“What?”
“Know,” says my mother.
Nana’s vigorous footsteps invade the front hall.
“Come on, Nana,” I inveigle her as soon as she walks in. “Hang out with me.”
She deigns to sit.
“What would revive us?” I ask her. “Tea?”
I make hers medium dark, pouring it exactly four minutes into steeping.
She loops her finger into the handle. “Do you still like yours so black?”
I’m surprised she remembers. “I haven’t changed. In the little ways.”
“Nor in the big ones,” she says.
“At least I’m consistent.” I am trying to retrieve my provocation for old time’s sake.
“Yes,” Nana states, “you were always boy crazy.” Her jaw, as she raises her head to look at me, is pugnacious.
I cannot decide if I should sacrifice myself in order to restore her.
“You,” she says, “still remind me of someone.”
Sandy’s visitation marks the end of all restraint. “I’m nothing like your sister. Did I ever steal Tam’s boyfriends?” Au contraire. “Did I borrow her wedding clothes and ruin them? You’re the one who’s boy crazy,” I say wildly. “You’ve always liked boys better than girls. You probably wished I were a boy when I was born.”
I expect Nana to deride me. When she doesn’t, a purity of terror descends upon me.
She looks down at her tea.
As always, I feel the need to be outspoken before her composure. “I know you’ve had the natural sorrows,” I tell her, thinking of Grandpa and of her first love. “But this death is the first—”
“No, it’s not,” she says shortly.
I find the discipline to match her reserve with my own.
Each of us is waiting for the other, as if we have been engaged in the most courteous of conversations. Nana’s posture is again unbending. And yet she would not allow herself this idleness if she did not want to speak.
“Is the tea strong?” I say inanely. She shakes her head, then nods, another portent.
“Nell used to have an expression,” Nana tells me. “She never drank liquor: ‘I’ve spirit enough without it,’ she would say. But whenever she had a problem—and Lord knows she had her share—she would pour herself a cup of tea and decree, ‘A little brandy for the old girl.’ I wish I could tell you it set her straight.”
I carry my own cup to the table and, as I have done all my life, wait until Nana is ready.
“I never thought he was right,” Nana says quietly.
Laurie? I ask myself, but she continues.
“They didn’t believe me. In those years, doctors were gods, and mothers—women—were just to be tolerated. I’m not an intuitive person,” she tells me unnecessarily, “but I was a scientist, trained as an observer. I knew something was the matter.”
Since my childhood I have longed for Nana to tell me a secret, about the romance of her youth, about her flapper heyday. But I understand from my clenched body that what is about to transpire will not be some overdue girlish confidence.
“It’s been fifty-seven years,” she says, “and I think about that tiny boy every day.”
My mother is sixty; my uncle fifty.
“When the doctor said, ‘I want to send him for tests,’ I started praying. I prayed with all my heart. And when he died—”
My own heart collides with my ribs.
“—it took the starch out of me. They wouldn’t let me sit shiva—the baby was too young—but I sat, believe me. And I made people come to see me. When I got up, I was a different woman. Before, I had known suffering as a cause, abstractly, for other people. Now I knew it stamped in my flesh.”
She hesitates. I am afraid she will unravel and that I will not know how to comfort her.
“If it weren’t for your grandfather—” Her chin is high.
“What did he do?” I am walking across the kitchen mechanically, counting floor tiles—one, two, three and a half.
“‘Don’t pray for a different ending,’ Grandpa said. ‘Pray for the strength to bear what we were given.’”
“Hard,” I tell her.
“Truthful. Everyone else was reassuring. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have other children.’ But I didn’t want other children. I wanted only him. For a long, long time I refused to think about another. That was the prescription in those days, to get pregnant right away, as if nothing had happened.”
Nana cannot stop talking.
“Thank goodness your grandfather was patient. I threw myself into my work—and made a lot of progress, I must say. It took me nearly ten years to be ready again. At thirty-nine, I was considered a medical hazard, but I paid them no mind. Did I ever tell you,” she resumes the impassive tone I know, “that before the war, pregnant women would go outside only after dark?”
She allows me to take her papery hand, which I do not relinquish. My mother pushes open the door, looks at Nana’s face, at mine, and withdraws. My father, seconds later, mimics her. Behind the closed door they speak in muted voices, intimate syllables I cannot decipher.
Nana follows my gaze. “They have a lot to talk about now,” she says.
“I hope they don’t fight.” I revert to another era. “It’s a good thing they’re divorced. I hear the death of a child can really break up a marriage.”
“Not always,” Nana says.
“I’m a jerk,” I say instantly. “A tactless jerk.”
“Sometimes,” Nana says, taking no notice of me, “sorrow is even more binding than joy.”
My mother, entering a second time with Gil and my father behind her, looks like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. “Glad it’s over?” I interpret her face.
“Yes and no,” she says.
“Is it me, or is everyone a little strange this morning? Not you, Nana,” I backpedal.
“Maybe we see that it’s time to get on with our lives,” says my mother.
I am mystified.
“Are you ready to go back?” Gil asks.
“I haven’t thought about it. But I’m sure it will be odd.”
“Will Simon meet you at the airport?” says my father.
My mother glances at him and then looks down demurely. I would love to believe she is hinting to him about not pressuring me, but subtlety is not in her lexicon.
“We never meet each other at airports.”
“Reunions can be nice,” Gil says.
“I guess so.” I sound dubious.
“They haven’t had that kind of relationship,” my mother pronounces.
“What kind?” Nana asks.
“Romantic. It’s been more—”
I listen, bemused, for her explanation.
“—practical,” my mother concludes. “Grown-up.”
“Grown-up can’t be romantic?” my father says.
Who is going to change the subject?
“Croissants anyone?” my mother asks cheerfully.
We all laugh. “Croissants,” I say, “are very romantic.”
We are clearing our plates when the doorbell rings.
“Why don’t you get it, Eve?” says my mother.
I am immediately suspicious. There is something overly knowing in her tone that I do not like. A premonition about Laurie gives me pause, my hand on the knob. Surely he would not be complicit in my mother’s unwitting plot of a grand farewell.
Like an elderly woman who lives alone, I lift the batik to look through the etched pane in the front door.
There, his earnest face looking back at my shocked one, is Simon.
FIFTEEN
AND SO IT COMES TO PASS THAT INSTEAD OF A ROUND in my old neighborhood with my family of origin, I am pacing the subdued morning street with Simon. My mother and my father, arm in arm and no doubt agog, are behind me, with Ben and Gil bringing up the rear.
Simon and I have already fought about the drama of his showing up, uninvited, “like some stupid Mr. Darcy,” I contend.
He is uncustomarily speechless in response to that charge.
“You’ll never understand,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he says reasonably, keeping up with my vicious stride.
“Because now I’m an only child.”
“What do you think I am?” he says.
“You never had siblings. You didn’t undergo a change of status.”
Simon looks behind him as if someone is stalking him, a tendency I realize is characteristic.
“We’re in the heart of residential Toronto,” I say. “Who do you think is tracking you, except members of my prying family?”
“Old habit,” says Simon.
We walk together. I have to admit: it is unexpectedly consoling to have him here. I point to a corner thick with trees. “That’s where I hid behind the car, and my parents thought I was dead.”
“But I did,” he says.
“Did what?” I take his hand to guide him across the street.
“Did undergo a change of status,” he explains. “Before I was born.”
“Your mother had a miscarriage?” I say, disoriented. “You were one of twins?”
“I am”—he stands still—“the fifth child of my parents, and the only one alive.”
“Metaphorically?”
“Literally,” he says, as though I have called him a liar. “My father lost a daughter and a son, and my mother lost two children; I don’t know what kind.”
“Lost?” I say idiotically.
“Lost, you North American. The war.”
I have to sit on the curb. Since I am holding his hand, now gripped in mine so unrelentingly he cannot loose it, he is bent over me awkwardly.
“You okay?” a woman calls out from the open window of her car with un-Canadian nosiness.
I wave her off with a gesture I hope looks normal.
Simon sits down beside me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you like that. In fact,” he seems surprised, “I didn’t mean to tell you at all.”
“Ever?” I say, surprised in turn. “It’s quite a fact to withhold.”
“I don’t talk about it,” he says. “My parents never told me.”
I pose the obvious question.
“I found a snapshot in his wallet. I wasn’t looking for it,” he defends himself.
“I’m not judging.”
“I asked my mother, and she told me about my father.”
“But not about herself?”
Simon shook his head. I am astonished to see his tears.
“We don’t have to talk about it, either.”
“I don’t know much more. Every night I heard my father screaming. I thought everyone’s father called out German names while he was sleeping: ‘Valter.’ ‘Dora.’”
I look at him—his narrow, nervy face, his dark eyes brimming beneath his tweed cap. If he threw up his hands, he’d look like that little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.
“Aren’t you supposed to circle the block?” Simon asks me.
“I think so, but I can’t remember why.”
“You’re returning to life,” says Simon. “Going back into the world after staying in the house for seven days.”
“I can’t escape,” I cry out. “I can’t bring her back.”
“Tam?”
“Winifred,” I say. “She died too young, and even when I get my degree she’ll still be dead.”
“Undeniably true. Which means you might as well finish.”
The eros of renunciation: Surrender that, too?
Simon’s incisive face is beautiful.
“All right,” I say, as if he is forcing me. “I will. Must everything be so complicated?”
Not a word.
“And why is your silence so alarming? Can’t you pretend you’re a regular person?”
“Let me think.”
I groan.
“Okay, I’ve finished thinking. You’ll never hear a more straightforward sentence than this one,” Simon declares.
“Try me.”
“Eve,” he says. “Will you marry me?”
Look who is mute now.
Decades ago, Nana rests in the shade of the cottage porch, and this is what she sees: Her sister, Nell, standing at the well in brilliant sun, the grass beneath her bare feet glittering with water as she pumps coil after glassy coil into the pail. Nell’s arms flash as she raises the handle of the pump and draws it down.
Across from her is a young man, a man who is wooing Nana. While Nana watches, Nell anoints him from the glinting pail. He flicks drops from his forehead, from his cheeks.
Nell is laughing as she cups her hands. The water she tosses at him falls from his hair in jeweled beads.
He looks bewildered.
Nell’s hair has loosened, shining copper strands falling about her shoulders. Her white dress is beginning to grow translucent. Already, the bodice is plastered to her skin. Her slip straps emerge from the thin fabric, and then they, too, dissolve. Nana, squinting, can see symmetrical dots of rose beneath Nell’s chemise.
Then Nell’s liquid skirts part at the thighs. In glorious midsummer, the dress has turned to flesh. Nana, her face pressed against the screen, contemplates the shadowy heart at the place where her sister’s legs meet.
Nell picks up the pail and, disregarding the young man’s protests, dances toward him. As she runs, shimmering wings of water dash from the pail’s lip. On the emerald lawn she appears naked, triumphant, leaping hair and gold skin, and the darkening triangle, explicit, magnet of Nana’s attention.
The young man peers at Nell as she lifts her chin to the heavens. Then she looks at him directly, her profile outlined in light, mouth softening.
Nana is motionless as he thinks. Then, slowly, he clasps Nell’s wrists and raises her arms, crossing them back against her chest in an X of supplication.
As the man who will become my grandfather walks with resolution toward the house, Nana observes his deliberate gait, step by considered step away from her sister, and decides.
“Yes?” says Simon.
We have completed the circle and are at the front door.
“No?” he adds, reluctantly.
“Maybe.” Decode that, smarty-pants. “When I finish my dissertation, I may as well.”
He looks at me and cannot help laughing. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he says.
Having nothing, yet possessing all things: Winifred was given her source and revelation.
My mother, who must have passed me on the way home while I was staring at Simon in stupefaction, is at the door the instant she hears my key.
I do not even wait to take off my coat. “You knew he was coming,” I accuse her.
“Naturally,” she says.
My mother hugs Simon and motions toward the living room, looking smug. Immediately, my uncle presents himself. “There you are,” he says to my mother. “And you,” he turns to me.
“And you?” He walks up to Simon, who holds out his hand in introduction.
My uncle can scarcely contain himself. My father is next, with Ben on his heels.
“Meet the family,” I say to Simon.
“He just happened to drop by,” I tell them helpfully. “Do you want to interrogate him now or later?”
Simon shakes one offered hand after another. “My intentions are honorable,” he says. “Where’s your grandmother?”
I dare not leave him alone with my blood relatives. “Who is going to find Nana?”
“I will,” says Gil, with mischief in his eyes.
“They’re all I have,” I say to Simon.
And here is Nana, perfectly coiffed and turned out, as usual.
“Delighted to meet you,” says Simon.
Nana chooses one of her chilling glances, but he merely looks amused.
Simon is not afraid of Nana, I inform Tam.
While I’m talking to my sister, Nana and Simon embark on an animated conversation about advances in organic chemistry, yet another subject about which he seems to know an
inordinate amount. They are sitting side by side on the couch, chatting away incomprehensibly.
I see how it is. Death is the ultimate choosing: This, not that. Him, not her.
He is winning her over, I tell Tam.
To which she replies from beyond: “I told you so.”
© Eugene Weisberg
NESSA RAPOPORT was born in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and a collection of prose poems, A Woman’s Book of Grieving. Her memoir, House on the River, was awarded a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She lives in New York with her husband, artist Tobi Kahn.
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