The Imposter Bride (2 page)

She couldn’t be expected to look otherwise, he realized, after all she’d been through. And he, in turn, wasn’t expected to love her, just to marry her and stay married for as long as it took to slip her through a crack in Canada’s doors, which had not yet reopened to refugees who were Jewish. The marriage, Sol’s first, was to be an act of charity. An act of charity for which he’d receive a small payment, a token of appreciation, nothing lavish, just enough to give him the start he’d been needing, the leg up that other young men, through no merit of their own, had received from family or other lucky breaks. Sol Kramer had had no lucky breaks. This marriage was to have been his first. But when he saw the bride he recoiled.

Damaged goods. That’s what he saw. A broken life, a frightened woman, a marriage that would bind him—however briefly—to grief.

Let someone else marry her, he decided on the spot. He was a charitable man, no one would dispute it. He would never deny the widows and orphans of the world. But neither, it turned out, did he want to have to marry them. And
why should he have to, with his looks and his smarts and the future that hummed just beyond his fingertips? Let someone else marry her, he told the busybody who’d arranged it. His charity did not extend to his marital bed.

But the woman he had left at the station was gone now, had disappeared entirely within the beautiful bride that his brother had taken. She was being lifted in her chair at the centre of the room. As the dancers beneath her struggled to get a solid grip, she sank briefly and her chair tilted, first one way, and then so far to the other that it looked as if she might slide off. A collective gasp went out, a few shrieks from the women, but Lily held on. Laughing, no less. More guests rushed in to help lift her, more muscled arms than were needed, and an instant later Sol watched as she rose straight out of the crowd. The woman who could have been—should have been—his.

She was radiant as her bearers transported her on her elevated throne across the room towards her bridegroom. Triumphant, she seemed to Sol. She didn’t bother to hold onto the sides of her chair, which still dipped and bobbed perilously. With both hands free she waved a handkerchief in the direction of her bridegroom—Sol’s own brother—who reached to grab the other end. Her eyes never lowered to the crowd beneath her; she spared not so much as a glimpse in Sol’s direction.

She noticed him, though, his attempts to draw her gaze with his own. So now he wants me, she said to herself. I know you now; I’ve met your type before. He was a man who could only want what another had wanted first, she thought, a man whose own appetite for life was so meagre that he relied on parasitic yearnings to sustain him. She met his eyes briefly, then looked away.

I’m nothing to her. Less than nothing. A coward, Sol
thought as he sank into the nearest available chair. He watched his brother stretch to reach her handkerchief, heard her laughter as Nathan caught hold briefly before the dancers beneath him bore him away.

“It won’t last,” said a voice beside him, a voice that emanated from the throat of a woman but had the weight and gravity of a man’s.

Sol turned and saw that he had joined the table of a guest he didn’t recognize, a middle-aged woman who either was or thought herself to be a cut above the rest of the guests. Her dress, a blue satin, was more formal than those of the other women, her bearing more upright and severe. Her hair was pulled back from a pale, wide brow and lacquered into a shell. She had not left her table the entire evening and had placed a restraining hand on the arm of the teenage girl beside her—her daughter, Sol assumed—every time the girl tried to rise to join the dancing.

“It can’t possibly last,” the woman said. “Already it’s emitting that inimitable smell.”

“Mother, please,” the daughter hissed. She was clearly mortified. She twisted a napkin between her fingers and stared down at the table, refusing to look up.

“The stench of a bad match is unmistakable,” the woman said.

“I see,” Sol responded, though of course he didn’t. He just didn’t know what else to say. He was good in social situations—smooth, some would say—but this particular situation, the woman’s peculiar rudeness, was beyond the range of his skills. The daughter, exuding sullenness, continued twisting her napkin. She kept her face down towards the table, showing nothing of herself but the straight part in her dark, wavy hair.

The mother looked at Sol, awaiting his response.

He thought for a moment, then smiled brightly and extended his hand. “Sol Kramer,” he said. “Brother of the groom.”

The woman didn’t return his smile, but she did take his proffered hand. “Ida Pearl Krakauer,” she said. “And this is my daughter, Elka.”

The girl looked up from her twisted napkin. She was pretty as well as sullen, Sol noted with pleasure.

“Ida Pearl Krakauer,” Sol repeated. He didn’t recognize the name.

“So tell me,” Ida said. “Where did your brother find that ring?”

“The ring?”

“That piece of chipped glass he thinks is a diamond.”

Sol felt his colour rising on his brother’s behalf. A full month’s earnings had gone into what this woman was now calling a piece of chipped glass.

“Grinstein’s,” she said, not waiting for his response. “I recognize the style. Lack thereof.”

“It’s been a pleasure, I’m sure,” Sol said as he rose to leave the table. He wasn’t about to listen to his brother’s taste and judgment being insulted. Nor would he lower himself by answering the woman’s rudeness with his own.

“Sit down, sit down. I didn’t mean to offend you. If I had known you were such a hothead I would have kept my mouth shut, I’m sure.”

Elka smiled slightly at her mother’s mimic of Sol—Sol’s turn of phrase which he had thought elegant but now knew to be ridiculous.

“And anyway,” Ida Pearl continued, “I’m a competitor of Grinstein’s, so you shouldn’t take me so seriously.”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Krakauer, I don’t believe you’re someone to be taken lightly.”

At this Ida Pearl smiled, an actual full and genuine smile.

“Instead of rushing off in a huff, why don’t you take my daughter for a spin? I don’t approve of mixed dancing at weddings, but …”

Elka was already on her feet, smiling invitingly if somewhat shyly at Sol.

“… as you can see, my disapproval is of no consequence.”

An odd bird, to say the least, Sol thought as he led Elka into the mixed circle of dancers of which Ida Pearl disapproved. But the daughter was adorable, there was no disputing that. Especially when she smiled up at him and two endearing dimples formed at the corners of her mouth.

A boor, Ida thought as she watched Sol manoeuvre Elka through the crowd. A man who was in love with his own brother’s wife and didn’t even have the decency to hide it.

“Here. Smell me,” Elka said, thrusting her arm under Sol’s nose.

Smell her? Sol wondered. But it was a lovely young arm, slender and well formed. Sol took the wrist between his thumb and forefinger, turned it so that the soft underside was exposed, and inhaled.

“Mmm …” he sighed. “Lilac.” Though, in truth, his sense of smell was so saturated with herring, sweat and the perfume of the other guests that the delicate floral scent he thought he detected might well have been imagined.

“Rosewater,” Elka corrected. “But that’s just my perfume. Can you really not smell it?” She smiled slyly at him.

“Smell what?” he asked, also smiling, but uneasy.

“It’s not their stench she smells.” Elka pointed in the direction
of the bride and groom. “Anyone can see they’re well matched. Just look at his face, how he loves her.”

But Sol couldn’t bear to look at his brother right then, at the happiness that should have been his.

“It’s her own marriage to my father that my mother smells. It leaks out through my pores, she can’t escape it.”

“You smell nice to me,” Sol murmured as he cast about for a way to change the subject. What was it with this mother–daughter pair and their bizarre talk of odours? And what kind of girl talked about her parents’ marriage in that way to a man she’d barely met?

A pity, thought Ida Pearl, looking in the direction her daughter had pointed. For it wasn’t happiness she saw on Nathan’s face. It was longing. A longing suffused, at that moment, with hope, but a hope that wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, Ida knew. And he seemed a decent young man, nice to look at and well mannered. A young man whose future, if not for his bride, might have held the promise of happiness.

IDA PEARL AND ELKA
had not actually been invited to the wedding, a fact Sol might have figured out for himself had he given the matter any thought. All the guests were from the Kramer side. They had to be. The bride had no friends or relatives in Montreal. She knew no one except the Eisenberg family that had agreed to host her.

But Sol wasn’t thinking about the guest list that night, hadn’t thought to wonder about the provenance of the only two strangers in the room. His mind was on himself, his own failings. How could he have turned away from a woman like
Lily? How could his first instinct about her have been so wrong? He was a man who set great store on instincts. He had to. His future, lacking education or family connections to support it, rested entirely and solely on his astuteness. And now this failure. The bright future that had flashed just ahead flickered and faded in his mind. In its place, a sepia-washed vision: a shapeless woman in a sundress, watering tomato plants on the balcony of a walk-up; a man in an undershirt, chewing sunflower seeds on that same balcony and spitting out the husks on the floor. It was a repellent vision, shocking in its clarity. One in which Sol immediately recognized himself and his future wife.

Was it that vision that impelled him to invite Elka to step outside the hall with him, a need for distraction from his own darkening thoughts?

Elka glanced worriedly towards her mother. She didn’t need to ask to know she was forbidden. “I guess if it’s just for a few minutes …” she said.

“We could both use the fresh air,” Sol assured her as he guided her towards the door, but there was no freshness to the air outside, just the heavy stillness of a humid summer night. And as for distraction … he waited for Elka to talk, to complain about the heat, to ask him about himself, his ideas, his dreams.

But Elka had suddenly become aware that she was alone with a man for the first time in her life, an older man, no less—he had to be twenty-three at the very least—and in a situation that, had she asked her mother, would have been expressly and unambiguously forbidden to her. She could think of nothing to say, stood silently, like a dark and sweating lump in the night.

“Shall we walk a bit?” Sol asked.

“Okay,” she said, and they walked a few blocks in silence. Every front stoop they passed had someone on it, every balcony, every staircase, people escaping the heat of their apartments, talking, playing cards, fanning themselves with newspapers.

“So tell me,” Sol said. “How do you and your mother know Lily?”

“We don’t,” Elka answered.

“You don’t? You know my brother, then?”

She shook her head.

“Then how …?”

“We weren’t invited.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s certainly … interesting.” He thought of the huge plate of cake and herring he had seen the mother helping herself to, the chaser of chickpeas and Scotch. It was one of the more ingenious schemes to fill one’s stomach that he’d come across, and certainly less arduous than any he’d managed to dream up until now.

“I thought you knew,” she said.

“How would I know?”

“Why did you come over to our table then?”

“Well, certainly not to throw you out.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Do you get thrown out often?”

“What are you talking about … ‘often’? You think we do this regularly? Make a habit of crashing other people’s weddings? What do you take us for?” And when Sol didn’t answer: “My mother had a cousin by the name of Lily Azerov back in Europe—Azerov was my mother’s family name before she married my father. We haven’t heard anything from her family, not since the war started. She’s been waiting for news,
but there’s been nothing yet.” She looked at Sol, who nodded. His mother, too, was waiting.

“They’re still sorting things out over there,” Sol said.

“So when she heard from one of her customers that a refugee by the name of Azerov had arrived in Montreal …”

“But if it was your cousin, wouldn’t she have contacted your mother directly?”

“You’d think,” Elka agreed. “But I guess my mother thought she might not be able to find us, or something, that maybe she forgot my mother’s married name.” Elka thought a little more, then shrugged. “I can’t explain what my mother was thinking, dragging me here with her, but your brother’s wife is not her cousin. She saw that right away.”

Which didn’t stop her from staying at the wedding and helping herself to food and drink, Sol noted.

“I don’t know why we stayed. I know we shouldn’t have,” Elka said as if she had just read Sol’s thought. “And then the things she said …” A blush rose to her face.

“It was a little peculiar,” Sol allowed.

“Peculiar” didn’t begin to describe it, Elka thought. She had expected her mother to turn around and leave the wedding hall as soon as she saw that the bride was not the lost cousin she had hoped to find. Instead, Ida’s eyes had hardened, and her grip had tightened on Elka’s wrist. She was transfixed on the bride, and not in the usual, admiring way. Elka could only hope that none of the other guests noticed the expression on her face, a cold, hard expression so out of place at a wedding. It was as if Ida’s disappointment had turned into anger towards the bride, Elka thought now as she walked with Sol. As if it were the bride’s fault that she wasn’t the cousin Ida had hoped she would be.

“I can’t really explain it,” Elka said again. “Why she would have said those things.” To the groom’s own brother, no less. And at a wedding she hadn’t even been invited to. “She thinks she has a sixth sense about people. You know: what they’re like, who they should be with.” She glanced at Sol. “For all the good it’s done her.”