The Imposter Bride (22 page)

“Lily,” I said. She had a name, the girl, even if my mother
took it. “How do you know my mother wasn’t Eva?” It was a nice name, I thought. Eva. I liked it better than Lily.

“Your mother wasn’t from Krakow.”

“Where was she from, then?”

“She didn’t tell me exactly where, but—”

“If she didn’t even tell you the name of her town—”

“Your mother was not the same girl as the Eva in this notebook,” he said, then he picked up the notebook, leafed through a few pages and began to read to me again. He was very familiar with the contents of the notebook, I realized.

“But that summer I had changed. I knew it the moment I stepped off the train. I saw Eva waiting for me, but her face, so beloved in my memory, did not bring me the joy I had anticipated. Her soft brown eyes, which were once windows to a soul I found endlessly interesting, were static, shallow pools now.”

My father stopped reading, looked up. “Your mother’s eyes weren’t brown,” he said. “They were blue.”

“Oh,” I said, exhaling with that one syllable all the anxious excitement that had been building in me since I had started imagining that I had just found my mother in the notebook.

“Like yours,” my father said.

Maybe he thought I didn’t believe him. Maybe it was easier to read to me from the notebook than to face my continuing anger at him, my disappointment that the mother I thought I had located—that I was now imagining in actual places, doing things like eating ices and drinking lemonade and lying in a field watching clouds drift by—had dissolved again to nothing. He began to read again.

“When Eva fell sick, then, it was a relief. There were only two weeks left to the summer, and I was happy to be able to spend them alone—”

“Who was she, this Eva?”

“A friend of Ida Pearl’s cousin, it would seem.”

But not my mother. No one my mother even knew, most probably. Yet another dead end.

“Why do we still have it, then? If nothing in it has anything to do with my mother. If it belonged to Ida’s cousin. Why didn’t you give it to Ida when my mother left?”

“I tried to, but Ida didn’t want it. She gave it back to me.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t say.” He closed the notebook then. There was a certain deliberateness to the way he did it, as if he were saying, with that gesture:
You see? I wasn’t lying. There’s nothing in it of relevance to you
. “Maybe it’s painful for her to see it. Maybe it’s too much of a reminder of things she’d rather not think about.”

A hundred questions crowded my mind, but I asked the only one I felt certain he could answer. “So how did you finally find out?”

“Ida Pearl told me. The night your mother left.”

I waited for him to go on. It was hard for him to go back to that night, I realized from the length of his pause, the slowness with which he dragged the words out from somewhere inside himself.

“We had just found her note.”

Forgive me. Yours, Lily
.

“Ida asked if she could speak to me for a minute. We went into the hallway and she showed me the letter from her sister Sonya.”

I imagined how mortified he must have been to have Ida Pearl tell him that what he had thought was his marriage was a sham. Again I was hesitant to meet his eyes, but when I did
I didn’t see any of the cuckold’s embarrassment I expected, none of the bitter shame I had just ascribed to him. What I saw in his face was a sorrow more tender than bitter. He had loved her, I realized, even if he hadn’t known her actual, real name and life history. He had loved what he knew of her—the sound of her voice, perhaps, the smell of her skin, the expression on her face when she first woke in the morning. And nothing in the disaster of her subsequent departure had ever robbed him of that feeling.

“I have something for you,” he said.

He disappeared into his bedroom and I had a moment where I imagined he would emerge with a letter she had left for me along with instructions that he should wait until I was fully grown before letting me read it. But I swallowed back the fantasy before it even fully formed so that I experienced only the most fleeting sensation of disappointment, just a hint of a bitter aftertaste at the very back of my consciousness when my father handed me … a rock. That’s what I thought he had given me at first: yet another rock, and the smallest one to date. But it was different from all the ones preceding it in that it was, according to my father, a gem. A diamond.

“It doesn’t look like any diamond I’ve ever seen,” I said, though I could see that it was, in fact, a crystal, and a crystal unlike any I’d seen before.

“That’s because it’s rough, still uncut. It was hers,” he told me. “Your mother’s,” he added, as if I had lost track of the subject of our conversation. “I found it after she left.”

“You mean she left it for you to find.”

“I suppose,” he said.

Had she left it for me, then? I looked at it more closely. It was definitely the smallest stone I had ever received from
her—it was no larger than a pea—but in terms of the diamonds I had seen it was large. In a way it resembled some of the bits of frosted glass that I had found as a kid washed up on the beach at Ogunquit, where I had gone one summer with Elka and Sol, but this was unmistakably a crystal. It wasn’t much to look at as it was, but perhaps in the right hands it could be as beautiful as the diamond Sol had given to Elka for their tenth wedding anniversary.

“Did you ever think about having it cut?”

“No,” he said. “And you shouldn’t either.”

Out of respect, I thought he meant, for property that was still, technically speaking, my mother’s, that we were just holding in safekeeping, that she still might wish to retrieve at some point.

“It’s been sixteen years,” I pointed out, meaning that if she hadn’t dropped in until now to pick up what she’d left behind, it was unlikely she was ever going to.

“That’s nothing in questions of provenance.”

I had never heard the word “provenance” used in conversation before—we were not a family that owned art or antiques—but I knew exactly what he meant.

“You think she stole it?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “It’s not something she ever discussed with me.”

“But you think she might have.” From the same girl whose name she had taken. Whose family’s business had been diamonds.

“I think if the matter of ownership hadn’t been problematic for her in some way she would have had it cut or taken it with her when she left.”

“So you’re not really giving it to me.”

“It’s not really mine to give.”

Yet he did give it to me. Maybe because it was all he had to give me of hers. A rough diamond, and one that had probably been stolen.

“RUTHIE,” IDA SAID,
peering at me from behind her glass counter as I stepped into the dimness of the store. Her surprise at my unexpected visit was evident in her voice. “Are you coming from your grandmother’s?”

I shook my head.

“From Resnick?” Mr. Resnick was a tailor who rented one of the units on the second floor.

“I came to see you,” I said.

“Ah. And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

I reached into the envelope in which I’d placed the stone the previous evening and handed it to her.

A brief bafflement knit her eyebrows as she stared at the tiny stone in her open palm, then she nodded.

She looked up to meet my eyes. “Where did you get this?”

“My father gave it to me last night. Well, he didn’t really give it to me …”

Ida raised her eyebrows now, waiting for me to go on.

“On the one hand he gave it to me, but on the other hand he said it wasn’t really his to give, and that I’m not to do anything with it …”

“He wasn’t intending for you to have it cut, then.”

“No, no. He said specifically that I wasn’t to—”

“He wanted you to have something of hers?”

I looked at her. “How do you know whose—?”

“She brought it to me.”

“My mother brought this to you?”

Ida examined the stone in the same way I had seen her examine countless stones before. First she held it between her thumb and index finger and rolled it in all directions, looking closely at it all the while. Then she placed it on the back of her hand and looked at it from every angle. Finally, she picked it up with her tongs and took a closer look with her loupe. She nodded periodically as if the entire inspection were mere confirmation of what she’d assessed at first glance. With a final nod she put it back in the envelope, folded the envelope in four so it couldn’t slip out again, and handed it back to me. “It’s the same stone,” she said.

Ida’s response unsettled me. I had assumed she would be interested, curious, excited even, albeit in a suppressed, disappointed, Ida sort of way. I had thought she might pepper me with questions about what my father had told me about it, at which point we would have a real conversation about my mother. I would tell her that I knew now that my mother had taken her cousin’s name, and she would tell me what she knew, what she thought. Enough time had gone by already, more than sixteen years. And if she thought my mother had taken the diamond from her cousin, I would return it to her. That’s what I had decided. But instead of everything I had imagined, there was just this offhand disclosure about my mother having been here, and her tight-lipped discomfort as she handed me back the stone.

“I didn’t know my mother had already—”

“Why would you?” Ida cut me off. “Your father brought it to me also. After she left. Who do you think told him what it is?”

Now I was at a loss. And worse, I sensed that Ida was as
well. “My father is under the impression that its … provenance might be questionable.”

Ida shrugged again.

“Don’t you think we should try to find out? It could be valuable.”

“And whom might we ask?”

The dead, she meant. My mother. As if.

I had the sense now that the passage of time had sealed the door to the past for her, rather than allowing for it to be reopened.

“Aren’t there networks or something among diamond workers? If you showed it around, isn’t it possible that someone might recognize—”

She waved me quiet before I even had a chance to finish. “Put it away,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Put it back wherever your father’s kept it all these years.”

“But why?”

She didn’t answer.

“What if it’s valuable?”

When she still didn’t answer, I pressed my point. “Isn’t it a waste to just put it away? It could be cut, made into something beautiful. A brooch, maybe, a ring …”

“It’s not a good stone.”

I thought she was referring to its physical properties, its colour, its clarity, some flaw she had detected in its interior.

“There’s nothing in it but sorrow,” she said.

She unlocked the cabinet beneath her counter and pulled out a box. “Let me show you something. Close your eyes and put out your hand.”

I did as she told me, extending my hand, palm down, so
she could slip a ring on it, but she turned it over and placed something on my palm.

“You can look now,” she said.

I opened my eyes. There was a tear of light on my hand.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Did she think I was a child who could be distracted simply by her dangling a bright bauble in front of my eyes?

“You haven’t even looked at it. Look at it.”

“It’s beautiful,” I agreed grudgingly, distractedly. I wanted to ask her about my mother, about my mother’s visit to her store seventeen years earlier, when she brought Ida the same rough diamond that Ida had just handed back to me.

“When you find a husband I’ll get him to buy it for you.” A slight pause now, during which I tried to find a way to bring the conversation back to my mother. “You’re still with the Blumenthal boy?”

“I’m not
with
him, Auntie Ida. We went to one sweet sixteen together.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

Another pause.

“I hear you’re looking for her.”

“I am very curious about her,” I allowed, and why wouldn’t I be, I thought. What could be more natural than to be curious about the mother I had never known?

But Ida Pearl shrugged as if to ask,
What’s to be curious?

“She’s half of who I am, you know.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Genetically, I mean.”

Ida shrugged again. “You’re doing well at school now?”

“Pretty well.”

“And your friends? You’re getting along with them again?”

I nodded, hadn’t realized Ida knew I hadn’t been getting along with them at one point.

“You like them?”

“Of course I like them. They wouldn’t be my friends if I didn’t like them, would they?”

Ida didn’t answer. “You’re a pretty girl,” she said. I was surprised to hear her say it; Ida wasn’t the sort to throw the compliments around. “And you have a nice family, nice friends, a good head on your shoulders. True?”

“I guess so.”

“I know so,” she said. “So listen to someone who knows a little bit more about life than you do. Don’t go looking for sorrow.”

CHAPTER 11

T
here was little of monetary value in the stone the woman had brought, Ida Pearl reminded herself as she sat in the darkness of her living room a few days after that visit from Lily, her cup of tea cooling on the table beside her. The market was glutted, first of all—a lot of the refugees had brought them. Every second or third shabby coat seemed to have a diamond sewn into its lining, and those were diamonds that were already cut, polished, fully achieved. Which this stone was not. Even in a good market, its value would lie only in its potential, which at that moment was entirely theoretical. Who knew what flaws might run through its centre? Who could be sure that rough, small stone could become the cut gem that Ida had already begun to see in her mind’s eye, though she tried not to see it, not yet, because that, right there, was the first misstep she could take: to form a preconceived notion and force the stone to conform to it, to cut it in the image of something too hastily imagined, a gem that might be adequate, and even beautiful, but that would not be the realization of the stone’s
unique potential. To achieve that uniqueness—and there was no point in proceeding if not for that—she would have to allow the stone to guide her. And it would; she was certain. She had felt that as she first held it. She had felt the life in it even before she brought it up to her eye for a closer look, even as she knew that its presence in her store, in the hand of the imposter who had brought it to her, confirmed the destruction of her family, who had once owned it. And she had known at that moment that she would be the one to release its light.