The Imposter Bride (26 page)

Nina smiled. “She just wants you to be happy. Isn’t that why people have children in the first place?”

“So they can make them happy?”

“So they can push their own failed hopes onto the next generation.”

“What failed hopes?”

Nina looked at me as if she couldn’t understand my question. “I wouldn’t exactly call Elka’s marriage to Sol the romance of the century.”

Now it was my turn to look at Nina in wonder. Did she think Sol and Elka had an unhappy marriage? “They may not be Zhivago and Lara,” I allowed, “but that doesn’t make them unhappy.”

Elka had spent most of her early childhood lying on the waxed linoleum floor behind the counter of her mother’s shop, playing with her dolls while her mother stood above her, arranging and rearranging the diamonds her uncle Chaim had sent her on consignment that nobody came in to buy. Then, when she got older and went to school, she had to rush home to serve tea and sweet wine to her mother’s matchmaking clients while the other girls in her class got to play outside or go over to each other’s houses for milk and cookies. She would listen to her mother discuss with her clients the compatibilities of background and affinities of character that form the basis of a good match, and at night, as she lay sleepless in her bed, staring into the darkness of the room, she would wonder about those affinities and compatibilities—or equally powerful aversions—that her mother claimed held the world together or could tear it apart. She knew that she was the product of disharmony, that her moodiness and other bad qualities were expressions of the incompatible union she embodied. And she wondered more and more about her father, a man she had never known. She made up fantasy fathers comprising bits and pieces of her
mother’s customers and of the heroes of the novels she read and the movies she went to, but whenever and whatever she asked her mother about him, Ida Pearl claimed she couldn’t remember.

“How could you possibly not remember the colour of his hair?” Elka finally demanded of Ida Pearl when she was twelve or thirteen.

“What difference does it make?”

“No difference. I’m just wondering.”

“What’s to wonder?” her mother responded. “Do you think he wonders about you? He doesn’t, I assure you. A man like that is too busy saving the world to wonder about a daughter he’s brought into it.”

He left for Russia soon after Elka’s birth, Ida Pearl had told her. “To be with all the other Bolsheviks.”

“He’s a communist?” Elka asked.

“Absolutely,” Ida Pearl answered. Though, once she had let drop that it was actually Palestine he had gone to, to be with all the other Zionists.

“You’re lying,” Elka accused her. “How can he be in Russia and Palestine at the same time? He’s probably in neither. He probably never left Montreal in the first place.” And when her mother didn’t answer: “He’s probably been here all along.”

“Do you see him?” Ida countered, sweeping her arm around the dreary apartment that she had worked so hard to attain. “Have I missed something? Has he been here all along and I just haven’t noticed?”

“And whose fault is that? Whose fault is it that I have no father and no one invites me to their parties?” Elka cried, throwing herself on the couch. She would never know peace, not in this life, and she raised her head to tell her mother that.

“No one needs a peaceful heart,” her mother answered. “It’s enough to have one that beats.”

“I might as well die,” Elka wept into her pillow.

“Enough with the dramatics. You have homework to finish.”

What Elka had wanted from marriage—from life—it seemed to me, was to be part of a family that looked like other families, to have a husband who would come home every night, and to live in a house that was decorated in the style of the other houses in the neighbourhood and that was filled with children so confident of their parents’ love that they dared to be noisy and to misbehave. All of which she got. And it thrilled her and changed her and opened her in all the ways that transformative love is rumoured to thrill and change and open a person up. I could attest to this because I lived in her home and saw the satisfied smile on her face when she complained on the phone to her friends about the domestic chaos caused by her ever-present husband and their three boys, or the pleasure it gave her to playfully swat Sol with a dishtowel in the way that Lucy and Ethel and other wives in the TV sitcoms that we watched swatted their husbands for similar husbandly misdemeanours.

None of which I could say to Nina without feeling I was betraying Elka in some way. “Elka seems happy enough,” I said.

Nina looked at me with her clear brown eyes that always seemed to see more than she was saying. “And what about you? Are you as happy and mature now as she says?”

“Can’t you tell?”

She smiled and began to tell me about an audition for a TV commercial that she had been to the previous day. “It’s not exactly a Greek tragedy,” she admitted, “but it pays a lot better than the radio ads I’ve been doing. And maybe it will lead to something.”

To yet another TV commercial, I feared. “Were you ever in a Greek tragedy?” I asked her.

“Not on the stage.” She stirred the sugar into her tiny cup, then drank back her coffee in a single swallow. “Don’t look like that. I’m just kidding. My life has hardly been a Greek tragedy.”

But was she happy? I wondered

I knew so little about her, I realized. She had left for Palestine in the spring of 1945, a couple of years before I was born, to teach teenage survivors from Europe the
ABCs
that they had missed learning because of the war. It was unclear to anyone how she had gotten in, since she possessed none of the qualifications the British required for the purposes of issuing visas to Jews, or what her life had been like there, or why she had wanted to go there in the first place just when war was ending and life beginning everywhere else. But none of that really mattered to anyone in my family. What mattered to them was that she had left for Palestine as a pretty and talented girl of twenty-one, and when she returned from Israel in 1954 she was an old maid of thirty, and even more out of step than before with everyone around her.

“Why did you go to Palestine?” I asked her now.

She thought about that, then shrugged as if it was so long ago she could barely remember. “For the same reasons Elka married Sol, I suppose. To escape an unhappy home life. To find the piece inside me that was missing.” She looked at me as if to let me know that I didn’t have to say out loud what she had already seen for herself about Elka. “For the same reasons you’ll probably marry this Ronald.”

“Reuben,” I said. “And I don’t have an unhappy home life that I’m trying to escape. Nor do I think he’s a fairy tale prince who can magically—”

“I didn’t mean to offend you. I just meant that that’s what we do when we’re young. We look outward for answers and solutions for our lives. We look to other places and other people. In my case, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted to act more than anything in the world. So I went to a country where I didn’t speak the language. How smart was that?” She signalled the waiter to bring her another coffee.

“Did you find it?”

“Find what?”

“The piece inside you that was missing.”

“Not there. No. And the sun was ruining my skin.”

The waiter brought her coffee.

“Do you want a piece of cake?” she asked me.

“No, thanks.”

“Bring her a piece of cake,” she told the waiter. “The one with the walnuts and apricot jam.”

“Did you know that Elka found her father?” I asked Nina.

She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure she had heard me right.

“She went to his funeral.”

“She did?”

“Uh-huh.” I said, feeling the sick drop in the gut that accompanies the betrayal of a confidence, though I knew I hadn’t, technically, betrayed Elka’s confidence since attending a funeral is a public act that anyone can witness.

“How do you know?”

“I went with her.”

“And?”

“There’s no
and
. She took me out of school, we went to
the funeral, then we went out for ice cream afterwards. I was wearing a blue and white seersucker dress.”

I supplied the detail about the dress as a way of proving the truth of my memory, and as I did, the image of myself in that dress pulled with it to the surface of my mind another memory: lilacs sitting on my teacher’s desk, a vase full of purple, mauve and white lilacs whose scent I inhaled as I walked to the door of the classroom where Elka was standing.

“So, what? Tell me.”

“That’s all I remember.” The dress. The lilacs. The hard bench at the rear of the chapel. The hat Elka wore with the half-veil that covered her eyes. There had been a grimness to her—something about the way she clutched my hand as we entered and left the funeral chapel, the set of her mouth. And a furtiveness. She had bowed her head as if to hide her face at the moment the coffin was carried past. And as we slipped out immediately following the mourners, her hand like a vise around mine, I had the feeling that we were fleeing.

“How did she explain it to you?” Nina asked.

“She didn’t. Not then.” She had turned up at my classroom door and spoken in a low voice to my teacher, who then told me to gather my things because there was an appointment I had to go to. But I knew already, before Elka said anything to me, that she wasn’t there to take me to a doctor or dentist, though I couldn’t say why. Her grimness, perhaps. Her dark suit that I associated with the High Holidays and other sombre, formal occasions.

We would have driven to the funeral in her blue Rambler—that’s the car she and Sol had when we first moved to Côte-St-Luc—but I didn’t remember the car, just Elka in the driver’s seat after we had parked at our destination. She turned the
rear-view mirror towards herself and put on her hat, a little black dome with a frill of black lace attached to its edge that hung down to veil her eyes. She applied a fresh coat of red lipstick, looked at me—her eyes were obscured but not entirely hidden by the veil; her lips, exposed, were vivid, red—then she looked back in the mirror and rubbed off all the lipstick with a Kleenex. When she looked at me again her mouth looked leached of life as well as colour.

“She had to have told you something.”

“She told me we were going to a funeral and I had to be very quiet and very good and sit absolutely still, and she would take me out for ice cream afterwards. It was only a few years ago that I figured out whose funeral it had been.”

Nina nodded and we sat without talking for a while. Nina toyed with an unlit cigarette; I toyed with the cake the waiter had brought.

“We can’t escape it. None of us,” Nina said.

“What?”

“Our need to know where we come from, to connect it to who we are and where we’re going. That’s what makes us human, what sets us apart from all the other animals.”

“I thought it was opposing thumbs,” I said.

“Monkeys also have opposing thumbs, my dear. It’s origins and destiny—our obsession with that. That’s what defines us.”

“You think so?”

“It’s not just me who thinks so. What do you think all the rigmarole in the Torah is about? Ultimately, I mean—all those lists of
begets
and
begats
that they made you sit and learn at that school they sent you to? What do you think the whole idea of God is about?”

I don’t know that I had ever heard God referred to as an
idea
until then.

“The nexus of origins and destiny. That’s what God is,” Nina said.

“I always thought of him more as a big bullfrog sitting on a throne with a long purple gown and a jewelled crown and a sparkling crystal sceptre.”

Nina smiled. “It would be worth finding your mother if only to find out if she’s responsible for your unique sense of humour.”

I looked at her for a moment. No one else in my family ever brought up the possibility of me looking for my mother any more. I wondered sometimes if they thought I’d gotten over it. “No one ever talks about her sense of humour,” I said.

“No.”

“All I’ve ever heard is how withdrawn she was. How frozen …”

“I’m sure she wasn’t a barrel of laughs at that time in her life.”

But my father had loved her, I thought, and they’d managed to conceive me, so she couldn’t have been frozen and withdrawn all the time.

“I remember her laugh,” I said. Just like that. It was something I had never told another person, and had thought I never would. People didn’t remember things from so early in infancy. I knew that. But Nina didn’t seem to. She was different in that way too: in what she knew and didn’t know. She responded now as if I had said something eminently reasonable.

“Tell me more,” she said.

“There’s not really anything to tell. It’s just that sometimes
when I’m sleeping I hear a peal of laughter. It’s so vivid, so
real
, that I’m sure there’s someone in the room with me. And I wake up.”

“It wakes you?”

“Yes.”

She nodded, as if the fact that it woke me was significant in some way.

“I know it’s just a dream, but it feels real. It feels like—”

“It’s memory,” she declared. “It’s memory so deep you can only access it in your dreams.”

I knew that. Believed it, in any case.

“Sometimes I imagine that one day I’ll be out on a street in a crowd somewhere, and I’ll hear it.” That familiar laugh. “And I’ll turn around …”

But at that point my imagination always failed me. As it did at that moment. Which Nina must have seen in my face.

“Can I give you a bit of advice?” she asked me.

“Do I have a choice?”

She smiled.

“Don’t make the same mistake Elka did.”

“Marry Uncle Sol, you mean?”

“I’m being serious now, sweetie.”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Don’t wait for your mother to die before seeking her out.”

“Elka didn’t
wait
,” I said. “She tried to find him for years, but Ida lied to her outright about who he was and where he was living.”

Elka’s father had, in fact, never left Montreal. Elka told me that soon after I found out about my mother’s name, when I was angry and unsettled and looking for an explanation from
all the adults around me about their omission that amounted to a lie. All the years of Elka’s childhood, her father had worked in a shoe store on Ste-Catherine Street, just a few blocks west of Ida Pearl’s first jewellery store. He had remarried soon after leaving Ida Pearl and had then fathered four children, all of whom he had stuck around to raise to adulthood. He had, in a sense, then, been there all along, just not for Elka.