The Imposter Bride (38 page)

“Thank you,” I said, and then we just looked at each other again.

We didn’t touch the cake sitting in front of us or sip at our coffee. She didn’t ask me how my trip had been, or how long I thought I might stay in Thunder Bay. Or how my life had been and was going, for that matter. I didn’t comment on her house or ask if the small, rust-spotted apples in the bowl were from the tree I’d noticed in the garden. Nor did I ask the name and age of my half-brother, who smiled at me with my own mouth from the mantelpiece. We looked at each other without self-consciousness, without thought of anything outside the long mutual study in which we were engaged. Her face was beautiful in its starkness; the only colour in it the blue of her eyes. Even her lips were pale. I felt the contrast of my own darker
colouring, the softer, more padded contours of my face. Was she seeing that too, the differences between us, the different way her own eyes looked when set against my colouring and within the fleshier, less austere structure of my face?

I heard the sound of a cuckoo clock from somewhere deeper inside the house, the breaking apart and falling of a log in the fireplace. Did my mother notice?

No, I thought. She was transfixed, the expression on her face one of wonder. Her eyes brimmed with tears again. Like sapphires now, her eyes, not like mine at all. The first tears spilled, slid down her face. She wiped them away, but more followed, and then more. A continuous flow of tears as if a well within her were emptying itself.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I reached my hand out, an instinctive reaching out, to comfort her, and she took my hand in hers.

It was a stranger’s hand, strong, weather-worn, not at all like the hands that had comforted and cared for me through my life, but I had known it once, I thought, as I felt it press against my own.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

I had imagined so many scenarios for our first meeting, had lists of questions and possible things we might talk about, things we might do. I had brought some of the rocks she had given me to ask her about them, why she had sent them, if there was something special about each particular one. I had brought the diamond, the notebooks. I wasn’t sure I would bring them out, but I had them with me just in case. And then there were the photos of Reuben and the kids, the drawings the kids had made for her, the rock Joey had found in our backyard that he thought I should give her from him.

“I can’t explain to you why I did what I did.”

“That’s not why I came.”

“Isn’t it?”

I thought about that before answering. “Only in part.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“It’s enough to see you,” I said.

“Is it?”

I realized the degree to which that was true. It wasn’t that my questions had disappeared or felt irrelevant. It was more that they had been displaced by the comfort I felt in her presence, a comfort I had not expected at all, that settled on me as I sat with her, pushing the noise of questions and explanations to the outer periphery of my mind. I didn’t answer, but maybe she felt my answer, because she smiled then and didn’t say she was sorry again.

“You’re not eating your cake,” she said.

“Neither are you.”

She smiled again. “You’re beautiful.”

“No, I’m not.” I was nice enough to look at, I knew—“easy on the eye,” Reuben liked to say—but I was not beautiful. Never had been, never would be.

“Yes,” she said. “Beautiful.”

And I didn’t argue a second time, because the look on her face, as she said it, was like that of a new mother proclaiming the beauty of the crying, slimy bundle of wrinkled humanity she has just brought forth into the world.

“You have your father’s goodness,” she said. “I felt it the minute I saw you. And your grandfather’s mouth.”

And ten perfect fingers and toes, I thought. Was it possible she hadn’t done this the first time she had seen me? It was, I realized, for whatever combination of loss and fear and
self-recrimination and bewildered grief and remembered horror, none of which I would ever understand at the level that she had felt them. And though I was thirty-five years old by now, with three children of my own, I basked in her strange, belated, proud inventory of my beauty.

I heard the clock strike again. How long had I been here? An hour? Two? The room had darkened, though it was not quite yet dusk. This time she had also heard the clock. I felt the shift in her.

“My husband will be home soon,” she said, and I understood she wanted me to leave before he came.

“Is that your husband?” I asked, looking at the photos facing me on the mantelpiece.

“Yes,” she said, without turning around to look.

I knew I should leave, should start making the motions to leave, at least, should ask her what time we might see each other the following day, if she would like to see me, that is, and if she would prefer to meet somewhere else, my hotel, perhaps. We sat a little longer. It seemed like no time, but the clock struck another quarter-hour.

“You’ll come back tomorrow?” she asked.

I said I would, reached for my purse.

“Earlier in the day,” she said.

We agreed on a time.

“Your husband doesn’t know about me, does he?”

“Not yet,” she said, and she looked at me then with a look that seemed to beseech me to understand. I was afraid she would say she was sorry, again, but she didn’t.

“How old is your son?” I asked, looking at the photo of my smiling half-brother in his graduation cap and gown.

“Twenty-nine.”

He was born when I was six, then. The year she sent me the first rock.

WHEN I CALLED REUBEN
that evening he suggested I rent a car the next day and take her somewhere we could walk.

“Where?” I asked him.

“Anywhere. Outside. Where you’re not just staring at each other. Somewhere she likes. She’ll tell you where.”

She directed me to a trail that led through forest to a small lake. She told me it was the landscape and lakes in the area that had made her get off the train.

“I just wanted to smell it,” she said. She had been in Montreal a year by then and had not been out of the city. And before that in Palestine. The train to Montreal when she first arrived had passed through forest, but she hadn’t stepped outside. “I grew up in a forest like this. I thought if I smelled it again, now that time had passed and peace had come, something from before the war would come to me.” Some lost memory of her father, of other members of her family whose voices and faces never came to her, she said, not even in her dreams. “No one came,” she said, but she didn’t get back on the train.

“Where had you been planning to go?”

“I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I had a ticket to Winnipeg.”

She had found work right away, at a roadhouse, making pancakes. She had liked the customers, men mostly, many of them from the northeastern corner of Europe: Finns, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles. They worked in the forest, the port. She rented an apartment in a house in Port Arthur. When she wasn’t working she walked and skied in the
forest. Often she camped, sometimes for days at a time.

“You weren’t afraid?”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Bears.”

She smiled. “I was always afraid. But not of bears.”

But over time she became less afraid. The fear started to slip from her. And then after a little more time she met the man who would be her husband. He was a surveyor, one of the customers at the restaurant. One day, four years after first meeting him, she noticed him.
He’s a good man
, she thought. She married him, they had a son. She stopped making pancakes, began working as a tutor.

“I have a talent for languages,” she said.

The more she talked the further I felt from the woman I had sat with the previous day who had looked at me with wonder through tear-filled eyes, but I was happy to hear some of the facts of her life. She asked about my life. I told her about Reuben, the children, the work I did restoring manuscripts. The more
I
talked, the less I felt I was expressing the truth of my life.

“I can’t explain what it was like for me,” she said at one point.

I knew that by then.

We sat on a large outcrop of rock overlooking the lake. I showed her the photos I had brought. She commented how beautiful my children were, how handsome my husband. I opened my knapsack again to pull out the drawings the children had made for her. “So talented,” she said. I gave her the rock from Joey, and she smiled and wordlessly enclosed it in her hand, and all the words and explanations fell away again and I felt myself in the presence of a deeper part of her.

We sat for a while longer.

“You weren’t my first,” she said.

I looked at her.

“I had lost a child already.”

“A baby?”

“I couldn’t keep her alive.”

“During the war?”

“Yes. Then.” And with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, “I’m not telling you that to excuse what I did, as if that would explain …” She paused. “Many people lost children. Your own grandmother.”

She looked at me, waiting for my response.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and with that, her eyes, which had been dry, almost hard as she told me about my half-sister who had died, softened.

“Tonya,” she said. “That was her name.”

“How old was she?”

“Five months.” She shook her head. “It was madness to keep her with us. There were families that would have taken her, helped us.” She looked at me. “Don’t believe it when people tell you no one would help us. People helped us. Good people.” She paused. “Even not-so-good people. They helped us.”

I nodded.

“But I wanted her with us.” She looked at me then as if to ask if that was such a terrible thing to have wanted.

I tried to imagine the situation she had been in, the choice she had faced, but knew I couldn’t, not really.

“Either way I would have lost her. But she’d be alive.”

I tried again to imagine it. “You did what you thought best,” I said, which sounded hollow and trite.

“I did,” she said. “But I was wrong.”

We sat for a while saying nothing. The wind had picked up, raising a light chop on the lake.

She looked at me. “It makes me happy to see you.” She smiled. “I know it may not seem that way.”

“It seems that way,” I said. I knew the undertow certain kinds of happiness could bring.

A few clouds moved across the sky. When they hid the sun the air lost all its warmth. I felt cold sitting there but didn’t want to move. She didn’t either. She pulled her coat tighter around her. We sat a little closer to each other.

“Why did you go to Palestine right after the war?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Where else was I going to go?” After a while she said, “It wasn’t Europe, and there was a chance of landing there and not being sent back. I suppose it seemed as good as any place to make a start. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered.”

“It was the wrong decision. I knew it as soon as I landed.”

“How did you know?”

She shrugged. “I just knew.”

What was it, I wondered—the heat? the smell of the air?—that somehow made her loneliness harder to bear there? She didn’t elaborate and we sat for a while without talking, looking out onto the northern forest that was like the one she had grown up in, the landscape, familiar to her, that had made her get off the train.

“In the end I had to pass through Europe again to be admitted to Canada.”

“You did?”

“Because I had come into Palestine illegally, so to leave
it and enter Canada … it wasn’t something that could be arranged with the British in control.”

“So you left it for Europe?” Whoever heard of a Jewish person leaving Palestine in 1946 for Europe?

“Someone I knew was going to Egypt through the Sinai. I went with him to Egypt and from there back to Europe. It wasn’t hard to get back into Europe then. And it was easier to make arrangements from there. Everything was still in chaos.”

“But after what you must have gone through to get to Palestine …” I remembered all the books I’d read about the attempts by Jewish refugees to land there. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense to stay and try to—”

Something in her face stopped me mid-sentence.

“Nothing made sense at that time. I had Canada in my mind; I can’t tell you why. The word itself raised certain images, a feeling of calmness … I really can’t tell you what I was thinking.”

I felt her shutting herself away from me, or maybe from the memory of that time in her life that I was prodding her to explain and thereby re-experience, to some degree. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you—”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.”

“It’s good enough.”

“Is it?”

We sat for a time and just when I thought the sun would never emerge again from the huge cloud that was covering it, it did. It was nice to sit there with her in the warming sun. I think I knew then that I would probably never see her again, but it was okay. This was what I had come for, I thought.

“I remember your laugh,” I told her.

She smiled. “Do you?”

I told her how I would hear it in my sleep, that it would seem like a dream but it would pull me from sleep and when I woke I knew it wasn’t dream, it was memory.

She nodded; she understood perfectly, and I hoped she would laugh, so I could hear it again, but she didn’t.

“You’re lucky,” she said.

I looked at her. “Lucky?”

“What I wouldn’t give to hear my mother’s laugh,” she said.

EPILOGUE

January 2005

Laughter wakes me. A single peal. It pierces my sleep, scatters my dreams, then it’s gone and I’m awake, alone, alert to the bark of a distant dog, the car driving too quickly along the pavement outside. I won’t sleep again tonight. Already I can feel the gathering pressure in my chest, a heavy beast awakening inside me. I open my eyes but darkness obscures the life I’ll resume in the morning. For the moment there’s just the shadow and shape of a room that isn’t home and the sweeping lights of cars as they pass in the street below.