We began to relax, to imagine that no harm had been done—no further, permanent harm, that is—and then Marc delivered the correct answer to a question Mr. C had posed. It was not a brilliant answer. It was not even a particularly interesting answer. But it was correct, entirely adequate—this from a student who had been caught once with Playboy slipped inside the tractate of the Talmud he was poring over with such fervour—and in the shocked silence that followed, Mr. C began to cry.
This time he did not turn away from us. He stood at the front of the class, facing us, with tears running down his cheeks. He was not sobbing, was completely still, in fact, so still that I was not certain at first that what I was witnessing was actually crying, an activity I associated with at least some facial movement, some exhibit of bodily will. His arms were at his sides, his palms out, facing us, his face tilted slightly upward. He seemed almost to be listening or waiting for something, and I might even have called his expression hopeful had it not been for the tears. And then it passed. We saw it pass, a tremor of self-consciousness like the shadow of a cloud moving rapidly across his face, and then a quick, furtive flurry of activity—a white handkerchief wiping, drying his cheeks. He blew his nose, one loud honk, as if he had just come in from the cold, then he called on the next student to read.
And so it continued. There was no pattern to the crying, no way of knowing what might set him off. It would be a stretch to say we got used to it, but over time we felt less afraid, were no longer frozen as we had been when it began. It became almost normal to us—normal for Mr. C, that is.
The crying had started in November and while it seemed at the time to go on forever, it was, in fact, over—finished—within a few weeks. We arrived at school one morning just before the winter break, and it was our principal, Rabbi Loffer, not Mr. C, who walked into our classroom. Mr. Czernowitz was ill, Rabbi Loffer informed us, and wouldn’t be returning to our school. Ever, we understood. A new teacher had been found and would be starting later that day, a teacher who had just arrived in Montreal from Israel. Rabbi Loffer smiled at us then and said he knew we could be trusted to behave in a responsible and respectful manner—which, of course, we and Mr. C knew we could not.
Was it his damage, then, that had driven him from our classroom, or something about us? Or some terrible combination of the two? That’s what I wondered long after the rest of my classmates seemed to have forgotten about him. Certainly no one ever mentioned him again, though Carrie did tell me once, about a year later, that he had gotten a job at the kosher bakery over on Victoria, that her mother had seen him at the back of the store where the baking was done, pushing a tray of loaves into the oven. “It’s a much better job for him,” Carrie concluded, and that seemed to be the end of the matter for her.
For me, though, it lived on, raising new, different questions about my mother. Not just what it was within her that made her unable to stay, but whether there might have been something about my family, about her new community in Montreal, some terrible interaction between her and them, between her and us—like the reaction I saw once when I mistakenly added water to the sulphuric acid in my chemistry set—that might have driven her away.
IT WASN’T LONG AFTER that Carrie let slip to our friend Mira that my mother sent me rocks in the mail. It was a slip that wasn’t technically a betrayal, because there was nothing about my mother that was supposed to be cause for secrecy, but I felt it as one, and as the word quickly spread and some of the girls in our group agreed that my mother was obviously off her rocker, I felt a deep sense of shame.
On one level our friends’ response was simply a pun that was too easy and obvious to resist, their taunts no more mean-spirited than any of the arrows that regularly flew across the classroom and schoolyard, but I couldn’t brush it off because it was clear to me by then that my mother wasn’t right. And me, by extension. I knew I also wasn’t right. Because of the rocks, yes. That was obviously strange behaviour. Both the fact that she sent them and my response to them. I knew that by then, knew enough to hide how special each one felt, each one a secret, unique communication between my mother and me. I knew enough also to hide the anxiety I felt when too long went by without a new one arriving, an anxiety that was nagging at me that year because I hadn’t received one for two years.
Deeper than that, though, was that she had left me in the first place. That’s what moved her—and me—into a territory set apart from that of other parents and children I knew, because no woman I had ever heard of had left her baby, and especially no woman who had already lost her entire family in Europe. That should have made her even more desperate to start a new family, like my friends’ parents were. Mira’s, Helen’s, Lena’s. The peculiar behaviours, habits and moods that those friends’ parents exhibited did not interfere with their love for their children. If anything, most of them hung on too tightly, watched their children too closely, like Mira’s father, staring at her late at night. None of them walked away.
I didn’t tell Elka or anyone in my family what had happened at school. The shame I felt in the face of the initial taunts persisted long after my friends had moved on to other targets. It swelled like a noxious gas within me, leaving little room for other feelings, smothering any confidence I had once possessed. One evening at dinner Jeffrey teased me about a pimple on my face. I told him he looked like a pug, and he then retorted that I had a face only a mother could love. It was a line that we had both heard on The Honeymooners a few nights earlier, but when he said it I ran from the table in tears, slamming the door to my room behind me.
A few minutes later Elka knocked and asked if she could come in. I didn’t answer, buried my face in my pillow, but she came in anyway and sat on the edge of my bed, her hand on my back.
“Is there anything going on at school?” she asked me.
“No,” I muttered into the pillow.
“Nothing you want to talk to me about?”
I shook my head no again.
She waited a few minutes, then she said that thirteen was a hard age, that she too had had a hard time when she was thirteen.
My misery had nothing to do with being thirteen. All my friends were thirteen and none of them were miserable.
“I know your father’s been busy with Naomi recently.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s perfectly natural to feel a little bit uncomfortable when your father—”
“I couldn’t care less about my father and Naomi.”
Naomi was pretty and had been spending a lot of time at our house in recent weeks, but the thought that I might be jealous of her relationship with my father was ridiculous. She had given my father the soundtrack to Exodus for his birthday because she thought a lot of the music he listened to had no tunes, and before we ate the chicken cacciatore or salmon à la king that she had cooked we had to go around the table, each of us talking about one nice thing that had happened to us that day. Nothing much was going to happen between my father and Naomi.
“I also only had one parent,” Elka said, trying a different tack.
That was true, I knew, but her situation, while difficult and shameful in its own way, hadn’t been as abnormal or unheard of as mine.
“You always feel like you’re different from everyone else.”
It wasn’t a feeling, my difference. It was a fact. There was no one else whose mother had lost all her family in the war only to walk out on the infant daughter who should have been the most precious thing in the world to her.
“You feel like there could be something wrong with you,” Elka went on, recalling her own experience at thirteen.
I didn’t answer, didn’t dare to pull the stopper on the torrent within me.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, I can promise you that.”
It was my mother that there was something wrong with. That’s what I understood Elka to be saying. And while I knew that, of course—there would have to be something really wrong with me if I didn’t know that by then—I felt a
surge of protectiveness towards my mother in the face of what sounded like yet another insinuation about her failure to be a normal person.
“Not everything in life is somebody’s fault,” Elka said, as if sensing my thoughts.
When I still didn’t answer, didn’t even let on that I had heard her, she began to get irritated. Her hand on my back was no longer resting there in a comforting way, but beginning to move about, restless, tapping impatiently. And sure enough, no sooner had I registered the change in her hand than she said that moping never helped anyone and it was time for me to get up and help her with the dishes.
Though Elka acted like there was nothing left to discuss, I suspect she may have talked about it to other members of the family, because at the Seder a few weeks later my aunt Nina took my hand, studied my palm with an expression of great seriousness and then whispered in my ear, as Sol was droning on about the ten plagues, that I would be blessed with deep and long-lasting love in this life, that it was etched on my palm by God himself or by one of his angels, and was therefore the truth, irrevocable and final, as only God’s truth can be.
I knew that Nina was probably only saying that because Elka had talked to her about my recent moodiness (that was the catch-all word to describe my sudden plunge into misery) and that the future couldn’t actually be read from a person’s palm, and that Nina was in fact an atheist who wouldn’t recognize God’s truth if it slapped her in the face, but I still felt a surge of hope.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, flushing with something other than mortification for the first time in weeks.
“Well, I do,” Nina said.
I wanted to believe her, but already I remembered that Carrie had recently started going over to Mira’s house most afternoons, leaving me to take the long bus ride across town with only Jeffrey for company, and that the two of them, Carrie and Mira, had gone bowling the previous weekend and not invited me along. And then there was my ongoing anxiety about how long it had been since the last rock had arrived from my mother, a non-event that felt more like active rejection with every day that passed.
“What?” Nina asked, seemingly reading my face as she had just read my palm, and with such sympathy in her own face and voice that without thinking, I blurted out my thoughts.
“Carrie hates me.”
“What?” Nina asked, at which point both my father and Elka glared at us because we were disturbing the Seder.
A little later, though, during the meal, when we were allowed to have conversation, I told her that Carrie had told Mira about the rocks.
“And that’s why you think she hates you?”
“For starters.”
“She’s just jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Her mother can’t think of anything more interesting than which golf club to join, and she sees you getting these amazing rocks from your mother—”
“Who’s jealous?” Jeffrey asked from across the table.
“Her friend Carrie,” Nina said. “She can’t stand that Ruthie has a more interesting mother than she does.”
“She’s not jealous,” I snapped, as angry at Nina now for revealing my private business to the whole family as I was at myself for confiding in her in the first place. “No one’s jealous of someone who doesn’t have a mother.”
There was momentary silence around the table, until Jeffrey said, “But you do have a mother, Ruthie.”
“But she’s not here,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist.” That was my father.
“Then why isn’t she here?”
An uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Elka busied herself with cutting Chuck’s brisket. All the other adults looked at my father. This was clearly his to handle. My father gave me his usual answer.
“We don’t really know.”
I knew that was the truth, that he wasn’t lying to me, but I also felt for the first time that he knew more than he was letting on, that everyone knew more than they were admitting. “Then maybe I’ll have to find her and ask her,” I said, and as I did so I knew, also for the first time, that that was exactly what I was going to do.
“Really?” Jeffrey asked, his eyes wide with interest.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t imagined meeting my mother before then. Of course I had. But my fantasies up until that point had been all about my mother finding me as she had when she sent me the rocks, about her seeking me out, the infant girl she had abandoned for reasons she would finally explain, stoically, without tears or drama, the pain of her life etched in her face but not gushing out in her manner. (She was not a gushy type, my mother, I’d decided. It would have been hard to reach any other conclusion.) I had often imagined the phone ringing, and the voice at the other end, a low, calm voice, lightly tinged with a Jewish-Polish accent. Is that Ruth? she would ask, with just a slight, almost imperceptible roll of the r that was nothing like the guttural r of my grandmother Bella and Ida Pearl, more like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Speaking, I would say. Then the invitation to meet for ice cream somewhere. Murray’s, I imagined, a Waspy coffee shop that I chose partly because I liked their ice cream cake roll with chocolate sauce and partly because no one else in my family would be likely to walk into the fantasy (too much mayonnaise in their egg salad sandwiches, Elka thought). But I had never imagined that I might be the one to take the initiative, to call her up, seek her out.
“But how will you find her?” Jeffrey asked me.
It was a good question, one that brought me back to reality, because nobody knew where my mother had gone. It was greeted with another silence, as uncomfortable as the first one.
“I don’t know yet,” I said to Jeffrey.
No one jumped in with encouragement or suggestions, until Bella said, “If Ruthie decides she wants to find her mother, there will be time enough to try to do that when the Seder is over.”
She had addressed her comment to Jeffrey, but everyone looked at me, and I think I was as relieved as the rest of them to let the topic rest for now. I felt myself alone on one side of the discussion, as if the chasm that had opened between me and everyone else in the family during my weeks of misery had just deepened and widened. I wasn’t sure why I felt so alone, was sure only of the discomfort all around as we broached for the very first time the possibility of my wanting to look for my mother.
“I’ll help you find her, Ruthie,” Jeffrey said.
“I’ll help you too,” Mitchell said, and even though I knew he was like a parrot who had imprinted on his older brother, copying everything Jeffrey said and did, I still felt as touched by his offer as I had by Jeffrey’s.
And then Chuck, who wasn’t even five yet, looked at me and said, “I help too.”
But I knew they couldn’t really help me. I was completely alone in some indefinable way. I had probably always felt it, but that was the first time I was conscious of it, aware that while part of me would always be a member of the family that surrounded me, the family that I loved and who loved me in return, another part of me would forever feel alone in some way, set apart. It made me think of the glaciers we had been learning about in school that developed chasms so deep that pieces of them broke off as icebergs that were then too small to resist the current sweeping around the larger glacier. Though they would always be made of the same material as the glacier that spawned them, they floated fast and far away.
CHAPTER 9
My father worked with light, I told him. He captured light with stones. He bent broken light into beauty.
To which he shrugged and said his father was a butcher.
And on my mother’s side I descend from kindness, I said, to which he shrugged again, and told me not to be nostalgic.
If you had known my mother’s father you wouldn’t call my grief nostalgia.
I knew him, he said. I knew a hundred men like him. A thousand.
He was a man so kind that migrating birds came to rest on his shoulders. I saw them, I told him. With my own eyes.
But not so kind that he would ever allow me to forget my mother’s shame, he replied.
His mother was not married to his father, it seems. Worse than that: his mother had been married to someone else, but then left her husband to run off with the butcher.
She had seven little bastards of whom I am the youngest, he told me. If you were still your father’s daughter you would cross the street to avoid my glance.
I wouldn’t, I assured him. We were fated for each other.
There was some truth mixed in with the girl’s fantasies, Lily knew—but how much? Was there a message or answer she was meant to understand? Was it really accidental that it had been left for her to find, or was there purpose in what had seemed to her, at first, to be mere chance? These were just some of the questions that filled her mind as she read it, repetitive questions, questions whose answers she didn’t know but that were there—she felt them—nudging at the back of her mind. She put the notebook down, waiting for what might become clearer if she looked away from it for a moment, but it was Ida Pearl Krakauer’s face that loomed, Ida’s cold, hard face, suspecting her, accusing her.
It was a week now since Lily had been to see her. A week, and she could still hardly bear to think about it, the woman’s suspicion, her wary, accusatory manner that made it clear she thought there could not possibly be any good in Lily’s intentions. It was hard even to remember why she had gone to that woman’s store in the first place, hard to recall the feeling of hope she had felt when she had awakened that morning after the conversation with Sol, the sense of purpose that had filled her. It had felt that morning as if the madness of what she had done to date was not madness at all, but part of a plan, a higher plan to return to the living what could be returned to them. She would go to Ida Pearl Krakauer, she had known when she awoke. She would show her the diamond. She would trust in—what? In what exactly had she thought she would trust? In fate? In God? In some hidden, higher purpose than her base instinct to survive? She couldn’t remember, could only remember the coldness of that woman, the suspicion. And worse than that, the fear that Lily had sensed in her, a fear so palpable that Lily had almost glanced over her shoulder to see if something dangerous might be hovering in her own shadow. But there was nothing behind her; she knew that.
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