Still, she couldn’t deny her hope. It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen anyone from her family. She was in the process of trying to calculate just how old Lily would be now when the bride appeared at the head of the aisle. A complete stranger.
“ARE YOU MAD AT ME?” Elka asked Sol as they settled into a booth at Miss Montreal. She shouldn’t have told him what her mother thought of him. She had thought he would understand, that it would make him sympathetic to the sorts of difficulties she had to put up with every day of her life with her mother. Every hour. Instead, he’d barely spoken the whole way over to the coffee shop.
“No,” Sol responded. “What would I be mad about?” He was as affronted as he was furious, thinking how wrong the mother was, how obtuse in her assessment of his character and prospects. Yet he wondered how Ida Pearl had come to her low opinion of him, on what basis she’d decided he wasn’t good enough for her daughter.
“It’s not really my mother’s fault,” Elka said, looking for ways to soften the blow, to soften Sol, salvage the evening somehow. “She’s …” But here Elka hesitated. How to soften the fact that she had already told him that her mother didn’t think he was quite up to her standard? “She was famous once, you know. In her youth.”
“Right.” Sol made a show of studying the menu, though he already knew it off by heart. He took a different girl to Miss Montreal every other week.
“Really.” Elka looked at Sol to see if he was still upset, but he was now studying the menu with such complete concentration it seemed he thought the future of the world could be read from its offerings. “Her work was famous, anyway.” Still no response. “She was a diamond cutter,” Elka went on, though there had been no indication from Sol that he was even listening. “Among the best in all of Antwerp. Who were the best in the entire world, of course.”
“Uh-huh,” Sol said. Like my father was a skilled metal worker once upon a time, he thought, and my mother a radical who lit fires of enlightenment in the hearts of every factory worker she encountered. “Ice cream?” he offered.
“Please. And cherry Coke. No, make that coffee.” Coffee was a more sophisticated choice, she thought.
“So … your mother’s Belgian, then?” No wonder she was such a snob. They were almost as bad as the German Jews, the Belgians, thinking they were better, more cultured than their Russian and eastern European brethren.
“She was from Krakow originally. That’s where she was born. But then after her father died, she moved to Antwerp. She didn’t want to, but she had to. She had an uncle there, her father’s brother Chaim, who was willing to take her in.”
“Her mother couldn’t keep her?” How high-class was that? Sol thought.
“Her mother had six other children to take care of. Not that her uncle didn’t, but he could afford another. He was in diamonds. And anyway, my mother worked for her keep.”
“He took her in and then put her to work?” Nice family, Sol thought. And she thinks I’m not up to her standard.
“He didn’t put her to work. She wanted to. She didn’t want to be a charity case.”
“Still … How old was she?”
“Seventeen.” Just a few months older than Elka was now. “She started as a polisher. That’s what the women in his workshop did. But somehow she ended up learning to cleave and cut. Which was almost unheard of for a woman. And her uncle tried to keep it unheard of. All her work was under his name, his reputation. And he paid her babkes.” Elka took a sip of her coffee, poured in three creams and half the container of sugar.
Sol smiled, watching her, took another sip of his own, black, as he liked it.
“She got better and better. Her uncle got richer and richer. But then they had a falling-out. Over pay, supposedly, but really over the fact that the secret was out, that more and more dealers were beginning to demand my mother’s work by name.”
“So what? He was still the one who was collecting on it.”
“My great-uncle Chaim had five sons of his own who also worked in that workshop. Five sons who also cut diamonds.”
“I still don’t see …”
“Mediocrity always lives in fear of excellence.”
“Ah.”
“He fired her.”
“Nice guy.”
“He not only fired her. He sent her into exile.”
“Exile?”
“Well, maybe not quite exile. He bought her a passage to Montreal.”
“So she wouldn’t go to work for one of his competitors.”
“Exactly,” Elka said, rewarding him with a full smile.
“But why Montreal?”
“He knew some people here.”
“And he just sent her off? With nothing?”
“With some cash to get started and the names of a few people he knew. Not that she ever contacted any of them. She didn’t have any of their addresses and had just started asking around when she met my father. Arthur Krakauer.” She looked at Sol to see if he knew him. “She thought he was a gentleman. Because he bought her dinner a few times and helped her with her English.” Elka shook her head. “Talk about naive.”
Sol smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” He couldn’t very well tell her how young she seemed to him at that moment, how green, how naive, calling her mother—that warhorse—naive.
“Do you find it amusing that he walked out on us?” There, she thought. I’ve said it. Her gaze was cold and steady.
“Not at all. I didn’t mean …”
“He was gone before I was even born.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Along with all the cash Uncle Chaim had given her for her new start.”
“He took her money?”
“Along with her honour.”
“No,” Sol said. “He didn’t take her honour.”
A faint blush of colour flowed in beneath the steady gaze.
“But all the same, if I ever meet him, I’ll spit in his face.”
“He’s not worth the spit in your mouth,” Elka said, but she was pleased with his response, Sol could tell. He had redeemed his earlier smile.
“She tried to find work after he left but there were no diamond workshops in Montreal. Or jewellers who would hire her. I guess they didn’t think an abandoned woman with a bawling infant was good advertisement for engagement rings and wedding bands.”
“I guess not,” Sol agreed. There was a courage to her honesty, he thought. He admired it. Most girls would have left out the details of such a family background, waited until the hook of their charms was more firmly planted in his flesh before revealing abandonment, poverty, the whole sordid picture. “Here,” he said kindly. “Eat some ice cream. It’s melting.”
He’s probably looking for the nearest exit, Elka thought. But better now than later. She had already had a disappointment when a boy she’d liked had disappeared after discovering that the upper storey of the duplex in N.D.G. didn’t represent quite the rosy picture he’d imagined. At least, she assumed that’s why he’d disappeared. She risked another quick glance at Sol’s face.
“But she has a good business now,” Sol said, encouraging her to continue. “Good” was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but Ida was certainly managing to keep herself and her daughter fed and housed, and in a good neighbourhood, no less, which was no mean feat for anyone, let alone a woman on her own.
“Pretty good,” Elka agreed. “She started it when I was still a baby. Uncle Chaim set her up. Mr. Generosity.”
“Set her up?”
“With diamonds. He provided them on credit.”
I should only have had such an uncle, Sol thought.
“Diamonds cut in his workshop by his sons. Inferior diamonds, in other words. Diamonds inferior to the ones she would have cut.” Elka shook her head remembering how her mother would point out the flaws to her when each new batch of diamonds arrived, the dullness one revealed when turned a certain way, the dark centre of another whose pavil
ion had been over-angled. The fire that could have been created here had this angle only been broken in a different way. Elka could hear her mother’s voice in her mind. Or the brilliance there had the light only been bent to a greater degree of refraction. As if Elka had any idea what she was talking about.
“So all she had to do was find a shop to rent.” Sol sighed.
“And build a business from nothing, with no contacts, no experience, no friends, no support from anyone.” The gaze again, cold and steady.
“Of course. I didn’t mean …”
“And she’s strange, my mother.”
Like I hadn’t noticed, Sol thought.
Elka sighed, licked the last bit of ice cream off the maraschino cherry. “Do you want this?” she asked before popping it into her mouth.
Sol shook his head, smiled. He signalled to the waitress for more coffee.
“She’s not naturally … friendly. You know? She couldn’t find customers. Not at first. It was so bad we couldn’t even afford a proper place to live. She couldn’t come up with rent for both the shop and an apartment, so we had a room in someone else’s flat. One small room. No privacy, of course. Not that I cared about privacy then, but she did. My mother. No hot water. And the shower six blocks away. That’s how we lived until I was eight. And my mother knowing all the while that she was one of the best diamond cutters Antwerp ever produced.”
“That was the thirties,” Sol said with a shrug. “She’s lucky she didn’t lose her shop.” He thought it best not to mention just yet that he still had to walk over to the Y for a shower, had done so, in fact, just that evening, in preparation for this date with Elka. “It wasn’t so great for us either.”
“What does your father do?”
“Nothing now,” he answered with a lightness that fell flat. “He died in ‘35.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hit by a streetcar on the way to work. The number 55,” he added, as if it mattered whether it was the 55 or the 83, or the 29 that he had taken just that evening to see Elka. “He was in buttons.”
“Better Made?” Her mother had made the ring for one of the Better Made weddings.
Sol shook his head. “Button King. Better Made makes the buttonholes. We make the buttons.”
“So you’re in buttons too, then?” Her face flushed again as she realized she hadn’t thought to ask until then what he did for a living, had been too busy talking about her own life. Not even her own life. Her mother’s life. How immature.
He saw her heightened colour and assumed it had to do with his job, with her disappointment over discovering the disparity between what she wanted for herself and what was actually sitting across the table from her. “It’s just for now,” he said. It had been eleven years at that point, excluding his years in the service. “Nathan and I took my father’s job when he died. Two sets of hands for the price of one—and we were supposed to be grateful.”
Sol remembered the look of gratitude on his mother’s face when Eisenberg showed up at his father’s funeral and made his offer of employment. It was a gratitude that seemed to reset the very lines and features of Bella’s face. And when Eisenberg assured her that he wouldn’t be a mere boss to her two boys, but a guide and mentor as well, Sol barely recognized her, his mother, who until then could have been faulted mostly for an unforgiving sharpness, but who was now transformed before his grieving eyes to a soft-eyed cow grateful for a day’s reprieve from the slaughter. It was a moment so shaming to Sol that he swore he would avenge it, a vow he had not yet honoured. Though Eisenberg—it had to be admitted—had made good on his own vow of that day.
“Which Nathan was, of course,” Sol continued. “Properly grateful. He tukhes-licked his way off the assembly line within a year. Right into bookkeeping and accounting. But he could—he had the education, had already finished high school by the time my father died. Or just about, anyway. He only missed the last four months. I missed the whole last two years and four months.”
Elka hadn’t realized that she, having already finished grade ten, was the more educated of the two.
“I wasn’t going to go back after the war, was going to strike out on my own, but Eisenberg made me a good offer.”
“Eisenberg?” Wasn’t that the name Sol had mentioned calling from the station to come pick up his rejected bride?
Sol waited for her to ask what his boss’s offer had been, but Elka’s attention had stalled temporarily on the fact that Sol’s boss had been the one to dig him out of the mess he’d made with Lily—how secure could his job be after that? That and the fact that he hadn’t finished high school. She was imagining how all of this would go down with her mother. If it came to that. If he ever asked her out again.
“Sales,” Sol said. “Head of sales, actually. Which would be great if I was the kind of shmo who wanted to spend his whole life working for someone else.”
“Head of sales,” Elka repeated. This was good, she thought. Unexpectedly promising. Definitely something she could present to her mother in Sol’s defence. “How many in the department?”
The question surprised him. He hadn’t thought she would know to ask that. She was still in high school, after all, didn’t have experience in the workforce. “For now it’s just me. But that’s part of my job. To build the department. Something from nothing. Like your mother did. Except that she had diamonds to sell, of course, not buttons.”
“Buttons are better.”
“Come again?”
“People always need buttons. You can’t rely on diamonds to pay the rent when times are bad.”
“Your mother did.”
“No she didn’t. We would have lost the shop had she not developed a sideline.”
“A sideline?”
“Matchmaking.”
“Are you serious?” He could see that she was. “But people don’t even use matchmakers any more.”
“They do when my mother sets her sights on them.”
He remembered Ida’s peculiar and off-putting comment about the stench of Nathan and Lily’s match, could not imagine what sort of loser would seek out her services. “Was she any good at it?”
“As good as fate.” A hint of a smile, which Sol met with his own.
“And let me guess where all the happy couples bought their rings.”
“Bingo.” A full smile now.
“I like that,” he said. “I like a woman who can think on her feet.”
“She can think lying down as well, my mother.”
CHAPTER 6
I had my own room at Elka and Sol’s new house, as promised, with flowered wallpaper, a red carpet and white furniture embossed with gold, and I liked both the prettiness of it and the fact that the door to it could be shut. If it was shut, people had to knock before entering. This was a new rule I had announced when we moved, and to my surprise neither Elka nor Sol told me that they were the ones who made up the rules in their home and that I was acting spoiled. The sudden privacy was a giddy pleasure. I could do whatever I liked in my room and think whatever I wanted to think, and no one asked me if they could have a turn (Jeffrey) or offered me a penny for my thoughts (Elka).
What I liked most about the move, though, was that Carrie lived just down the street on Bailey, which was by the train tracks. Most afternoons she and I climbed the fence behind her house so we could play on the tracks that ran behind it or in the large empty fields that had not yet been developed into tracts of apartments and single-family housing. In colder weather we trudged through the snow drifts pretending we were explorers trying to reach the North Pole, setting up forts along the way so that our competition—usually the kids from Saint Richard’s—couldn’t claim they had been there first. As the weather warmed we would lay our ears and pennies on the tracks and thrill to the vibrations of the trains we could hear from miles away and to the flattened images of the Queen after a train had rolled over her.
One afternoon one of the girl’s from Saint Richard’s taught us how to hitch a ride
on a slow-moving freight train that was coming through. “It’s easy,” she said. We just had to know that the train was moving faster than it seemed, so we would have to run along it as fast as we possibly could to get up enough speed and momentum to land correctly when we jumped. We had to grab hold of the metal handle exactly right and if we got it wrong we would fall under the train. It had happened to another girl from her school. She’d lost both her legs. “I was there and saw the whole thing,” the girl assured us. “The blood was”—she dropped her voice a little—“terrible.”
My terror made it all the more enticing and exciting. I looked at Carrie. I don’t think fear was even part of her mix. She had just heard that someone else had failed at something, so she was going to succeed. I’m sure that’s what the gleam in her eye was about, though I wouldn’t have put it that way then. I only knew, at that moment, that she was too competitive. That’s what Elka thought. “Winning isn’t everything,” Elka had told me at supper one night after I hurt my back trying to jump over a skipping rope that Carrie had kept tying higher and higher between two trees in our yard. (“It’s not going to hurt her, Elka,” my father had answered.)
So we ran exactly the way the girl had instructed us and grabbed hold of the metal bar and hauled ourselves onto the train.
“Well done,” the girl said. I felt a glow of accomplishment and external approval beginning to warm me. “For a couple of Jews,” she added with smirk.
I was a bit stunned at first. We lived in an almost entirely Jewish world. Our school was Jewish, our neighbourhood was Jewish—so much so that some people called it Côte-St-Jew—and I had not encountered that sort of comment before. I had heard of anti-Semitism, of course, but it was from somewhere else (Russia, Europe, the part of town my father, Sol and Aunt Nina grew up in) and another time (before I was born). My first thought was how stupid the girl was. I hadn’t quite moved to my second thought when Carrie hit her. More than hit. She punched her right in the stomach. It looked to me like a hard punch, the sort of punch that, if there were an audience and they weren’t on a moving freight car, would have led to a fight. But they were on a moving train and there was no one else around to witness any loss of face, so the girl just gave Carrie a funny sort of grin that was different from her smirk and then proceeded to jump off the train. We followed quickly, automatically, but though we knew to push as far out away from the train as we could, we had no sense of the physics of the thing, and both had hard falls followed by some rolling.
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