The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  “You met someone?” Isabel said.

  “No.”

  “You going to tell me or not?”

  “There's nothing to tell.”

  Isabel sipped at her tea with exaggerated care. “He must be no good.”

  “Ma, what did I just say?”

  “Your brother Moshe, he's a good man. A schemer but a good man. Bertha too, you should take a lesson from her. Stop with the nogoodnik.”

  Had her father's friends actually visited? Lillian couldn’t have made them all up. Couldn’t have made him up.

  “Lillian? You hear what I’m telling you?”

  “What else do you want, Ma?”

  “You already got pearls.”

  “What?”

  “You think I don’t know you. I know you. You want more pearls, you ask your brother Moshe.”

  She had not invented Abe Cohen, his hands moving over her, had not invented their coupling: these remained clear. What seemed slippery and opaque was the life he occupied without her. Lillian could only imagine it as a shell around blank air, the reasons for his absence spurious. And so, in the late weeks of winter, Lillian deliberately circled Abe's life, choosing the streetcar stop nearest his store, visiting his favorite bakery, buying from the pharmacy near his house. Twice she borrowed her brother's Packard and drove it up and down Abe's street. House lights on the first floor and often the second, occasional fluttery movements at the windows. Snowdrifts buttressed the side of the house. The front walk was cleanly shoveled. Ice shone on porch rails and shingles. The interior remained impenetrable, a kind of shadow into which she and Abe had disappeared.

  She waited until March before visiting the jewelry store. The son, Irving, minded the counter. Beautiful boy, spitting image of his father but still soft, irresolute, except for that glimmer, the same pleasure lust she saw in Abe's private moments. In Irving the lust was more public but more diffuse. “Can I help you, Miss Schumacher?” A light purr in the voice.

  No sound from the back room, where Abe set stones, though the door was ajar. She asked to see bracelets, and Irving opened up the case, pulled out a velvet card with four, let her hold them to the light and try them on. For her sister-in-law Bertha, she said. She’d have to confer with her brother, she’d send him over to look. And would Irving please give regards to his family, all best wishes for good health?

  Two nights later, Abe returned to Lillian's flat, defeated and sad, his hands redolent of illness. Complied when she asked him, first, to bathe.

  One thing Lillian knew: open the door to risk and the room will widen and stretch. The work of caution—automatic at first—becomes over time onerous and boring, another chore in a too-long list of chores. You can’t manage it all, defer whatever seems inessential. And this was how she explained Abe's about-face: almost nightly, he visited. Seemed, in fact, oblivious to risk, foggy with exhaustion and despair. He wept when she touched him, wept when she did not. The weeping, she knew, was hidden from his family. Seeing Abe this way—shaken down to boy, neck-deep in bewilderment and sorrow—moved her. But she also preferred him careless. He’d appear at her flat, late, and collapse on her bed, and after a time they’d make love without speaking. For an hour he might sleep. And though she knew better, some nights she’d meet him on Delaware, a few blocks from his house. Once, at two A.M. Lillian parked the Packard across the street from his house and he slipped out the back door and through the neighboring yard, crossing the snow-crusted lawns to the curb, her borrowed car.

  They carried on this way until Rebecca died. During shiva, Lillian joined her brother and his wife when they paid their respects to the family. Red buds studded adjacent trees, crocuses bloomed in the Cohens’ front yard, the bright greens of the new grass mixed with the winter browns. For the first time, Lillian entered the house on Lancaster. In the foyer the dark wood shone, wallpaper pattern of spray roses spilling down the hallway and into the parlor. There was a faint scent of cedar and baked sugar and tea, and in the parlor visiting relatives sat quietly with the daughters—the crazy one, the paper thief, Celia, perfectly still and paler than usual, Irving slumped beside her; the married daughter elegant in black, whispering to Abe, her husband standing guard beside them, adjusting his spectacles and surveying the room. The other daughters were ragged and red-eyed, Jo meeting Lillian's condolences with a scouring stare. The pattern of roses dropped behind the upright piano; sheet music lay open, a sonata. Lillian retreated to the hall which led in one direction to the fragrant kitchen, the other to the front staircase, with its fat maple banister and Persian runner, silent invitations to push farther into the house. She passed the formal dining room (more roses) before two synagogue women arrived, arms loaded with platters and casseroles, a jumble of piety and whispers, noodles and fish. Lillian stole outside to the empty front porch, away from the windows, and waited for Moshe and Bertha to finish with their sympathy.

  Lillian would not have chosen that wallpaper: the clipped pink roses girlish, sentimental, falling in dainty lockstep. Still, the papered rooms felt like sugar bowls, and after she left that day the image of the spray roses returned to her. Davenport in dark wood, upholstery the color of biscuits and linen, Abe's reading chair a fine pale green. Upright piano, the scatter of black notes across the white pages of the open score. She pictured the parlor empty of visitors, the davenport clear of Celia and Irving, open, inviting, a place to let the day hush, to gaze up at roses, light patterned by budding trees, lazy piano softening the afternoon. That night, Lillian imagined her own bed as a davenport, lulled herself to sleep with the pretense of thick petals and buttery air and Abe's weight upon her.

  That was the beginning of a more deliberate daydream, the trail of roses leading up and back to both glimpsed and unseen rooms: the wide white kitchen, the polished dining room table, and the tall glassed cabinets, company china and Passover dishes, thin-stemmed goblets, heavy brass candlesticks, silver Kiddush cup. And upstairs? The carpeted steps leading to an unlit pocket of space. And to pass through such space? Like passing through night, perhaps. Lillian knew about the windows, stout rectangles facing the street, a round moon of glass above them, smaller windows on the sides. She guessed at the floor plan: front and back stairways, the windows suggesting a division of rooms. In some of the rooms there would be beds, dressing tables, chairs. Cream walls? Some ought to be cream, a base that would hold the light but allow you to add color. And in the master bedroom, there ought to be violet and royal blue bedcovers and chairs, which would suit Abe. She imagined herself and Abe coupling in pale blue sheets, his broad back and thick arms wrapping her, intermittent dark freckles on the white skin, black eyelashes against the blue, and the steady rhythm and near ache of Abe moving inside her. Butterscotch and white for the front guest room, perhaps some fleur-de-lis.

  She considered colors for other rooms, tending toward blues and greens, inventing a complete house the shape and size of Abe's house on Lancaster. Downstairs, the rose wallpaper stayed, the piano stayed, the parlor furniture stayed, and at moments the invented house and the real one seemed indistinguishable. In the fantasy house, Abe's children did not appear; presumably they had moved to another invented house, or, better, another city. That could happen, in the mind. The arrangement seemed beyond Lillian's will, as if Abe's house had chosen to occupy her and she could not refuse it. The invented house hummed, waiting to be manifest in the physical world.

  You begin, of course, with where you are. Begin with the life you know, begin with sex. Try a simple request, and make the request late at night, after he has climaxed. A Thursday. Lillian and Abe were spooned together in her bed, Abe's hand still on her breast, when Lillian asked, “Shall we go to a restaurant next week?”

  Simple and not simple, a meal in a restaurant. Or tea? Wasn’t it what he had once proposed? A table, a waiter, a menu. Polite conversation. Nothing, compared to what they’d done. Tea but tea in public and now: a signal of earnest courtship or of scandal. He closed his eyes, sighed. She had seen him resp
ond this way to Celia's incessant could we will we can I before he answered no. But to Lillian he said, “I don’t know.” To Lillian he said, “Perhaps in time.”

  A week later, she cooked a dinner at her flat. Abe arrived harried and distracted, and she poured him gin, set the table with a blue-bordered cloth, carried out plates. Roast beef and sweet potatoes, glazed carrots, salty bread. Tea and linzertorte. By dessert he was back to the Abe she wanted: alert gaze, body tipped in her direction, his cheeks slightly pink. “Does this feel like home?” she asked, and he answered yes. She stroked the back of his hand. “You don’t invite me to your home.”

  “Oh but Lillian. You know why.”

  “Good reasons,” she said. “Before.”

  “This is our place.”

  She hesitated. The blue-bordered tablecloth seemed part of a past life, and she thought of that other polished table, and the imagined linens and the glass bowls, a basket of pears. The invented house seemed wholly real and she did not know what this meant. “Not forever,” she said. She loosened her fingers from his and rose, cleared the dinner plates and the empty serving platter and the used glassware. Then she offered him chocolate from the box he’d brought, square pieces decorated with waves of green.

  “Tell me,” Lillian said to her brother, “how a person buys a house.”

  Moshe had always been a big man, but here at his law office he seemed even larger than usual. An enormous, round-bellied suit, sighing at her. “Lilly, would you like a cigarette?”

  She took one from him, allowed him to light it, noted the resemblance of his fingers to the cigar he lit for himself. “A little house?” he said. “Just for you?”

  “Maybe that.”

  “Or maybe you’re thinking a bigger house?”

  “I think all sorts of things. Let's say any house.”

  “Are you asking can I buy you a house?”

  “No. I want to know how a person buys a house.”

  “First,” Moshe said, “a person needs to have money. Lilly, sweetheart, you do not.”

  “But if I did?”

  Moshe squinted, as if he were adding numbers in his head. Pursed his lips, not unlike a fish. “A very large if. You understand that? You be careful, Lillian.”

  You cannot rush fate, Lillian told herself, no matter how sure you are of your path. For now, she was in God's hands; she imagined a light touch on the top of her head and refrained from talk of houses. Surprisingly, this seemed to work. In the spring of 1929, Rebecca Cohens gravestone was unveiled, and two weeks later Abe again asked Lillian to tea. A Wednesday afternoon. They took a table in Jocelyn's tearoom, surrounded by middle-aged women. Abe bought tea and sweet cakes, inquired about her mothers health. Asked about the stationery business, where the paper was shipped from, if the shop owner traveled to New York, as Abe often did. Mentioned that her brother's law firm was growing admirably. Lillian watched his lips as he talked. This was a strange game, Lillian thought, but a pleasant one. She sipped her tea and folded her hands in her lap and spoke about her fondness for, of all things, gardens; she imagined kissing him in the tearoom. After an hour he asked if he might secure a taxicab for her.

  Among the gossips there was murmuring the next day, there always would be murmuring about Lillian, despite the legitimacy of the tea with a widower. But Lillian's faith in God seemed justified. She felt a surge of hope: Why shouldn’t she be happy? Why shouldn’t Abe? On his next visit, he brought flowers to her apartment, and there seemed a new lightness to his mood. Now he wanted to make small but definite plans: tickets to the theater, an afternoon at the Falls. In May he suggested a restaurant dinner with Moshe and Bertha, followed by dessert and coffee at his house.

  The evening they went to Little Paris, Lillian wore black silk and pearls, her hair cut that day in shoulder-length waves. Abe brought corsages for Lillian and Bertha. At Moshe's house, they drank illicit champagne, then drove to the restaurant, Bertha carrying Moshe's gin in her handbag. A waiter arrived with savory tarts, then with soup. Four courses. They drank the gin over ice. Through the dinner, Abe joked with Moshe and squeezed Lillian's hand and seemed purely happy; by midevening, Lillian was awash in grand hope. The soft night air seemed a confirmation, and on the drive to Abe's house, she leaned her head out the side window—the elms and maples in full leaf, the breeze pushing her hair from her face, Abe holding her hand, kissing her on the cheek and pulling her back into the car. And when they reached Abe's house it was quiet, the lilacs swaying in the light wind, perfuming the parlor, which was as Lillian envisioned: falling roses, empty davenport, pale green chairs. There was a bakery cake, chocolate, and Bertha brewed tea. In the china cabinet, Lillian found dessert plates: gilt edged, the inner pattern a ring of grapes on the vine, the fruit precise and dense and violet blue.

  Would the evening have gone any differently if, instead, she’d taken down the everyday china, left the grapevines dutifully in place, stubborn tribute to the dead? Abe and Moshe lighted cigars and patted each other on the back, and Bertha—round and affectionate and drunk—concerned herself with cake, which she served in thick slices. Lillian sipped the milky tea, savored the chocolate. Abe sat beside her on the davenport, and it seemed that another life was beginning, that grief had fallen away and time had stopped, leaving them forever in this bright soft evening, this parlor, this house. Abe's fingers circled and circled Lillian's palm, sweet measured pressure he might later move to the rest of her body.

  If the others sensed the presence of Abe's daughters in the house, they didn’t think much of it. Why would they? Moshe and Bertha commonly entertained, their children and housekeeper discreetly migrating to the upper floors. Here on Lancaster, there had been little entertaining for years, but Abe—admittedly flushed with alcohol—seemed completely at ease, affectionate and unworried. It was after all Abe's own house, his parlor, his evening with Lillian and Moshe and Bertha. And the parlor seemed fully the parlor Lillian had imagined.

  They were still eating cake when Lillian heard steps on the back stairway, an uneven thudding, the steps approaching from the kitchen through the long hall to the parlor. A muttering. And then in the parlor doorway stood Jo and Celia—Jo in another of her mud-colored dresses, Celia puffy-eyed, her thick hair disheveled. They stared at Lillian, Lillian and Abe, Lillian again. Celia swung her left arm back and forth.

  Jo snorted. “You seem pleased,” she said to Lillian.

  From across the room, Moshe cleared his throat, and Jo registered his presence and placed her hand on Celia's swinging arm. Moshe smiled his expansive, warning smile and gestured at the cake, “Would you girls care for some dessert?”

  “Mr. Schumacher,” Jo said. “Thank you, no. Hello, Mrs. Schumacher. We’ll go upstairs. Celia?”

  “Hello.” Celia relaxed her arm, then fixed her gaze on the dessert plates, and in that moment the evening tipped. “Those aren’t yours.”

  “No,” Lillian said.

  “Celia,” Abe said.

  Bertha, drunk, traced the grape pattern with her index finger. “Beautiful,” she said.

  And Celia stepped into the parlor, her arm swinging again. “Not yours.” She yanked Bertha's plate from her hand, then Lillian's from the table, bits of cake still on them.

  Abe, white-faced, standing, lurched toward Celia. “Celia, leave the plates.”

  But Celia grabbed the other cake-stained plates, tucking them against her dress and retreating to the hall.

  “Enough.” Abe's voice was louder now and harsh, and Celia unblinking.

  “Not yours,” she repeated, this time to her father.

  Moshe licked his lips, a deliberately delicate gesture. Checked his watch, while Bertha glanced out at the swaying coned lilacs.

  “You don’t tell me,” Abe said. “You do not tell me.”

  And now Celia turned back to Lillian. “You stay away from them.”

  “Celia, you will apologize,” Abe said.

  Celia backed up to the staircase, the plates crushed against her,
chocolate crumbs falling over the parquet floor. “You apologize,” she said.

  “Jo, take your sister upstairs,” Abe said.

  Jo crossed her arms over her chest and dropped her voice, “If she wants to go.”

  Would knowledge have mattered? Lillian did not yet know that Celia only slept in her late mother's sickroom (a second-floor room which faced the street and the tall elms, and from which a familiar Packard could be remarked); that Jo had suffered insomnia since her mother's collapse; that Rebecca Cohen had not been an Isabel. These were things you tried not to know, truths that might starkly appear and pin you down anyway.

  Neither Abe nor Jo nor Celia moved. There was the chugging of a car on Lancaster, and Moshe rose, smiling, stretching, as if nothing had transpired in the mood. “What about a nightspot?” he said. Ashed his cigar. “I think we should. Lillian? Bertha, love?” He set a hand on Abe's shoulder. “Abe?”

  “What?” Abe said.

  “Let’s.” Moshe ushered the Schumacher women to the front door, nodding to Jo and Celia, “Good evening, ladies.” And then Lillian was out on the lawn, stranded it felt, her sister-in-law murmuring That Celia's a nasty one and strolling past her to the Packard. The upper reaches of the house were lightless, remote. Lillian's palms were damp with sweat, and the lilac-scented air seemed a strange trick. How does one forestall what has already passed? Lillian counted the windows. The ember of Moshe's cigar marked his progress down the front steps and the walkway, Abe and Celia and Jo now fragmented silhouettes through the open front door. Lillian? Moshe's hand a warm weight on her shoulder. Lilly, come with me. Cake still sweet in her mouth, thin breeze nosing a sycamore, the Packard sputtering awake. Then the puzzle of silhouettes shifted, lush grass spilling over Lancaster Avenue, her fingers not exactly her own, her body close to dissolving in the fragrant air, and the night sky unspeaking.