The Imposter Bride (12 page)

She did come for Jeffrey’s birthday though, which was in late June, stopping at our house first to see my scrapbook. Another rock had arrived from my mother just the previous week. That brought the total to four. This one was black with swirls of green that Ida Pearl thought might be olivine. My mother had found it on the west bank of the Fraser River, near Boston Bar, British Columbia, which was farther yet from Montreal. The wrapping paper was blue. “Exactly like your eyes!” Nina said, and it was true that the colour was a sort of greyish blue very much like my eyes. Which meant it was also like my mother’s eyes, if what Ida Pearl had told me about my eyes being like hers was true. The stamp had a picture of the explorer David Thompson standing beside a map of western Canada.

Nina admired the scrapbook and told me it had given her an idea for my birthday present, which she still hadn’t gotten me.
“What kind of aunt am I anyway, forgetting to get my favourite niece a present for her birthday?” she asked. (I was her only niece.) I showed her the birthday present my father had given me: a chemistry set. “Our own little Madame Curie!” she said.

Nina brought her present over the following week: a map of Canada attached to a bulletin board, with different coloured pins that I could stick into the places where my rocks came from. Which were, of course, the places I knew for certain my mother had been.

I knew when my father was happy and when he wasn’t, and as I unwrapped my present from Nina and she explained what it was for, he definitely wasn’t happy. That didn’t stop him from helping me and Nina stick it up on the wall in my bedroom, but after, when I told them I wanted to find the places on the map by myself and they left my room and walked down the hall, I heard him ask her if she really felt she should be encouraging me.

Encouraging me in what? I wondered. What was wrong with encouraging me? Wasn’t “encouragement” a good word? But they were far enough away that I didn’t hear Nina’s answer.

CHAPTER 7

Who are you? he asked
.

I had been walking for days. My skin was caked with dust, my hair a mat of grime, but it was not the black soil of the fields that clung to me, or the red clay of the riverbed or the yellow sand of the paths and roads I had walked. It was the grey dust of ruin, of homes destroyed, of entire towns pummelled to a fine dead powder. I carried it with me. I felt its weight with every step
.

I’m a walking graveyard, I told him. The dead are buried in my skin. Look at my face. You’ll find your father in its pores. Your mother rests in the creases at the corners of my mouth
.

He wet his shirttail with the spit from his mouth and cleared a swath of skin
.

Don’t, I said. You’ll disturb them
.

My cheek, a clearing now in the dust. He licked the flesh of his thumb and drew it along
my brows, uncovered the sloping curves of my face. I felt the groove above my lip exposed by his touch, the tender skin beneath my eyes, the mole on the corner of my mouth that my grandmother promised would one day cast a spell of love on a man. Hours passed. Days, I think. His eyes were black but they reflected light. My face emerged, revealed itself to him
.

There was no truth in this notebook, Lily thought as she snapped it shut. It was just the fantasies and dreams of a desperate, heartbroken girl, a girl who was perched on the edge of her death at the very moment that her life should have been opening before her. It was sad to read, but it wasn’t truth.

IDA PEARL
had just flipped the sign on the door of her shop from
PLEASE CALL AGAIN
to
RING TO GAIN ENTRANCE
when the buzzer rang. It was 10 a.m. on a warm September day. She hadn’t expected a customer so early, hadn’t expected a customer all day, in fact. It was the Friday before Labour Day; people were savouring the last fleeting bit of summer, thinking no further than the three days of leisure ahead. No one was going to buy a ring that day. Ida had opened her shop resigned to filling the hours with bookkeeping, inventory and the inevitable arguments with Elka. The girl had not heard back from Sol since their first date—a month ago now—and had decided, it seemed, that it was the fault of her mother, her mother who had ruined, once and forever, any possibility that she, Elka May Krakauer, might someday know happiness and the love of a man.

“I hope you don’t expect me to hang around here all day,” Elka had just spat, which, of course, Ida hadn’t.

She had hoped, rather, that Elka might find some way to amuse herself on this, one of the last remaining days before school started up again, that she might go for a walk with a friend, have a picnic on the mountain … do something, anything other than sit in the shadows of the shop with her nose in a book and a scowl on her face, waiting for the phone to ring.

“Do you want to get the door?” Ida asked when the buzzer rang.

“No,” Elka said, though she did then rouse herself from the chair by the back wall where she had set up her camp for the day. She slid the keys off the hook under the counter and ambled over to the door, at which point her demeanour changed entirely.

“Oh! Hello!”

Ida heard the change in Elka—the current charging through her, straightening her back and animating her voice—and her stomach sank. The mediocrity, Ida thought.

But the voice that answered Elka’s wasn’t Sol’s. “May I enter?” A woman’s voice.

“Oh! Of course! I’m sorry!” Elka jumped aside, freeing the entrance she had been blocking.

Ah, Ida thought, as she saw who it was. She rose from her desk to stand behind the counter.

“Mrs. Krakauer?” If Lily had noticed Ida’s presence at her wedding, she didn’t let on.

“Yes. Come in. Please.”

“Thank you.” Lily closed the door behind her and approached the counter. “Lily Kramer,” she said.

“Yes,” Ida said. She would not pretend she didn’t know who was standing before her in her own store. “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you. And you?” She was speaking in Yiddish.

“Very well.” Ida answered, also in Yiddish. “Thank you.”

And now Ida waited. She did not jump in with small talk to ease the way, did not ask how she might be of assistance, did not even allow herself to consider the range of possible reasons that might have impelled the woman to come to her. She waited, observing the fine bones of the face before her, the fine cut of the dress, the same grey dress—though Ida couldn’t know this—that Lily had been wearing when Sol rejected her at the station.

Wool, Elka thought. In this heat. A light wool, true, but still … And yet, if Lily was warm or uncomfortable in any way, she gave no sign, not a drop of excess moisture on the surface of her skin, not a hint of heightened colour in her cheek. She showed nothing, Elka thought, but a smooth countenance of untroubled elegance.

“Is it getting hot out there?” Elka asked.

“Not unduly,” Lily answered, a response that insulted Elka, who felt her attempt at conversation snubbed, and impressed Ida, who mistrusted histrionics of any sort.

Lily placed her purse on the glass countertop, her gloved hands folded, for the moment, on top of the clasp.

Kid gloves! Elka thought. That must have set her husband back a bundle. Her own naked hands looked childish in comparison, and her dress—a lively cotton print—flimsy and inappropriate to the season, which was early fall, after all, even if the weather did not yet reflect the change in the calendar. No
wonder he hasn’t called me, she thought with new despair, her prospects for future happiness sinking ever lower.

Lily unlatched the clasp of her purse and reached two long, gloved fingers into the dark mouth that opened.

Ida felt the hammering of her heart, the slowing of time as she waited for what might emerge.

A velvet bag, Elka imagined. Black velvet, as befitting the glamour of the fingers reaching for it. Black velvet and tied with scarlet string. Never mind string: satin. Scarlet satin, a long narrow strip of it, and tied in an elegant loop. So caught up was Elka with the packaging she expected that she didn’t recognize what was actually between Lily’s fingers when they did re-emerge from the purse. And how could she have been expected to recognize the small grey crystal that her mother had been wondering about ever since receiving her sister Sonya’s letter? Elka had never seen a rough diamond before. Nor did she know the contents of her aunt Sonya’s most recent letter.

“I have reason to believe this might be …”

Ida waited, looked at the woman who had the gall to come into her store with her stolen diamond as she had gone to her sister Sonya’s with her stolen name. But Ida was stronger than Sonya. Surer. She would outplay this woman at her perverted game.

… yours
, Lily had thought she might say. That’s what she had imagined on the way over. But would she have, really? she would wonder later. Even had the woman not been looking at her like that, so coldly, as if there could be no good in her. Would she really have put her fate in this woman’s hands?

“… a diamond,” she said.

Ida placed a small square of paper on the countertop.

“Please,” she said, gesturing towards it.

Lily placed the stone on the paper.

Ida picked it up first with her fingers, rolled it between them, placed it on the back of her hand, examined it with her naked eye, then put it back down on the square of paper. Next she reached for the loupe that always hung from a chain around her neck and brought it to her eye, picked the stone up with her tongs and brought it to the loupe for a closer look. She put it down again, removed the loupe from her eye.

“It’s a diamond,” she said.

Lily nodded, swallowed audibly, the first and only indication that she might be nervous.

“As for its value …” Ida looked again at the stranger in front of her, who met her eyes, waiting, it seemed to her, but for what? For Ida to sink into a faint as her sister had? “Value is not a simple matter to determine.”

Lily nodded again.

“The size is good. The weight. But the surface is cloudy, as you can see for yourself, so we don’t know what’s inside. It’s possible that once a window is cleared—to take a look inside, you understand?—that the inclusions found there, the flaws, will require a cutting that sacrifices much of the weight. Even the surface is flawed. Look at this …” She passed a loupe to Lily as she would to any customer, picked up the stone again and pointed with her tweezers to a tiny rust-stained crack. “Iron oxide,” she explained. “It’s been forced into the crack by the movement of the earth or water. On the surface such a flaw presents no problem, of course. A surface flaw is polished away, but interior flaws, if the interior is riddled with—”

“The Pohl was riddled with flaws,” Lily said. As any customer might.

“The Pohl.” Ida laughed. “Oh my. Now you begin to remind me of my neighbour Mrs. Kaplan. Her son Hyman was expelled from school last spring for bad behaviour. Terrible behaviour, from what I’ve heard. Well, it seems that Einstein too was once expelled from school, also for bad behaviour, so Mrs. Kaplan reasons that if Einstein was expelled for bad behaviour and Hyman shares the same flaw it must mean that her Hyman is another Einstein in the making.”

Lily received this comparison with a cold stare. “My reasoning couldn’t be more unlike your neighbour’s.”

“And your diamond couldn’t be more unlike the Pohl.”

It must be an extremely valuable stone, Elka thought. She had never seen her mother feign quite such a level of indifference. If indifference was what she was feigning.

“The quality of the stone is … potentially … good.
Potentially
, you understand.”

Lily nodded.

“But if it’s value that interests you, that will depend first on whether you can find a buyer who doesn’t care about … the circumstances in which it was acquired.” At this she brought her eyes again to Lily’s. “There’s no value if there’s no buyer, after all. And then, if you do find a buyer, and that’s a big if, Mrs. Kramer … people do care about the provenance of the goods that pass through their hands.”

They do? Elka wondered.

“I apologize,” Lily said. “I had heard, had been led to understand …”

Elka remembered how she had gone on to Sol about her mother’s skill and former fame. Had he talked about that to Lily, then? Was it Sol who had led her to understand that Ida was the person to whom she could bring a diamond to cut?

“I see,” Ida said. “You want me to cut this stone, which may well be stolen …” But now Ida hesitated. She had arrived at last, at the moment to confront the woman, to demand that she explain who she was and how she came to possess the name, the memories and the diamond that she was claiming as her own; but her instinct told her no, not now. There was strength to the woman standing before her, she thought, but it was a hard, brittle strength. It would not yield to direct confrontation, would shatter before it would yield. It needed softening.

And besides which, Ida suddenly felt afraid, though of what, exactly, she couldn’t say.

“Not that I’m accusing you of theft, you understand, but in the absence of any information whatsoever about how this stone came into your possession …” She waited until it was clear that no further information would be forthcoming. “You’d like me to cut this diamond, which may well not even be yours, so that you can then turn around and sell it, at a good price, a far better price than you can get for it at this stage, given the circumstances.”

And now, without responding, Lily made motions of leaving, reaching for the diamond, enfolding it in the paper on which it lay.

“I’m sorry,” Ida said. “But you must understand, Mrs. Kramer …” Ida knew she had misplayed the encounter, but didn’t know how, to what effect, or how to shift it. “I can’t simply …”

“That’s fine,” Lily said. She picked up the diamond and put it back in her purse. “I do understand,” she said. And with that she snapped shut the clasp of her purse, wished good day to mother and daughter and swept out of the store.

IT WAS NOT STRICTLY ACCURATE
to say that Ida Pearl had been among the most renowned diamond cutters of her entire generation. She had been good, yes, and would no doubt have become even better had she not had the disastrous falling-out with her uncle so early in her career. But she
had
fallen out, and she had not, in the relatively brief period of her active working life, been able to achieve quite the heights that Elka had ascribed to her in her conversation with Sol. Certainly she had never worked with a stone anywhere near the size and calibre of the one that had sat, for a few precious minutes, on her counter. Her dusty counter, she noted in those first stunned moments after Lily left her store.