The Imposter Bride (15 page)

I should have eaten it, Carrie told me later. I should have stuffed it in my mouth and swallowed it, as we had seen done in countless movies and as she would have done, she assured
me. But I had neither Carrie’s presence of mind nor her flair for the dramatic, so I opened the note as ordered and read it aloud.

“‘He’s the one who should be ashamed. He’s a murderer,’” I read, and as I did, the blood drained from Mr. C’s face in precisely the manner described by Rav Nachman bar Isaac in the passage Carrie had referred to: “You say well because I have seen it [the shaming], the ruddiness departing and paleness supervening.”

Mr. C didn’t speak, couldn’t speak, it seemed. His face was grey and still as stone. The class was quiet too, so quiet that I heard the hand of the clock on the wall behind me advance a minute in its hourly cycle. We were all suspended in the same moment, the same horrible silence until finally, after some time, Mr. C told us to take out our readers and read to ourselves, which we did, or pretended to. I tried to keep my eyes on the meaningless letters and words that swam in front of me, but after a while I had to look up, to see him. He was looking away from us, out the window, but I could see enough of his face to know that the blood that had drained from it had not returned. It was a cadaver’s face I was looking at, or could have been if not for the lone muscle working in his jaw, clenching and unclenching in a rapid, repetitive motion.

He was not at school the next day, or the rest of that week, and the word was that he had had a breakdown, one caused—obviously—by me and Carrie. Though he had never been a popular teacher, the sympathy was all with him, even after Carrie explained herself repeatedly and eloquently. If our principal or any of the teachers were aware of what had happened, they didn’t intervene. I think they probably didn’t know, because as quick as our classmates were to blame me
and Carrie, they felt ashamed of themselves as well, implicated in the unspeakable act that they had witnessed. That one of us—safe, spoiled and pampered in every way—could accuse one of
them
of murder, and Mr. C, no less, who was the embodiment of the walking wounded, was so inexcusable that it tainted anyone who had heard the words that Carrie had written and that I had given voice.

He did return to school the following week and to my great relief he looked no different than before: the same hard compactness inside the same grey suit, which fell in the same folds over the same oversized black shoes. He removed his hat—the same grey homburg—as he always did upon entering the classroom and ran his hand across the crown of his head, as was his habit, to make sure his black
kipah
was where it should be before placing his hat on his desk.

“Good morning, children,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Czernowitz,” we answered in unison, because it was we who were different, or thought we were, changed by our shame about what we had done, and by our hope that our repentance—in the form of unwavering courtesy towards him from that moment on—might suffice, if not redeem us.

Mr. C began the class by having us read aloud, each of us in turn, from a text we were learning. We read as we always did, some of us fluently, some of us not, Mr. C interjecting corrections as necessary, and interrupting now and then with questions that the smart and more diligent among us fought to answer by waving their hands in the air, some going so far as to grunt while they waved in hopes of attracting Mr. C’s attention, and the stupider and less studious among us looking down to avoid Mr. C’s eyes, which had regained the sharp, almost beady focus that the blow—mine and Carrie’s—had
knocked out of them the week before. Mistakes were made, corrected. Mr. C did not explode.

We began to relax, to imagine that no harm had been done—no further, permanent harm, that is—and then Marc delivered the correct answer to a question Mr. C had posed. It was not a brilliant answer. It was not even a particularly interesting answer. But it was correct, entirely adequate—this from a student who had been caught once with
Playboy
slipped inside the tractate of the Talmud he was poring over with such fervour—and in the shocked silence that followed, Mr. C began to cry.

This time he did not turn away from us. He stood at the front of the class, facing us, with tears running down his cheeks. He was not sobbing, was completely still, in fact, so still that I was not certain at first that what I was witnessing was actually crying, an activity I associated with at least some facial movement, some exhibit of bodily will. His arms were at his sides, his palms out, facing us, his face tilted slightly upward. He seemed almost to be listening or waiting for something, and I might even have called his expression hopeful had it not been for the tears. And then it passed. We saw it pass, a tremor of self-consciousness like the shadow of a cloud moving rapidly across his face, and then a quick, furtive flurry of activity—a white handkerchief wiping, drying his cheeks. He blew his nose, one loud honk, as if he had just come in from the cold, then he called on the next student to read.

And so it continued. There was no pattern to the crying, no way of knowing what might set him off. It would be a stretch to say we got used to it, but over time we felt less afraid, were no longer frozen as we had been when it began. It became almost normal to us—normal for Mr. C, that is.

The crying had started in November and while it seemed at the time to go on forever, it was, in fact, over—finished—within a few weeks. We arrived at school one morning just before the winter break, and it was our principal, Rabbi Loffer, not Mr. C, who walked into our classroom. Mr. Czernowitz was ill, Rabbi Loffer informed us, and wouldn’t be returning to our school. Ever, we understood. A new teacher had been found and would be starting later that day, a teacher who had just arrived in Montreal from Israel. Rabbi Loffer smiled at us then and said he knew we could be trusted to behave in a responsible and respectful manner—which, of course, we and Mr. C knew we could not.

Was it his damage, then, that had driven him from our classroom, or something about us? Or some terrible combination of the two? That’s what I wondered long after the rest of my classmates seemed to have forgotten about him. Certainly no one ever mentioned him again, though Carrie did tell me once, about a year later, that he had gotten a job at the kosher bakery over on Victoria, that her mother had seen him at the back of the store where the baking was done, pushing a tray of loaves into the oven. “It’s a much better job for him,” Carrie concluded, and that seemed to be the end of the matter for her.

For me, though, it lived on, raising new, different questions about my mother. Not just what it was within her that made her unable to stay, but whether there might have been something about my family, about her new community in Montreal, some terrible interaction between her and them, between her and us—like the reaction I saw once when I mistakenly added water to the sulphuric acid in my chemistry set—that might have driven her away.

IT WASN’T LONG AFTER
that Carrie let slip to our friend Mira that my mother sent me rocks in the mail. It was a slip that wasn’t technically a betrayal, because there was nothing about my mother that was supposed to be cause for secrecy, but I felt it as one, and as the word quickly spread and some of the girls in our group agreed that my mother was obviously off her rocker, I felt a deep sense of shame.

On one level our friends’ response was simply a pun that was too easy and obvious to resist, their taunts no more mean-spirited than any of the arrows that regularly flew across the classroom and schoolyard, but I couldn’t brush it off because it was clear to me by then that my mother wasn’t right. And me, by extension. I knew I also wasn’t right. Because of the rocks, yes. That was obviously strange behaviour. Both the fact that she sent them and my response to them. I knew that by then, knew enough to hide how special each one felt, each one a secret, unique communication between my mother and me. I knew enough also to hide the anxiety I felt when too long went by without a new one arriving, an anxiety that was nagging at me that year because I hadn’t received one for two years.

Deeper than that, though, was that she had left me in the first place. That’s what moved her—and me—into a territory set apart from that of other parents and children I knew, because no woman I had ever heard of had left her baby, and especially no woman who had already lost her entire family in Europe. That should have made her even more desperate to start a new family, like my friends’ parents were. Mira’s, Helen’s, Lena’s. The peculiar behaviours, habits and moods
that those friends’ parents exhibited did not interfere with their love for their children. If anything, most of them hung on too tightly, watched their children too closely, like Mira’s father, staring at her late at night. None of them walked away.

I didn’t tell Elka or anyone in my family what had happened at school. The shame I felt in the face of the initial taunts persisted long after my friends had moved on to other targets. It swelled like a noxious gas within me, leaving little room for other feelings, smothering any confidence I had once possessed. One evening at dinner Jeffrey teased me about a pimple on my face. I told him he looked like a pug, and he then retorted that I had a face only a mother could love. It was a line that we had both heard on
The Honeymooners
a few nights earlier, but when he said it I ran from the table in tears, slamming the door to my room behind me.

A few minutes later Elka knocked and asked if she could come in. I didn’t answer, buried my face in my pillow, but she came in anyway and sat on the edge of my bed, her hand on my back.

“Is there anything going on at school?” she asked me.

“No,” I muttered into the pillow.

“Nothing you want to talk to me about?”

I shook my head no again.

She waited a few minutes, then she said that thirteen was a hard age, that she too had had a hard time when she was thirteen.

My misery had nothing to do with being thirteen. All my friends were thirteen and none of them were miserable.

“I know your father’s been busy with Naomi recently.”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s perfectly natural to feel a little bit uncomfortable when your father—”

“I couldn’t care less about my father and Naomi.”

Naomi was pretty and had been spending a lot of time at our house in recent weeks, but the thought that I might be jealous of her relationship with my father was ridiculous. She had given my father the soundtrack to
Exodus
for his birthday because she thought a lot of the music he listened to had no tunes, and before we ate the chicken cacciatore or salmon à la king that she had cooked we had to go around the table, each of us talking about one nice thing that had happened to us that day. Nothing much was going to happen between my father and Naomi.

“I also only had one parent,” Elka said, trying a different tack.

That was true, I knew, but her situation, while difficult and shameful in its own way, hadn’t been as abnormal or unheard of as mine.

“You always feel like you’re different from everyone else.”

It wasn’t a feeling, my difference. It was a fact. There was no one else whose mother had lost all her family in the war only to walk out on the infant daughter who should have been the most precious thing in the world to her.

“You feel like there could be something wrong with you,” Elka went on, recalling her own experience at thirteen.

I didn’t answer, didn’t dare to pull the stopper on the torrent within me.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, I can promise you that.”

It was my mother that there was something wrong with. That’s what I understood Elka to be saying. And while I knew that, of course—there would have to be something really wrong with me if I
didn’t
know that by then—I felt a surge of protectiveness towards my mother in the face of what sounded like yet another insinuation about her failure to be a normal person.

“Not everything in life is somebody’s fault,” Elka said, as if sensing my thoughts.

When I still didn’t answer, didn’t even let on that I had heard her, she began to get irritated. Her hand on my back was no longer resting there in a comforting way, but beginning to move about, restless, tapping impatiently. And sure enough, no sooner had I registered the change in her hand than she said that moping never helped anyone and it was time for me to get up and help her with the dishes.

Though Elka acted like there was nothing left to discuss, I suspect she may have talked about it to other members of the family, because at the Seder a few weeks later my aunt Nina took my hand, studied my palm with an expression of great seriousness and then whispered in my ear, as Sol was droning on about the ten plagues, that I would be blessed with deep and long-lasting love in this life, that it was etched on my palm by God himself or by one of his angels, and was therefore the truth, irrevocable and final, as only God’s truth can be.

I knew that Nina was probably only saying that because Elka had talked to her about my recent moodiness (that was the catch-all word to describe my sudden plunge into misery) and that the future couldn’t actually be read from a person’s palm, and that Nina was in fact an atheist who wouldn’t recognize God’s truth if it slapped her in the face, but I still felt a surge of hope.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, flushing with something other than mortification for the first time in weeks.

“Well, I do,” Nina said.

I wanted to believe her, but already I remembered that Carrie had recently started going over to Mira’s house most afternoons, leaving me to take the long bus ride across town
with only Jeffrey for company, and that the two of them, Carrie and Mira, had gone bowling the previous weekend and not invited me along. And then there was my ongoing anxiety about how long it had been since the last rock had arrived from my mother, a non-event that felt more like active rejection with every day that passed.

“What?” Nina asked, seemingly reading my face as she had just read my palm, and with such sympathy in her own face and voice that without thinking, I blurted out my thoughts.