An unendurable silence set in, and my father quickly ended it with his favorite tension breaker: “Vould you like some vodka?”
“Yes,” Mr. Beltrafio cheered, “vodka on the rocks.”
My father laughed as though Mr. Beltrafio had just tickled his armpits and poured vodka into our gold-rimmed Russian shot glasses. My parents at last seemed to settle into themselves. The shot glasses glistened like old ribald friends from the motherland, murmuring of upcoming festivities. My father churned out another abbreviated toast: “To new love, to our children, to zeir happiness and healths!” We clinked our glasses together, but Mr. and Mrs. Beltrafio retained their stifling nervous calm; only their polite smiles zigzagged frenetically at the edges of their chins.
“Um, do you have any ice—” Mr. Beltrafio attempted his request again.
“They drink it straight, Hal,” Eddie said, blushing from his father’s insistence.
“But I don’t,” Mr. Beltrafio snapped at his son. Mrs. Beltrafio’s mouth involuntarily curled into a grin.
“Of course, we have ice,” my mother sang and ran to the ice box.
“Why aren’t they drinking?” Grandmother cried out in Russian, “what more do they want from us?”
“Ice,” Bella snickered.
“You shouldn’t have brought out the vodka,” my mother said to my father in Russian, “it’s not their thing.”
“What, I can’t drink vodka in my own home, when my child is about to get married again?” my father exclaimed.
“Please, already, can we please switch to English,” I begged.
But no one seemed to hear me. Eddie gulped down his shot in seconds and, following Igor’s lead, took a spoonful of the cow’s brain stew. My mother cried out, “Whoooh” and Grandmother emptied her glass with heroic speed. My father was already pouring us seconds, while the Beltrafios were slowly sipping their vodkas on the rocks, still making no movements toward the stew. My mother rose and miraculously returned with a new dinner for them, consisting of sandwiches of Russian bologna and salami, which they found “charming and delicious.”
The Pagan Dance
But it was after dinner that the Beltrafios were truly overexposed to our culture.
At first we behaved ourselves. Bella and I performed our favorite classical pieces on the piano, holding ourselves hostage to what we felt was the American reserve. Then Bella and I performed a duet of “Sunrise, Sunset” (everyone in the family felt that God had personally summoned them to submerge the gentiles in our Jewish identity, and no album, besides perhaps The Jazz Singer by Neil Diamond, was as fitting for our current predicament as Fiddler on the Roof). And although Grandmother and Mother acted as background hummers (because they only knew the melody), their voices occasionally outgrew ours, enhancing the chorus with Soviet-era Yiddish ballads. But when Sirofima began to tap dance, my father, overtaken by the child’s enthusiasm, broke into a gypsy song on his mandolin. I endured a few seconds of reserve while my legs trembled and the music invaded my ribcage—podayte mne bokalo, naleyti mne vina, i dayte mne malchonku v kovo ya v lublina … I only managed to translate to Eddie, “give me a glass, pour me some wine, and give me the boy I’m in love with,” when Bella pulled me into a circle forming in the center of the room. Together with Mother, Grandmother, and Sirofima, we stomped our feet and shook our breasts and shoulders, howling, “na, nee, na, nee, na, nee, na,” arching our backs toward the floor, each trying to outdo the other. Grandmother couldn’t go down as far but she mimicked our movements with her head and arms, so that she appeared to the uninitiated observer as though she were participating in a pagan worshiping ritual. Bella and I smashed our hips together, our legs and arms intertwining, our hair flying helter-skelter, our bodies dropping into full backbends midair. Sweat poured down our foreheads, washing the mascara, the lipstick, the foundation off our faces, allowing our true skins to emerge.
I felt myself growing aroused from my sudden exposure. My white cotton shirt clung to my breasts and untucked from my jeans revealing my midriff. Bella was in her customary figure-fitting red dress that barely covered her knees and revealed an impressive cleavage.
We imagined ourselves on the Broadway stage—believing momentarily that this was where the Kabelmacher sisters truly belonged—but that by some accident of our fortunes, some beguiling factor relating to our foreignness, our lengthy immigration, our Jewishness, our Russianness, we ended up resigning ourselves to sedentary careers, fated to be stars only in this mammoth house, in front of family and friends. Only intermittently did I catch glimpses of Mr. and Mrs. Beltrafio’s faces. They sat in an unconscious stupor, frozen, yet fascinated by what we would do next, swallowing bricks as they attempted to smile.
At some point, my mother, drunk on her beauty and voluptuousness, climbed on top of my father’s shoulders while he played “Kalinka Malinka” and planted a moist, ardent kiss on his grinning mouth, climbing over him like a plump caterpillar. My mother’s breasts, which were housed in a tightly knit blue sweater, pressed into my father’s cheeks and eyes, and seemed to have a most profound effect on Mr. Beltrafio. The glances he shot at my mother after that incident appeared to reflect a new admiration for her, one that he was not skilled enough to conceal from his frightened wife.
It was not long after that kiss that Mrs. Beltrafio announced that she was ready to go to their hotel, because “a violent migraine has suddenly overtaken me.” In parting, Bella asked her if she wouldn’t perhaps like to hear a repeat of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to soothe her. But Mrs. Beltrafio smiled, massaging her own temples, and said, “that’s very kind of you, Bella, but I’m afraid that if I don’t lie down soon, I’ll collapse. It was lovely to meet all of you.” And with that emphatic “lovely” the Beltrafios rose from the couch.
As everyone gathered in the hallway, and Igor was ascending the staircase, carrying a sleeping Sirofima in his arms, and my father was handing jackets to the Americans, the doorbell rang. “Who could that be?” my mother asked and everyone froze like characters on a TV screen that’s been set to “pause” by the VCR. Everyone except for Grandmother, who swiftly and cheerfully unlocked the door. There, shrouded in black gauze, stood an exact replica of Mrs. Bagdanovich.
“May I come in?” Mrs. Bagdanovich in the flesh announced, and without waiting for an answer, she marched into the living room, where her excavating gaze landed on Mrs. Beltrafio.
“Come in, come in,” my grandmother murmured sweetly, “just yesterday natural Valium came in from Russia, just as I promised, but we’re still waiting for powdered vitamin C extracted from natural cranberries.” Grandmother was running a small business venture as a middleman, ordering minerals, medicinal herbs, and other favorite Soviet remedies from the new Russia, and distributing them to Russian émigrés in the Chicago’s suburbs.
“So that’s them—the Americans you’ve traded us in for,” Alla declared in an accusatory tone.
“I thought you weren’t speaking to her anymore!” I stared at Grandmother, while my brain thawed from the initial panic freeze.
“Why wouldn’t I speak to Allochka?” Grandmother replied. “Just because you’re no longer dating Alex doesn’t mean I have to cut off ties with my friends.”
“Are you trying to ruin my life?” I asked, trying to mentally ward off a scorching itch on my lower back and the quick deadening of English-speaking neurons.
“Oh, you’ll do that on your own without my help,” Grandmother said with astonishing composure, “I was merely trying to get Alla her Valium.” It dawned on me that at some point during our pagan dance Grandmother had disappeared from the living room, only to reappear when the Beltrafios rose to leave. She must have stolen away to make a phone call. And she had nudged Bella to perform another round of the “Moonlight Sonata” to buy herself time.
“Who is this woman—why is she here?” The alien language seemed to come out of nowhere, and it belonged to the irked Mrs. Beltrafio, who now clutched the lapels of her beige jacke
t like a woman confronted with a rapist.
“A friend of my mozer’s,” my mother said. “She stop by to get Valium.”
“Valium is highly addictive,” Mrs. Beltrafio noted in a nervous voice.
“No, it better for who zhan if you take sleep Tehelenol,” Mrs. Bagdanovich angrily spat (her English was intimately connected to her nervous system). “Did who know people die from Tehelenol?”
“Allochka, please, this is Eddie and his parents, Cyntia and Hall,” my mother went on.
As they shook hands, Alla Bagdanovich grimaced at my mother and murmured through her fake smile, “You aren’t going to tell them who I am, are you? Coward!” Yet despite her threatening demeanor, I swiftly understood that Alla would never reveal herself. Having escaped Russia in its first flushes of Jewish emigration in 1978, Alla knew the importance of silence better than anyone. We had all come from a world where betrayal was the true mark of evil, where ratting out your friends, neighbors, even your enemies could only be done by reptiles who scurried at the edges of society and drained humanity of spirit.
“There’s something I must say,” I suddenly cried out. “This woman, this woman is Alex’s mother.”
“Alex Bagen?” Eddie mumbled.
“My son is Alex Bagen?” Alla inquired in disbelief, forgetting momentarily that her son had chopped down his Russian name.
“Don’t be a fool!” my mother gasped in Russian, “he doesn’t have to know. If you tell him the truth now, it will ruin it. I know, I know, your grandmother and I have been pushing but I’m proud of you—”
“What are you saying to her?” Grandmother screamed.
“I’m proud of you for standing your ground, for fighting us,” my mother said, “so why retreat now—this is only the beginning!”
“The truth has been forced out—Grandmother made sure of that,” I whimpered.
“Don’t you throw stones at me—no one’s going to rat you out,” Grandmother put in.
“That’s true,” Alla averred with a dollop of Russian pride, “I’m not an evil person. Whatever happened between you and my son I have to accept it. I may not like it but I have to accept it. And if you left my son for this—this”—she pointed with disgust at the Americans—“then what can I say—it’s your life.”
“Tell him the truth,” Grandmother shouted. “I want to see what he does. He’ll run from you like a cheetah, I assure you, and Godspeed! I don’t want them—these anti-Semites in my house! Remember, when you marry him, you marry her too. You think your children will be Jewish? You think they won’t step foot in a Catolik church?”
“My children, my children,” I burst out, “they’ll have my—my—my blood running through their veins.”
“Marriage is bigger than you, than love, than sex—marriage is the future, it’s your children, and they’re your destiny! You can never escape your destiny—don’t you understand what I’m saying? I’ve seen it all—women ruined by the choices they’ve made; Jewish men alienated from their own children, children who spit in their father’s face and scream, ‘Yid, get your dirty physiognomy out of my face!’ Intermarriage will kill you—and us! Look at his mother—don’t you feel her hateful glare burning your skin? Don’t you feel it? I feel it—I can spot an anti-Semite from a hundred kilometers away—”
“You can spot a KGB agent on Deerfield Road too, so what! So what!” my mother shouted, intervening on my behalf. “Where are you getting your evidence from? You’re a deaf mute in this country—you understand nothing, nothing! I see no evidence of your anti-Semitism—she’s been perfectly civil to all of us—she’s been trying so hard—”
“I can put burning coal on your skin and hold it there, and still you won’t cry.” Grandmother spoke strangely now, her voice seemed ancient, centuries old. “That’s how you always were as a child: smiling at pain, smiling and holding it all in. You’re the deaf mute, my daughter, you’re the deaf mute.”
The chandelier began to twirl and faces fused together in a rainbow of lights across the ceiling. Old thoughts broke into old words, old words into disparate sounds, disjointed from meaning, falling, falling—splat!—across a silent canvas aglow in lucent white, erasing cultures and points of view, each individual drawn indistinguishable in my abyss.
Nothing, no one mattered—least of all me. No matter what I said now, I knew he was vanishing. “I’ve been lying to you,” I said at last—in English. “I’ve been lying! Right up until Maine I was still with Alex. This is his mother and we were engaged—do you understand, until about two months ago we were still engaged.”
I repeated the word “engaged” as if it were a hammer, but he appeared inexplicably unperturbed, except for the fact that he didn’t speak.
“What kind of show are you people running here?” Hal Beltrafio exclaimed.
“Fascinating—how did you ever manage it, my dear?” Mrs. Beltrafio remarked with a befuddling grin. “Why, Emma, my dear, it’s a dangerous thing, you know, confusing life with art!”
My family stared at me without comprehension.
“What did she say? What did Lena say?” Grandmother demanded in Russian. “Someone translate for me!”
Eddie looked wildly around the room—at my mother and father and grandmother and Bella and then his eyes shone upon me.
“Is that all—is that all, Emma, is that all you’ve been lying about?”
“Yes,” I replied, stunned.
“Don’t be a fool, Ignatius, she’s just admitted who she is—”
“I know who she is,” he said, giving his mother a quick abrasive glance, “and her lies don’t scare me.” Then he looked at me again, kindly, with such forgiveness in his eyes I thought my heart would burst from pain. “I don’t care—I don’t care about the past. It was difficult for you to get here, but now we’ve arrived: we’re together. Do you hear me, Emma? You’re with me, fully, I know that. I don’t care about any of them. Or whatever nonsense you had with him. I know who you are.” His hands waved the room away and pulled me in, bringing my face close to his. “Do you understand what I am saying to you?” He kissed my mouth in front of them but there was a quivering in his lips, panic in his eyes.
“I—I don’t understand—why—why are you doing this—”
“Because I love you—I love you and I know what this is—what all of them are doing. You have to be strong, Emma, you hear me? This is the moment to be strong, to remember who you are, what we have, to remember the ‘us’ in this chaos.” He paused, looking at me intensely. “You have to be honest now.”
“I am honest. I am finally honest. I was with him—engaged to him—I led a double life. I was indecisive. I told you I’d be honest with you when I came to you in my burgundy dress and I went on lying. I just went on. I told you I loved you, and I went back to Alex when I went to Chicago. I got into the habit, the habit of lying, of bifurcating my identity.”
“But did you lie in Maine? Were you fully with me in Maine?”
“Yes, in Maine, I was yours. I had broken everything off by then—I broke it off for Maine, for you.”
“You took her to Maine—to your house in Maine? That was supposed to be our house!” his mother whined. “How dare you? You promised me, Ignatius, you’d keep it as it was—”
“As it was?” I was suddenly confused. “I thought it was your house, Eddie.”
“Emma’s my life now, Mother, you have to accept that, and the cottage is going to be ours, hers and mine—it belongs to us.”
“I don’t have to accept anything—I don’t have to accept her or them,” his mother announced definitely. “You are my life, and I’m here to tell you that these are not people I want to be connected to in any way. They are not like us, Ignatius, they’re not to be trusted—she’s not to be trusted—can’t you see that?”
“Mother, you need to leave now—you need to leave me alone!”
“Why don’t we go to our hotel now, Cynthia, we really should let Eddie work out his own issues.” His father spoke
so meekly his voice fell into a whisper.
“Shut up, Hal, you stupid fool!” she snapped. “Can’t you see, Eddie, can’t you see it—they don’t want us either!” She was screaming now, her controlled features seeming to melt into her face.
I backed away from him, after catching sight of her rage.
“Emma, please, please I’m begging you—don’t let her come between us—try to remember what I told you in Maine—Emma—”
“What’s happening? Someone translate!” my grandmother screamed. But no one did.
“Why haven’t you asked your fiancée the most critical question?” Mrs. Beltrafio was suddenly calm, her features sewn back into her skin, her jaws hardened, her eyes releasing a malicious smile. “Why don’t you ask her if she slept with Alex, if she was sleeping with the two of you at the same time?” The room glared at her at once, as if she had punctured a vein in the collective flesh of our entire community. “What—why are you all looking at me like that? It’s a legitimate question—the question of betrayal! Don’t you think my son deserves to know to what extent—to what depths these lies reach?”
“I tink you should leave,” my mother said. “Take your son and leave.”
“No, I refuse!” Eddie didn’t look at anyone but me.
Then with a sudden, violent leap forward, he grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here, somewhere, anywhere away from them—all of them!” He pulled me into the library, to the same room where I hid, listening to his mother speak.
I looked at him for some time before he lifted his gaze to me and said, “Did you sleep with him?”
“You would think that, wouldn’t you, together with your mother?”
“Forget her. Just tell me the truth!”
“I’ve lost all track of time and space and definitions. I don’t know what anything means anymore, Eddie—”
“Don’t pretend to be crazy—grow up, Emma, for once in your life, grow up!”
“How was I supposed to decide between two different worlds? Between you and them, but don’t you see—I chose you—I—” I flung my hands through the air and my mind involuntarily recalled the image of Mrs. Beltrafio’s purgatory.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 35