Girl Unwrapped (29 page)

“I’ll go out then,” Toni shrugs, “if it bothers you so much. I don’t have to smoke in the house.”

“Oh no,
liebling
. Don’t go.”

Her mother’s face, taut and determined a moment ago, comes apart. Her cheeks sag, and dark circles show through the makeup under her eyes. Worse is their naked desolation. Lisa wraps her arms around her daughter in a hard, desperate grip. Toni has heard her mother say on the phone to a friend, “I have no future. I live for my daughter now.” Those words lie in Toni’s soul like cement. Her father would never have said such a thing.
It would have been easier if she’d been the one
to die first.
A sickening thought, but there it is. Like a bad smell from something rotten behind a wall.

An apparition approaches in the hallway, a white-robed figure with arms outstretched, walking slowly through the murky corridor. The figure stops, lifts its hands and utters a wail like a soul descending into hell. Toni freezes. A cold fist grips her heart. Her reason has been shattered. The two of them—Toni and the apparition—confront each other in silence for an endless moment.

“Mama?” Toni finally says when her jaws work loose.

“Oh, Toni, it’s you.”

The apparition remains rooted to the spot, but transforms itself into her mother in her cream-coloured, brushed-nylon housecoat.

“Oh, my dear. I thought … For a moment you looked so like your father. Those pyjamas … like his.”

“I thought
you
were the ghost.”

They clutch each other and laugh. Their laughter is a series of shuddering gasps.

“So who gets the bathroom first?”

“Age before beauty.”

Toni dips her head in a bow. Her mother tweaks her ear as she staggers past.

Afterward, they sit across from one another in the breakfast nook, the single bulb above the stove casting its muted glow. Neither can sleep. One of those nights. Lisa thinks she might have become distracted and forgotten to take her tranquilizers. (“Because, without them, it’s no use.”) She reaches over to touch Toni’s cheek.

“You’re too thin,
Mausie
,” she says. They both fall silent.
Mausie
was
his
term of endearment. Her mother jumps up to make the tea, a blend of chamomile and verbena from Europack Deli. When she sits again, she begins to talk, her eyes wide and dark and fixed on some spot on the wall beyond Toni’s head.

“Our early years together come back to me, as if it were right now. As if all these intervening years were a dream, and I have just awoken. I smell the blossoms along the Tappeiner Weg, the lovely landscaped path above the river in Merano. I hear the rush of the water, feel the mist on my cheeks. I see Julius pluck a red hibiscus, big as a teacup, to present to me. I scold him, because, of course, you’re not supposed to pick the flowers. We continue, up, up, the steep path, breathless, as he pulls me to the top. From up here, you see everything—the ring of snow-capped mountains, the town in the valley, the red-roofed houses, the vineyards, the orchards. Roosters crow. Church bells ring. And the sun pours down. And the blue, blue sky. Oh, you can’t imagine how beautiful. A garden of Eden. As if the war never was, nothing bad ever was.”

Her mother’s fist presses against her chest like she is trying to contain her beating heart. She tears her eyes away from the spot on the wall to look at Toni.

“Merano is in the north of Italy, you know, in Tirol; once it was part of Austria. There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers among the Tirolers, who longed for reunification. When Franco was courting Hitler, Merano was the first Italian town to expel its Jews. So it had its poisoned past, this Eden. But with defeat, the rats had to crawl back into their rat holes. I saw the town with fresh eyes and so did your father. All was washed clean by the sun, the mountain air, the new era. We walked freely through villages where before we would have been terrified of betrayal. We dined in open-air
tavernas
, beneath arbours. Julius would spend his last lira on a meal of pasta and wine. He had recovered from an illness and was like a man born anew. He was witty, gallant, charming, passionate. Yes, passionate. The war was over. We were alive. For me, those years were the best. I would have found a way to make a new home for us in Italy, as my brothers did, but Julius wanted to leave Europe. And he had a falling out with my brothers— it’s not important what about. A man’s pride is so delicate. He wasn’t quick to anger, but he could hold a grudge forever. We came here. The beginning was hard. We struggled, but we succeeded. It seems to me now the better our success, the more he became cautious, closed within himself. All his
meshugas
developed in this country where he believed we could have a fresh start. As if he was afraid to lose everything again.”

Lisa sucks in a deep breath. Toni fiddles with the salt cellar, twisting and untwisting the cap, scattering the white grains, as she absorbs her mother’s words with growing unease. Her mother’s disappointments were always apparent, but never so clearly spelled out. She had had something grand once and lost it. He was witty, gallant, charming, and passionate, the man who took himself away. The man Toni never knew. This isn’t fair.
You henpecked him, you pushed him into his shell
.

“He wasn’t always gloomy,” she says instead.

“
Ach
,
ya
. We had our moments,” her mother sighs. “Funny thing is, he didn’t mind reminiscing about our nice times in Italy with me. As long as it remained there.” Her mother stretches her arm, palm outwards, to indicate a distance.

“As long we did not discuss a real trip to the real place. The same with Vienna. But he could talk about places and people we once had known. He remembered my home town of Karlsbad very well. Now I don’t even have that, someone with whom to share those memories.
Ach
, never mind. One has to look forward. Forward.”

She fixes Toni with a piercing gaze. Her clenched fist raps the table, making the teacups rattle.

Her mother is thankful to hear that Toni doesn’t want to go back to Israel, that she doesn’t care about missing a year of university. A flurry of emotions passes over Lisa’s face: guilt and worry, along with relief, and then a dull, unfocused bewilderment. Toni vows she’ll get a job and apply to McGill next year. Avoiding specifics, she lets it be understood she has her own reasons for staying put. She expects the questions:
Where were you those two weeks in August? The landlady
on Bialik Street had no idea. What was going on?
Before the questions can be asked, she volunteers a vague story about a camping trip in the Sinai. Her mother swallows it, too convulsed with grief to probe. Getting away with her sins is a relief, but awful, too. A poisonous snake of a story has gnawed at her mind since the day she heard the news in Jerusalem.
Papa was sick with worry about his daughter gone missing,
and that is why his heart failed
. The fact that her mother’s frantic calls to Mrs Katz on Bialik Street came after his heart attack doesn’t still the accusations within. He must have known, or suspected, or feared. He never wanted her to go to Israel in the first place.

“Mama,” she blurts out in her anguish. “It’s my fault.”

She begins a confession—or at least tries to—about the truth of her disappearance, how bad she was, how terrible she feels, and how she wishes she could apologize to him, but her mother cuts her off.

“You are not to blame. Nonsense. Put that out of your mind at once. Of course he worried with you so far away. So did I. When did we not worry? That has nothing to do with what happened. He had a … what did you call it? A cardiac infraction.”

“A myocardial infarction.”

“That’s it! You see?”

Lisa pounces on the scientific name as if it were some kind of answer and absolution.

“He had a bad heart, and we didn’t know it. The doctor should have known, but then your father was not so good about going to the doctor. Regrets do no good. One has to look forward.”

Then her mother’s flare of spirit fades and she slumps back on the bench, staring at her cup of tea, confounded by the sight of the whitish brew. In her distress, she added milk. She never takes milk in her tea.

The door to her father’s study stays shut. Her mother has taken out the papers she needs and works at the kitchen table on the bits and pieces of wrapping up a life. Forms. Bills. Phone calls. In a furious swoop, she had ransacked drawers and closets, packed up his clothes for the Hadassah bazaar and left the bags in a row by the wall on his side of the bed. And there they remain. As if she’s forgotten the next step. She sleeps on the living room couch (when she sleeps). The bedroom has become dangerous, a minefield of memory. The study is worse. She can’t face the room that contained so much of him. Then, one morning she tells Toni in a tone of flat finality, “Take a look through your father’s books and keep whatever you like. I’m selling the rest. I’ll get a dealer in for an evaluation.”

Toni is shocked. It seems a sacrilege to even contemplate dislodging the books he so painstakingly collected over the years. Every few weeks, a package would arrive from far away. He would carry the parcel to his study, a slight bounce in his otherwise solid step and open it carefully. He would lift the book to the light, examine its pages, and record something on an index card. Then came the ritual of placing the volume on the shelf according to some system of his own. The rows of books always stood silently at attention. They were his children and his sanctuary. And now, her mother wants to just tear that all apart?

As if reading Toni’s thoughts Lisa says, “He put nothing in his will about the books. I was surprised. He made every other kind of provision. I don’t want them, and I don’t want to keep them as a museum.”

Bitterness, long-harboured resentment, sours her voice.

When Toni enters the study, she’s greeted by the room as her father left it, ordered and ordinary. The big oak desk, scratched and dented and familiar as her father himself, stands by the window. On it are objects that speak of a lifetime of methodical work: the big ink-stained blotter that covers most of the desk’s surface, the goose-neck lamp, pens and sharpened pencils in the pencil tray, his glasses case, his watch. The cushion on the swivel chair bears the imprint of its years of service. The workspace is embraced on two sides by floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. Nothing creates such an effective sound barrier as books, her father used to say.

Where to start? She feels like a marauder come to pillage. As she leafs through antique books by some of his favourite German authors, she finds notes on which her father jotted down where he found the volume, when, how much he paid. The sight of his handwriting—the small, neat, closely spaced letters—arouses a sudden craving.

She rummages through his desk drawers, through the stationery, ledgers, files, index cards of addresses, boxes of cheque stubs, to-do lists. She’s not sure what she’s looking for exactly. Something personal, something beyond the dry, factual notes.

Interspersed among his businesslike items she finds strange hoardings: cellophane wrapped crackers, Melba Toast and cookies, packets of sugar, salt, ketchup, vinegar, coffee whitener. The kinds of things provided free of charge at lunch counters. In a bottom drawer she finds an unopened carton of Camel cigarettes. But her father never smoked, at least not that she knew. She opens a pack. They are stale. She lights up and nearly faints—she hadn’t realized how stale. The cigarettes must have lain in the drawer for years. What sort of catastrophe did he think to fend off with this odd assortment of provisions?

A discovery in another drawer—letters she sent from Israel—sears her with guilt. Such a small bundle, and filled with such chatty nothings. On the top is the postcard of the Dead Sea Scrolls with belated greetings for his sixty-first birthday. She continues to poke around, but finds nothing more of interest. What she wants, she realizes at last, is something addressed to
her
. A letter in which he explains himself. She recalls something the funny man—Mr Abbott, the bookseller—at the
shiva
said about her father: “He had his sensitivities.” A complete stranger seems to know her father better than she does. A fury surges inside. Her mother is right. Sell the books, truck everything out, erase all traces of the father who wasn’t really here anyway. She slams the drawers shut.

She is about to storm from the room when she notices something tucked into the corner pocket of the large blotter. She snatches it up, then almost wishes she hadn’t. It’s an old snapshot, cracked and faded and vaguely familiar. The photo shows a young girl of about eight in a lacy white dress and white stockings. Her hands are clutched in front of her stomach, as if she’s just been told to stop fidgeting and is doing her best, but the results aren’t entirely successful. Her hair is parted to the side, creating a severe, boxy look, the fashion of the time, and topped with a floppy white bow. On the girl’s face is a guarded, brooding expression. Toni recognizes Papa’s younger sister, Ida, the one who, along with her parents, was among the first to be taken away when deportations from Vienna began.

Something was terribly wrong with Ida, Toni remembers. Her mother once said that her father grieved for his little sister more than for anyone else. He grieved for the sufferings he witnessed throughout her brief life and for the agonies of her end. These are the facts Toni grew up with and that always seemed both unremarkable and filled with a deep, mysterious horror. Toni’s childish questions drew reproachful adult silence, and eventually her curiosity about Ida became dulled. She accepted that here was a riddle, one of many, without an answer. Looking now at the photograph, her heart sinks because she realizes that this brooding Ida holds a family secret.
Something wrong
with her. Something shameful. An inherited defect of some kind.
Was this the reason her father would sometimes look at Toni with despairing concern, then avert his eyes? Some days later, she brings the photo to her mother.

“What was the big deal about Ida?” Toni asks, affecting a casual air. “She wasn’t normal, right?”