Thorns of Truth (38 page)

But even those stories couldn’t warm Sylvie on winter nights when the landlord turned the heat down so low they had to huddle together under the covers to keep from freezing.

Sylvie’s asthma would flare up then, and Mama would sit her up in bed, rubbing her thin chest with Vicks VapoRub.

What Sylvie remembered most about those nights was how hard she’d struggled, not only to breathe, but to keep from panicking. Lying in bed, surrounded by pans of hot water emitting ghostly fingers of steam. The sharp eucalyptus odor of Vicks barely penetrating the thick fog clogging her lungs. And Mama, dear Mama—singing to her softly, Viennese lullabies that made Sylvie cry even as they soothed her fears.

She felt now as she had then, as if the only thing keeping her alive was the familiar torso against which she lay, the arms that circled her as securely as a gold band. Mama was gone, but she had Nikos. Sylvie opened her eyes and smiled up at him, a smile that felt like a thin line traced by a fingertip along a frosty windowpane. She was cold … so cold. Not even Nikos could warm her.

At the same time, she felt oddly weightless. The thorn that had been plucked from her heart had liberated her in some way. She was sorry for the years of pain her silence had cost Rose … and for the anguish and confusion Rachel would suffer in the months and years to come. She was sorry, too, about Iris. But none of it could take away from this wondrous lightness.

My children will survive, she thought.

Rose? If there had been time, Sylvie would have counseled her not to view her solitary widowhood as some sort of virtue; a sturdiness that doesn’t know how to bend can become a weakness, she’d have said.

Rachel? She needed to understand that saving the world began with shoring up one’s own ramparts.

Iris was the one who worried her most. The thought of her granddaughter tugged at Sylvie. She’d wanted to say goodbye, and to plead with Iris not to turn away from the family who loved her.

So little time … so much left unsaid!

Panic set in again. Sylvie. drowning, struggled to stay afloat. She had to fight this, she told herself. Hoard every moment that remained.

Then a voice, so real she could have sworn she felt its breath against her ear, whispered. They’ll miss you, but their lives will go on. Mama’s voice.

Yes, Sylvie thought, relaxing a little. Even her garden, she knew, would survive without her. Nurtured by other hands, and by God. Come winter, its branches would grow bare, and its roots curl in on themselves … but in spring, it would bloom again.…

I remember, I remember… the roses, red and white.…

Sylvie labored mightily to draw in a breath; it felt like a rope being pulled through the eye of a needle. She no longer had any sensation in her hands and feet—and that was a blessing. She hardly felt the cold that had ached in every corner of her being. It would be over soon, she knew. And she understood that to be a blessing, too.

But before she let go, there was one last loved one she needed to say goodbye to.…

Sylvie lifted her face to the man she had known nearly half her life … the man with whom she’d shared thirty years of sorrows and joys in every shape and size.

“I … will … miss you.” She managed to speak the words, but only barely. “I … never asked. Do you … believe … in heaven?”

Nikos nodded. It was as if some invisible bolts holding his expression intact had loosened, causing the rough planes of his face to sag. “I believe in God,” he said. “And if I am made in His image, then He is a builder like me. Heaven must look like New York City, I think … lots of skyscrapers.”

“I’ll save a room for you.”

“Next to yours, I hope,” he answered in an unfamiliar choked voice. “One with a view.”

“A … garden, too.”

“Of course.”

Nikos cupped a hand about her face, tipping it so that her chin rested against his rib cage. He didn’t want her to see him crying … and that was okay. In all these years with Nikos, Sylvie had been unsuccessful in only one respect: she’d been unable to convince him that to cry was to feel, and to feel was to be strong.

My spirit flew in feathers then, that is so heavy now.…

“Nikos?” she breathed. “Are you … sorry. That we never married?”

He was silent, his broad chest lifting and falling with a reassuring steadiness. When he spoke, it was with the same unwavering directness, like a skilled hand on a plow, cutting wide, straight furrows in the earth.

“You are my wife,” he told her. “In every way that counts. I used to think it mattered what people would say. I believed, as my father did, that only when a woman wears his ring on her finger can a man feel she is truly his.” Nikos sighed. “But I know now that to love someone … there is no piece of paper for that. And a ring … it is empty in the middle. The emptiness can be filled only by the person who wears it.”

Sylvie laid a hand over his. “I love you,” she whispered. The weight on her chest seemed to have eased for just an instant, enabling her to speak clearly the words he needed to hear. “You are my husband.”

“I’ll look after her … our Rose,” he promised.

“Look after Rachel, too,” she pleaded. “And Iris. See that she gets … the help she needs.”

“I will.”

I remember, I remember … the fir-trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops were close against the sky.…

The room seemed to fade, like a picture exposed to sudden intense light. But she wasn’t at all frightened. Even as her senses began to fade, too, she felt she was being lifted, borne on some invisible current of brightness.

Oh, how lovely! she opened her mouth to cry out. But no words came. There was only a rushing sound, like the wind stirring the tops of tall trees, like the silken murmuring of pine needles in a forest too vast for any map. She could feel that breeze against her skin, the warm lick of it sliding along her arms and legs as she was lifted toward the sky—like when she was a little girl, swinging in the playground, her bottom snug in the leather sling-seat, its creaking chains seeming to writhe against her palms, the little bits and pieces of sun that shone through the narrow leaves of the ailanthus trees falling against her face like warm kisses.

I remember, I remember where 1 used to swing, and thought the air must rush as fresh to swallows on the wing.…

The sun wasn’t coming in bits and pieces anymore. It was shining down on her with all its might … with a brightness that seemed to beckon her toward its source. She felt as if she were floating … as if her childhood fear of swinging so high she would actually be plucked right up into the sky were coming true at last. Only it wasn’t scary at all.… It felt perfectly natural, in fact.

Sylvie, in the end, found it quite easy to let go. Dying isn’t hard, she would have said, had she been able to form the words. Dying was a rose without thorns—beautiful, with nothing to prick you. It’s life, she thought in her last instant of consciousness, that makes us bleed.…

Chapter 14

T
HE FUNERAL SERVICE
was held at Temple Emanu-El. But those who came to mourn—the synagogue was filled to overflowing with relatives, friends, former employees—agreed that the real tribute to Sylvie came afterwards, when she was laid to rest on a green slope shaded by a Norway maple just beginning to lose its leaves, under the most brilliant fall sky in recent memory.

In accordance with her faith, the coffin was fashioned from plain pine, without adornment of any kind. No flowers—that, too, was forbidden. In exactly one year, there would be a ceremony to unveil the headstone yet to be carved, and small stones would mark the presence of those who’d come to pay their respects. But until then, Sylvie would be blanketed only in the green, growing things she’d loved—soft grass spangled with the bright coins of dandelions; fallen leaves offering themselves up like small curled hands.

Rachel watched as Nikos sank to his knees before the open grave. Any weeping he might have done, he’d done in private, and the face that stared vacantly into the gouged earth, except for his bloodshot eyes, made her think of an Easter Island statue—blocky, rough, pagan somehow. She saw his lips moving, as if in silent prayer, but if Nikos belonged to any church—or even believed in God—Rachel had never heard about it.

It occurred to her, as she stood with her head unbowed, and her hair blowing in the faint breeze, that there was a great deal she didn’t know—and not just about the people in her mother’s life. If Mama had been able to keep Rose a secret all these years, what else had she hidden? What secrets had she taken with her to wherever she’d gone?

Even more troubling was that Rachel, who should have been frantic to explore every dark corner, every twisting path of her mother’s life, felt nothing more than mild curiosity. The wrecking ball that had swung down out of the blue had leveled her whole existence, leaving her utterly empty. It was as if Mama’s secret had robbed her of her ability to feel as well as her identity.

Rachel looked around her, at the grieving faces forming a ragged wreath about the grave. Aunts, uncles, cousins—all the people whose blood she was supposed to have shared.

Her gaze shifted to Rose, defiantly resplendent, not in black, but in a muted red suit. Or maybe she’d understood Mama better than anyone—Mama’s impeccable taste, and her love of bright colors. Rose wore a pale, strained look, but she, like Nikos, remained dry-eyed.

Flanking Rose were her sons, Drew and Jay, sober in suits—though Jay seemed to have shot up an inch or two since he’d last worn his. They looked more dazed than sorrowful, but it was touching to see how solicitous they were of their mother. Drew, muscular and dark-haired like his father, with an arm around her shoulders, and Jay standing guard with all the macho seriousness of a rookie cop. They were a closed corporation, those three, Rachel thought. Even Eric, standing a few feet away, remained outside that circle.

Rachel had to search the crowd to find Iris. Throughout the funeral service, her daughter, who’d been devastated by the death of her beloved grandmother, had sat dutifully between Rachel and Brian, but since arriving at the cemetery, she’d more or less melted into the background. When Rachel finally spotted her, half hidden behind the mountainous bulk of Morris Beder, a childhood friend of her mother’s from the Bronx, she felt a pang that brought the faint sting of tears to her eyes. So thin! How was it possible, in just a few weeks, to have lost what looked like at least ten pounds? In a long black cotton-pique dress that hung forlornly about her ankles. Iris was like some spectral vision.

Rachel thought:
I need to talk to her, alone, find out what’s the matter.
Whatever it was, Mama had been alarmed. If it hadn’t been for …

Her sense of urgency dissolved suddenly as a sudden gust of wind shook a fistful of raindrops from the maple tree—a souvenir from last night’s storm—onto the grass at Rachel’s feet. It was a full-time job, Rachel thought dully, just looking after herself. Like a ventriloquist, she had to be conscious every minute of making sure her arms and legs moved in concert, that the words coming out of her mouth weren’t gibberish.

Even Brian, standing beside her, seemed far away. They were like two people on opposite sides of a glass wall. She could see him—hear him, even—but if she’d tried to touch him, she felt sure her fingers would have met only with cool, slick glass. Brian must have felt it, too, for his eyes, she saw, weren’t on her, or even the rabbi chanting the mourners’
kaddish,
but on Rose.

Rose caught his gaze and held it, the two of them seeming to share a private communication that needed no words. Rose, in her dark-crimson suit—the one flower adorning Mama’s grave. Rose, who for years had kept silent out of respect for the mother that Rachel, in many ways, had taken for granted.

Had Brian known about Mama? Had Rose confided in him all those years ago? The thought, like some nasty hornet that wouldn’t be brushed away, was almost enough to stir Rachel from her strange lethargy. Almost … but not quite.

Watching her husband reluctantly tear his gaze from the woman he would have married but for an act of God, Rachel gave herself a mental shake.
Do something! FEEL something, damnit!

But all she felt was impotent. Like someone in a wheelchair willing her paralyzed limbs to move. How could she keep her husband, her child—her
life
—from slipping away, when she herself had come undone?

Rachel felt someone touch her elbow, and looked down into the concerned brown eyes of her friend Kay. “You dropped this,” Kay murmured, handing Rachel a crumpled handkerchief. Dear Kay, who’d had the good sense to wear a purple so dark it was nearly black, even if it made her look like a plump eggplant.

“Thanks.” Rachel tucked it into the pocket of her black coatdress. In storybooks, she thought, it was the lovelorn gentleman who returned the handkerchief. She glanced again at Brian, for whom she might have been invisible, and was ambushed by the first real emotion in days: a sorrow that pierced through the cottony layers in which she felt swathed, all the way down to her heart.

Touch my hand, tell me we’ll be all right … anything,
she pleaded silently.

If only to let her know she was still here. Still important to him.

But when Brian did speak, as the rabbi’s wailing chant reached its crescendo, it was only to murmur, “Peter wants us to meet at the house afterwards. To go over the will. Is that okay with you?” Peter Harbinson, Mama’s lawyer and good friend.

Rachel nodded, unable to speak.

The will. Of course. Somehow, in all the shock and confusion, she’d forgotten there was a will to be read, a sizable estate to be distributed. As if Mama’s things were a pie to be divided up into even slices. As if Sylvie’s house, her garden with its lovingly tended roses could ever be anything but her own.

You believed
you
were part of her, too, remember? But that was only an illusion.

No more real than the hand she slipped into the crook of her husband’s elbow. For, had she been flesh and blood, wouldn’t she have felt something—some warmth, some answering pressure—from him? Instead, there was only cool gabardine, against which her fingers made barely a ripple.