“O.K.,” Julian replied — this much American Mme. Bernard understood, though nothing beyond it — and hauled in his overloaded duffle bag; a nuisance, it held more books than shirts and socks. He would not let Lili lift its bulky tail. That other time, when they were still a little new to each other and he was leaving Mme. Duval’s, she had begged to help carry the thing, and he yielded: it weighed like a ton of coal. But now she was his wife.
32
DR. MONTALBANO DIDN’T turn up until early the next morning. He had missed his train: a last-minute skirmish, a genuine fight, fists and teeth, her nails in his flesh, tearing the skin. Adriana when provoked (but how had he provoked her?) pounded and drew blood. He slapped her hard, and his Italian operetta came to its noisy coda. He couldn’t say he regretted it. She was a woman without imagination; she liked to see matters to their destined conclusion. He preferred improvisation. He spent the night prone on a bench in the train station in Milan, with his shoes off and his feet sticking out.
The concierge was dozing at her desk; he passed her by. The elevator sang familiarly. The keys in his pocket, when he pulled them out, were a confusion — Lyon, Milan, Paris, even the old Pittsburgh set on a rusty ring — as if he’d ever go back! It was difficult to remember which was which, they all looked alike, but after one or two resisted the lock, the door finally gave way and struck a bottle behind it. It rolled off with a hollow clink and tipped over two others standing like ninepins. All three were empty. He noticed the suitcase lying flat on the floor before he took in the rest: a head propped against it. The head of a girl. An airline tag attached to a strap dangled above it. His rooms smelled sourly of stale dregs, but inside the sourness a different smell, darker, looser. Was she dead? Stupid, asinine, to have trusted Alfred! Alfred had vouched for that marshmallow boy, and Alfred could not even vouch for his own life. He had promised to live; he broke his promise. And the boy was gone, leaving this corpse. Such things happened. There was violence all around — Adriana would have killed him if she could.
He scanned the deserted waiting room: it was not very tidy, but it did not seem abused. On one of the tables, under a lamp, he spotted the key he’d left with the boy — at least he hadn’t run off with it. But this girl, abandoned, bullied, bludgeoned! He bent to examine the body. No marks anywhere. He lifted one arm, and the other. Nothing amiss with either . . . but hadn’t Alfred said some bruise, some deformation? She was very young; she didn’t look to be more than twenty, if that. And she was breathing! A bobbing pulse in the throat. He came to his senses: of course she was only drunk. Those bottles, why had he jumped to the most pernicious conclusion? Violence all around. She stirred into wakefulness.
“Lea’ me be,” she murmured. “Go ’way.”
Now he shook her. “Hey you. Where’s your boyfriend?”
“Go ’way.”
“Where is he? Did he ditch you?”
“Go ’way.”
Bending over her, he fingered the airline tag: IRIS MARY NACHTIGALL, 560 BEL AIR CIRCLE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. And below this: Flight 196, departing 6 P.M. Ten hours from now? Tomorrow? Yesterday?
“Hey you,” he said again. “Get up.”
“Don’ wanna. Lea’ me ’lone.”
He yelled, “Damn it, get up on your feet!”
It surprised him that she obeyed. She stood up and wobbled toward the door, then wobbled back and picked up her suitcase. And collapsed.
“Over there,” she rasped, vaguely pointing. “Key —”
“Never mind. Just sit here, that’s right. Where’s that fellow was supposed to take care of the place?” He took out his wallet and searched for the slip he remembered putting there. “Here, I’ve got it. Julian Nachtigall . . . Then you’ve got to be his . . . what? Don’t tell me at your age — from the look of you — his wife?”
“Lili’s his wife. He got married, that’s why.” The rasp splintered into a dry croak.
He brought her water in a cup. She swallowed it thirstily.
“Fine, you’ve been spared, so what the devil are you doing here?”
Her eyes swam in bewilderment. And then, gathering focus: “Home. Going home.”
“Well,” he said, “before you try that, maybe you should just sleep it off.”
There was nothing to be done. He left her where she was. He was exhausted — that hard bench all night! — and hauled himself into his bed. He saw with distaste that the sheets hadn’t been changed. A smelly blotch on the pillow. A half-full bottle on the bureau nearby. It was plain the girl had been living here. Goldilocks soused in his own bed. Alone, or with some lowlife from Alfred’s crowd. Stupid, asinine, to have trusted Alfred! But the boy had appeared soft and safe and civilized . . .
When he woke to empty his bladder and came back he found her standing passively at the side of the bed, staring at the stained pillow.
“Dr. Montalbano?” she said.
So she knew him. He had slept for what felt like hours. He supposed she had too. But it still was not enough to stem the tiredness, and what was she jabbering now?
“I’ve behaved badly, I’ve behaved so badly —”
Yawning, he asked, “Did that Julian person let you in?”
“He’s my brother.”
“And did he invite in all his cousins by the dozens and the rest of his relations too?”
“It’s been just me. I stayed on to say thank you, because Lili wouldn’t, and I waited, but you didn’t come —”
“You stayed to make a mess. When does your plane leave?”
“It went last night. Without me.”
“So I see. You were delayed by Emily Post. By your nicely brought-up manners. To thank me for my invitation, which was somehow lost in the ether.”
“Oh please, I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of going home.”
Circles. What was he to do with her? Throw her out?
“Then go to your brother.”
“I can’t. He might be leaving pretty soon. Not to go home, his wife is taking him away —”
“None of my concern. I’ll be having clients coming, you’d better find something.”
“I’m practically out of money. I know I’ve behaved badly, I know it, but I thought . . . I thought maybe I could stay a little longer and finish cleaning up —”
“It’s all right, I’ll get the concierge to send up a crew.”
“You don’t understand!” she cried. “I’m not like Julian, he drifts with the tide, he follows this one and that one, I’m not like that! I know what I want!”
“Three empty liters,” he said. “And one just started.”
“Only because I was waiting for you, and you never came.”
“Waiting to thank me. By getting drunk in my bed.”
“I don’t want to go home!”
What was he to do with her? He studied her face, her hair. Every strand of it was agitated. She was agitated all over. Was it the wine still? Or some innate force, a vortex of intent. An insidious will, the secret worm that burrows into the brain.
“Good point that,” he said. “Neither do I.” He hesitated. “I’ll cook up something. You need to eat, don’t you?”
“I’m too tired to eat. Oh, please, I know I’ve been bad, I know it!”
“Come lie down,” he said.
“You won’t mind? This was my bed, I’m used to it. Julian and Lili were down the hall. They were awfully private.”
He felt her weight next to him. Long solid arms, intact. Hair shivering, the color of leaves in a Pittsburgh autumn. As if a wind were passing through. But there was no wind. They were enclosed in his clinic, and soon the clients would arrive.
They slept again, heavily, deeply. Dreamlessly; or so they believed.
33
A poor man came to a rabbi renowned for his sage counsel. “I live in a tiny hovel with my wife and seven children,” he lamented, “and my wife is about to bear
another child. We are so crowded that we scarcely have room to turn around, and I am too poor to change our dwelling for a better one.”
The rabbi asked, “Do you have any chickens?”
“My wife keeps a few skinny birds for the eggs, which she sells for a few pennies.”
“Then bring the chickens into the house.”
The man did as he was told, but a week later he was back, more wretched than before. “Rabbi,” he cried, “our lives are unbearable! The chickens scamper everywhere and squawk, the children scream and chase after them, and it becomes impossible to breathe.”
“Do you have a cow?” asked the rabbi.
“My wife keeps a scrawny cow for the milk, which she sells for a penny or two.”
“Then bring the cow into the house.”
And so it went, week after week. In came the chickens, a horse borrowed from a neighbor, an ox lent by a farmer, a stray dog, and finally a sheep that had got lost from its flock.
“Rabbi!” the poor man pleaded. “Life is worse than ever. The new baby is here, and the children fight for elbow room, and my unhappy wife weeps day and night.”
“I see,” said the rabbi. “Then will you do what I tell you?”
“I will do anything you say,” answered the desperate husband.
“Good. Send away the chickens, the cow, the horse, the ox, the dog, and the sheep. And when you have done all that, come back and let me know how you are faring.”
The man went off and did as the wise rabbi had instructed.
“Well?” said the rabbi, when the man returned.
“Rabbi, all blessings upon you! Thanks to you, our house has become as vast and airy as a king’s realm. You have transformed our little shack into an earthly Eden!”
Laura was reading aloud from a fat children’s book, a long-ago gift from Leo Coopersmith’s mother when Jeremy, the Bienenfelds’ son, was born. It was called A Treasury of Jewish Folktales, and had been sent in gratitude (according to the inscription) for Laura’s “cousinly kindness to Leo when he was boarding with your family and was studying music composition at Juilliard. Who knew then,” Leo’s mother wrote, “that so much success lay ahead!” Laura recalled solicitous awe rather than cousinly kindness, and certainly no reciprocal mildness from Leo — but what did all that matter now? Since then, a generation had gone into the earth: Leo’s parents, Laura’s, Bea’s. And Jeremy was almost seventeen. Even as a little boy, he had never liked these moralizing old fables.
She had brought the book along, Laura explained, as a kind of celebratory joke; the tale she was reading from, with many interruptions from her husband, was titled “How to Make a Big House out of a Tiny House.”
But Harold Bienenfeld pooh-poohed it. “Everybody knows that story, Laura, you didn’t have to drag it out like that. And anyhow what the rabbi should’ve told the guy was go get some birth control.”
“Folktales don’t have birth control,” Laura said.
Bea put in, “There’s another version too, about a Bedouin who brings a camel into his tent.”
“Sure, and maybe one about an Eskimo and an igloo,” Harold said. “Some Jewish story!”
The evening’s subject was the sale of the piano — how, with the monstrous thing gone, Bea’s narrow habitat was suddenly magicked into an expanse as free and light as a prairie. All at once there was room for a broad dining table and four fine chairs, and Bea was inspired to give a jubilant little supper party; so here were Laura and noisy nosy insistent Harold. Jeremy had also been invited, but declined to tear himself away from what Laura called “the porthole,” a brand-new television set with a small round screen and a two-pronged steel antenna on top. The Bienenfelds were, impressively, the first in their West 84th Street building to acquire one. “It attracts the neighborhood kids like fleas,” Harold bragged.
The fumes of his cigar had begun to infiltrate Bea’s ambitious dessert, an apple cake baked according to a complicated recipe on the flour bag. It was a ceremonial marker: the widening of a room can be the widening of a life.
Laura said, “And since we bought the set, Jeremy won’t go near the piano. We had to let the piano teacher go. Not that she was ever satisfied either with Jeremy or my old piano.”
“I wouldn’t give two cents for that piece of junk,” Harold said. “So how about it, Bea,” he pressed, “this fancy white elephant you had in here, how much did you get for it?”
“Well, it did bring more than I expected,” she said. “It’s in pretty good shape, considering it wasn’t new when we got it. The buyer seemed thrilled.”
The vagrant “we” was an embarrassment. She rarely spoke of Leo even to his cousin Laura. And Laura herself usually avoided mentioning Leo, though it occurred to her, too late, that tonight she had been indiscreet: Bea must remember who had sent that storybook, and how it was inscribed.
“Sounds like you made a killing,” Harold said.
If not a killing, then certainly a windfall. Leo knew how to pick his pianos! She had never suspected the real value of the grand, or that it would increase with time. And if Leo’s abandoned instrument had fetched so much, what must his sacred Blüthner be worth? My prize. A treasure. She understood it wasn’t money he meant. And it wasn’t money she meant either, in getting rid of the grand: it had usurped her wedding. A marriage without a wedding, and then no marriage at all. Worse yet: the heavy grand had weighted her years and pinched her orbit. Light! Lightness and scope! Lightness and amplitude, the lightness of infinity! She was a light-footed dancer on a stage as large as a tract, a fish in an unbounded sea!
But money was on Harold’s mind: he was in pursuit of the price of things. The new television cost a fortune right now, he said, he was glad he and Laura could afford it with their two incomes, but when more people started getting their own sets, when every family got to own one the way today every household has a radio and a telephone, it was only a matter of time . . . though it had to be different with something like a piano, there’s no technical stuff involved, nothing with vacuum tubes, it’s more like furniture, so come on, Bea, don’t hold out, how much did you really get for it?
Entertaining Harold was an affliction — but according to the rules of domestic hospitality one couldn’t have Laura without the tedium of Harold. Bea seldom practiced those rules: where was she to have put a visitor? Even Iris, that one night, had seemed uneasy, and for Bea, stoically settling into the crevice of her worn old davenport adjacent to the grand, it had been a torment: the listless odors of stale grievance mixed with lemon-scented wax. She had summoned Laura this evening to be witness to the purging of these overfamiliar fumes — to the purging of Leo. Laura alone knew that the grand was Leo, and Laura too had endured her cousin’s disparagements. Yet in that far-off time she had in a way welcomed Leo’s acerbic swipes: artists are always granted leeway, aren’t they? Leo was family on her father’s side, the artistic branch — though Harold disputed the value of artistic branches.
“That ex of yours, Bea,” he took up, “he’s probably one of those Hollywood Reds out there. Dalton Trumbo types, McCarthy’s got a job on his hands cleaning them out —”
“Just stop it, Harold,” Laura said. “Bea hasn’t been in touch with Leo for ages, she wouldn’t know anything about that. Besides, Leo isn’t political. All he ever cared about was music.”
“He might have turned. Those war movies we used to go to, with all that patriotic stuff, it was mostly Commies who made them. Soviet propaganda.”
“But the Russians were our allies then, and what was so Soviet about Van Johnson? I’m still in love with Van Johnson, aren’t you, Bea?” Laura shot her a rescuing glance. “And by the way,” she said, “did you get that notice at school, the thing about next month?”
“No,” Bea said.
“They put it in all the teachers’ boxes.”
“I haven’t looked in mine since I got back.”
“Oh Bea, you’re getting so careless lately. Something about the teachers having to sign
loyalty oaths —”
“Loyalty oaths,” Harold scoffed. “What, all these pinkos don’t know how to lie? You should’ve looked under the hood, Bea, before you let it get away from you.”
“The hood?”
“The what d’you call it, the top. The lid, whatever. Of that oversized Tinkertoy you sold off. Maybe you’d find some sort of Russky spy map stashed away in there, y’never know —”
It was Harold’s version of a witticism. He started to cut himself another slice of apple cake, but Laura picked up her purse and A Treasury of Jewish Folktales and began their goodnights. When Harold leaves, Bea thought, so will the chickens, the cow, the horse, the ox, the dog, and the sheep.
But Laura, loitering in the doorway, whispered: “That old thing did you no good, Bea. And you could give a ball in this place now —”
In the nearly denuded room the hairs of the carpet were ruthlessly indented where the grand’s brass claws had long bitten down. A brownish discoloration lay there, as flat as a shadow, in the shape of a piano.
34
IT WAS IN HIS first year at Princeton that Marvin learned what it was to find oneself the object of contempt, a knowledge he hid under a skin of confidence, not always his own. His mother especially had confidence in him — he had, after all, passed the entrance exam for Townsend Harris High, and how many boys could do that? Marvin was bright. In high school it didn’t count that he hated Latin and couldn’t see the use of it, and sang out the resentful old hand-me-down jeers (slippo, slippere, falli, bumpus) — he was good at math and science. Unexpectedly — because his sister was the bookish one — he could write a passable school essay when he was in the mood for it, or when he saw that he could get something useful out of it. Approbation was useful. A few of his teachers were nineteenth-century relics; he liked to parrot (but only on paper) the high-flown style he picked up from the genteel-bachelor manners of these faded frail-boned elderly aesthetes. In Marvin it was all ingratiating artifice; otherwise he talked the tough New York talk of his peers. He was his mother’s favorite — she prodded and blazed and egged him on. His father was more remote, and also more placid. He was untroubled by the worn wooden floors of the shop that had fallen to him as if through nature’s edict, while Marvin’s mother, on her knees with a bucket and a broad brush, was driven to lacquer over those scarred boards inch by inch, until every splinter was smoothed away under a honeyed gleam. Marvin was proud of her then (two years into Townsend Harris, and before modernity and his mother had risen to fluorescent lighting); he had not yet been made to understand that a mother on her knees in an ill-lit hardware store is an embarrassment to be concealed, or at least suppressed; or that a spiritless father with a novel too often in hand is a disfigurement to be overcome.
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