The Imposter Bride

  “I’m not feeling well,” Bella said at one point in the second period.

  “None of us are,” Sol said. The Soviets had pulled ahead by then and were outskating and outshooting as well as outscoring us.

  Bella went to my old bedroom to lie down, and when Sol went upstairs after the game to tell her the disastrous final score, she was dead.

  She was seventy-seven when she died, and had seemingly been in good health until the end of the first period of that hockey game, but at the shiva Ida told us Bella hadn’t been feeling well the last months of her life, had been finding it an effort to get her shopping done, to make herself a cup of coffee in the morning. She had been afraid that one morning she simply wouldn’t have the strength to get up at all, would not even be able to pick up the phone to call anyone, so Ida had been calling her every morning.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “How would you?” Ida answered, and I wasn’t sure if she was accusing me of being a selfish, non-attentive granddaughter or acknowledging that Bella was always someone who had kept her troubles to herself.

  “She loved roses,” the rabbi said at one point in the eulogy, which I also hadn’t known, but then, who didn’t like roses? It seemed an oddly generic type of detail to put into a eulogy, one that blurred Bella into a fuzzier, more Hallmark version of herself, rather than bringing her more sharply into focus. I wondered if there was list of safe, generic details that someone had compiled so that rabbis and other clergy could choose from it when writing eulogies for people they barely knew, but when I said that aloud, Ida Pearl shook her head.

  “I’m the one who told him.”

  On summer evenings she and Bella would often walk around the neighbourhood admiring the roses in their neighbours’ gardens, she told me. Bella liked the older varieties that hadn’t given up their scent for the sake of a more intricate layering of petals. She thought that showy roses with no sweetness to their petals were like the shaved, deodorized women that Canada produced.

  “She told you that?”

  “You think I’m making it up?”

  “I never really knew her,” I said.

  “But you loved her,” Ida answered, and again I wasn’t sure if she meant that as accusation or comfort. Was it less important or more important to know someone than to love them?

  Bella left me her candlesticks, an enamel butterfly pin that I had never seen her wear and a sealed envelope with my name on it.

  She had left envelopes for each of her grandchildren. Jeffrey tore his open immediately. I watched his face as he read it, how full of feeling it was, feeling he tried to make light of.

  “So now I know what she really thought of me,” he said.

  The rest of us saved our letters for when we could read them in private.

  My dear Ruthie, I read when I got home that evening. Her voice was so clear in my mind that it was hard to believe I would never hear it again. It was a voice soft and heavy with the Yiddish she had spoken before she learned English. She addressed me as a granddaughter, but appealed to me as a mother. The birth of my first child was still a few months away, so it seemed Bella had expected to live longer than she had, long enough to see me become a mother. She appealed to my own understanding as a mother that there are times when you don’t know the best thing to do to help your children, the children in this case being me and my father. She told me about the conversation she had had with my mother on the back stairs of the apartment on Clark Street that warm afternoon on the eve of Yom Kippur in the autumn of 1946. She told me about the life my mother had lived before, and of the husband she had loved and still loved three months into her marriage to my father, a man who had betrayed her and then possibly murdered the girl with whom he had betrayed her, the girl—Ida’s own cousin—whose name my mother then bore out of Europe. She told me my mother’s real name and how the person my mother had been re-emerged in the telling of it—Right before my eyes, like the chicks I used to watch chipping through their shells—and how once Yanna Marissa emerged from the outer shell that she had taken on, Bella knew she would stand up and walk away. She had to, Bella wrote. How could she not? How could she stay when she was no longer the person your father had married and no longer the person who had married your father, and when I knew and Ida knew, but your father she hadn’t told?

  The way a thing begins is how it continues, my father often said. What begins in deception continues in deception. I knew he believed that, but would it really have been too late three months into their marriage for my mother to correct the deception with which that marriage had begun? Could they really not have made a clean start had she wanted to, given the circumstances of her life at that time, the reality of where and what she had just come from? They could have, I thought. Had she wanted to.

  What Bella hadn’t known was that my mother was pregnant at the time. She would have left immediately after that conversation on the stairs if she hadn’t been, Bella thought. She would have left that night, or within days, and the fact that she didn’t was a credit to her. She didn’t have to stay. She could have left at any point, taking you with her in her belly. But she didn’t, and why? That’s what I’ve had to ask myself. Why did she stay when, in her heart, she was already gone? Because she had morals, your mother, despite everything that had happened to her and what she’d seen and been party to. She had morals and in her heart she was good. She knew you’d be better off with us than wherever she was going and so she left you. To be better off. That was her gift to you, to leave you with a family she knew would love you and raise you as you needed. And you were her gift to us.

  It was a nice spin on it, I thought, but I couldn’t really buy it. If I had been a box of chocolates, yes. Women gave chocolates as gifts. We gave pretty objects, flowers, books … but we didn’t give our babies. As atonement, then? Could that be what Bella really meant, but she didn’t want to come right out and say that my mother’s role in the death of Ida’s cousin might have made her feel she had to offer her own baby as atonement? Possibly. But I couldn’t buy that either. It had a neatness to its logic that human emotion didn’t obey.

  As if sensing the turn of my thoughts, my own unborn baby stirred inside me. I rested my hand on her as I read further.

  I should have told your father what she’d told me. Not right away. I don’t mean right away. She had taken me into her confidence and I’m not a person who breaks another’s confidence. And I felt sympathy for her. More than she ever knew. I think she may have thought I didn’t.

  There it was, then: Bella’s confession of her part in driving my mother away. Everyone in my family thought there was something they had done or hadn’t done, I’d come to realize. Some failing, a discomfort with her that they couldn’t hide. Ida most of all, but all of them, right down to Sol, who had rejected my mother at the very outset of the new life on which she was trying to embark. Bella was probably telling the truth when she said she felt a sympathy for my mother. When she sensed that my mother wouldn’t stay—couldn’t stay, Bella stressed—she probably really did hope that my mother would be able to make a new life for herself somewhere else. But she was probably also relieved that that new life would not be lived in the core of Bella’s own family. It was a relief that she would not have been able to help but convey, and that then would have compounded the reasons for that young woman to be unable to stay. In Bella’s mind, in any case.

  But after she left I should have told him. I know that now, but at the time I thought it would only hurt him more. He was still young when she left him and the marriage had been so brief, and based on falseness. It was more a dream than a marriage, your parents’ time together. I didn’t want to add anything else to the pain he already felt. It would not have changed anything for the better. It would not have brought her back.

  So she didn’t tell him. She didn’t tell anyone—except perhaps Ida Pearl—that she knew my mother’s real name and some of the circumstances of her life before and during the war. To protect
my father, she said. And it didn’t occur to her that sparing her son’s pride might be hurting me in some way. She swore that to me.

  I wanted you to be happy.

  To move forward in my life, in other words, away from the tragedies of the past. As she had done. Could I really fault her for that?

  There was a certain cowardice, I thought, in Bella’s waiting as she did until she would not have to face my response to her deception. But there was generosity in it too. She could easily have taken her long, dishonest silence with her to her grave, but she hadn’t. She had chosen instead to risk my good memories of her and to incite my anger when she could no longer defend herself against it in order to set right what she felt by then was a wrong she had done to me. Because she was a moral person, I thought, and in her heart she was good.

  My response to Bella’s revelation was muted. It had been nine years by then since I had received anything from my mother. I didn’t know why the rocks had stopped any more than I knew why they had started. I would have liked to know, of course. I wondered if she was all right, if there was something in my lack of response that had disappointed her, if she had hoped, perhaps, that I would take more initiative, as Nina had once suggested, once she had re-established contact with me by sending the rocks, but I had accepted by then that I would probably never know. My mother was like a death that lay buried within me, a muffled mix of sadness, dread and regret beneath the layers of my busy, ongoing, ever-expanding life, but I wasn’t tormented by it. I felt an unease within myself that I knew was related to her, though it felt diffuse, unbound to anything that specific. I felt also a sense of incompleteness, but was it any worse than what other people experienced? I didn’t know, and I could push it away more easily as my own adult life moved forward, even if there were times those feelings sharpened. The previous spring, for example, when Reuben and I had taken our first trip to Israel.

  Was it because we had just made the decision to start our own family and the thought of becoming a mother myself raised the spectre of my own lost, failed mother, the broken chain of continuity from one generation to the next? Probably. We had arrived in Tel Aviv, and I had wanted to retrace my mother’s steps, to stand in places where I knew for a fact that she had once stood. We had sought out the building where Ida’s sister Sonya had once lived, only to discover it was gone, replaced by a high-rise hotel, one in the long line of high-rises that had been built along the shoreline and that now blocked the sea breeze that had brought relief to the city from the oppressive heat of the summer when my mother and Nina had lived here.

  “I’m sorry,” Reuben said as we stood in the fumes of the tourist buses that were idling in the driveway of the hotel.

  “It’s okay,” I said. He took my hand. “Let’s go for a swim,” I suggested, and we did.

  And later on that trip we returned to our room in another of the high-rise hotels that now dominated the shoreline, obliterating any hint of what had been there before, and conceived the child I now felt coming to life inside me.

  I took in the information that Bella had given me, but it was not the bombshell she seemed to have worried it might be. I did not read that letter and feel the layers of my present life giving way, my mother’s name the proverbial warm blade melting a path to the agitated longing and failure at my core. The acute sadness I felt that fall was actually about Bella, a real person who had been with me every step of my life until then, whose voice and cooking and book recommendations and admonishments and praise and less-than-subtle guidance and awkward pats on whatever part of me was within reach were still so vivid that I kept waiting for her to reappear.

  My father too did not seem on the verge of falling apart from Bella’s belated disclosure. If he might once have been upset that the wife whom he adored had confided in his mother and not in him, he was over it by then. A quarter-century had passed. It was 1972, not 1947. He was thoughtful and quiet when I told him, and there was an expression on his face that might have been sorrow, but if it was it could as easily have been sorrow for my mother, not himself. Or maybe it was sorrow for me. I don’t know. As for him, he loved Sandra now. They lived together in her house on the Lakeshore, where they listened to music and walked Oscar. (And when Oscar died, they walked Sadie. Also a Newfie. Also huge.) He had learned to read music, and had taken up the cello, which he played for hours after work, Sandra told me, and while she thought maybe he was improving, Sadie always got up and walked out of the room and resettled herself with a sigh as far away from my father and his cello as she could get.

  It was with the birth of my daughter that I felt a sorrow so powerful I thought it might pull me under. It was like a dark undertow of the amazed, protective love that flowed into me the first time I held her and looked into her searching, bewildered little newborn face. With each ritual of new motherhood I felt it: the counting with Reuben of ten tiny perfect fingers and ten tiny perfect toes, the discovery of every inch of her newborn perfection, learning how to feed her, to change her, to anticipate her needs, to interpret the timbre of her cries, the gazing into eyes that slowly came into focus and gazed back at me. Could my mother possibly have done the same with me? I wondered. She had to have, I thought. But she couldn’t have, I also thought, because if she had she would not have been able to leave me.

  When Sophie first smiled at the sound of my voice, I understood that I too had smiled at the sound of my mother’s voice, had followed the sound of that voice around the room as Sophie began following mine. And as Sophie began to coo at me—sooner than I expected, younger—I knew that I too had cooed at my mother and that it had been a sound as soft and sweet and melting as Sophie’s. I had probably cooed at her the day she left, maybe as she was preparing the bottles of formula for others to find. And as I understood this, a grief took hold of me that was as deep and strong as any love I had ever felt.

  I didn’t speak about it to anyone, not even Reuben. I felt too ashamed to be feeling such a deep, pulling sorrow in the face of the joyful miracle that was Sophie. And I felt afraid, because it had a life of its own, this sorrow. I was afraid of where it might take me. But I hoped that if I kept moving forward, caring for Sophie, loving her, living the life that I knew I wanted, it would recede without pulling me with it. And it did, over time. As it had receded the first time I had experienced it.

  But what had it been like for me, that first grief, I wondered, the desperate longing that I must have felt for the warm living centre of my world that had simply ceased to be? How had I experienced it with no way to understand it? Who had comforted me? Bella? My father? Not Elka, who had only been seventeen then, too young yet to become the surrogate mother she would later be to me. Did they even know I needed comfort? Or did they think I was too young to feel the impact of what had happened?

  I couldn’t think about it, didn’t want to think about it. I attended to the ongoing minutiae of my everyday life, and it was a full, busy life. Sophie was as active and demanding as any healthy baby and then as any healthy toddler. I was completing a master’s degree, and beginning my work as a paper conservator. I became pregnant again, sooner than we had planned, had a son, Joey, then another, Sam. We bought a duplex in Côte-St-Luc, thought about moving to Toronto like so many of Montreal’s anglophones of our generation, then decided to improve our French instead and take advantage of the depressed real estate prices caused by the city’s fleeing English. We bought a house just a few blocks from where I had grown up. I was surrounded by people who loved me and whom I loved in return. I was part of a noisy, boisterous family. I wasn’t always happy, but I wasn’t unhappy.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL 1982 that I decided to find her. It was summer and we were on a family road trip. For reasons that escape me now, Reuben and I had thought it would be fun to drive all the way across Canada and back with three children under the age of eleven. We had been driving for two days when we reached Wawa, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Superior. Sam and Joey had been bickering for several hours by the time we drove in
to town. Sophie was pressed up hard against the car door to create as much distance as she could between herself and the rest of us and was reading a comic book, pretending she was somewhere else. I turned around to yell at the boys and utter threats about sending them home on the train, and when I turned back I was looking at a huge goose that seemed to be rising straight out of my dreams. It was a massive statue of a Canada Goose, Wawa’s claim to fame.

  “Stop the car!” I said. There was such urgency in my tone that Reuben veered to the side of the road.

  “Do you have to throw up?” Joey asked me.

  “No,” I said. “Look at the goose.”

  It was an impressive goose. None of the children found it strange that I would have commanded Reuben to stop for its sake. Only Reuben found it odd. He was looking at me, not the goose.

  “She was here,” I said to him, but it was more than that. It was as if the sight of that goose had released the latch on the place within myself in which she resided and she had shot up through all the layers of my life to its surface.

  “Who was here?” Sophie asked.

  “My mother.”

  I had told them about her before, how she had come after the war but not been able to stay, and that I didn’t know why and I didn’t know where she had gone, and yes it was sad, but having sadness doesn’t mean you can’t have happiness too. We’d been through the whole story, our own personal fairy tale: the mysterious mother who disappeared and then sent her daughter beautiful rocks from beautiful places. There were times it didn’t even feel real to me any more. But at that moment it felt real. I didn’t know why, couldn’t explain the impact of that stupid goose on my psyche any more than I could explain anything related to my mother.

  My children picked up on the opening in me. “Do you miss her?” Sophie asked me. She was still at the age where her worst fear was losing her mother. They all were. Are you sad? they wanted to know. A little, I admitted. Joey thought we should go to the beach and look for a rock like the one she had sent me from there, and we did go to a beach, though I don’t know if it was the one she had walked twenty years ago when she sent the last rock to me. We found many rocks, some of them beautiful, but none with the beauty and pleasing shape of the banded agate she had sent me. My children’s questions continued. Do you think she’s sad? Do you think she misses you? Why did she send you the rocks? Why did she stop? Did she love you? Do you think she’d like to see you? Would you like to see her? Do you think she’d want to meet us? Is she dead?