The County of Birches

by Judith Kalman

  “What can you see in him?” Apu morosely pondered aloud. “Lili, a girl of your background. Your great-grandfather stood up before the aristocracy in Vienna to plead the cause of Jews to own land in its Hungarian dominion. A pious, orthodox Jew, but a man of the world. A girl who comes from such stock, what can you see in a backward boy who doesn’t have the character to look a person in the eye? A boy who isn’t Jewish!”

  Mummy and Apu said it often, in fact, between themselves and in front of Lillian. “The boy Lili has fallen for isn’t a Jew.”

  “Who says I’ve fallen!” Lillian fumed.

  But it was obvious. After the prom the muffled voice called more frequently, and with increasing expectation of being understood.

  * * *

  In her final year at McGill Lillian was called in to see her thesis advisor. She came home in the evening, excited by the news. Snow glistened on the tips of her hat. That winter we wore fur hats that buckled under the chin and burst around our heads like soft, tentacled space helmets. We called them eskimo hats, but it was a year before the moon landing and perhaps the vogue was as much inspired by the space race as by our weather. My eskimo hat was fake fur, of a uniform length like a dense crew cut. But Lillian’s was the real thing, long-haired raccoon that fanned bulbously around her face. Coming in from the outside, sparkling and bright with cold, her head glowed in the dark portal like a human Christmas ornament.

  The hat was a gift from Alan Bradshaw. This was the third Christmas in a row that he had bought Lillian something Mummy prudishly and disapprovingly referred to as an intimate gift because Lillian would put it on her body. First he gave her a silver bracelet with engraved Siamese dancers and little dangling earrings that matched. Last year, a jet pendant. The fur hat was his most extravagant present so far. It was a declaration from a boy who was sparing with words.

  Mummy and Apu didn’t accept Alan into their lives, but they bore him like other Canadian tribulations. In the summers, he was allowed up for the weekends to the cabin we rented in the Laurentians. Mummy couldn’t help but show off her cooking to a fresh, unjaded palate. She broke him in with a cold, dayglopink borscht that later even she admitted wasn’t entirely fair to a beginner. Mutely brushing himself off, as it were, much as he would from a quarterback sack, Alan managed afterwards to gird himself for each new obstacle she set before him: stuffed peppers; goulash; chicken paprikás; palacintas; cold fruit soups (his favourite it turned out was the same as Lillian’s, cherry); floating islands the Hungarians called “bird’s milk,” which would have daunted the uninitiated, but by now he was game; chestnut purée coiled like worms, and the same colour, into a hillock capped with whipped cream. He was a good eater, that much could be said for him. And it was saying something; it showed in more ways than the obvious that he had inherent good taste. What favour Alan hadn’t been able to win with conversation, he tried to earn through appetite. Searching, despite their compunctions, for a common ground, Mummy and Apu admitted that the boy might have something to recommend him.

  Lillian stamped the snow off her leather cossacks but brought the fresh blast of winter with her into the house. She went straight into the kitchen where she knew she’d find Mummy.

  “Professor Dawes asked to see me,” she exhaled, rubbing her hands in anticipation of the warming effect of good news. “He said he’s putting my name forward as the history department’s candidate for a scholarship!”

  “Scholarship. What do you mean, scholarship?” Mummy sounded grouchy. “You will get your degree this year.”

  “A scholarship to go to graduate school,” Lillian continued, not registering Mummy’s irritation. “In the States. He says I should apply.”

  “What are you talking about, Lili?” Mummy burst out as though Lillian had made an embarassing blunder. “You’re not a child any longer. Look at you, you’re a woman. You can’t play at being a schoolgirl forever.”

  When had the rules of the game changed? No one had told us. The best news Lillian and I brought our parents always had something to do with marks. It was the most valuable gift we could give them, as though high marks were a moral imperative. Now Lillian had hit the jackpot, just as Mummy rendered it worthless.

  “I don’t know what you think life is all about, Lili. What you need is a practical profession, make a little money so you can settle down and raise a family. Graduate school in the United States!” She made it sound indecent. Then she slipped in lethally, “Think about Alan. You would go away and leave him after leading him on all this time?”

  The pelt hung from Lillian’s hand, its wet fur spiked in startled clumps. “What do you care about Alan! You never wanted me to go out with him. This isn’t about Alan!”

  The outside door slammed. Lillian had gone back into the cold and dark. Looking out from the living-room window, I saw her walk down our path and onto Boulevard de la Loire. She went as far as the corner of Place Croissy and turned back, then walked as far the other way. She paced halfway up and down our street in each direction as though there were a wall on both sides that prevented her from going farther. I left the window, went into my room and closed the door behind me. If I were my sister, I wouldn’t want anyone staring at me when I had to come back inside.

  * * *

  Levine’s was a ladies’ clothing boutique on downtown St. Catherine Street. The telltale name on its awning and the Jewish salesladies who commandeered its floor were an illumination for Lillian. The store was openly Jewish, yet prospered. The summer after graduating from McGill, Lillian came under the influence of Levine’s. They recognized a find when it presented itself.

  “Weisz—you’re a Jewish girl? You can work the cash?” Here was an educated Jewish girl who didn’t consider herself above selling clothes, and could speak French like a native Québécoise. “When can you start?”

  It wasn’t a liability at Levine’s to be obviously Jewish in a public place. Its staff lived among other Jews in the neighbourhoods of the west end. They accepted Lillian at face value, a Jew born of a Jewish mother and a Jewish father. So what if she lived on the French-Canadian side of town? This alien concept went straight to Lillian’s head like wine in a teetotaler.

  Lillian brought home stories all summer about Levine’s. Levine’s kosher butchers, Levine’s synagogues, Levine’s Jewish neighbours. Mummy and Apu were taken aback. Lillian had never shown any indication of interest in Jewish tradition. Her regard for these Jewish strangers was an unexpected boon they hadn’t hoped for once Alan appeared on the scene, and for the first time in years, he was temporarily out of the picture.

  The Levine ladies knew plenty of eligible Jewish boys. There were sons, nephews, cousins. They teased Lillian and nuged: “Try it, you might like it.” She had heard the same line used on Alan as he stared at a plate of comestible art he would never on his own have associated with being edible.

  Lillian bloomed. Her slim figure swelled under the attention. Giddily, she entertained the idea, but stopped short of actually going out with one of these boys. She and Alan had been going steady for over four years.

  “Cheating, what cheating?” Mummy rationalized. “You’re not God-forbid going to sleep with any of them. It’s just a movie. You’d go to see a movie. You don’t think Alan’s going to go out to a movie once or twice while he’s working in Ontario this summer? You think he’s going to watch TV every night at his uncle’s house?”

  Lillian submitted. It would have been rude to rebuff the generous offers of Levine’s. “All right,” she warned, “but just this once.”

  Mummy couldn’t get over the gift that had fallen out of the blue. Apu smugly chided her disbelief. “You see, if you have faith, God will provide.” Mrs. Levine and her pink bouffant hairdo was an unlikely transfiguration even for the Lord, but Mummy was too pleased to bother to cut Apu’s high-mindedness down to size.

  “I’ll just wear what I’d normally wear to the movies,” Lillian shrugged off Mummy’s wardrobe suggestions. “It’s no big deal. And certa
inly no reason to get your hopes up.”

  But hopes were up, they were up very high, even Lillian’s. She was infected by Mummy and Apu’s rare good spirits. The atmosphere at home was uncharacteristically light. Mummy’s feathers didn’t ruffle when Apu brought home French pastry from La Savoureuse. Lillian looked from one to the other as the mille-feuille left crumbs in the corners of their mouths. They had so few pleasures, how could she deny them?

  In the week before the date, Alan happened to call from Ontario. Apu tapped on his watch twice to remind Lillian it was long distance. Finally, he gestured questioningly with his hands, indicating she was making Alan spend more money than was seemly. Lillian had consulted with Laney by phone a number of times before the date, but hearing Alan’s voice, audible and intelligible to her in a way that eluded the rest of us, must have made up her mind.

  By the assigned day, Lillian had stopped eating. Mummy was uneasy. “You want to look like a skeleton? At the best of times your backside is no bigger than a pinhead. What’s the matter with you?” she fretted. “This isn’t a funeral.”

  At three o’clock that afternoon, Lillian called. Mummy’s mouth pursed as she listened on the phone, and tight lines radiated from it, drawing her cheeks together. “So, if you’re sick, come home. But if you’re love sick,” she said as though she had a bad taste in her mouth, “I can’t help you.” Lillian was sick. In the toilet in the back room at Levine’s she had retched and heaved and brought up a thin, sour fluid.

  “When it’s your turn,” said Mummy, spinning around at me accusingly as though I were Lillian’s accomplice, “don’t be so stupid.”

  * * *

  I was angry at Lillian. I had been ever since she went away to teachers’ college and left me alone with Mummy and Apu. She had abandoned me in a cell with my parents and I wouldn’t forgive her. The curtains were drawn, closing out the light Lillian had brought in with the books she had pushed on me but for which I’d developed an appetite, just as she’d anticipated. Over time the Abbey Girls had given way to Heidi, then Little Women, and later Jane Eyre and Emma. Lillian was my torch. She lighted the way ahead. She brought the world into our hermetic household—young people, ideas exchanged at the university, books read, movies seen, opinions that drove our parents up the wall. The house was stiflingly quiet, except on weekends when she came home and quarrels flared. Lillian ignited when she crossed the threshold of the house, and it didn’t take much of a spark from Mummy or Apu to fan her flames. The year before Lillian married, I no more existed for her than the clothes she’d left behind in her closet.

  Her wedding took place in the rabbi’s study, a room that had seemed large and imposing to Mummy and Apu when they visited the rabbi to negotiate the terms of a reduced-rate membership to the wealthy Reform congregation. Fifty guests had to cram inside. It seemed out of keeping for our family to have pulled in that many people—friends, colleagues, members of the family diaspora who had turned up over the years in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. Perhaps now Lillian would stop complaining about being lonely.

  She entered through the ceiling-high door, and we squeezed against the walls so that, led by my parents, Lillian could pass through to the chupah that had been set up beside the rabbi’s desk. Mummy and Apu at each elbow piloted her around the canopy as though she were blind.

  Nothing, not even the dress fittings or the photographs taken before the wedding, prepared me for the sight of my sister in her wedding dress. All that white like a blizzard that obliterates landmarks. Lillian’s face wiped out behind a fountain of gauze. I heard the voile of her train caress the rabbi’s carpet, the swish of each step press the constricting silk of her gown. This was what she had wanted. It was what she had clamoured for. Insisted. What she had spent a year fighting about with Mummy and Apu whenever she came home from teachers’ college. I was sick at the thought that she was going to bring her French, her Latin, her years of British history, all her precocious scholastic excellence to encircle a boy standing waiting under the chupah.

  It scared me, the sight of my sister subsumed in that monolith of white froth. She had never played with dolls like I had. She had not fastened then refastened with cunning tiny gold clasps the filmy train of a bride doll’s mantle. I was the one who had fashioned fantasies from bits of shiny taffeta my aunt in England had used to pad the parcels of our childhood, because Auntie Christine was something of a seamstress too. Small bundles of rolled textiles tied up with ribbon or lace were wedged between the real presents of books and dolls. Unravelling a strip of maroon velvet, I would pray I wouldn’t waste it and hack it to shreds, but at least approximate the regal confection for which it was obviously intended. While I worked my pedestrian daydreams in tight, crooked stitches, I felt secure knowing that my sister had managed to escape to a higher cerebral plane where she would, in due course, lift me up to join her. That together we would rise above what my parents had been reduced to by history and circumstance, and regain the poise and mastery that was theirs before the war destroyed everything.

  Alan gazed at the floor, as was still his wont. He had taken a Hebrew name in order to marry my sister—Abraham, the name of the first Jew, also in a manner of speaking a convert.

  A PROPERTY OF CHILDHOOD

  My mother’s kindergarten was the showcase of our school. It was palatial, the size of three regular classrooms. The longest wall was window and light. Below the windows, a two-tiered shelf ran its length, offering toys that were clean, unbroken and not missing any parts. A standard-sized door in the far wall led outside. Dwarfed by the room, it admitted a single parent at a time, who my mother made sure was quickly evicted. The kindergarten was her domain. It had a piano, and enough instruments in a capacious leather-lined case to supply an army band. At the annual teachers’ convention, she skipped all the workshops but visited each display in the convention hall, order book in hand. My mother’s kindergarten was a gallery. Two of the walls were papered floor to ceiling with her children’s art. It spilled into the hallway outside, filled the display cabinets in the school’s foyer. The consultant from the school board selected the finest pieces to decorate the halls in the board building downtown.

  My mother couldn’t help gloating as she told my father, “Gibbs he just sniffs. Mrs. Lenahan the consultant says—right in front of me—‘Mrs. Weisz is a gem, Mr. Gibbs. She makes all of us shine.’ That’s why he sniffs. If I wasn’t there, he would show off that he found me. Of course that isn’t true. I asked for a school in our neighbourhood.”

  My mother was quick to feel slights. “That Pratt woman thinks she can frighten me because I am a foreigner? I told her my words are broken yes, but my eyes are good. I saw her boy smack the other, not just one time. And Gibbs he is standing there smiling in his moustache. He says, ‘Mrs. Weisz runs a tight ship in the kindergarten.’ But why is he smiling? He makes me look like a fool.”

  When the principal came into our classroom and we scraped briskly and obsequiously to our feet, I knew something the others didn’t. I knew he couldn’t be trusted.

  * * *

  “Good morning, boys and girls.” Heat melted the back of my neck. Thirty wooden chairs scraped over linoleum. My mother had entered my classroom. Sly grins and sideways glances at me. Was I to lilt with the rest, “Good morning, Mrs. Weisz”? Mortifying to stand up for your own mother, but then it would be worse if you were the only one sitting down.

  “The big snow today makes your teacher late. But we can sing some songs—yes?—to keep us warm, then we will do a little work. What do we sing first?”

  Heads swerved around to see if my hand was up. My raised hand was a fixture in the classroom. My mother sang pleasantly. She played the piano in her kindergarten and she could be heard when you took a note to the office. Kids standing in front of the office for a minor offence grinned at me and mouthed the nursery song “A-B-C-D-E-F-G.”

  My mother’s accent was painful because it made her appear vulnerable. When the other kids said, “You got all
those Es on your report because your mother’s a teacher,” it wasn’t about me; they were pointing at her difference. My mother prided herself on not interfering with my schooling. She was indignant about slurs. “You should have seen that Gibbs. Second year in a row the Jewish child gets the Excellents, and he can do nothing. But you think he would say to me even a little ‘Congratulations’? He says to the Polish one, you know, Borkowski with the big house on Boisvert Street, how his Mandy was good.” What pained me was that others might see in her a handicap where there was none. The principal made me nervous. I felt he was waiting for us to slip up.

  “Hey, Mrs. Weisz, Dana wants to sing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’.”

  “You are being rude, no?” My mother bristled. In these classroom encounters our eyes didn’t meet. It wasn’t clear to whom we were first accountable.

  * * *

  My mother tried to teach me to draw, but I couldn’t form a stick figure. I didn’t know how to wield a paintbrush. The paint ran, smeared, made a mess. As a last resort she gave me a colouring book, but my crayon went over the lines.

  “Look,” my mother said in exasperation, pulling the crayon from my hand, “the sun is yellow, not blue. Otherwise what colour would you make the sky?”

  Giving up, she bought me shoes instead, red, shiny and smooth. There wasn’t a crease or a crack in them. The buckle on the strap was brassy bright, neither chipped nor scratched. They were beautiful. Against white knee socks, and worn with the navy box-pleat tunic and white cotton school blouse, they were the clarion call of child-splendour. My mother said, in Hungarian, that colour was a property of childhood. My perfect, splendid new shoes, with the buffed black slab of heel that clicked down the school hallway—the rich, new-leather smell of them—when I looked in the mirror they leapt at the eye from under my white socks. How could something be so lovely as this red beside white?