The Imposter Bride (19 page)

“It’s enough with the diaries,” he told Lily now. “You need to get out more, meet some people. You should think about going to some of my mother’s lectures with her.”

“Your mother doesn’t like me.”

“She finds you standoffish, but if you extend yourself,
just a little, she’ll come around—you’ll see. And it would do you good to get out, meet some new people, hear some new things.” Living people, living things, he meant. “Air your brain out a bit.”

When she had first brought the new journal home, the empty pages had made her think of fields of fresh snow, those white expanses that she had awakened to as a child when they visited the countryside in winter, flat white surfaces bordered by stark lines of brown and black trees, and stretching out on all sides to meet the white of the winter sky. She had run her hands along the clean surfaces of the book’s pages and imagined that words would flow easily onto them, would mark them with the evidence of her continuing life as inevitably as those fields of snow had been marked by her footprints when she crossed them. A page for each day, the filling of it as straightforward as walking across a field—but as she had faced the first page with pen in hand, she had hesitated, hadn’t known how to start. With the details of her daily life? The time she awoke? The dream that woke her? The egg that she had eaten for breakfast? And if so, in what language? The languages of her childhood? The English of all that stretched ahead? The pen hovered over the page but didn’t land.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. The hope she had felt when she bought the book had not returned. The pen, when she held it, was dead in her hand. “Nothing feels real. I can’t explain it. I thought if I wrote it down, my life … the egg I ate for breakfast, for example …”

“You were planning to write in your diary about an egg you ate for breakfast?”

“As a start,” she said.

Was it possible, she wondered, that what she felt now, the
lethargy, the sense of being coated in a thick, viscous substance that separated her from her experience, her life, was an exhaustion and alienation that might pass in time? That the egg, if she wrote it as
ayer
or
jojko
, might, for a moment, regain its richness and bring her the pleasure that she had once enjoyed as a child?

“
Jojko
,” she said quietly, allowing the familiar sounds to roll over her tongue. She waited. Nothing. “That’s ‘egg’ in Polish,” she told Sol.

He nodded, also waited. This wasn’t good, he thought. There was little about this conversation that he felt he had fully understood, except that this wasn’t healthy. This wasn’t good.

“It’s enough with the diaries,” he said quietly. What she needed, he thought, was a baby, a living, crying, laughing baby whose need for her every minute of every day would root her to the real she said she couldn’t feel.

“You really need to try to get out more.”

“Maybe so,” she said, but even as she said the words her mind was absent, travelling back to the notebook, a passage she had read earlier that day:

I’m lost in a city of stone. I’ve entered through a breach in the outer wall. At first I think I’ve come to a place of safety. It’s clean and dry, the stones unsullied by mud or blood or excrement of any kind, and worn to smooth, grey surfaces by the countless feet that have preceded mine. And it’s quiet, so quiet, the din of what I’ve left behind muffled at first by the outer wall, then gone entirely as I penetrate the inner warren of streets. The city is intact, unharmed by the war outside it. It’s Canada, I think, amazed
by the ease with which I’ve gained entry. Canada, I whisper, as my father used to whisper, the name a prayer in his mouth, an incantation that evoked endless prairies in my mind. Canada, I whisper, running my hand along the cold grey surface of stone that bears no resemblance to the dream my father planted in my consciousness
.

It was a dream that could have been her own, Lily thought. It was like reading her own reality filtered through the dream of another. A prescient dream: the girl had foreseen the peace that awaited her if she had lived. The peace I’m now living in her place, Lily thought. A peace that was not the summer courtyards of her childhood, or the endless prairies of her father’s prayers, but the lifeless stone of a city in which she was lost, its featureless surfaces—unsullied, she called them—a colourless cold beneath her hand.

The streets are empty and I imagine at first that the people are inside, at home, gathered around the evening meal, but they’re not. They’re gone. They’ve fled. And I’m alone
.

It was her own life she was reading, Lily thought, written in the hand of another.

I’ve entered an abandoned city, and I’m alone. The quiet is unnatural. There’s no movement, no background hum, no rustling of leaves or lives of any sort. Even my footsteps are silent, the sound of their impact swallowed by the stones against
which they fall. Frightened, I begin to speak, to reassure myself. I state my name, the names of my family, the city in which I was born and raised, but my voice too is silenced, swallowed by the air into which I project it. The quiet in this place is not a mere absence of sound, but an entity, a vacuum that will swallow me whole if I stay. I turn to leave, but there is no leaving. I feel its presence, the silence at the core of the maze. I feel its power as it sucks at my blood like a moon that pulls a tide. It pulls me to itself, its empty heart
.

CHAPTER 10

N
o one questioned why I started going straight home to my father’s after school almost every afternoon. Elka’s boys were noisy and rambunctious and always getting into my things; I had homework to do and couldn’t concentrate with Mitch and Chuck constantly trying to get me to play with them; I needed to spend more and more time on the phone with friends as my social life began to improve, and Elka didn’t like me tying up her line. There were many reasons for me to want to spend the hours between school and dinner somewhere other than at Elka and Sol’s. I don’t think anyone in the family imagined how many of those hours were taken up with me prowling through my father’s home like a cat burglar, combing it for clues about my mother.

I had divided our home into zones. The living room held the two notebooks, one of which was empty, one of which was written in a language I couldn’t understand. I knew the girl’s notebook could be important, but for the moment it was impenetrable. I had once asked my father to read it to me
but his Yiddish wasn’t good enough, and when I asked my grandmother Bella, she said, “What for?” There was nothing in it of interest, they both assured me, and I believed that they thought that, but I wanted to confirm it for myself.

I would sometimes run my fingers over the words I couldn’t understand, as if they might bypass the closed gates of language in my mind to enter me through my skin. I did the same with my mother’s smooth, unmarked pages, and something did enter me. Not the pulsing I had once felt, something else. I felt its weight—the girl’s words, my mother’s silence. It was like an animal curled up inside me, its current running within my own. But that wasn’t anything that would help me track my mother down.

The bathroom and kitchen were devoid of anything related to her. Although she had chosen and used many of our dishes and utensils, our own use of them in the years since she’d left had taken them over completely, buried any traces of her they once might have held.

In my bedroom were the rocks. What they yielded to me—that she hadn’t forgotten me, that she wanted me to know where she was or had recently been, that she was either slightly or severely off her rocker—was no more the sort of information I was looking for than the current I felt from the notebooks.

I still had the scrapbook as well, but that seemed nothing other than pathetic to me by then. It was true I had slipped the wrapping and stamps from the most recent mailing between the scrapbook’s pages (a piece of layered shale from Jasper, Alberta, that had arrived two weeks after my fourteenth birthday), but only because it was the most logical place to store it.

And then there was the map, which I still had hanging
over my desk. “What’s that?” Mira asked the first time she came over. (Stop being so paranoid, Carrie had said when she invited herself and Mira over, as if the rift between us was entirely in my head.)

“A map,” I said.

Carrie busied herself with the orange she was peeling, which was as much of a sign as she’d ever give that she was sorry she had betrayed me once and would not do it again.

“Are those places you’ve been?” Mira asked, referring to the pins sticking out of places like Rainy Lake, Ontario, and the Old Man River in Alberta and Jasper, Alberta.

“Places I want to go,” I answered.

“Neat,” Mira said, and Carrie handed her a segment of orange.

Our house was littered with clues about my mother, but none of them added up to anything. Which is why I crossed the threshold to my father’s bedroom one afternoon. I knew I shouldn’t. My sense of the inviolability of my own and others’ privacy couldn’t have been stronger, even as I opened the drawers of my father’s night table, saw the little candies he kept there for when he got a scratchy throat, his packets of Kleenex, his flashlight, various receipts, some loose change. There were a couple of tie clips and a pair of cufflinks that should properly have been in the tray of his valet, some folded notes to himself, a few of which were grocery lists, others of which were reminders of doctors’ appointments, performances or tests at school that I had told him about. On one scrap of paper he had noted the title of a book that I knew he had recently bought for Sally, a woman he had taken out for dinner several times. (She was nice, but not his type, I could tell right away. Too gushy.) I felt silly and ashamed of what I was doing—it was like pawing through
the inside of a woman’s purse—but that didn’t stop me from moving on to his dresser. What girl of fourteen goes snooping in her father’s underwear? I asked myself as I opened the top drawer. I must be truly sick. I saw a pair of ratty old grey wool socks that should have been thrown out years ago, a few singles that also should have been discarded, and then I noticed the edge of something that was neither sock nor undershirt. A card of some sort. I pulled it from its nest of socks with a mix of thrill and dread.

It was a valentine, and an old one at that. It was definitely old enough to have been sent from my mother to my father or vice versa. And definitely the strangest valentine I’d ever seen. Valentines were supposed to be romantic, but it was impossible to see how this one could have represented romance to anyone, ever. The sender was
looking for a Valentine / but none of those Jazz gluttons
, which was odd in itself because my father loved Bill Evans and Duke Ellington and Oscar Peterson and other jazz musicians. Just that week he’d brought home a new recording by John Coltrane. The next two lines were even odder:
I want a handy little miss / who can sew on a few buttons
. A message that was not only corny but insulting, it seemed to me, as if the sender (my father?) seemed to be looking more for a charwoman than a sweetheart. There were even two red buttons attached to the card in case the sweetheart in question (my mother?) felt a sudden urge to start sewing right then and there.

The card had been torn to pieces and then reassembled and taped together again. The tape holding it together was yellow with age, but the two buttons at the bottom were still bright red. There was no mystery to me about why my mother would have torn it up. Were I to receive such a valentine I too
might tear it up, I thought. But why then had it been put back together? Who would take such care and time and effort to reconstruct something that had obviously been a mistake, a disappointment, a failure? And why?

I turned it over, but the inscription was in Yiddish, and while I could piece together the sounds of the letters because Yiddish used the Hebrew alphabet, I couldn’t understand the words the letters formed. The name, though, I could read. It was the same in Yiddish as in Hebrew.
Yoseph Kramer
. My father’s father.

Had my grandmother Bella been the recipient of this valentine, then? I could not imagine it, could not imagine her in any way other than how I’d always known her: as an old lady who did a lot of cooking and reading, and whose idea of a good time was going to the library or getting together with Ida Pearl for tea and whisky over a game of cards. She was simply not the valentine type, though if she ever were to receive one it would make sense that it would be one like this, and that the sender, her husband, would sign it with his full formal name. Knowing it had probably been given to Bella made me less interested in why it had been torn up and reassembled. I loved my grandmother but was not fascinated by her, wasn’t particularly keen to try to imagine aspects of her beyond those I knew, or to envision possible scenarios that had Bella in the starring role.

What I was curious about was what that valentine was doing in my father’s drawer. Could it have to do with the fact that it had been his father’s at some point, had his father’s handwriting on the back? I wondered. Joseph Kramer had died when my father was fifteen, not much older than I was now. As far as I knew, this was the only thing of his father’s that he possessed,
besides the
siddur
on our living room bookshelf that my grandfather had used for his morning prayers, and that my father also used for the prayers he said every morning before he left for work. Maybe my father liked to look at his father’s handwriting from time to time. Maybe he even ran his fingers over it like I sometimes ran my fingers over the index cards my mother had written to me, and over the pages of her notebooks. I couldn’t ask him, not without admitting I had been snooping in his things. In his underwear drawer, no less. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. The idea of my father sitting alone in his room at night running his fingers along the lines of the handwriting of his dead father was depressing. Creepy, actually. I put the valentine back, closed the drawer. I didn’t want to open another. I felt slightly queasy about what I’d uncovered already, a secret life less interesting than lonely and sad.