by Belva Plain
The graves lie in a level square of grass cut out of an evergreen grove. Laura finds the marker.
“What does it say?” Anna asks.
“Just the name and the dates of birth and death according to the Hebrew calendar.”
The guide says in English, “You know Hebrew, and your grandmother doesn’t?”
“In my time,” Anna replies, “the sacred tongue was for boys to learn.”
She tries to sort out what she feels. This is, after all, the true reason she has come so far. She remembers how she and Joseph spoke of coming here, how they dreaded the moment when they would stand where she is standing now.
“Did you by any chance know him?” she asks the guide.
“No, I wasn’t here then. But I heard about him.” His hands move in a gesture both rueful and fatalistic. “Our history is ongoing, you see. We need to remember our brave ones. And so on this place we all know about the American boy and what he did that night. Although it was a long time ago.”
It was almost noon. A voice calls in the barnyard and another briefly answers. Birds, which have been flurrying and whistling through the morning, fall still. Heat pours on the scrap of earth where Eric lies, and all over this hard-held land between Syria and Lebanon, whose very tree tops can be seen from where they stand.
“So terrible.” Laura speaks into the stillness. “So terrible, when he had finally found the place where he was happy.”
“He wouldn’t have stayed,” Anna says, with sudden knowledge. “He would have become disillusioned with this, too.”
“You surprise me, Nana. I should think you would have thought this was the right place for him.”
“No. He was looking for something. He would have spent the rest of his life looking for a place to belong, a perfect place, and never finding it.”
“Does anyone?”
“Find it? Oh, yes, some people never even have to look. Your grandfather was one. He was blessed that way.”
Laura’s mouth opens, as if to ask, “And you?” But she doesn’t ask it.
Anna stretches her hand out into the burning air. Blue veins and brown spots disfigure the hand, as with some disease. But it is only age. My flesh, she thinks, mine lying here. Joseph’s and that of his old mother whom, for no reason at all, I never liked. And Agatha’s. Delicate Agatha and her people with their cool, Gentile austerity. Out of that poor young pair, their love and their anguish, came this boy.
“I don’t understand very much,” she says out loud and clearly.
Laura and the guide turn to her in surprise. Then the guide says, “Your driver’s waving. It’s time to go if you’ve a plane to catch.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m coming.”
The others walk to the gate. With consideration and respect they leave her alone. Memorize it before you go: loose sweep of evergreen branches over the wall; two half-grown laurels at the right and a row of geraniums along the path.
Peace, Eric, son of my son, wherever you are and if you are. Shalom.
“It’s always sad to leave a place that’s so beautiful,” Laura remarks, “even when you’ve only been in it a few days.”
They are coming down out of the hills in late afternoon. Below lie the Mediterranean and orange groves cleft by a highway, along which traffic is speeding toward the airport.
“So it’s meant something to you, being here?”
“Oh, yes! You feel, you can’t help but feel, there’s something here. After thousands of years! It’s lasted so long, it gets to you. I didn’t think it would,” and Laura touches her heart.
“Yes,” Anna says. “Yes.”
“Nana, tell me something. I’ve been feeling that you haven’t said anything because you wanted harmony on this trip, but that you’ve been very angry at me all the same. Have you been?”
Anna turns to her. “I was. But I’m not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It just all went away, the anger, hurt, or whatever you want to call it.”
“I’m glad,” Laura says simply.
As always, Anna sees both sides of the question. (Joseph used to complain that she never kept firm opinions.) She knows one thing, though, that you can’t live by slogans. What’s honest for one is a lie to another.
The main thing is to live. Foster life. Cherish it. Plant flowers and if you can’t pull the weeds up, hide them.
“L’chaim,” she says, speaking aloud for the second time that day.
The driver smiles through the rear-view window. “You’re right, Mrs.,” he says. “I’d drink to that if I had anything to drink. L’chaim. To life.”
47
It was not what anyone could call a “proper” wedding. Joseph would have been horrified for more reasons than one. Still, Anna thought, it’s very moving. Laura had wanted to be married in Anna’s garden and she hoped Iris’ and Theo’s feelings weren’t hurt, although they didn’t seem to be. But Iris had never brothered about a garden and Anna’s was lovely, the pears heavy on her famous espaliered trees, the phlox full-crowned in mauve and violet, and on the air a sweetness like cinnamon or vanilla, the bouquet of summer.
The judge was a woman, mother of one of Robby’s college friends. The two young people stood before her, hand in hand, he wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt, she in a long white cotton shift, with her red braids hanging over a white shawl. Like me as a greenhorn, Anna thought. Laura’s face turned up to Robby in simple worship. Just yesterday Iris had stood like that, her solemn gaze framed in lace. Robby began to speak the poem which they had chosen for their wedding service, while Philip played very softly on the portable organ.
“Oh the earth was made for lovers, for damsel and hopeless swain. For sighing, and gentle whispering, and unity made of twain. All things do go a courting, in earth, or sea, or air, God hath made nothing single but thee in His world so fair!” “Emily Dickinson’s one of our favorites, Nana,” Laura had said. “You’ve read her poems, I’m sure?”
Flattering that her granddaughter had been sure! It just happened that she had read some, Emily Dickinson having been one of Maury’s favorites, too, along with Millay, Robinson and Frost.
Now Laura answered.
“Approach that tree with caution, then up it boldly climb,
And seize the one thou lovest, nor care for space, or time!
Then bear her to the greenwood, and build for her a bower,
And give her what she asketh, jewel, or bird, or flower—
And bring the fife, and trumpet, and beat upon the drum—
And bid the world Goodmorrow, and go to glory home!”
No one stirred. The judge began to speak. One wondered what the assorted guests might be thinking of all this. Iris had been terribly troubled, Theo not as much so, yet more than one would have expected from a man who claimed to have no beliefs and no allegiances.
“There’ll be none of us left at the rate things are going,” Iris kept saying. “And when I think of Papa I could cry.”
It was true. Joseph, watching his darling Laura married in such fashion, Laura for whom he had no doubt already imagined a stately wedding of the ancient tradition in the chapel he had built!
But Robby was a remarkable young man, and Joseph was dead. There was no fighting the times; it would be like fighting the tides to try. This was the way it always had been, in greater or lesser degree. Waxing and waning. Some stayed, some went.
For Robby’s people, conservative small-town folk standing quietly in their print dresses and white gloves, for them too this surely was not a first choice. But this was a different time and generation. People didn’t fight to the death for their first choices anymore.
Anna’s eyes roamed over the group, over the young New York girls with flat shoes, and long, straight hair. Their faces were as unmade-up as in Anna’s own youth and as different from their fashionable mothers’ as it is possible to be. Full circle.
Ah, there were the Malones, come all the way from Arizona! He must
be—let’s see, Joseph would be eighty-two, so Malone must be eighty-five. And Joseph always worried so about his health, always said Malone wouldn’t last.
Too bad that one had to wait for a funeral or a wedding to see people whom one didn’t see for years, or never had seen. She had seen the twins—twins again after two generations!—when they had visited Mexico in 1954, but Rainaldo and Raimundo had only been a little more than one year old.
Anna had had a letter a month before, enclosing, as always, snapshots of the increasing family. So many of them, generation after generation! Prospering, too, to judge by the façade of a house which looked more lavish than the ones they had visited, and those had been very handsome houses, indeed. Dena looked very old. The paper was splotched; her sight was failing. But she had wanted Anna to know that her granddaughter’s twin sons were going to be in New York on their way to Europe, and wouldn’t Anna like to see them?
So here they were, one of them speaking no English at all, the other just able to understand and be understood. They also spoke a little Yiddish, learned from their grandparents, but only a little, and Anna’s Yiddish was rusty enough. In their fine, dark suits with black velvet yarmulkes on their curly hair, they stood courteously and correctly. From where she was Anna could watch their dignified, skeptical expressions. She was ruefully amused. They were strictly Orthodox: what could they be thinking? Thinking it wasn’t a real wedding at all, no doubt.
“And so, by the authority vested in me by the State of New York—”
Man and wife. They kissed, as if nobody else were there. Oh, my! And then the congratulations and laughter, more kissing, and it was over. Darling Laura.
She’d wanted bare feet, said she liked the natural look of it in a garden. There had been such a fuss over that, Theo being the most scandalized. “How far out can you get?” Iris had wailed, Iris who was always the first to excuse the innovations of the young. Fortunately, a pair of sandals had come as a present from Steve, handmade white sandals, with a bag and belt to match. He was “into”—loathsome expression—leather handwork on the commune. And because Steve had made the sandals, Laura wore them, which had settled the matter, thank goodness.
Theo walked beside Anna into the house. “It was very lovely after all, Theo,” Anna said.
“It was cockeyed, and you know it.”
“I don’t. It was honest and poetic. Not my style or yours, but theirs.”
“These kids today! These kids!”
“At least your daughter is married, and that’s more than a lot of parents can say these days.”
“Steve could have come to his sister’s wedding,” Theo remarked darkly.
“He’ll come home one day. Maybe sooner than we expect.”
“I don’t know that I can forgive him for not being here today.”
“He wanted to come, can’t you see? That’s why he sent all those things. They’re so carefully made, it must have taken him weeks of work. But he just couldn’t face everyone. That’s the reason.”
“Messed up his life,” Theo muttered stubbornly. “An unforgivable mess.”
Suddenly Anna felt Joseph’s presence, felt in her mouth the words of authority that he would have used if he had been convinced he was right.
“People get into situations they never wanted to get into. And it’s hard getting out. You know that, Theo.” It was the first and only time she had reminded him. It hurt her to do it. But she knew by his silence that Steve would have no trouble from his father when he did come home.
“Look at your Philip!” she cried gaily. “He’s become a man overnight! He seems much older than sixteen, don’t you think? And I thought he played beautifully.”
Laura and Robby hadn’t wanted a reception line, so people simply clustered around them, wandered about the garden and drifted into the house where the champagne had already been opened.
Anna took a glass and handed another to Theo. “Come, drink! Every man’s upset at his daughter’s wedding. There’s nothing wrong with you, in case you’re thinking it’s odd to be feeling depressed.”
Theo grinned. “As a matter of fact, I was.”
She patted his arm. “You’ve an awful lot to be happy about, Theo,” she said, not meaning to lecture him.
She saw that he understood. They were both looking over at Iris, who was standing at the fireplace talking to Janet’s parents and some others. She could have been photographed for one of those “social” magazines in which gracious ladies stand before fireplaces or under the curve of a stairway. How Iris would have been amused at that!
“What are you laughing at now?” Theo inquired.
“I was thinking about that woman who asked you one time why Iris didn’t have her nose fixed, since you were ‘in the business.’”
“I wouldn’t have done it even if Iris had wanted it.”
Yes, Ruth had been right, all those years ago. Now in middle age an authentic beauty had come upon Iris. It was at this moment almost astonishing and she understood that Theo was seeing it, too. Iris’ dark hair, which had gone only a little gray, was parted in the center. She had worn it that way for so long that Anna couldn’t remember when it had been different.… Her face was all pure curves: the high strong arch of the nose, the eyebrows, the fine mouth. When you looked away you wanted to look back again at her face.
Now people were crowding in from the garden, thrusting out hands to shake and cheeks to kiss, giving greetings and compliments.
Someone, some friend of Theo’s?—(Too old.) Friend of Joseph’s? (Too young. My memory certainly isn’t what it used to be.)—paused for conversation.
“What a marvelous house! And the grounds! One doesn’t expect to see grounds like these so near New York these days.”
“Ah, but it’s changed! When we first moved here, it was so quiet you could sit outside at night and all you’d hear was katydids. Now you hear the traffic on the highway.”
The man sighed. “I know. They’re building a development in what used to be an apple orchard across the road from me. It’s very sad,” he said, and moved on.
For a moment she was left alone. When I die, she thought, they’ll sell this property. No one wants these big houses anymore. They’ll tear it down and build garden apartments or else turn it into some sort of business. There’s an insurance company at the corner already.
It had been tactfully suggested that perhaps Anna might want to sell the house and take an apartment. It was the suggestion she had herself urged upon Joseph when he had the first heart attack. He had resisted as strongly as she did in her turn. No, the house was home; she was able to afford it and she wanted to stay in it. She had planted trees: birches, locust and firethorn. There were all those books in the library, and the things in Joseph’s round room that mustn’t be disturbed, his collection of pipes that would go to the grandsons. And what would she do with Albert? Such a big dog, in an apartment! No, it was unthinkable.
Iris was still talking at the far end of the room. She must have been saying something amusing, because people were laughing. Then she laughed too, clapping her palms together in a pretty gesture. How far she had come! Truly, truly, prayers are answered, Anna thought. Well, sometimes they are, at any rate.
But to think that Iris would be the one to manage things! No one else in the family had any idea of business. Dear Theo never knew whether he had a nickel or a dollar in his pocket. So it was Iris who had learned how to deal with property and investments for the estate. No doubt she would know what to do with this old house when the time came.
I hope it won’t be torn down, Anna thought. Perhaps there will be someone who can use it. And there will be a child’s swing under the ash tree again. They’ll keep the feeders filled for the winter birds.
“Nana,” Laura said, “have you met Robby’s aunt? This is Aunt Margaret, his favorite. He talks about her so much, and I talk about you, so it’s only right for you to meet and know each other.”
“Margaret Taylor.” A stout, friendly
woman, with the dignity that large women can have, took Anna’s hand. “Your little bride is darling. We all love her already.”
“I’m glad. Sending them so far away when they get married, one can only hope they’ll be loved.”
“They’re going to New Mexico, I understand. They’ll adore it. The most marvelous colors, and all that space.”
“I’ve heard. I’ve never been farther west than Pennsylvania.” Strange. In all these years. And we could have afforded it. Why didn’t we?
“You grew up in New York, Mrs. Friedman?”
“I came to this country when I was seventeen and I’ve lived in New York or near it ever since.”
“Such an exciting city! I wish we could manage to come more often, but somehow one never finds the time. When I was young I used to visit; my older brother, fifteen years older than I, had a friend from Yale who was just wonderful to us all. For years, at Christmas, when wed come for a week of shopping and opera, they’d insist that Mother and my sister and I stay at their house. Paul Werner, his name was, and they lived in the most sumptuous apartment on Fifth Avenue, near the museum. I’ve never seen such a place. Perhaps you knew the family?”
“I know who you mean,” Anna said, and the woman sped on. “They had quite marvelous art. I was an art major at college and I was so impressed! It was all Hudson River School; it went out of favor for a while, but I needn’t tell you how it’s prized today. He had so much charm, Paul Werner. Young as I was, I sensed it. Too much charm for the woman he married. She was a fine person, but awfully dull, I thought.”
“You haven’t seen him since she died?”
“Oh, no, not since I was in my twenties. But my sister’s kept in touch; she saw him just a couple of years ago, in Italy. He had a villa on Lake Maggiore, you know, an old house filled with Renaissance furniture and modern art. That’s the style these days, to mix incongruous things, isn’t it? Oh, Donald, come meet Laura’s grandmother; this is my husband.”
“And whom are you ladies talking about? Paul Werner? I couldn’t help but overhear.”