The Book Borrower (35 page)

We sat for two days on a cold marble bench staring at a marble wall, memorizing the pattern of streaks in the marble. Sometimes I thought that they had meaning, like handwriting, and if I could only decipher them, the verdict would go our way. Yet when the gentle clerk came to tell us that we had to return to the courtroom because the jury had reached a decision, I wanted to sit there for the rest of my life.

Jessie came in, walking stalwartly with her legs slightly spread, like an older woman, and sat at the table with her lawyer. She lowered her head and raised it. Then she turned and looked right at me. I stared at her and we were alone. I felt that if I could look steadily enough at her I could give her what she needed: safety, forgiveness, justice, whatever it was.

The foreman of the jury announced a finding. Jessie was not guilty. The courtroom was astonished—and looking back, I, too, am astonished. Anarchists were never acquitted. Maybe it happened because of Jessie's youth, or the spell of her power, which was oddly charming. More likely, I sup-pose, those sober businessmen really did listen to Mr. Arthur. The courtroom filled with murmurs of disappointment but louder ones of jubilation. I had assumed nobody was on our side, but maybe that wasn't true. Jessie was allowed to go free. She walked through the crowd, which separated quickly for her. She walked up to my mother, took her in her arms, and held her stiffly. My father had been walking toward Jessie. He suddenly sat down on the floor and began to sob. I sat down with him. I don't know how long we stayed there. When we got up, the courtroom was empty.

Jessie came home with us, and for a brief time, once more, I could hear someone else's breathing as I was falling asleep. Her landlady had rented her room to someone else; when I accompanied Jessie to pick up her belongings, the landlady expected us to be surprised and grateful that she hadn't thrown them into the street, but had bundled them into her cellar. We walked home together with bags of clothes and books and piles of drawings—Jessie did draw. Before Sarah's death, we'd have been merry about it—the stupid landlady, the clumsy parcels. Now we didn't speak. At times, though, Jessie did talk to me. I didn't ask her whether she knew what caused the wreck, or if she'd caused it herself, and she didn't bring up the subject. She'd lost her job, and seemed afraid to look for another one, and that was probably sensible. I lost mine, too, but not for a while; Miss Fredericks must have made up her mind to get rid of me the day she had to wash my face, but she didn't let me go until spring, maybe out of compassion and maybe because her mother was sick and I was needed in the store.

Jessie stayed home, reading. She didn't go to meetings, and I thought she'd become disenchanted with radical politics. She had little to say to me or our parents, and acted annoyed with us most of the time, while we in turn acted annoyed or downright angry with her and one another, but after a while her old friend and lover Maurice began to stop at the house. He'd come before dinner and stand in the middle of the living room, speaking slowly and evenly, while Jessie sat before him, and I'd tell my mother we had no choice but to set an-other place for him and make the food stretch. He was a comfort, someone with humor, someone who cared for Jessie and also respected us. He patted his mustache daintily at the table and I thought he was civilization incarnate, introduced into a roomful of brutes who might as well have eaten on the floor, tearing their meat with their teeth.

He talked about the Boston Red Sox, who had sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees but were still his favorite team, and about radio. Baseball games were going to be broadcast on the radio! My father stared at him. After dinner Maurice and Jessie would go out for a walk, even in the snow. For months it was the only time she went out. My mother wanted to know if Maurice was going to marry Jessie, and whether he was Jewish, and I didn't try to explain that anarchists often didn't believe in marriage but lived together without benefit of state-sanctioned ceremony. Then I lost my job. I wanted to move to Boston or New York and forget my family. My mother was hysterical at the mere suggestion, but at last, after a few weeks of unemployment during which I became even more difficult than usual, she shouted one evening, “Go, go!” I knew she didn't mean it, but I went.

I remained loyal. I found a job as a secretary in Boston, eventually moved to New York, took courses at night, and at length received my degree in classics, but I was always hurrying home, spending every holiday with my parents. By the time I had my B.A. the Depression had begun; eventually I secured a WPA teaching job, and spent most of my working life as a Latin teacher at a high school in The Bronx. I had lovers, I married, I divorced. When my father died I brought my mother to live with me, and I put up with her unwillingly, living a private life elsewhere, from that time until a few months ago, when she finally died.

When I visited my parents in the weeks just after I moved out of Boynton, my mother waved her hands in the air and incoherently expressed terror. Jessie was spending more and more time away from home, sometimes overnight. Often I didn't see her; when I did, she passed through the room and out again. She was vigorous and active but seemed as alien as a lodger about whom we knew nothing but the cut of her coat. When I seized her and questioned her, she said, “I'm working.” I think she was earning some money copying or transcribing for one of the old anarchist writers, one of the few who had a little money. Then she was arrested. She'd participated in a demonstration in support of a strike of garment workers at a Boynton factory, and for no reason other than a refusal to leave the premises, she was arrested for dis-orderly conduct and inciting to riot. This time she was found guilty, and spent a year and a half in jail. For my parents, in some ways this event was worse than what had happened be-fore. They understood it and felt ordinary emotions like shame. They were angry with Jessie for causing them more grief, although the charge was so flimsy and the case so obviously rigged that it seems clear the police were simply waiting for her to show her face. I suppose the District Attorney was furious that he couldn't convict her before. This time, when Jessie was released she had little to do with my parents. She left town and we weren't in touch with her for a while. Next we heard that she was married and living in New York. She'd married an artist who'd been her customer when she was working in a cheap lunchroom. Soon she was sharing his studio, taking lessons from his friends, and eventually she went to art school. They lived in Europe; the next we heard, they were divorced. At times I'd see Jessie's name in the newspaper. She was the chairwoman of a committee of artists raising money for the Lincoln Brigade at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Maybe by then she had her new name— her second husband's name, which she kept even when she divorced him and married a third.

I wasn't upset or ashamed, or not very, when Jessie was in jail, and I wasn't curious about her husbands. With Sarah dead and Jessie acquitted, I haven't cared much about any-thing else for the rest of my life. Jessie did care. She never stopped caring. I suppose, even now, she thinks about Sarah more than I do. I feel nothing but bitterness about Sarah, too— most of the time: my strongest emotion when I think of Sarah is still irritation that she couldn't see that it made sense to stay home that Sunday. She wasn't sensible.

We never exactly lost touch with Jessie. I wrote to her when Papa died, and now and then in between, and again when Mama died. I would have addresses but usually not phone numbers. Both times, though, Jessie called me. “Miriam, when is the funeral?”

“We had it already. Why didn't you call sooner?” Identical conversations, twenty years apart.

“I was away. Are you still being good, Miriam?”

“I was never good.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Let's get together,” I said both times.

“I'll be in touch.”

Nobody as angry as I am is good. Once I visited Jessie in New York, in a small place in the Village where she was living with a lover. She might have been married to someone else at the time. I remember thinking that I could have been shocked, but wasn't, so something shocking must have been going on. Jessie tidied things quickly when I came in. Maybe her lover's underwear was on the bed. The place, just a room, smelled of sex. We talked platitudes, and then she said, “Aren't you ever going to ask me if I did it?”

“Did what?”

“Changed the signals. Killed Sarah.”

“No, I'm not.”

“What do you want to say to me, Miriam?” she asked me. She was beginning to look middle-aged, like a woman who had had children, though she never did.

It turned out that I knew what I wanted to say. “Jessie, do you think, do you really think it's all right to break things, destroy things, maybe hurt people, to bring about a good cause?”

“I'm not a pacifist, Miriam.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“In a war, do you think everyone who dies is bad and guilty?”

“Of course not.”

“So there's your answer.”

Because I am so full of destruction I can barely control, I cannot endure to think of deliberate destruction. I haven't seen my sister in decades. Maybe I never will again. Yet I know I'm writing this account with only one reader in mind. I've almost forgotten Sarah, but I never spend a day without thinking of Jessie and wishing her well or ill, mostly ill. I've gone to her shows—she became a successful sculptor—and I read her reviews. It's painful for me, whether the critics like her work or not. I like her work, which moves and scares me. Huge, greenish stony shapes like big stalagmites, in the last show I saw. I went to the ladies' room and pressed my face against the wall of a booth and wept while the toilet flushed. And to my surprise, I felt joyful. Somehow I know that my sister cares constantly about everything, even though she has behaved like someone who cares about nothing but ideas, or people in the aggregate.

I write these words in a smoke-filled New York apartment, nicer than I could afford without rent control, untidy in a good way. I'm still full of relief that my mother is dead and I can be alone. If and when this book is published, maybe I'll send Jessie a copy. Maybe she'll call me. Maybe this time we'll go for a walk through New York streets together. For some reason I picture us walking downtown, near Wall Street, on one of those narrow streets that haven't changed much since the time decades ago when we did walk together elsewhere. It's a summer evening, hot. Twilight comes slowly. My living sister and I, in rumpled skirts and blouses, walk, smoking, down to Battery Park and watch the Staten Island ferry come in and depart again. The water is beautiful, dirty, and garbagy, like a Turner harbor. I put my arm on my sister's arm and we walk miles, all the way back to Little Italy, where we eat spaghetti and meatballs in a hot little place where the red wine is cheap and bitter.

Call me, Jessie. I think you killed Sarah. I forgive you at last. Call me.

 

 

Rain fell in the night, and Toby Ruben dreamed that she couldn't find Mary Grace, then discovered her asleep in a wide blue-covered bed behind an oak door, in a room with rain-mottled windows, a room in her own house she hadn't known about. She woke in the dark full of hurry, then heard her guest walk to the bathroom, then walk back to Peter's room.

—Deborah, I read that book.

—What book?

The book she had been afraid to read as a young woman now lay on her bedside table with its antique bookmark, the scrap of old newspaper, next to it. A book one has read is different from a book one has not read.

—Here's a book of yours.

—What book? I don't remember lending you a book.

—Please take it back. I'm done with it.

—I can't. I'm dead. You'll have to give it to Jeremiah.

In the morning Ruben was alone. Harry had hurried away early to a meeting about money, arguing out loud as he dressed; she woke to his voice. She listened, but he finished the argument—won it, surely—downstairs. Few leaves remained on the maple outside her window, and rain pressed detached yellow leaves against the screen. Sorrow can be encompassed, somehow; Miriam Lipkin had written her book, Toby Ruben had read it. At the store, that day, yellow ceramic pepper pots and salt shakers gleamed from shelves while customers scrambled among the wares finding wonders and making reasonably funny jokes about them. When Ruben left the house, Mary Grace had been asleep; in the afternoon she phoned the store, her voice crabby, to ask where Granny's leash was, and if it was all right to take him out. Isn't it raining? Ruben said.