Saving Grace (27 page)

Jonathan was silenced, for it was from this very knowledge that he’d worked so hard to protect her. How strange: Martindale was a world away from Brooklyn, yet somehow his daughter had ended up learning the same hard lessons Jonathan had learned as a boy.

Just as well that she had, he thought now. At least she still knew how to take a hit, whereas Barnaby, like that schoolboy bully, could dish it out but couldn’t take it.

As he gazed into that dear, infuriating face that was both itself and the reflection of his own secret, integral self, Jonathan felt the last vestige of bitterness remaining in his heart melt away. He put his hands on Gracie’s shoulders. “No one would ever call you a quitter. I admire your courage, I admire your heart—but it makes no difference.”

“Dad, you can’t send me away. Don’t you know I’m on your side?”

“I do know.”

“If you let me stay, I swear I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that. And yet now that you have, I find it’s the last thing on earth I want.”

“I mean it. You need me here.” Gracie hugged him, pressed her head against his chest. “Please don’t send me away.”

His arms flew apart in surprise, then closed around her. As he pressed his daughter to his heart for the first time in years, Jonathan felt his suffering merge with hers, so that the pain of each was heightened, but also, mysteriously, solaced. He kissed the crown of her head and at that moment awoke to the full magnitude of his loss: it came to him that if he sent her away now, it would be forever. Gracie would never forgive him for humiliating her twice in the same manner, fhis was not a new wound, but the rupture of an old one that never healed right. When Gracie discovered that he had sold their Martindale house, Jonathan had tried to make her see the matter rationally; but his daughter, so quick to grasp the dynamics of politics, proved quite uneducable on the subject of economics in general and real estate in particular. “Selling out,” she’d chanted, “selling out, selling out, selling out,” until he could not bear the sound of the words.

She fought him until she understood that her passionate opposition was no equal to the sheer weight of parental authority Jonathan wielded in the wake of persuasion. Then she quit and plunged into a period of mourning: tore her clothes, locked herself in her room, quit eating. When she emerged from hibernation, Gracie was a changed child, her wild-eyed spunk replaced by watchful reserve, not only in the house but also out of it.

It broke his heart. Jonathan tried to blame their rift on her intransigence and willful misapprehension, but he knew that in her place he would have felt as she did, betrayed and abused. Now, once again, he was plucking her prematurely from the fray, this time even sending her away.

“It’s not punishment.” He cupped her face, gazed into eyes that blinked furiously, fighting back tears. “I love you, Gracie. I’m trying to protect you.”

She backed away from him. “The worst things you do, you say you do for us.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But this isn’t one of them.”

* * *

All through the night, Jonathan and Lily lay side by side, thinking and worrying separately about Gracie. Lily was afflicted by an unshakable sense of vicarious déjà vu, reliving an experience that belonged, not to her, but to her mother, and perhaps her mother’s mother.... An innocent might attribute Jonathan’s persecution to rivalry, jealousy, or changing political mores; but Lily’s history proscribed innocence. Anti-Semitism was a many-headed hydra.
They
wouldn’t stop with Jonathan.
They
would come for her and the children next.

At last her mother’s purpose was revealed. Greta had returned to warn her, remind her that what happened before was bound to happen again, because the world hated Jews, always had, and always would. Save the children, her mother’s ghost commanded. When Lily shut her eyes, a memory came, vivid as a dream. She was lying in her girlhood bed, listening as her mother read from a book of Bible stories the story of baby Moses. The volume was illustrated, and one picture, Lily’s favorite, showed the pharaoh’s daughter and a handmaiden kneeling beside the river, reaching toward a drifting cradle woven of bulrushes, while the infant’s mother watched from a hiding place. Pharaoh’s daughter plucked baby Moses from the river, Greta said, and raised him as her own son. As she read, she wept, and her sighs were like the rumbling of the el trains that passed outside Lily’s window.

Lily watched and wondered why, but did not ask. Surely the story of Moses was a tale of triumph, in which a simple Jewess tricked the mighty pharaoh into fostering a child who would become his nemesis and the savior of the Jewish people. Only now, forty years later, as Lily prepared to set her own child adrift, did she understand what Greta had always known: that salvation comes only through sacrifice of the heart’s deepest bonds.

She sighed again and again. Jonathan heard her but said nothing, only reached out and stroked her back. When she turned toward him, he kissed her, first tentatively, then more urgently. Silently they made love. When talking was too dangerous, sex became the last channel of communication and solace.

But even as he kissed his wife, a small nagging voice inside Jonathan was calculating what it would cost to defend Gracie if Barnaby pressed charges. He wasn’t afraid they would lose the case—she had been too cruelly and blatantly abused by Barnaby. But innocence, he well knew, availed nothing without money; and good counsel and expert witnesses were punitively expensive. And there were other costs, greater costs. How could Gracie endure the press scrutiny that was sure to come? While she was just his daughter, they’d left her alone and focused on him. Now that she’d made herself part of the story, they would have no such mercy.

* * *

The phone calls started before seven A. M. and stopped when Jonathan took the phone off the hook. He listened to the messages: all reporters, all asking for Grace.

* * *

At 9:00, the family gathered around the breakfast table. Clara had made pancakes, but only Paul could eat. He wore tennis whites; his racket was on the sideboard.

“After breakfast,” Jonathan said to his daughter, “you’re to go and pack. We’ve already spoken to your aunt. Your flight leaves today.”

She put down her cup and stared at him, but didn’t answer.

“What?” said Clara. “What did you say?”

He raised his voice. “Gracie’s going to Israel.”

“Since when?” Paul demanded. “Not that I mind.”

“Since your father and I decided,” Lily said, “that she’s better off away from here.”

“And I’m not?”

“Why? Do you want to go to Israel, too?”

“No, but a bunch of my friends are putting together a trip to the Bahamas.”

No one bothered to answer him.
 

“She’s your daughter,” Clara appealed to Lily, “and you know I’m not one to interfere, but this is not a child you send to Israel. Learn from my mistake. I lost my daughter to Israel.”

Jonathan shared her fear. Love was a binding force, but not a strong one. Gracie was no homing pigeon. Set free, she might very well fly away, never to return.
 
And yet the thing had to be done. To save her, he had to let her go.

“In Israel,” Lily said, “she’ll be safe.”

Gracie spoke at last. “Would anyone care to hear my opinion?”
 

No one did. They went on talking over her head, discussing her, until she scraped her chair back loudly and rose to her feet. Then they stopped talking and looked at her.
 

“Israel’s out of the question,” she said. “I’m not going, and you can’t make me.”

19

JUST UNDER TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, Gracie Fleishman walked down the steps of an El A1 plane into a torrid blaze of sun that fused her senses. The great heat, undulating off the ground and ricocheting off the metal surfaces of the planes, made people standing nearby seem to shimmer; others, at a distance, appeared and disintegrated like phantoms. The heat invaded her body and pressed down on the top of her skull, filled her nostrils with a mix of burning dust and jet fuel, parched the roof of her mouth, and coated her tongue in acrid dust.

Gracie looked up into a cloudless sky of palest blue that was higher than any sky she’d ever seen before. In the space between earth and sky, a hawk soared, riding the air currents like spiraling escalators to heaven. All around her the runways bustled with activity; military jeeps darted about the runways, and soldiers, male and female, toted rifles and submachine guns as if they were loaves of Italian bread.

She lifted her loose mane of hair and lowered her head, but the sere wind lapped at her nape with a tongue like a branding iron.

Her fellow passengers hurried toward the glass doors of the terminal, fifty feet away. She began, slowly, to follow.

A man approached from within the heat mist, his eyes fixed on her face. When his features jelled, Gracie found herself looking at one of the best-looking men she had ever seen. He had a head of black curls, almond skin, high cheekbones, and a strong cleft chin; he was lean and sinuous, and though he wore an army uniform, his bearing was more feline than martial.

She recognized him at once, though Clara’s treasured snapshots didn’t do him justice. He came up to her and stopped, looking her up and down critically.

“Tamar couldn’t make it. Welcome to Israel.” No smile. Tone polite, handshake cold.

“Thanks,” she answered in the same manner.

“I’m Micha.”

“I know.”

He reached for her bag. “I’ll take that.”

“I can manage.”

He shrugged and let her.

Inside the terminal, passengers from Gracie’s plane and another that had arrived minutes before waited in long lines at passport control, but Micha led her to a small office on one side of the entrance hall. The young officer sitting behind the desk jumped up, shook Micha’s hand. They spoke in Hebrew; then the officer extended his palm toward Gracie. “Passport, please.”

She handed it over. The officer flicked it open. He looked from the passport photo to her face and lingered there. “Very nice,” he said. “So, this guy’s your cousin, eh? Very bad. Big trouble, Micha.”

“I’m used to trouble,” she said in a Lauren Bacall drawl. The officer laughed all out of proportion, but Micha, whose strong, silent act was beginning to irritate Grace, gave her a noncommittal stare. He had removed his sunglasses; his eyes were a startling indigo blue.

The officer stamped her passport and returned it. “See you again, I hope,” he said to Grace, and he waved them through a door that led directly into the baggage-retrieval area.

“Now we wait,” Micha said.

“Wait for what?”

“Your bags.”

“I don’t have any.”

“No bags?”

“Just this.” She indicated her carry-on.

“You travel light.”

“I don’t plan on staying long.”

Sliding doors led outside. Something about the height of the sky made Gracie want to duck. Several men rushed her, shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!”, subsiding into silence when they noticed Micha. He led her to a white Peugeot parked in a no-parking zone at the terminal’s curb.

“Good connections, huh?” Gracie said.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye but did not reply. He hadn’t, she thought, much to say for himself at all. No questions about the flight, no inquiries about the family. Clearly her cousin was no more thrilled to have her there than she was to be there.

“Look,” she said as they sped down a cypress-lined avenue toward the airport gates, “you might as well know this wasn’t my idea.”

“I’m devastated.”

“Just because I happen to be a Jew doesn’t mean I’m a Zionist. I think what you people are doing to the Palestinians is disgusting.”

His mouth twitched. “Very perceptive, considering you’ve been here all of ten minutes.”

So he had a tongue after all, a sly, sarcastic tongue. “I watch the news. I read. I’m not totally ignorant.”

“Oh, well, then.”

Smug, self-satisfied, and conceited, Grace diagnosed, unsurprised. Her cousin was too handsome for his own good. “What are you, anyway?” she said.

“You mean my sign?” he mocked her.

“I mean your rank.”

“I’m a captain.”

Gracie didn’t know whether or not to believe him. “Then why didn’t that guy in the customs office salute you?”

He raised an eyebrow. “We both know who I am.”

“Aren’t you kind of young to be a captain?” she asked severely.

“Israelis age faster than Americans. I know American men my age and older who still call themselves kids.”

“Whereas you are a man.”

“I am a man,” he agreed.

“It must be great to be so sure of yourself.”

“It’s an easy thing to be sure of,” he said with a laugh. Gracie turned away, annoyed at herself for arguing with him, and stared out the window. They were driving through a small dusty village in which all the street signs, shop signs, billboards, even the graffiti, were in Hebrew. This astonished Gracie, who knew that Hebrew was the national language but had imagined somehow that this was just for show, that in the privacy of their own country, Israelis secretly spoke English with a Yiddish accent. Some of the street signs had oddly spelled English translations beneath the Hebrew lettering.