The Imposter Bride (3 page)

Sol raised his eyebrows in a questioning way.

“Her marriage to my father wasn’t exactly a huge success.”

Sol smiled. “Maybe her sixth sense works better for other people’s business than her own.”

Elka smiled, relieved that Sol didn’t seem as put off as she’d feared.

“And maybe in this case she’s on to something,” Sol added.

“What do you mean?”

“It was me the bride was supposed to marry, you know.”

“You?”

He told her about the letters he and Lily had exchanged, the arrangement they’d come to—leaving out the part about the payment he’d negotiated. Then the scene at Windsor Station.

“But it wasn’t right,” he concluded. “I could feel it in my gut.” He looked at Elka. “Sixth sense,” he added with a wink.

He expected a smile from her in return, agreement from her that he had done the right thing, that the gut never lies. He expected some variety of the nodding, smiling encouragement he was used to receiving during a first encounter with a girl.

“And so you left her there?” she asked instead. “You left your fiancée at the train station?”

“I didn’t just
leave
her.” What did she take him for? “I called the people who had agreed to host her until the wedding.” He remembered his desperate call to Eisenberg—his
boss and self-appointed mentor since his father’s death eleven years earlier. “I explained what had happened and asked them to come and pick her up.”

“And then you left her? A refugee who travelled half the world to marry you?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Sol protested, but it was, of course. He remembered Lily’s face as she waited to be greeted, the hopeful lift of her eyes at each approaching man, the disappointment, then confusion, as one after another swept past her to welcome someone else. As the crowd around her thinned, she had developed a sudden preoccupation with her luggage—an attempt, Sol knew, to control her rising panic, rein in her darting eyes. She’d bent over her suitcase, a lone, still figure in the swirling crowd, her grey dress too sombre amid the bright summer colours, its classic cut too severe among all the wide skirts and needless flourishes that flaunted the end of wartime restrictions. How long had she bent over that suitcase, he wondered now, fiddling with the leather strap that didn’t need adjusting, postponing the moment when she would have to look up again at the emptying hall?

Someone had bumped him, a girl with yellow hair and a wide red mouth. “Sorry, hon,” she’d exhaled. Her eyes were blue, her hair crimped into countless perfect, yellow waves. A doll, he thought, like the one his younger sister, Nina, had loved so many years before. A living doll that would leave on his arm if he would just give the signal. She smiled encouragement, her mouth a blur of red. While across the hall on the periphery of his vision, the grey blot he was meant to marry.

What kind of man …? he wondered now, remembering Lily’s shadowed face, the dress, all wrong, that had obviously been chosen with care.
What kind of man …?
he heard Elka
think, and a hot shame filled him, a shame charged with anger at the silent girl beside him through whose eyes he had just glimpsed a distinctly unpleasant view of himself.

What Elka saw, though, didn’t seem to her unpleasant. She liked how Sol kept to the outside of the sidewalk as they walked, as if what menaced her resided in the empty street. She liked the light touch of his hand on her waist as he guided her around corners and across streets, had begun to wait for it at each crosswalk, that light, fleeting touch claiming different parts of her. It was scandalous, of course, that he had left the woman at the station, but she felt flattered to think that she had caught what Lily couldn’t. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that her mother had insisted they stay at the wedding, she thought now as she smiled up at Sol. Maybe her mother had a sixth sense after all.

MAYBE IT WILL BE ALL RIGHT
, Bella Kramer thought as she sat alone at the table reserved for the wedding party and watched her son and daughter-in-law dance above her in their lifted chairs. The wedding party consisted of three: Lily, Nathan and Bella. Nathan’s father, Joseph, had died eleven years earlier, and his sister, Nina, had departed for Palestine as soon as the war in Europe ended. Sol would normally have acted as best man and been seated at the table with the rest of the family, but in this case it was agreed all around that he had no further role to play in this marriage.

Some head table, Bella had thought when she first sat down, a small round table with five chairs, the extra two chairs being for the rabbi and his wife. She remembered the head table at
her own wedding, a long table that extended the length of an entire wall in one of the biggest wedding halls in all of Berdichev, with her large and boisterous family filling one end and Joseph’s equally large and boisterous family filling the other. Now
that
was a head table.

Nathan had thought at first that there shouldn’t be a wedding party at all, that they should dispense with walking down the aisle, given that Lily had no one to walk with her on the way to the
khupah
, but Lily had shaken her head. “Why should my misfortune rob you of a proper wedding?” she asked. “Then I’ll also walk down the aisle alone,” he said, to which she shook her head again. She would not have his mother be insulted in such a way.

Nathan had told Bella about that exchange as the two of them sat in the back seat of the car he had hired to take them to his wedding. They could easily have walked over. The synagogue where the wedding was being held was on Hutchison Street, just a few blocks away from their apartment on Clark Street, and it was a beautiful summer evening. But the way a thing starts is the way it continues, Nathan felt, so it was important to him that every member of the wedding party arrive in as much style and comfort as he could afford.

Just how much was this ride costing him? Bella had wondered briefly, but then she dismissed the thought because she knew how proud Nathan felt to be able to hire a car for the occasion. And not just one. Another hired car was travelling through the same streets at that very moment, bringing his bride to the hall where they would soon be united in marriage. It was a gloomy way to go to a wedding, Bella couldn’t help thinking. She had been danced through the streets to her own wedding. She had heard the singing and clapping of her
family and friends from a distance and then growing louder and louder as they approached her parents’ home. Joseph was already waiting for her at the hall, and they were coming to bring her to him. What a moment that had been. She remembered her joy and feeling of triumph as she was swept through the streets to the man she had chosen for herself and already knew she loved. This quiet drive to her son’s wedding felt better suited to a funeral, but she knew Nathan was happy and proud. And she knew he had just told her about that exchange with Lily to paint his bride in the most favourable light to her soon-to-be mother-in-law.

She had patted his knee and smiled.

NATHAN WAS NOT ACTUALLY
Bella’s first-born; he was her fourth. But he was the first to live past childhood. Her first children had died during the civil war that followed the revolution in Russia. They had not been murdered as so many had been, torn and tortured as each successive band of soldiers reconquered the city; and in that, she supposed, she had been lucky. She shook her head now at that thought, tried to imagine if the hopeful bride she had been would ever have believed what life would soon force her to consider “luck.” She wouldn’t, Bella knew, but the woman she had become understood the darker shades of good luck. And that’s what it had been, a very dark shade of good luck that her children had not been afraid when they were taken. They had gone quietly of hunger and illness while in the embrace of their mother’s arms. One after another they had gone, the baby first, than two-year-old Leah, then her first-born, Shmulik, who had been his father’s delight.

She had thought then that her life was over, but Nathan had been born just one year later on the passage over to Canada. He had come early, an entire month before the date she had calculated, and neither she nor Joseph had thought of a name for him, neither of them able, at that point, to imagine a happy and usual conclusion to the pregnancy. One of the other passengers had suggested he be named for the ship that was carrying them all to new lives. She smiled now, remembering that passenger—a tailor from Pinsk who was on his way to become a farmer somewhere in the wilds of Saskatchewan or Manitoba. Good luck to him, she had thought at the time, thinking he could farm with a stooped back like that. She wondered now what had become of him.

The man’s suggestion for her son’s name had been as absurd as his ambition for his new life—the ship was the SS
Vedic—
but it had some appeal to Bella. Not because of any shortage of traditional names—there were all the names of brothers and uncles that were not currently in use, suspended as they were by the premature deaths of their previous owners. But Bella hadn’t wanted to plant in new earth what had withered in the old. She wanted a fresh name, one unrelated to anyone she and Joseph had ever known. It was she who had suggested Nathan, from the Hebrew for “gift.” It was a name, she thought, that balanced the memories of what they’d come through with their hopes for the future. Joseph, though, had had no hope for the future—his or anybody else’s—and had suggested Sol instead, the name of his beloved youngest brother who had died at thirteen of typhus, also during the civil war. Bella, however, was adamant: Nathan, she insisted. Joseph’s hope would return. They had been given another child, another chance, and were heading to a new life in a new and distant land. But she had been wrong.

In Russia her Joseph had worked with metal. An honourable substance, he had told her the first time they met. A substance whose history paralleled that of man himself. She smiled to remember it, how cocky he’d been. She had agreed with him, of course. She would have agreed with anything he said at that point—he was so handsome and brash—but her agreement went deeper than that. She was a socialist at the time. She shared the view, prevalent among her co-believers, that the metal industry was by far the most valuable and important of all the industries that would build the socialist future.

In Canada, though, Joseph Kramer had sorted buttons. That was the first job he found when they disembarked in Montreal, and it was a fine job for a newcomer, as it required neither English nor French and paid almost a living wage to anyone who could stand the hours.

Joseph, it turned out, could stand the hours. He preferred the hours, Bella soon came to understand, to those he spent at home, mute and stiff with her and their new child. He preferred the procession of buttons that asked nothing more than to be sorted by colour and size.

Bella had assumed the job would be temporary, a stepping stone to something better, especially when one of their neighbours told her that the Canadian Pacific Railway was hiring Jewish tinsmiths and other metal workers. But the weeks went by, and then the months, and Joseph was still sorting buttons.

“What kind of work is this for a man like you?” Bella began to ask. An endless parade of coloured buttons, and Joseph a man who had once tempered the steel that built bridges and ships.

Joseph couldn’t explain it. Not to Bella. Perhaps not even
to himself. “It’s calming,” he said finally. More calming than the hot milk laced with rum that Bella prepared for him each night before bed. More calming than the prayer he had given up as a youth and resumed again now in the dark mornings before he left for work. He was a man who had thought he would not be able to go on after the deaths of his children, would not be able to find the strength to bear himself through his life.
Forgive me that you and the child are not enough
, he implored Bella, though not in words, never in words. He had found his reassurance, Bella understood, in the meaningless work he now performed. In the ceaseless turning of the conveyer belt: a reminder that life would continue with or without the strength of Joseph Kramer. She had not found it in her heart to forgive him.

Who is that? she wondered now as she lifted her eyes from the past to look around the room. She had noticed the woman earlier; she was the only stranger in the room, she and her sulking daughter, whom Sol had just taken outside. Probably a relative of the Eisenbergs, who had been kind enough to host the bride after Sol’s misstep at the station. Everyone else in the room, though, Bella recognized. She had not done too badly, she thought, to be sitting here in a room full of people wishing her and her family well.

“I wish your father were here,” she had told Nathan earlier, and she had meant it. There’s a force to life that sweeps you along, she thought now, as she watched her son dance with his bride. It was a force not unlike that of the guests who had swept her long ago to her wedding and her future. It would have picked Joseph up again if he had been given more time. It would pick Lily up too, Bella thought. Lily was stricken, Bella knew. She recognized grief when she met it. But
she’ll come along. People come along. It’s the nature of our species to come along, she thought. Maybe this really would turn out all right.

She rose from the empty table to join the dancing.

CHAPTER 2

T
he first package arrived on April 27, 1953. I remember the date because it was my sixth birthday. I had learned to read that year, so I could piece together the letters on the wrapping of the little box that the mailman had slipped through the mail slot.
Ruth Kramer
, I read. My name. And below it the address on Cumberland in N.D.G., Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where we lived at that time, my father and me in the upper half of the duplex, and my aunt Elka and uncle Sol downstairs, with Jeffrey, my cousin, who was a year old then. I remember my excitement. I had never received anything in the mail until then. Not a letter, certainly not a package, and so nicely wrapped. The paper was sky blue with different coloured polka dots, and a patch of white like a cloud on the front where my name and address had been written.