by Alice Nelson
She had planned to visit the small doctor’s surgery the next day to see if there were any records of Gizela, but instead she walked to the station and caught the early train back to London. She wanted only to leave the town.
Gizela’s life in Brooklyn after the war was more available to them, because the great-aunt she had lived with was known to the Jewish community of Crown Heights. Marina and Dov had grown up among people who remembered Aunt Sura and had known Gizela as a girl before she had left America for Israel. Even so, nothing Marina and her brother uncovered was particularly satisfying. Sura and Gizela seemed to have existed in isolation from the insular Hasidic neighbourhood, their lives floating, unnoticed. Some scandal had placed Sura outside the circle of the community, and she had abandoned any kind of religious observance, which had cast her further beyond the pale. There were things that people would not tell them because they were children, but they managed to decipher that Sura had conducted an affair with a married man and this had brought disgrace to his family and to Sura. No amount of detective work could uncover who this man was, but it was generally believed that he had given Sura the apartment in the brick row house on Union Street where Marina and Dov had later lived with Gizela. There seemed no way that Sura could have bought the apartment herself. She had no family in America and her only work was taking in sewing. She had done less and less of that as the years passed, and no one knew how she and Gizela had lived. There was no doubt that they had been destitute. Gizela had not attended any of the Jewish schools in the neighbourhood, nor had she ever come to shule, so her life had very few points of intersection with the community. People remembered her, but no one seemed to know anything about her.
The reluctance to discuss Sura, Marina later realised, had to do not only with the fact of the scandal, but her instability. Many years afterwards, a rabbi from Crown Heights told Marina that Sura was profoundly unhinged. That it had always been so, but it became more evident as she grew older. There would be a better understanding of it now, perhaps, he said, but in those days it was brushed away as a kind of eccentricity. He did not know exactly what form her illness had taken, but remembered her shouting in the street once. Sura was not capable of caring for a child, he said. It was wrong that the little girl had been left with her, but no one had seen fit to intervene.
Sura died in 1952, the year after Gizela left for Israel. Gizela was her only relative and the rabbi wrote to tell her of the death, but there was no answer. Gizela did not come back to attend the funeral, and the apartment on Union Street remained empty for many years until she returned to Brooklyn one winter with her two small children.
Marina often wondered what it would have been like for Gizela to come back to that apartment, where nothing had changed since she had left it nearly a decade before. The dark, heavy furniture, the enamel dishes on the kitchen shelves, the small collection of books in the glass-fronted cupboard, the brown velvet curtains –all of these were from Gizela’s childhood and yet, for Marina, they never seemed to swell with any particular meaning. They were simply objects that Gizela lived among, just as she and Dov felt that they, too, were incidental to her life. Sometimes Gizela would emerge from Sura’s bedroom in the mornings and stare at them with mild surprise as they sat at the kitchen table, as if she had not expected to find them there at all. They had the sense that she kept them with her only because she could not think of anything else to do with them.
Gizela had never lived with Marina and Dov before, never bathed them or cooked for them or put them to bed – all of that had been done in the Children’s House on the kibbutz. Very early on they had been taught to be independent, like children in an orphanage or a boarding school. When they moved to New York with Gizela she did not know them on any intimate terms, and there was an odd formality between them. Marina remembered Gizela asking them what they usually ate for breakfast, as if they were house guests whose preferences she must ascertain.
Ben told her once that when Leni came home from London when he was six years old she greeted him with a formal handshake and said, ‘You’ve grown very tall.’ She called him buddy and gave him a toy that was intended for a much younger child. It was as if she were some distant aunt returned from abroad, not the vanished mother who had loomed so large in his remembering. Her absence, and the hush that surrounded her name, had transfigured her and it had amazed him that she was a flesh-and-blood person after all. She seemed uncertain and he could feel her nervousness, Ben said, the effort she was making to sound casual. Leni sat down on the floor with him and they took the toy she had bought out of its box. Leni applied herself with great earnestness to its assemblage. It seemed extraordinary to Ben that this very beautiful woman with her long curled hair and her soft white cashmere coat had consented to sit there with him and build castles out of blocks. He realised that she was trying hard, and the very fact of her trying made him feel tenderness for her, and pity, too. Leni did not know how to be a mother, Ben said. She did not know what she was supposed to do. But he had his grandmother’s example and his father’s unwavering love. He could help her.
Sometimes Marina and Dov would walk from Crown Heights to Prospect Park after school had finished. Often they would stay in the park until it was dark, or too cold to be outside any longer. On one edge of the park there was a playground that was always full of women and children. She and Dov never played on the children’s equipment, they preferred the parts of the park that were still shrouded in wilderness – the lake with its tall reeds and the tangled thickets beyond. But one day they stood by the railing of the playground and watched the mothers pushing their children on the swings, helping them to climb up the ladder of the fort. One little girl had fallen down and she sat there in the sand, an expression of bewildered despair on her face. She could not see her mother and she began to cry. Just then a woman came running across the playground and knelt down in the sand by the child, folding her into her arms. Dov and Marina both saw the terror on the little girl’s face when she was casting around for her mother, and the instant relief when she saw her dashing across the park towards her. They watched this small unfolding drama of despair and rescue with bemused interest. They had never imagined that this sort of comfort might be available to them. For if Gizela did not know how to be a mother, they did not know how to have a mother.
After Dov died and Gizela had gone, Marina was left with the strange archive of their childhood: the boxes full of maps and notes and photocopies, the pictures of Prague and Suffolk they had cut out of magazines, the imaginary family trees they had constructed. All of it seemed so accidental, so marginal and inadequate. No detail they had uncovered had ever mitigated Gizela’s distance from them. They were children who had spent their whole lives watching their mother, waiting and hoping for her to turn back and take their hands. By their vanishing, Dov and Gizela had turned everything that was left behind into a ruinous sort of clutter, a false history. Standing there in the dark apartment, Marina felt like she was the last survivor among the wreckage. That if she did not leave, she too would plummet disastrously beneath the surface. When she cleared out the apartment to move to California, she threw the boxes of papers into the garbage along with everything else. Gizela had forgotten her pale-blue coat and Marina left it hanging limply from the hook behind the front door.
At first Constance kept to the hours of her classes, returning to collect Gabriel soon after midday. She never spoke about what she had learned. Once, Marina showed her a child’s book of letters that Rose had given her for Gabriel, but Constance displayed no glimmer of recognition. She looked at the letters as if they were something far from her. One of the women in a book on Rwanda that Marina had found in the library had spoken of suffering because she was tied to a life that was not the one she was supposed to have. When she watched Constance trailing down the street towards East Harlem, Marina thought she must feel that, too. How terrifying it must be for Constance to have been transplanted here, into a life she could never have imagined. How
had the things she needed to know been passed on to her when she first arrived? Marina had asked her once what it had been like when she first came to New York and Constance only considered her with an inscrutable expression. Marina was not sure if it was because she did not understand the question, or if she could not think of any way to answer it.
One day Constance did not arrive to collect Gabriel until nearly two hours after the appointed time. Marina had made lunch for the little boy and he was playing in the garden when Constance finally knocked on the door. She said nothing about her lateness and Marina thought it would sound like a scolding if she mentioned it. She wanted to ask Constance anyway if she could keep Gabriel longer the following day so she could take him to the Central Park Zoo. Rose was going to walk across the park to meet them and they had planned a picnic for lunch. It was something that Rose had done with Jacob and Leah, and then later with Ben. She still had the old picnic basket and the set of enamel dishes her own children had eaten from on camping trips and holidays. Rose had accepted the presence of the little boy in Marina’s life with great delight, although there was a thread of anxiety there, too. She had started knitting him a sweater for the coming winter. She would make a sweater for Constance as well, Rose said, so that the girl would feel that she was in the circle of their care too. She had always imagined, Rose had told Marina once, that she would have many grandchildren, and it was a great sorrow to her that Leah had never had children. She did not say it, but Marina knew that Rose also grieved that she and Jacob did not have a child together.
Marina felt guiltily that perhaps she should invite Constance to come with them to the zoo, but she did not. She thought of Jacob’s advice about giving Constance the space to love her child. But she could not imagine the girl sitting on Rose’s plaid blanket with them under the trees. It would be a relief to Constance not to be asked, she told herself.
She asked Constance if she could come for Gabriel at four o’clock the next day, and after that she always arrived in the late afternoons to collect him, usually waiting in the entrance hall while Marina gathered up Gabriel’s things and fastened his shoes. She could never be persuaded to stay for a cup of tea or something to eat. Marina had no idea what Constance did in the hours between the end of her class and the time she collected Gabriel. There was nothing she could imagine the girl doing.
The first few times Marina looked after him, Gabriel had dissolved into screaming tantrums when Constance arrived to collect him, sliding to the floor and kicking his legs. But then this stopped and he went home with his mother without complaint. Marina wondered if Constance had threatened him or if he had simply resigned himself to the order of things. She would stand on the front steps and watch the two of them walk down the street together, Gabriel a few steps behind Constance. Sometimes when they reached the corner, the little boy would turn and look behind him before hurrying along after his mother.
In the afternoons Marina would often lie down on the couch by the windows with Gabriel while he slept, his body curled into hers. The force of her feeling for him terrified her at times. It was something akin to falling in love; the same consuming surrender, the same vast tenderness. What she felt for Gabriel was more capacious and potent than her love for Jacob, for Ben, for anyone else. There was no reservation, no part of herself that it was possible to withhold. She wondered, as she held Gabriel in her arms, was it ever possible to love anyone but a child in this way? Sometimes she thought that Jacob was right, that she should have made a greater effort to fortify herself against this. Humming away behind her love for Gabriel was the vertiginous fear of loss. Perhaps that was why it was easier when Constance was not with them – there was no reminder that the little boy belonged to someone else.
She had not told Jacob that she was taking care of Gabriel so often now. It was easy enough to disguise it. When they spoke on the telephone each evening she filled their conversation with other things: the book chapter she had finished, the new Mexican restaurant that had opened on the corner, the film she and Ben had watched together. She always felt a guilty sense of withholding when they spoke, a small kind of treachery. Was this what it was like to have an affair? To hold a secret world inside you and to pretend that it did not exist?
Gabriel would turn three in February. His papers said he had been born on Valentine’s Day. The poignancy of this struck Marina: his life had contained so little love until now. Another term of literacy classes would begin in the new year and Marina had been thinking about nursery school for Gabriel. When she returned to work after the Christmas vacation she would no longer be able to take care of him during the week. There was a very good nursery school at Columbia; several of her colleagues sent their children there. Marina liked the idea that he would be close by her. She knew that Jacob would say that she should find a Head Start program for him in the neighbourhood. Somewhere that Constance could take him and collect him. It would not be the cost of the fees that he would object to, but that she was pushing the child’s mother to the edges of his life. He would say that providing Gabriel with the expensive kind of private education that Ben had received would be a terrible displacement for him and for Constance. It would be another one of those conversations that would end with Jacob looking pained. She wished, Marina realised, that Jacob could share her love for Gabriel. That he would not see it as something errant and misguided, some foolhardy form of trespass.
Marina often thought in these days about a story that the dean of her faculty at Columbia had once told her about her daughter. She and Marina were at a conference in Phoenix together and, because of an error made by the hotel, needed to share a room. The two women were not close and Marina initially felt alarmed at the prospect of such proximity for four days, but they slipped into an unexpectedly easy companionship. One evening they stayed up long into the night, drinking wine and talking. The dean showed Marina a photograph of her daughter, who was the same age as Ben. She and her husband had adopted the child. The baby had come to them when she was only a few days old, but the adoption could not be finalised for six months. This was because the child’s mother had abandoned her at the hospital and a stretch of time was needed in case she changed her mind and returned for the child.
The baby was sickly and unsettled, as if whatever trouble had come into her mother’s life had been passed on to her. The dean sat up through each night rocking her; the little girl would only sleep if she was pressed against her chest. It was a terrifying time, she told Marina. Even so many years later this woman could not look back on it without being seized by an awful anxiety. After the first week she had known she could not possibly relinquish the child. Her claim on the girl might not have been recognised by a judge if the mother returned, but she felt that it was the truer claim nonetheless. If it had come to it, the dean told Marina, she would have taken the child and run. To South America or some other place where they would not be found. Each night for those uncertain six months she would walk up and down the hall of the apartment with the baby in her arms and plan their escape. The things she would take with her. How she might obtain false papers. She didn’t talk to her husband about any of this, the dean said. He would have thought that she had lost her mind. But she would have left him behind if it had come to it.
During those fall days Harlem seemed transformed. The heat of the summer had dissolved and the light seemed clear and luminous. It was the light of mountains and green valleys. The sky felt high and pure, the afternoons very still. In the mornings when Gabriel was with her they would walk across the road to Mount Morris Park. The little boy loved to climb up the great craggy rise of rocks, or to play on the swings on the eastern side of the park. He did not know how to play with other children, Marina realised. Sometimes he would approach a cluster of children and stand on the fringes staring at them with a bewildered sort of fascination. He always hung back, holding on to her skirt, his thumb in his mouth.
One day Ben and Alma came to the house carrying crates full of plants. There were plas
tic pots of herbs and lettuces, small chilli plants bent over under the weight of their fruit, tiny trays full of marigolds. They had been discarded by the grocery store and he had retrieved them, Ben told her. He and Alma wanted to plant a garden. It was not the right time of year for planting but they thought that if they could get the seedlings into the ground they might be strong enough by wintertime to survive the frost. Their seriousness and their careful attention to the task warmed her. What could be more hopeful than planting a garden?
Marina sat with Gabriel while they dug out a square in one of the flowerbeds for a herb garden, another for lettuces, earnestly discussing the best arrangement of plants. Alma wore one of Marina’s straw hats, her hair hanging in a thick braid down her back as she bent over the plants, pressing marigolds in among the green seedlings. Ben knelt beside her, tying the chilli plants gently to tiny stakes with scraps of fabric.
When Ben was fourteen, Marina and Jacob had taken him to Philadelphia. Jacob was at a conference, and she and Ben spent the weekend wandering through the city together, slipping into museums to avoid the frequent rain. At the Rodin Museum she loved watching Ben stare intently at each sculpture, silent and absorbed. He bent over every plaque, reading the accompanying information attentively, his hands folded behind his back. Watching him now, Marina could see the same absorbed attention, the same watchful love for the world. She tried to think of a way that she could let Jacob know that Ben had received all the good he had meant for him. That things would be put right somehow.
In the early mornings a silvery light hung over the backyard. When Marina looked down from her window the garden was mapped out into small squares of green, like a landscape seen from high in the air. A careful patchwork. The plans for the garden grew more elaborate, all of them slipping into the work. Marina went with Ben and Alma to the nursery and they bought more herbs: sage, mint, chives and thyme. Alma chose tomato plants and they staked them against the far wall, beside the nuns’ abandoned grotto. Ben found an old gardening manual in the library and he sat on the steps with the book open on his knees, reading out loud to them about methods of natural pest control and the benefits of mulching with pea straw.