The Houseguest (7 page)

“What's wrong?” she asked. “You're not yourself tonight. You're acting even stranger than our houseguest.”

“Am I?”

“You didn't read the Yiddish paper again, did you? More about that awful fire?”

“No. Even worse. I spoke to the news vendor at the station. He stopped getting letters from his family.”

“That doesn't mean anything, necessarily.”

“Sure it does. It means what it means, what we all know.”

Irene turned to face him. Her cheeks were still splotchy from the washing away of her makeup. Her hair fanned out over the pillow. Even the scent of her cold cream was calming, comforting. “No,” she said flatly. “Maybe you could volunteer with me sometime at the soup kitchen on Lafayette, or work a little harder so we had more money for the orphans coming out of Germany. But lying here thinking about it, keeping yourself awake—how does that alter anything? Who benefits?”

He smiled. After all these years he still found her sincerity charming. “You're right,” he said. “As always. Forget I said anything. Let's go to sleep.”

She reached to the nightstand and turned off the lamp. A few minutes later she was unconscious. Lucky woman. He needed sleep so badly, but he was too tired to sleep.

He thought of the woman, Ana, and the thought of her surprised him. Who was she? What did she want and what had she lost? This was all he wanted to know of anyone. Had Max known what he was getting them into? How long would she stay? Where would she go when she left? Irene, he could tell, was disappointed with their refugee. He didn't need her to say so to know it was true. She'd probably been hoping for an old woman poor in English and opinions, a yen for gossip, someone from an irrelevant Galician backwater to whom she could be charitable but also superior. She was a native-born American, after all. A protégé, a project—that, he supposed, was what she had been hoping for when she agreed to go along, and now he could tell she felt tricked, and probably assumed Abe was responsible.

He placed his hand on her back, and when she didn't respond, he pushed off the covers, got out of bed, trod softly down the hallway, down the stairs. In the living room, he lifted a book off the shelf beside the fireplace, sat down in his favorite armchair, and began to read. The words felt heavy in his head. When he wanted to sleep he read in English; Charles Dickens was best. He saw industrial London, smokestacks and chimney sweeps, emaciated orphans and gold chains draped across the bellies of sweatshop owners. Everywhere one looked, east, west, future, past, human suffering stretched on without end. For what purpose? For what cause? His eyelids grew heavier. His breath moved slowly. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and now he saw there was actually a great deal of light—moonlight and streetlight. Utica. Quiet Utica. A sleeping city. Peace. He'd been right to come here. Here, they were safe. The curtains were white, half-translucent. The curtains in his childhood home had been thick, velvet ripples of fabric, too heavy to be moved by the breeze, designed to keep out cold as well as light. These were thin as tissue paper. They reminded Abe of a hotel near the Black Sea where he'd once spent the night. Sometimes he still heard the streets of Grodno in his mind. He still heard the sounds of the forest from their summer trips. Abe pulled himself out of the memory. It was
a long-perfected trick, a balancing act. He focused on the softness of the armchair's upholstery, the shadows of the ceiling fan. He listened to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the dining room, stared at the red darkness behind his closed lids, a red like the coals inside a kiln.

He was about to doze off. Then, a noise. It was coming from upstairs. Laughter. Hysterical laughter. He sat up straight, waited for it to stop, which it did for a moment. Then it resumed. He rose, climbed the stairs. It was coming from the guest room. The laughter grew louder as he approached. He knocked softly. The laughter stopped but there was no reply. He knocked again, waited, then pushed the door open a few inches. There, on the floor beside the bed, sat Ana Beidler. She had not been laughing but sobbing, weeping. She lay there hunched over, gasping for breath, her face wet and red and swollen with tears. Her whole body heaved as she wept. She was hardly dressed, just a black slip. Her hair hung in her face and was matted with tears. He came in the room slowly and waited for her to look up at him, which she did after what seemed a long time.

“Miss Beidler,” he said. “Can I get you something? Some water, maybe?”

When she looked at him directly, he could hardly bear the openness and urgency of her gaze. Her face seemed changed once more. Her lips were twisted, pained, her eyes panicked.

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

He hurried back to the kitchen, took a glass from the cabinet and filled it to the brim. His hands were shaking as he carried it, tried to prevent it from sloshing over the edges on his way back up. When he pushed through the door again, she was lying on the bed, her head resting on the pillow, her face obscured. She sat up stiffly as he crossed the room and set the glass on the nightstand.

“Here,” he said. “Please, how can I help you?”

“Help me?” she said, no longer weeping but smiling. The words were hardly more than a whisper. “Forgive,” she said. “Can you forgive me?”

He sat on the edge of her bed. “But there's nothing to forgive.” The words seemed to soothe her. And so he repeated this phrase the way he used to repeat to his daughter the chorus to a lullaby when he didn't know the other words. “Nothing to forgive. Nothing to forgive.”

Her skin was darker on the sides of her forehead where her tears had washed away the paint. She looked up at him, calmer, blinking slowly. A long time passed before she spoke, and when she finally did, he was expecting her to thank him, or to say she felt better, or to offer some explanation or excuse. Though they'd only just met, he somehow expected she'd confide everything in him, her deepest secrets and regrets. She seemed to him, right from the beginning, a woman incapable of keeping secrets, a woman who needed to be heard and seen the way others needed the nourishment of food or the oxygen in air. No, he wouldn't have been surprised if she'd told him everything that first night. But when she spoke again, there was a hardness to the words he hadn't expected.

“Leave me,” she said.

II.

THE LAKE

5.

I
T WAS THE
finest morning they'd had that year, the streets and the houses and the cars and the trees washed in sunlight, the town's inhabitants dazed with it, every person Max passed on the street a little drunk on this new softness in the air, the sky's wide-open brightness, the ground that gave off the scent, finally, not of rain and sludge and grass seed but of fresh dogwood blossoms and peeling birch. It was a hard morning to be anything but hopeful, he thought, walking up the Auers' driveway. And so he tried to feel hopeful. He hoped that in the two days that had passed since Ana Beidler's arrival, the family he liked most in Utica and the woman he'd brought into that family's home were tolerating each other's company well enough. He tried to be hopeful that he hadn't somehow made a mistake. The Auer family, as fond as he was of them, always seemed to have a coating, a protective layer around it, a distinct barrier between themselves and the rest of the world. This began in the largeness of Abe's person and continued into Irene, who was lovely but also, if one knew her, quietly shrewd. Even their home itself felt like a kind of keep. Max hoped, with increasing worry, that he hadn't picked the wrong place for the refugee and that they wouldn't reject her. But hope, for Max, had always been hard. It took an active and conscious expenditure of mental resources, a suspension of those feelings that came most naturally to him.

It wasn't a particularly grand house and it wasn't a particularly new or expensive house, but it was a definitively, almost insistently, American house, an example, Max thought nearly every time he passed by it or came to dinner, of how much a man could make for himself in this country, if only he worked hard and had a bit of luck and also, maybe most importantly, threw his lot in with a good woman. He studied the Auers' house now as he lurched up the drive, not stalling exactly, with this visit he sensed he should have made the day before and would have had he not been called away by a plumbing crisis at the synagogue.

It was a typical, two-story frame house, the kind of colonial one saw all across the Corn Hill section of Utica, a small white house with a green roof, green shutters, a green door, a wide front porch with a swing and a couple of white rocking chairs and a view onto the street, the goings-on of the neighborhood. When Max imagined, as he occasionally did, what it might be like to have a family of his own, he saw them in such a house, on such a porch, in such a swing. Leading up to it was a walkway of gray paved stones lined by hedges. The hedges were expertly trimmed, never overgrown, curving gently into the front yard in which Irene and Abe had long ago planted a peach tree that now towered almost to the second-story windows and dropped its soft fruit onto the porch every July. The fruit never rotted there or went to waste. Irene swept it up into her apron, ushered it into her kitchen with its white countertops scoured daily, covered in matching canister sets, its drawers full of egg whiskers and potato mashers, a cozy breakfast nook in the corner and coffee percolating beside the stove. It was a house with everything a man could want or ask for, a house with not just the basics a person needed to survive—heat, plumbing, a roof to block out the elements—but all the small comforts that made it a place that drew a person in, invited him back. Max looked up at the Auers' home, at the sun hammering at the windows, the peach tree swaying
lightly in the breeze, the white nubs of a dogwood overhanging the porch like little bells. And on the porch, the person who brought it all into being, a beautiful brunette planting flowers in a window box. Abe Auer had come to this country with nothing; now he had all this. Yet still he worried. Max stood a moment, dizzy in the drinkable summer air, trying to make the disjointed ends meet, and then he remembered why he'd come, that it wasn't his job to solve all the human mysteries of the world. He stepped forward, waved hello to Irene Auer.

“How goes it there, Irene? Lovely flowers.”

“Yes, aren't they? Like little gems. At least that's how they seem after our winter. By the time June comes around I've forgotten anything can grow. I found these at the market hidden under a bushel of onions. All the others got swept up the moment they were put out. What do you think? I'm trying to draw the eye away from the state of our shutters. This wood here seems to be allergic to paint. It doesn't even look like wood anymore. You think the red ones in front or the yellow?”

He'd known her for as long as he'd known her husband, and every time he saw her he was gripped by the same question that had formed in his mind the first time they met: Why? Why had a woman like this joined with a man like Abe? Why had Abe pursued her and why had she succumbed to his pursuit? She was as smartly dressed as he was slovenly, as meticulous in her words and home and overall demeanor as he was careless. It surely must have been some sort of mutual self-punishment that had brought the two together, which Max supposed wasn't so hard to fathom. Yet each time he saw her, now, for instance, wearing a neat blue dress, her hair tied back with a wisp of a scarf, her lips pulled tight while she arranged the potted flowers in the window boxes with the care of a curator in a gallery, it struck him anew.

The sun formed drops across the petals and over her arms. “I'm partial to yellow, myself,” he said, taking off his hat to wipe the sweat
from his brow. She nodded as though he'd said something terribly astute. “Well, don't just stand there. Come up.”

He climbed the steps and briefly took her hands in his. Her hands were soft, her smile knowing. Ten years ago she was probably still a great beauty. Even now. But the grunt work and worry of domesticity were wearing her down, not to mention her hours volunteering for the National Council of Jewish Women, the local chapter of Hadassah. She was keeping herself afloat, barely. Soon she'd wither. Still, a woman like Irene Auer would wither gracefully. Abe was the one who took every change hard.

“A nice surprise, Max. It's not Tuesday, is it? I thought Bezique was Tuesday. It keeps changing.”

“It is Tuesday. I was hoping to have a word with Miss Beidler.”

“Ah, our elusive guest.”

“Is she so elusive?”

Irene came farther onto the porch, glanced up at what he took to be the guest room's window. “Miss Beidler,” she said softly, “is sleeping. Miss Beidler is often sleeping.”

“At noon?”

“Yes, I know. A bit peculiar. It seems she sleeps all day. Never at night. I put a tray of food beside her door, and she must open it at some point because an hour later it's empty. But other than that, I haven't seen her. Yesterday she woke around that time, came out of her room, went into town for a few hours to visit the library. Then she joined us for dinner and regaled us with more of her stories of the stage, which I must admit are enchanting. She laughed at comments no one else found funny, pecked at her food, guzzled her wine, and then after dinner she left abruptly and stayed out the remainder of the night.”

“A night owl,” Max said.

“Is that what they call it?”

“It's quite likely she's thrown off by her ordeal. Insomnia's not so uncommon, really. I've had a bit myself.”

She was smiling, not at him but at the flowers in their pots, lifting them out of the soil, dark and damp as coffee grounds, untangling the roots.

“And what do you do, Max, when you have your insomnia?”

“Oh, I don't know. Read, mostly. I read a lot at night. Sometimes I listen to the radio. Sometimes I get up and make myself a sandwich.”

“Do you ever leave your house and walk around town all night in your pajamas?”

He looked up at the guest room window, opaque in the afternoon light. “I suppose I don't.”

“I'm sure she has her reasons.” Irene began to say something else, then stopped.

“We all do,” Max offered.

Irene tilted her head to the side slightly. She pressed her lips together in what might have been a smile but could have also been something else, something far more disconcerting.

“How long do you think Miss Beidler will be staying here? I'd been meaning to ask you. Not that I mind having her, of course. But it occurred to me that we never really discussed what happens next, where she'll go, how long she'll be with us. Will she stay in Utica? Move to a city? It seems there must be more work for an actress in the city, more opportunities. And other immigrants. Not to mention the arts. We haven't got much to offer her in that regard. Abe and I went to see that traveling production of
Oklahoma.
The lead actress couldn't carry a tune. I kept wanting to get up and offer her a glass of water. It was like listening to an animal die.”

“You and Abe go to the theater a lot?” Max asked.

“Every seven years whether we want to or not. You know Abe. He prefers to take his entertainment alone in his armchair. Crowds make him nervous. And people, generally. But he does enjoy your Tuesday Bezique. How about you, Max? Do you get out much these days?”

“I went to Saratoga the other week.”

“Oh, that doesn't count. How are you going to meet a nice girl at the horse races?”

Max then remembered an exchange from the night before with the synagogue's secretary. The girl was thirty, a thin brunette who could type at lightning speed and balance budget ledgers in her head. She'd been breezy and pleasant when they'd first met and he'd pegged her as an amiable spinster, the sort with no real desire for a conventional domestic life. But a few weeks into her employment it became clear to him that she was, in fact, the other sort of spinster, the heartbreaking kind. She came into his office, closed the door behind her, then turned, offering up a tense smile. “Do you like the clarinet, Rabbi Hoffman?”

“The clarinet?”

“Artie Shaw is playing at the Colonial Theatre next Thursday. My brother got me some tickets, and I was thinking maybe . . .”

There must have been something painful-looking in his expression.

“But you probably have better things to do . . . ”

He gestured to the office. “I'm still behind. I feel a little underwater, that's all.”

She nodded slowly. “I just thought I'd ask.”

Irene was still looking at Max, waiting for him to answer. “So how long did you say she'll be staying?” she asked. “Honestly, I wouldn't care if it weren't for Judith's wedding. Girls these days make such a to-do. When Abe and I got married all I wanted was a glass of champagne and a one-way ticket out of my mother's home. Judith, on the other hand, wants to be carried across town on a chariot. It's a lot to pull off.”

Max glanced up at the window again, saw a brief flickering of color, a curtain drawn. “Not more than a couple months, I'd guess. Long enough to let her get her bearings. I'd expect to hear more from the agency in New York soon. My assumption is she'll head back that way, that a woman of her disposition would be more at home
in the big city. And the synagogue's Hadassah is putting together a fund for her.”

Irene nodded, not hiding her relief. She brushed the soil from her hands onto her apron, made a last adjustment to the flowers. “Summer,” she said. “You know, on a day like this, I have no complaints. How could anyone be unhappy on such a day?”

“It would take some doing.”

A breeze rustled the elm trees and the wisps of hair poking out from her scarf. She reached out and took his hands. “It's good to see you, Max. You should come to dinner again soon.”

“I will. I promise. In the meantime, would you tell Miss Beidler I came by? I'd love to talk with her and see how I might help her acclimate once she's settled in a little.”

“I'll tell her, Max. You're good to come.”

HE RETURNED THE
next day, and again, Ana Beidler was sleeping. When he called again the day after that, this time it was later in the afternoon, an hour before dinner, a time when no one was asleep, only alcoholics and the truly deranged, and if she was sleeping he would insist on waking her up to see if she fell into either category. She wasn't asleep, though neither was she home. Irene informed him and then a moment later, he was being commanded to sit down at the table and two lamb chops were being placed before him, though he hadn't planned on staying.

“Really, I can't,” he tried, but it was useless.

“You want rice or potatoes or a little of both?” Irene said. Then, before he could answer, “Take a little of both. I made enough for our phantom houseguest.”

“Maybe she really is a phantom,” Judith said, sitting down across from him, placing a bowl of peas on the table, “a Yiddish ghost holed up in our guest room.”

“What sort of a joke is that to make?” said Abe. “Girls your age in Europe aren't worrying about their weddings.”

“Calm down,” Judith said, turning over her shoulder to her mother. “How do you stand being married to a man who takes everything so seriously?”

“Practice. Years of practice.”

“You see what I live with?” Abe said to Max. “The attacks on my character. Tell us what you think, Rabbi. What does the Torah say about cracking jokes about ghosts when the paper has an article every week about more Jews murdered?”

Max held up his hands, “I try not to take sides in domestic disagreements.”

“He's polite,” Abe said. “He knows I'm right.”

Irene sat down at last. “I set aside a plate for our ghost,” she said, looking at Abe.

They fell into silence as they began to eat. Halfway through the meal Irene paused, blotted at her mouth with a napkin. “We should talk about this seriously. I've gotten at least eight calls in the last few days from people wanting to come by and welcome her to town, invite her to dinner. Sarah called from Hadassah and Edith from the JCC. Several others. We hear you have a Yiddish actress refugee living in your house, they say. Can we meet her? I don't know what to tell them.”