Evening. Nessa Rapoport
does what I cannot do and breaches my mother’s grief. At last she reaches out to me.
Immediately, I want to crawl into her arms as I did when I was little, wrap myself in her scent and amplitude. Until this moment, her arms have hung slack at her sides; she has worn the same dress for two days and no perfume for the first time in my memory.
One of Tam’s gifts, inherited from our mother, was her embrace. For a methodical, conscientious sort, Tam had an exuberant hug, a homecoming in itself. I basked in that hug at airports and outside trains. Now my skin needs touch as an animal craving, instinctive, essential. But I cannot curl into my mother. Many people have come to see us, and I’m meant to welcome them with dry-eyed dignity.
“Eve,” my mother proffers in a whisper. “You might do something with your hair.”
I am stupefied.
“It’s just—” She looks around for help; none is forthcoming. “You’re allowed to,” she explains. “Your father once told me that an unmarried woman can even wear makeup during shiva.”
I can tell that I’m gaping at her.
“Don’t look so wild,” she says.
If Tam were here, she and I would be snorting vulgarly. “Can you believe Mummy?” she’d complain. “Trying to find you a husband on the day of my funeral.”
A gnarled old man, renowned for his appearance at weddings and funerals to cadge a meal, materializes before me, mumbles the requisite solemnities, and heads for the food.
“Maybe he’s the one,” I say to my mother.
My mother and I were standing side by side before the mirror in the lounge of the East Side restaurant she preferred, while Simon stayed at our table, choosing the wine. It would be their first meeting, and I was not optimistic. For my mother, the eros of reading was a personal affront, as if my riveted gaze were a pronouncement to the world that she was not sufficient. Syntax and meter, the furnishings of Simon’s professional dominion, did not tempt her.
“To be honest,” she began.
“He’s spectacular?” I said. Nothing positive has been known to follow this introductory phrase.
“He’s so—”
I fortified myself.
“—unattractive,” said my mother.
What I was not able to parse for my mother is that a man’s most seductive organ is his brain. When Simon starts to talk, I’m entranced. His speech is like a fingerprint: the unique pattern of him. From his mobile mouth, Simon releases effortlessly words like “withering” or “sibilant.”
“Say anything to me,” I’ll goad him. “Say something banal.”
He laughs, and that’s another winning aspect of Simon. His finding me funny is so much more valuable than beauty.
Simon is slight—make that scrawny—with black eyes and the pallor of someone who spends most of his life in a library or basement. He looks like Franz Kafka on a bad day. To quote him, “I’m a poster boy for the kind of Jew Hitler couldn’t wait to exterminate.”
Occasionally, I’ll interrogate him about how much he must have suffered in his public school, where I know from British memoirs that rugby was the currency and being Jewish and intellectual a near-fatal combination.
But Simon loved school. He was such an obvious genius that everyone left him alone. As a result, he is a more subtle type of insufferable. Simon’s view of himself is an accurate estimation of his strengths.
“Why don’t you begin with the assumption that I’m right?” he once asked me.
“Why would you want to be with a woman who thinks you’re always right?”
Which rendered him wordless, for once.
Simon’s mind works in such an oblique way that I cannot anticipate him. Long ago, Tam and I distinguished between men who are interesting and men with interests: Is there anything worse than hearing someone drone on about opera or golf or the minutiae of his fixations?
Simon has infinite obsessions, but no need to share them. If I’m in an elevator with him, he might say, “That’s the worst Schubert I’ve heard in a decade.”
Then, of course, I have to know which Schubert he heard ten years ago. Being Simon, he can tell me.
Our banter is like a game of chicken neither of us is willing to call. Since he’s in England for half the year, we do not see each other routinely. “Besides,” I inform him, “I cannot live in a rainy climate.”
“Noted,” he says. “Writing her dissertation on British writers. Cannot live in Great Britain.”
We are neither here nor there, immobilized on an Iceland of relationship, decisions adjourned.
No situation on this earth was more likely to drive my sister crazy. For Tam, indeterminacy was a moral failing.
In my mother’s living room, the brief day is shuttered, sky waning to ambient light, when the arbitrary murmurs coalesce, a melody in a minor key. Someone thrusts a prayer book into my clenched hands.
I do not follow, but when my father and my mother stand, I stand. And then: it is our turn to recite the fearful words.
Naked, I mouth the syllables of the kaddish in a monotonous trance. I cannot believe we are now the ones speaking aloud into the silent, receptive community.
I’m too proud, I think, as the service ends and people take their leave.
“Eve, we want you to know how—”
“It’s hard to believe that—”
“We’ve been thinking of you so—”
Inevitably, I flee.
Above everyone, the hall is an airy refuge. Portraits of Nana and Grandpa gaze at each other pacifically across the landing, as if to say: We made this family. We did our best. But such a matter is beyond our province.
I pass my mother’s room, evade Tam’s childhood door. Beside the laundry chute is the entrance to the third floor. My fingers are adept at disengaging the latch. I cannot remember when I was last in the attic, and yet I know exactly where to place my foot on the first steep stair. When I close the door behind me, I find myself in absolute blackness.
Slowly I ascend, placing each foot with care. At the top, a thread of moonlight outlines the wood ledge.
Turning the glass knob, I am in our old playroom, unadorned, toys scattered where Ella has left them. Here is the tiny dormer room where once—Tam and I were enthralled to discover—a maid had lived at the century’s turn.
On this flowered window seat I would lie until dusk, reading the books that are still piled beneath the hinged lid: lives of nurses in the Crimean War, siblings who journey to faraway lands by sail, wand, or potion. Here, when I was dropping out of high school, failing every class but English, Tam held me while I cried and told me she was certain I would be like Margaret Mead, intrepid, singular.
“With a PhD as good as Nana’s,” she insisted.
“But not in chemistry.”
We agreed it was unlikely.
My mother’s decorating habit has not extended to the attic. On this braided rug, I lay under Laurie as he kissed me. If I turn quickly enough, I might catch a ghostly glimpse of him.
I breathe in an essence of dust and wood oil. In the crooked closet where Tam and I had our clubhouse are a couple of wire hangers. The attic’s emptiness is not sorrowful but confers a perfect peace. Alone