The Imposter Bride (21 page)

As I walked home from the library, though, and settled in to wait for my father’s return from work, that bit of excitement gave way to anxiety. I was about to accuse my father of having lied to me my entire life, of having withheld from me essential defining facts about my mother that he had always known, my father who had always been a steady and loving presence for me and who was probably just trying to do his best by me in circumstances that were not—no matter how positive a spin one might try to put on them—the best.

He had been a young man when she left him, a young, good-looking, ambitious and responsible man. And as time went on he became a financially successful man as well. He was a catch, in other words, even with a young child in tow, and yet he had never remarried, had never even seriously dated another woman. That was because of me, I sensed. Because I came first in his life. Because he had arranged his life so we could be a family, he and I.

Elka and Sol were also my family, their home my second home, and there were times in my childhood when I spent
more time with them than with my father, but my first home was with my father, always. Throughout my childhood he and I spent the last hours of almost every weekday evening together, and most of the weekend as well. On weekdays, after we moved to Côte-St-Luc, he would pick me up from Elka and Sol’s after supper and we would walk the three blocks home together. We didn’t have to walk; he could have picked me up in his car. Often—in the dead of a Montreal winter, for example—it would have been more expedient and certainly more sensible to drive. But our walk home together was what we did, he and I, separate and apart from everyone else, and the image of family that developed in my mind as a child was not the nightly suppers at Elka and Sol’s, much as I enjoyed them—all of us around their table at six o’clock sharp, eating a good and balanced meal and chatting about our respective days—but that silent walk home later with my father. When I thought about that walk it was always winter. In reality, of course, it was often spring, summer or fall, and the nights were variously warm, cold, rainy or windy, but what remained in my mind, what rose to the surface of all the blended memories of those nightly walks home was one cold winter night, a night so cold that the bones around my eyes ached, and so still that the only sound was the squeak of snow beneath our boots, and so peaceful that the only thing that pressed on me was my father’s mittened hand holding my own.

And now I was waiting to accuse him.

“Ah, you’re home,” he said, when he walked in the door.

A happy discovery, his tone implied, and I felt ill about what was ahead. I pretended to be absorbed in my homework, barely looked up as I returned his greeting. He took off his tie and jacket, poured himself a Scotch.

“There’s some meat loaf in the fridge,” I said. “Do you want me to heat it up?”

“We can eat later. Unless you’re hungry—”

“No, no,” I assured him. “Later’s fine.”

He let out his usual end-of-the-day sigh as he settled himself in his chair with his newspaper. I continued to pretend to be utterly absorbed in my school work. It was quiet except for the rustle of his newspaper and the occasional rumble of a passing bus or truck on Côte-St-Luc Road, ten storeys down.

Was the withholding of this fact the same as lying? I wondered. Did the truth of my mother really reside in this information that he had withheld from me?

I remembered an afternoon, years earlier, when he and I took a walk together in the woods around a cabin in the Laurentians that Sol and Elka had rented for the summer. It was a warm day and the air was thick with buzzing, biting insects. I knew the walk was supposed to be a special time for us—my father was not the type to take time away from his newspapers and business magazines to go tramping through the woods—but the insects were driving me mad. “I thought mosquitoes liked to sleep during the day,” I said, slapping my ear, but missing the source of the infernal whine, then slapping my arm, a direct hit, which left a bloody smear. “Do you know what kinds of trees are around us?” my father asked me. “Birch,” I said. “What else?” he asked. “Evergreens.” I pointed to a clump of conifers. “Yes, but what kind of evergreens?” I didn’t know. “And those?” he asked, pointing to a clump of deciduous trees. “I don’t know. Can we please get out of here and go for a swim?” He looked surprised then. “Of course,” he said, and I felt I had hurt him. We started walking back out
along the trail towards the lake, but then he said, “Stop for a minute. Give me your hand.” I did. “Now close your eyes.” I did again. He took my hand and pressed it against a tree trunk and held it there for a minute. “That’s a birch,” he said. I nodded. To say that this was uncharacteristic behaviour for him is an understatement equivalent to observing that it would be uncharacteristic for our rabbi at the time, Rabbi Searles, to come twirling down the aisle of the synagogue wearing a pink tutu. “Now keep your eyes closed,” he said. He led me a few steps and placed my hand on another trunk. The bark was rougher, almost corrugated. “That’s a pine.’” He released my hand and we kept walking towards the lake. “Your mother could identify trees like that,” he told me then, and though I immediately wanted to know more, wanted to stay in the forest the rest of the day so he could tell me more about her and the trees that she knew, I had already spoiled it. In another minute we would be out at the lake, where Elka would be sitting on her lounge chair with her silver sun reflector under her chin and a leaf on her nose to protect it from burning, and my cousins would be flinging sand pies at each other, and Sol would be out in a rowboat, pretending he liked to fish.

Was the fact that her name had not been Lily really more important than what he’d tried to tell me that day in the woods?

“Do you mind if I put some music on?” I asked.

“No, go ahead.”

I put on an old Artie Shaw record. A mistake, I realized as soon as I returned to my couch and “Begin the Beguine” filled the room. It was annoying, grating. I went back to the record player, took it off.

“Change your mind?”

“I prefer quiet.”

My father lowered the newspaper, looked at me. “You all right?”

“Yes, fine. Why?”

“No reason.”

That’s how it was between us, had always been. We noticed each other, but didn’t pry. (Searching through his private things for traces of my mother was different than prying, I had decided.) In our entire life together neither of us ever once said to the other “A penny for your thoughts,” an expression I heard so often at Elka and Sol’s that I could have amassed a small fortune had I answered it even half the times it had been directed my way.

“I saw Bubby at the library today.”

“Oh?”

“I was researching my paper on Danton.”

“How’s that going?”

“Fine. Good.”

“And how did Bubby seem?”

“Fine.”

“Her cold’s all cleared up?”

“Seems to be.”

“Did she have any light reading to recommend for you?
Crime and Punishment
, maybe?”

I wanted to smile as I normally would, but nothing felt normal. “She told me about my mother’s name. You know. That it wasn’t hers.” I had thought I could be straightforward, but my voice was tight, choked with anxiety and a pent-up mix of emotions I couldn’t begin to name.

My father nodded, but in the long silence that ensued he didn’t offer anything beyond that non-verbal confirmation. He
didn’t apologize as I had expected he would, didn’t scramble to offer me the explanations he should have offered long before now. He displayed a reticence that might simply have been a non-hysterical and straightforward response to my obvious distress but that felt to me at that moment like willful withholding.

“Who was she?” I asked him. “Her
real
name, I mean.”

“She never told me.”

“You don’t
know?
”

“Do you think I would have kept it from you had I known?”

“You kept this from me, the fact that the name I know her by wasn’t hers.”

“Because I had nothing to give you in return.”

“What about just telling me the truth?” I asked. And when he didn’t answer: “Is that nothing?”

Again he didn’t answer right away, but this time I waited.

“I thought that would just make things worse,” he said, finally. “Not now, perhaps, but when you were young, a little girl with no mother. To take even that from you, to not even leave you with a name you could—”

“But it wasn’t hers.”

He didn’t nod or agree, but neither did he go on with the explanation I had just interrupted. “It was the name I knew her by,” he said finally. Lamely, I thought.

“When did you find out, then?”

“After she left.”

I waited for him to go on, to explain something, anything, about the woman he had married, my mother, who had now receded farther from my reach than ever before. I wanted him to open up a new track that might lead me to her to replace the one that had just dissolved, to offer some new piece of information that I might grasp at, but he said nothing.

“No wonder your marriage broke up,” I said. “You didn’t even know her name, for God’s sake. It’s so basic. To not even know the name of the person you’re married to. I mean, how could you possibly not …?”

But something in my father’s face stopped me. He was ashamed, I realized. And why wouldn’t he be? He was humiliated to have to admit to me how little my mother had trusted him, how little of her she had let him know. And maybe that was the truth of why he hadn’t told me. Not out of a desire to protect me. Not out of concern about taking something away from me without having anything to replace it. But because he was ashamed. Because to say out loud that he hadn’t known was to acknowledge how false his marriage to my mother had been, how false his great—and only—love. So false that even the name he had called her at their moments of greatest intimacy—perhaps at the very moment that I came into being—was false, not hers, did not resonate within her any deeper than her outermost layer of skin.

I couldn’t keep looking at him, his shame exposed to me as it was. It was like seeing him naked; I had to look away. I got up off the couch, walked over to the bookshelf and pulled out the girl’s notebook. “I know you think there’s nothing in it,” I said, repeating the family mantra. “But she wouldn’t have kept it if it wasn’t important to her. If the girl who it belonged to wasn’t important to her.”

Was my father relieved for the break in the conversation we were having? Was he happy for the distraction from the light I’d just been shining on his complete failure as a man? He dropped his usual protest that his Yiddish wasn’t good enough, took the notebook from me and opened it to the first page.

“There’s a quote at the beginning that I don’t understand. It’s in Polish.” He turned the page, began to read.
“I begin with a dream. I’m running through a city of stone …”

“Read me something that isn’t a dream,” I said.

He leafed through the pages and began again.

“The afternoon before the war began I went to visit Eva.”

That Eva again.

“She had come down with a grippe a few weeks earlier, a lingering grippe that she could not seem to shake off, and I had not visited her yet, a lapse on my part that would have been unthinkable in previous summers.”

He translated slowly but easily. Fluently, in fact. So why the pretence, all these years, that he couldn’t read it when he could?

“She had been my dearest friend since childhood, a friendship that had been heightened by longing during the ten-month separation we were forced to endure every year and deepened by the impassioned letters we wrote to each other, letters sealed with kisses and tears in which we revealed our deepest selves to one another and planned everything we would do together when the school year ended and we could finally be together again.”

I was so angry with him now that I could barely concentrate on what he was reading. That he would have pretended he couldn’t read Yiddish. That he had lied outright to me …

“All through the grey Antwerp winter I would imagine the coming summer in Krakow, how we would walk hand in hand along the leafy lanes of the Planty, stopping for lemonade or cherry ices at one of the cafés there, or spend entire afternoons lying on the grass near the playing fields by the Vistula, watching the clouds overhead, imagining that the shapes those
clouds assumed as they drifted over us were auguries of our future lives and loves.”

He paused in his reading. I thought at first that he was trying to make out a word, a phrase, but then he looked up.

“This notebook was Lily Azerov’s,” he said, and I was confused for a moment because the name still evoked my mother for me. Then I realized he meant the original Lily Azerov, the girl whose name my mother had taken. Who had been Ida Pearl’s cousin, I came to understand as my father told me about the letter Ida Pearl had received from her sister Sonya in Tel Aviv a few days before my parents’ wedding.

“But … why?” I asked. Why would she have taken someone else’s identity, I meant. And why that particular identity?

“I don’t know. There are many possible—”

“Did they know each other before?” I persisted, unable to accept that my father could really know as little about the woman he had married as he claimed. Was it possible that my mother was Eva, the real Lily’s childhood friend that I had just heard described in the pages of her journal? I asked my father, and as I did an image formed in my mind of a girl of about fourteen walking hand in hand with her friend, lying on a grassy slope watching the clouds, eating cherry ices, writing the exact sorts of long, sentimental letters that I had once written to my friends from summer camp, sappy teenage letters sealed with kisses and promises of unending friendship. It was the first time I had ever had any kind of image of my mother as a girl in a specific place, doing everyday things. I wanted to hear more, could hardly wait to hear more, but my father was shaking his head.

“Your mother wasn’t the Eva the girl wrote about,” he said.