The Lost Wife (28 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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What do you do with a child who has no interest in making friends? Who instead invents imaginary playmates when he is alone in his room, with the blocks piled high, and the LEGO towers colorcoordinated, and who only wants to wear the color blue?
Blue T-shirt. Blue pants. Blue socks.
“He likes the color blue, so he’s decisive. He is passionate about what he likes,” I tell Amalia.
She shakes her head. “No. There is something wrong.”
I’m the doctor
, I want to tell her.
He is a little strange, yes, but he’s ours and he’s fine.
But a mother’s intuition is always right. Shouldn’t I have known that? How many times have I seen a woman come to my office saying she sensed something was wrong with her pregnancy, and she turned out to be right?
As Jakob entered elementary school, it became clear he couldn’t function in the structure of a classroom. His dark brown hair was often in his eyes, and his once-chubby body had now lengthened and thinned. He reminded me of a sickly colt, floundering as he tries to get himself up on his legs. Noises bothered him, any adjustment the teacher made to the schedule sent him into a tantrum, and he could not bear to have anyone but Amalia or me touch him. It was as if his skin burned if someone else even grazed him.
We took him to specialist after specialist. He perplexed everyone with his intelligence scores, but he seemed unable to function outside his own bubble.
The Yeshiva school in Brooklyn was the only one that would take him, and he seemed to blossom under the care of its teachers. He loved the Hebrew language, taking to it as if it were a mystery he needed to decode. The schedule was rigid and the children there were obedient and left him alone.
He embraced the uniform; although it was black and white rather than blue, he liked the consistency of having to wear it every day and the material didn’t irritate him like so many other things did.
He liked the little brick building and the benches in the schoolyard, and that no one bothered him if he played by himself or simply watched from the side. When he rocked back and forth or flapped his arms, the teachers told the children it was Jakob’s own method of prayer.
 
My adult life is cursed with a constant duality. It is as if someone came and took a cleaver to my existence so that I cannot enjoy one thing without seeing the sadness on the other side. I married Amalia, but couldn’t stop thinking about what my life would have been like with Lenka. I saw my beautiful daughter grow into the woman she is, while I saw my son barely able to eke out an existence with all his various limitations.
Those years, when Jakob and Rebekkah were teenagers, our daughter would dress up in her corduroy skirt and turtleneck and meet friends for a hamburger or milk shake down the street, while Jakob joined Amalia and me in front of the television. I cleared the plates of Amalia’s overboiled vegetables and overcooked meat, scraping them quietly into the dustbin as I heard my son answering every answer correctly on one of the quiz shows before any of the contestants even had a chance to respond.
And I watched Amalia and Jakob’s heads staring at the screen. I wanted my wife to look at me, but she continued to gaze ahead. I know she must have heard Jakob calling out the answers, but she did not smile with any pride. Nor did she cry. She simply ate her food that had no taste and looked at a TV show that, for her, had no meaning, and never said a word.
Rebbekah is now a wife and mother. Married to a lawyer with a son. My son, now fifty, still lives with me at home. He is competent enough to live by himself, but has always refused the opportunity.
“Why, Dad? I’m happy.... I’m happy here with you.” His speech is careful and deliberate, as if he is weighing each word in his head before he articulates it.
I raise my eyebrows and stare at my son’s wan complexion, the pale of his eyes like cracked ice. The nervous hands. Part of me wants to raise my hand to him, to release so many years of frustration at seeing my brilliant child cocooned in his own silken shell. But I don’t have the will.
He reads my mind. He reads my sadness. He reads my anger. It flashes across my retinas like lightning in a storm.
And then it’s gone.
CHAPTER 32
 
JOSEF
 
At Amalia’s funeral, Isaac played the Kol Nidre. He looked ancient to me now. He was entirely gray, his once-black hair now looked like a heap of curling leaves dusted in snow. But his thin body was still elegant and straight. He was dressed in a tasteful black suit, the one he wore when Amalia and I went to hear him play at Carnegie Hall years earlier. When the rabbi called his name, he rose from the pew behind me and reverently walked to the bimah. His violin at his side as he walked down the stairs; he held his bow carefully to his heart.
There was complete silence as he stood still, the gilded ark behind him and the scrolls of the Ten Commandments flanking him on either side. There were only a handful of mourners around us, those few people who had become friends over the years, Benjamin’s family, my two children, my grandson, and a few patients I had become close with.
He stood there for what seemed like several seconds, looking out beyond the pews as if trying to catch someone he hoped in vain was still there. I sat with my hands folded, watching as he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He finally raised the instrument to his shoulder and he settled his chin. Then he lifted his bow.
He played more beautifully than I had ever heard him play. The music resonating like a heart torn wide open, each note released onto golden wings. The skin of his cheeks shuddered as he played; the lashes of his eyelids sealed his gaze. But it was clear to me as I watched him—almost an epiphany as I heard him play—that he had always been in love with Amalia. That all those years when he sat in our little kitchen quietly watching us, he had been there to be around her.
Rebekkah wept as he played. Her body shivering and quaking, her thin frame unable to contain her grief. My son stared ahead, his clear eyes ethereal in his mourning. A single tear streaking his face.
And my tears eventually came, too, as the music, slow and mournful and then rising and falling, came like waves in the sea. I cried because yes, I missed Amalia. But also because it was all too clear to me that my best friend had loved my wife in a way that I never could.
The kaddish he played consisted of the notes that came from my heart, my yearning for a love eternally lost. But not for a woman who now lay in a pine coffin before me. It was for a woman I left forty-five years ago in a crowded train station in Prague, who had never been given a proper funeral. And had I played the violin, my sorrow for having lost her would have sounded exactly like Isaac’s did for Amalia. Each note played hauntingly in the fullness of its sorrow, each chord emphasizing the loneliness that she was gone.
CHAPTER 33
 
JOSEF
 
We sit shiva in our apartment, Rebbekah with her young family, me and my lethargic son. As custom dictates, we cover the mirrors with cloth. We rip our clothes. We sit unshaven on low stools.
My grandson reads a book in my office. He is in high school now, and loves books as much as I did when I was his age. His mother chides him so he will sit with her and her brother, but I tell her it’s fine. He is young. He is vital. Let him not sit in a dark room with us and receive visitors he couldn’t even name.
Another plate of rugelach and a platter of bagels with smoked fish arrive from one of my daughter’s friends. She writes down each arrival on a small pad so she can write them thank-you notes afterward.
The sofa is covered in the slipcovers that Amalia had sewn herself. The curtains are drawn so there is no sunlight. Outside on Third Avenue, the taxis honk their horns and mothers call out to their children as they get out of school. Inside, the containers in the cabinets are still marked with labels in Amalia’s careful hand:
Flour
,
Sugar
, and
Salt
. The phone numbers she had written for the hospital, the fire station, and the police are still taped to the wall.
Already, I can barely remember the sound of her voice. A week in the ICU after a stroke, a long sleep, and then a wordless good-bye. I know, in the weeks that will follow, I will look for her in the simple cotton dresses that hang in the closet, in the tube of hand cream by her nightstand, or in the round of rye bread that will go stale without another mouth to share it.
I don’t imagine Amalia will now visit me as a ghost. She will be busy elsewhere, searching the heavens for her family, flying to the arms of her mother and father and beseeching forgiveness from her sister, who will tell her she should have forgotten long ago.
Her ghost will finally be at home now. Because that’s what happens when we eventually return to the ones we loved but left behind. To the ones we never forgot. We slide into them like two perfect hands. We fall into them like two cotton-filled clouds.
 
Isaac attends Amalia’s burial but doesn’t come to pay his respects at the house. For seven days I expect him to walk in the door or call. But he doesn’t. I finally hear from him the following week, when he tells me he is sorry. He tells me that he had a bad cold and was in bed all week. He also mentions in passing how he seemed to have dropped his bow somewhere and so now must buy a new one.
But something in his voice reveals that he is not telling me the truth about either thing. I suddenly imagine him burying the bow alongside Amalia. And as soon as I think it, I know in my heart it’s true. While my children and I were walking to the limousine, I looked back and saw him standing there alone beside her grave, his head tipped solemnly down.
I imagine he placed it there in the earth, when no one was looking, to be buried beside her. Quietly. Just as she was quiet. A single note hanging in a crowded sky.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I understand. You’ll just have to get a new one.”
“Yes,” he says. “A new one.”
I think of the two bows Isaac has lost over the years. One dropped in the sea where I lost my parents and sister, and one placed with my wife of thirty-eight years. Each of my own losses marked by a single slip of his hand.
CHAPTER 34
 
LENKA
 
My mother had grown even thinner that summer in 1943. I could see the ligaments under her skin, her collarbone protruding in such high relief that it reminded me of a scythe. Her cheekbones so sharp they reminded me of the bladelike facets in the glass drops of a crystal chandelier.

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