The carpet handlers moved off to work with another customer while Henry and Costanza sifted through the subset of possibilities. They were all fairly neutral, and mostly geometric. Henry would have been happy with any of them, he told Costanza. He fully expected them to go on having this lightweight conversation about decoration until he heard himself say to her, “There’s something I’ve been wondering…”
“All this pattern is going to be too busy against those chairs of yours? I know it’s a concern. But I think it’ll work.”
“It’s not about the rugs.”
She leaned against one of the stacks.
“I’ve been wondering whether you’ve given up wanting to have a baby or whether you still—whether it is something you still think about.”
Several reactions passed across Costanza’s face in rapid succession. Surprise; then confusion; then something that looked like pain. That was what Henry thought he saw anyway. For a moment he wished he hadn’t asked her so directly, but it wasn’t his nature to sit on certain questions when they occurred to him. He needed to know what he needed to know when he needed to know it.
When she didn’t answer, he added, “I hope I haven’t offended you by asking.”
“You haven’t offended me, Henry,” she said slowly. “But I am curious why you’re asking me this now.”
“Maybe I started at the wrong place. Maybe what I should have said first—what I should have said first is that I love you.”
She waited for him to continue, since he appeared to have more to say.
“I cannot stop thinking about you. The more time I spend with you, the more human I feel. The more—hopeful. I feel—I feel that, with you, I have a chance to be alive in a way that stopped, for me, a long time ago, probably farther back in my marriage than it’s easy for me to admit.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve been having these feelings pretty much since I met you, and I’ve been trying to understand them for myself and communicate them to you, even as I’ve been aware that it may be too soon, that we don’t know each other so very well at all. But I just can’t reconcile that worry with what I’m experiencing. What I’m feeling—for you.”
He paused. “The only constant I’ve had in these past years has been the clinic and my kids. I’ve let my friendships go, my house … and I want more now. I want to live. Don’t you?”
She seemed to have been holding her breath as she listened. Breathing now, she said, “Of course I do, Henry.”
After a moment she added, “But you assume that, when I met you, I had not been living.”
“Is that so wrong?”
She didn’t answer him at first. Then: “No. Not entirely.”
“I want to be with you, Costanza. And if being with you means making a family with you, then I want you to know that I’m open to that too. I think it’s important to establish that from the get-go.”
Costanza looked at him with shining eyes, and she nodded.
“I wish I knew what that nod meant. What your eyes…”
“It means that I hear what you’re saying. It means—I want to make sure I understand. You’re asking if I want to have a baby—with you.”
“Yes, with me. Of course with me.”
“Isn’t it a little—a lot—too soon?”
“I’m only asking you to think about it. To think, maybe, possibly, eventually, about trying. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that time is against you—against us.”
“No,” Costanza said softly. “You don’t need to tell me that.”
Costanza looked down at a rug as if some kind of hieroglyphic were woven into it that it was important for her to decipher or translate yet was beyond—way beyond—her skill set.
“And if we tried … and failed…?” Naturally her mind went there, first of all. To that place; that experience. That unhealed wound.
“Then you would come in, obviously, and let me run some tests.”
“And if those showed—if they showed, definitively, that I couldn’t have a baby, what then? You wouldn’t want to be with me?”
“You can’t have truly heard what I just said if you’re asking me that.”
She flushed. “I’m sorry. I did hear you, and what you said was moving. It’s just that it’s all a little confusing. The speed with which you think … and act.”
“I’m a man, Costanza, but I’m also a physician who specializes in issues of fertility. It may be clumsy of me to merge the two, but what can I say, this is how I’m made.”
Her chest tightened. It was easier to nod than to speak.
“Biology, in these matters, has a certain degree of control over destiny, but biology can be more malleable than you expect. As long as you know what you’re doing, and do it early enough. Personally I believe that it’s best to decide your own life when you can, rather than having it be decided for you. Which is basically what happens to so many of the women I see.”
She was listening closely. “Henry, I feel … I feel that this is too—”
“Too fast,” he said, deflating.
“Too much. I don’t know. And at the same time not enough.”
“What do you mean, not enough?”
“Isn’t it a little—strange—yes—strange to open up this kind of conversation without our first having—”
“Committed to each other.”
She nodded.
“There’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask you. I almost asked you in bed last night.” Henry’s face turned subtly pink. “All morning I’ve been hoping that by suggesting we come here you were thinking along the same lines, thinking that it didn’t make sense for you to move back downtown but to stay with me. To live with me. To give us a proper chance.”
Costanza thought about the intensity of feeling that passed between them in the last few evenings, when the boys had left and they lingered over their wine. And the talk that continued long after they went to bed. And the lovemaking that followed. She was so unused to things in her life aligning that she had to review them to assure herself that they were true.
“This is a question I can answer more easily. And it’s yes. Yes, Henry, I will live with you and I will give us a proper chance. I will do that much. Yes, I will.”
* * *
Despite her minimal experience of what life was like in Henry’s household, Costanza sensed a distinct change in the atmosphere about an hour before Leopold Weissman was due to arrive for dinner with his caregiver, a Jamaican woman named Lorna. Costanza was sitting in the living room, trying to read but instead thinking, still thinking, about the conversation she and Henry had had that morning at the rug store, when she perceived a tautness in the air, a palpable sense of anticipation that was broken, in spurts, by flurries of activity: two showers running in close succession and then some harried banging around. Between Henry and one of the boys—Costanza couldn’t be sure which—several heated words were exchanged.
At about six thirty Henry emerged. His beard was newly trimmed and he was wearing a freshly laundered shirt. He asked Costanza if she would help him set up the table. Set up, not set. What this meant was moving into the center of the library the drop-leaf table that Costanza had previously noticed and wondered about. Afterward, from a cupboard she had not seen in her earlier survey, Henry retrieved a linen cloth and matching set of napkins, china with a delicate pattern of garlands and flowers, footed crystal glasses, silver flatware and candlesticks: so it was possible for Henry to have more than eight people over, after all.
He explained that the china, glasses, and linen were gifts from his parents, and that Leopold liked Henry to use them when he came to dinner, even if the meal was ordered in from a deli on Second Avenue. “It’s a kind of re-creation,” he said. “This is how the table was set when my father was a child. It’s how my grandmother’s house was run, and it’s how he feels houses should still be run half a century later and half a planet away.” Henry lit a match to soften the bottom of a taper, something Costanza’s grandmo
ther used to do. “It’s easy to please Leopold in such small matters. The large ones—less so.”
By a quarter to seven Henry, Justin, and Andrew had gathered in the living room. The boys were freshly showered and newly shaved, their hair combed, their jeans traded for khakis. Henry and his sons sat in a line on the sofa, one two three. It was the most like a family that they had seemed to Costanza since she’d seen them together.
The house phone rang. The boys sat up straight; Henry stepped into the hall. When he came back, he said, “The deli’s coming up.”
The deli came up. Henry tipped the deliveryman and left two warm, aromatic bags on the kitchen counter. He turned down Costanza’s offer of help. “Later,” he said, as he resumed his place on the sofa.
“Did you order his cream soda?” Andrew asked his father.
“I ordered the cream soda,” Henry answered.
The three continued to sit in their silent line. Henry glanced at his watch. “Maybe the car was running late.”
“You called the usual service?” asked Justin.
Henry nodded. “Why don’t you play something for us? You know how much I hate waiting around.”
Justin retrieved his violin from his bedroom. In a single flourish he had it balanced between his chin and shoulder. Two quick adjustments to the tuning pegs, and he was off, just like that producing a sound of such depth and ease that it seemed to originate as much from somewhere in his body as from the instrument in his hands. The music—Bach—was tender, far more tender than Costanza expected it to be. She was impressed by the speed with which Justin became so decidedly at one with the sound he was making; but almost as notable was the way Henry watched his older son, the way he looked at him as if he were hearing him play for the first time.
The bell rang again before Justin had finished the piece. As abruptly as he began, he stopped. “Ugh.”
“That was exquisite, Justin,” Costanza said. “From one of the partitas?”
“Number two and about a million miles from exquisite. Maybe I’ll try again after dinner.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, Justin,” Henry said as he headed toward the entry hall. “You always have been.”
“My numero uno fan,” Justin said.
Through the arched opening between the two rooms, Costanza watched Henry open the door and then stand there, as though at attention.
The boys shuffled over to join their father. A minute later a gravelly voice could be heard saying firmly, “I prefer to do it on my own.”
Do it meant walk into the apartment. On his own Leopold somewhat unsteadily came through the door and stopped to be kissed on his right cheek, first by Henry, then by Justin, then by Andrew.
Costanza saw him in profile first. The profile was bold, with a high forehead, a sharp nose that evoked Henry’s, and a solid chin. Something about the shape of Leopold’s head, or his bearing, or both, was regal, almost aquiline. It wouldn’t have surprised Costanza to see a plume of feathers cascading down the back of the old man’s skull. Instead he had hair; silver and abundant, neatly combed, parted, and tucked behind his ears.
Costanza didn’t see Leopold’s eyes until he had turned around to face her. By then he had been followed into the apartment by a refined-looking older woman with rich dark skin and hair through which, here and there, white strands twisted and turned: Lorna; “our godsend,” Henry had called her.
Lorna, their godsend, was holding Leopold’s cane. Once he had entered on his own, he was apparently willing to take it back. He pivoted toward the living room and looked Costanza over with icy dark eyes. “I am Leopold, and you are Costanza. I will be just a moment.”
He stepped int0 the powder room and closed the door.
“He always washes his hands as soon as he arrives,” Henry explained to Costanza. “It’s left over from the camps.”
“They were pestilential places,” Costanza said.
Henry shook his head. “The water was filthy. It wasn’t about cleanliness. It was about holding on to civilized habits.”
Everyone stood waiting for Leopold, with his civilized habits, to wash his hands and emerge from the powder room.
When he reappeared, Leopold said to Henry, “You got deli?”
Henry nodded. “I got deli, Father. Yes.”
“And my cream soda?”
Henry nodded again. “Would you like it now?”
“In a minute.”
Leopold turned to Justin. “Your father says you have something to discuss with me.”
Justin shot a dark glance at Henry.
“I thought it would be easier if I prepared him,” Henry said.
Leopold said to Henry, “I think I’ll have the soda now, after all. Maybe Lorna can help you unpack the dinner.”
As soon as Henry and Lorna disappeared into the kitchen, Leopold said to Justin, “I’m not blind, you know. Two years you don’t have a girlfriend—and look at you. They should be taking numbers.” He looked around the apartment. “So where is he, this young gentleman?”
“He might stop by later. I think you’ll like him. He’s an excellent musician.”
“What instrument?”
“Violin, like me. Some piano.”
“You make music together then!”
Justin reddened.
“Well, I can’t like someone I haven’t met, now can I?” Leopold leaned forward on his cane. “In the building across the street from me in Warsaw there lived my friend Mendel, a dancer. A very good dancer. We sat in the first row at his recitals, I could see the perspiration flying off him like sparks.” Leopold’s fogged eyes looked off into the distance. “A fagele and a Jew. That was a bad combination in my time.”
“This time could be considered your time too, Grandpa,” Justin said.
“Possibly, but not by me.” Leopold turned to Andrew, his face brightening. “And you, boychik, what news?”
“No news.”
“I’ve decided which class you should take for your elective next semester.”
“Let me guess. Twentieth-century history. The Second World War, maybe?”
“No. Fifteenth century. The Wars of the Roses.” Then: “Of course twentieth-century history. What else?” Then: “Girls?”
Andrew shook his head.
“You’re not a fagele too, are you?”
“I don’t think so, Grandpa, but the way things are going…”
“Oh, come on now. The one with the glasses, the librarian—gone for good?”
“It seems so.”
Leopold produced a sound. In English it might have been something like blech; but it wasn’t English.
“What about you, Grandpa?”
“What about what about me?”
“Any girls?”
“Ha.” Then: “Go, both of you, help Lorna and your father,” he said to the boys. “Make sure he puts out the mustard. He always forgets the mustard.”
The boys obediently headed toward the kitchen. “Not Dijon—French’s,” Leopold called after them.
He turned to Costanza. “Funny, isn’t it? Dijon is French, but French’s is American. Let’s sit.”
She offered him her arm. Surprisingly he took it. When she looped his arm through hers, she found herself looking, as how could she not, at a patch of his forearm where the skin differed in color and texture from the rest.
Leopold noted her glance. “I was awake when they went on. And I was awake when they came off.”
In the living room he indicated one of the easy chairs. Costanza walked him toward it. Before he sat down, he used the tip of his cane to whack the skirting, which was folded back over one corner, into place.
It was a simple chair, but Leopold sat on it as though it were a throne.
He pointed to the left end of the sofa. “This way you’ll be on my good side.” Then, appearing to understand that the sentence could be taken in more than one way, he clarified, “For my hearing.”
It was not as though Costanza thought that getting on Leo
pold’s good side was going to be quite that easy.
She sat down where he indicated. He focused his slate-colored eyes on her. He seemed to be reading her, her face and her body, more than looking at her. “You are not Jewish.”
“No. I’m not.”
“You’re Italian.”
“Half.”
“Which half?”
She gave him the facts.
“But you’re light.”
“Yes.”
“That’s your natural hair color.”
“Yes.”
He looked her over once more. “No children?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want children?”
First the son, now the father. “I don’t know. It depends.” As the boys were still in the kitchen, she decided to add, “I might try.”
“My son tries. Every day. He tries to replace what they took away.” Leopold paused. “I know what you’re thinking. He does not make Jewish babies alone. But a lot of them he makes. Thirty, forty percent. This is New York. Manhattan. He takes care of his people. And not just his people—twenty percent pro bono too. Women with no means also have a right to reproduce. No one knows about that. Henry is a good man. Responsible. He has helped all people and he has helped in particular his people. A bisl.” He paused. “It means a ‘little.’”
“Yo, ikh vays.”
“You speak Yiddish?”
“A bisl. My husband was Jewish. And anyway I translate. I pick up languages. Bits and pieces.”
He gestured at the room. “Translate this.”
“What do you mean?”
“What went on, in this house. Put it in plain English.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t following him.
“The wife, venomous. Sneaking around with another man under my son’s nose, then bloodying him in a fight for the boys. Not how a Jewish woman should act. She broke him. Broke his spirit. Took the wedding china, the rugs, and the tchotchkes too. But not my dishes and silver, not my furniture. My furniture she did not touch.”
What Is Missing Page 12