A commotion outside interrupted her thoughts, an argument of some sort, Bella’s voice, raised against the lower, calmer tones of a man’s. Lily could make out no words, only anger. She waited for it to stop, but it didn’t. She closed the notebook and put it away, left her room and walked down the hallway to find a delivery man on the landing outside the apartment, and Bella standing in the doorway, blocking his entrance.
“Tell your boss we don’t want any more of his disgusting furniture,” Bella was saying. “Tell him he can take his filth and …”
“Are you Mrs. Kramer?” the deliveryman asked Lily as soon as she appeared behind Bella.
“I’m Mrs. Kramer,” Bella answered.
“I have a delivery for Mr. and Mrs. Kramer,” the delivery man said, still speaking to Lily as he held out a card for her to take. He was the same man—though Lily couldn’t know this—who had delivered the hated piano a year earlier, and since this new piece of furniture—a delicate, finely made vanity—was just as frivolous, just as useless as the piano that fouled their living room, Bella could be forgiven for assuming that this too was a gift for Nina from the same married lout of a suitor.
Lily read the card that accompanied the gift and handed it to Bella: For my brother and new sister. May your love be long and your life together happy. Mazel tov. Nina.
This clarification did nothing to pacify Bella, who knew full well that a young schoolteacher in Palestine could not afford to buy such a fine piece of furniture. She assumed Nina had sent a letter to the lout—who owned a furniture store, after all—requesting his help in sending a wedding gift to her brother and his new wife. She did not even want to think what might lie behind the man’s willingness to provide that help, to deliver such an offering to the family of a girl who had still been in her teens when he had insinuated himself into her affection and trust. The nature of the offering—a vanity more suited to a preening woman than a struggling couple starting out in life—suggested to Bella lingering intentions on the part of the sender.
“It’s filth,” Bella said. “Take it away.”
But Lily laid her hand on her mother-in-law’s arm. “Please,” she said.
It was the first time that Lily had touched Bella. Until then there had been the obligatory kisses dictated by convention, the required scrapes of dry lips against cheek, but there had not been this: the light, warm touch of the young woman’s hand on her skin, the life Bella felt pulsing behind that warm touch. She turned now to look at her daughter-in-law’s face and she saw in it emotion that she couldn’t name. Desire, possibly, though it looked like pain. Grief, though she was smiling. Later Bella would think, She loves the wedding gift more than the husband, but at that moment she had no thought, just awareness of a surging life within the shell that her son had married. She stepped aside and indicated to the delivery man the hallway that led to the bedroom.
When Nathan came home he found the bedroom dresser in the front hallway. In its stead, according to his mother, was the latest from Nina. For a second he imagined a cradle, complete with Nina’s laughing, bouncing illegitimate baby tucked into it, and he was surprised when he realized that what his mother was so worked up about was nothing more than a new piece of furniture.
“Does she think this is a warehouse?” Bella asked, indicating the dresser’s looming presence in the hall.
“I’ll speak to Lily about it,” Nathan promised.
Lily was sitting at the new vanity, her back to Nathan, when he entered the bedroom. She had been sitting at it all afternoon, according to Bella. Doing what, exactly, God only knows, Bella had said. At that moment she was doing nothing more mysterious than rubbing cold cream into her skin. Its scent, mixed with her own, shifted something inside him as he kissed her shoulder in greeting. She met his eyes in the mirror and smiled. He took off his shirt and lay on the bed in his trousers and undershirt.
“Long day?” she asked. She leaned closer to the mirror to inspect an imagined flaw that her fingertips had detected.
“Long enough.”
She knew he was watching her, knew he liked the sight of her in her slip, her upper back exposed to him, one spaghetti strap slipping off a bare shoulder.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“What’s not to like?”
“I meant the vanity.”
“It’s lovely.”
“You haven’t even looked.”
He smiled. “I’m too tired. Describe it to me.” He closed his eyes and listened to her talk about the fine grain of the wood—mahogany, she thought—the subtle pattern of the inlay, the bevelled oblong mirror, the delicate turn of the legs.
“Mmm,” Nathan said. “Now describe yourself. The slip you’re wearing. Satin, isn’t it?”
“Silk.”
“Grey silk.”
“Pearl, Nathan. The lingerie of the woman you love is never grey.”
He heard the smile in her voice, opened his eyes. She was applying lipstick now, a deep, rich burgundy that probably went by another name.
“I know the dresser can’t stay out there,” she said.
“My mother’s not too pleased.”
“Neither was the delivery man when I asked him to move it.”
“Why on earth did you have him move it all the way out into the hall?” He was not looking forward to moving it back. It was a large piece, heavy as well as bulky. “You could have just asked him to shift it a few inches down the wall.”
She didn’t answer.
“There’s plenty of room for both pieces.”
“It’s ugly,” she said.
“Ugly?” He sought her eyes in the mirror, but she was intent now on her lips. “It may not be to your taste, but …”
“It’s not a matter of taste, Nathan. The dresser is ugly.”
He remembered his mother’s delight, his father’s pride the night they brought the dresser home. Pure maple, his father had said, knocking the wood with his knuckles. His mother’s smile at that moment had seared into his mind the impression that maple was the most valuable of all the woods.
“Maybe so,” he allowed. “But that doesn’t mean we can ban it from our bedroom.”
“I was just taking a break from it, enjoying one afternoon …”
He wondered if she’d been spoiled once. There was something in her tone … It made it possible for him to imagine her as a girl who had ruled a rich father with a stomp of her foot and a petulant toss of her hair.
“I didn’t realize it bothered you so much.”
“It didn’t. But when this arrived …” She stroked the surface of the vanity with her full open hand.
“We’ll have our own place soon,” Nathan promised. “Just another few months. Half a year at most. You’ll be able to choose all the furniture. Every piece. It will all be what you like.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s how I felt when it arrived. To think that your sister could have known exactly what to send me. As if she knew me.”
“But … she doesn’t know you.”
“I felt like she did.”
“Because she sent you a vanity that you like?” He was trying to understand, but was worried too. Was Lily losing touch with reality, spending all her days alone in her room as his mother described? It had been a week since she had last offered to do the shopping, his mother had reported, a week since she’d left her room during the day for anything other than the required appearances at meals and the walk alone on the mountain that she took every morning after breakfast. “I doubt Nina was even the one who chose it.” Although he and his mother had not discussed it, he too suspected that Nina’s role in the matter had been limited to contacting Levine’s Fine Furniture, and that it was Nina that Levine had in mind when he chose it, not the anonymous bride to whom he was sending it. “It was Levine, that piece of—”
“My mother had a vanity just like this.”
Nathan stopped talking. It was the first image from her childhood that she’d offered him.
And she was trying to, but nothing came to her. She opened her eyes again.
“The vanity was going to be mine. Because I was the eldest. It was going to be her wedding present to me.”
Nathan met her eyes in the mirror.
“So you see.”
“See what?”
“It’s as if your sister knew me, somehow.”
“But, Lily, sweetheart …”
“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me with condescension in your voice.”
“I wasn’t condescending. I was just … Look, it’s great that you love it, but it’s not like Nina knew beforehand that you would. She doesn’t know you, after all. You don’t know her.”
“I do know her.”
“You do?”
“Not personally, but I know who she is. I saw her in a play once.”
“You saw Nina?”
“Do you have another sister?”
“No. I’m just surprised you haven’t mentioned it before.”
“It was just a bit part.”
“Still.”
Lily shrugged.
“Was she any good?”
“She wasn’t terrible.”
“That bad?”
Lily smiled. “She wasn’t, actually. It was her Hebrew, her accent. You couldn’t tell what she was trying to say. But aside from that she was—”
“Bad enough for you to remember her.”
Lily smiled again. “I remembered her because I was expecting a letter at that time from a certain Sol Kramer in Montreal, Canada, who might be interested in matrimony. The woman who was helping me with my arrangements had put your brother’s name forward just a few days earlier, so, of course, the name Kramer in the playbill caught my eye. I didn’t know anything about Sol yet, that he had a sister in Tel Aviv, but it seemed like quite a coincidence that I should go to a play where one of the actresses had the same last name as a man whose offer of matrimony I might soon have to consider.”
Nathan took this in, this very ordinary fluke that Lily seemed to see as something more. “It’s not exactly an uncommon last name, Kramer.”
“Maybe not,” Lily agreed. “But then I saw her again a few nights later.”
“In another play?”
Lily shook her head. “At a café near my apartment in Tel Aviv. I didn’t usually go to that café, but it was a terrible night outside. The rain was pouring down the way it does there, driven by the wind that howls in from the sea—it could drive anyone mad, that wind. I didn’t want to be alone in my apartment.
“I was sitting on my own, reading a book, trying to read a book, but there was a group at one of the other tables, a noisy group that kept getting noisier. They were about my age but they seemed of another generation, another world almost. Which I suppose they were, in a sense. Their laughter took over the place and I felt more and more uncomfortable sitting alone while they laughed. More and more alone. I tried to ignore them, to concentrate on the book I was reading—leaving wasn’t an option; the apartment I was living in had no heat, and I knew the lights would probably be out too in such a storm. But there was no ignoring them. Maybe they were no more brutish than any group of young people anywhere, but their loud confidence seemed to me an insult—I can’t explain it—their laughter …” She shrugged, remembering.
“And then I noticed a girl among them who seemed familiar to me. Almost immediately I recognized her as the girl from the play. The girl with the last name that soon might be mine. I felt a connection to her already.” She looked at him. “Does that seem strange?”
“Not really,” Nathan said, though it did, a little.
“It seemed like too much of a coincidence to be just that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was like it was a sign, almost, seeing her again. I started to think about what the chances might be of such a coincidence, to wonder why I had suddenly decided to go to a café that I didn’t usually frequent.”
“A sign of …?”
“What I should do, what direction I should take when the letter arrived.” She glanced at him again. “Don’t look so worried. I know what I sound like.”
“You don’t sound—”
“I’m like one of those old ladies I used to see in cafés in my childhood, pathetic creatures with papery skin who were so lonely they’d attach themselves—in their fantasies, at least—to anyone who spared them so much as a glance.”
“You were so alone,” Nathan said.
“Yes. I was so alone,” she repeated, as if explaining something to herself. “And there was something about her that kept drawing my eye, not just her name. She was more made-up than her friends. There’s a particular style, a plainness of style that’s cultivated by some circles there. The girls don’t wear a stitch of makeup, for example—that’s too bourgeois for them. Or too European—I’m not sure what it is. But this girl, with her plum lips and kohl-lined eyes … she brought to mind a bird of paradise who happened to land in the midst of a flock of starlings.”
That would be Nina, all right, Nathan thought.
“I wondered if she might have just come from the theatre, from another appearance on stage, but then my musings were interrupted by a new eruption of laughter, accompanied now by shouts of greeting. ‘Ezra, Ezra,’ they shouted, and I turned to see who had inspired such an enthusiastic greeting. Their hero stood in the entrance for a minute, shaking the rain off his coat, removing the drenched newspaper that he had used as a makeshift hat. They were all still calling out and laughing, with no sense that there were other patrons in the café. I shifted my glance back to them and saw that the girl I had noticed before wasn’t laughing or smiling, wasn’t participating in any way in the elaborate collective greeting. She was applying fresh lipstick, looking into the mirror of her compact with such concentration she seemed not to have even noticed the new arrival. Which made me understand at once that he was the reason for her made-up face, that she’d been waiting the entire evening for this moment. I turned to give a second look at the man who had elicited such a well-planned display of indifference. He sprawled on the nearest empty chair, one long arm thrown around the shoulder of the nearest female at hand—not the bird of paradise, who pretended not to notice. She rubbed her lips together to smooth her lipstick, snapped her compact shut and got up to leave.”
Nathan could see his sister in the scene that Lily had just described: the feigned indifference, the snap of the compact. He’d seen that scene so many times before that there was a staleness in it for him.
“She wove her way through the maze of tables, towards the door, holding her head high just in case he was watching her.”
“And was he?”
“No.”
Of course not, Nathan thought. “She’s the star of her own play, my sister. She just hasn’t noticed that no one else is watching her.”
“I was watching, Nathan. Am I no one?”
“Of course not. You know I didn’t mean it that way. I meant—”
“She kept her head high, her eyes straight ahead, so dignified. Like a queen.”
“But she’s not a queen, Lily. That’s the point.”
“Oh, hush. She
has style, your sister. That’s the point.”
“She’s obviously carrying on the same sorts of debasing love affairs over there that she was carrying on here.” Nathan shook his head “Though at least there my poor mother doesn’t have to witness them.”
“Your poor mother. You see why I didn’t tell you this before?” And to Nathan’s offended look: “She has imagination, your sister. She has class. She reminded me so much of one of my sisters. Who was actually the one my mother promised the vanity to.”
She turned back to the array of lipsticks and creams she had arranged on the vanity over the course of the afternoon. “It wasn’t really like what I just described to you.”
“What, she tripped on her way out the door?”
Lily smiled. “An actress like your sister doesn’t trip in the middle of an exit like that. I meant my mother at her vanity. It wasn’t like I just said to you. I barely ever watched my mother make herself up at the end of the day. I was with my father, helping him with his business. That’s where I went after school. By the time we got home, my father and I, they were often already in bed. And even if I had been there … We weren’t close, my mother and I.”
“You fought?”
“Not even. I didn’t even bother to fight with her. I thought she was trivial, that I was better than her.”
“A lot of girls don’t get along—”
“I regret it now, of course, but I didn’t have the time of day for her, with her hats for every occasion, and her gloves and shoes to match, and her lipsticks and rouges. She knew it; it must have hurt her.” Lily removed the lipstick she had just applied, opened another one, a brighter, redder shade. “I didn’t have time for this. Lipsticks, rouges, rules about how ladies do and don’t leave the house.”
The Imposter Bride Page 13