Saving Grace (10 page)

As they passed the dining-hall entrance, Yaacov barreled out of the kitchen to intercept them. “Find anything?” he asked his daughter.

“We did all right. I’ll show you later.” Looking at the dish towel he wore around his throat like an ascot, Tamar asked, “Did they stick you in the kitchen again?”

“Goddamn Yossi,” Yaacov snorted. “Whoever thought I’d come to this?”

She made sympathetic noises. Eighteen months ago, riding through a field of alfalfa that the kibbutz cultivated to keep the ibex out of their real crops, her father had fallen from the tractor. For over two hours he lay in agony on the damp ground. By the time someone noticed the idling tractor and came to investigate, the wet cold had seeped into his bones. His broken hip healed well, but he developed rheumatism and a strain of pneumonia that proved highly resistant to antibiotics. He spent three months in Tamar’s hospital, but as soon as he was back on his feet, he began fighting with Yossi, the kibbutz secretary. Yaacov insisted on being reassigned to his old job in the fields; Yossi, on orders from Tamar, adamantly refused.

Tamar linked her arm in his. “I had a letter from Clara.”

He grunted. “What’s she got to say for herself?”

“She sends regards.”

“I bet.”

“I’m thinking of asking Grace to come.”

Yaacov’s face lit with pleasure, then turned dour. “Clara won’t stand for it.”

“If Gracie wants to come, she’ll come.”

“Stubborn, is she?” said the old man, who had never met his granddaughter.

Tamar smiled. “She comes by it honestly.”

“In my opinion, she won’t come. Your mother’s poisoned her mind against us.”

“Can’t hurt to ask.”

Micha made a face at her behind Yaacov’s back. “Remember last time.”

“Gracie and Paul couldn’t be more different,” Tamar replied firmly.

“Then I like her already,” Micha said. His cousin Paul’s one and only visit, at the age of 18, had been disastrous. Tamar had arranged for him to live and work with the volunteers, young people from all over the world; but Paul refused to work, pointing out that he was on vacation and adding that where he came from, dinner guests were not expected to wash the dishes.

Tamar curbed her tongue and arranged for his transfer, at her expense, to the kibbutz guest house. On his first night there, Paul put his dusty shoes outside his door for cleaning. Next morning, when he found them untouched, he carried his complaint all the way to the kibbutz secretary, who laughed in his face and to that day took pleasure in retelling the story.

A few nights after that incident, someone crept into Paul’s room, stole his shoes, and left a pair of stinking galoshes from the coop, caked with chicken shit and mud. Paul was not amused. The following morning, without a word to anyone, he took the bus to Tel Aviv, where he stayed in the Hilton until he could get a flight back to New York.

Micha didn’t care; the kid was nothing to him. But Yaacov, who felt in Paul’s desertion a painful echo of his wife’s, was deeply hurt. Tamar said it was a shame, but not entirely the boy’s fault; it was a matter of upbringing.

“Gracie is different,” she said later, as they lolled, pleasantly tired, in deck chairs on her lawn. Half an hour to go before dinner, the sun was setting over sandstone mountains that glowed pink and gold. This was the breathing hour, when the air was sweet and cool and the parched earth sighed with relief.

“Mother seems obsessed with this child,” Micha said lightly to his grandfather. “The daughter she never had, perhaps.”

“I’ve reconciled myself to having a son,” she said, with a complacent look at him. “But I do feel it’s a shame there’s been so little contact with the other family.”

“Thank your mother for that,” Yaacov said automatically.

“It’s not a matter of fault; it’s just a shame.” Her muscles ached from the digging. Micha moved behind her, and began massaging her shoulders. Tamar closed her eyes and Gracie’s face appeared before her.

The girl had been fourteen when they met. It was one year after Tamar’s husband died. She didn’t choose to go to New York; the hospital sent her to deliver a paper at an international oncology conference in New York.

She had disembarked at Kennedy Airport, rumpled and jet- worn from the twelve-hour flight, to find the whole family waiting at the gate. Even before Tamar recognized them, they caught her eye with their elegance. Lily and Clara in furs, Jonathan in a suit. Clara spotted her first and ran forward, crying her name. The others followed. Lily offered a cheek, soft as rose petals, and Jonathan gave her a quick hug. The son followed his father’s example. Tamar looked around for the daughter, and spotted her standing some feet away dressed in blue jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, remote and watchful. A slender child, with a thin, dark face much like her father’s, raven hair that hung straight to her shoulders, and bangs that came down to her eyes, giving her a hooded look. Summoned by her father, Grace came forward and shook Tamar’s hand but did not kiss her.

They drove to Jonathan’s house in Highview, a three-story brick mansion on the outermost edge of the borough over which he presided as Democratic leader. It was beautifully decorated but oppressively large; though she felt provincial doing it, Tamar could not help counting the rooms and estimating the number of kibbutz families that could be accommodated in comfort. On the ground floor, spacious reception rooms flowed one into another, and original art was displayed without pretension. A sunlit music room led through French doors into a greenhouse, which opened into three acres of varied and delightful gardens, designed by Lily and maintained by a small army of gardeners. Yet all this splendor served only to sadden Tamar, for it seemed to her that its creator had lacked a worthier object for her talents and energy; she noticed too that although it was all her handiwork, Lily did not seem to own this house, but rather wandered through it like a guest.

They dined
en famille
the first evening, at a table laid with white linen, silver, and crystal, groaning with food and French wines. The meal was excellent but the conversation languished. The gap was too wide. Tamar found it hard to look Jonathan in the face, ashamed for him that he should need so much.

She stayed with them for a week. Her days were taken up by the conference, where she delivered her paper and listened to many others, and her evenings by the family, who seemed determined that like it or not, she would enjoy New York. They went to the theater and concerts, which she did enjoy, and to dinner parties, which she did not. When Jonathan introduced her to his friends, he invariably used her title: “My sister, Dr. Tamar Kimchi.” She saw this as a sign of embarrassment, a means of compensating for her plainness, her unfashionable clothes and short, choppy hairstyle, so convenient in the operating room but so difficult elsewhere.

Tamar enjoyed Clara, felt an unexpected affinity for her, and spent several amusing hours trying to imagine what had ever brought two such disparate people as Yaacov and Clara together. Clara was as voluble as Yaacov was quiet, as practical as he was dreamy. The one thing they had in common, Tamar finally concluded, was the very thing that had torn them apart. Both were convinced that they’d found that elusive grail, the good life.

Toward her brother Tamar felt no affinity, perverse or otherwise. He was too smooth, too rich, too secretive—the kind of man, she guessed, who kept secrets even from himself.

Despite the affluence of her brother’s home, Tamar sensed in it an uneasiness embodied in the little girl, who stood out from her glamorous family, a little waif amidst the riches. Gracie rarely spoke, but followed her aunt with watchful, guarded eyes. In this family of charmers, she seemed indifferent to being liked, self-possessed beyond her years.

Gracie’s room, which Tamar, to her surprise, was invited to see, made a statement at striking and deliberate odds with Lily’s. Mother and daughter clearly shared a taste for simplicity; but while Lily’s was realized
 
through exquisite, costly materials, Gracie’s took form in raw brick and plywood. Her bedroom was sparsely furnished with a mattress on the floor, a desk, a simple pine dresser, and rows of homemade bookshelves, unvarnished planks balanced on bricks and anchored by the weight of hundreds of books. A dozen locked diaries were the only personal belongings displayed in a room too arid to support even a stuffed animal or rag doll.

The doctor in Tamar diagnosed a kind of material anorexia; Gracie’s appetite seemed fine, but she could not stomach
things.

Several days after her arrival, Jonathan invited Tamar into his study. It was the first time since childhood that they’d been alone together. They studied each other in silence, intimate strangers wondering at their resemblance to one another, which was much greater than their resemblance to either parent. Both had olive complexions, small neat features, black hair, and wiry builds; only Tamar’s eyes were robin’s-egg blue, Jonathan’s greenish gray.

“You have a fine family,” Tamar said. Talking to Jonathan, she was conscious of the oddness of her English, fluent but stripped of regional accent, spoken with a lilting Hebrew inflection.

“I’m sorry I never had the chance to meet yours,” Jonathan said.

He astonished her. He could have come to her wedding. He
should
have come to Zach’s funeral. They’d invited him to Micha’s bar mitzvah; he sent the boy a ridiculously large check but stayed away. She knew that he had often traveled through Europe, had even visited Egypt; but he never came to Israel. Fair enough, he owed her nothing; but their father was another matter. Jonathan’s cold indifference was an unending source of pain in Yaacov’s life.

“Never mind my family,” Tamar said in her forthright way. “Why have you never visited our father?”

He considered before he spoke—he was the kind of man, she thought, who always would. “I invited him to come here.”

“He wants to. He’d love to see his grandchildren. But he doesn’t believe he’d be welcome.”

“I asked him. I offered to pay his way.”

Tamar waved this aside. “But you’ve never come to him.”

“I’m not the one who deserted him,” Jonathan said. “He left us.”

“Clara left us and took you with her,” Tamar said. “I remember. You were too young.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. But why should we fight their battles now? It’s ancient history. We’re all grown-up.”

Tamar agreed; but, having dismissed the only subject that bound them, they fell into an awkward silence. She walked around the room, which was far less stylish than the rest of the house and had about it an air of sanctuary. Massive bookshelves lined the walls, filled with law books, volumes on public policy, money management, real estate, and political biographies. In a dim corner of the room, behind a worn leather armchair, were older-looking paperbacks, carefully preserved but exuding the faint, forlorn odor of books long unread. The wall behind the large captain’s desk was papered in deep-crimson-and-black print and covered with framed photographs of Jonathan with various important-looking people. Tamar recognized three: the governor of New York, the mayor, and a former president. Lily, who photographed like an angel, appeared by his side in many of the photos.

On top of the desk was a portrait of the family. Tamar picked it up and studied it. Jonathan was standing between Paul and Lily, an arm around each of their shoulders. All three beamed at the camera. A little to the side stood Gracie, aged twelve or thirteen. She stared unsmiling at the camera, her body canted away from the others.

“What is it with Gracie, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Jonathan bristled. “What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t talk. I’ve yet to hear her speak one word to you, civil or otherwise.”

“A bad case of adolescence. My daughter is convinced she knows better than anyone. She is the supreme judge of human conduct, especially mine, of which she strongly disapproves.”

“What does she disapprove of?”

“We had a falling out a while ago, when we built this house. She didn’t want to move. But I had the chance to acquire this place at an exceptionally good. In fact,” he couldn’t resist adding, “in two years it’s already doubled in value.”

“Why should moving house upset her so much?”

Jonathan hesitated. She thought he was going to blow her off, but he surprised her by answering. “Our last house was in a town called Martindale. A short time after I sold it, the city announced a plan to integrate Martindale through clusters of low-income housing. My charming daughter had the gall to accuse me of selling out ahead of time, for fear housing values would plummet.”

“Did they?”
 

“For a while. They’ve recovered.”

“But if you sold before the plan was announced, you couldn’t have known.”

“Oh, I knew,” Jonathan said offhandedly, “of course I knew; I was on the Commission.
 
But that had nothing whatsoever to do with our decision. No one who knows me would ever accuse me of white flight, except my daughter.”

Tamar said nothing, but looked troubled.

Jonathan put his hands on the desk and leaned forward. “You have to understand how hurtful that was. I despise racism. It’s been the great battlefield of my life. I happen to believe that racism and xenophobia are root of most social evils.”