The Imposter Bride (8 page)

I thought about that. “Like an X-ray?”

“In a way,” Ida said, and I thought immediately of the machines at Kiddie Kobbler, not far from Ida Pearl’s in Snowdon, where they X-rayed my feet to make sure my saddle shoes, loafers and oxfords fit properly. I liked to see my bones, though, liked how my insides looked.

“But she was a smart lady,” Ida said, as if someone had just said she wasn’t. “A person can have certain superstitions and still be very smart, and your mother—I could tell from the conversation we had in my store that day that your mother is a very smart lady. But you want to know something?”

I nodded, breathless with expectation about what she was going to tell me next.

“Even if she wasn’t so smart, your phone number and new address are going to be in the phone book just the way they’re in the phone book now, so if she’s looking for you she’ll be able to find you just like she’s been able to find you on Cumberland.”

It wasn’t quite the next new fact about my mother that I had been hoping to hear, but at that moment it seemed better than that. Relief filled me like a blast of heat.

“Which isn’t to say that you won’t be sad to leave your house and street.”

It suddenly didn’t seem quite so sad to me any more. The relief pushed the sadness away, and Ida must have sensed that, because she smiled that same smile again and poured two more cups of tea, added the same raspberry jam to mine, and the same amber fluid to hers, which was whisky, I realized, from the smell that drifted my way. She lifted her cup to me as she had for our previous
l’chaim
.

“Life is change, my dear, so we might as well enjoy it, don’t you think?”

CHAPTER 5

E
lka was waiting outside for Sol when he went to pick her up for their first date. An odd behaviour, he thought when he saw her standing there on the street. She lived just west of Decarie, in N.D.G., in a brick duplex that looked small but well kept, with a bit of lawn in the front. So what inside could be so shameful, Sol wondered, that she wouldn’t even let him in the door?

“It’s hot inside,” she said at once, as if reading the question in his mind.

“Outside’s not much better.”

“It’s better. Shall we go?”

The August heat had raised a thin sheen of sweat on her skin, a look, he noted, that not every girl could carry off quite so sweetly.

“Don’t you think I should say hello to your mother? Let her know I’ll bring you home in one piece?”

“My mother doesn’t like you. She’s forbidden me to go out with you, to even talk with you on the phone.”

“I see,” said Sol, more surprised at that point than insulted, half pleased, in fact, to imagine Ida Pearl taking his measure and recognizing that he was a man to contend with.

“She’s like that.” Elka shrugged. “She thinks no one’s up to our standard, and hasn’t noticed, of course, that we’re not up to it either. Our standard, I mean. That our situation in life, the circumstances in which we find ourselves are not exactly—”

“Wait a minute. Slow down. You mean … she thinks I’m not good enough?”

“
Not
our type
, is how she’d put it.”

“And that’s what you came out to tell me? That your mother doesn’t like me? That I’m not up to your family’s standard?”

“I came out to take a walk. It’s stifling in our house. And you can walk beside me if you choose.”

“Big of you.”

A faint smile now. The dimples. “You can walk wherever you want. My mother doesn’t own the sidewalk, after all.”

He was angry, insulted, but to turn and leave without another word would be a hollow victory, he felt, more her mother’s victory than his own.

“I could use the exercise, I suppose,” he said as he fell into step beside her on the sidewalk her mother didn’t own.

IDA PEARL WAS LOOKING OUT
her living room window when Elka walked away with Sol. She had known as soon as she had prohibited the meeting that Elka would go against her wishes—and why? Ida wondered. Why this man and not another? Why this mediocrity instead of a nicer or wealthier
one? Why not a mediocrity who was not already in love with his brother’s wife? Was she so starved for attention? Ida wondered. Have I so starved her that she follows the first man whose eyes actually linger for a moment on her face?

It had been a mistake to suggest Sol take Elka out onto the dance floor, Ida thought. A mistake to ever show up at that wedding, which had not been quite the mission of dashed hope that Elka imagined.

Ida and Elka were at the wedding because of a letter Ida Pearl had received from Sonya, her sister who lived in Palestine. Letters from Sonya came regularly and Ida usually skimmed them with impatience. They were litanies of complaint, nothing more, about the humid heat in Tel Aviv in the summer, the damp in the winter, and the ailments those conditions produced in Sonya, her husband, Leo, and their ever-growing brood of children; about the lack of culture in Palestine—she’d been a poet back in Poland and had belonged to a literary circle there; about the British, the Arabs, the price of eggs, the growing violence … None of which dissuaded her from encouraging Ida Pearl to move there.
Why should you and Elka sit alone in Montreal like two dogs that have lost their master?
she asked at the end of each letter.
You can starve here as well as there. Your loving sister, Sonya
.

Sonya’s letters always found their way to the garbage within ten minutes of entering the Krakauer household, but the foul mood they invoked in Ida Pearl persisted well into the evening and following day. The most recent letter, however, deviated from all those that had preceded it in that there was actually something of interest in it. A woman had turned up on Sonya’s doorstep in Tel Aviv claiming to be their paternal cousin Lily.

She wasn’t their cousin, Sonya wrote to Ida. She bore no resemblance at all to the Lily that Sonya remembered, a brash and freckled little girl who used to visit from Antwerp every summer.
I know people change
, Sonya wrote.
And G-d knows what she’s been through would change anyone. But such a change? So extreme?
Could an experience change a person so much that there was no hint left of the person she’d once been? Sonya wondered.

She didn’t know. How could she know, never having been exposed to such an extreme of human experience? This alone gave Sonya pause, made her invite the young woman into her home.

Was it possible, then? Sonya wondered as she made tea, prepared the platter of cake. But when they started to talk, she knew that it wasn’t. The girl was an imposter, a thief. Maybe worse. She didn’t even know the names of her own family, her beloved parents, brothers …
all of whom I now fear are lost
, Sonya wrote.

She confronted the girl with her lie, expecting a confession, a plea for mercy that Sonya fully intended to extend.
She’s still a living soul, after all, a living, breathing, Jewish soul that managed to escape an inferno the likes of which you and I cannot understand. I would never expose her, never turn her in, and was prepared to reassure her completely
. But the young woman didn’t flinch, didn’t ask for reassurance. Confronted with her lie, she maintained it, maintained with perfect calm that she was Lily, despite not knowing any fact of her own past.

This is what confused me
, Sonya wrote.
Why the pretence? “I won’t expose you,” I promised. But neither would I take her in. “It’s not like we’re family,” I told her
.

“We are family,” she said. Then she related a dream in which she was running through a town, fleeing for her life. She came to a door. It was a heavy wooden door the colour of stone. She described it to me, its colour and markings, the scratched indentation to the left of the keyhole. It was the door of our childhood home in Krakow
.

It wouldn’t open to her no matter how hard she pushed. She threw herself against it—her life depended on its opening—but the full weight of her was as insubstantial as a pebble bouncing off its surface. That’s what she told me. She leaned against it, resting more than pushing now, knowing these were the last moments of her life. She leaned her cheek against it, the flat palm of her hand. It opened easily then—into peace: a leafy courtyard, clucking chicks, strains of piano trickling through an open window
.

Our own courtyard
, Sonya wrote.
She was describing to me the courtyard of our childhood, this imposter who looked nothing like Lily, yet knew the summers of her childhood, this stranger who had never stepped foot in our home but could bring it back to me with such force that I lost myself in it. I lost the present moment of my life to a summer afternoon heavy with the scent of ripening apricots, the sound of Mama’s voice mingling with the notes of Mrs. Gamulka’s piano. Do you remember those afternoons?

Ida did.

I don’t know how long I rested there in the dappled shade of that courtyard—such a deep, contented rest. More than a few moments, I suspect, for there was a note of alarm in the voice that pulled me back, dragged me to the present by asking if I was all right
.

I became aware at once of the noise of Tel Aviv, the nauseating
smell of the sea, the weight of the grief that for one brief moment had lifted from my chest
.

“Close the windows,” I begged her. There was nothing to be done about the smell—it’s everywhere, always, that briny rot that swells the walls and permeates even the soft, fine curls of my children’s hair—but the noise could be blocked. I couldn’t bear the noise
.

And what were the sounds that so upset me, sounds so offensive that I experienced them as an assault? People talking on the balconies below me, motorcars and the hum of the city, the high, laughing voices of children in the playground, my own three children among them
.

“Please, the window,” I said, but she wouldn’t do as I asked. She brought me water, cooled my forehead, encouraged me to drink
.

I was in danger at that moment, I’m telling you the truth. I was standing on an edge, the balls of my feet still firmly placed on the hard, cold surface of my present life, but my heels unsupported, sinking deeply into memories, the past, a surface that yielded like billowing cloud. I wanted her to stay now, this woman who wasn’t Lily. I wanted her to stay and return the dead to me, return me to the dead that felt more like life at that moment than my own children laughing and calling to one another in the playground outside my open windows
.

“Please,” I said again. Stay, I meant. Tell me your dreams. I wanted to fall back into the void that was waiting to receive me
.

But she wouldn’t tell me anything more. She’s practical, this new Lily of ours. She had arrived just that morning and her status was still precarious
.

“Help me,” she said
.

I sent her over to the Zlotnik woman who arranges things for
people like this—papers, marriages, jobs, whatever is needed. No problem, Mrs. Zlotnik said. She could have something arranged that very afternoon, but—are you ready for this?—a new life in Palestine wasn’t good enough for the imposter
.

“Canada,” she commanded Zlotnik
.

“Canada?” Mrs. Zlotnik could only laugh. She was still laughing, I believe, when the woman pulled out a diamond. Not a cut diamond, mind you, a rough one, and a good size, apparently, its source as untraceable as its bearer—I can only fear it belonged to our dear cousin Lily, that it was one of Uncle Chaim’s, from his workshop
.

Zlotnik told her to put the diamond away. There must have been something she would find easier to resell, gold coin, maybe—what does a woman like Zlotnik know about assessing the value of an uncut diamond?

“It’s all stolen,” I reminded her when she was telling me the story
.

“Who are we to judge?” she responded, my moral instructor, the righteous Mrs. Zlotnik, who gets richer with every refugee that she helps. She told the woman to leave it with her for a few days
.

It was more like a few months, and then a little longer to get things properly arranged, but she’s on her way over right now as I sit here on my balcony. She’s travelling more quickly than these words I write to you. The lucky bridegroom’s name is Kramer. Go to her wedding and weep
.

Ida had read the letter, shaking her head.

“What?” Elka asked, watching her.

“Nothing,” Ida said. She could not quite absorb what her sister was telling her, could not quite believe it was true.

“Is she still trying to get us to move there?” Elka asked.

Was it Sonya’s tendency to embellish that had made Ida doubt what she had read? Or was it a reluctance to face the implications for her family if what Sonya said was true? She’d gone to the wedding fully informed that the bride was an imposter, yet expecting, somehow, to see her cousin Lily walk down the aisle.
I forgive you
, she’d been prepared to tell her, though her cousin probably wouldn’t even have known there was anything about her or her family that required forgiveness. Lily had been a girl of just eight or nine when her father, Ida’s uncle Chaim, had thrown Ida out of his workshop in Antwerp.
What’s past is past
, Ida had been planning to say, though as she prepared her small speech she knew that wasn’t quite true. Just receiving the letter had been enough to stir the hurts from the past that she had thought long dead, extinguished, not merely hiding within her.

Still, she couldn’t deny her hope. It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen anyone from her family. She was in the process of trying to calculate just how old Lily would be now when the bride appeared at the head of the aisle. A complete stranger.

“ARE YOU MAD AT ME?”
Elka asked Sol as they settled into a booth at Miss Montreal. She shouldn’t have told him what her mother thought of him. She had thought he would understand, that it would make him sympathetic to the sorts of difficulties she had to put up with every day of her life with her mother. Every hour. Instead, he’d barely spoken the whole way over to the coffee shop.