“Call Elka,” I told him before he even had time to shut the door.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he did that before he even poured his Scotch and got his little dish of salted almonds.
Once he was settled in his chair with the newspaper and the other magazines that had arrived in the mail he asked how my day had gone.
“Fine,” I said.
He looked at me for another few seconds to see if I’d go on. When I didn’t, he asked if I had any homework to do.
“Did it already.” Which was true. The following year Carrie and I would be switching from our school to the Young Israel Day School because it was better, harder and stricter, according to Carrie’s parents. For now, though, our homework didn’t occupy much of our after-school time. “That’s why I came home. I worked on it all afternoon.”
My father nodded. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I might lie to him. Just like it may not have occurred to him that my mother might lie to him, I suppose. And I didn’t think of what I was doing as lying. (Maybe my mother hadn’t either.) I thought of it as privacy. That new concept. It wasn’t just the door to my bedroom I was learning to shut that year, but other doors that guarded places deep within myself that were my own and that I didn’t want to share. So I didn’t tell him about learning to jump up onto a moving train. I knew that if I did, Carrie and I would be forbidden to cross the fence to the tracks and the field beyond. And I didn’t tell him about the girl from Saint Richard’s saying “Jew” as if it were a bad word, because I knew that he and other adults would make too big a deal out of it. And I didn’t tell him about the time I had spent with my mother’s notebooks, because the pulsing I had felt was something between her and me that other people wouldn’t understand.
“You know what I was thinking today?” I asked him.
“What?”
“How neat it would be to have a chemistry set.”
“A chemistry set!” The idea obviously pleased him. “What kinds of experiments do you think you might want to perform?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Litmus tests, maybe.” We had just learned about that in science class. “And stuff with ink. You know, invisible ink.”
My father nodded. Then he said, “I don’t suppose we have any baking soda in this house, do we?”
“Elka might.”
“Lemons,” my father said. He always had his tea with lemon. Milk and lemon were the two things we always had in the fridge.
He got up from his chair and we went to the kitchen, where he sliced a lemon. We didn’t have a squeezer like Elka had, so he just used his hand and squeezed the juice into a little bowl.
“Okay. Now go get a sheet of paper and a Q-tip.”
I ran to get them. My father never cared if I ran in the house.
“Good,” he said when I returned. “Now I’m going to go back to the living room and you’re going to write a secret message using the lemon as ink. When you’re finished, bring it to me.”
What to write? I thought about writing my name, but he had said I should write something secret. I finally decided what it should be.
“Don’t forget to let it dry before you pick it up,” my father called, just as I was about to lift the dripping wet paper.
I waited a few minutes and when it seemed like the lemon juice had dried I brought the paper to my father.
“Ah. A blank piece of paper,” my father said.
It really did look blank. As blank as the pages in my mother’s notebook, except a little wavy now, from still being damp with lemon juice. My father held it up to the light bulb in the lamp by his chair and as he held it there I saw my letters begin to emerge in brown. Mrs. Lazaar is mean, I had written. Mrs. Lazaar was my ballet teacher, and just that week she had assigned our parts for the end of the year performance. I had hoped to be one of the swans but I wasn’t chosen for that. I would be a bulrush, Mrs. Lazaar had told me, a role that was just as important as a swan, she said, and one that would require lots of hard work because it wasn’t easy to learn to sway the way a bulrush does. But I knew it wasn’t as important or as pretty as a swan. Carrie would be a swan dancing across the stage while I would stand swaying in a corner being a stupid bulrush. I saw my statement emerge in brown and then begin to fade as the rest of the paper also turned brown.
“It’s the acid in the lemon juice reacting with the acid in the paper,” my father explained.
He didn’t ask about Mrs. Lazaar, the way Elka would have. I don’t know that he even noticed the secret message I had written. He was more interested in why the heat revealed the writing and in explaining that to me. If I were to mix baking soda with water, we could do the same thing, he told me. And we could also use grape juice then, rather than heat, to reveal the writing.
I didn’t care that he hadn’t asked about Mrs. Lazaar. Or if I did, just a little. I could hardly wait to be alone in the apartment again, and as soon as I was I went straight to the bookshelf, pulled out my mother’s notebook and held it to the light.
Nothing.
I held it closer.
Still nothing.
I held it on the light bulb itself and the paper turned warm without revealing anything.
“ROCKS?” my aunt Nina asked.
We were all at Elka and Sol’s for the Passover Seder and I had told her about the fossil in the rock my mother had sent me. She hadn’t heard about any of the packages my mother had sent to me, probably because she lived downtown and we didn’t see her much.
“She’s sending her rocks?” Nina directed her question to Elka.
Elka nodded, and the look exchanged between Nina and Elka during that nod was not unlike the look exchanged among all the adults the evening the first rock from my mother arrived.
“What kind of rocks?”
“Beautiful ones,” I said. It was not that I didn’t know by then that there was something strange about my mother sending me rocks. I knew. But strange could mean many things, and since Nina and Elka’s exchanged glance was pushing its meaning towards nuts, I was pulling it back as hard as I could towards special and beautiful.
Nina jumped right on board with me. She asked me about the latest rock, and made admiring sounds as I described it to her. So much so that I felt encouraged to describe the scrapbook to her as well, as if I still thought it was a wonderful project, which I didn’t, but it became a little less boring when Nina took such an interest and said she absolutely must see it that very evening and was going to come right over to our house after the Seder.
She didn’t end up coming over that evening—the Seder went on longer than expected, as it always did, and by the time we had helped Elka clean up it was late and time for bed—but she told me that she would definitely come over soon to see it. On my birthday, for sure, which was just two weeks away.
I wasn’t to get my hopes up about Nina’s visit, Elka told me. It wasn’t that she didn’t mean to come. She did mean it when she said it, but often things got in the way for Nina.
“Yeah, like Nina,” Sol said, meaning that Nina was selfish.
That was what my father and Sol thought about Nina: that she only thought of herself. That that was the real reason she had gone off to Palestine right at the end of the war, when my father and Sol still weren’t home from the service and their mother, Bella, who was a widow (not that Nina cared) was all by herself in Montreal. Not because she was an idealist or a Zionist or wanted to teach war orphans to read, like she said, but because she thought she could do whatever she wanted over there (“Must be nice to have no one to answer to,” Sol said), including trying to be an actress.
“Your aunt Nina’s a dreamer,” Elka told me, which was why I wasn’t to let it hurt my feelings if she didn’t come over to see my scrapbook on my birthday.
Which she didn’t.
“I’m so sorry,” she said when she called to tell me she wouldn’t be coming. She was a little breathless, as if she had just run in the door from something very important. And it turned ou
t she had. A really, really important acting part had come up for her and if she didn’t take it her whole career might fall apart. (“What career?” my father asked.)
She did come for Jeffrey’s birthday though, which was in late June, stopping at our house first to see my scrapbook. Another rock had arrived from my mother just the previous week. That brought the total to four. This one was black with swirls of green that Ida Pearl thought might be olivine. My mother had found it on the west bank of the Fraser River, near Boston Bar, British Columbia, which was farther yet from Montreal. The wrapping paper was blue. “Exactly like your eyes!” Nina said, and it was true that the colour was a sort of greyish blue very much like my eyes. Which meant it was also like my mother’s eyes, if what Ida Pearl had told me about my eyes being like hers was true. The stamp had a picture of the explorer David Thompson standing beside a map of western Canada.
Nina admired the scrapbook and told me it had given her an idea for my birthday present, which she still hadn’t gotten me. “What kind of aunt am I anyway, forgetting to get my favourite niece a present for her birthday?” she asked. (I was her only niece.) I showed her the birthday present my father had given me: a chemistry set. “Our own little Madame Curie!” she said.
Nina brought her present over the following week: a map of Canada attached to a bulletin board, with different coloured pins that I could stick into the places where my rocks came from. Which were, of course, the places I knew for certain my mother had been.
I knew when my father was happy and when he wasn’t, and as I unwrapped my present from Nina and she explained what it was for, he definitely wasn’t happy. That didn’t stop him from helping me and Nina stick it up on the wall in my bedroom, but after, when I told them I wanted to find the places on the map by myself and they left my room and walked down the hall, I heard him ask her if she really felt she should be encouraging me.
Encouraging me in what? I wondered. What was wrong with encouraging me? Wasn’t “encouragement” a good word? But they were far enough away that I didn’t hear Nina’s answer.
CHAPTER 7
Who are you? he asked.
I had been walking for days. My skin was caked with dust, my hair a mat of grime, but it was not the black soil of the fields that clung to me, or the red clay of the riverbed or the yellow sand of the paths and roads I had walked. It was the grey dust of ruin, of homes destroyed, of entire towns pummelled to a fine dead powder. I carried it with me. I felt its weight with every step.
I’m a walking graveyard, I told him. The dead are buried in my skin. Look at my face. You’ll find your father in its pores. Your mother rests in the creases at the corners of my mouth.
He wet his shirttail with the spit from his mouth and cleared a swath of skin.
Don’t, I said. You’ll disturb them.
My cheek, a clearing now in the dust. He licked the flesh of his thumb and drew it along my brows, uncovered the sloping curves of my face. I felt the groove above my lip exposed by his touch, the tender skin beneath my eyes, the mole on the corner of my mouth that my grandmother promised would one day cast a spell of love on a man. Hours passed. Days, I think. His eyes were black but they reflected light. My face emerged, revealed itself to him.
There was no truth in this notebook, Lily thought as she snapped it shut. It was just the fantasies and dreams of a desperate, heartbroken girl, a girl who was perched on the edge of her death at the very moment that her life should have been opening before her. It was sad to read, but it wasn’t truth.
IDA PEARL had just flipped the sign on the door of her shop from PLEASE CALL AGAIN to RING TO GAIN ENTRANCE when the buzzer rang. It was 10 a.m. on a warm September day. She hadn’t expected a customer so early, hadn’t expected a customer all day, in fact. It was the Friday before Labour Day; people were savouring the last fleeting bit of summer, thinking no further than the three days of leisure ahead. No one was going to buy a ring that day. Ida had opened her shop resigned to filling the hours with bookkeeping, inventory and the inevitable arguments with Elka. The girl had not heard back from Sol since their first date—a month ago now—and had decided, it seemed, that it was the fault of her mother, her mother who had ruined, once and forever, any possibility that she, Elka May Krakauer, might someday know happiness and the love of a man.
“I hope you don’t expect me to hang around here all day,” Elka had just spat, which, of course, Ida hadn’t.
She had hoped, rather, that Elka might find some way to amuse herself on this, one of the last remaining days before school started up again, that she might go for a walk with a friend, have a picnic on the mountain … do something, anything other than sit in the shadows of the shop with her nose in a book and a scowl on her face, waiting for the phone to ring.
“Do you want to get the door?” Ida asked when the buzzer rang.
“No,” Elka said, though she did then rouse herself from the chair by the back wall where she had set up her camp for the day. She slid the keys off the hook under the counter and ambled over to the door, at which point her demeanour changed entirely.
“Oh! Hello!”
Ida heard the change in Elka—the current charging through her, straightening her back and animating her voice—and her stomach sank. The mediocrity, Ida thought.
But the voice that answered Elka’s wasn’t Sol’s. “May I enter?” A woman’s voice.
“Oh! Of course! I’m sorry!” Elka jumped aside, freeing the entrance she had been blocking.
Ah, Ida thought, as she saw who it was. She rose from her desk to stand behind the counter.
“Mrs. Krakauer?” If Lily had noticed Ida’s presence at her wedding, she didn’t let on.
“Yes. Come in. Please.”
“Thank you.” Lily closed the door behind her and approached the counter. “Lily Kramer,” she said.
“Yes,” Ida said. She would not pretend she didn’t know who was standing before her in her own store. “How are you?”
“Very well, thank you. And you?” She was speaking in Yiddish.
“Very well.” Ida answered, also in Yiddish. “Thank you.”
And now Ida waited. She did not jump in with small talk to ease the way, did not ask how she might be of assistance, did not even allow herself to consider the range of possible reasons that might have impelled the woman to come to her. She waited, observing the fine bones of the face before her, the fine cut of the dress, the same grey dress—though Ida couldn’t know this—that Lily had been wearing when Sol rejected her at the station.
Wool, Elka thought. In this heat. A light wool, true, but still … And yet, if Lily was warm or uncomfortable in any way, she gave no sign, not a drop of excess moisture on the surface of her skin, not a hint of heightened colour in her cheek. She showed nothing, Elka thought, but a smooth countenance of untroubled elegance.
“Is it getting hot out there?” Elka asked.
“Not unduly,” Lily answered, a response that insulted Elka, who felt her attempt at conversation snubbed, and impressed Ida, who mistrusted histrionics of any sort.
Lily placed her purse on the glass countertop, her gloved hands folded, for the moment, on top of the clasp.
Kid gloves! Elka thought. That must have set her husband back a bundle. Her own naked hands looked childish in comparison, and her dress—a lively cotton print—flimsy and inappropriate to the season, which was early fall, after all, even if the weather did not yet reflect the change in the calendar. No wonder he hasn’t called me, she thought with new despair, her prospects for future happiness sinking ever lower.
Lily unlatched the clasp of her purse and reached two long, gloved fingers into the dark mouth that opened.
Ida felt the hammering of her heart, the slowing of time as she waited for what might emerge.
A velvet bag, Elka imagined. Black velvet, as befitting the glamour of the fingers reaching for it. Black velvet and tied with scarlet string. Never mind string: satin. Scarlet satin, a long narrow strip of it, and tied in an
elegant loop. So caught up was Elka with the packaging she expected that she didn’t recognize what was actually between Lily’s fingers when they did re-emerge from the purse. And how could she have been expected to recognize the small grey crystal that her mother had been wondering about ever since receiving her sister Sonya’s letter? Elka had never seen a rough diamond before. Nor did she know the contents of her aunt Sonya’s most recent letter.
“I have reason to believe this might be …”
Ida waited, looked at the woman who had the gall to come into her store with her stolen diamond as she had gone to her sister Sonya’s with her stolen name. But Ida was stronger than Sonya. Surer. She would outplay this woman at her perverted game.
… yours, Lily had thought she might say. That’s what she had imagined on the way over. But would she have, really? she would wonder later. Even had the woman not been looking at her like that, so coldly, as if there could be no good in her. Would she really have put her fate in this woman’s hands?
“… a diamond,” she said.
Ida placed a small square of paper on the countertop.
“Please,” she said, gesturing towards it.
Lily placed the stone on the paper.
Ida picked it up first with her fingers, rolled it between them, placed it on the back of her hand, examined it with her naked eye, then put it back down on the square of paper. Next she reached for the loupe that always hung from a chain around her neck and brought it to her eye, picked the stone up with her tongs and brought it to the loupe for a closer look. She put it down again, removed the loupe from her eye.
“It’s a diamond,” she said.
Lily nodded, swallowed audibly, the first and only indication that she might be nervous.
“As for its value …” Ida looked again at the stranger in front of her, who met her eyes, waiting, it seemed to her, but for what? For Ida to sink into a faint as her sister had? “Value is not a simple matter to determine.”
The Imposter Bride Page 9