The Imposter Bride (31 page)

“AH, YOU’RE EARLY,”
Ida greeted me, though we hadn’t actually set a definite time.

Reuben had presented me with my ring the night before. It was Ida who had made it, and when I had called her to thank her she had invited me over so she could see for herself how it looked on my hand.

Did it trouble me that the same hand that bore that ring had explored the contours of another man’s face just a few nights earlier? It did, but I had constructed several rationales for the power of the attraction I had felt for David, most of them relating to the past that I was hoping to leave behind. And I had little doubt that I was moving towards a happy future by marrying Reuben. Still, when Ida took my janus-faced hand in hers, I wondered how she could not feel the treachorous heat of its fingertips and palm as she admired the cool beauty of the diamond that sat so nicely on its back. She didn’t seem to. She nodded her satisfaction, then gestured me towards the living room and told me to wait there while she made tea.

Ida had lived in that apartment for most of my life—its spacious size and decor reflecting the improvement in her economic
position since the end of the war—but only one other time had she received me in her living room, that weekend of my family’s move to Côte-St-Luc, years earlier.

“Remember when I spent the weekend with you?” I asked her now as she joined me in the living room.

“Of course I remember.” She put the tray down on the coffee table by the sofa. “You were such a peculiar little thing. Cleaning your plate no matter how often I filled it—I was worried maybe you had tapeworm—and thanking me every three minutes for every little thing. And then patting your clothes as if they were your pets.”

She didn’t mention my peeing my pants, which I appreciated.

The tea set was the same one she had used then, and she placed a slice of lemon in her own cup as she had that afternoon, but instead of stirring raspberry preserves into mine she added the amber fluid from the smaller of the silver pots on the tray.

“You’ve graduated,” she said as I inhaled the whisky-scented steam rising from my cup. She spiked her own cup, then raised it to toast “
L’chaim
.”

I returned her
l’chaim
, raising my cup to her.

“So …” she said. We spent very little time together, just the two of us; with the inspection of the ring now complete, she was scrambling for something to say to me. “The plans for the wedding are coming along?”

I assured her they were.

She nodded, smiled.

I reached into my satchel and retrieved the notebook I had brought with me. Ida looked at it, then at me. “Remember you once told me you’d read it to me when I was engaged to be married?”

I expected her to put me off again, but she didn’t. Had
enough time finally passed for her? Did she have some reason of her own to want to read through it again? Had she always intended to read it to me when she thought I was old enough to understand the feelings it raised for her? She reached for the notebook, put on her reading glasses and opened it.

“I begin with a dream …”
she read, and a scene formed in my mind of a stone city from which the entire range of human emotion had been cleansed except for terror, and from which every colour had been drained except for the grey of the streets and the blackish red of the fluid that filled the hollows where rainwater had once pooled. I saw a terrified girl running through the maze of streets and coming to a door that blocked her flight. I saw her falling against the door, pleading with it as if it held some residue of mercy in its fibres, and then the miraculous opening: into colour, sunlight, the scent of apricots, the tinkling notes of a piano.

“That was my childhood home,” Ida said. “Lily’s aunt Lottie was my mother. She doesn’t refer to my father because she never knew him. He was her father’s oldest brother, but he died when she was a baby. His name was Herschel—I named Elka after him.” And to my expression of confusion: “
Hersch
means ‘deer’ in Yiddish. Elk.” She smiled. “It was another thing for her to hate me for when she was a child.”

“Elka didn’t like her name?”

“She would have preferred Elizabeth.” Ida shook her head. “Lily and her family lived in Antwerp—her father was my uncle Chaim.” She looked at me.

I nodded, already knew that.

“She and her mother would visit my family in Krakow every summer. The visits continued even after my father died and my mother remarried—there was a deep bond of friendship between
my mother and her mother, and it endured and deepened even when they were no longer sisters-in-law. Lily’s mother still had her own family in Krakow to visit as well, but they would stay with my mother. Every summer. They would leave Antwerp in June and not return until September. And I would watch them go, my aunt and my spoiled little cousin, to my home, my family. While I had to stay and work like a servant for her father.”

“Why was your uncle Chaim in Antwerp if the rest of the family was in Poland?”

“Antwerp was the centre of the diamond trade. A lot of people moved there. My own father had wanted to move there, but he was the eldest, he couldn’t leave. And he might not have been able to leave even had he been the youngest, like Chaim. He had more vision than strength, my father—he could see what should be done without being able to do it.”

She picked up the notebook.
“Who am I?”
she read.
“A mound of mud in an autumn field. A pile of leaves to the side of a forest path. In your cities I’m a rat scurrying beneath the surface of your life. I hide in your sewers. I infect your dreams with pestilence. Vermin, you call me. Cur. Once I was a girl.”

“She always had tendencies towards the dramatic,” Ida said, peering at me over the top of her reading glasses. “She went through a stage of wanting to be an actress. The Sarah Bernhardt of her generation. But at thirteen she was overcome with shyness. You could see it descending on her, my sister Sonya wrote me.” I saw a tight-fitting dress inching down the length of a girl’s body, a sheath of shyness binding her in. “But beneath it she was still the same as before. Full of herself. So I guess she decided then that she would become a writer, a fantasy that her parents encouraged just as they had
encouraged every other whim that came into her head, bowing and scraping before her—she was their youngest and their only girl. Their little princess. And all the while I was working twelve-hour days in her father’s workshop, providing the materials of life that allowed her to entertain her fantasies in comfort. Including this, I might add.” She held up the notebook itself, which had probably been an expensive purchase, I realized, though one made long after Ida had already departed for Montreal.

Ida read a bit further then about a meeting the girl had had with a being who was either a man or a figment of her imagination:
“A crack had appeared in the Polish day, a drawing back of the world along a ragged seam. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, this parting in the shape of him, this opening to someplace else. Get up, he said. Quick.”

“Do you think she was really hiding in a pile of leaves?” I asked.

“More likely it was some sort of dugout. It wasn’t a chance meeting she was describing. He was a smuggler. He was going to smuggle her across a river—I’m not sure which river, and I don’t know why. I don’t even know where the border was at that point in the war. The lair she was hiding in was probably a pre-arranged point of rendezvous.”

“A smuggler? You mean for payment?”

“Of course for payment.”

I thought about the segment she had just read to me. “If she hadn’t lived to write about it, you’d think it was the angel of death she had just met, not a man.”

She peered at me again over her glasses. “She didn’t live long.” She picked up the notebook.
“Who are you? he asked. I had been walking for days. I’m a walking graveyard, I told him
.
The dead are buried in my skin …”
Ida’s voice was strong, but her hands were trembling, I noticed. Just a little, but it made me as uneasy as if the earth beneath me was trembling just a little.
“Hours passed. Days, I think. His eyes were black but they reflected light. My face emerged, revealed itself to him.”

“So you see,” Ida said.

See what? I wondered.

She read on.
“My father worked with light, I told him. He captured light with stones. He bent broken light into beauty …”

Her writing in that passage reminded me of some of the poems I had written in high school when I fell for Charles Blumenthal, the efforts I had made to try to elevate the boring details of my life into something more interesting, something that might match the intensity of the feelings I had for him.

“And on my mother’s side I descend from kindness …”
This was a reference to the girl’s maternal grandfather.
“He was a man so kind that migrating birds came to rest on his shoulders,”
Ida read, and a vision formed in my mind of a man standing on the edge of a field with exhausted geese resting on his shoulders.

“Wouldn’t they be heavy?” I asked.

“What, heavy?”

“The geese,” I said, thinking about the Canada geese that migrated every spring and fall, imagining how terrifying it would be to have one fly in for a landing on my shoulder.

“Who said anything about geese? It was songbirds. Tiny songbirds, scores of them, all along his shoulders and arms.”

“Like a tree,” I commented, and she looked at me as if I had said something right.

“There was something wrong with her grandfather,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“In his head. That’s why Lily and her mother stayed with us. It was like he’d gone senile, except that he was too young for that. His mind and personality just dissolved. First memory, then reason, then language, then appetite of any sort.”

“Until all that was left was kindness,” I said, because that was the impression the girl had created, and while Ida didn’t nod or agree, she also didn’t disagree.

“And she was a coward, Lily’s mother; she couldn’t face it. Any other daughter would have used those summer visits to help her mother, to take some of the load onto her own shoulders, but she couldn’t … And yet, she was a real friend to my mother. Through everything. With all the courage that friendship demands.”

Ida’s face looked different to me, softer somehow, as she granted me limited entrance to the life and people she had known before, a life and world so different from the one I knew her in. She shrugged, turned back to the notebook.
“If you were still your father’s daughter you would cross the street to avoid my glance. I wouldn’t, I assured him. We were fated for each other.”

Ida paused now. “Lust always feels like fate,” she said. “That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

I felt the colour rush to my face as I imagined that Ida had sensed more than she’d let on when she’d held my hand in hers earlier in our visit, that she somehow knew about the desire I’d felt for David several nights earlier—
lust
, she would call it—that could easily have become my fate. But Ida’s comment wasn’t about me, I realized. She was thinking about her own past, perhaps. Her cousin’s.

She continued reading. Some of the entries were more down-to-earth: descriptions of the food they ate, the texture
of the autumn mud. A lot of it was dreams, as Bella had said years earlier. There was some gibberish, though less than I had been led to believe; a few quotes and verses of poetry; some descriptions of her life before the war—her friendship with Eva, other friends, a favourite dress she had once worn to attract a boy that she liked—but there was nothing, it seemed to me, to merit Ida’s refusal to read it to me until now, Bella’s refusal to read it to me altogether, the family’s general discomfort about it.

“Is it all like this?” I interrupted Ida at one point.

“What do you mean?”

“Does anything
happen?
” A stupid question, I realized, but once again I was disappointed. I wanted to know how she had died, what the connection was between her and my mother, why my mother would have taken her name, pretended to be her.

Ida shrugged. “Nothing happens, no.”

“But?”

“There’s no but.” She flipped through a few pages as if to confirm that she hadn’t missed anything. “Do you want me to continue?”

“It’s okay,” I said.

She closed the notebook and put it on the coffee table.

“In some ways it’s the usual story,” Ida said.

“Usual?” The word hit me like a slap.

“She misread a man’s interest in her. In that she was no different from any rich girl who falls in love with a man who courts her for her money. No different in some ways from my own misreading of Elka’s father, though I wasn’t rich, of course, just richer than him. And the consequences, in my case, weren’t fatal.”

“I know that’s what happened in your life, but—”

“His interest in her was mercenary, my dear—he wanted her diamonds—but she misread it as love. It’s a common enough occurrence, I’m sorry to say.”

“And you were there, then? You knew him?”

All the natural colour in her face receded, leaving behind a pallor against which the orangey beige splotches of her makeup stood out to ghastly effect. She was silent for a few minutes, and I worried I had ended the conversation with my challenge, but then she began to tell me about a visit she had made to my mother twenty-three, almost twenty-four years earlier.

“It was just before Yom Kippur. She and your father were still living with Bella then—it was just a few months after their wedding. She was pregnant with you already, though no one knew it yet. She had been to see me a few weeks earlier in my store. With the diamond—I told you already …” Ida looked at me.

I nodded.

“When she showed it to me, I wondered how she had come to possess a diamond like that.”

Again I nodded.

“I shouldn’t have wondered, perhaps, not aloud, but you have to understand, she was presenting herself to me—to the entire world—as my cousin Lily Azerov.”

It was not Ida’s response that confused me. Why
wouldn’t
Ida wonder about the source of that diamond? It was my mother’s behaviour that made no sense: showing up at Ida’s store like that, claiming to be her cousin.