdy-shouldered porter rolled out a red carpet from the front of the terminal to the platform of track 34, a gesture no one would have appreciated as much as Ana's mother. She pushed through the crowds of boys on their way to training, the tearful good-byes with girlfriends and mothers. The Limited was full but not crowded. Another porter offered her a hand as she stepped up, then a small bouquet of violets to sweeten the journey. A beautiful train, even more beautiful than the Orient Express she and Szymon had always dreamed of riding to Shanghai.

She slipped inside the tube of fluted steel, fumbled with her purse and bag, breathed easy only when she'd settled into her seat and could gaze out at the other trains, gleaming, blue-gray creatures waiting side-by-side. They reminded her of chorus girls before a show.

All the details tended to. Nothing to do but wait. It was a relief to her when the wheels released because then she was beyond second guessing. The engine sighed. There was that unsettling instant when it wasn't clear whether her train or the one on the opposite track was moving. But a moment later, she watched the station glide away. The train rushed past the high-rises and tenements, then came the gravel lots and wooded plots of land surrounding the city. Then wider open spaces. They slipped past her window. They slipped into her past. The past vanished so quickly behind her. Not for the first time in her life, she experienced time not simply as a thing to be hurried through and
endured but as a solid substance, something less like a line and more like a sea. She was at sea in it, skimming the surface. Her past, her family's past, and her people's was deep and unreachable beneath her, invisible yet buoying her up. The future was like the sky, also inaccessible but easier to see.

There was a man across the aisle, a handsome man in a tan fedora reading the
Times.
A little older. No wedding ring. Nice smile. He wore silver-rimmed glasses. His hair flopped a little over one lens. He peered at her over the corner of his paper, faint creases around his eyes. An hour into the journey, she put a cigarette in her mouth and pretended to look for a lighter. He was quick on the draw. He was from California, going back home. She knew this even before he told her. It was in his voice, his easy way of talking, his eager, open face. She moved to the seat next to him. It occurred to her he might be useful down the line, so she didn't turn away, even when the boredom hit. She gave him a mysterious, sideways smile and found herself unconsciously putting on an accent, not European now but something else. She's a Southern belle—a Jewish Southern belle. She's from Atlanta. Not far outside Atlanta, she hears herself saying. They exchanged the usual pleasantries. No, he's never been down that way himself. He's a city boy at heart. Eventually he turns back to his paper, she to her magazine. Still, she notices him noticing her, peeking up now and then as the train carries them west, away from Second Avenue, away from her mother's world, the fire, the war.

She speeds along, alone again, and the future seems, as it did before, both empty and full of promise. In her mind, she can shape it, mold it around her longings and dreams. Only the present moment, thin as the pages of the magazine she holds in her hands, is real. She turns the pages without reading them. The train carries her slowly at first, and then more quickly, gaining speed as it moves west. In the beginning, she watches the icy fields and rotting barns go by, as well as the darkly shifting shadows across New Jersey. Later, as the train chugs through
the beautiful and desolate landscape of Appalachia, she closes her eyes, lets herself feel carried. She finds it is no longer the scenery that interests her, but the way it disappears.

epilogue

THE STATION

T
HE PLACE WHERE
Max found himself was both familiar and strange, a halfway place. It was not what he had expected, and yet he felt at home there.

In this other place, the trains pulled in every hour, on the hour, from sunrise to sunset, and Max's job was to greet them. He waited on a sunny bench by the station, only it wasn't really a station. There was no building, no ticket counter, no platform and no stairs. There wasn't even a track. There was just a wide field of prairie grass and sunflower stalks as high as his chest and eucalyptus trees that turned blue-green in morning and purple in the evening sky, and the bench on which he sat.

The trains seemed out of place among the natural beauty, black, groaning hunks of steel, doors nailed shut, seeping gas and soot. They opened up, and the human cargo tumbled out, a tangle of gray flesh and twisted limbs, human figures so deformed by the journey they looked less human than the gnarled trunks of the trees in the distance. Max and the other receivers pulled them from the wreckage one by one and began the process of repatriation. Their clothes, which were no more than sodden rags, were stripped or cut from their bodies. They were led, and those who couldn't walk were carried, to the shallows of a wide sea where they were lain out on palm leaves and scrubbed
with pumice until their skin shone pink again and their hair and nails glistened, until they were clean and pure as babies, even the old ones who were not old here but ageless. After that, the receivers took them to a dining hall where they sat at long tables and ate bread hot from the hearth, and wine bursting with the flavor of not just grapes but every plant and every herb, of the earth itself, and savory soups and custards, and meat and fish and milk and honey, buckets of it, as much as they could get. After that they were taken to the village and taught how to sing again and work and laugh. In the village, they first seemed familiar to him, their faces so similar to the ones he had known in his life, the faces of the people he had wanted to help and save. But over time, others came, and they were no longer familiar to him. They were every size and every color. They spoke every language, those that could speak. Some slept for months in a sunny bed before they could make a sound. It was an awful journey. Some couldn't make it to the village themselves, and Max or the other greeters would carry them.

There was one man, both old and ageless, who was carried across a vast poppy field, carried in Max's arms like he was his own child, like he weighed nothing, like he was made only of light.

It was good work. And Max was happy to do it, but sometimes, still, beneath this happiness, there was a tinge of something bittersweet, some unmet, unmeetable longing.

Maybe he would see Hirschler here, he thought. Maybe he would see his sister or his mother. It didn't seem likely, but it didn't seem impossible, either, in this place that was neither real nor imagined. He looked for their faces among the others, among the men coming in on the trains and those in the village. He was vigilant in his looking, always on guard. Sometimes, he thought he recognized a likeness in someone's face, but then the expression changed, and the likeness vanished, and he felt foolish and dejected.

Another receiver caught him staring off toward the distance one morning, staring off at the mountains that were blue-gray under
the rising sun. He must have noticed the yearning in his expression. “You're still looking for someone?” he asked, smiling.

Max didn't say yes, and he didn't say no.

“You won't find them here,” he said.

“I know.”

“We can never meet again those we loved. It's the one condition.”

“I know that, too.”

In the distance, a black mark appeared on the horizon, another train. There were so many of them.

“It seems like they'll never stop,” Max said. And they never did.