Travellers in Magic (16 page)

“Hello?” the person at the other end said, as if uncertain she had reached the right number. And for a moment Emily didn't recognize the voice, it had been that long.

“Hello,” she said.

“Emily.” She heard relief in her mother's voice, but something more as well—trepidation, probably. “I was wondering—well, we'd like to know—that is, Passover starts next week.” She was silent, waiting for Emily's reply. When it didn't come she said, “Well, we'd like it if you came over for the first night.”

“We?” Emily said. “Or you?”

“Please. He misses you.”

“Does he? He's got a funny way of showing it. Why can't he tell me so himself?”

“It's hard for him, you know that—”

“Actually I don't know it. I never noticed that it was hard getting him to talk. The problem was always shutting him up.”

She heard her mother's in-drawn breath, and then the sound of static on the line. She'd gone too far. Or maybe not—how far were you allowed to go if your father had more or less disowned you? It was an interesting question. Probably the etiquette books didn't cover it.

“I called to ask you to dinner,” her mother said. “Heather deserves to get to know her grandparents.”

“And whose fault is it that she doesn't?” Emily said. Anger and resentment flared up so strongly she shook as she said it.

“I thought that for Heather's sake—”

Somehow her mother had hit on the only argument that would carry any weight at all. She had never been so good at getting her own way when Emily was growing up. Her father had been the one Emily had had to watch out for. What else had changed in six years?

Emily forced her anger away. She owed it to Heather to try to lay aside old wounds, old scores. “All right,” she said reluctantly.

“And please—don't argue with him.”

That was the way she remembered her mother. It had been so easy to disobey her as a child, almost a game. “Did you ask him not to argue with me?”

“He never starts it—”

“He
does.
He's just cleverer about it than I am. Watch him if you don't believe me.”

“All right, I'll ask him.”

For a moment Emily felt sorry for her mother, for the way she and her father had used her as a game-piece in their skirmishes. “Okay, I'll be there,” she said. “Should I bring something?”

“Oh, no.” Her mother sounded hurt. If Emily brought anything it would mean that her mother had been lacking in some way, that all bounty did not flow from her mother's kitchen. She was remembering all the ways her family interacted now, and she sighed. What had she gotten herself into? Would Heather be able to hold her own? “We're looking forward to seeing you,” her mother said.

Emily sat by the phone for a while after she had hung up, thinking about her family. She was fourteen, and had brought home a boy from school. She had thought about this boy every day for the past month and having him so close to her now made her breath hurt. Everything seemed sharper, more filled with meaning, around him, so that she felt that she had never really noticed anything until this moment. And her father had laughed and joked with him, and told him a story about being captured by gypsies as a child.

“Your father is so great,” the boy had said. “I wish mine was like that.”

She couldn't describe what she felt until much later. It was jealousy, pure and simple. Jealousy, and anger that someone she loved had spent two hours talking to her father when he should have been paying attention to her. “You know that nothing he said was true,” she said.

“So what?” the boy said.

She was eighteen, and the family car she had been driving had been hit by a van which had then driven off before she could get the license number. She arrived home shaking, terror at what had nearly happened to her mingling with anger at whoever had hit her. And her father, instead of comforting her, instead of saying that she was fine and that was the important thing, had told her a story about being a truck driver, and the strange people he had met on the road.

Over the years she had learned that very few of his stories were true. The process had been slow and painful, like coming to terms with a chronic but non-fatal illness. He might have been a construction worker and a truck driver, and maybe he had even ridden the rails as a young man, but everything else had been elaborations, fantasies. In place of the conversations most kids had had with their fathers she had gotten stories. Endless stories.

But the stories had ended when she'd married Andy, who wasn't Jewish. Tales of carnivals and princesses and magicians and pirates had suddenly given place to silence. And she wasn't at all sure that the silence hadn't been welcome, a space in which she could sort out who she really was, what was true and what was lies.

She and Andy had gotten divorced six months ago. It had been a friendly divorce; they still talked on the phone, and she had met him for lunch once when his business took him close by. How typical of her parents that they called after the divorce, that now she was their daughter again. But her anger had gone for good; she wondered only how she would survive an evening with her family.

At first, as she stepped into the entryway with Heather, she thought that nothing had changed. The house still smelled of tea and chicken. The bulky furniture of her childhood, the hi-fi cabinet and end tables and coffee tables, stood in their old places. The same worn trail on the rug led from the living room to the kitchen.

Her mother, coming forward shyly to kiss her, as if entertaining royalty, seemed the same too: small and worried and smelling of cosmetic creams and dish detergent. But when she moved back Emily saw the lines in her mother's face and the thickness of her new glasses. She'd changed the color of her hair, too; it was redder now. “Hello, Emily,” she said. “I'm so glad you came. Your father's out in back.”

Of course, Emily thought. I've got to go to him. I wonder if he set it up that way.

“Heather!” her mother said. “I didn't see you at first. Look at how you've grown.”

Heather had never been shy. “Yes, I have,” she said gravely.

“You were only two years old the last time I saw you. I bet you don't recognize me, do you?”

“Sure I do.”

Emily wondered if that was true. She still remembered the time her mother had stopped by the house, furtively, as if scouting out enemy terrain. There had been an argument about, of all things, whether she could have Sinclair the dog. “He's
my
dog!” Emily had screamed as her mother hurried toward her car. “I raised him. He's not yours. Or Dad's either!” The entire block must have heard her. Since then they had communicated through Emily's brother David.

“Just leave Heather with me,” her mother said. “We have a lot to catch up on. Your father's looking forward to seeing you.”

Was that true? Emily made her way down the hall and past her parents' bedroom. Her old room was at the back of the house but she didn't look inside. From the kitchen she heard laughter: David and his wife and their two children.

The light was going from the sky as she stepped out onto the back porch. Her father looked up from his weeding. He had always been a stocky, vital man, with powerful shoulders and black eyes and curly black hair. It came as a shock to see that his hair had turned almost pure white. But when she got closer she noticed that aside from his hair he had not changed at all. Just for a moment she had hoped he had become smaller, shrunken. But she couldn't wish that of anyone, even him. And he would stay the same until he died; he was too stubborn for anything else.

Why hadn't she stayed in the house? She couldn't think of anything to say to him. Or maybe she had too much to say, and no way to manage it. Why didn't you visit for six years? Are your stupid principles more important than your daughter, your grandchild?

Just as he filled any space he entered he filled her silence with words. Anyone watching wouldn't have guessed that six years had passed since they'd last seen each other. “Emily! I hope you've brought Heather. She'll have to say the Four Questions, your brother's boys are older than she is. We've got eight people tonight—that's the largest Passover we've had since Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Moe moved away. Your mother's been cooking all week.”

“Sure, Heather's a great reader,” Emily said. You'll like her, she wanted to add, but she didn't know if that was true. He hadn't even visited when she was born, she thought, and, suddenly angry, she nearly said something she would regret. I won't argue if he doesn't, she thought, remembering the promise she had given her mother. “How've you been?”

“Fine, just fine. Your mother wants to go to Canada to see Phyl and Moe, and we're going to visit Quebec while we're there. I've always wanted to go someplace they speak French. I took a class at the local college.
Comment allez-vous?
”

She didn't understand him. “Listen, I think I hear Ma. I'd better go see if she needs any help.”

He waved at her and returned to his weeds. Going inside felt like surrender, but she didn't think she could stay outside another minute. What did I expect? she thought. An apology?

In the house she helped set the table with David's wife Janet. “This is so great,” Janet said. “My family never celebrated Passover when I was growing up.”

“Wait till it's over before you say anything,” Emily said.

Janet looked at her oddly. She wondered what her brother David had been saying about her. Did they think of her as the black sheep of the family, the one who had never fit in?

She went back into the kitchen to see what else needed to be done. David and his two sons had gone out to the backyard, and the family was now divided the way she remembered it from her childhood: the men standing and talking, the women working in the kitchen. Heather watched while her grandmother lifted a platter from the oven. Wonderful, Emily thought. What terrific role models we're showing her. The kitchen windows had steamed over from all the cooking.

“I think we're done here,” her mother said. “Oh—Elijah's cup. Could you reach it, Emily? It's in the top cupboard there. Heather, go tell your grandfather we're ready.”

Emily would have wanted to be there when Heather met her father but she thought that her daughter could take care of herself. And maybe it would work out better this way; she knew she could hardly act neutral around him. Carefully she took down the goblet of cut crystal and filled it with wine.

She had been fascinated by the cup as a child, that something so weighty could be fashioned into such airy beauty. She remembered how the candlelight would shine from its facets. And sometime during the evening the wine in the goblet would disappear. Her father would tell her and David that Elijah had come, that they had missed him again this year. She had been eight or nine when she realized that her father had been the one to drink the wine, and then she'd felt angry and embarrassed, as if she'd been taken in by a confidence trick.

She took Elijah's cup to the table and set it in front of Heather. If her daughter got bored by the service at least she would have something to look at. Everyone except her father was already sitting down at the table: the chair at the head was empty. Finally he came into the room. He had washed and changed, but Emily could see the dirt beneath his fingernails.

Her father looked at the family with great satisfaction and made the blessing over the wine. “The youngest child reads the Four Questions,” he said when he had finished. “Bob read them last year and Mike the year before, and now it's Heather's turn.”

Emily showed Heather the Four Questions in the Haggadah. She looked nervous but pleased by everyone's attention. “Why is this night di—diff—”

“Different,” Emily said.

“Different. Different from all other nights.” Her voice, which had started out breathy, grew louder, more confident.

“Very good,” Emily said when she had done.

“You have asked me the four questions and now I will answer you,” her father said solemnly, exactly as he had said to her and her brother twenty and thirty years before. He began to read from the Haggadah in his sing-song old-fashioned Hebrew.
“Avadim hayenu l'Paro b'Mizraim.”
We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt.…

She barely listened as her father told the story of Passover. The plagues God sent to Pharaoh. The flight of the Jews in the night. The parting of the Red Sea. Manna in the desert. Stories and miracles; no wonder her father enjoyed Passover so much. It was rooted in his blood and stretched back thousands of years. But no more; it would end here, with her and Heather. Heather would not be raised on this superstitious nonsense.

She watched Heather and wondered what her daughter made of it all. She couldn't be following it very well, even in the English translation printed alongside the Hebrew in the Haggadah. But Heather wasn't even trying to understand. She was watching her father as he read, a look of wonder on her face.

Damn! Emily thought. He's doing it to her, just like he used to do it to all my friends. She's fascinated by him, she's under his spell. What on earth did he say to her outside? I'd better set her straight about him before it's too late. It was Andy her grandfather had snubbed, after all. We're only here because of the divorce—I'll have to tell her that. And even then he didn't even have the courage to invite me back—he had to get my mother to do it.

She was so angry she didn't notice her father had stopped reading. That was quick—they must have shortened the ceremony considerably during the years she'd missed. The shorter the better, as far as she was concerned. She had to get Heather home and tell her a few things, the difference between truth and lies, for one.

Her mother and Janet got up and went into the kitchen for the food. Her father had embarked on one of his stories. She had missed the beginning; he was somewhere in Prague, arguing with someone. She would bet any amount of money he had never been to Prague. He had been too young for World War Two and too old for Korea; he had probably never left the country in his life.