The Imposter Bride

by Nancy Richler

  “Mmm …” he sighed. “Lilac.” Though, in truth, his sense of smell was so saturated with herring, sweat and the perfume of the other guests that the delicate floral scent he thought he detected might well have been imagined.

  “Rosewater,” Elka corrected. “But that’s just my perfume. Can you really not smell it?” She smiled slyly at him.

  “Smell what?” he asked, also smiling, but uneasy.

  “It’s not their stench she smells.” Elka pointed in the direction of the bride and groom. “Anyone can see they’re well matched. Just look at his face, how he loves her.”

  But Sol couldn’t bear to look at his brother right then, at the happiness that should have been his.

  “It’s her own marriage to my father that my mother smells. It leaks out through my pores, she can’t escape it.”

  “You smell nice to me,” Sol murmured as he cast about for a way to change the subject. What was it with this mother–daughter pair and their bizarre talk of odours? And what kind of girl talked about her parents’ marriage in that way to a man she’d barely met?

  A pity, thought Ida Pearl, looking in the direction her daughter had pointed. For it wasn’t happiness she saw on Nathan’s face. It was longing. A longing suffused, at that moment, with hope, but a hope that wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, Ida knew. And he seemed a decent young man, nice to look at and well mannered. A young man whose future, if not for his bride, might have held the promise of happiness.

  IDA PEARL AND ELKA had not actually been invited to the wedding, a fact Sol might have figured out for himself had he given the matter any thought. All the guests were from the Kramer side. They had to be. The bride had no friends or relatives in Montreal. She knew no one except the Eisenberg family that had agreed to host her.

  But Sol wasn’t thinking about the guest list that night, hadn’t thought to wonder about the provenance of the only two strangers in the room. His mind was on himself, his own failings. How could he have turned away from a woman like Lily? How could his first instinct about her have been so wrong? He was a man who set great store on instincts. He had to. His future, lacking education or family connections to support it, rested entirely and solely on his astuteness. And now this failure. The bright future that had flashed just ahead flickered and faded in his mind. In its place, a sepia-washed vision: a shapeless woman in a sundress, watering tomato plants on the balcony of a walk-up; a man in an undershirt, chewing sunflower seeds on that same balcony and spitting out the husks on the floor. It was a repellent vision, shocking in its clarity. One in which Sol immediately recognized himself and his future wife.

  Was it that vision that impelled him to invite Elka to step outside the hall with him, a need for distraction from his own darkening thoughts?

  Elka glanced worriedly towards her mother. She didn’t need to ask to know she was forbidden. “I guess if it’s just for a few minutes …” she said.

  “We could both use the fresh air,” Sol assured her as he guided her towards the door, but there was no freshness to the air outside, just the heavy stillness of a humid summer night. And as for distraction … he waited for Elka to talk, to complain about the heat, to ask him about himself, his ideas, his dreams.

  But Elka had suddenly become aware that she was alone with a man for the first time in her life, an older man, no less—he had to be twenty-three at the very least—and in a situation that, had she asked her mother, would have been expressly and unambiguously forbidden to her. She could think of nothing to say, stood silently, like a dark and sweating lump in the night.

  “Shall we walk a bit?” Sol asked.

  “Okay,” she said, and they walked a few blocks in silence. Every front stoop they passed had someone on it, every balcony, every staircase, people escaping the heat of their apartments, talking, playing cards, fanning themselves with newspapers.

  “So tell me,” Sol said. “How do you and your mother know Lily?”

  “We don’t,” Elka answered.

  “You don’t? You know my brother, then?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then how …?”

  “We weren’t invited.”

  He smiled. “Well, that’s certainly … interesting.” He thought of the huge plate of cake and herring he had seen the mother helping herself to, the chaser of chickpeas and Scotch. It was one of the more ingenious schemes to fill one’s stomach that he’d come across, and certainly less arduous than any he’d managed to dream up until now.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “How would I know?”

  “Why did you come over to our table then?”

  “Well, certainly not to throw you out.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Do you get thrown out often?”

  “What are you talking about … ‘often’? You think we do this regularly? Make a habit of crashing other people’s weddings? What do you take us for?” And when Sol didn’t answer: “My mother had a cousin by the name of Lily Azerov back in Europe—Azerov was my mother’s family name before she married my father. We haven’t heard anything from her family, not since the war started. She’s been waiting for news, but there’s been nothing yet.” She looked at Sol, who nodded. His mother, too, was waiting.

  “They’re still sorting things out over there,” Sol said.

  “So when she heard from one of her customers that a refugee by the name of Azerov had arrived in Montreal …”

  “But if it was your cousin, wouldn’t she have contacted your mother directly?”

  “You’d think,” Elka agreed. “But I guess my mother thought she might not be able to find us, or something, that maybe she forgot my mother’s married name.” Elka thought a little more, then shrugged. “I can’t explain what my mother was thinking, dragging me here with her, but your brother’s wife is not her cousin. She saw that right away.”

  Which didn’t stop her from staying at the wedding and helping herself to food and drink, Sol noted.

  “I don’t know why we stayed. I know we shouldn’t have,” Elka said as if she had just read Sol’s thought. “And then the things she said …” A blush rose to her face.

  “It was a little peculiar,” Sol allowed.

  “Peculiar” didn’t begin to describe it, Elka thought. She had expected her mother to turn around and leave the wedding hall as soon as she saw that the bride was not the lost cousin she had hoped to find. Instead, Ida’s eyes had hardened, and her grip had tightened on Elka’s wrist. She was transfixed on the bride, and not in the usual, admiring way. Elka could only hope that none of the other guests noticed the expression on her face, a cold, hard expression so out of place at a wedding. It was as if Ida’s disappointment had turned into anger towards the bride, Elka thought now as she walked with Sol. As if it were the bride’s fault that she wasn’t the cousin Ida had hoped she would be.

  “I can’t really explain it,” Elka said again. “Why she would have said those things.” To the groom’s own brother, no less. And at a wedding she hadn’t even been invited to. “She thinks she has a sixth sense about people. You know: what they’re like, who they should be with.” She glanced at Sol. “For all the good it’s done her.”

  Sol raised his eyebrows in a questioning way.

  “Her marriage to my father wasn’t exactly a huge success.”

  Sol smiled. “Maybe her sixth sense works better for other people’s business than her own.”

  Elka smiled, relieved that Sol didn’t seem as put off as she’d feared.

  “And maybe in this case she’s on to something,” Sol added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was me the bride was supposed to marry, you know.”

  “You?”

  He told her about the letters he and Lily had exchanged, the arrangement they’d come to—leaving out the part about the payment he’d negotiated. Then the scene at Windsor Station.

  “But it wasn’t right,” he concluded. “I could feel it in my gut.” He looke
d at Elka. “Sixth sense,” he added with a wink.

  He expected a smile from her in return, agreement from her that he had done the right thing, that the gut never lies. He expected some variety of the nodding, smiling encouragement he was used to receiving during a first encounter with a girl.

  “And so you left her there?” she asked instead. “You left your fiancée at the train station?”

  “I didn’t just leave her.” What did she take him for? “I called the people who had agreed to host her until the wedding.” He remembered his desperate call to Eisenberg—his boss and self-appointed mentor since his father’s death eleven years earlier. “I explained what had happened and asked them to come and pick her up.”

  “And then you left her? A refugee who travelled half the world to marry you?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Sol protested, but it was, of course. He remembered Lily’s face as she waited to be greeted, the hopeful lift of her eyes at each approaching man, the disappointment, then confusion, as one after another swept past her to welcome someone else. As the crowd around her thinned, she had developed a sudden preoccupation with her luggage—an attempt, Sol knew, to control her rising panic, rein in her darting eyes. She’d bent over her suitcase, a lone, still figure in the swirling crowd, her grey dress too sombre amid the bright summer colours, its classic cut too severe among all the wide skirts and needless flourishes that flaunted the end of wartime restrictions. How long had she bent over that suitcase, he wondered now, fiddling with the leather strap that didn’t need adjusting, postponing the moment when she would have to look up again at the emptying hall?

  Someone had bumped him, a girl with yellow hair and a wide red mouth. “Sorry, hon,” she’d exhaled. Her eyes were blue, her hair crimped into countless perfect, yellow waves. A doll, he thought, like the one his younger sister, Nina, had loved so many years before. A living doll that would leave on his arm if he would just give the signal. She smiled encouragement, her mouth a blur of red. While across the hall on the periphery of his vision, the grey blot he was meant to marry.

  What kind of man …? he wondered now, remembering Lily’s shadowed face, the dress, all wrong, that had obviously been chosen with care. What kind of man …? he heard Elka think, and a hot shame filled him, a shame charged with anger at the silent girl beside him through whose eyes he had just glimpsed a distinctly unpleasant view of himself.

  What Elka saw, though, didn’t seem to her unpleasant. She liked how Sol kept to the outside of the sidewalk as they walked, as if what menaced her resided in the empty street. She liked the light touch of his hand on her waist as he guided her around corners and across streets, had begun to wait for it at each crosswalk, that light, fleeting touch claiming different parts of her. It was scandalous, of course, that he had left the woman at the station, but she felt flattered to think that she had caught what Lily couldn’t. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that her mother had insisted they stay at the wedding, she thought now as she smiled up at Sol. Maybe her mother had a sixth sense after all.

  MAYBE IT WILL BE ALL RIGHT, Bella Kramer thought as she sat alone at the table reserved for the wedding party and watched her son and daughter-in-law dance above her in their lifted chairs. The wedding party consisted of three: Lily, Nathan and Bella. Nathan’s father, Joseph, had died eleven years earlier, and his sister, Nina, had departed for Palestine as soon as the war in Europe ended. Sol would normally have acted as best man and been seated at the table with the rest of the family, but in this case it was agreed all around that he had no further role to play in this marriage.

  Some head table, Bella had thought when she first sat down, a small round table with five chairs, the extra two chairs being for the rabbi and his wife. She remembered the head table at her own wedding, a long table that extended the length of an entire wall in one of the biggest wedding halls in all of Berdichev, with her large and boisterous family filling one end and Joseph’s equally large and boisterous family filling the other. Now that was a head table.

  Nathan had thought at first that there shouldn’t be a wedding party at all, that they should dispense with walking down the aisle, given that Lily had no one to walk with her on the way to the khupah, but Lily had shaken her head. “Why should my misfortune rob you of a proper wedding?” she asked. “Then I’ll also walk down the aisle alone,” he said, to which she shook her head again. She would not have his mother be insulted in such a way.

  Nathan had told Bella about that exchange as the two of them sat in the back seat of the car he had hired to take them to his wedding. They could easily have walked over. The synagogue where the wedding was being held was on Hutchison Street, just a few blocks away from their apartment on Clark Street, and it was a beautiful summer evening. But the way a thing starts is the way it continues, Nathan felt, so it was important to him that every member of the wedding party arrive in as much style and comfort as he could afford.

  Just how much was this ride costing him? Bella had wondered briefly, but then she dismissed the thought because she knew how proud Nathan felt to be able to hire a car for the occasion. And not just one. Another hired car was travelling through the same streets at that very moment, bringing his bride to the hall where they would soon be united in marriage. It was a gloomy way to go to a wedding, Bella couldn’t help thinking. She had been danced through the streets to her own wedding. She had heard the singing and clapping of her family and friends from a distance and then growing louder and louder as they approached her parents’ home. Joseph was already waiting for her at the hall, and they were coming to bring her to him. What a moment that had been. She remembered her joy and feeling of triumph as she was swept through the streets to the man she had chosen for herself and already knew she loved. This quiet drive to her son’s wedding felt better suited to a funeral, but she knew Nathan was happy and proud. And she knew he had just told her about that exchange with Lily to paint his bride in the most favourable light to her soon-to-be mother-in-law.

  She had patted his knee and smiled.

  NATHAN WAS NOT ACTUALLY Bella’s first-born; he was her fourth. But he was the first to live past childhood. Her first children had died during the civil war that followed the revolution in Russia. They had not been murdered as so many had been, torn and tortured as each successive band of soldiers reconquered the city; and in that, she supposed, she had been lucky. She shook her head now at that thought, tried to imagine if the hopeful bride she had been would ever have believed what life would soon force her to consider “luck.” She wouldn’t, Bella knew, but the woman she had become understood the darker shades of good luck. And that’s what it had been, a very dark shade of good luck that her children had not been afraid when they were taken. They had gone quietly of hunger and illness while in the embrace of their mother’s arms. One after another they had gone, the baby first, than two-year-old Leah, then her first-born, Shmulik, who had been his father’s delight.

  She had thought then that her life was over, but Nathan had been born just one year later on the passage over to Canada. He had come early, an entire month before the date she had calculated, and neither she nor Joseph had thought of a name for him, neither of them able, at that point, to imagine a happy and usual conclusion to the pregnancy. One of the other passengers had suggested he be named for the ship that was carrying them all to new lives. She smiled now, remembering that passenger—a tailor from Pinsk who was on his way to become a farmer somewhere in the wilds of Saskatchewan or Manitoba. Good luck to him, she had thought at the time, thinking he could farm with a stooped back like that. She wondered now what had become of him.

  The man’s suggestion for her son’s name had been as absurd as his ambition for his new life—the ship was the SS Vedic—but it had some appeal to Bella. Not because of any shortage of traditional names—there were all the names of brothers and uncles that were not currently in use, suspended as they were by the premature deaths of their previous owners. But Bella hadn’t wanted to plant in new earth what
had withered in the old. She wanted a fresh name, one unrelated to anyone she and Joseph had ever known. It was she who had suggested Nathan, from the Hebrew for “gift.” It was a name, she thought, that balanced the memories of what they’d come through with their hopes for the future. Joseph, though, had had no hope for the future—his or anybody else’s—and had suggested Sol instead, the name of his beloved youngest brother who had died at thirteen of typhus, also during the civil war. Bella, however, was adamant: Nathan, she insisted. Joseph’s hope would return. They had been given another child, another chance, and were heading to a new life in a new and distant land. But she had been wrong.

  In Russia her Joseph had worked with metal. An honourable substance, he had told her the first time they met. A substance whose history paralleled that of man himself. She smiled to remember it, how cocky he’d been. She had agreed with him, of course. She would have agreed with anything he said at that point—he was so handsome and brash—but her agreement went deeper than that. She was a socialist at the time. She shared the view, prevalent among her co-believers, that the metal industry was by far the most valuable and important of all the industries that would build the socialist future.

  In Canada, though, Joseph Kramer had sorted buttons. That was the first job he found when they disembarked in Montreal, and it was a fine job for a newcomer, as it required neither English nor French and paid almost a living wage to anyone who could stand the hours.

  Joseph, it turned out, could stand the hours. He preferred the hours, Bella soon came to understand, to those he spent at home, mute and stiff with her and their new child. He preferred the procession of buttons that asked nothing more than to be sorted by colour and size.

  Bella had assumed the job would be temporary, a stepping stone to something better, especially when one of their neighbours told her that the Canadian Pacific Railway was hiring Jewish tinsmiths and other metal workers. But the weeks went by, and then the months, and Joseph was still sorting buttons.