The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  Natalia flew to New York the week after the baby was born. She checked into her hotel in Manhattan, then took a taxi to Queens. She hadn’t been back to New York for a long time, and she felt overwhelmed. She stood outside the apartment building in Forest Hills for a while, collecting herself, before she went in. She thought it would perhaps be an awkward meeting after all this time, but when Elv opened the door, she quickly embraced her grandmother. They both blinked back tears and studied each other, then laughed and studied each other again. Elv brought Natalia inside. It was a small apartment, sparsely furnished, but tidy. They went into the room where the baby was sleeping.

  “Gorgeous,” Natalia breathed.

  “This is your ama,” Elv said to the baby. She leaned over the crib and stroked Mimi’s hair. “She’s here to welcome you to the world.”

  Natalia spent a week entranced by the child. She spent so much time with Mimi that she checked out of her hotel and moved into the apartment, sleeping on the couch. One night they invited Elise and Mary Fox over. Elv was a nervous wreck. The visit went better than she might have expected. Mary worked in the ER at St. Vincent’s. She had been such a studious, well-behaved girl, but as an adult she craved the excitement and chaos of the emergency room. She shook Elv’s hand and said, “Long time no see,” just as corny and smart as ever. Mary’s mother, Elise, hugged Elv and told her she couldn’t believe how strongly she’d come to resemble her mother.

  “Just as pretty. And that’s saying a lot.”

  Elv was flattered. Even when Annie was in the garden, muddy, wearing her old black jacket, she seemed more beautiful than any movie star.

  They all oohed and aahed over the baby, who had turned out to be a good sleeper, something Elise assured Elv was the most important attribute of any newborn.

  When the time came for Natalia to leave later in the week, it seemed too soon. Pete picked her up at Elv’s apartment to drive her to the airport.

  “I think our girl’s holding her own,” Pete said.

  When he asked after Claire, who rarely answered his letters, Natalia sadly could not say the same. “She’s doing the best she can, considering the circumstances.”

  As Pete was carrying her suitcase out to the car, Natalia embraced her granddaughter. “Now, you come see us,” Natalia said. She handed Elv an envelope. Elv looked at her quizzically. “Two tickets to Paris.”

  “Of course,” Elv said. She thanked her ama and they both wept, but Elv knew it was unlikely she would come. Every year she planned on going to Paris and every year her plan dissolved. She and Lorry had always talked about it. She’d wanted him to see the Île de la Cité, Berthillon’s ice cream shop, the chestnut tree in the courtyard. She had wanted to sit outside Notre Dame with him and let him guess which were the happy families. She wanted to take him down to the riverbank where she’d found the kitten someone had once tried to drown. After her ama left, she gazed out the window, then went to stash the envelope in a dresser drawer, beneath the sweaters that were stored away until winter.

  MADAME COHEN NOTICED that something had happened to Claire after Shiloh’s death. She seemed wary, like the stray dogs that gathered in the Bois de Boulogne at night. People said they were werewolves, but they were nothing of the sort. They were uncared for and abandoned, dogs left on street corners and in empty lots that gathered in packs deep inside the park. You only saw them at night, if you were foolish enough to walk along the dark paths. Their eyes glinted yellow from behind the lindens.

  A year had come and gone, and then another. Claire had begun to drink alone at a café on her way home from work and once or twice had become so inebriated she hadn’t been able to find her key and slept in the courtyard, under the chestnut tree.

  Madame Cohen had not given up on her. She had plans for Claire even if Claire had none for herself. She still hung long strips of flypaper from the ceiling. So far she had caught forty-two demons. She was watchful, ready for those that might be lingering nearby. She had sent her grandson to the Rosens’ several times to complete a series of tasks: He was to change the lightbulbs, open windows that had been shut for the winter and were now stuck, carry Martin’s old armchair down for the trashman. But each time he appeared, Claire made herself scarce, hiding out in her room behind her locked door.

  “I have a different job for you,” Madame Cohen told Claire one day. This was part of her plan. Jeanne and Lucie were shrugging on their coats as they got ready to leave the shop, but Madame Cohen grabbed Claire and told her to wait. She scrawled down an address. “Be there tomorrow at nine.”

  When Madame Cohen’s husband had been alive, he’d designed and crafted the jewelry in the shop, but for the past twenty years his brother, Samuel, who was called the deuxième Monsieur Cohen, had taken his place. His were extraordinary pieces, necklaces and rings that looked like gumdrops, or clouds, or slices of tangerine. He could no longer leave his apartment on the top floor of his building. He was eighty-eight and his legs had given out. Although he could get around in his flat with the help of two canes, the steep, circular staircase to the lobby of his apartment building was impossible.

  Monsieur Cohen lived on the fringes of the Marais on a street where all his neighbors had three locks on their doors. He had constructed an elaborate alarm system for himself, made of ropes and pulleys that deployed pots and pans that could knock any potential robber unconscious. The whole place rattled when Claire knocked on the door. Monsieur Cohen had a very suspicious nature. But of course, it made sense for him to be paranoid. He had rooms full of gems.

  He hadn’t wanted an assistant, but Madame Cohen had convinced him he needed one. Claire would do the marketing, make his dinner before she left, sweep the floor. On the first day of her new employment Claire had to show her identification before he let her inside. After that when she knocked three times she would hear the locks being undone and the pots and pans snapping back into place. At last the door would open. The apartment was crowded with very old and beautiful furniture, mohair and velvet couches, gilded tables. The rooms were large and dark and smelled of burning metal. The deuxième Monsieur Cohen kept birds that chattered constantly. There was a veneer of feathers over everything, gold canary fluff. Each canary had a name. Each answered to a special whistle, meant for it alone. A crow with a broken wing had landed on the window ledge one rainy morning and Monsieur Cohen had invited it in and fed it bread and milk. It lived atop a cabinet in the kitchen and hopped in and out the window at will now that its wing had mended.

  “Hello, hello.” Monsieur Cohen pulled Claire inside. He liked Claire even though he was antisocial by nature. He had never been close to anyone. He’d been too busy with his work. Everything in his working life was a mystery, and that mystery had spilled into his everyday life. He never spoke of his methods. He used jewelers’ tools in the old way, preferring a small ancient soldering iron that overheated and spat out smoke. He had secrets, as most goldsmiths do.

  Claire did the marketing, but she was a terrible cook and she wasn’t much better at tidying up. When she swept the floors, all she did was raise dust. Before long Monsieur Cohen allowed her to sit at his worktable exactly as Madame Cohen had presumed he would. In this way Claire became trained in his methods. If there was a difficult piece, she served as his assistant, handing over gold links, citrines, diamonds, clasps. When working with the soldering iron, she wore a pair of battered goggles held together with tape. Through the bubble of the goggles the gold looked green. Once she saw the shape of a lion in the torchlight; another time it was a butterfly.

  At last Claire found herself interested in something. She came to work early, picking up some bread and cheese for their lunch on the way. One day the deuxième Monsieur Cohen stunned her by allowing her to make her own piece of jewelry. A little canary had died and he was too depressed to work. “Surprise me,” he said. “Show me something that makes life worth living.”

  It was a tall order for anyone, especially someone new to the craft. Claire spent hours wor
king on a brooch of white gold that resembled the skull of a bird. It was a bit rough around the edges; still, she felt some pride. She recalled the robin’s bones Elv had worn, but they had turned to dust, broken apart. Gold would last. It wouldn’t scatter in the red leaves or the rain.

  She nervously presented her piece to the deuxième Monsieur Cohen, who lay almost prone in an armchair. When he saw the brooch, he clapped Claire on the shoulder, pleased. “You have it,” he said solemnly, as though diagnosing her with measles or mumps, but referring, in fact, to talent.

  As Claire walked home she saw the birds in the gray evening sky. She took note of the budding trees. She felt alive. By chance she stopped at the antiquities shop, where she riffled around in the tangle of junk. There were shells and beads galore. Monsieur Abetan rooted in a drawer, bringing forth an old amulet. A five-pointed star imprinted on thin silver. He handed it to Claire. “Take this.”

  “Really, I’m not looking for anything,” Claire demurred.

  “It’s this piece that does the looking. It lets you see what’s there.”

  Claire laughed. She took the coin to be polite. She had it in her pocket the next time she went to work. Halfway through the day, she remembered the amulet, and took it out to show Monsieur Cohen. He studied it, then handed it back. “Look what I have at the end of my life,” he announced, as if blinders had just been taken from his eyes. “Nothing.” His pale blue eyes were watery, swimming with tears.

  He was looking hard at what surrounded him. The rooms were dark and the birds were quiet; only one or two chirped as the last of the evening light faded. No children, no wife, not even any photographs. After such a long life, what did he have of any value? Claire was unnerved. She tucked the amulet away. Then she remembered why she had begun to notice things on her way home, why she felt alive. She brought him the soldering iron, the gold, a packet of opals. Monsieur Cohen did indeed have something of value. It was something he’d never expected or wanted, but it was what he had. A student. As for his student, she had even more. She could now see the leaves on the trees, the cobblestone streets, the sky above them, and on some days, when she looked carefully out the window in her grandmother’s apartment, she noticed that the light was orange.

  WHEN NATALIA AWOKE from her afternoon naps, she often went to her desk to take out the box filled with the photographs Elv had sent her over the years. She loved to look at them, even though they marked how quickly the time was passing and how much she was missing of the child’s life. By the age of three Mimi seemed very grown-up. Natalia talked to her on the telephone on a regular basis. “You’re my great-grandma,” Mimi had said matter-of-factly. “So you’re great.”

  “I am,” Natalia agreed.

  “You’re probably beautiful,” the child had announced. “You’re like the good witch.”

  “I am exactly.” Natalia had laughed.

  Natalia paid for Mimi’s day care and ballet lessons. Elv still worked in the animal shelter. She’d been promoted to assistant manager, but she’d made clear what her hours would be. She would not work overtime. She was always out by three, waiting on the corner for Mimi. Elv didn’t like to go into the school and tried to avoid it. She felt she’d somehow manage to get herself into trouble. She still didn’t trust authority figures. She’d been so nervous about her first parent-teacher conference, even though it was just nursery school, that Pete Smith had gone with her.

  “Hey, baby,” she would call cheerfully when the preschoolers all came rushing out. You’d never have guessed that she was brokenhearted when her girl came racing over, lunchbox in one hand, pink backpack over her shoulder. Elv had to laugh when she discovered it was her fate to have a daughter who loved pink. Mimi always did extra credit and scored the most stars on her weekly worksheet. “I’m the best,” she said quite simply and Elv grinned. She quite agreed. The funny thing was, she reminded Elv of Meg. The serious set to her face, the fact that she worked so hard at every task, how she set her shoes in a neat line: boots, ballet slippers, sneakers. But she reminded her of Claire as well, the way she would reach for Elv’s hand when they went to the cemetery in Astoria. Tell me a story, she always said, so Elv would sit with her on the bench where the hostas grew. There were starlings in the trees. She wanted to say that she would have done anything to change what had happened, to bring back the people she loved; instead she said that once upon a time, in the heart of New York City, there was a boy who found a secret world, a place where some people were good and some were bad, and loyalty was the most important trait of all.

  “It was Daddy,” Mimi would say. She knew the story, word for word, and took great comfort in the fact that it never changed. It only went forward if she asked What happened next? Then Elv would tell her the next section, all about the man who was a giant, and a boy who had a gold ring that could transport him anywhere, and the sisters who could hear tomato plants growing, and the great-grandmother who could sew stars into dresses so that they would glow in the dark, and the little girls who wore them who could never get lost.

  SOMETIMES THEY TOOK the train out to North Point Harbor and Pete picked them up at the station. He’d bought the two-family house in which he’d been renting an apartment when the place went up for sale. It was right in the town center; you could walk to everything. Mimi loved the tea shop that served homemade ice cream. She took her doll, Miss Featherstone, with her wherever she went.

  “Miss Featherstone is a dancer,” Elv told Pete.

  “A ballerina,” Mimi corrected her.

  “I see,” Pete said.

  They all ordered ice cream. Mimi always ordered vanilla.

  “Just like Claire,” Pete said.

  “Claire, my momma’s sister?” Mimi asked.

  “That’s the one,” Pete said.

  “Finish up,” Elv suggested to the child, who had begun to color on the back of her place mat with the crayons the tea shop provided.

  Mimi drew a scoop of ice cream in a silver cup. There were stars all over the ice cream.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to Pete. “This is for Claire.”

  Pete looked at Elv, who nodded her okay.

  “She lives far away, but I’ll mail it to her,” Pete said.

  “She lives on the other side of the ocean,” Elv told Mimi, “where they all speak a different language and the light is a different color every day.”

  Elv went to North Point Harbor on her own sometimes, when Mimi was at school. She still visited Lorry every Sunday, bringing their daughter along. But she didn’t want Mimi to think their world was made up only of the departed, that all there was in this life was something more to lose. She went to the other cemetery with Pete, who had arranged the stones from Paris quite beautifully and who still cut the grass and tended to the lilacs nearby. Elv noticed some spindly green things growing as well.

  “Tomato plants!”

  “I put them in every year,” Pete admitted. “I get different varieties, ones I think your mom would have appreciated. This year I planted Black Krim, from the Ukraine.”

  Elv ducked her head so Pete wouldn’t see that she was crying. Pete handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose. Before Elv took the train back to Queens, they went to the new diner that had just opened and ordered grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in honor of Annie. They had strong cups of coffee.

  “Remember the Cherokee chocolates?” Elv said. “Those were my favorites. One year I said I was allergic, just to be difficult, but I’d sneak out and eat some when no one was looking.”

  “I never knew a tomato could be brown and still be edible.” Pete chuckled. “Remember the Golden Jubilees? They were huge. They didn’t even taste like the same species as what you get in the grocery store.”

  Pete wanted to say something more, but instead he just started talking about the library project. Annie had left funds for him to oversee a reading room in the new elementary school on Highland Road.

  “Is there something else?” Elv asked. “Are you s
ick of me and Mimi coming out and bothering you?”

  “Oh, no,” Pete assured her. “I was just thinking of how things used to be.”

  One day when they were visiting, Mimi went to play in the yard and Pete suggested they have a cup of coffee in the kitchen. They could watch from the window, make sure Mimi was safe.

  “I found him,” Pete Smith said. He was gazing out at Mimi, thinking how delighted Annie would be if she could see her grandchild dancing around, shoes kicked off. She was picking up leaves, then letting them rain down. Her long black hair was down her back in one neat braid.

  “Who’s that?” Elv worked hard. She was tired, but she was still beautiful. Not that it mattered. She was far more concerned with the fact that Mimi hated all vegetables. She wouldn’t even try broccoli. The only thing she could be coaxed to eat was a tomato, and that was only because Elv had sworn it was actually a fruit.

  “The man who was a teacher. The one in the car. He’s never going to hurt anyone again.”

  Elv went to the sink. Mimi had made a bit of a mess while giving Miss Featherstone a bath. Elv took a paper towel and sopped up the spilled water. She felt a shiver inside her, but she kept cleaning up.

  “I got rid of him,” Pete said.

  Elv laughed, then turned from the sink and saw the look on his face.

  “That’s what Lorry wanted to do,” Pete told her. “He told me that the day he came here with the letter. I did it for him.”

  Elv’s eyes were burning. She never cried when there was the slightest chance that Mimi might walk in on her, but Mimi was out in the yard. She’d found a watering can and was pretending to water the garden.

  “I wasn’t sure I could find the right person. I started to ask around, in town, at the school. I fished around online. I came to think it might be a fellow who had taught at the elementary school years ago. He’d retired suddenly, and there weren’t many people who remembered him. But there was one teacher, Ellen Hayward, second grade, who did. She hadn’t liked him. She said he’d been fired for some inappropriate actions; children and parents had complained. It had been hushed up. No one would file a legal complaint. Mrs. Hayward said that most children know their parents will be upset if they find out they’ve been molested. They want to protect them.”