The Houseguest (8 page)

“How do they know she's an actress?” Abe asked.

“Is it a secret?” said Irene. “Was I not supposed to mention it?”

“I don't see any harm,” said Max. “It's not as though you're spreading gossip.”

“What gossip would I have to spread? I've hardly seen the woman. She hides in her room by day and traipses across town by night. We've barely exchanged ‘hello' and ‘good-bye,' much less had a proper conversation. That's the point. People are calling and I don't know what to tell them.”

Abe looked from Max to Irene. “Why don't you tell them the woman is a human being, not a carnival attraction. Her misfortune does not exist for their entertainment. They'll meet her when they meet her.”

“They'll meet her when they meet her,” Irene echoed. “As though you own the key to the city. These are our neighbors, Abe. They don't mean any harm. They know she's here and they want to welcome the woman, to make her feel at home. What's wrong with that?”

“She's not
at
home, that's what. She was chased out of her home at gunpoint, remember? Her home no longer exists. She's a refugee in a strange town, a strange country, speaking a strange language.”

“I thought her English was quite good,” offered Judith.

“And if I were a stranger here,” Irene said, “I'd want to be welcomed. I'd want to meet people, make connections. Wouldn't you, Max?”

Max held up his hands, gave Irene a drowning look.

“But you're not a stranger here,” said Abe. “And you never have been.
Nu
.”

“I'm still a person. I can imagine what it's like to feel frightened and alone.”

“You can imagine feeling that way as yourself, not as a refugee. People are different.”

“No one's claiming they're not. All I'm asking is whether or not at some point in the not-so-far-off future, it's fair to expect the woman to be a little less reclusive, a little less mysterious, a little more . . .”

“American?” Abe offered.

“I was going to say gracious,” said Irene. “It would be nice to have an actual conversation with her, to find out what her plans are, where she'd like to settle.”

“Lots of things would be nice. A good cigar. A nightly foot rub. But I don't expect them.”

“I'm not asking the woman to rub my feet. I'm wondering if she might wave hello to the neighbors, say a word to the people who come to meet her. Doesn't she owe us that small courtesy?”

Abe picked up his fork, opened his mouth, then closed it and put the fork down. “I'm sorry, but I disagree. The woman doesn't owe us anything,” he said. “For all we know, she's escaped a living hell, endured suffering none of us have experienced. She's our guest now, but she doesn't owe us or anyone else a window into that world. The view belongs to her alone.”

No one spoke after that. They finished the meal in a solemn silence that Max took to mean the discussion was closed. He assumed this would be the pattern, Abe defending the woman, Irene demanding information. It was a surprise to him then that after coffee and dessert, Abe approached him as he was leaving the house, walked beside him in the early darkness until they reached the end of the drive. “Listen,” he said. “I need you to tell me the number of weeks she'll be here, and I need the number to be small.”

He stopped walking. “Is it that bad, Abe? I thought . . .”

“I try to make the best of situations. But the truth is Irene is right. And we've been bickering as a result. You see how it is. Do I need more evenings like this? And believe me, you haven't heard the worst of it. I haven't told you everything about our guest.”

“There's more than the insomnia?”

“Much more,” Abe said. There was her slovenliness, muddy-soled shoes abandoned under the coffee table in the parlor; pins and barrettes, which Abe could only guess had liberated themselves from her heavy tresses, appearing in the carpet; her feminine garments washed out in the bathtub and never reclaimed, a cold and somewhat disconcerting surprise for the next person inclined to bathe. There were the entrances (tipsy) and exits (unexpected). She rose mid-course during a meal that had taken up the better part of Irene's day in preparation, and wandered forlornly onto the back porch as though she had unpleasant
business that needed attending out there. One evening, she'd had her dinner at the oyster bar by the rail station instead and not returned until the bottom of the morning, announcing her arrival in a thick and clumsy mumbled Yiddish. She treated their house not so much as a home but a cheap hotel she'd mistakenly been booked into, and Abe was beginning to wonder if perhaps there had been a mistake, if she was somehow under the impression that this was not a private residence opened to her out of his family's generosity, but an inn of sorts, a way-station, a temporary bed until proper lodgings could be secured.

“I don't think there's been any mistake,” Max said. “I think I just need to talk to the woman.”

“I'd appreciate it.” Irene and Judith's voices drifted toward them from the kitchen window. They were arguing again, about what, Max couldn't say. The sentiment came off more clearly than the words. “You understand. Irene's heart is big but her kitchen's small.”

“I understand,” Max said.

THE NEXT MORNING
he sat at his desk and wrote Ana Beidler a letter, saying he hoped she was settling into town without difficulty, finding everything here she needed. He'd be more than happy to help her in any way that might be useful. Would she come by and see him some afternoon at the synagogue, or if she found the evenings more convenient, at his home? He penned both addresses at the bottom of the page, slid the note into an envelope, slid the envelope beneath the Auers' door the following morning.

In the days that followed, every time there was a knock on his door, he thought it would be her. He waited, but three days passed and she never came. He spotted her one afternoon, boarding a bus downtown. Two days later he thought he saw her stepping into the Boston Store, but he was never close enough to stop her, never bold enough to chase after her or get her attention. A week and a half after her arrival, they still hadn't spoken, which seemed surely to be a failure on his own
part, if only he could figure out what he'd done wrong, what he could have done differently.

July arrived, and with it a number of other matters vying for his attention, the usual slog of Bar Mitzvah scheduling and nuptial counseling and fundraising, the demands of the synagogue addition. He was wading through it so intensely that for a few days he was nearly able to put the matter out of mind, and just when he'd begun to do so, the phone rang and it was Shumel Spiro. “How goes it in the provinces? I've been meaning to talk to you for some time but since Field's temple we've been bringing them over by the dozen, it seems like. Sending them to places that don't make Utica look so ridiculous. One Rumanian should be getting off a train soon in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm tempted to feel sorry for the man.”

“You probably shouldn't.”

“The refugee. The woman. How is she adjusting to your little hamlet?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Fine, I assume.”

“I gather she's doing fine, then. Wonderful.”

“Do you think you'll be sending more our way? I've spoken to a few other families.”

“It seems unlikely for the time being. But listen, you've been an enormous help to us, to me personally. I can't thank you enough. And I want you to call if there's any trouble at all.”

“Have any of the others encountered any trouble?”

“No. Nothing that I'm aware of. But trouble, Max, it doesn't schedule an appointment. If something comes up, you tell me right away.”

“Well, there is one small issue. When I said I assumed she was fine. I haven't exactly been able to verify that. She's always out or sleeping when I come by. I've started to wonder if she's hiding from me.”

“Don't be silly, Max. Why would she hide from you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Max, I can understand if you feel a certain sense of ownership or responsibility for Ana. No one played a bigger part in bringing her to Utica. My people, our group, we know that, under normal circumstances, she is a good and remarkable woman. Dramatic, maybe, but we all carry bits of our work around in our daily lives. That's what this American capitalism does. It makes your work who you are. Ana's work is being dramatic. She's caught on quick. All I want to check on is that she isn't having any sort of allergy to your town or that the weight of what she went through—and this part I want you to think about carefully—isn't causing her any undue grief.”

“If I knew, Shmuel.”

“I understand. You want to lay eyes on her yourself, make sure all is in place. Don't fret. Tend to your flock. Don't waste your energies racing after this poor woman. Should you happen to encounter her, you can let me know. How does that sound, Max?”

“Fine, I suppose.”

“You and me, we're men of action. There's nothing harder for men like us to tolerate than those moments when nothing's required of us. It's another reason I'm calling you, in fact. I wanted to tell you more about our operation here, the Committee for a Jewish Army. It just so happens, you see, that at this particular moment, I'm in desperate need, we're in desperate need, of a rabbi.”

“A rabbi?”

“To take on a project for us.” There was a clattering in the background, people arguing. “Listen, Max. I'll be brief. I've asked one great favor of you and now I'm asking another. All I can offer now is to say how much this demonstrates the esteem I hold you in. There's a conference coming up in Chicago convened by the American Jewish Council, a gathering of Jewish leaders, organizers, rabbis from all over the country, all of them coming together to discuss the refugee problem, and I want you to attend as our representative. I had hoped to go myself, but
it seems I'm not welcome, not American enough. I was wondering if you might go as my proxy, report back to me.”

“Spy, you mean?”

“Call it what you will, Max. You'd be doing a
mitzvah.
You have family in Chicago, no?”

“My sister.”

“It's perfect then, don't you think?”

“I'm flattered, Shmuel. I am. But I don't think I'm the man you're looking for.”

“Just do me this kindness and consider it, will you? You'd be doing us at the Committee a great service, not to mention the millions of Jews still trapped in Europe. If things continue on it may well be thousands by the time you go.”

“I wish I could do it, Shmuel. But the timing . . . I'm behind on everything.”

“Yes, we're all behind, aren't we? That's why we're in this mess. Thousands are perishing as we speak because we've fallen so terribly behind.”

Max felt a strange déjà vu, a falling back in time to Heidelberg, that other life. The man hadn't changed at all in the years since Max heard him speaking before a group of Zionists, riling them up, rallying them forward. He did what he needed to do, asked what he needed to ask of people without a tinge of embarrassment, without an iota of fear that they'd say no or be offended. He wondered what it must be like to live that way. “Just like that?” Max said. “You say, ‘Go to Chicago,' and I hop on a train.”

“I knew you would understand, Max. I knew you were exactly the man for the job.”

“I'll think about it. That's the best I can do.”

“I'll take it.”

Max hung up the phone, sat at his desk for the next few minutes, not doing anything but reflecting on what five million people looked
like. How many baseball stadiums of people? Five million seconds was a lifetime. Five million steps to walk around the earth. The phone was ringing again. He assumed it was Spiro calling back, that he'd forgotten something.

“I'm thinking about it,” he said into the receiver.

It was a woman's voice that answered. “Could I speak with Max Hoffman, please? This is Ana Beidler.”

He picked up a piece of paper on his desk, folded it in two for no reason.

“Miss Beidler. I'm so glad you called. I've been waiting to hear from you.”

“Yes,” she said. “I've been waiting, too.”

6.

H
ER NAME WAS
Sonia. Sonia the beautiful. Sonia the prostitute Abe met and made love to under the bridge on the banks of the Neman nearly thirty years ago.
Make love?
he interrogated. Does a sixteen-year-old boy
make love
to a whore? To her, he did. He doted on her, dreamt about her, hungered for her affection and approval. He stole things for her, brought her flowers and jewelry and perfume and books. Of course, she wasn't only a whore. She was also an intellectual. A member of
Hitahdut,
the Socialist-Zionist Labor Party. “A revolutionary from the waist down,” she called herself if anyone asked. This dark figure from his past was who Ana Beidler brought back to his mind. The memory, long buried, coming up to him not in images at first but in sounds, the timbre of her voice. Her breathing heavily in his ear, the distant train, the traffic over the bridge as they made love in the high grass. Sonia. Her favorite customers were older men—journalists, agitators, anarchists, university professors, not sixteen-year-old schoolboys, the bourgeois son of the owner of a cigarette factory. But somehow, the day she met Abe at the market, convinced him to buy her an apple, then ate it in front of him, relishing it, licking the juice off her soft lips, she took pity on him and asked if he'd like to walk her home. He could still remember the sweetness of the apple on her breath, the stickiness on her fingers. They never made it farther than the bridge. He muddied his clothes and bruised his knees on the rocks.
Then he emptied his pockets without the slightest regret. This was how it went. Sometimes he paid her and sometimes he didn't. It depended on her mood, how things went between them on any day.

“I like you, Abe,” she used to tell him. “You're a funny boy. Tell me a funny joke and then you can have it for free.”

Other times she'd be strict. “Fifteen rubles? You must be joking. That was worth fifty, at least.”

“Come on. You know I haven't got that much.”

“Meet me tomorrow then and bring some of your mother's jewelry. Your parents are rich, aren't they? She won't miss it.”

He protested, but eventually gave in. Regardless of what they did together under the bridge, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and not beautiful in the way the girls at school tried to be. Her face was covered with freckles. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were white-blonde. She painted her lips dark red, but he suspected that without this paint, they'd be as pale as her lashes. Her dresses were wrinkled and threadbare but somehow more lovely to him for this quality. She had wide hips and small breasts and a mole on the lower part of her neck, which he liked to kiss. It was not only the way she looked but also the way she smelled and the way she laughed and the way she sat under the bridge while they talked, legs apart, back rounded. She sat like a man, without shyness or modesty. He loved the dirty way she talked, too, the bit of gravel in her voice, and the way she wasn't shy or prickly or stuck up like the other girls he knew. It seemed to him his feelings were, at least a little bit, reciprocated.

“I like you,” she told him often. “I do. Even if you are a strange kid.”

“What makes me so strange?” he asked.

She thought about it for a moment, then said in a more serious tone of voice than he'd heard her use before, “Most people want to lift themselves up. If they're dirty, they want to make themselves clean. If they're poor, they dream of being rich. If they're ignorant, they want
to go to school. But you, you're good and clean and clever and rich enough, and you want to be filthy and low.”

He smiled. He had the feeling that no one, not his parents, not his brother, had ever bothered to look at him as closely as she.

“Now,” she said, “Tell me some of the fancy things you've learned at school this week.”

He began reciting Pushkin's
The Gypsies,
but she interrupted him after a few verses. “That's enough,” she said. “Now, want me to teach you something new, something that will serve you well the rest of your life?”

The next day, he brought her a single strand of his mother's pearls.

“They're seeded,” he told her while she held them to the light.

“What does that mean?”

“That they're valuable.”

She laughed then, at his earnestness, his generosity. When she laughed, he didn't care if he was caught or not. He didn't care about anyone but her. And yet the night he came down from his bedroom unable to sleep, it was not Sonia's ghost he saw in his living room but his brother's, Shayke's, sitting on Irene's ivory sofa, leaning forward and rolling tobacco between his fingers like it was gold leaf. He was exquisitely careful rolling the tobacco and yet he'd never been careful when it came to living his life. He was still wearing his worker's cap, still wearing his muddy boots. If he'd been real, Irene would have had a conniption for the mess it would make, but Abe knew he was not real because he could not perceive him with his other senses. He had no scent and his movements, his shifting on the sofa, leaning forward, sitting back, made no sound. He sat suspended in silence, and Abe knew that this silence was death. He smiled, raised his eyebrows at Abe, who now, at forty-seven, was more than twenty-five years his senior. Of course, it was not Shayke. The arrangement of skin and bone and blood and brain and uncompromising spirit that had been Shayke no longer existed. Abe knew that. He was neither religious, superstitious,
nor delusional, and yet there Shayke sat. Leaning back on the sofa, crossing one leg over the other, he lit his cigarette without a lighter or a match. The paper ignited quicker than a lock of hair, an orange spark that flared then shrunk to nothing. He brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled, then exhaled until the exhalation became a sigh.

“What are you doing here?” Abe said.

Shayke put the cigarette into his mouth and put his hands behind his head, leaning back on the sofa. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“I live here,” Abe said.

Shayke laughed softly. When the cigarette was gone, he stood up and began looking around, picking up picture frames with photos of Irene and Judith, running his fingers over Irene's crystal ashtrays and porcelain figurines. He walked across the parlor to the piano by the fireplace, pushed a key near the middle, then near the top. It made no sound, or none that Abe could hear.

“Have you ever had this thing tuned?” Shayke asked.

“Why bother? No one ever plays it. Irene wanted Judith to take lessons when she was a kid but the girl would never practice. No patience.”

Shayke played another soundless chord. “Do you remember that girl back home, beautiful Sonia? She knew how to play . . . the piano and other things. You used to follow her around.”

“Until you took her from me.”

“You never forget anything, do you?”

Abe closed his eyes, willing the vision away. But when he opened them his brother remained. “Why are you here, Shayke?”

“I am here and not here—nowhere and everywhere.”

“
Drek
.”

“Is this any way to greet your brother? Why are you here? Why have you come?”

“Go back to Grodno then. The living can't get entrance visas; why should the dead?”

Shayke stood slowly. He walked to the china cabinet across the room, picked up a kiddush cup, one of the few objects from their childhood home that Abe still possessed.

“Careful,” Abe said.

He tossed the kiddush cup into the air, caught it with the other hand. “You have anything to put in this? I'm dying of thirst. Vodka is what I'd really like. Cold, cold vodka. There was a guard at the camp who slept with a bottle under his bed. He used to call prisoners in and give them little thimblefuls to use as antiseptic in exchange for sex. Now, who's this lovely lady?” He was pointing to a portrait of Judith on the mantle above the fireplace.

“My daughter.”

Shayke picked up the picture and held it closer. “So it is, so it is. Look, she has my eyes.”

It was true, his dark eyes and his high forehead marked by creases where his stubbornness seemed to reside. Abe had noted the likeness before, and each time, the observation strained something inside him, twisted his guts up until they felt like gnarled roots. He noticed the resemblance and then he had to bury the knowledge of it, cover it over with the more pressing, less painful details of his life.

Shayke returned the portrait to the mantle, looked at Abe and smiled. But there was something amiss with the smile, too much space between his gums and his teeth, between his lips and his chin. His eyes were dark, hollow orbs; they were not for seeing.

“They starved us, the camp guards,” he said to Abe, in way of explanation. “But at least they let us smoke. Did you know that smoke is a heavy thing inside an empty body? Even air has weight. Cold air is lighter than warm air. It squeaked inside my chest, made a harp out of my ribs.”

“Please, Shayke. Don't tell.”

“But you knew already. You knew.”

Abe glanced down at his hands, and when he looked up, Shayke had vanished.

“What did you know, Mr. Auer?” Ana said.

It was not Shayke who was sitting on the ivory sofa but Abe himself, and Ana was speaking to him from the doorway. “You were talking in your sleep,” she said.

“Was I?”

“I didn't mean to disturb you. I'm only coming in from a walk.”

She moved closer, sat down beside him on the sofa, all that dark beauty set against the pale fabric. “What were you dreaming about? Your eyes were closed but you were smiling.”

He rubbed his eyes, his forehead. “
Antshuldikt mir
.” Forgive me.

“No need for forgiveness, Mr. Auer. You haven't done anything wrong.” She paused. “Do you mind if I join you? It's very late yet somehow I'm still not tired. In fact, there are few things I find more enjoyable than watching another person dream. Or even sleep for that matter. There's satisfaction in watching other people benefit from what I can't do myself.”

“You can't sleep?”

“Not at night, no. At least not with any regularity. It's terrible. A curse.” She tucked her legs up beneath her the way a child would, removed a cigarette from a black leather case on the coffee table, then snapped closed the small brass latch. “Then again, I have time to read, to think, to walk under the stars.” Her fingernails were smooth and red against the white paper. Her hands showed her age more than the rest of her.

“I'm sorry I disturbed you,” he answered. “I thought you were upstairs.”

“No, I returned from a walk a few minutes ago.”

“So late?”

“Yes,” she said. “I like to walk at night. You may have noticed. I went to see Max Hoffman today. He was so kind and helpful, and we talked for a long time about my situation. But sometimes after such a talk it's good to be alone, let words settle. The evening got away
from me.” She was looking at him more closely than she had before. “Would you like to sit with me a while?”

He nodded. “Can I get you something first?”

“A bit of company is all. Maybe a few drops of whatever you're drinking.”

He looked at the coffee table before him, noticed the half-empty glass. He'd poured himself some vodka when he'd first come downstairs, which explained the bitterness on his tongue. He started to rise, but she stopped him with a motion of her hand, stood and walked to the liquor cabinet. Her feet made no sound against the floorboards. He listened to the clink of ice on glass, the liquor pouring.

When she returned, he said, “I've been meaning to ask you if you're finding everything you need here? Settling in.”

“Settling?” And there was something strange about the way she said the word. She said it the way Irene or Judith said it, so smoothly, swallowing the “l.” Was she mocking them? Or was he imagining? “Yes. I suppose I am. Your wife is so lovely, so gracious. She made me an omelet yesterday with little bits of onion in it and yellow cheese. She showed me how to use the iron. She's the sort of wife every man I've ever known has yearned for.”

“You should tell her so. She doesn't get the compliments she deserves from me.”

She turned her head and smiled, not at him, but at some private thought. “You've been married a long time, haven't you? Sweet words are for the young . . . or the stage.”

“Twenty-one years we've been married.”

“That is very long. Did you meet in Utica?”

“When I arrived, I lived on the Lower East Side. I got off the boat, moved in with my uncle who owned a butcher shop on 9th Street. I was supposed to work for him there, but I couldn't stand the sight of all that blood, so I found something else to do, something equally glamorous. I started picking rags under the elevated, selling them to sweatshops.”

She shrugged. “You survived. That's nothing to be ashamed of.”

“After a year or so, I moved up in the world, found work assisting one of the tailors. His store was on the bottom floor of a six-flat. Irene lived with her parents on the second floor. She was born in the Bronx. A real American. For months, we didn't do more than nod at each other in the vestibule. I was too embarrassed of my accent to say ‘hello.' But one day, I noticed as she was hurrying past that she had a button hanging loose from her coat. I chased her up the stairs with a thread and needle. We married a few months later, but we were both so fed up with the city by then. She had family in Gloversville. We moved there, then here.”

He'd told this story a dozen times, or heard Irene tell it, yet never in the telling had a listener seemed to savor every word, every sentence. As he spoke, her eyes opened wide, her mouth resisted, then succumbed to a smile, her expression shifting gradually as the memory progressed, her whole body leaning forward as though to say, yes, yes, go on.