The Imposter Bride (23 page)

She was no longer a religious woman, would not even say that she still believed in fate, but that diamond was her destiny, she suddenly was sure. Why else would things have happened as they had? How else could she possibly understand the appearance of that woman with her cousin’s name and her cousin’s diamond, not only in Montreal, but in her own store? Coincidence? No. Destiny, she felt certain, and with that certainty, the seemingly senseless unfolding of her life until then revealed its purpose. The untimely, tragic death of her father, the subsequent plunge into poverty and shame, the cold-hearted expulsion from Chaim’s workshop and home—an expulsion that she now knew had ultimately saved her life—Arthur’s betrayal, the second plunge into poverty and shame, the birth of her daughter, who so often seemed a stranger though it was her own blood that ran through the girl’s veins, the unfolding comprehension of what had happened to her family … Even the imposter no longer seemed just the looting, lying thief that she had first thought but the agent of a deliverance the exact nature of which Ida could not yet understand, but that she would …

“Oh my
God!
” A high-pitched shriek interrupted her thoughts.

Elka, expressing her surprise at stumbling over her mother sitting alone in the dark.

“You just about gave me a heart attack! What are you
doing?
”

“I’m having a cup of tea.”

“In the dark? It’s pitch black in here. Haven’t you noticed?”

It was not even close to pitch black, merely dusk, Ida thought.

And since when did tea smell like booze? Elka wondered. And just how long had her mother been sitting here alone in the dark drinking the whisky that she persisted in calling tea despite the ever-shrinking proportion of the latter in the mix?

Elka flipped the light switch on the wall, and in the harshness of the electric light that flooded the room Ida could no longer see the purpose of her life that she had glimpsed just a moment earlier. Instead: a middle-aged fool with a ruined life sitting in her armchair drunkenly murmuring to herself that everything happens for a reason. And her daughter’s face—the light revealed that too. Her daughter’s swollen, tear-streaked face, which she knew she couldn’t ask about, because Elka would interpret any inquiry from her mother—no matter how kind and well intentioned—as snooping, the underlying purpose of which was to ruin Elka’s life. And so they sat in silence for a few moments, Elka on the sofa, her long bare legs awkwardly crossed at the ankles, her hands braced against the edge of her seat as if she might spring up and bolt at any moment, Ida in her armchair, trying to affect an expression of bland neutrality.

“What?” Elka asked.

“What,
what?
”

“You’re staring at me.”

Ida did not point out that she would have to twist her neck into an uncomfortable position to avoid looking at the spot on the sofa, directly in the line of Ida’s vision, that Elka had chosen to occupy. She picked up the cup at her elbow, had a swallow of her tea and then, reaching for the most innocuous way she could think of to open the conversation, she asked: “You didn’t happen to pick up the
Star
on your way home, did you?”

Elka shook her head, and as she did the fresh tears that had been welling in her eyes slid down her cheeks. “I went to their house,” she said.

“Whose house?” Ida asked. Gently. Carefully.

“Theirs.”

It wasn’t possible, Ida thought. But of course it was. Elka was an intelligent girl, and resourceful, actually, when left to her own devices. And just because she’d stopped asking Ida about her father didn’t mean she’d stopped wondering. Why wouldn’t she have found him? It wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t like he had bothered to hide. He was right there in the phone book:
A. Krakauer
, the third one in the list.

“I made a complete fool of myself,” Elka said, at which point her sobbing began in earnest. She bent over, face in her hands, rocking back and forth.

Ida moved to the sofa to sit beside her, placed her hand on Elka’s back. Elka turned and heaved herself into her mother’s bosom as she hadn’t done in years.

“It’s not you who’s the fool, my sweet,” Ida murmured, as she held her daughter close.

“I’m hopeless. Utterly useless,” Elka sobbed. “If you could have seen his face when he walked in and saw me sitting at his kitchen table with his mother.”

His mother? Ida wondered. Hadn’t Arthur told her eighteen years earlier that his mother was dead? Didn’t Elka mean his wife, the woman he had chosen over Ida?

“And he was with her. That woman. They walked in together.”

“What woman, my sweet?”

“The bride. I didn’t even know they lived in the same house. She smiled, so superior, when she saw me. Like I’m some sort of lovesick child. Which I must look like to them. I know they were talking about me.” A fresh burst of sobs racked her body.

Ida’s arms still embraced her daughter, and she still made reassuring clucking noises, but her mind had moved away from the heartsick sympathy she had felt a moment earlier to a cooler mode.

“You went to Sol’s house?”

“I’m such a fool,” Elka wailed.

She had planned it perfectly, she had thought, allowing just enough time after the end of his workday that she wouldn’t arrive the second he walked in the door, but not so much that her arrival would interrupt his dinner. It was a long streetcar ride from Snowdon Junction to his neighbourhood, but she didn’t have to transfer and she had a seat the whole way, which she didn’t give up as she usually would because she didn’t want to be pressed against other hot, sweaty bodies and arrive with her dress creased and smelling less than fresh. The house was closer to the streetcar stop than she’d expected, so she was in front of it at 5:42, three minutes earlier than planned.

It was a building like every other one on the block, three storeys high and attached to its neighbours on either side, with an outdoor staircase leading to the upper-storey apartments. Two girls were sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, playing
jacks. Elka asked if the Kramers lived there. “Second landing,” one of the girls answered without looking up from her game. Elka stepped over the girls and climbed the stairs, her heart beating more rapidly as she anticipated Sol’s expression when he opened the door. He would probably not be happy to see her, she was prepared for that.
I don’t want to impose on your time
, she would assure him in a tone of dignified detachment, and then she would hand him the note she had already written:

Dear Sol
,

I’m not sorry that we have had no contact with each other since the evening we spent together a month ago. I believe that if people are meant to be together it is obvious to both of them, and that it is both futile and foolhardy to try to force an affection that does not exist. What I am sorry about, though, is to have discovered this week that you lack even the barest modicum of discretion and common decency. For you to have told your sister-in-law the personal information about myself and my family that I shared with you in confidence that evening is a violation of the most basic code of human interaction
.

Perhaps there is no purpose in bringing this to your attention since you seem to lack the ethical standards of even the most ill-mannered boors of my acquaintanceship, but in the event that you do have a shred of integrity, I ask that you at least acknowledge the wrong you have done to me
.

Sincerely
,

Elka Krakauer

The letter had taken her three days to write. She had wrestled with every line and phrase for hours. Sol would see that she was a person with education, intelligence and dignity, and he would be sorry, then, to have let her go, to have treated her like she was nothing, a child. She could hardly wait to give it to him, then to turn her back just as his face registered his recognition of what he had lost.

But Sol was not at home. It was his mother who answered the door—Elka recognized her from the wedding—his mother who looked her over with bemused curiosity, then informed her that Sol wasn’t there. How could he not be home? Elka wondered. She had anticipated and developed responses to every eventuality, she had thought, but somehow, not this.

“What time do you expect him?”

“I don’t know,” his mother said, a simple statement of fact that Elka heard as mockery, and it was that imagined mockery that re-stoked her anger and emboldened her. She met Bella’s eyes dead-on, a technique that she had learned early on to combat the whispers—both imagined and real—that accompanied her passage through life.

“May I wait for him, then?”

What was she doing here, this girl who was no more than sixteen? Bella wondered. Had Sol stooped to this now? To schoolgirls as young as Nina had been when her innocence had been violated by the lout? Had he taken to hanging around high schools? To passing time in soda shops, perhaps, where girls like this giggled with their friends over ice cream, excited by but only half comprehending the intentions of the men who leered at them from the next booth? Was he courting his sister-in-law on the back stairs by night only to soothe his ruffled feathers with schoolgirls the next day? And
who was she, this girl? She seemed familiar to Bella, but from where?

“Come in,” Bella said, and Elka followed her down the brown hallway—the bloom of pink roses on the linoleum barely visible in the dim lighting—to the kitchen at the back of the apartment, then sat on the bench seat Bella indicated, wedged between the table and the wall, facing the window that opened to the fire escape where Lily and Sol sat every night.

“Something to drink?” Bella offered, pouring a glass of lemonade and placing it on the red and white checked oilcloth in front of the girl. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“I’m sorry. Elka Krakauer. I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Kramer,” Elka said, extending her hand in a belated display of the manners she had accused Sol of lacking.

Bella smiled as she took the proffered hand. She was plucky, the girl, if nothing else. Her hand was warm and dry despite her obvious nervousness, her handshake was firm, her eye contact unwavering.

“And how do you know Sol?”

“We’re friends.”

“I see.”

Elka did not glance away, despite the disapprobation she read on Bella’s face.

“And how old are you, Elka?”

“Seventeen,” she said. “Next March.”

“So you’ll be starting grade …”

“Eleven. Next week.”

“And do your parents know that you’re friends with a man in his twenties?”

“No.”

“I see,” Bella said again, and stood with her arms folded across her chest as Elka sipped at her lemonade with a show of calmness.

She hates me, Elka thought. And why wouldn’t she? She thinks I’m a tramp and a slut and that I lie to my parents. The parents she still thinks I have … which she’s about to discover I don’t have, because that’s where she’s heading now, right this minute as she stands here sizing me up like I’m a chicken on inspection at the market.

“Krakauer …” Bella said, as if casually musing about the name.

Here it comes, Elka thought.

“Not Lou and Irma’s …?”

Elka shook her head. “Ida Pearl.” She put down her lemonade to look Bella directly in the eye. “My mother has a jewellery store on Decarie Boulevard. It used to be on Ste-Catherine Street.”

“I don’t think I know it,” Bella said. She did not utter the usual platitudes about Decarie being a good street, a good neighbourhood. She had noticed there was no mention of a father. And given the bravado of the girl’s stare at that moment it seemed a fair assumption that that absence had not been caused by something as shameless as death by natural causes.

Elka glanced at the clock on the wall.

“I’m not sure what’s keeping Sol …”

“I should probably get going,” Elka agreed. It had been stupid to ask if she could wait for Sol. She should have just given the letter to his mother and left. Though, had she done that, she couldn’t have been sure she would ever see him again—it was so easy to ignore a letter, to simply not respond—and she did so want to see him. She had worn a dress that she thought
particularly flattering—a linen shift in a shade of cream that contrasted perfectly with her late-summer tan. The linen was a little stiff but was a more sophisticated fabric, she thought, than the girlish cottons he had seen her in so far. She wanted him to see her in it. There was a way he had of looking at her as if he wasn’t quite looking, as if he didn’t want her to know he was looking and liked what he saw. She wanted to see that quick appraising glance that he thought she didn’t notice, that private smile that she couldn’t quite interpret, which made her yearn all the more to elicit it again.

But the dress was ugly, she realized a moment later when he walked into the kitchen with Lily. It was wrong in every way. A large stiff tent. More nurse’s uniform than dress.

Lily was in a form-fitting grey skirt and light blue blouse. The colours reflected the blues and greys of her eyes, the cut flattered the slender lines of her figure. At the sight of her mother-in-law, her hand flew up to push a strand of hair back behind her ear, a nervous mannerism so beautiful in its execution that Elka felt her heart sink.

Lily noticed Elka a second later, but Sol was ahead of her there. He had seen her as soon as he came in and his expression was neither the pleasure Elka had hoped for nor the anger she half expected. Worse than angry, he seemed baffled.

“Elka,” he said, the tentativeness in his voice so unlike that of the firm man of her fantasies. His eyes shifted to his mother for some clue about what was going on, a clue that was obviously not forthcoming because he then looked to Lily, whose eyebrows—pencil thin and perfectly shaped—knitted together before she smiled at Elka in a way that could only be interpreted—at least by Elka—as condescending and superior.

Elka might still have been able to salvage the situation, or
at least some shred of what remained of her dignity, had she simply said, “Hello, Sol,” and met his look with the gaze she had directed so effortlessly at his mother just moments before. But she hadn’t. She had risen clumsily from her spot between the table and the wall, pulled the letter out of her purse and thrust it at him. Then she had beaten a hasty retreat from the kitchen and down the brown hallway, aware the entire time that the back of her dress was soaked with sweat from leaning against the vinyl back of the kitchen bench.