Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (9 page)

There were two living rooms, one adjacent to the entrance, its windows facing the street, and an even larger one at the end of a wide corridor. Both could have accommodated—and, as it turned out, did accommodate—concerts or a dance party. Rosie led me down the hallway, and like a passenger on a train, I felt the scenery was passing by too quickly: a kitchen and den to our left, two bedrooms to the right. If only time would freeze for an hour, so I could take everything in.

Rosie’s parents were seated at either end of a sofa in the back living room. Mrs. Michaeli was negotiating an unwieldy newspaper and her husband was absorbed in a paperback. They made me think of penguins or swans: silent and alike, at home in their chosen habitat, entirely benign, but essentially untouchable. They rose when they saw me, first Rosie’s mother and then, with the help of a cane, Mr. Michaeli.

“Mummy, Daddy, this is Maya, Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter—from the dry cleaners.”

Rosie’s mother was Rosie with the charm drained out of her, and with blonde hair, now streaked with white, instead of black. Her skin was papery, her undefined body curved softly under her dress, her eyes were misty. “How do you do,” she said.

Mr. Michaeli steadied himself on his cane. If he were a painting, there’d be only a few tremulous outlines on the canvas, filled in with hasty strokes. He wasn’t exactly gaunt, but it was as if he’d been pieced together in a last-minute, makeshift effort. And sure enough, Rosie and her mother immediately closed in on him with concern as they walked to the kitchen. I tagged clumsily behind them.

“Here, have a seat,” Rosie and her mother both said, and I didn’t know whether they meant me or Mr. Michaeli.

The kitchen table had been pushed to the corner of the room, and I slid into the narrow space between the wall and the table. I felt like an astronaut in a capsule, an astronaut whose deeds of bravery were about to be honoured.

“So you’re Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter…” Mr. Michaeli looked at me and smiled. For all his fragility, there was a faint suggestion of recklessness and subterfuge in his smile. His eyes resembled tiny watery stars, for like a drowsy cat he raised his lids only slightly.

“Yes,” I answered nervously.

“She for us has fixed many things. And always so fine the stitch, you can’t even see. Presto.”

“Mrs. Levitsky’s mother was also a dressmaker,” Rosie said proudly.

“And from her she learned?” Mr. Michaeli asked me. Beneath his question lurked a chasm I could not begin to fathom.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “They were separated when my mother was thirteen. But, I was telling Rosie, it probably runs in the genes.” I was talking too much, and soon I’d get on their nerves. “But I don’t sew at all,” I added desperately.

“No, no, in modern times it’s different. Ready-made. Ready-made everything.”

I was afraid that if Mr. Michaeli overexerted himself, the slender mechanism holding him together would give way and he’d collapse. It seemed amazing to me that he was a teacher, that he stood in front of a class and raised his voice to a roomful of children.

“Maya, Maya, Maya,” he said. I need not have worried about making a fool of myself. Mr. Michaeli’s covert intransigence could have been intimidating, but it was countered by informality—an informality that went hand in hand with his retreat from the tenets of the world the rest of us inhabited. I could trust him. As for Mrs. Michaeli, she was only tenuously connected to her surroundings, though not because of a surfeit of preoccupations, as with my mother, but because she was absent-minded. I sank back into my astronaut seat and waited to be served.

“Would you like juice, milk, or tea?” Rosie asked me.

I was witnessing a tribal ritual. In this anthropological scene, no other options existed: when guests arrived, they were led to the kitchen, ushered to the seat against the wall, given a choice of juice, milk, tea. Something admirable about them or their family was brought to notice; a plate of homemade poppyseed cookies and a bowl of apples and bananas were set at the centre of the table.

“Tea, please—thank you—I’m sorry,” I said inanely.

“Do you want your pillow, Daddy?” Rosie picked up a shabby cushion from one of the kitchen chairs. We had the same chairs—sturdy, framed by curved metal rods, upholstered in some kind of transparent laminate—but theirs were marbled grey and white, while ours were a plasticized marvel of cornflowers and blue leaves.

“No, no, me I am fine. Hunky-dory.” Mr. Michaeli chuckled with private despair.

“Please, help yourself,” Rosie said, passing me the cookies. Her mother put on the kettle for tea. She smiled at me, but her smile was distant and somehow unreliable. “Mummy used to be a nurse,” Rosie informed me. The biography—or hagiography—was, like the drinks, a part of the ritualized hospitality they were offering me. “She met Daddy that way, when she was working with the Red Cross, taking care of people who came out of Auschwitz.”

Auschwitz, Red Cross—the words were familiar from my mother’s mangled monologues. But what exactly happened during the war? The only clear image I had of the war was one I’d invented myself: my mother and I are trapped in an immense windowless museum: sterile, brightly lit, and bare, with endless serpentine corridors. On exhibit, under glass globes, are worms, happily squirming. We want to ask one of the barrel-bellied guards for directions, but they turn out to be wax figures, and my mother seizes my hand, scurries this way and that, searching for an exit.

Where did these images originate? Possibly from a nightmare I had when I was small, back in the days when my mother ran to me
at night, weeping with terror. But the dream, if that’s what it was, took hold. For months at a time I forgot about the museum, and then, for no reason at all, a phantom memory of being trapped in the windowless labyrinth would come over me, accompanied by nausea and a piercing headache, and I’d have to stay in bed. My mother would hover over me with mugs of hot milk and honey. As I sipped the milk, she swished a bar of Pears soap in a basin of warm water, dipped a towel in the fragrant solution, and rubbed my back and arms and legs. Eventually the worm museum receded, and in its place I resurrected Monet’s brimming poppy fields. There an ordinary girl trailed alongside her ordinary, umbrella-twirling mother, their heads protected from the sun by ribboned hats that replicated the colour of the clouds.

“I’m not very good at history,” I said apologetically, and the Michaelis burst into laughter, all three of them laughing in the exact same way, as if this was the best joke they’d heard in a long while, or maybe ever. They didn’t mean to exclude me; their laughter, almost deliberately prolonged and hearty, was affectionate, and for a minute I hoped I’d said something witty. But I knew my comment was ridiculous. I also understood, in a flare of lucidity, that the Michaelis were inseparable, and more impenetrable, as a trio, than any clique I’d encountered at school.

The laughter subsided and Mrs. Michaeli prepared the tea. Rosie’s family, like ours, drank their tea in glass cups with slivers of lemon floating on top. I dropped two cubes of sugar into my cup and stirred. Rosie went on: “Mummy was lucky, she managed to work in a hospital the entire war, and no one found out she was Jewish—but everyone else in her family died. She called Daddy the humming patient because he didn’t tell anyone his name at first, he just hummed tunes. She didn’t know he was famous. Daddy was a violinist before the war.”

There was no avoiding it now: the Michaeli household was as mad as my own. Even the form of madness was the same. Like my mother, Rosie’s parents were both holy and unappeasable; in this
home, as in mine, the persistent echo of absence and horror made way for fantastic claims on us, the progeny.

Rosie, intuitively grasping my silent verdict, nodded at me and shrugged helplessly. Yes, this was how it was, for better or worse. Yet she held the strands together with her serenity. It was a feat I was in a position to admire.

“My parents met on a ship,” I said. “Or rather, they were reunited.”

But the Michaelis already knew the story: my mother never missed an opportunity to ply captive audiences with the full range of her misfortunes. It was this trait that led to her dismissal from Solomon’s Kosher Butcher; customers complained about the stress of buying a chicken from Fanya Levitsky. She wasn’t sorry to leave. Raw livers disgusted her, and she also disliked Solomon, whom she called King Solomon or, when she’d had a particularly hard day, Slaughterman Sol.

“Daddy, do you think Maya could go to Eden next year? She really wants to. What if she studies all summer?”

Mr. Michaeli nodded, smiled, nodded again, considered. Imagine someone always on the verge of recoiling with fear. Not actually afraid but on the verge, at the edge. The second before terror. Imagine someone frozen into that moment forever. “Maybe, maybe … the main thing would be to learn to read Hebrew. We’ll find for you some books, yes?”

“I could get them from Mr. Lewis.” Turning to me, Rosie explained, “The janitor. I’ll get him to open the cupboard. He’s still at school, cleaning up.”

“What will we sing for our guest?” Mr. Michaeli asked no one in particular.

I thought he meant a singalong around the table, and I was about to suggest “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” but the three of them rose and made their way back to the living room. I had somehow missed seeing or had not paid attention to the upright piano in the corner. Mrs. Michaeli and I sat on the sofa,
Mr. Michaeli perched himself on the piano stool, and Rosie stood beside him like an attendant, facing her audience of two. Snacktime was over, storytime was over—now we were ready for the music recital.

The piano was the only thing of beauty in the room—or in the apartment, as far as I could see. In my own home, my mother’s personality declared itself in every ceramic shepherd and plastic apple, every snail-shaped soap dish and skirted tissue-box cover. The Michaelis, on the other hand, seemed opposed to the entire idea of ornamentation. There were no paintings or prints on the walls, and even the sofa seemed devoid of colour, as if it had come with the place and through some process of progressive invisibility had faded from notice. The floor lamps, with their stark metal stems and yellowing shades, were merely serviceable, and the only movable object in the music room was an overflowing ashtray on the armrest of the sofa—Mrs. Michaeli was a heavy smoker. The house was a variation on Rosie’s navy skirt and white blouse: a form of stalling, a way of keeping something, though I didn’t know exactly what, at bay.

But the walls in this room weren’t altogether bare: fourteen framed photographs of Rosie had been arranged in sequence above the piano. An annual celebration, starting when she was a year old.

I gazed at the portraits and mourned. I was not there when Rosie wore a sailor dress, I was not there when she’d had a Christopher Robin haircut. Rosie beaming for the camera, six years old, eight, eleven: I’d missed it all. At the same time, I absorbed this iconography with famished gratitude. At least those lost years weren’t hidden away, at least they were on display.

“Les Nuits d’été
, by Berlioz,” Rosie announced, then added, for my benefit, “Except we call him Berliozo. We have crazy names for all the composers—Mozartino, Lord Ludwig … This isn’t real singing—I’m only faking. Daddy says you can’t start training for opera until you’re eighteen.” She nodded to her father, and he began to play.

Though I hadn’t been in many homes, I knew these family traditions were idiosyncratic. Whoever heard of Miss Popularity offering her beleaguered parents to her friends, or singing arias for their entertainment? But beyond that, there was an exigency in the Michaelis’ behaviour that clashed with their casual style, as if they were involved in some ongoing ceremony which an onlooker could only partly understand.

Rosie sang, her father accompanied her, the two of them exchanged meaningful glances.

L’ange qui l’emmena
Ne voulut me prendre
Que mon sort est amer
Ah! Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer!

Extraordinary talent takes us by surprise, when it emerges from someone we’ve met in ordinary circumstances.
Here, let me show you my secret wing
. I was hoping when the song ended that no one would speak for at least an hour. But Mr. Michaeli had long since renounced reverence, and deliberately broke through mine. “What say you, Maya, to that G? You do not expect it, and there it arrives. Unfortunately, such things in life don’t last. A whole octave and one-half you must go to get back to Earth.”

Rosie hugged her father, folded him into her embrace as he sat at the piano, and Mr. Michaeli said, “Yes, yes, love we definitely have.” He didn’t exactly return Rosie’s embrace, and to compensate he mocked himself, mocked his own inadequacy. Rosie didn’t mind. She and her father had come to an understanding.

“Would you like to hear another song?” Rosie asked.

“Oh, yes! Yes,” I said, and the three of them laughed again, briefly this time.

Mr. Michaeli played a few notes and Rosie’s voice, effortlessly bearing its sensuous, incorporeal sadness, slowed down as she invoked the lowering of a coffin into the ground—

When I am laid, am laid in earth
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast
Remember me! Remember me!
But ah! forget my fate.

Rosie asked for her fate to be forgotten for the fourth and last time, and as Mr. Michaeli struck the final funereal notes, his body seemed to droop with sudden fatigue. I was afraid it was my fault and, wanting to help, I quickly asked Rosie: “What other names do you have? I mean, of composers.”

“Oh, they’re crazy.” Rosie smiled. “Moony Mahler … Bachanova … We even have a dance called the Bachanova.”

“A dance?”

Rosie giggled and Mr. Michaeli nodded. He began playing a piece by Bach in a boppy, syncopated rhythm. I didn’t know at the time what he was doing exactly, for I had only the vaguest notion of Bach or his music, but I recognized the frivolity of it. Rosie swung her arms with simian abandon as she tap-danced on the faded carpet. She danced until she was flushed and out of breath.