The Two-Family House: A Novel (25 page)

“Just for a little while. I never finished. When my father died, I left to help Abe with the business.”

“Uncle Abe asked you to quit school?” Judith was surprised.

“No, he didn’t want me to leave school. But my mother worried that it would be too hard for him to run the company alone. They argued about it.”

“You majored in mathematics?”

“Yes, but I had to leave in the middle of my sophomore year.”

“Is that why…” Judith hesitated as the waitress approached their table and put two cups down. Judith put both of her hands around the steaming cup of tea. She was shivering.

When the waitress left, her father raised his eyebrow. “Why what?”

“Why you’re always so angry.” It dawned on her all at once. “You never wanted to work in the box business.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she tried to take them back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

The waitress reappeared and set down their plates. Her father picked up half of his chicken salad sandwich and took a bite.
Why isn’t he yelling?
She repeated her apology. “I’m sorry.”

Instead of answering, he just chewed and swallowed. “I can’t believe this place is still here,” he said. “They always had the best chicken salad.” He proceeded to polish off the first half of his sandwich with a gusto Judith couldn’t remember ever seeing before. He usually only picked at his food. “You’re right about the business.” He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin from his lap. “I wanted to be a mathematician.”

Judith was utterly confused. She barely recognized the man sitting across from her. The man who carried around old photographs and liked chicken salad sandwiches. The man who wanted to be a mathematician and wasn’t angry at his daughter. The man who wanted to have lunch with her.

She took a sip of her tea and stared at her plate. Yellow cheese had congealed along the edges of the toasted bread. Her appetite was gone.

“Why are you telling me this?” Judith asked her father.

“I was going through some of my old things, and I found the photograph. It made me realize I never told you that I went to school here.”

She had so many questions. “Is that why you made me go here? Because you wanted me to go to the same school you went to?”

Her father’s face took on a familiar irritated expression. “Look, Judith, I don’t want to rehash that old argument. City College is a damn good school, even if it isn’t Bryn Mawr or Barnard. When you told us you wanted to go away we were just about to move. We were building the business. We had no idea what we’d be able to afford—”

Painful memories came back to her in a torrent. “Do you know you never even congratulated me for getting into college? Not even for being named valedictorian of my class?” Her face grew hot and she began to cry. She tried to hold back her tears, to spare herself the embarrassment of crying in front of her father in the coffee shop booth. She felt ridiculous. But she couldn’t stop.

Her father said nothing. He turned to the briefcase that was still next to him on the seat of the booth, opened it again and fished out a second envelope. Was it another photo? Another piece of his past that he suddenly wanted to share? He handed it across the table to Judith. But this time the envelope was sealed. It was a letter, addressed to her, from Radcliffe College.

She stopped crying. “Where did you get this?”

“It came in the mail yesterday. Your mother hasn’t seen it.”

But I told them to mail all correspondence to my adviser.
Judith had decided to take an extra year at City College in order to continue her studies, but now she was ready for the next phase of her education. Five years had taught her a few things—this time around she was prepared. She had applied for scholarships, housing stipends and work-study jobs, all to secure her financial independence. She wasn’t going to ask her parents if she could go away to graduate school—she was going to
tell
them. She would work two extra jobs if she had to, but there was no way she was going to be discouraged this time. She had it all planned. Except the part about Radcliffe mailing her letter to the wrong address.

Her father interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t you want to open it?”

“I don’t want you to be angry.”

“How can I be angry when I don’t even know what it says?”

His casual manner only confused her more. She opened the envelope. “Read it,” her father urged. So she took a sip of cold tea and began:

“‘We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Radcliffe College as a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts.…’” She skimmed the rest of the first page and then scanned the second. “This says I’ve been accepted as a Mary B. Greenough Scholar.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I have a full scholarship. I don’t have to pay any tuition. They’re giving me room and board.” Judith closed her eyes, savoring the words. “I have a full scholarship. I’m going to Radcliffe.” She braced herself for her father’s inevitable protest. He would be furious with her. Furious that he had been duped yet again. That she had schemed and withheld information. And this time he would be right. This time she
had
schemed. This time, she thought, he had every right to be angry.

But he wasn’t. When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her. Staring straight at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. An expression that she recognized only because she had seen it on the faces of
other
people’s parents. He was proud of her.

“May I?” he asked, pointing to the letter. She handed the pages over to him and held her breath as he read them. When he was done, he handed the pages back to her. “Congratulations,” he said. “English literature?” She nodded, and he went on. “This is a tremendous accomplishment, Judith.”

She was stunned. Claire had been right—her father had surprised her. She wasn’t sure what to say next. But she had to say something. “Did you ask me to have lunch with you today because of the letter?”

He took another sip of coffee. “I found that picture a few days ago. And then yesterday the letter came. I thought we should talk.”

“Where did you find the photograph, anyway?”

“Natalie found it in one of my old books.”

“Natalie?”

Her father sighed. “It’s a math book. Teddy and Natalie found it in the garage last fall. I started teaching them some simple equations. Teddy really enjoyed it. Then after the accident, Natalie wanted to keep studying with me. Abe brings her to the office on Thursdays.”

“Natalie comes to your office every week to study math with you? Really?”

For a moment her father looked like he might cry. “Sometimes we talk about Teddy, about the things he liked—comic books and baseball cards.…”

Judith could not believe what she was hearing. It was too much to take in, too many revelations in one day. She couldn’t put all the pieces together or reconcile the man she had grown up with her whole life with the one sitting across from her in the booth.

“I suppose your mother needs to be told about Radcliffe.” Her father was back to practical matters. “Would you like to tell her, or would you like me to do it?”

“Maybe it’s best if we tell her together.”

“All right,” he agreed. “We’ll do it tonight.”

Judith checked her watch. “I really should go, or I’ll be late for my two-thirty class.” She got up from the booth and adjusted her sweater. “Do you want to walk back with me?”

“You go ahead. I think I’ll stay and have a piece of pie. I used to love the apple pie here.”

Judith stared at him. “You know, I love apple pie too. I used to always look forward to Aunt Helen’s pie on Thanksgiving.”

Judith’s father shook his head. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s something we have in common then.”

Chapter 48

ROSE

(September 1957)

Rose still couldn’t believe Judith was leaving, but Mort was adamant. “We can’t hold her back,” he said. Rose knew it wasn’t so much the fact that Judith was going away that bothered her. It was the fact that Mort and Judith had decided it together. There was something between them that night, an easy solidarity Rose had never sensed before. She didn’t like it.

“You had no problem holding her back last time!” Rose snapped at him after Judith was out of the room.

“Last time we didn’t know a lot of things that we know now,” he answered.

“So you
know
things now? What could you possibly know?”

“I know how hard Judith is willing to work for her education. How much it means to her.”

“If you didn’t know those things when she graduated from high school, you were a fool.”

“Then I was a fool, Rose.” Mort held up his hands in defeat. “But five years ago she was a child. This time she’s a grown woman, and she’s determined to go. She has a full scholarship. She doesn’t need our permission or our help.”

“Then why are you so quick to give her both?”

Mort cleared his throat. “Before Teddy died, you told me I didn’t pay enough attention to Judith, that I didn’t encourage her. Do you remember that?”

Rose wouldn’t answer him. “Look, Rose. We both know how bright Judith is. We can’t keep her from this kind of opportunity just because we’d rather have her at home.”

It’s not because I want to keep her home, Rose thought. She walked away from Mort and went upstairs to Teddy’s room.

After Teddy died, Rose hadn’t been able to go into his bedroom. She kept the door closed and pretended not to notice if Mort or one of the girls wandered into it. It was only a few months after the funeral that she was finally able to muster the strength to go inside. She had been surprised by how neat the room was, until she remembered that Teddy had died on a Thursday. On Thursdays she usually made the beds and tidied up the bedrooms. She must have done that the morning before he died.

That first time she was in Teddy’s room, Rose had wandered around in circles. She wanted to touch everything. Did the bedpost feel different? The desk? What should she do with his books and his clothes? Rose had opened the door to Teddy’s closet and found the tall wicker basket that served as his hamper spilling over with dirty clothes and sheets from that morning in December. She picked up the basket to carry it downstairs to the laundry room, but on the way down the steps, the scent emanating from the sheets overpowered her, and she let the basket drop. She watched it fall, tumbling down the steps and knocking into the walls of the stairway, until it landed at the bottom with a thud.

Rose never washed the sheets or the clothes. Instead, she folded them neatly and placed them, unlaundered, in the back of Teddy’s closet. Teddy’s scent was all she had left of him, the last tangible trace that could conjure him to her.

After that day, Rose went to Teddy’s room every now and then when she wanted to be alone. She would pretend she was dusting if anyone asked, but the girls never did ask, and Mort never questioned her. She would sit at Teddy’s desk and stare out the window, and sometimes, when she was particularly upset, she would open up the closet and pick up the sheets. She would hold them close to her chest and breathe in the scent she had almost forgotten. Sometimes in Teddy’s room, as surprising as it was to her, Rose almost felt like she wanted to pray.

Rose had never paid attention to the prayers that were spoken at the services she attended. She was not a religious person, and, like many women her age, she had never learned how to read Hebrew. After Teddy died, however, she found that bits and pieces of certain prayers started popping into her head at different moments. Some fragments had tunes and some were just words. Tidbits from holiday prayers and arbitrary blessings would come together in combinations that made no particular sense to her. Most of the time she didn’t even know the meaning of the Hebrew words she was humming.

After her argument with Mort, Rose felt a new incantation composing itself. So she went into Teddy’s room and opened the closet door. She clutched the worn sheets and let the words fill her head. This time they came to her as a melody, something she had learned as a young girl, from the end of the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Oseh shalom bim’ro’mav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, V’al kol Yisrael V’imru, V’imru amen.
The melody repeated itself over and over, until part of the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer the rabbis read every year on the High Holy Days, interrupted it. This time it was in English.
Who shall have rest and who shall wander, Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued, Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented …

There was no question that she was being tormented now. And somehow Mort was the one finding peace. How could that be the result after all the trouble she had gone to, all the sacrifices she had made to give her husband what she thought he wanted, and all she had lost in that terrible process?

*   *   *

A few months later, when the time finally came to take Judith to Boston, Rose tried to avoid making the trip with her and Mort. But Helen had offered to take Mimi and Dinah for the night, leaving Rose no excuse for missing the ride. She could express to no one why she wanted to stay home or why her participation in the excursion would be so painful. Soon they were leaving together, bound for Massachusetts to give Judith the education and the adventure that Rose always thought had been reserved for Teddy alone.

Rose watched the miles go by through the dusty patches on the car window. Mort navigated the road and Judith sat behind them in the backseat, carrying on a conversation with her father as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Rose sat in silence, listening to them talk, listening to the familiarity that had sprung up between them like weeds through a sidewalk crack. And all the while Mort drove and all the while Judith chattered, Rose gripped her hands together on her lap and clamped her lips together. She was afraid to open her mouth, even to breathe, because in the car’s small space, stuck between her husband and her eldest daughter, Rose felt the anger brewing inside her push its way out of her chest and into her throat. She could feel it, twisting and bending, like smoke on her vocal chords, ready to burn its way up to her tongue. She pursed her lips tighter in an effort to stop it, for if she couldn’t, she knew, the truth would burn its way out of her and escape from her mouth in one inexhaustible scream.