The Other Traitor (3 page)

“You can take the professor out of the classroom, but…”

He waved her joke away with his hand. “I’m glad you’re finally able to talk about this without getting angry and defensive.”

“I wasn’t defens…”  She stopped herself. “Okay, maybe a little. Anyway, there was something in the album I’m following up on. Photos of my grandparents with a couple named Mariasha and Aaron Lowe.”

Bill scrunched up his face and shook his head to indicate that he didn’t recognize the names.

“They had a daughter named Essie Lowe who’d been my mother’s friend,” she said. “I started researching the Lowes looking for other connections between them and my grandfather. “

Bill nodded, as though to encourage her, just like he used to do in class.

“Aaron Lowe died thirty years ago, at the age of eighty,” she said. “I found an obit online. He was survived by his wife, Mariasha, daughter Esther, also known as Essie, and two grandchildren. He’d been an economics professor at NYU.”

“Hmmm.”

“You think that’s significant?”

Bill took off his glasses and examined them. “If he was teaching at NYU in the 1930s, there’s a good chance he was a communist or at least a socialist. Most of the professors were left-wing back then. There wasn’t the stigma of being a communist that developed years later. I can research him for you. Did you find anything on Mariasha?”

“Quite a bit, actually. She was a sculptress. Worked primarily in metal. Has several pieces on display at a few small museums.”

“Is she alive?”

“At least as of an hour ago,” Annette said.

“She must be pretty old.”

“Ninety-five. A bio mentioned that she’s still in the same apartment in the Lower East Side that she lived in with her husband. I looked it up. It’s on Ridge Street, one of the few buildings that haven’t been bulldozed.”

“I take it you’re planning to pay her a visit.”

“I am.”

“Interesting,” Bill said. “You’ll be returning to the same neighborhood where your grandparents and mother once lived.”

“That’s right.” The place her mother refused to revisit.

Annette ran her fingertips over the carved initials, hearts, and dates in the wood tabletop. ‘63. ‘79. ‘48. Had any of these people been back? And if so, were they happy they had returned, or sorry they disturbed their memories of the past?

The thought of going back to his childhood house in Forest Hills, Queens always caused a knot in his stomach. Even now, almost twenty years after his father’s death, Julian still felt the same hollow ache knowing Dad wouldn’t be there. Would never be there again. But as much as he didn’t want to return, he needed to see his mother and clear away the past.

A blast of cold air sliced through the army-surplus jacket that he’d dug out of the back of his closet after Sephora had stomped out of their apartment. The old jacket was special to him, a souvenir from the brief period when he’d lived in Paris. Despite his hat, his ears felt like they might freeze and crack off, but at least it had stopped snowing. He turned up his collar and ducked his head down into his jacket like a turtle as he entered his old neighborhood. Streetlights brightened the snow that was neatly piled against the curbs and around the bases of thick oak trees.

He turned the corner. He slowed his pace as his heart sped up. His childhood house was down the street. A rambling white Colonial with peeling paint, it stuck out from among the large, elegant brick and stucco Tudors as much as Julian had stuck out among the other kids. He’d been the fatherless geek, the kid who preferred homework to teamwork.

Smoke circled up from the red brick chimney into a pewter sky. He blinked. No. There was no smoke. That had been a memory, or maybe an illusion. His mother never made a fire in the fireplace.

He turned down his collar, pulled his head up out of his jacket, and opened the front door with the rarely used key he kept on his key ring. “Essie,” he called, stepping into the small foyer. There had been a time when he called her Mom, but that had been when Dad was alive and Julian had felt like he was part of a family.

The house had its customary sterile smell and the entranceway was still covered with the paisley-patterned wallpaper from his childhood. There was a piece missing at the bottom that he’d torn off when he was a kid. He didn’t think his mom even noticed.

He hung his jacket and hat on one of the wooden pegs that were almost too low for coats. His dad had screwed those pegs into the wall and probably set them at a height that Julian and his sister Rhonda could reach when they were kids.

He heard the slam of a cupboard door in the kitchen and tentative footsteps crossing the planked dining-room floor.

His mother stood in the arched foyer doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. She was tall, almost his height, and as erect as a model balancing a book on her head. She wore a white button-down blouse and black slacks, her wavy hair cut along her jawline like she’d always styled it, except there were now streaks of white mixed with the dark blonde.

“Your call was certainly a surprise.”  Her blue eyes were slightly unfocused, and Julian picked up a vague scent that could have been antiseptics. She must have just gotten back from the hospital. Dr. Essie Sandman. Not Esther. Odd that she used her childhood nickname professionally, but maybe it appealed to her kid patients, who called her Dr. Essie.

“A nice surprise, I hope,” he said.

“So do I.”

Essie was such a downer, always expecting the worst. But that could have been because she was an oncologist and many of her young patients died. Or maybe her negative disposition had led her to her chosen profession.

“I figured you’d be out celebrating your big day with friends,” she said.

She had remembered his birthday. He hadn’t expected that.

“I’ll get you a beer. We can sit in the living room.” She headed toward the kitchen before he could remark on how odd it was that she had beer in the house.

He stepped into the “dead room” as he thought of it, since it was anything but a living room. It hadn’t changed in his lifetime and was rarely used since Dad died. His eyes roamed over the leather Chesterfield sofa and two navy-and-green plaid club chairs. Built-in bookshelves faced the windows, which were flanked with heavy drapes that matched the chairs. In the corner of the room was the game table where Julian and his dad once played chess every evening, until they didn’t. That ended when Julian was ten.

The heart attack had come while Dad was making dinner. Julian had heard a crash in the kitchen and ran in to find his father unconscious on the floor. Julian tried to shake his father awake, then called 911. Terrified, he left an urgent message for his mother, who’d been at the hospital working. If she’d been home, would that have changed anything? Probably, but unfortunately you couldn’t change the past.

Julian crossed to the white brick fireplace that hadn’t had a fire going since his father’s death. At least he could change that. He jiggled the flue open. A basket of logs sat on the hearthstone. They were probably twenty years old, but wood was wood. Julian laid the fire like he remembered his father doing, broke off a piece of kindling and lit it with a match from the matchbox. The fire caught. He fanned it and watched the flames flick against the logs, just as they had when he was a kid. He stood up, pleased with himself, and took a step back from the fireplace.

The familiar watercolor painting confronted him from above the mantel. It was a large piece, about two feet by three, and framed behind non-reflective glass. Julian had always been fascinated by the dark red stain that seemed to explode like a blood-tinged geyser. On the bottom of the composition lay mysterious, three-dimensional black shapes that looked like rotten potatoes, and everywhere were neon green dots that practically glowed. The painting was unsigned, but Julian could tell, even as a child, that the artist was very skilled. He had once asked his mother why she kept such a disturbing painting in the living room, but she had ignored his question.

“Here you go.” Essie seemed a bit wobbly as she came into the room and handed him one of the pewter steins she was carrying. She glanced at the fire in the hearth, then perched on the arm of the leather sofa and took a swig of her beer. Had she been drinking before he got here? But his mother never drank, did she? Julian knew very little about what his mother did or didn’t do.

He sat on the club chair closest to her, feeling awkward. He saw her every few months or so, usually at a restaurant in Manhattan. She’d call him when she was coming into the City to see a play or visit a museum.

Essie took another swallow, then rested the beer stein on her thigh. “Well, you must have something on your mind to make the long trek out here. What’s wrong?”

Where to begin? “I quit my job.”

She tilted her head, as he imagined she did when she examined an x-ray to determine how serious her patient’s condition was. “What triggered that?”

“I hated what I was doing. I guess I finally reached the saturation point.”

“Milestone birthdays can do that. Are you thinking of practicing medicine? Would you like me to make some calls?”

“No,” he said, a little too harshly. He softened his voice. “But thank you. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

He stared across the room at the table where he and his father once played chess. “I’ve decided it’s time to change my life. To try to make myself happy for once.”

“I thought you were happy.”

He shook his head. She obviously didn’t know him very well, either.

“Well, I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.

“That’s it?”

“What do you expect me to say?”

Julian got up and went over to bookshelves. The upper shelves were filled with dozens of medical books, the bottom two with his dad’s favorites— Clancy, King, Turow, Michener, Ken Follett’s
Pillars of the Earth
.

What had he been expecting from her? That she’d finally react? Finally notice him? “I wonder if you have any idea how badly I wanted your approval when I was growing up.”

“You had my approval.”

“It sure never felt that way,” he said. “After Dad died, I remember when you’d come home from the hospital, I’d show you my drawings. Dad always told me how much potential I had as an artist, but you hardly looked at them.”

She took a sip of beer. “It was a difficult time for me, too.”

“I know that, and all I wanted to do was make you happy. Rhonda was off at college, so it was just the two of us. And when I saw that my art meant nothing to you, I started working harder in school.”

She gave him a funny look that he didn’t know how to interpret.

“I thought if I went to medical school, that would make you proud, but you didn’t even come to my graduation. So I went for a PhD at one of the top biophysics programs in the country, but you didn’t make it to that ceremony either. Only Nana came. Only Nana cared about me.”

“Pfff,” she said, pushing the air away with her hand. “Your grandmother only cares about herself.”

“That’s not true. It’s Nana who’s been around for me since Dad died.” A collection of his father’s pipes were lying on a shelf. He picked one up, feeling the weight of the polished bowl in his hand. “I spent my whole life trying to get your attention, but you were too busy to notice.”

“That’s just your perception, Julian.”

“Really? So help me fix my perception. Tell me that whatever path I choose, you’ll still be proud of me. Even if I decide to take up painting again.”

She looked away. “Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“Yes,” he said, even though up until this moment he had been unsure of his next move. Still wasn’t sure of it.

“You’re thirty years old. You don’t need my approval.”

“I know that, but I would like it. And I’d finally like to understand why you never seemed to care about me when I was a kid.”

“I did the best I could.” She stared into her beer stein. “I’m not a warm, hugging person. That was your father’s role. I was the breadwinner and I enabled him to be the nurturer. It was an arrangement we both wanted.”

But was it the arrangement Julian had wanted? Sure, he understood it. His dad had been a fifth-grade teacher and was always home early. He made dinner, reviewed Julian’s homework, took care of Julian when he was hurt. Julian held the pipe to his nose, imagining he could still smell cherry tobacco smoke.

“That’s why we worked as a family,” his mother said. “We each had our own areas of responsibility.” She took another gulp and set the stein on the end table. “Then your father died. And I didn’t know how to do the things he’d been so good at. So I just kept doing the part I knew. It wasn’t like I had much instruction on being a good mother from my own.”

“I know you and Nana have issues, but…”

“It wasn’t just your grandmother and me. She had problems with her brother, too.” Essie got up from the arm of the sofa and went over to the fireplace, where she gazed up at the watercolor above the mantel. “He painted this,” she said. “My Uncle Saul.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “This has been here my entire life. You never mentioned someone in the family made it.”

“Didn’t I?” she said. “Uncle Saul gave it to me as a present. On my thirteenth birthday. My mother was very angry about that.”

Saul had been his grandmother’s younger brother. Nana occasionally talked about him, but she never said he’d been an artist or that they’d had issues.

“Why are you telling me this now?” he asked.

“To give you some understanding of what your grandmother’s really like. You see, she took the painting away from me and hid it. I found it years later.”

“Why would she hide it?”

“She hides a lot of things.”

It was hard to believe how different Essie’s perceptions of his grandmother were from his own. “What you’re saying about Nana makes no sense to me.”

“Your grandmother shows you a different side of herself. She loves you.” She leaned against the mantel, as though she needed support to keep from falling. “But she hates me. Always has.”

“Hates you?” he said. “No, she doesn’t.”

She gave him a sad smile, looking like a hurt child.

He got that knot in his stomach again, but this time it felt like he’d read something he shouldn’t have in his mother’s hidden diary. Some dirty little secret he’d have been better off not knowing.