Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (33 page)

The minute I enter the little sanctuary, a profound lethargy spreads through me. I sink down on the plush sofa, and my mother enumerates all the items on the Levitsky menu. I nod submissively. At some point during the procession of dishes, I fall into a limp, dreamless sleep. When I wake, I take the elevator down to the pool to swim laps. Sometimes I’m joined by Max, a hollow-chested man who before going into the water dons, with the shamelessness of the elderly, a white spandex bathing cap and state-of-the-art scuba gear. Then I head back upstairs for another carbohydrate-enriched meal, while on the television the mysteries of woodwork are unlocked by a man we can’t exactly hear but who inspires confidence. My mother continues to recount stories of sedition on the part of manufacturers—she calls them corporations, these days—
and her victories over them. But Gustav has succeeded in shifting her base of operations, and her narratives are now confined to the present. She no longer mentions the war.

Everyone else mentions the war; the silence has been lifted, replaced by a flood of memory and monuments. A search for information on the Internet yields millions of sites.

I’m interested, now, in my mother’s past, but having trodden those merciless waters for so many years, she’s better off on shore, and I let the past be. Instead, I tell her and Gustav about my life—the sort of people I meet at Sororité, the dramas I watch from the sidelines or hear about at my table. I’m considered a good listener, a safe repository for confessions of harboured resentments or infatuations. “I’m the on-site Mother Superior,” I say, and they chuckle. They chuckle at all my stories; I make them funny. Since I’m not involved in any of them, it’s no effort to take a lighter view. But about Tyen I haven’t breathed a word. I don’t know yet where, among the
dramatis personae
of this mystery play, she’ll be cast.

In the evening, I return to my place. I bought this triplex with the war reparations that for years had been arriving regularly from Germany. My mother never touched those payments; she thought they were a trick, and that if she withdrew so much as a dollar, uniformed Nazis might spring from behind the counter at the Bank of Montreal and take her away. But a few years after I moved into the flat, the building went up for sale, and I persuaded my mother to release the money for two down payments: the triplex for me, a condo unit for her and Bubby.

Fanya resisted at first, but the Bedford Street neighbourhood had deteriorated, and one evening hoodlums snatched her famous alligator purse. Mrs. Blustein came to my mother’s rescue once more; there was an apartment for sale in the Côte St. Luc building where she lived. Pleased with its immediate availability, the security features, and the idea of a friend close by, my mother overcame her fear of moving house. She gave me custody of her account and asked me to go ahead with both purchases. When the
last papers had been signed, Gustav insisted on treating us to a meal at Ruby Foo’s, famous for Cantonese egg rolls, boisterous celebrity diners, and the beautiful silk-clad woman who sold cigarettes on a tray. Bubby, as always, preferred to stay at home, but she was happy about the move, and while we were at the restaurant she baked us an apple cake. That evening we all gathered around the kitchen table in the Bedford Street flat for the last time.

Bubby is gone, of course. If she were alive, she’d be well over a hundred. She was sick for a week, unable to swallow or eat. I came to Intensive Care and said her name, held her smooth, round hand, now shiny and slightly waxy. If she felt my hand on hers or knew I was there, she didn’t respond. An hour later the nurse told me it was over; she’d stopped breathing.

I remembered a story my mother used to tell me. I’d lost the story inside the maelstrom of my mother’s memories and my resistance to those memories, but it resurfaced now. When my father was a baby, my grandmother had taken him with her to visit friends in the country. She left him in the garden, under a tree in bloom. My father lay on his back in his baby carriage, looking up at the white and pink blossoms. Miriam was indoors, having tea, biting into a cookie, when all of a sudden she cried out,
He can’t breathe
. She ran out to the pram and saw that two petals had fallen on my father’s nose and mouth, and she was right, he couldn’t breathe, he was suffocating.

Her sixth sense gave him sixteen more years that were good, before the war came. Her sixth sense gave me life.

I phoned my mother from the hospital and told her Bubby Miriam was gone. There was no funeral; my grandmother didn’t want one. No one in her family, other than my father, had had a funeral: everyone else had been thrown onto piles. My mother, under the influence of Gustav, behaved well. Every day I thank the good angels for bringing Gustav into our lives.

. . .

As for the Michaelis, Glenn moved in with them that September. My mother, who kept up with developments from her post at the dry cleaners, informed me that Glenn’s high school, Seed, had allowed him to complete his last year by correspondence. Rosie was taking music at Cégep and Glenn accompanied her to her classes. I was at Cégep, too, but not the same one, as the last thing I wanted was to see the Eden gang. I enrolled at a more offbeat, inner-city campus, a converted St. Henri factory, not far from the Camp Bakunin pickup spot, as it happened.

That winter, Mr. Michaeli died; my mother called to tell me, and I considered going to the funeral, but in the end I came down with the flu and couldn’t make it even if I’d wanted to. Sheila had also gravitated to the St. Henri Cégep, and sometimes we ran into each other in the college’s lounge, where between classes we lazed about on red and grey ottomans. Sheila told me that Glenn had been accepted by the Math department at Harvard. They were all moving to Boston: Glenn, Rosie, Mrs. Michaeli.

“How come you’re not in touch?” Sheila asked. “You used to be inseparable.”

I shrugged. “Things change.” Rosie had left several messages for me with my mother, but I never answered and she’d given up. I did hear from Mrs. Michaeli, though. The trip to Paris had whet her appetite for travel, and she joined a trekkers’ club. At regular intervals, my mother and I received postcards from her of desert dunes, children in holiday costume hugging shaggy llamas with oddly anthropoid legs, sci-fi peaks of aquamarine glaciers.
The world is larger and more diverse than anyone imagines
, she wrote.

Dvora is in touch with Rosie—she’s in touch with everyone. Two days after high school, Dvora found work as a waitress at a seafood restaurant, and there she met an Australian obstetrician who was in Montreal for a convention. When he returned to Australia, she went with him. They have five children and a horse farm, or maybe not exactly a farm, maybe just a large field that
allows them to keep horses and enter competitions. Banished, as she puts it, to antipodean Australia, Dvora maintains contact via email with what she likes to call “life on the outside.” She mentions mutual acquaintances from time to time, but the information is skeletal: Rosie’s had three children, all boys; Earl and his wife are real estate agents in Toronto; Avi is a lawyer. A catalogue of lives.

Sheila phones me once in a while, or I phone her. She teaches at a high school in Vancouver; I gather that she’s popular with her students. Her two marriages ended in divorce, but she has a son, currently studying at Stanford, from a third liaison. Last year, her father fell off a ladder at work and died shortly afterwards. Her mother is at a nursing home in New Brunswick which is run, conveniently, by one of Sheila’s sisters. In her usual wry, dry way Sheila explained why she didn’t attend her father’s funeral and hasn’t been to see her mother. “My mother wouldn’t recognize me, and my father wouldn’t have, either.” She’s invited me to visit her in Vancouver, but I can’t leave Sailor. In any case, between semesters I find I want only to vegetate on the sofa under a mohair blanket and watch movies from La Boîte Noir.

Anthony has a child. Gloria came searching for him in late August; she’d had a change of heart and was looking forward to a happy reunion—especially in light of the good news that she was pregnant with Anthony’s child. Patrick had already absconded, and Gloria, scrounging for information about her husband, asked to see me, so I went round to Vera’s to meet her. Vera left us to ourselves.

I don’t know exactly what Anthony saw in her; we hardly ever know. To me, she seemed unengaging, but maybe pregnancy had made her placid, flattened an alluring intensity or hunger that had been there before. Or maybe I was too distraught to see her clearly. I gave her a truncated version of our last encounter: the restaurant, the nightclub, Anthony’s intimations that he was leaving soon,
though he didn’t say where. My voice almost betrayed me, but Gloria didn’t know me well enough to identify as out of the ordinary the irregular pitch and halting syntax.

She nodded as I spoke. When I’d finished, she said, “We fought, you know. We fought over nothing. He was trying to protect me, I guess, and I kept saying, you’re being patronizing. But he wasn’t, I don’t think. Anyhow, he was right about those guys I went off with. All they wanted was for me to make them coffee and sandwiches. Women’s rights, that’s just lip service. They weren’t a real group. There’s power in sticking together, not in dividing up again and again. And sisters have to stick together if we’re going to get anywhere.”

It was my turn to nod.

I felt small, physically, I felt I was shrinking. Lying had shrunk me. I made my excuses as soon as I could and ran down the street, disoriented and ashamed. At the water’s edge I caught my breath. The lake’s soft beauty, its gentle desolation in the ethereal light of dusk, shifted me back into place. Anthony’s reach was long, but it weakened in the face of such distractions.

I worried about Gloria, pregnant and husbandless, and I was relieved to hear that two months after her fruitless visit she moved in with a famous New York theatre director. Vera bought an apartment in Brooklyn Heights so she could help with the baby. Gloria sent me news of the birth on a postcard of the Manhattan skyline. She’d had a boy on December 11, his name was David.
If you hear from Tony, tell him we miss him
, she wrote.

At first, Vera phoned me every few months. Skimming was not her style, and her conversation drew on unanswered, and unanswerable, questions. She assumed there had been a romantic entanglement up at the country house—heartbreak, unrequited love, perhaps a triangle that had driven us all apart. She asked if I’d heard from her sons. No, I said, we weren’t in touch. Facts are elusive, she said; they serve to hide more than they reveal. Like language itself, she mused. And did I know that Patrick was in
Alberta in a small northern town, working as a shipper? He phoned her on Sundays but didn’t have much to say. He seemed to like the job and the people he worked with. He was on the defensive, she told me, torn between concern for her and resentment. She hoped he would find a way out.

The shipping stint lasted two years. Then Patrick had a fight with a new manager and quit. He continued westward to Vancouver—“even farther from me,” Vera commented, with her usual stricken composure. He decided to go back to school and study library science. And it was at the library that he met a woman who was translating a thesis on the medieval Jewish commentator Abravanel. Or Abrabanel. Or Abarbanel. That was the difficulty that brought them together: the many spellings of the commentator’s name. She was separated and already had a child; Patrick moved in with her, and they married when she became pregnant again. Their daughter is nineteen now, or maybe twenty. “It would be good if he found some balance,” Vera said. “Adar initiated the relationship, I think. She is the expressive, vulnerable self he longs to release but can’t. That can spell disaster.” As for Anthony, he was still at the monastery in India. “Searching for something, just like his father,” she sighed. She heard from him once a year, she told me; he sent her long letters. He was doing well; he liked the life he led; it was peaceful. Gerald, on the other hand, had returned from his travels. Did I want to come for supper and meet him?

I declined. It was hard enough lying to her on the phone; I couldn’t imagine maintaining the deceit for an entire evening, making small talk with Anthony’s parents while images of his freakish burial forced themselves on me like a movie reel spinning out of control. And Vera, who had struck me as a mind reader when I first met her, would notice at once that something was awry. No wonder Patrick had left.

Three months ago, I ran into Vera at a bookstore. She wanted to buy a gift for her grandchild, Anthony’s son. He liked biography,
did I have any ideas? In her billowing beige windbreaker she looked like a sad old owl. She was glad to see me, and we talked about my job, my mother, the weather. Then suddenly she peered at me and said, “I think you know where Tony is. I think you know and don’t want to tell me.”

“We promised not to tell,” I said uneasily.

“Ah. Well, as long as he’s happy with that sort of life. I thought it was a phase that would pass. But as long as he’s happy. It’s too bad for David, you know. Still, Wallie is a loving father to him.” And then I imagined that she looked at me suspiciously.

I looked away.

A few days later her heart, a frail bird’s heart, gave way in her sleep. Gerald phoned for an ambulance and then he phoned Patrick. The funeral was private, but there was a column in the newspaper about Vera: her work as a child psychiatrist, the books she’d written. I called Patrick and suggested we get together. “It would be nice to see you,” I said, “after all these years. I’d like to meet Adar too.”

I was aware, as I left the house, that I was excited—it was the sort of pleasurable excitement I’d feel if I were about to mount a major exhibition, or see a photo of my father. Patrick was after all a link to something, and maybe he had the key—though I hardly knew what I might be trying to unlock.

Patrick introduced me to Adar in the noisy brasserie. I saw almost at once that his marriage was not a success, and during the next few hours I was privy to a discouraging close-up. Patrick’s self-protective irony had strayed into the arena of offhand nastiness. He had become cruel—maybe against his will and without his approval, or even his recognition. Subtly he disguised a frozen rage, detached himself from his behaviour. Only when he spoke about his daughter did he step back, or away, as he had when he’d communed with Woofie, all those years ago in his attic apartment. His face lit up, and I saw that he was a loving father. But the rest of the world was as deadly as ever, and he had become deadly in return.