Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Uh … um,” I said, and coughed to buy myself a little more time. I remembered the day in Port Washington when I was caught in my car by that couple, and made up the story about being lost. I would have done the same right then, except that someone else came up behind the guy and the dog. It was Leila, of course, although I didn’t know her immediately. The hair had been cleared from her face, pulled back in a ponytail. She looked scrubbed and ordinary, not wild or mysterious at all. And she was very pregnant. Jesus, it was an epidemic. I’d have to tell her the truth now that she’d seen me, that Jason was missing and I was hoping she had a clue. But the idea of his hiding out here seemed ridiculous now—did I think they’d adopted him? I drew in my breath and was about to speak when I realized that Leila was looking at me with only mild curiosity. She didn’t recognize me! All those times she’d fled past Paulie and me to Jason’s room, our faces had probably never registered on her brain. Maybe she couldn’t see us clearly through that tangle of hair, and we were only “them,” anyway, the old folks, the parents, the enemy. I bet she never dreamed on those steamy afternoons that she’d become us someday, or a reasonable facsimile of us.

  “Whatever you’re selling,” she said, “we’ve already got two of.” She leaned over awkwardly to stroke the struggling dog. “Nice boy, good boy,” she crooned.

  “Aha,” I said. “Even central air-conditioning?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “And a central vacuuming system. And a central burglar alarm.”

  “Well, you sure don’t need that,” I said, indicating the dog. It was incredible that she still didn’t know me, especially considering the strong family resemblance.

  “Isn’t this a bad time to sell air-conditioners?” Leila’s husband asked, not without sympathy. “I mean, it’s still winter.”

  “But that’s my product,” I told him, “and I’m a man for all seasons.”

  “Well, good luck,” he said, and began to close the door between us.

  “Leila!” I said. “Wait!”

  The door swung open. “You know each other?” the husband asked. Even the dog seemed surprised; his growl had changed to a pitiful whine.

  “I’m Jason Flax’s father,” I said.

  “Jason,” Leila said, like someone coming awake from a dream. “God! How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We can’t seem to find him.”

  “Who’s Jason?” Leila’s husband asked, and she reached out absently to pat his arm, the way she’d patted the dog before.

  “Jason’s missing?” she asked.

  “Sort of. Yes,” I said. “But you haven’t seen him.” It wasn’t really even a question.

  She laughed. “No, not recently, not since high school. God!”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “I’m just following every possible lead.”

  “Well, when you find him,” she said, “will you give him my love?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking that she’d already given him more than his share. Walking back to my car at the curb, I was sorry I’d told her who I was, and for blabbing about Jason. I knew it was my pride that had made me do it, my resistance to being invisible. But I felt invisible again a few minutes later, when I drove slowly down Sara’s parents’ street and looked up at their swanky house. It was set way back on a sloping lawn, and it seemed even further away than it was, and unapproachable. Sara was their loss, I told myself. Jason was ours.

  29

  “LISTEN,” CARMEN SAID, PUTTING the fetal stethoscope to Sara’s belly, and I heard the gallop of the baby’s heart. “My God,” I said, knowing by Carmen’s complacent smile that it was probably what everyone said.

  Later, while Sara was getting dressed, Carmen beckoned me into her office, where the walls were lined with photographs of babies. “Is anything wrong?” I asked, my hand pressed to my own beating heart.

  “Oh, no, no,” she said. “Everything’s normal, perfect. It’s the daddy I’m thinking about. Still no sign of him?”

  I shook my head. “My husband’s been looking everywhere. Sara is really depressed, isn’t she?” It was something I’d known all along, but was unable to admit before, even to myself. Instead, I’d pretended she was merely concerned with the metamorphosis of her own body.

  “Yes,” Carmen said. “And she’s getting a little scared, too. A baby on the inside is one thing, you know …”

  “I know. But at least we’ll be here for her, won’t we?” And then I confessed that I wished the baby was going to be born in a hospital. I told Carmen that I’d discussed it with Sara more than once, arguing that it would surely be safer there, with all that high-tech equipment, all those people. “Yeah, and all those germs,” Sara had said.

  To my surprise, Carmen agreed with me. “I’ll be honest with you, Paulie,” she said. “If something goes wrong, I’d rather have that equipment handy myself—the intensive-care nursery, the blood bank, anesthesia. I don’t advise home births, but I’ll attend them as long as my insurance covers it. If the mother is completely healthy, that is, and if there’s a backup hospital nearby.”

  Sara had decided to be delivered at Ann’s house, and there was a hospital only minutes away. And I’d already asked Bernie if I could call him to come if there was trouble. So far, Sara’s troubles were all of the spirit. She was deeply distressed about Jason, and it was difficult to comfort her. What had my mother said when Howard went off with Marie? “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.” That turned out to be true, in a way, but it was hardly encouraging when she said it. Despite Howard’s daily progress reports, I wondered if he was really trying hard enough to find Jason. Maybe this was a vicarious way of regaining his own early freedom, although God knows he was free enough now.

  After we left Carmen’s, Sara took a cab to Grand Central, and I walked over to the St. Marks Bookshop to meet La Rae. We browsed a little and then went to have lunch at one of those Indian restaurants on Sixth Street. It was a tiny, dark place with relentless canned sitar music.

  “I can’t even read the menu,” La Rae complained, “and that music is driving me crazy.”

  “Typical Western intolerance,” I said, squinting at my own menu and tilting it to catch the candlelight.

  “I’ll probably have heartburn all the way home,” La Rae muttered.

  “Stop being such a pill. When it’s your turn, you can choose someplace American, okay?” I said, remembering her bitter prediction that we’d end up meeting for lunches. But it didn’t really matter where we met—I hadn’t felt truly comfortable with La Rae since Frank’s “visit.” We argued more than we ever had, mostly about silly, petty things like this. “Listen, I’m sorry,” I said, leaning forward to touch her arm. “I’m just in a lousy mood.”

  “You haven’t heard anything from Jason yet, have you?” she asked.

  “No, although Howard says he’s looked everywhere …”

  “Don’t you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s compensating, maybe he’s acting out his own old fantasies through Jason.”

  “Oh, will you stop playing Freud, Paulie,” La Rae said. “It’s so boring.”

  I became unreasonably angry. “Look who’s talking,” I said. “You could be arrested for practicing without a license. At least I don’t mess around with the lives of perfect strangers.”

  “Well, it’s better than wasting your own life on bathtub rings and plant mold, isn’t it?”

  How could she! Why, she was the one who’d gotten me into it in the first place! I was so angry I almost told her about Frank’s pass, and I think she almost revealed worse things she thought or knew about Howard and me. But instead I mumbled, “Let’s order, okay?” and we bent to the menus as if they were scripts that would tell us what to say next.

  We managed to make polite, artificial conversation until dessert, when La Rae confided that she was having serious problems with her father. He was accusing her and Frank of stealing things from
his room in their garage: underwear, newspapers, money. She said he was hoarding food against some imagined Armageddon, and the whole house was starting to stink.

  “Your poor dad,” I said. “And poor you,” I added, as a kind of olive branch.

  “Frank is pretty good about it,” La Rae said, as if she’d read my mind before and felt obligated now to speak in his behalf. “In fact, he’s a lot better than me. He tries to draw my father out, to talk him up. I just want to shake him and say straighten up and stop acting like this.”

  “He’s your father, that’s why. I get that way with my mother, too, when she starts singing Howard’s praises, when she repeats things. God, she tells me everything about thirty times.”

  “I hate when my father coughs and clears his throat. I swear he does it just to annoy me.”

  We both laughed, guiltily, comfortably, the tension between us relieved. And later we parted with affection, but I mourned the unqualified easiness we’d once had, and I feared the eventual end of our friendship. All relationships seemed fragile to me then. People changed without fair warning, or they died or went away. If you left them first, you saved face and protected yourself from the pain of abandonment. Still, I sorely missed everyone who was missing: Howard, Jason, my long-lost father. And although he’d stopped talking about her, I knew that Bernie continued to ache for his wife.

  I had been writing whole poems, in the middle of everything. At least they seemed whole until the class got at them, and then I knew they were still fragmented and badly flawed. The criticism was much harsher than it had been the first time. Somehow, it didn’t discourage me, once I’d gotten over the initial shock and hurt. It actually motivated me to work harder, as if even a negative response proved my poems were viable, were worth the effort of revision.

  I went to the health club after leaving La Rae, and joined an aerobics class that was already in session. “Get it up, get it up!” the instructor ordered, in time to the hard-driving rock blasting from the speakers. How did people ever exercise during the big-band era? I had trouble keeping up with everybody else, even the only other woman who looked my age. Maybe their head start had given them momentum, and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to work out right after lunch. I crawled away before the class had ended and went down to the Jacuzzi, where the same kind of music was playing. There was a woman sitting there alone, with her eyes shut, and I sat beside her in the rushing water. “Ahhh,” I said. It was actually too hot for comfort, practically scalding, but I thought I’d get used to it.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” she said, opening her eyes. “It draws all the poisons out of your nerves.”

  What did she mean by that? There were so many disturbed people in the city, and although most of them were probably harmless, you couldn’t ever be sure. The towel attendant was reading a magazine and listening to his own personal Walkman. You could easily drown without ever getting his attention. I looked at the other woman and she was smiling companionably. I smiled, too, and tried to relax, to release my nerve poisons to mingle with hers in the steaming foam.

  Back at the apartment, I found that one of Ruth Trueheart’s books had arrived in the mail. I had ordered it so long ago I’d almost forgotten about it. There was a bill tucked inside that described it as a “First Edition, d.j. slightly torn and sunned.” I knew that there had only been one edition of each of Ruth’s books. This was her second, a slender volume called Wrong Turn. I opened the back flap and there was a photo of her, taken, it seemed, during another lifetime. She looked only slightly familiar, the way my friends and I looked in our wedding pictures. The hair that was mostly gray now, and worn in a careful French knot, was dark and willfully unkempt in the picture, like Colette’s, like mine. Who was this? It wasn’t only that she was incredibly young but that she had the striking radiance of someone in love.

  The book itself was handsome, with a simple Art Deco design on its jacket, which had been mended with yellowed tape. I wondered what “sunned” meant. Did it refer to the faded corners, the bleached spine? The word evoked a sun-filled room where someone sat reading poetry in a happy, golden daze. I opened the book and saw the dedication: To A. Oh, the holy mystery we make out of ordinary, mortal love. Wrong Turn had been out of print for years. This copy had to be hunted down for a modest fee, and was probably found on some dusty old shelf somewhere. There was a bookplate pasted inside; the book had once been part of Judith Lehmann Pearl’s library. Ex Libris. Did she still exist? Did A.? And were Ruth’s later books dedicated to B., and C, and so on? I turned to the first poem. It was titled “A Winter Prothalamion” and began:

  Come to the window now;

  can so much snow

  be simply bridal?

  Does love

  remain

  a sword of flowers?

  My eyes filled with tears, making the poem run off the page like rain off a window. The words had taken me by surprise, the way music does sometimes, or sudden, unbidden memories. So this was poetry! Of course, I’d always known the real thing when I read it, but now I faced the truth that my own writing was not and never would be, despite Ruth’s kind encouragement and all my diligent revising. And worse, I had always known this, too. Then why did I persist, and with such sinful pride and hopefulness? It certainly wasn’t for any fantasy of fame and fortune—even the real poets shared such stingy rewards. Why else did so many great ones die young, if not from the complications of disappointment? And here was Ruth with seven lost books, trying to teach her secret music to mostly tone-deaf students. I knew that I was moved to write by something like desire, although I couldn’t name it exactly. Yet it had to do with naming, and with giving shape to the scary shapelessness of being.

  I called La Rae later and apologized for being so cranky at lunch. She was friendly, but I detected an edge of coldness to her voice. And she insisted there was nothing to apologize for, which gave me no chance to try and repair things between us. Helplessly, I made another date to meet her for lunch. Then I got into bed with a pile of books, including Ruth’s, even though it was only eight o’clock. This was what I’d dreamed of doing when the children were young and I hardly ever had time to myself. I used to read in the locked bathroom, while Jason or Annie jiggled the knob and hammered on the door with a toy. I read during their brief naps, and even while I fed them, the volume of stories or poems propped on my cookbook holder on the table. Some of my favorite books are still marked with smears of baby food and tiny fingerprints. “Mommy is reading now,” I’d announce when they demanded my attention, and then I’d try to get a few more lines in before I had to stop. Did that have anything to do with the reading problems Jason developed later? Maybe I wasn’t the best mother in the world, despite my passion for mothering. I had the domestic life I’d wanted so badly, and yet I’d escape into other people’s imagined lives every chance I got. Katherine kept assuring me that someday my children would be adults who’d leave home, and that I’d have plenty of time to read. I told her that the way things worked out, I’d probably go blind first.

  In the meantime, there were other, more serious concerns. I saw our family slowly dividing into opposing sides, and I warned Howard that something was very wrong. “We should be all for one and one for all,” I said, and he said, “Jesus, Paulie, we’re not the Three Musketeers.” He continued to favor Ann and I championed Jason, even when he was perversely bratty. I thought I was close to him, that I understood him in some special, symbiotic way. But as he grew older the distance between us grew, too. He became so unpredictable—manly one minute and babyish the next—that I wasn’t sure how to treat him anymore. The insistent high-pitched voice deepened and cracked; his body began to grow too quickly into the promise of his oversized hands and feet. He was being transformed, like some poor creature in a horror movie who can’t help turning into a monster. When he was sixteen, Leila Stark, that sexy, feral-looking girl from school, started hanging around him. She would go right past me into his room and close the door behind her. “Talk
to him,” I’d beg Howard, and later I’d hear embattled voices from another part of the house. I was always grateful for the ultimate, peacemaking noise of their music.

  Bernie was at a medical meeting in Chicago, and I wouldn’t see him for a few days. He’d asked me to go with him, but I said I couldn’t leave town because of Sara, and wondered later how true that was. I’d just finished proofreading a huge stack of engineering papers; they were on the dresser, neatly bundled for delivery the next morning. There were no demands on me as I lay in Mary and Jim’s bed, propped on pillows like an invalid, surrounded by a landslide of books. But I was unable to read. Of course, there was nothing wrong with my eyes that my reading glasses couldn’t fix—it was simply that life had completely invaded my consciousness. I gave up and reached for the telephone, which was still my main connection to the outside world. I called Ann, and she and Sara answered at the same time. Then Spence picked up a third extension somewhere and yelled hello. We all said the inane things families say to one another on the phone: “How are you? … I’m fine … Take care …” As if the mechanics of phoning interfered with natural discourse. I hung up, feeling restless and dissatisfied, and then I called Howard, something I rarely did.

  He was surprised to hear from me. “Nothing’s happened yet, has it?” he asked, and it took a few moments before I realized he was referring to Sara.