Chicken soup did lie lightly on his stomach—Jews were right about that. Wulf ’s, the only kosher market left in town (there had been half a dozen during his childhood), cooked up a batch every few days and put it in jars. Jay bought a jar on Sunday, ate what he could during the week, threw out the rest. Sunday after Sunday the bearded man at the cash register looked at Jay without recognition. His mind was on higher things, maybe his inventory.
Jay’s clothes had grown roomy. On one of his rare good days he bought two pairs of chinos, apparently back in style, at the local Gap. And a navy blazer, size what?—small, God help him. His daughter dropped in every day to say hello and straighten the apartment. They were both silently waiting for the doctor to mention hospice. Meanwhile he could still make his weekly trek to Wulf ’s.
And it was at Wulf ’s, on a Sunday morning, that he saw Yamamoto again, and the Yamamoto family, four children in total. Jay stepped behind a rack of spices. From this hiding place he inspected the dentist-wife. She was surprisingly pretty, and slender despite many pregnancies. She was wearing a felt hat with an upturned brim. Fetching. He recognized it as the substitution made by modern Orthodox for the matron’s wig. Rich brown hair curled below the hat. She was pushing a cart in which a two-year-old lorded over groceries. Yamamoto walked behind her, wearing an infant in a sling. Two little boys marched in the space between their mother and father, and talked in light voices—English, he noted. The children, even the infant, had the straight black hair of Woody’s little son; they had similar dark eyes, too, angled more gently than if their blood were pure. The boys wore yarmulkes. Likewise Yamamotosan, their Yiddische chichi.
So this was the current trajectory of an immigrant’s career—this leap from one ill-favored group into another. What had happened to those necessary decades—generations, even—spent dissembling among the Yankees? Jay the commissioner, Glickman the judge, Fessel the surgeon—how delicately they’d mingled with the favored. And bold Feivel Ostroff, applying himself to pagan texts, had managed a complete metamorphosis. Somewhere a bishopric was no doubt waiting for his daughter the priest … And here, where shelves of canned mackerel faced shelves of boxed kasha, the Yamamoto children, crossbred progeny of two outcast clans, confidently trotted. Assimilation had become as passé as the jitterbug.
Forgetting to conceal himself behind the spices, Jay stood up as straight as his pain allowed. He was still what he was born to be—an Anti-Defamation Jew; a citizen of Godolphin, Mass; a loyal Harvard man. Papa Yamamoto was perhaps immune to the lure of the Houses across the river. But in this new world of interchangeable gods, and of females dressed up in priestly robes like drag queens … in this world where nations who’d tried to obliterate each other ended up in the same bed, and where your offspring hurled themselves across the planet and forgot to return … in such a world the enduring things, really, were bricks and bell towers, a library and a stadium. They remained, they steadied you until the end—flow’rs in your wilderness, stars in your night. He’d reveal this truth to the rabbi when she made her dutiful visit to the almost dead.
A nearby church bell chimed. With his jacket floating around what was left of him, Jay moved from spice rack to register. “Chicken soup,” he said, in a voice just audible above the call to the faithful. He received the jar and put money into the impassive hand. “I’ll see you next week,” Jay promised, or maybe pleaded. It was all the same to the man with the beard.
LINEAGE
“GOOD MORNING, Mrs. Lubin.”
Silence.
“Professor Lubin,” the doctor corrected, consulting his clipboard.
Silence.
“How are you feeling?”
Contemptuous silence.
“Do you know why you are here?”
Strenuous silence.
“You have suffered a neurological event, a transient ischemic attack …”
“Stroke,” she said at last. She was lying on a hospital bed whose aluminum side bars were half raised. An unused IV pole stood in a corner of the room. The second bed was unoccupied. A fuzzy Cézanne print hung on the mustard wall.
“Stroke? Well, not yet, we hope not at all. I’m pleased that your voice is so strong. I am Dr. Mortimer Lilyveck and this is Dr. Natalie White and this is Dr. Eric Hauser. Dr. Hauser will ask you a few questions.”
Silence.
Dr. Hauser cleared his throat. “What month are we in?”
Her eyes strayed to the window, to the snowy Chicago sky. They returned to Dr. Hauser with a glare.
“Who is the president?”
The glare intensified.
“What is your age? Where were you—”
“Ninety-two,” she said. “It should be on your records. I was born in 1914. In Brooklyn.” Young Dr. Hauser produced a grimace probably meant to be heartening. It might have earned him the firing squad years ago, far away. “My father was born in Russia,” she said, more slowly. “He was the … He was … He was the …” and the voice, suddenly aged, quavering, slipped into a different language. There it regained its strength.
He was the tsar. Little Father.
She spoke rapidly now, in this other tongue.
“He dressed simply and bathed in cold water. He carried a metal pocket case containing a portrait of his wife, the empress Alexandra. He loved the forceful empress. My mother was not forceful. He did not love my mother.
You don’t wish to hear this history, you indifferent Americans. But there will soon be another ischemic attack …”
“Ischemic attack …” Dr. Hauser, with a second ghastly smile, seized the familiar words.
“… and so I wish to … tell. I am not the last of the Romanovs—there are collateral descendants here and there, one operates a cleaning establishment—and I am not even a legitimate Romanov, and I am not even legitimate; but I am the sole surviving offspring of Nicholas II and Vera Derevenko. I could, if I were so inclined, claim the treasure supposedly residing in a French Bank. I could claim the crown now under glass in Moscow. I could claim all those eggs Fabergé made for my family.
My mother, Vera Derevenko, was the daughter of a doctor in the royal household. She had trained as a nurse. She and Nicholas copulated in the woods surrounding Nicholas’s favorite residence, Tsarskoye Selo, in June 1913, when the world was at peace. And then Vera went back to her St. Petersburg hospital and discovered she was pregnant. She fled to America. There I was born. My father knew nothing of me, he was the tsar.”
“Professor Lubin, it would help if you spoke English,” said Dr. Lilyveck.
“Whom?”
“…?”
“Whom would it help?”
“US.”
She made a weary gesture. “The empress Alexandra and the children, my half siblings, destined to die in a basement, were away at the time, on holiday, in the Crimea. The doctors and tutors, too. Rasputin was drinking and fornicating in another province. Nicholas, head of state, remained in Tsarskoye Selo to examine documents and sign them, to read letters and answer them. Ministers visited him continually. The duma was a joke.
My mother, too, had stayed behind to arrange some matters for her father the doctor.
The tsar walked alone every day in the woods. She also. Theirs was not an assignation but an accident. I happened by chance.
Have you seen our land in the spring? I myself have not, nor in any other season; but my mother described it to me during her final illness fifty years ago. Mud; well, the mud is famous. A sweet confusion in the woods, young leaves furring the birches, immense red pines, willows. You can hear the new blackbirds. They will be shot …”
She aimed two fingers at Dr. White, who did not flinch, did not even lower her eyes.
“… in autumn. There was a ravine where crystal water bubbled. On a branch hung a funnel-shaped ladle made of birch. They drank the cold fresh water. They walked along a winding path to an unused hunting lodge. They spoke of Dickens, of Dürer … favorite topics of well-bred Russians. In the late-afternoon sun
the air was full of amber droplets, and everything was as if bathed in warm tea—the trees, the wet lane, even the faces of the two people who had not yet touched one another. This is the Russian spring.”
Dr. Lilyveck touched his balding head. “There is a translator. She is not in the hospital today.”
“My mother’s eyes were hazel and her teeth were widely spaced. Her skin was freckled, her curly hair light brown. As a member of the household, she had seen that Nicholas was prodded and worried by the adored empress and the detested monk. She pitied the Little Father. She was not raped that afternoon, not seduced; seigneurial right was not exercised. She collaborated in her own deflowering. His hands were gentle. His eyes were the brown of a thrush, and his beard too. There was only a little pain. There was extreme sweetness.
And then came an extraordinary moment. She looked up, into his brown gaze, and she saw his murder, the murder that would take place five years later, in July, Dr. Hauser.”
“It’s January,” he said in a low voice.
“Eight, she saw eight corpses—man, wife, five children, serving-maid—and a crushed spaniel, dying. The corpses, first shot, were then chopped, drenched in acid, burned, and buried. These meager remains were identified later by the metal photograph case and the skeleton of the spaniel, whose body had been tossed into the grave.
My mother saw other future things, disconnected images. She saw an open-eyed little girl, dead of typhus, or was it starvation, or was it the bayonet. One of the millions of the Little Father’s children to die during the coming civil war. She saw Trotsky in his greatcoat. She saw Zinovyev the apparatchik getting out of a limousine whose seats were covered with bearskin. She saw members of the cheka, blood dripping from their fangs. She saw Lenin dead from stroke or perhaps poison.
When news of these happenings reached her ears in far-off Brooklyn she merely nodded.
Good doctors, there is a figure in Russian legend: a domesticated bear, I cannot remember the name given him, call him Transient Ischemik …”
“Transient ischemic, yes,” Dr. Hauser encouraged.
“… who has the power to foresee the future but not the language to reveal it. He can only gaze at his masters from the hearth—sorrowfully, for the future is always grievous. So it was with my mother—she spoke little, she spoke less, she spoke hardly at all, she might have been an animal. In Brooklyn, despite her nurse’s training, she worked as a lowly attendant in an institution for the feebleminded. We lived with an impoverished female cousin. The few sentences my mother did say she said in Russian.”
“The translator will come tomorrow.”
“Afterwards they stood and straightened their clothing. He picked up the framed picture of his wife, which had fallen out of his pocket. He raised my mother’s fingers to his lips. Separately they returned to the palace. She never saw him again.
She would hear many times that he had been autocratic, weak, extravagant, indifferent to his subjects, deserving of the epithet ‘Bloody.’ She did not contradict.
All this she told me in a spate of verbosity the night she died.”
Dr. Lilyveck said, “You need not think of death.”
She closed her eyes, banishing him, banishing his two subordinates. She recalled and then chose not to recall her pinched girlhood apartment on Avenue J and the two gloomy women who had raised her; her long and indifferent marriage; her contributions to topology; her only son, victim of cancer at thirty-five. Another dead Romanov. And she, propped up in a bed under three watchful pairs of eyes … might she at this late hour be invested with that old bear’s power to envision the future? Plagues, civil disruptions, babies born monstrous—any wag could foretell those catastrophes. No. Her gift was to witness not what was to come but what had been. She thought of the Little Father, Nicholas, abandoned before his death and disregarded afterward, remembered now only by a stroked-out mathematician who had not known him but could nevertheless see khaki garments. Beard. Kindly eyes. Mouth smiling at the freckled nurse who on a warm afternoon had soothed his troubled spirit. A solitary incident, one moment of singular ease, its issue one life of singular unremarkableness: hers. And with her passing would die not the memory of the incident—that memory had perished with Nicholas, with Vera—but the memory of its deathbed telling. The reputation of the tragic tsar … no further stain …
She opened her eyes. The doctors were still there, writing on their clipboards, exchanging glances, as thorough as the cheka. “My mother was mad,” she said hurriedly in English. “Her story was merely an invention,” she recanted, “to console me for my shameful birth. The season is winter, Dr. Hauser. The president is … a boob.”
Dr. White touched her hand. Little Mother, she said in the old woman’s tongue. If a lie, a generous one. And if the truth, safe with you and me. Rest now.
A few minutes later, in the hall, “Natalie,” snapped Dr. Lilyveck. “Your command of Russian—an unexpected talent. The patient’s prattle: what was it?”
“Mortimer,” Dr. White said sweetly. “A folktale, more or less.”
GIRL IN BLUE
WITH BROWN BAG
THEY HAD MANY THINGS IN COMMON, the man of sixty-seven and the girl of seventeen. They were both undersized. Their eyes were a similar light blue, though Francis’s vision was excellent, requiring reading glasses only for very small print, and Louanne’s was poor—she glared at the world through spectacles so thick they seemed opaque. They lived in mirror-image apartments on the second floor of a double brownstone. (Such solid burghers’ buildings were the mainstay of housing in Boston and its nearer suburbs, Francis said often, probably too often.) Louanne lived in her apartment with her uncle and aunt. Francis lived in his alone. Both preferred ice cream to pastry. Both favored backpacks.
Francis’s worn pack was almost empty nowadays. It held a book or two, the morning Globe, the neglected reading glasses, the Cystadane powder he had to mix with water and drink every four hours. But the pack was, he liked to think, his sartorial trademark. During the forty years he’d served in the Great and General Court of Massachusetts—first in the house, then in the senate—he’d disdained a briefcase. His pack had been full then.
Louanne’s was full now. It bulged with high school textbooks. She was studying chemistry, calculus, English, French, and Constitutional law. Constitutional law was a new and experimental course for gifted seniors. She had some trouble with it because it presumed a knowledge of American history. She’d come to this streetcar suburb from Russia only two years earlier, as a sophomore; American history was offered in the freshman year.
“American history is finished,” she’d muttered to him on a memorable afternoon the previous September. They’d met on the staircase. She was coming home from school, he was going out for a stroll.
“What do you mean, Ms. Zerubin?”
“I mean that I’ve never learned it and I can’t take it now,” and she explained further. “Please call me Louanne, Mr. Morrison,” she wound up.
Her name was no more Louanne than his was Édouard Vuillard. She’d snatched it from some country singer she’d seen on TV the morning she arrived from Moscow. “All right, Louanne. Please call me …” He hesitated. Senator?
“I’ll call you Mr. Francis, Mr. Morrison. Mr. Francis, aren’t you sort of American history in your own person. You’re an embodiment.” She was two steps below him. Her raised face was flushed. He saw dandruff in the parting of her dull hair, weasel-brown. “I mean, serving as a lawmaker all those years—you’ve only just retired, my uncle told me. And your ancestors were Pilgrims. Didn’t they sail on one of those ships?”
“The Pinta.”
“I thought it had another name. Mr. Francis, could I come to you for instruction? I would consider it a weighty favor,” she added in an imperious tone.
He backed up a stair. “Oh, my dear, you see, my hobby, looking at paintings, it takes up much of my now freed time. I am a museum trustee, too; I serve on the Acquisitions Committee—”
; “Once a week, I could come once a week.”
How long had she been planning this attack?
“We get out at noon on Wednesdays,” she said. “It’s the afternoon the teachers go to meetings.” She moved up a stair and threw her backpack beside her feet. He wouldn’t be able to descend without leaping over the pack. “You may assign texts,” she continued. “I will read them. I am thorough.”
He knew she was thorough. She was a thorough housekeeper. On Saturday mornings her aunt left the apartment door open, as did Francis, honoring the unbuttoned quality of the day. He had seen Louanne vacuuming on her knees, reaching her wand far underneath the sofa. She was thoroughly plain—ungroomed, un-adorned, her wardrobe limited to jeans and denim jackets—as if she’d made it her mission to complete what nature had begun.
“You may give quizzes,” she offered.
He had never seen her with a schoolmate. She was thoroughly friendless … And did his retirement really promise to be thoroughly fulfilling? Did he have so many friends?
“Instruction?” he said. “Wednesday afternoons? I will consider it a privilege.”
And so had begun their modest tutorial, six months earlier, conducted mostly in Francis’s living room—they were sitting there today, a cloudy March Wednesday—and sometimes at the museum and sometimes at a nearby pond. They didn’t adhere strictly to the original curriculum—the Constitution, the colonial period—but drifted into art and nature and even pedagogy.
“I disapprove of yes-or-no questions. Your essay answer is very good,” he said one day, handing her back a test she’d shown him. She’d earned a B-plus.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 35