“What?” Here it came, I thought: the reason no one would ever read it to me.
“You’re not going to believe this.” She continued: “My dream repaired the break between us …”
“Another dream?”
“… inserted summer warmth like a ray of sun that pierces a gloomy day.”
Carrie shut the notebook. It had taken her the better part of an hour to read and translate that passage. “It’s just a bunch of dreams.”
“And I thought no one would read it to me because it was sexy.”
“They just didn’t want to bore themselves to death,” Carrie said.
We put the notebook back on the shelf beside my mother’s.
I had come to a dead end. There was nothing else about my mother to find in our home. But at the same time, the compulsion I felt to do that was easing off. My own life was getting busier and more interesting. Happier, even. It was starting to open up more and more, filling up with matters as pressing as whether or not I would be invited to Lina Tessler’s sweet sixteen, or whether Charles Blumenthal liked me or hated me, or whether it was fair that I should have to wait until I was eighteen to learn to drive when Carrie was allowed at sixteen. The separateness I felt in my family continued, but that no longer made me feel unusual. All my friends felt separate from their families now.
When another rock arrived from my mother I felt annoyed by it, uncomfortable. I wondered why she didn’t either write me a letter or leave me alone. I was practically an adult, and she was still sending me these packages like I was a six-year-old who could barely read and would thrill to a pink rock arriving in the mail. And yet there was also something about the rock (a gorgeous banded agate from the north shore of Lake Superior, near Wawa) that touched me, the trouble she took with the wrapping, the careful curves of her handwriting. There was something pathetic about her that both touched and repelled me.
So it wasn’t really longing that drew me to the phone books in the library one afternoon, so much as serendipity. I was doing a research project for school and happened to notice that there were shelves of phone books from cities all across Canada. Saskatoon was the first one that caught my eye. I pulled it off the shelf on a whim, looked under Kramer, Azerov, Azeroff. I couldn’t find a Lily with any of those last names, but there was an L. Kramer.
Could it possibly be? I wondered as I jotted it down. My heart raced. Had it been this easy all along? There were phone books from just about every city in Canada, it seemed, a whole long shelf. It would take a while to check each one, and I did have a paper to write, a research paper on the French Revolution that was due at the end of the week, but the French Revolution seemed trivial compared to what I was doing, of almost no consequence at all. I pulled out Lethbridge. Nothing there, but Regina had an L. Kramer.
I was on Winnipeg when I heard, “Ruthie!” I looked up to see my grandmother Bella.
“I thought it was you.”
She was always happy to see me, but never more so, it seemed, than at that minute. Probably because I was at the library rather than hanging around the shopping centre with my friends. She had already looked to see what I was reading. I saw the puzzlement in her face as I stood to give her a kiss.
“Bubby,” I said.
I felt the way I had five years earlier when Elka found the stash of gum and other candy that Carrie and I had stolen and hidden between my bed and the wall. There was no reason to feel that way now, I told myself. What was the crime in looking through a phone book? But my face was hot and I felt an awkwardness entirely out of place in a meeting between a girl and her grandmother in the reading room of a public library.
“Who do you know in Winnipeg?” Bella asked me, because contrary to Ida Pearl’s assertion, Bella didn’t actually have a finely tuned sense of other people’s privacy. If she sensed my awkwardness at the moment, which she had to, that would only be more reason to pry.
“Oh, no one. I’m just taking a break from a paper I’m researching.” I launched into a long and tedious description of Danton’s fate during the Reign of Terror.
“Who are you looking for in the phone book?”
It was possible she didn’t actually know, that she was asking the question in a purely neutral, curious way, but I felt she did know. What other reason could I have for looking through the phone book of a western Canadian city? What other person might I possibly be looking for?
“My mother,” I said.
She hadn’t known, I realized immediately from her response. Her delight at finding me in her favourite haunt was erased, her expression so serious now it seemed pained.
“I found a few L. Kramers,” I said, just to try to sound normal, to change the look on her face. “I know they’re probably not her.” I didn’t actually know that, was still racing with excitement that one of them might be.
Bella nodded. “Put the phone book away and come outside with me. I want to talk to you about something.”
I was resentful, resistant. I didn’t need or want to hear from her the advice she was going to give me, her warnings about cans of worms and Pandora’s boxes, but I knew there would be another opportunity to continue working my way through the phone books. I put the book away and followed her to the lobby, sat beside her on one of the benches.
“Your mother’s name wasn’t Lily Kramer,” she told me.
Just like that. No preparation, no preamble about having something to tell me that might be confusing, difficult, whatever. Just that. My mother’s name was not what I thought it was.
“Not Lily Kramer. Not Lily Azerov. Not Lily anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Lily Azerov was somebody else’s name that she took at the end of the war. It wasn’t that uncommon,” she added quickly.
I knew it wasn’t that uncommon. I had a friend at school whose father had taken the identity of another person in order to get into Canada. It was a secret I would never breathe to anyone—not even to this day—for fear she and her family could still get deported. But the fact that it wasn’t uncommon wasn’t the point.
“So … what is her name?”
That seemed to me to be closer to the point, but Bella shrugged. “She didn’t want anyone to know.”
“But why?”
“Why did she take another name?”
That wasn’t exactly what I had been asking, but I let Bella answer.
“Because she was from Poland, very near to the Soviet border, and I think she was maybe afraid she’d be forced back there when the war ended. The Soviets were the liberators of Poland, don’t forget.”
“But tons of people came over from Poland after the war.” Half my friends’ parents, it seemed.
“Whether she really needed a false identity, I don’t know. I think she probably didn’t, in the end, but maybe she did. I don’t know,” Bella said again. “But she didn’t keep the name Lily once she left you and your father.”
I was just wasting my time looking for a Lily Kramer or a Lily Azerov in the phone books, in other words. “How do you know that?”
“I feel it.” And then, as if sensing my dissatisfaction with that answer: “You can’t explain everything you feel in life.”
I thought about what she had just told me, tried to absorb it.
“But wouldn’t anyone have told me?” If it was really true, is what I meant. I found it hard to believe that my father and Elka and Sol would have withheld such a basic fact from me all these years.
Bella took so long to answer, it was as if she’d never considered the question before. “I think your father wasn’t sure what to do. What was best. For you.”
“So he thought that it was best for me to not know that my mother’s name was fake?”
“I know you don’t understand that now, but maybe you’ll understand it better when you’re a mother yourself.”
“I don’t ever intend to lie outright to my children.”
“No one was lying to you, Ruthie.”
&nbs
p; “What would you call it then?”
Bella didn’t answer.
“It’s lying,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to tell you. Not without talking to your father about it. But when I saw you with the phone books, and then you told me what you were doing … And you’re sixteen now, not a child any more.”
I didn’t believe her. My father and Elka would not have withheld this from me. But I didn’t disbelieve her either. Why would she make up something like this?
“I probably need to talk to my father,” I said.
She patted my hand. “Nothing’s really different than it’s ever been.”
I looked at her and saw she believed that. So what if my mother’s name had been Selma or Freda rather than Lily? She had still left; I still had never met her; I still had a family who did love me. That’s what Bella meant, I assumed, but if she’d been speaking Martian it would have made more sense to me at that moment.
“It’s different” was all I said.
Initially I felt a bit of excitement. There was an element of mystery about my mother now that had been lacking before. She wasn’t simply a woman who had cracked, but a woman who had been hiding behind an entirely false identity. And why? Why would she not want her real name to be known, as Bella had said? What was she afraid of? Who was she, if not Lily Azerov Kramer? I would speak to my father, demand he tell me the complete truth, even if it was difficult. It was time now. I was sixteen, no longer a child.
As I walked home from the library, though, and settled in to wait for my father’s return from work, that bit of excitement gave way to anxiety. I was about to accuse my father of having lied to me my entire life, of having withheld from me essential defining facts about my mother that he had always known, my father who had always been a steady and loving presence for me and who was probably just trying to do his best by me in circumstances that were not—no matter how positive a spin one might try to put on them—the best.
He had been a young man when she left him, a young, good-looking, ambitious and responsible man. And as time went on he became a financially successful man as well. He was a catch, in other words, even with a young child in tow, and yet he had never remarried, had never even seriously dated another woman. That was because of me, I sensed. Because I came first in his life. Because he had arranged his life so we could be a family, he and I.
Elka and Sol were also my family, their home my second home, and there were times in my childhood when I spent more time with them than with my father, but my first home was with my father, always. Throughout my childhood he and I spent the last hours of almost every weekday evening together, and most of the weekend as well. On weekdays, after we moved to Côte-St-Luc, he would pick me up from Elka and Sol’s after supper and we would walk the three blocks home together. We didn’t have to walk; he could have picked me up in his car. Often—in the dead of a Montreal winter, for example—it would have been more expedient and certainly more sensible to drive. But our walk home together was what we did, he and I, separate and apart from everyone else, and the image of family that developed in my mind as a child was not the nightly suppers at Elka and Sol’s, much as I enjoyed them—all of us around their table at six o’clock sharp, eating a good and balanced meal and chatting about our respective days—but that silent walk home later with my father. When I thought about that walk it was always winter. In reality, of course, it was often spring, summer or fall, and the nights were variously warm, cold, rainy or windy, but what remained in my mind, what rose to the surface of all the blended memories of those nightly walks home was one cold winter night, a night so cold that the bones around my eyes ached, and so still that the only sound was the squeak of snow beneath our boots, and so peaceful that the only thing that pressed on me was my father’s mittened hand holding my own.
And now I was waiting to accuse him.
“Ah, you’re home,” he said, when he walked in the door.
A happy discovery, his tone implied, and I felt ill about what was ahead. I pretended to be absorbed in my homework, barely looked up as I returned his greeting. He took off his tie and jacket, poured himself a Scotch.
“There’s some meat loaf in the fridge,” I said. “Do you want me to heat it up?”
“We can eat later. Unless you’re hungry—”
“No, no,” I assured him. “Later’s fine.”
He let out his usual end-of-the-day sigh as he settled himself in his chair with his newspaper. I continued to pretend to be utterly absorbed in my school work. It was quiet except for the rustle of his newspaper and the occasional rumble of a passing bus or truck on Côte-St-Luc Road, ten storeys down.
Was the withholding of this fact the same as lying? I wondered. Did the truth of my mother really reside in this information that he had withheld from me?
I remembered an afternoon, years earlier, when he and I took a walk together in the woods around a cabin in the Laurentians that Sol and Elka had rented for the summer. It was a warm day and the air was thick with buzzing, biting insects. I knew the walk was supposed to be a special time for us—my father was not the type to take time away from his newspapers and business magazines to go tramping through the woods—but the insects were driving me mad. “I thought mosquitoes liked to sleep during the day,” I said, slapping my ear, but missing the source of the infernal whine, then slapping my arm, a direct hit, which left a bloody smear. “Do you know what kinds of trees are around us?” my father asked me. “Birch,” I said. “What else?” he asked. “Evergreens.” I pointed to a clump of conifers. “Yes, but what kind of evergreens?” I didn’t know. “And those?” he asked, pointing to a clump of deciduous trees. “I don’t know. Can we please get out of here and go for a swim?” He looked surprised then. “Of course,” he said, and I felt I had hurt him. We started walking back out along the trail towards the lake, but then he said, “Stop for a minute. Give me your hand.” I did. “Now close your eyes.” I did again. He took my hand and pressed it against a tree trunk and held it there for a minute. “That’s a birch,” he said. I nodded. To say that this was uncharacteristic behaviour for him is an understatement equivalent to observing that it would be uncharacteristic for our rabbi at the time, Rabbi Searles, to come twirling down the aisle of the synagogue wearing a pink tutu. “Now keep your eyes closed,” he said. He led me a few steps and placed my hand on another trunk. The bark was rougher, almost corrugated. “That’s a pine.’” He released my hand and we kept walking towards the lake. “Your mother could identify trees like that,” he told me then, and though I immediately wanted to know more, wanted to stay in the forest the rest of the day so he could tell me more about her and the trees that she knew, I had already spoiled it. In another minute we would be out at the lake, where Elka would be sitting on her lounge chair with her silver sun reflector under her chin and a leaf on her nose to protect it from burning, and my cousins would be flinging sand pies at each other, and Sol would be out in a rowboat, pretending he liked to fish.
Was the fact that her name had not been Lily really more important than what he’d tried to tell me that day in the woods?
“Do you mind if I put some music on?” I asked.
“No, go ahead.”
I put on an old Artie Shaw record. A mistake, I realized as soon as I returned to my couch and “Begin the Beguine” filled the room. It was annoying, grating. I went back to the record player, took it off.
“Change your mind?”
“I prefer quiet.”
My father lowered the newspaper, looked at me. “You all right?”
“Yes, fine. Why?”
“No reason.”
That’s how it was between us, had always been. We noticed each other, but didn’t pry. (Searching through his private things for traces of my mother was different than prying, I had decided.) In our entire life together neither of us ever once said to the other “A penny for your thoughts,” an expression I heard so often at Elka and Sol’s that I could
have amassed a small fortune had I answered it even half the times it had been directed my way.
“I saw Bubby at the library today.”
“Oh?”
“I was researching my paper on Danton.”
“How’s that going?”
“Fine. Good.”
“And how did Bubby seem?”
“Fine.”
“Her cold’s all cleared up?”
“Seems to be.”
“Did she have any light reading to recommend for you? Crime and Punishment, maybe?”
I wanted to smile as I normally would, but nothing felt normal. “She told me about my mother’s name. You know. That it wasn’t hers.” I had thought I could be straightforward, but my voice was tight, choked with anxiety and a pent-up mix of emotions I couldn’t begin to name.
My father nodded, but in the long silence that ensued he didn’t offer anything beyond that non-verbal confirmation. He didn’t apologize as I had expected he would, didn’t scramble to offer me the explanations he should have offered long before now. He displayed a reticence that might simply have been a non-hysterical and straightforward response to my obvious distress but that felt to me at that moment like willful withholding.
“Who was she?” I asked him. “Her real name, I mean.”
“She never told me.”
“You don’t know?”
“Do you think I would have kept it from you had I known?”
“You kept this from me, the fact that the name I know her by wasn’t hers.”
“Because I had nothing to give you in return.”
“What about just telling me the truth?” I asked. And when he didn’t answer: “Is that nothing?”
Again he didn’t answer right away, but this time I waited.
“I thought that would just make things worse,” he said, finally. “Not now, perhaps, but when you were young, a little girl with no mother. To take even that from you, to not even leave you with a name you could—”
“But it wasn’t hers.”
He didn’t nod or agree, but neither did he go on with the explanation I had just interrupted. “It was the name I knew her by,” he said finally. Lamely, I thought.
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