The Bookseller's Sonnets Page 7

  I laughed with her, as always marveling at the busy, active life she still led. She and a loyal coterie of elderly friends filled their days with activity, which made me feel slightly less guilty about my infrequent visits. I also realized - as I helped myself somewhat gloomily to the irresistible nut torte - that my grandmother probably got to the gym more often than I did.

  “That sounds great,” I said, surveying the tea tray with a critical eye. “You don’t have any Equal, do you?”

  “Of course I don’t, darling. I don’t believe in fake sugar.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  “Besides, you’re eating nut torte and you’re worried about a smidgen of sugar in your tea? You’re as bad as your mother.”

  “Come on. I’m not that bad.”

  My mother’s weight obsession was a well-known fact in our family. Since retiring from her job as a professor, which had kept her running around a college campus and on her feet teaching several hours a day, she had become horrified at the idea of a potential weight gain. Now, anything she ate was immediately exercised away playing outdoor tennis with my father four times a week. Throughout my childhood, she had nagged me incessantly about exercising with her, and constantly policed my consumption of the delicious homemade treats my grandmother would always bring to our house. If she could have seen me with both a slice of torte and the cookies on my plate, she would have killed me.

  “Have you heard from Mom and Dad?” I asked. “I haven’t talked to them in a couple of days.”

  “I talked to your mother last night,” she said. “She called to tell me they’re off on a cruise. The Greek Isles, I think.”

  “Right, I knew about that. I have to call them before they go. Did she say when they were leaving?”

  “Sometime next week. She said your father was getting bored again.”

  “If I lived in the south, I’d be bored, too.”

  “I’m with you,” she laughed. Living in the city, no matter what sort of mess the climate threw at us, was one thing we always agreed upon. “So tell me, how are things by you? How’s work?”

  “It’s okay,” I said, through a mouthful of cookie. “A little crazy at the moment. Aviva is about to go out on maternity leave, so I’ll be managing a lot of the department’s work while she’s gone.”

  “Aviva is the Orthodox girl, right?”

  “Yes. I went to her wedding last year, remember?”

  “Of course. And she’s having a baby, already.” Her voice sounded wistful. I knew what it meant, and what she was thinking. The cookie crumbs suddenly felt like wet sand in my mouth. I felt like a transparently guilty suspect on a bad cop show; in my mind, I saw myself being hauled in by the Jewish Continuity Police, being charged with Failure to Marry.

  “Well, I think it’s kind of soon,” I said brightly. “But you know, that’s the way it is in her community.” I tried to make myself sound sophisticated and worldly, but I knew exactly what was coming next.

  “And how about you, my darling? Any dates? Any boyfriends?”

  I took a sip of my tea. “Not so much. You know,” I hated myself for lying, “with my schedule, it’s so hard to meet people.”

  I thought guiltily about Michael, and what my real answer should have been. Yes, Omi – I have met the man of my dreams, and we live together so happily. His name is Michael. His parents are from here, they’re American. No, he’s not Jewish, Omi. But that’s irrelevant. I love him. He loves me. We love one another so much. And the fact that he isn’t Jewish has made me so afraid to tell you about him. He makes me happy, Omi, and he wants you to like him. I want you to like him. He even learned how to chant the Kiddush for me, Omi. You’d love him. No, I don’t know if he would be willing to convert. Please don’t be like this. I wish you’d just give him a chance.

  She nodded sadly. “Maybe you shouldn’t work so hard, then.”

  “Right,” I replied, using my classic fall-back excuse, “except that there’s the tiny question of paying the rent.”

  “With the right man you wouldn’t have to worry about paying the rent anymore. A beautiful girl like you should have someone to take care of her. Besides, I just know the right person is out there, waiting for you.”

  “Omi, it’s not the 1950s. Women make their own way now. I don’t mind paying my own rent.” Inside, I was cringing at the sheer scope of my lies. There was no way I could have afforded the rent in our apartment if Michael and I didn’t live together. With both of our notfor-profit jobs, money was always an issue. “Besides, even if I were married, I’d still probably have to work so I could afford to live here in the city. That’s the whole point of having a career I really like. Everyone works. No one minds.”

  “You should mind,” she said, shaking her head. “As far as I’m concerned, your mother’s generation ruined it for all of you. Now you don’t even have the freedom to choose whether or not you want to have a career.”

  “Everyone I know has a career,” I argued. “Otherwise, what was all that education for?”

  “Ai, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have had an education. I’m just telling you that a few decades ago, women like you had more choices. In my day, even in your mother’s day you stayed home with the children. Now, you young women hand off your babies after three months,” she waved a careless hand in the air. “It’s all over when maternity leave ends, and you go back to work and leave your children with strangers. I see these women from Jamaica and West Africa and Haiti wheeling double strollers with little blond babies. Babies whom they pay no attention to while they’re busy gossiping in the park. All because there are no choices nowadays.”

  I attempted to fill my voice with the pretense of infinite patience, “I think it might be a little premature to worry about whether or not I’ll be staying home with my kids.”

  “That’s true,” she said sadly. “No point in worrying about greatgrandchildren that I don’t even have yet.”

  “Oy,” I sighed, shaking my head. And then I realized that I never, ever said things like “oy” anywhere but here, no matter how stressed out I got at work or at home. My grandmother, however, always managed to provoke some sort of Yiddish response code hidden deep within my psyche.

  In the ensuing silence, I nibbled on a piece of nut torte. It had been a while since my last visit, and on my way uptown I had wondered why I stayed away for so long. Now, I realized, it was to avoid conversations just like this one. Then I realized that I was avoiding conversations with Michael, with my grandmother, with my mother, of course, and probably, if I really gave it some thought, even with Aviva.

  Thinking of her reminded me about the manuscript that I had reluctantly stopped reading on Friday afternoon.

  “I received a very interesting artifact donation this week,” I said brightly, changing the subject. “It’s a very old manuscript, possibly about four hundred years old. Aviva isn’t sure that it’s the real thing, but I think it is.”

  I could see the glimmer of interest in her eyes. I knew she loved when I told her about life at the museum, no matter how much she may have objected to my life choices in general. “That old?” she asked. “How can you tell?”

  “The date says 1536. We’ve been looking at it – well, actually, I’ve been looking at it. Part of me thinks that Aviva doesn’t want to look at it, doesn’t want me to get my hopes up, in case it’s a fake. But in a way, she’s right.”

  “Right about what?” She settled back on to the couch cushions, holding the cup and saucer in her hands.

  “She thinks it could be part of someone’s religious or political agenda. But I don’t think that’s the case. I suppose it could be a hoax of some sort.”

  “How can you prove that it’s the real thing?”

  “We would send it to a lab. They have the equipment and technology to determine the age of the paper. And it’s in very delicate condition, almost falling apart. I’m almost afraid of what might happen to it at the lab. Not that the one we use isn’t a good one, I
’m just afraid that it would come back in even worse condition. Right now, I still think with enough conservation, it could go on display. But if the condition degrades further, it becomes a problem.”

  “And if it gets too damaged, then it can’t be displayed?”

  “Exactly. Of course, there are amazing labs out there, but at the best ones, the process is very costly. For something that might not relate to our period of history, it might be tough to ask for that much budget money in order to send it someplace that would handle it the way it needs to be handled.”

  I placed my cup and plate on the table, and wiped my mouth with a napkin. “It’s a bit of a catch-22,” I continued. “Without authentication, we won’t display it, and if we authenticate it through less costly channels, it might become too damaged to display.”

  “Do you know where it came from?”

  “That’s just the problem,” I replied. “We’re not sure who sent it to us. It came as an anonymous donation. The thing is, the package came to me, with a letter from the person who said she – or he - had met me, and had donated other items to the museum. But I have no idea who it could be.”

  “And until you figure out who it came from,” my grandmother reasoned, “you can’t tell whether this is the real thing or not?”

  “It’s either that or the lab.”

  “Could you go back through your records? Figure it out that way? After all, this person said they made other donations.”

  “I could,” I considered. “But there are more than four hundred potential donors. And I don’t have that kind of time. Especially since Aviva is leaving soon.” I hated to bring Aviva back into the conversation – I didn’t want to bring up the marriage-and-baby tangent again – but my grandmother was far more interested in asking questions about the mystery artifact.

  “What do you know about the person who sent it?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “But it looks as if she’s a survivor.”

  At that word, my grandmother flinched slightly, and automatically, swiftly, pulled down the sleeve on her left arm. She had done that for as long as I could remember, in order to make sure that the tattooed numbers were hidden from view. For that reason, I had never seen her wearing short sleeves, not even on the hottest summer days. I had only seen the number on her arm twice in my life, and both times she had been in the hospital.

  I was ten years old the first time, and as soon as she caught me wordlessly staring at it, she quietly asked the nurse to cover it with a bandage. The second time was only a couple of years ago, when I had gone to see her after a gall bladder operation. She was asleep when I arrived, and there was time enough for me to stare, unseen, at the unfaded bruise of blue ink on her forearm.

  That number seared itself on my mind: 462735. For days, I thought of it as a code for the subways – East Side Express - East Side Local - West Side Express - Queens and Crosstown – Brooklyn - East Side Express. How strange, I later found myself thinking, that I would associate trains with her number, when that was exactly the method by which she had been taken away from her home, her family, her life.

  “Well,” she sighed, “that does narrow it down a bit. Not many of us left.”

  “Don’t say that, Omi. There are plenty of survivors still alive.”

  “Not really, my darling. Just because you spend your days listening to survivors doesn’t mean that there are that many of us left to tell the tale. Every year, more of us fade away. And of those of us still here, many have begun to forget.” She made a small gesture, motioning to her head with her hand. “Feeble in body, feeble in mind.”

  “Some of the survivors I work with are the most vibrant people I know,” I told her. “And look at you. At your age, still leading a happy, full life. Still active, no matter what the weather. Still gorgeous, too,” I said, smiling.

  “You should have seen me in 1936,” she laughed. “No one could hold a candle to me.” She sighed. “The war. It changed everything. Wearing that uniform. Day after day, watching the bones of my ribs protruding from my middle, seeing my skin turning gray from the years of cold, of hunger. Sometimes, I thank God we didn’t have mirrors in the camps. Because the first time I saw my own face after the war, I thought I was looking out a window at some other woman instead of at my own face in the mirror. Once you have seen yourself that way, you can never be beautiful again. Nothing, except maybe your children, and your children’s children,” she smiled as she patted my cheek with her hand, “can ever be beautiful again.”

  “Omi,” I said, “of course you were still beautiful after the war.”

  “Maybe,” she said, her voice sounding resigned. “I remember how my father used to call us each by our own special name. Hilda was his little bird, Rachel was his little cat, and I was his little rose. ‘Anna,’ he used to tell me, ‘all of my girls are beautiful but you are my little rose.’”

  She sighed. “He never imagined. He never knew what would happen – that his little bird would die in a cage, and that his little cat died only just a kitten.” Her voice sounded tired and far away. “And that his little rose would wilt, but not die.” She sighed. “And only thorns would be left.”

  It was almost too much, except that I had heard this story before, and even more than how upset and powerless I felt at hearing her talk about her family, it always made me nervous when she repeated things that she had told me, because it made me wonder if her mind was slowing down. I placed my hand over hers, and we sat in silence for a moment.

  Abruptly, she changed the subject, as if she had returned to the present. “So, there is no good way for you to find out who sent this thing to you? Can’t you get someone to help you do the research?”

  “I suppose I could. I don’t think there’s an easy way to figure out whether or not this book is authentic.”

  “Well, my darling, you know that sometimes the things most worth having come because of the time and energy you have to put into getting them.”

  “How pithy. Have you been subscribing to Reader’s Digest again?”

  “Very funny. I’m just saying, if you put the same time and energy into finding a husband that you put into figuring out the history of this artifact, maybe you’d be getting married soon.” She smiled at me in a self-satisfied way, her face looking a lot like my mother’s after she had won an argument.

  I laughed. “I can’t win with you, Omi. You’re just too clever.”

  “Absolutely right. Now come with me into the kitchen,” she said, as she rose from the couch. “Your mother would be very upset with me if I only fed you sweets today. Let’s go see what we’ll have for dinner.”

  8

  Returning home from my grandmother’s, I was laden with plastic bags which held containers full of homemade mushroom barley soup, potato kugel, and brisket. She also packed half a loaf of challah from the wonderful Jewish deli on her block, and of course, more cookies. I fumbled with the bags and my keys, and opened the door to the apartment.

  It was dark and quiet inside. “Michael?” I called, assuming he’d be in the bedroom, typing away on the computer, or maybe on the couch in our tiny living room, watching a basketball or hockey game.

  There was no answer. I turned on the hall light and glanced at the wall clock – it was 10:00. He must still be out at the party, I thought.

  I checked the answering machine. The light was blinking so I pressed the Message button. The authoritative voice of my mother immediately filled the room.

  “Jill, this is your mother.” I sighed. She said the same thing every time she called. I had no idea why felt she needed to identify herself, as if I didn’t recognize her professor’s voice, the one that tolerated no misbehavior in her lecture hall. “Where are you? It’s been days since we heard from you. We’re leaving on that cruise next week, so I want to touch base before we leave. If you get this message before 10 tonight, give us a call. If not, call us after tennis tomorrow morning. We’ll be back around 11. Bye.”

  The machine rewound itsel
f with a whirr and click. I deleted the message, not wanting Michael to hear it. Even though my parents knew we lived together, they barely acknowledged his existence.

  Before they moved away, when it was still mandatory for me to go home for Friday night Shabbat dinner, I made the mistake of bringing Michael with me to meet them one Friday, just a couple of weeks before Passover. I hoped that they would invite him to the family Seder.

  We prepared ourselves – and one another – for what might happen. He got a nod and a brief handshake from my dad, and the evening proceeded cordially enough, but during dinner, my mother made special mention of a Christian evangelist, recently in the news, who was “no better than Hitler” and other comments that made my cheeks burn. No invitation to the Seder had been forthcoming.

  “We already have too many people coming,” my mother had said, when I had questioned her about it. “I’m sure he’s a nice person, but he won’t know what to do at a Seder.”

  “He could learn,” I had argued.

  “I’m sure he could, Jill, but that’s not the point. I think it would be very uncomfortable for everyone. Besides, if your grandmother knew you were seeing him, it would be too much for her. She’s been through enough. This would kill her.”

  I wanted to argue with her, but it was their house, and their rules. And at the time, I thought my mother had a good point; if my grandmother knew about Michael, it would be one more disappointment in a life filled with tragedy and loss. It was easier to make excuses, to protect someone who had already lost so much.

  But from that moment on, my relationship with my mother began to deteriorate. I got the sense that my family’s disapproval of Michael was all coming from her, and my dad was just going along with it. He told me more than once that he tried to talk to her about Michael, but as soon as he brought up our relationship, my mother told him that there was no way he could understand, because his parents hadn’t lived through the Holocaust.