Storm Tide (6 page)

She got a much better look at them a couple of days later, when they were called in by Dr. Silver’s lawyer, Mr. Vetter, along with the rest of the family. He seemed ironically amused as he introduced them, without explanation. “Jerri Silver,” the widow Sharon Silver repeated. “Are you a cousin?”

Yirina shook her head no. She volunteered no information. Judith stared at her sisters. Lisa was pretty, dressed in a pink pants suit with bell bottoms. She must be eighteen, maybe nineteen. Brenda was pregnant. Her husband was addressed as Doctor. They all kept looking at Yirina and Judith. Judith felt frightened. Yirina was wearing black, one of the dresses she used to put on when she was playing piano in the cocktail lounge. She held Judith tightly by the hand and sat upright in one of the chairs.

“I don’t understand why they’re here,” the widow said. “What are they, some obscure relatives?”

“It will all be clear when I read the will,” Mr. Vetter said suavely,
poking his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. “Should I commence, then?”

This man was the first lawyer Judith had ever met face-to-face. Judith did not have any desire to be a doctor, although Yirina spoke of it as the highest calling. She hated hospitals and sickbeds and pain. But it looked powerful to be a lawyer. You told people what was what. The law stood behind you. People waited on your words. She felt as if Mr. Vetter did not despise them, but was somehow on their side. He was a slight man, balding with a patch of dark hair over either ear, but he seemed to radiate power and confidence. He had a strong carrying voice like an actor or a rabbi.

Dr. Silver left most of his considerable estate to his wife and his daughters, with a trust for his coming grandchildren. But he also left a trust for Judith, to be applied only to her education. It was not to be touched except for that purpose. If she failed to attend college by age twenty-five, it was to revert to his other daughters. She was so referred to. She was finally spoken for as a daughter. They were his other daughters. Judith began to weep, not from grief or joy, but from the overwhelming sense of no longer being invisible. She hardly listened when the lawyer read the bequest of five thousand dollars to Yirina, to be paid in two installments a year apart. She hardly registered the screams of the widow and the daughters, their ranting, their insults.

“You’re telling me my husband was having an affair for the last fourteen years? That’s not possible. This is a lie!”

The blond daughter, Lisa, began to sob. “Our daddy wouldn’t do something that low! You’re trying to tell us that … that shabby creature is our sister! She doesn’t look anything like us! And her mother can’t even speak English.”

“I speak six languages,” Yirina said coldly. “English, Czech, German, Turkish, Spanish and Yiddish. I also read and write them. If you never have to change countries in your life, you should thank Adonai, rather than insult those who have had to begin again and again.”

“I don’t know who you are or what kind of hold you had on my husband, but you will not get a penny!” the widow said, shaking her lacquered finger at Yirina. “I see no resemblance between this gawky child and my dear husband.”

Mr. Vetter stood. “Dr. Silver has acknowledged his daughter. He wishes to leave her a small remembrance. That was his wish and I doubt if you will find a court in New York to overturn this will, ladies. After all, he left you almost everything.”

Yirina stepped forward and smiled at the lawyer. “Thank you, sir. You’ve been very understanding to a woman who has survived many
troubles. Dr. Silver meant a great deal to me. I’m sorry his widow and his other daughters resent his acknowledgment of his second family. But I appreciate your gentlemanly treatment of me and our daughter.”

“Five thousand dollars,” Yirina said after they left. “He wasn’t so generous. I thought he might give me a little house or a trust fund or some stocks. He promised to take care of me. Well, it’s better than nothing.”

For Judith, the will meant she would go to college; and it meant she was visible, no more a shameful secret. She no longer believed her sisters would be her friends, for they had treated her as if she were a rabid dog. But she still felt better. Mr. Vetter was her new hero.

J
UDITH

    Judith went to NYU on scholarship, majoring in political science and commuting from Brooklyn by subway. In her junior year she had a part-time job typing for a professor. Often she did not get home until ten at night, after studying at the library, working for Professor Jamison, sometimes seeing her boyfriend Mark or working on her column for the school paper.

Mark had an apartment with two other guys in what was beginning to be called the East Village, which sounded better to parents than calling it the Lower East Side. His apartment was dirty and run-down, with what passed for a bath in the kitchen. There was only one bedroom, with bunk beds. The guys took turns sleeping on the fold-out couch at one end of the big room, the kitchen. It was hard to get privacy, but obviously that was the only place they had to make love. They had managed it six times. Judith found it awkward, never knowing if the roommates would walk in, hearing the neighbors through the open barred window. The guys had been robbed once, of the TV and stereo parents had provided. This was the beginning of spring vacation, so both roommates were gone tonight. Mark had decided to stay around, to have time alone with her and to work on a term paper.

They were both earnest skillful students, adept at taking exams and dealing with professors’ demands and foibles. She was the more driven, viewing being a student as a job. He did not have to work as hard, since his parents were putting him through. They lived in Fairlawn, New Jersey, where his father owned a men’s clothing store. Mark had many clothes and his roommates were always borrowing them. It was part of his capital at college. She thought Mark extremely handsome: he was a full head taller than she was, slender, with a curly dark golden beard that made him look far older than twenty-one. Mark had light brown hair, a shade or two darker than his beard, and medium brown eyes she thought soulful and commanding. He had a fine singing voice. His roommates called him the Lounge Lizard because of his habit of singing show tunes in the tub. He was her first lover: she found everything about him extraordinary.

But when she came home, Yirina was a cold shower. Yirina did not think much of Mark, although she did not dislike him. She simply
viewed him as a puppy, with friendly contempt. “He’s just a boy,” she said to Judith. “You have twice his brains. Don’t tie yourself down. He’ll do as a boyfriend, but anything more? He’s a pastime. You’ll forget him.”

Sandy had long gone, marrying a woman whose house he had painted, a woman with a steady income and two children. Yirina played out a five-year affair with Dr. Silver’s lawyer, but that too was over. She was working in a dry cleaner’s, which gave her terrible headaches, but what choice of jobs did she have? She had finally begun to look her age, whatever that was. “I’m tired is all, darling. I’m so tired.” They lived in the same apartment. The neighborhood was eighty percent Black now, a lot of Haitians. All summer police helicopters hung over the rooftops, setting their nerves on edge. There was a drug scene on the corner, but Yirina had always got on with her Black neighbors. Many people knew her from the cleaners, owned by a Haitian couple. Yirina’s legs kept swelling. “It’s from standing so much,” she said. “My feet could explode!”

Yirina was nostalgic these days. She did not have many mementos or photographs from her previous lives, but what she had, she cherished more than ever. Often she took down the leather-bound album with its black pages and showed Judith the two photos she had of her parents, the photo of her brother graduating from the lycée, even a photo of her husband, a handsome Turk. In one photo, Yirina, fresh-faced in a flowered dress, was standing in the curve of his arm holding a baby.

“Who is that?” Judith asked.

Yirina’s face crumpled. “Don’t ask me that.”

She wondered if somewhere in Turkey she had a half brother. Her half sisters were both married with children. They pretended she did not exist, but now they knew. They could not undo her existence or their knowledge of her. For that she was grateful. Neither of them had amounted to anything, as Yirina said. “But you, my daughter, you’ll be a success! Not just a suburban house biddy.”

It was the end of spring vacation and she longed to stay over at Mark’s. At ten she called Yirina. There was no answer. She knew Yirina would not be going out. She was too exhausted after work. Judith was afraid her mother had been mugged. Something was wrong. She must go home. “But you can’t go! You promised!” Mark insisted, pouting.

“I have to see what’s wrong.”

When she finally reached the apartment, the lights were on. She called Yirina, hurrying through the rooms. Her mother’s purse was on the couch. Yirina lay on the bathroom floor, her face twisted, breathing hoarsely. She was unconscious. Judith could not tell if she had hit her head. She knelt over Yirina, wiping her face with a damp cloth and
calling, “Mama! Yirina! Can you hear me?” Judith called an ambulance. It took half an hour to arrive. Ambulance services did not like to go into Black neighborhoods.

Yirina had suffered a massive stroke. In four days, she was dead. Judith hated sleeping in the apartment. She was depressed, lonely, given to weeping half the night. Everything reminded her of her mother, every dish, every chair, the bottles of scent and lotion on Yirina’s vanity. They had never been separated. She wandered their rooms, no longer at home in a place that meant only deprivation.

A month later, over the protests of his parents, Mark and Judith were married. Only his roommates and two of her friends from school attended. They could not find a rabbi who would marry them over his parents’ objections, so they were married at City Hall. Mark did not want to move to Brooklyn. They found an apartment three blocks from where he’d been living, similar in layout, a bedroom, a bathroom, a big kitchen and a tiny room overlooking the street that became Mark’s study. She studied in the kitchen. She brought her desk from Brooklyn, along with the things of Yirina’s that were precious to her: a teapot with marvelous curlicue blue and white designs on it, the Mexican vases, some pieces of jewelry (the diamond necklace was long since permanently pawned), some fine Czech glassware. Within a month those were broken. She could not keep Mark from using the goblets for beer and then leaving them in the sink, where other dishes inevitably ended up on top of them. She started out keeping house with zeal, studying recipes, scrubbing the floor, making curtains.

That Friday she roasted a chicken with carrots and potatoes. Mark did not come home when she expected him. An hour later she gave up. Weeping quietly, she lit the Shabbat candles and sat down to supper. When he came in at nine, she was furious.

“Well, who asked you to make a stupid fancy supper? I had a hamburger at the Cedars with guys from my class. Jeez, what is this stuff? We aren’t living in Fairlawn. What’s got into you? Who needs all this bourgeois fussing?”

She did not do well on her midterms. That frightened her. She stopped cleaning daily and then stopped cleaning weekly. The dirty clothes piled up and the dirty dishes began to swarm with roaches. She studied at the library. Now that she wasn’t trying to keep house, she had time. Mark expected her to be there when he got home, and he expected to have sex with her. Weekends they went to movies, danced in a bar, bicycled in Central Park. They went to a lecture on the constitutional implications of Watergate; she went alone to hear Gloria Steinem. She worked for her professor whenever he wanted her to type papers.
Their lives went on as before they were married, except that they fought more. She got her grades back up by finals and finished well. She admitted to herself she was bitterly lonely without Yirina, and that Mark did not make an adequate replacement for her mother. He was a kid, as Yirina had warned her. She did not feel married. He was not her image of a husband. She had never had a father, but she had many fantasies. They were not fulfilled by an adolescent whose idea of a great evening was watching a Knicks game in a bar while eating potato chips or nachos and drinking beer.

They both got summer jobs in New York and went on living in their dirty apartment. In the fall, they were seniors with a full load of classes. They ate most meals in the school cafeteria or in hangouts around the Village. She could not remember why she had married Mark; she was sure he had no clue why he had married her. She felt ashamed. When she met some women who were meeting for consciousness-raising, she joined them every Wednesday night. It was a month before she confessed she was married. She felt it was a fake marriage, a failed improvisation, each of them playing in different stories. His parents finally had them to dinner, but it was painful. Mark disappeared with his brother after supper. She was left to make conversation.

She had never told Mark about her family; she had given him the official story, and by the time they were married, it was too late to tell him the truth. She felt her face turning to brittle lacquer as she answered his mother’s questions about her dead father. It was hard to explain why her father had not left her mother better off, considering he was a doctor; she invented an unscrupulous uncle who had obliterated their inheritance in bad investments. Whatever she said sounded hollow to her, and relieved none of their anxieties. She could not cough up a normal family for them. She sat on the beige sofa balancing a cup and a china plate with a slice of cherry cheesecake on it and lied and lied. Finally, unable to eat and half nauseous, she dropped the cheesecake into her lap.