The Other Traitor

by Sharon Potts

  I wish I had told you how much I love you, but my world was forever darkened the moment Yitzy Goldstein was executed. Every time I looked at you, I remembered that I was responsible for your father’s death. Guilt kept me from hugging you, kissing you, telling you how much I love you.

  Oh my darling girl, how can I ever make up to you the pain I’ve caused you?

  I can only tell you that Yitzy Goldstein, the father who made you, was a good man. A kind and generous man. And you were the product of the purest, the most beautiful love. I only wish …

  The letter ended there, the ‘h’ in ‘wish’ running off the page.

  Essie stood without moving, as the phonograph needle scratched around and around, making a shrill noise like the scream that was forming in her head.

  “Liar,” she said. “You’re such a liar.”

  She went to the old Victrola and lifted the tone arm.

  The record was ancient, with a hand-written label.

  For Mariasha, it said. From Yitzy.

  A heavy pressure pushed against her chest. She cranked up the phonograph and cued the tone arm.

  A wistful voice sang a cappella. Soft and distant, like it was coming to her from another world. But the words were clear and strong.

  Believe me, deceive me

  Darling, just don’t leave me

  You are the apple of my soul

  If you love me, don’t let me go.

  Her real father.

  She thought about her mother’s letter. You were the product of the purest, the most beautiful love. Was that part true?

  Essie sank down beside her mother on the chair and held her small, stiff body. Hugged her tight. She smelled the citrusy fragrance that had always been her mother’s and a memory came to her.

  Her mother combing her hair when she was very little. You have your father’s golden curls. Then a kiss. I love you, Essie. More than you’ll ever know.

  The pain started deep, deep inside, taking her breath away, as her father continued to sing.

  One promise I will make to you

  Wherever I am, whatever you choose.

  I will love you till my last breath’s drawn

  I will love you long after my time is gone.

  Tears ran down Essie’s cheeks as the pain erupted.

  “I love you, too, Mommy. More than you’ll ever know.”

  CHAPTER 53

  The cemetery reminded Julian of a park. Low rolling hills, paths, benches, lots of thick-trunked trees that had probably been here for a hundred years. If not for the rows and rows of headstones, this could have been Central Park.

  He had never been to a cemetery, at least not one where people he knew were buried. When his father died, there had been a service at a funeral home, but no burial. A few months afterward, his mother and sister had taken his father’s ashes to be scattered in the bay, but Julian had refused to go with them. He hadn’t wanted yet another reminder that his father was gone.

  With Nana, though, it was different. Rather than upheaval, he had a sense of quiet, as though something significant had come to an end. Then why couldn’t he feel anything?

  He stood arm-in-arm with his mother at Nana’s grave as they listened to the rabbi speak and recite prayers in Hebrew. Rhonda was on Julian’s other side, next to her husband.

  Only a handful of other people had come. A couple of Mariasha’s neighbors. A man who introduced himself as a collector of her sculptures. Someone from a museum. Most everyone from Nana’s past was dead.

  Julian hadn’t cried when his mother had called him with the news on Thursday evening. He hadn’t cried in the two-and-a-half days since he learned of her death. Would he ever mourn her? Ever forgive her?

  A grave had been dug beside Aaron Lowe’s. Half the headstone read ‘Aaron Lowe 1910-1984. Loving husband, father, and grandfather.’ The blank side was for Mariasha, as per her instructions.

  Nana had chosen to be buried beside her husband. Out of duty? Devotion? Love? Julian wondered where Isaac Goldstein was buried.

  The weather had been unseasonably warm over the last couple of days, confusing a few of the trees where Julian noticed tiny green buds.

  The rabbi finished his eulogy. Julian was surprised when his mother dropped his arm and turned toward the mourners.

  “My mother was a complex woman, who had been faced with an impossible choice in her life,” she said.

  Impossible choice. Nana’s words, too.

  “But she was human, which meant she made mistakes. But whatever she may have done wrong, I know in her heart, she loved her family. All of us.”

  The rabbi picked up the shovel, scooped up dirt, then flung it into the grave, over the coffin. His mother did the same. Then Rhonda. Julian shook his head when the rabbi handed him the shovel. Maybe his mother and sister were able to move on, but Julian wasn’t quite there.

  The rabbi led the group in the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead. Julian remembered his mother reciting it when his father died.

  The ceremony was over. The neighbors and the others came over to the family and expressed their condolences, then left.

  Julian stared down into the open pit at the casket that held Nana’s physical remains.

  “How are you doing, Jules?” Rhonda asked.

  “Still numb.”

  “Are you able to forgive her?”

  “Are you?”

  “It’s different for me,” his sister said. “I’d written her off years ago, but I know how much you loved her.”

  “I haven’t cried,” he said.

  Rhonda touched his shoulder.

  Their mother was beckoning them. She was a short distance away with the rabbi, her hand on top of a dark gray headstone, which looked much older than the ones near Nana’s gravesite.

  “I don’t think anyone’s visited these graves in many years,” she said, as Julian and Rhonda approached.

  He read the headstone his mother’s hand rested on. Below several Hebrew letters, it said, ‘Beloved Mother, Esther Hirsch. Died March 15, 1936, Age 42 Years.’ There was a well-preserved photo in the upper right-hand corner of a young woman, hair piled on her head, a determined expression on her face. Very different from the sad, broken woman in the sketch Saul had made of her.

  “Esther Hirsch was my grandmother. Your great-grandmother.” His mother’s voice caught. “I was named for her.”

  That’s what Nana had written in her final letter.

  “And this.” His mother touched the headstone beside it. “This was my grandfather.”

  ‘My Beloved Husband and Our Dear Father Abraham Hirsch. Died June 8, 1925. Age 34.’ There was a place for a picture, but it must have fallen out some time ago.

  “They were both so young,” Rhonda said.

  Woman Wearing New Hat, Man Reading, Julian thought. Nana had kept them in her life right until the end. She had made them a promise to always watch over Saul.

  “And here’s my uncle’s grave,” his mother said.

  ‘Saul Hirsch. My Brother. Died October 23, 1958. Age 36.’ And beneath his name, an epitaph, very likely written by Nana. ‘If only his dream to play baseball had come true.’

  Boy Playing Stickball.

  If only. Would Isaac Goldstein have been executed? Probably not. Without Saul at Los Alamos, it was unlikely Isaac would have been involved with the information passed on to the Soviets. Would Isaac have had an affair with Mariasha? That was something he could never know. But one thing he did know was that if Isaac and Mariasha hadn’t consummated their love, Julian wouldn’t now exist.

  The rabbi was reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.

  Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’mei raba

  Julian didn’t know what the Hebrew words meant, but he found the cadence of the prayer comforting.

  He thought about Nana losing both her parents when she was young. Only seven when her father had died. Then her mother. And all she had was her kid brother.

  Impossible choice.

>   He was only just beginning to understand the complexity of what Nana had been faced with. Saul wasn’t simply her brother, he had been her responsibility. And so, she protected him up to the end, but in doing so she sacrificed the man she loved.

  Oseh shalom bim’romav hu ya’aseh shalom

  Aleinu v’al kol Yis’ra’eil v’im’ru

  The rabbi met his eye. “Now say ‘Amen’.”

  Julian’s mother and sister said, ‘Amen,’ but he said nothing.

  “Amen,” said a shaky unfamiliar female voice behind them.

  He turned to the woman, tall like his mother, who stood beside a tree. She wore a camelhair coat that hung loosely on her narrow frame, and had thin white hair and blue eyes. A petite woman in a long black coat came from behind the tree and slipped her arm through the woman’s.

  It took a pulse beat for him to process her without the red ski jacket, then his heart lurched. Annette!

  The two women approached. “I hope you don’t mind our being here,” Annette said to Julian’s mother. “I read that the funeral was today.”

  “You’re very welcome here.” His mother stared at the tall woman. “Sally?”

  “Essie,” she replied, in a small childlike voice.

  The two women studied each other, perhaps trying to find something in each other’s faces of the children they’d been so many years before.

  Julian felt something in the pit of his stomach he couldn’t identify. They were daughters of the same father. Two women whose lives might have been reversed had Nana chosen differently.

  “I’m very sorry about your grandmother.” Annette was only inches from him. Agonizingly close. “Whatever she did doesn’t change that she loved you very much.”

  He couldn’t bear to look at her or smell her now-familiar scent. “Thank you,” he said, focusing instead on their mothers.

  The two women had taken each other’s hands. For an instant, he was reminded of the two little girls in the photo. Then Sally kissed Essie on both cheeks, and walked quickly away.

  He felt the gentlest pressure on his chest. Annette’s hand. He wanted to clamp it against his heart with all his might, but he knew she would pull away.

  Her eyes were shiny, brimming with sadness, maybe even regret. “Au revoir, Julian.”

  “Au revoir,” he whispered.

  “Remember,” she said. “Revoir means to see again, not goodbye.” Then she turned and hurried after her mother.

  He remembered. Their first conversation about her name. Annette Revoir. She had said revoir meant to see again, not goodbye.

  Would he ever see her again?

  The blue sky, rolling hills, thick old trees, and rows and rows of headstones pressed in around him. It was quiet, as though something significant had happened and the world would never again be the same.

  He sank to his knees by his grandmother’s grave, overwhelmed by a pain so crushing it took his breath away.

  Nana was gone. Nana, who had watched over him when he felt he had no one else, who had always loved him unconditionally.

  Gone.

  He inhaled sharply, the smell of sweet, rich earth and budding trees filling his lungs. Then he threw a handful of dirt into her grave, and at last felt her release.

  “Au revoir, Nana.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Au revoir, Julian.

  Annette and her mother hurried from Mariasha’s gravesite. No backward glances. Would she ever see him again or did au revoir really mean goodbye?

  “Thank you for making me go to see Essie,” her mother said, as they stepped outside the cemetery gates. “J’avais peur.”

  “I know you were afraid.”

  “She’s my half-sister,” Mama said, more to herself than to Annette. “I thought it would be strange to see her, but it wasn’t. I think I always felt a special bond with her.”

  “I’m glad.”

  The heels of their shoes tapped against the sidewalk as cars sped by on the wide boulevard.

  “I like her son,” Mama said.

  Annette didn’t answer, afraid her voice might break.

  When they got home from the cemetery, Mama sat on the sofa while Annette went to the kitchen alcove to make them chocolat chaud. She brought the milk in the saucepan to a slow boil, whisked in finely chopped bittersweet chocolate, then added a little brown sugar, just like Grandma Betty used to make it. Just as she’d herself done a few days before for Julian. The memory hurt, but she tried to ignore the pain. She and Julian had shared many beautiful things. Even if they never saw each other again, she wasn’t going to block out her sweet memories the way her mother had done of her own past.

  She brought the two mugs of cocoa to the sofa, where Mama was thumbing through Grandma Betty’s photo album.

  Her mother took a sip. “This tastes just like your grandmother’s.”

  Annette nodded, and sat beside her, close enough to see the photos. The first time she’d shown Mama the album, just after Grandma Betty had died, her mother had been reluctant to look at the old photos. Now, she lingered on each one.

  Mama turned slowly past her parents’ wedding photos, past the pictures of the Goldsteins with the Lowes, past pictures of family and friends long dead. Something slipped out from behind one of the pasted-in photos. It had apparently been stuck there all these years. Mama picked up the faded black-and-white snapshot, and Annette studied it over her shoulder. Her mother as a young child with her parents.

  The three of them were sitting on an Adirondack chair, Grandma Betty on one of Isaac’s knees, Mama, her hair in two thick braids, on the other. Grandma Betty wore a halter and shorts and Isaac was in a striped T-shirt. They were all laughing.

  Mama turned the photo over, read it, then handed it to Annette.

  With the two loves of my life in the Catskill Mountains, July 1950.

  The penmanship was stronger and less fussy than Grandma Betty’s, and Annette realized it was her grandfather’s handwriting. He’d probably put the photo into the album, perhaps intending to paste it in some day. She wondered if Grandma Betty had ever seen it or had known it was there.

  The photo had been taken a couple of months before Isaac was arrested—so Mama was only five—and it was very likely the last one of her mother and grandparents together.

  “I remember this day,” Mama said. “I remember being happy.”

  With the two loves of my life, Isaac had written.

  Annette took a sip of cocoa, tasting the bittersweet chocolate.

  Whatever Mariasha had meant to him, her grandfather had loved his wife and daughter, too. Annette believed that. And as much as he’d hurt Mama, and Grandma Betty, and even herself, she understood the impossible choice he’d been forced to make, and it saddened her that he’d been put through that.

  Mama slipped the snapshot in her pocket, then closed the album and hugged it against her chest, as she stared across the room at the bricked-in fireplace.

  That’s what Mama had always been, Annette realized. A bricked-in hearth without enough oxygen for fire to burn in it. Unable to love or be loved. But now, perhaps, that was changing.

  For both of them.

  Annette put her mug on the trunk and scooted closer to her mother. She slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Her mother winced at the touch, then relaxed.

  “You know I love you very much, Mama.”

  Her mother looked at her, narrowing her eyes as though she was troubled. Then she reached out and touched Annette’s hair. “Would you like me to braid your hair like Grandma Betty used to do?”

  Forever hugs.

  “Oui, Mama. I would like that very much.”

  CHAPTER 55

  The morning after Nana’s funeral, Julian awoke to warmth. Without Sephora there to prop open the balcony door, his apartment was no longer cold. But it wasn’t enough to make him want to stay. He got out of bed and wandered around the sterile rooms for the last time. It had never felt like home and never would.

  He called th
e landlord and agreed to forfeit his security deposit to get out of his lease. Then he sent Sephora a text message that she was welcome to all the furniture. He glanced at her headshot on his phone, but felt nothing except relief that she was gone from his life. He deleted her from his contacts.

  His clothes all fit in a large suitcase, and his chess set in his backpack. He carried his art portfolio separately, and stepped outside his apartment. He stared at his reflection in the black lacquered door for the last time. Still blurry.

  Goodbye, whoever you are, he thought. I hope you find your real self soon.

  His mother had sounded pleased when he called to ask if he could stay in his old room for a few days until he found a new apartment. He got to Forest Hills in the afternoon, while his mom was still at the clinic, brought his suitcase and backpack upstairs, and put his portfolio on his childhood desk. He hadn’t been up here in years. His old microscope, protected by a vinyl cover, was still there, along with the four boxes of slides he’d once examined with fascination. No dust anywhere. Had his mom kept the room clean all this time?

  The bedroom was mostly unchanged from before he’d left for college when he was sixteen. Blues and grays and a large window that overlooked the backyard where he and his dad would occasionally toss a ball around. The smell was even the same. Like unwashed gym socks. It made him feel as though he’d never left.

  He plopped down on the too-soft mattress on his bed and put his arms behind his head like he always did as a kid. On the wall to his left were several pen-and-ink superhero drawings he’d made as a kid. Funny—he’d thought he had thrown these away. Now, he remembered how he’d carefully framed each one, then hung each drawing so he could see it from his bed. Why had he forgotten that?

  He took in his collection of anatomical posters on the opposite wall—the skeletal, muscular, vascular, and nervous systems. He used to stare at them in the semi-darkness before he fell asleep and recite the specific details he’d memorized, but couldn’t see.