The Imposter Bride (16 page)

“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.

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.