The Imposter Bride (27 page)

“Was that something I would have been better off knowing when I was a little girl?” Elka asked me pointedly. “Was my mother really wrong to have kept it from me?”

Better to have blamed and raged at a mother who was present, a mother who could absorb Elka’s anger and temper it with the reality of her love than to have let Elka loose too early in the wasteland of her father’s inexplicable indifference. That’s what I understood Elka to be saying, despite all her talk over the years about being open with me and answering any questions I might have about my own missing parent.

It was not until Elka had children of her own that Ida divulged the identity of the man who had fathered her, admitted, that is, that he was not the Arthur Krakauer who was roaming the world in search of a revolutionary or otherwise heroic cause—there was no such person, and never had been—but was one of the A. Krakauers easily found in the Montreal phone book, the third one listed, in fact. And it was only at his funeral—a typical funeral like others Elka had been to, with a grieving widow and children in attendance, and friends and neighbours talking about how nice he had been—that she fully understood just how banal his abandonment of her had been.

“Ida deliberately threw Elka off the trail to her father,” I said to Nina.

“I’m sure that’s true. But when she was ready to find him she did find him.”

As if the only barrier between me and my mother was my own state of unreadiness.

“I just hope you don’t wait until it’s too late. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Too late for what?”

“That’s not for me to answer,” Nina said.

CHAPTER 13

B
ella had just made herself a cup of coffee and was settling in with the newspaper at the kitchen table when she heard the front door open. She had thought Lily was home because the door to the bedroom was shut—the only indication, still, of Lily’s presence in the house during the day—but obviously she had slipped out without Bella’s noticing and was returning now. She would glide down the hallway like a ghost, without a glance towards Bella, never mind a word of greeting. The door to the bedroom would open with a creak, then click shut, and there would be no further activity, none that Bella would be able to discern, until five o’clock, just before Nathan’s return from work, when she would emerge nicely dressed and made-up, just like any housewife who had passed a regular day.

It wasn’t right to blame her, Bella knew, but she did. She knew plenty of people who had suffered shocking and grievous losses, but they still managed, somehow, to accord their in-laws a civil and pleasant greeting when they passed them
in the hallway. Bella herself, for example. Had she not also lost everything? Her whole life, it had seemed. Her past, her future. Her children. It had all been taken, leaving her only a present to be endured, a present as thin as the edge of a razor and set in a void. But she had inhabited what was left to her to inhabit. And she not only would have accorded her mother-in-law a civil and pleasant greeting given any opportunity to do so, she would have carried her mother-in-law onto the ship on her own shoulders had the woman not died of typhus before they even left Berdichev.

Though it wasn’t really fair to say that Lily wasn’t civil. She was very civil if forced into contact. Unfailingly civil and courteous, in fact. It wasn’t that, but another sort of absence. Of mind. Of heart. And Nathan trying to coax her back, to rouse her to life, to love, just as Bella herself had tried to coax his father back, not realizing the futility …

“You?” she said when Nathan appeared in the door frame of the kitchen.

“Nice to see you too, Ma.”

“What happened?” It was three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

“I was fired.”

“What!”

“I’m just kidding, Ma. Relax. Who’s going to fire me?” He took a cookie off Bella’s plate. “I’m my own boss now, remember?”

Hanging off the crook of his arm was a woman’s coat of black lamb’s wool. A stylish coat, Bella thought, as she took in the trim of fur around the collar and sleeves. A beautiful coat. A coat so exactly to her taste that for a moment she thought Nathan had suddenly been granted second sight, that he had
seen past the frowsy, frumpy woman she’d become to the dangerously chic young woman she’d once wanted to be.

La Belle was the
nom de guerre
she’d made up for herself once. Even from a distance of thirty years it embarrassed her to remember that ridiculous moniker which, thankfully, she had never said aloud to anyone. And the equally ridiculous fantasies she’d concocted: “La Belle seems overly concerned about which of the latest styles from
Paree
are appropriate for the metal workers’ strike, and which are more suited for teaching female factory workers to read,” she had imagined one of her comrades commenting, a jealous girl who couldn’t stand that Bella’s beauty and fashion sense didn’t compromise in any way the seriousness of her class analysis and her commitment to the cause. And of course in her fantasy she had the perfect rebuttal: “I’ll soon show the world a new meaning for the term ‘femme fatale,’ she would hiss, a promise of violence imbued with such erotic charge that when she added, “Watch me,” no one would be able to resist.

“What?” Nathan asked, seeing Bella’s distant smile.

“Nothing,” Bella said.

Was there any of that young woman in the woman she’d become? She couldn’t say for sure. If she were to encounter that other Bella in the street, if the two women were to confront each other now, to stare at each other across the ravine of time and experience that lay between them, would the younger recognize the older version of herself? Or would she simply walk right by, mistaking the older woman for a stranger?

She would walk, Bella thought, because what was left to recognize?

And would Bella then call after her:
Wait! Let me prove to you who I am
…? That she didn’t know, because how could
she prove it? What could she point to as evidence of continuity through the course of her life? What gesture or mannerism or turn of thought or emotion remained of the self she’d once embodied, that younger, better self that she felt staring at her now in confusion and disappointment? Her ideals had not changed, it was true, but she had lost the nerve that had once undergirded them, the courage without which ideals are mere indulgence and self-delusion. The closest she ever got to mass action now was the weekly melee at the fish market, the Thursday morning crush of women trying to beat each other to the freshest, plumpest carp. She, who had come to hate her husband for his weakness.

And yet, here was Nathan with a coat for that young woman. As if he felt her presence. As if he had seen through the layers of his mother to the original girl who lay in ruins at her core. He laid the coat carefully along the bench seat against the kitchen wall. Oh, what it must have cost him, Bella thought.

“Where’s Lily?” he asked.

LILY WAS ALSO SURPRISED
by Nathan’s appearance. She had heard footsteps bounding up the front stairs but she hadn’t imagined they could be his. He was never home in the middle of a workday.

“It’s you,” she said, looking up. She was sitting on the bed, her back against the headboard, pen in hand, a book open on her lap.

“Expecting someone else?”

She smiled and closed the book. It was the journal she had bought a few weeks earlier.

“Any room for me?” he asked.

She moved over a few inches, and he sat down, feeling for a moment like a doctor sitting on the edge of his patient’s bed, an image he dispelled by leaning over to kiss her mouth.

“You’re freezing,” she said. The cold from outside still lay on his skin.

“It’s gotten cold,” he agreed. “They say we might even see some snow.”

“Already?” It was just the first week of October. “Is this usual?”

“Not usual, no, but not unheard of either. We need to get you a winter coat. I’ve been thinking about it. I saw one at Eaton’s … lamb’s wool with a fur collar, and a strip of fur around the cuffs.” He ran his finger around the circumference of her wrist to demonstrate the bracelet of fur on the coat. “Do you think you’d like that?”

“Why wouldn’t I like it?”

He smiled. “Wait here.”

A moment later he was back.

“Oh, Nathan …” She ran her fingers over the soft black wool, the fur collar, the lining that was so smooth it felt to her like satin.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s beautiful. Too beautiful.”

“Try it on.”

She did.

“It’s you who’s beautiful,” he said. “Turn around.”

She turned slowly, enjoying his gaze.

“Shall we take it for a test drive?”

Her brow furrowed slightly but she would not ask what he meant. She never admitted what she didn’t understand, waited
instead for clues, for more context, and he liked that: her pride, her wiliness, the way she hid herself. He also liked that she didn’t ask about the coat’s cost, about whether they could afford it. It was probably a bad quality in a wife, impracticality about money and expense, but it attracted him, excited him: the implication that factors other than cost could determine his actions.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “To show you off in it.”

She smiled, picked up her journal from the bed and slipped it into the top drawer of the maple dresser, where she kept her lingerie. She had not written anything in it yet, but even its emptiness was not something she wished to share with her mother-in-law should Bella happen to see it lying around and be unable to resist a quick peek inside its cover.

“What were you writing when I came in?”

“Nothing. A few notes to myself.”

“Nothing? Or a few notes to yourself?”

That same smile. Sometimes it felt to him inclusive, conspiratorial, erotic. Other times, like now, it seemed evasive. But the smile itself never changed, he realized.

“Shall we show off my new coat?” she asked.

BELLA WAS STILL RELAXING
over her coffee and the newspaper when Nathan retrieved the coat to give to Lily. Now she was standing at the counter, grating onions, her back to the kitchen entrance. Beside the growing mound of onion was a larger mound of ground fish.

“Ma! What are you doing?” Nathan asked.

Bella didn’t bother to answer. What did he think she was doing?

“You didn’t even finish your coffee.” And beside the half-drunk cup of coffee, the newspaper was still lying open. “Leave it. Finish your coffee. Lily will help you when we get back.”

Bella continued grating.

“Don’t you want to see the new coat I bought for Lily?”

Bella turned around. “Very nice.” She turned back to her task.

“I’ll help you when we get back,” Lily promised.

There’s a comfort, Bella thought. But she said nothing aloud. She was determined not to become that sort of mother-in-law. There was no sweetness to be squeezed from bitterness.

The previous week Lily had returned home from one of her outings and had not slunk back into her room as usual, but had hovered at the kitchen door instead, clutching her shopping bag to her chest like a child holding a sack of kittens. “I bought apples and honey,” she’d announced. “For Rosh Hashana,” she had added, as if Bella wouldn’t have known why they needed apples and honey. As if Bella didn’t already have a chicken soaking in a tub for the meal they would all sit down to the following evening, and hadn’t spent most of the morning grating mountains of onions, potatoes and carrots for the kugels, gefilte fish and
tsimmes
that still had to be made. Lily had unpacked the jar of honey and six apples onto the table and smiled at Bella, an expectant smile, it seemed to Bella—was she awaiting Bella’s gratitude for the enormous effort she had just undertaken on behalf of the household?—and Bella’s mind had flashed then to Mrs. Pozniak’s new daughter-in-law, whom Bella had run into just that morning at the entrance to the fish market.

“Mrs. Kramer!” the girl had greeted her. Shirley was her name; she’d had her eye on Nathan once. “It’s a stampede in there,” Shirley had said, laughing. “You stay right here and let me get your fish for you.”

Bella had started to protest but Shirley insisted. “Don’t you dare move! Why should we both risk life and limb?” When she’d emerged a few minutes later she’d wished Bella a
gut yor
and given her a warm hug and a kiss.

A lovely girl, Bella had thought, as she tucked her package of fish into her shopping bag. But Nathan had not been interested in Shirley, not in the least. Why would he want a nice, healthy girl who brimmed with energy and love of life when he could marry the broken bird who was now perched at the edge of her kitchen?

“We’ll just be out for an hour,” Nathan added.

“Have a good time,” Bella said, her back to them both.

“See you soon,” Lily said, smiling politely at Bella’s back. She was determined not to become the sort of daughter-in-law who becomes a wedge between her husband and his mother.

“IT’S FREEZING,”
Lily said as they stepped outside. The temperature had dropped dramatically over the course of the day.

“Poor Sol,” Nathan said.

“What now?” Lily asked. She slipped her hand into his as they descended the staircase from their landing to the street.

“He was all excited about the game tonight. He’s taking a girl.”

“He is?”

“And now they’re going to freeze half to death.” Nathan shook his head. “The whole evening will be a bust.”

“Who’s he taking, do you know?”

“Some girl who apparently crashed our wedding with her mother.”

“Elka?” She dropped his hand.

“You know her?” He nodded at Mrs. Beler, who was out on her front porch, beating a rug.

“She came to our house.”

Nathan smiled. “Must be serious, then. He’s never had a girl over before.”

“He didn’t have her over. She came over uninvited. He didn’t call her after taking her out, so she came calling, chasing after him.”

Nathan smiled. “A girl who knows what she wants and goes after it. Sounds like just the ticket for Sol. Is she pretty?”

“You saw her. She was at our wedding.”