Legacy of Silence (16 page)

She is mine, entirely mine. I made her myself. All her blood comes down from Father and Mama, from my people, through me. She belongs to me and to no one else.

“I want to tell you both something,” she said passionately. “You have to promise me that as long as you live you will never let her know anything about who—about how she came. She must never know. Do you promise?”

The two others looked at each other in astonishment. “Of course not. That’s understood,” Lore said. And Joel exclaimed, “Who in heaven’s name would hurt a child that way?”

It was bizarre. Here she was, this baby, just seven days old, going home with this odd, patched-up family to start out in the world. Yes, it was bizarre.

“What is her name?” asked Joel.

“Eve.”

Lore corrected her. “Eva. Your mother’s name is Eva.”

“In America, people say Eve, and this is America. Her name is Eve.”

S
he remembered how, from the first, people remarked upon the child’s beauty. The first pale fuzz had soon turned into black silk, and the black eyes were brilliant in the tiny face. They were Mama’s eyes.

“An Italian bambina,” exclaimed Mrs. Ricci, who kept bringing feasts, along with wine and kisses.

Emmy Schulman came with her ladies, piling glossy boxes tied in pink ribbon on the table.

The Sandlers sent a snowsuit and a loving card, which unlike other people’s cards said nothing about “Happy Parents.”

Gertrude, always chary of praise, observed that the baby looked healthy. It was still early in the morning, and of all days, today Joel had forgotten to put the sofa back in order. “Eve had a wakeful night,” Caroline quickly said, for she had followed
Gertrude’s gaze, “so Joel moved out here to get some sleep.”

Lore had knitted a yellow blanket. Often, when Caroline laid her book down for the late night feeding, she took a final look at the round lump under that blanket. An awful fear made her heart beat faster: What harm might life do to this child? This child had a legacy.… She reached down and gently rocked the cradle.

Joel had built it for Eve. It was made of fine wood, well joined and polished to a gleam. When Caroline, thanking him, expressed surprise at his skill, he answered simply, “What a person doesn’t know, he can learn.” And he explained, “Cradles are best for newborns. The motion reminds them of rocking in the womb, or so I have heard.”

“He’s full of surprises,” Lore said later, “and the soul of kindness.” She said it too often, for surely Caroline needed no reminder. “A father couldn’t be more attentive to that baby.”

In the pet store one day he bought a puppy, an unidentifiable gray mongrel with a rough coat and a pleading expression.

“A child should grow up with a dog,” he said earnestly. “Besides, he looked so sad in his cage. He talked to me.”

Joel had really taken too much upon himself, Caroline thought, bringing back a dog without asking whether it would be welcome. Nevertheless, she let it sleep on her bed at her feet, and she named it Peter.

Life in the little flat was undergoing a definite change. Drying diapers, midnight bottles, and the general fussing that a baby collects around its presence—to say nothing of the dog’s possessions underfoot, its bowls and rubber bones—had diminished privacy and space. In these narrow quarters, they were living as someday people would live in college dormitories in brotherly or sisterly indifference, without emotion. Or so Caroline thought …

No longer could she feel uncomfortable about the shared bathroom, or about walking past the front room where Joel was sleeping. Nor did he seem to notice her. If he still cast quick glances at her when she passed, she did not see them.

Lore rebuked her. “You don’t pay any attention to Joel.”

“Why? What am I supposed to do? I’m too busy for small talk.”

“You’re never too busy to talk to me.”

“Well, you are a slightly different person from Joel,” she answered, somewhat impatiently.

“You could make a little effort. Aren’t you ever sorry for him?”

“I’m perfectly nice to him. I’m comfortable with him, but I’m indifferent. And that’s progress, Lore, counting from where I started.”

Indeed, as the months passed, she began to feel that she was making progress. One morning when she woke up, she realized that the feeling of hopeless dread with which she had so long been waking up
was gone. It was as though a fog had suddenly lifted. She looked in the mirror and whispered to herself.

“I always used to think that I was a strong woman. Dr. Schmidt told me I was that day when my life fell apart, but I didn’t believe him. I knew I was not strong, not at all. Now I feel again that maybe I can be. And I must be, for Eve.”

N
OW
they were all making progress. To begin with, Mr. Ricci gave Joel a substantial raise. With Al Schulman’s help, Lore was studying for the licensing examination. And because Vicky was willing and eager to baby-sit, Caroline was able to put a notice on a bulletin board outside the post office offering lessons in both French and German at two dollars an hour. The response surprised her. It was a good feeling, now, to pay her fair share of expenses. They were all beginning to see daylight. Everything seemed to have changed since Eve arrived. It was as if the baby had given a sense of authentic purpose to those three who had boarded the train together in New York.

What was to come next, they could not know, and for the time being at least, Caroline tried not to think about it. Perhaps it was just enough for each of them to have this period of calm relief in which to pause and breathe and let the future wait.…

“A lot has happened since we came here two years ago,” Joel said one evening.

Long afterward, Caroline recalled the moment in precise detail. He had been reading the evening paper. Lore was hemming diapers, it being too expensive to rent them from a diaper service. She herself was correcting a French test.

He put the paper away. “Yes, a lot has happened,” he repeated.

Into the casual ordinariness of the time and place, his remark fell, heavy with importance. “A lot of things have changed, and a lot of things have stayed the same. Perhaps it is too complicated for me to explain.”

Both women stopped their work and looked expectantly toward him. But avoiding them, he spoke to the air.

“The fact is, I’m going to leave you. The time has come.” When he paused, it was plain that this speech was going to be hard labor for him. “I am a businessman. My English is good, thanks to you, Caroline, and I am ready to do more with my life than spend it in a small-town bakery. Although,” he added quickly, “I mean no offense to anyone. Anthony Ricci is content with it, so it’s fine for him. But I am not content.” He took a breath and continued. “I am not the person I was when you first knew me. You must have thought, Caroline, that I was some sort of idiot, a good-hearted fool who could expect by putting a ring on your hand that I could somehow make
you love me. And I’ll tell you, you were right. I was a fool. I myself look back now and wonder how I could have failed to see how much you disliked me. And you dislike me now. The marriages they call ‘marriages of convenience’ are more truly named ‘fraud.’ No, don’t go, Lore”—for Lore had laid the diapers on the floor and was about to stand up—“I have no secrets from you. You are a part of all this.”

Caroline was trembling. His words were hard to refute, and still she tried. “But I do not dislike you at all, Joel. How could I? The most loving brother could not have cared or done more than you have. Why, when I think of Eve and how you—”

He put up his hand to stop her, and interrupted. “I had a sister, you see, the baby of my family. Her name was Anya. She was three years old when they shot her there in the courtyard. She was holding a rag doll.”

The women were silenced. Awful tragedy had silenced them.

“We have both been through terrible times, Caroline, and your parents still weigh on your heart. I asked too much of you. You cannot force yourself. I understand. Believe me, I do. And so that’s why I’m leaving. I’ll be going fairly soon. It will be better.” His tone grew harsh as his voice rose. There was anger beneath his sorrow. “Yet something at least has come out of this mistake. Eve has a name.”

Lore coughed and turned to Caroline, who was
expected to make some response, and was too shocked to make one.

“Joel, we shall miss you!” Lore cried. “It will seem so strange—”

“We’ll be friends. Everyone will know where he stands.” Joel looked toward Caroline. “We’ll be friends, with no further expectations. I’m sorry. I don’t express myself well.”

On the contrary, he expresses himself all too well, she thought. And he says correctly that he is not the person he was two years ago. He has been working hard, he is thinner and older and somehow stronger. The overgrown boy with the flushed cheeks is gone. Now that he has spoken, he sits in a weary thoughtfulness; perhaps he is wondering how he ever arrived here with people who have no relationship to anything he has ever known or can have anticipated.

Deeply moved, Caroline stood up, went to him, and took his hand.

“I will never forget you,” she said. “If we should come to live as far apart as Australia and the North Pole, I will never—”

“You don’t have to do this,” he told her, gently withdrawing his hand. “I’ll be all right. And so will you.”

O
N
Sunday she pushed the stroller as far as the lakefront. Eve, well wrapped against the arctic weather, sat up and watched the scene with interest:
A man shoveled snow, gulls in raucous cry swooped overhead, and Peter in his plaid coat trotted alongside on his short legs.

It is too cold to have been out so long, she thought. But the little rooms at home were so oppressive, filled with a subtle anger, although possibly she was only imagining the anger. Joel seemed to stay away as much as he could; she had an idea that he lingered late at the Riccis’ house. He was unusually silent.

Certainly she had never expected, let alone wanted, their singular arrangement to be permanent. Yet Joel’s choice of this time did seem to be very strange and sudden.

“It’s no mystery to me,” declared Lore. “It tortures him to be near you. He’s a man, after all.” She hesitated. “Do you think you could ever—” And she stopped, blushing.

She meant:
Would you ever sleep with him?
Lore, however, being Lore, so prim and repressed, would never actually say those words.

As if I didn’t know, thought Caroline. He’s a man, after all. And I am a woman with needs of my own, one of them being that I want to love. I want to
want
again.

She paused, gazing out over the gray lake, huge as an inland sea, and she thought, as she often did, how small they were, she and her baby girl, with their little needs and heartbreaks, in the face of these rocks
and the waves that shape them, and the wind that shapes the waves.

Ah, well, so it is! Shaking the mood, she turned around toward home. On the corner, the Schulmans’ car passed; they waved, and she thought ironically about the astonishment they would feel when they learned that Joel was leaving his “little bride.”

Lore and Joel were listening to the radio. They motioned for quiet when she and Eve came in. A voice almost hysterical was speaking.

“Over three hundred Japanese planes have attacked so far. The loss is incalculable. Our ships, battleships, destroyers, and cruisers, were at anchor in the harbor … The
Nevada, California, Arizona
, completely destroyed … Thousands dead, thousands wounded … Disaster … The United States crippled in the Pacific …”

The three stood solemnly looking at each other. “This means war,” Joel said. “We’ll be in it by tomorrow.”

So the last hope for Father and Mama was gone. Silently, Caroline took Eve into the bedroom and laid her in the crib for a nap. She went to the window and stared down at the trodden snow in the dreary yard. She felt nothing. Then she remembered having read that wounded people have a few moments without any feeling at all before the agony begins.

T
HE
hours pass in a dream. The Riccis’ son Tom is lost on the
Arizona
. In the little brown house behind the bakery, the broken parents are left to bear the unbearable. Al Schulman has brought medication for Angela and sends her to bed. Anthony refuses help; he sits in a frozen trance and stares at the wall. People crowd the room to approach him on tiptoe and murmur words that he does not heed. Only when Joel comes does he respond at all. Joel kneels beside him on the floor, taking his hand, saying nothing. Anthony grasps Joel’s hand in both of his and is able to weep.…