How to Fall
Page 19
“The kids’ apartment out there . . . it’s adorable,” said Lucienne.
“With all that clutter, how can anybody tell?” said Harry.
“Mostly Jotham’s paints and canvases, that clutter,” Justin bravely admitted.
“Miriam drops her briefcase in one room, her pocketbook in another, throws her keys on the toilet tank,” said Lucienne. “I raised her wrong,” in mock repentance.
“They like their jobs. They both seem happy,” said Judith, turning large khaki eyes to Harry—a softened gaze. Justin said, “They do,” and Lucienne said “Do,” and for a moment, the maitre d’ if he was looking, the fiddler if he was looking, anybody idly looking, might have taken them for two couples happy with their connection-by-marriage. Sometimes what looked so became so. If Jotham was a bit high-strung for the Savitskys, if Miriam was too argumentative for the da Costas, well, you couldn’t have everything. Could you? “Many people have nothing,” Harry said aloud, startling Judith, alerting Justin’s practiced empathy—“Yes?” the doctor encouraged—and not at all troubling Lucienne, who was on her fifth breadstick.
The appetizers came—four different dishes full of things that could kill you. Each person tasted everything, the Savitskys eager, the da Costas restrained. They talked about the Red Sox, at least the Savitskys did. The team had begun the season well, and would break their hearts as always, wait and see. The da Costas murmured something.
The main course arrived, and a bottle of wine. Judith poured: everyone got half a glass. They talked about the gubernatorial race. The da Costas were staunch Democrats, though it sometimes pained them. “No one cares enough about the environment,” said Judith. Harry nodded—he didn’t care about the environment at all.
The fiddler fiddled. They talked about Stalin—there was a new biography. None of them had read it, and so conversation rested easily on the villainy they already knew.
Harry finished the rest of the wine.
They talked about movies that both couples had seen, though of course not together.
There were some silences.
Lucienne would tell the story tonight, Harry thought.
She would tell the story soon. The da Costas had never heard the story. She had been waiting, as she always did, for the quiet moment, the calm place, the inviting question, and the turning point in a growing intimacy.
Harry had heard the story scores of times. He had heard it in Yiddish and in French and occasionally in Spanish. Mostly, though, she told it in her lightly accented English.
He had heard the story in many places. In the sanctuary of the synagogue her voice fluted from the bima. She was sitting on a Survivor Panel, that time. She wasn’t technically a Survivor, had never set foot in a Camp, but still. He’d heard it in living rooms, on narrow back-yard decks, in porches attached to beachfront bungalows, in restaurants like The Hussar. Once—the only instance, to his knowledge, she’d awarded the story to a stranger—he’d heard it in the compartment of an Irish train; their companion was a priest, who listened with deep attention. Once she’d told it at the movies. They and another couple arrived early by mistake and had to occupy half an hour while Trivia questions lingered on the screen. That night she had narrated from his left, leaning toward their friends—a pair of Lesbian teachers—on his right. While she spoke she stared at them with the usual intensity. Harry, kept in place by his wife aslant his lap, stared at her: her pretty profile, her apricot hair, the flesh lapping from her chin.
Whatever language she employed, the nouns were unadorned, the syntax plain, the vocabulary undemanding: not a word that couldn’t be understood by children, though she never told the story to children, unless you counted Miriam.
He could tell the thing himself, in any of her tongues.
I was four. The Nazis had taken over. We were desperate to escape. My father went out every morning—to stand in line at one place or another, to try to pay the right person.
That morning—he took my brother with him. My brother was twelve. They went to one office and were on their way to a second. Soldiers in helmets grabbed my father. My brother saw the truck then, and the people on it, crying. The soldiers pushed my father toward the truck. “And your son, too.” One of them took my brother by the sleeve of his coat.
My father stopped, then. The soldier kept yanking him. “Son?” my father said. “That kid isn’t my son. I don’t even know him.” The German still held on to my brother. My father turned away from them both, and started walking again toward the truck. My brother saw one shoulder lift in a shrug. He heard his voice. “Some Goy,” my father said.
So they let my brother go. He came running home, and he showed us the ripped place on his sleeve where they had held him. We managed to get out that night. We went to Holland, and got on a boat for Argentina.
The dessert came. Four different sweets: again they shared.
Lucienne said, “We will go to Santa Fe for the Holidays.”
Judith said, “We will go for Thanksgiving.”
“And the kids will come East for... in December,” said Justin.
The young couple spent half their vacation with one set of parents, half with the other. “More room in their place,” Miriam told Harry and Lucienne. “More food here.”
The bill came. They paid with credit cards. The nervous waiter hurried to bring their outerwear—two overcoats, and Judith’s down jacket, and Lucienne’s fur stole inherited from her mother.
“Judith,” said Lucienne. “I forgot to mention your father’s death.”
“You sent a kind note,” said Judith in a final manner.
“My own father died when I was a little girl,” said Lucienne. “But when my mother died—I was fifty, already—then I felt truly forlorn, an orphan.”
“Dad’s life satisfied him,” said Judith.
The fiddler had paused. A quiet moment. Justin leaned toward Lucienne.
“You were a little girl?” he said softly. “What did your father die of?”
The patrons were devotedly eating. A calm place. A growing intimacy.
“Where?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder, and lifted her lip too. “Overseas,” she said. She stood up and wrapped herself in her ratty stole; and Harry had to run a little, she was so fast getting to the door.
THE AUTHOR
Edith Pearlman has published over one hundred stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among The Greats, won the Spokane Prize for Fiction.
Pearlman’s short essays have appeared in the The Atlantic Monthly, The Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Yankee. Her travel writing—about the Cotswolds, Budapest, Jerusalem, Paris, and Tokyo—has been published in The New York Times and elsewhere; but she is a New Englander by birth and preference. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and now lives with her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts. She has two grown children.
Edith Pearlman has worked in a computer firm and a soup kitchen; she has served in Brookline’s Town Meeting; her hobbies are reading, walking, and matchmaking.
Copyright © 2005 by Edith Pearlman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:Managing Editor
Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearlman, Edith, 1936–
“Winner of the 2003 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.”
eISBN : 978-1-936-74706-1
I. Title.
PS3566.E2187H69 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004006221
Manufactured
in Canada
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
Partial funding has been provided by the Kentucky Arts Council, a state agency in the Commerce Cabinet, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.