“Well,” Phoebe says, frowning, “I guess you’re one of the lucky ones, Simon, never finding anything a struggle. But if someone needs my help, why wouldn’t I give it? A simple act of generosity can revive a flagging confidence, restore a belief in goodness. So what if I sometimes give away my expertise? It usually balances out in the end. I just sold four paintings for twenty times the value of the original legal bills. You can’t take a month of your own salary and do as well as I’ve done.”
The family’s two lawyers are off, Phoebe questioning whether Simon remembers that he followed her into the law, not the other way around, and despite his dramatic trips abroad to foreign courtrooms, she doubts he has much feeling for the actual works he recovers. Simon keeps saying, “You’re wrong, Phoebe, totally wrong.” Harry usually functions as the voice of reason for these two, but not today. Let them battle it out; let them find their own way to an accord, without him.
At the other end of the table, Elena and Roma are talking about kindergarten, or about some program that comes before kindergarten, which Harry thought was called nursery school, but apparently is not.
Next to him, Camille is entertaining Lucy and Isabel with stories about the Trobriand Islands, telling them about how in Trobriand society it is taboo to eat in front of others: people take their food away and eat by themselves.
“So they don’t, don’t, don’t have parties like us?” Lucy asks, and Camille says “No, not at all. Weird, right? We love having parties, don’t we?”
“Wedowedowedo,” Lucy chants, her voice climbing the scale, going higher and higher, and Harry wonders if her voice might reach the register heard only by dogs. Roma has mentioned to him her concern about how Lucy snatches onto a word, or a phrase, and can’t stop repeating it, and Lucy is still saying, “Wedowedowedo …” until Camille hugs her tight. And that hug slows the words, until they stop, and his first granddaughter is quiet, sitting on his second child’s lap.
“So,” Camille says to the little girls, “do you want to hear about the very special old women on those islands who know how to make magic spells?”
“Savah?” Isabel says, pointing to Roma, making Camille laugh.
“Well, Savah’s not old, but yes, special women just like Savah.”
Roma hears Camille invoking her name and smiles, then blows a kiss to Harry. Beneath the animated conversations, words she intends only for him travel across the length of the table. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? That you and I created all this together.”
He wants to cry out to Roma, “Yes, yes, my love, it is unbelievable that we created all this together.” He wants to cry out to them all that he’s lost, but an iciness is spreading through his insides, freezing the blood in his veins, and he is seeing only the darkness descending, the destruction when the truth about him comes to light. His thoughts reducing down to a single breathless hope: that they are all strong enough to endure whatever the future may hold.
Then Isabel is tugging at his hand, which he finds curled tight into a fist, her tiny fingers inching in until her palm is resting in his palm, warming him up. “Sabba, nap,” she says, looking up at him, the feathery little-girl lashes like fans. He looks down into her deep brown eyes, and though it cannot be possible, for she is only two, he is certain they are reflecting the weight of his world.
TWENTY
I’LL TAKE HER IN,” Elena says, rising from her chair, but Harry shakes his head.
“Story?” Isabel says.
“Of course,” Harry says.
“Sleep well, honey,” Elena says, stroking Isabel’s head.
“Happy nap, sweetheart,” Simon says, kissing his daughter’s cheek.
Phoebe, Camille, and Lucy chime in, too, as Isabel holds tight to Harry, her small hand clutching his much bigger one, her trusting eyes heavy and ready to close.
Tallish grandfather and minute granddaughter bonded together; it is a sweet tableau, but Roma is troubled. Subdued since he came home, unnaturally serious during the water games, and even now, at lunch, Harry was so quiet amidst the chatter and jocularity. Is it exhaustion from the hours of tennis he played in the heat? Introspection because of tonight’s award ceremony? She would like to suggest he take his own afternoon nap, but he would pooh-pooh the recommendation, say, “I am strong like Russian bear.”
Roma watches how oddly he’s holding himself as he walks toward the house with Isabel, as if his mind has detached from his corporeal form. It’s the reverse of Noelani, who can gain no distance from the flesh of her being. Roma wants to follow them in, check on Harry, then check her voicemails again to see if Jeanine McCadden has left a message. Later she will wonder why she didn’t heed her concern, but Lucy is undressing right where she stands, pulling off her bright yellow sundress, pulling down her bright yellow bathing suit, then running naked and yelling, “Water, water, water, water, water,” a bright angel flinging herself into the pool, and Simon, watching his daughter, says, “Mom, we need some advice.”
Roma turns her full attention to her son and says, “Lucy’s needing to be naked is a natural trait she’ll outgrow, and it’s healthy neither of you makes a big deal of it. You want her to be proud of her body, not ashamed. Of course, the difference between private nakedness and public nakedness will be important to teach her.”
Simon looks over again at Lucy, slick as a dolphin in the pool, then back to his mother. “We weren’t worried about that, but should we be?”
“Not at all. I thought that’s what you wanted to ask me about.”
It’s not at all what Roma thought Simon wanted to ask her about, but given the circumstances, five-year-old granddaughter stripping naked without thought or compunction, she decided to throw in a little unsolicited professional advice.
“No, but now I can’t get the image of her being a naked teenager out of my head, having to lock her in her room because we’ve failed to teach her about when it’s okay to be naked and when it’s not.” What he actually imagines is a line of boys snaking around their house, waiting for a glimpse of the developing nymphet.
Roma puts a hand on Simon’s arm. “Society will take care of that, for better and for worse. First, she’ll insist on wearing exactly what her friends wear, then she’ll absorb the kind of positive and negative attention she receives if she dresses more individually, or shows more skin, or less skin. It’s a tightrope you’ll both learn to walk, and so long as she’s raised to respect her physical being, everything will be fine. I guessed wrong, so what’s on your mind?”
“That kinder-readiness program I was telling you about,” Elena says. “I’m worried about what happens if she starts the program a week late? Are we setting her up to be an outsider?”
Roma has seen it so many times, young parents, new parents, worried about the wrong thing. She thought she was going to be asked about Lucy’s repetitive speech pattern, which she’s been studying since Lucy began to talk. She would have told them repetitive speech can be a sign of delayed development or developmental difficulties, especially if accompanied by an aversion to eye contact, a preference for viewing things from the corners of the eyes, squinting, covering ears against loud sounds, body rocking, difficulty interacting with others, which typically results in difficulty relating to peers. Roma hasn’t seen Lucy display any of those behaviors associated with the kind of self-talk she engages in, and she seems, at times, to be cognitively advanced; still, if they were parents in her office, not her son and daughter-in-law, she would suggest they remain on the alert to Lucy making unnatural and sustained body movements, or shying away from looking at people, or developing an inability to relate to other children, or evincing an overly strong resistance to change, or if her desire to be naked continues and she begins complaining that she hates the feel of cloth on her skin.
“I wouldn’t worry about her joining the class a week late,” Roma says. Lucy’s speech pattern could make her a prime target for bullying, but why worry them now about something that might happen whether she joined th
e class on time or late? Children were cruel to those perceived as different, but in the early weeks, most were too stunned by the shock of school to become aggressors immediately. The conflicts, the aggression, and the bullying usually took time to emerge.
“That’s reassuring,” Simon says, and Roma looks to Lucy, on the step in the pool, uttering, “Swim, swim, swim, swim.” She would like to ask whether their efforts at redirecting Lucy’s repetitive speech are working, then thinks: Keep your mouth shut. One piece of unwanted advice a day is enough. It’s a double-edged sword Roma feels at her neck: relating to her children and grandchildren as mother and grandmother, while incapable of not viewing them all through her highly trained psychological lens.
“But why would she have to join the class late?” she asks.
Simon smiles at his mother. “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to hear about it.”
“You’re being very mysterious.”
“Being mysterious is good, isn’t it?”
Roma laughs. “Being mysterious is sensational, honey. Life is always more interesting when it’s filled up with mysteries.”
TWENTY-ONE
ISABEL INSISTS ON HER pajamas. Harry places her butterfly suitcase on the twin bed she sleeps in and unzips it. “Do you think they’re on the top or the bottom?” and Isabel answers by tossing out the neatly packed clothes until she finds tiny blue-flowered pajamas.
She holds up her arms so Harry can lift her sundress over her head, and then holds her arms up again, so he can slip the pajama top down. He holds up the bottoms and she holds out her hands and says, “Me, Sabba.”
He drapes the clothes over one of the dressers, sets the suitcase on the floor, folds back the duvet, and Isabel climbs in. She fluffs her pillow the way he does, then turns on her side, looks at him with her enormous eyes, and says, “Story.”
Harry said of course to a story when his granddaughter asked him outside, but can he calm himself sufficiently to tell one? Does he have in his head any story to tell? He hears his father’s smoke-graveled voice again, his opening for the tale about Cantor Simon Tabornikov, the name that Harry inexcusably used, that he heard in part this morning, that always began with the words “Your great-grandfather’s brother trained as a cantor”—and Harry, his body cricked and tight from fear and fright, tries to stretch out next to his granddaughter on the twin bed Simon slept in for years. He puts his big hand on his granddaughter’s small head, aware that Isabel is surely too young to remember anything he might say. But if by some chance in the future she recollects being cradled in her sabba’s arms at the age of two and hearing his words, he ought to tell her a story worth remembering. A story of blind derring-do, and flawed wisdom, and the fallible human need to believe in only the best version of oneself. A true story. And he understands the story he should tell, and he opens his mouth to usher forth that story, though he doesn’t know it yet in full, and then his voice is spilling into the quiet room.
“Your sabba is, at his core, a fine man, a serious man, a man who always wants to do the right thing, which means that he wants to be good, and do good, and offer goodness and succor to those in need, and that’s nice to say and it’s nice to hear, but it’s possible the story begins in a different way …
“Your grandfather, your sabba, me, Harry, known in childhood as Hiram, grew up being taught the ways of our people, learning right from wrong. And for many years, I did no wrong, until the day I lost track of myself, and became a man unshackled from the Commandments. And with that unshackling came my worship of the wrong things, the graven images, the false idols. My father, and his father, and his father before him, they would have said I was practicing nachesh, taking actions based on signs and portents, using my own version of charms and incantations. And that I was practicing kisuf, magic, using herbs and stones, for which I substituted their modern form—information. They also would have said that I consulted the ovoth, the ghosts, and the yid’onim, the wizards, to attain what wasn’t mine to attain. And they would be right. I trampled upon our ancient six hundred and thirteen mitzvot, not every one of them, not those no longer applicable in our time, but those that remain as powerful as they ever were. I failed to trust that if I heeded what was right, what I knew to be right, and if I did right, I would have ended up exactly where I am, but without the stink of disgrace, the taint of dishonor, the ignominy of shame. Oh, my sweet child, it happened so fast, so easily, and some of the details have yet to be revealed, and I don’t know the ending—”
TWENTY-TWO
THESE ARE THE LAST of the dishes,” Camille says, coming into the kitchen, plates piled up to her chin. They rattle on the stone island when she sets them down.
“What are they talking about out there?” Phoebe asks. Her mother, brother, and sister-in-law are still at the table, chairs pulled close.
“About Lucy’s preference for being naked. Mom said she’ll outgrow it.”
Phoebe sighs. “I think it’s sad life is all about outgrowing things.”
At the mall, and at the table, when she was sparring with Simon, which the two of them love to do, Phoebe’s eyes were bright and clear, but now they look dull. Camille can’t remember ever seeing her sister’s eyes dull, filled with any kind of pain. But pain is what crosses her mind.
“Is everything okay?” Camille asks.
“I’m just remembering being a kid. How easy things were.” Phoebe looks at the glass in her hand, then loads it into the dishwasher.
How easy things were? Things have never not been easy for Phoebe.
Camille tells herself to stay quiet, but out it comes. “Phoebe, things are easy for you now, like they’ve always been. You were the perfect child and the perfect teenager and now the perfect adult, with a life that works perfectly. Some people just get lucky. You got lucky.”
Phoebe shakes her head. Camille is wrong. Phoebe does not have a golden life, not in the ways that matter, the way her siblings have lives that matter. Simon has a golden life, not because of his genius, his going off to college young, graduating first in his law school class, making equity partner at thirty, but because he found true love. Because he’s happily married with gorgeous children. And Camille has a golden life, not because of her brilliance, or all her awards and honors, but because she has always followed her own path.
“Maybe it would have been better if everyone hadn’t thought of me as a golden child,” she finally says.
Such a Phoebe response, Camille thinks. “I said perfect, not golden. There’s a difference.”
Phoebe starts laughing, and the laughter brightens her eyes.
“There is a difference,” she says. “You’re right. I’d rather have what you and Simon have, golden lives.”
Camille thinks how wrong Phoebe is, then turns on the faucet and slides the plates into the sink.
They work quietly for a while—Phoebe rinsing and stacking the dishwasher, Camille wrapping the leftovers, putting them into the fridge.
“Are you lonely now that Valentine’s gone?”
“It’s fine,” Camille says.
“Are you going to visit him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t have any problem with being apart for six months, with all that distance between you?”
“In the world of any kind of anthropology, six months isn’t even a grain of sand.”
Phoebe stares at Camille and nearly says to her sister that if their situations were reversed, she’d be on a plane to South Africa in a heartbeat. She nearly says to her sister that a handsome man at the gas station wanted to talk to her and she pretended she was French, without any command of the English language. She nearly says to her sister that the last time she went on a date, more than a year ago, she sat across from the man with a frozen smile on her face, aware she had completely lost the concept of conversational rhythm. She nearly says to her sister that all she wants is a future with marriage and children, but there won’t be either with Aaron Green, because he doesn’t exist,
because she made him up in an inane appeal to the god of love.
Camille stares at Phoebe and nearly says to her sister that she thinks she might have had some kind of nervous breakdown, a possibility unacknowledged until this minute standing here in the kitchen at home in Palm Springs, and she can’t understand her collapse when once she considered herself invincible. She nearly says to her sister that since the start of the year, she’s been working as a caregiver to the dying, spending her days in a lilac house on a steep hill, and even though it’s helping her, she’s still not herself. She nearly says to her sister that she doesn’t want to visit Val in South Africa, because he wants to marry her, and the notion is so paralyzing that she’s trying to pretend he never asked, because all she imagines is having to act as if the depression is nearly gone, when it’s not. She nearly says to her sister that she can’t picture the future when the most she can handle right now is barely living the most hateful of all things, a quotidian life.
“You want to—?” Phoebe asks.
“Yeah. Let’s go float in the pool.”
Phoebe drops in the soap packet and turns the dishwasher on. “So,” she says, searching for a safe topic, “what are you wearing tonight?”
“Oh, Phoebe,” Camille says. “Don’t ruin everything.”
Ruin everything? Phoebe thinks, as she follows Camille outside, where their mother now sits alone at the table, watching Lucy dunking herself madly. Why would asking Camille what she’s wearing tonight ruin everything? Low-level anger roils inside of her, a slight raising of her hackles; then it all drains away. Why is she pretending she doesn’t know what she was doing? She knows perfectly well. She asked Camille what she’s wearing tonight to shift the balance of power back to herself. Because it’s spectacularly maddening that Camille can so easily slough off the very idea of a man who loves her, hasn’t given a thought to going to visit Val. Why should her sister have love in her life if she cares so little about it? And that’s why she asked that supposedly casual question, to put Camille on edge, make her uncomfortable, force her to face something, maybe that no one gets everything in their life, a truth Phoebe has been dealing with every single day for years. Camille has everything that is unconventional—the top-notch degrees, the fantastic career that has her living on distant islands with fascinating people, her scintillating Russian lover—and what does Phoebe have? The known and familiar life she opted for when she abandoned Elijah, and an enviable lover who is completely made up. But her phenomenal fashion sense, that’s where she reigns over her sister. And because she’s become a small-souled liar, because she’s jealous that Camille set high-flying goals for herself and has achieved them all, she wanted to hurt Camille just a little, and it was wrong and childish and she needs to find her natural better nature this moment.
The Family Tabor Page 17