The Imposter Bride (6 page)

“Hi, Ma,” Nathan said as he came into the kitchen.

Bella was sitting at the table by now, fanning herself. Lily was standing at the counter by the sink, her back to them both, slicing and salting a tomato. Nathan lifted Lily’s hair and kissed the moist nape of her neck.

“It’s hot,” he said, pulling off his tie and jacket.

The apartment was—by coincidence and unfortunate turns of luck—the same one Nathan had lived in as a child. There had been others in between, some slightly better, some slightly worse, but now this one again, this cold-water, one-bedroom walk-up on Clark Street with its dark kitchen opening onto the back fire escape, and the airless bedroom, now occupied by Nathan and Lily, where Bella’s hope for her own husband and marriage had died.

Nathan remembered a night—how long ago was it? He couldn’t have been more than five. Sol was about three, Nina no more than nine or ten months. It was a winter night. Joseph came home from work with a valentine for Bella, a card with a man dressed in the fashion of the times and peering hopefully at the reader:

I’m looking for a Valentine
But none of those Jazz gluttons
I want a handy little miss
Who can sew on a few buttons
.

At the bottom were two buttons sewn right into the card, two little disks of red plastic that Joseph himself may well have sorted. Bella looked at the card, then tore it into pieces and walked out of the room.

Sol and Nina were already at the table—it was supper-time—Nina in her high chair, banging the tray with her spoon. Sol slipped out of his chair and ran out of the room after his mother. Nathan stayed with his father, retrieved the pieces of the card that his mother had torn to shreds and brought it back to the table. A red and white checked oilcloth covered the table, the red slightly darker than that of the two buttons that had been sewn into the shredded card.

He worked quietly, aware of but not distracted by the cold draft at his back where the heat of the stove didn’t reach, his father’s silence across the table, the rising racket of Nina’s beating spoon and increasingly impatient vocals. His father rose from the table to get one of the potatoes that was cooling on the counter. He broke it in the palm of his hand, put it on Nina’s tray and then sat back down. The card came back together, but it was painstaking work, the letters and words not providing any clues about which pieces went where, because Nathan could not yet read.

As Nathan worked and Nina ate her potato, their father began to speak, his voice a low murmur. He described the properties of iron, lead and zinc, explaining the reasons you might use one as opposed to another, or might choose another
metal entirely. Tin, for example. Aluminum. He explained how carbon combines with iron to make steel, the various ways to combine zinc and aluminum for die-cast. He spoke in the same tone of distant wonder with which he might have recounted a dream, with which his own father or grandfather before him might once have described the fruits of the Galilee on which they would sate themselves in the world to come.

“Do you know what lies at the core of the earth?” his father asked him.

“Rock,” Nathan answered.

“Iron,” Joseph said. “Molten iron. That’s what keeps us rooted to this world. Why do you think we don’t go flying off into space as the earth spins around like a wild woman? Did you ever wonder about that?”

Nathan hadn’t, had never perceived himself to be spinning.

“You think it’s gravity that keeps us here?” his father asked him. “It’s not gravity, believe me. In a hundred years gravity will be as much an accepted part of science as the flatness of the earth. As Divine Revelation at Sinai. As nothing more than the half-baked rantings of another false prophet. It’s magnetic force that keeps us here. Magnetic force, do you understand me?”

“What does the valentine say?” Nathan asked. The reassembly was complete, but he couldn’t see what might have made his mother so angry, unless it was in the words.

“Stupidities,” Joseph answered.

“Is that why Mama tore it up?”

“In part.” Joseph came over to Nathan’s side of the table. “Are you finished with this now?”

Nathan wasn’t finished. He had planned to turn over each piece and tape the whole thing along the back so it wouldn’t fall apart again. But he nodded yes.

“May I put it where it belongs, then?”

Nathan nodded again, and his father gathered the pieces in his hand and tossed them back into the garbage. Nina started banging her tray again with her spoon, gleeful now, bits of potato smeared all over her face, her tray and on the floor beneath her high chair.

“Your mother’s a good woman,” Joseph told Nathan. “A faithful woman. She’s faithful to the man she married.”

Nathan shook away the memory now, put his briefcase on one of the kitchen chairs. It’s just for a while, he had promised himself when he first rented the apartment. The war hadn’t been over that long; housing in Montreal was still very tight.

“It’s just for a while,” Nathan had promised Bella, which had touched her. It was the sort of promise a man made to his bride, not his mother, and she had not expected to hear such a promise out of the mouth of a man again. She had boarded at Mrs. Pozniak’s during the war, and while she had hoped she might have a home of her own again one day, or at least be invited into one of her children’s homes when and if her sons returned alive to Montreal from the war or her daughter, Nina, returned from Palestine, where she was teaching school, she had tried very hard not to expect it.

“Did you have a good day?” Bella knew the question was one better asked by his wife, but Lily never asked, didn’t seem to care.

“Not bad.” He opened the icebox to take out a beer, saw the supper Lily had prepared. Then he saw the hamburgers sitting on the counter. Which would it be? he wondered. Who would be the victor of this particular skirmish? “Is Sol coming home for supper?”

“He didn’t say,” Bella answered.

“He has a date,” Lily said.

Bella looked at Lily.

“He told me last night,” Lily said. “I was up when he came in.”

So, Sol she talks to, Bella thought.

“You couldn’t sleep again?” Nathan asked. He knew about Lily’s insomnia but usually slept through her comings and goings in the night.

Lily shrugged. “Not too well.”

“It’s so hot,” Nathan said.

“You’re late getting home today,” Bella said. This too seemed to her an observation that should have been offered by his wife. Did Lily even notice the length of Nathan’s workday? Bella wondered.

“I had a meeting.”

“A good meeting?”

“Good enough,” Nathan said. He winked at Lily as she set the table.

Lily smiled, lowering her eyes. She had noticed he was late but hadn’t commented. A man doesn’t want his comings and goings commented on by a woman, her mother had taught her. She put the hamburgers in the frying pan, looking away as she did so, breathing through her mouth to avoid the smell of dead flesh. It permeated the room, that fresh-kill smell with just the faintest underpinning of rot. She glanced at Nathan and Bella. Was it possible they didn’t notice it?

“A business is always slow at the beginning,” Bella was saying. “It takes time to build a base of customers, to find suppliers who aren’t out to cheat you.”

Nathan’s business was building fast, faster than anything he had imagined possible when he’d told Eisenberg that he wouldn’t be returning to his old job once he was discharged
from the air force. It was hard work, yes, but steady. More and more metals were being released from war production every day. Steel, iron, aluminum—everything that had been in such short supply. And more and more customers were lining up to buy them. It wouldn’t be long before he would need his own truck for deliveries, rather than borrowing and renting as he’d been doing until now. And soon he would also need an office of his own. A rented corner with a desk and telephone wouldn’t do for much longer.

“Business isn’t slow, Ma.”

Bella and Lily both looked up at the confident tone of his voice.

“Business isn’t slow at all.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Bella warned him. His father had been cocky once, she remembered. It was an attractive quality in a man, but dangerous. No man was stronger than life, Bella thought.

CHAPTER 4

I
t was a full year and a half before the next package from my mother arrived. October 17, 1954. The date is recorded in the scrapbook about her that I started soon after the arrival of the first package. I was in grade two by then, so I wasn’t home for the mail delivery; Elka gave it to me when I was having my after-school snack. Jeffrey (two and a half then) and Mitch (eight months old that October) were upstairs having their nap, so it was just me and Elka in the kitchen. Girls’ time, Elka called that brief period of time between my arriving home from school and the boys waking up from their naps.

This time the package was wrapped in plain brown paper, which wasn’t as nice as the blue, but I would still save it, I thought, and put it into the scrapbook. The scrapbook didn’t have anything in it so far except the blue dotted paper, the Canada goose stamp that Elka had steamed off the paper for me, and the index card that told me, in my mother’s own writing, where she had gotten the piece of pink quartz that now sat on top of my desk in my bedroom.

The stamps on this most recent mailing were all of Queen Elizabeth, which presented a dilemma. They should more properly go into the scrapbook I had made about the Queen’s coronation, a scrapbook I still added to all the time because I had expanded its scope to include ongoing stories and photos of the Queen’s family, her corgis and the trips she took with her husband, Prince Philip. But the Queen’s scrapbook was already full to bursting and my mother’s was all but empty, so I decided I would put the stamps in my mother’s. I would cut them from the corner rather than steam them, because I needed help to steam and Elka was busier since my cousin Mitch was born, and not always as interested in helping me with my projects.

Elka was cooking something at the stove while I unwrapped the package, but I knew she was watching me as she stirred whatever she was stirring. I ran my finger over my name. It was written in block letters, so it was easy for me to read. Then I unwrapped the paper, careful not to rip it. It was another little box, though not from Birks, and when I opened it there was the same layer of cotton. Beneath it, another rock.

“What is it, honey?”

I lifted it from the cotton, carefully, as if I could harm it with rough handling. But I couldn’t harm it; it was solid. A smooth, flat grey stone shot through with veins of other kinds of rock. It was beautiful, I thought, and this time I wasn’t disappointed.

“Is there a card?”

I pulled out an index card and started to read it, but Elka had to help me. “
Rainy Lake, Ontario, 14:00, October 9th, 1954, overcast, 56 degrees F, light breeze
,” we read together.

“Well …” Elka said.

I looked at her. She was doing that little thing with her mouth.

“Your mother likes rocks, I would say.”

In retrospect I can see that that was the response of a woman at a temporary loss for words, but at the time it seemed like a perfectly reasonable observation to make. And it gave me an excellent idea for the scrapbook. I would have a page where I would list all my mother’s likes. “And lakes,” I added. “She likes lakes.”

“Yes, that’s true. The last one was also from a lake, wasn’t it.”

“Gem Lake,” I said.

“Right.”

“Where is Gem Lake, Manitoba?”

“Far away.”

“And Rainy Lake?”

“Also far away.”

I liked the name Rainy Lake. It would smell nice there, I thought. We had been to a lake the previous summer, Trout Lake up in the Laurentians. I’d learned to swim there but had felt a little afraid every time I went into the water after Sol told me to be careful not to let the trout nibble at my feet. Nothing would nibble at my feet at Rainy Lake, I thought. I would float on my back and the rain would fall softly on my face.

“How far away?”

“She’s not there, sweetie. That’s just where she was that day.”

“Is it closer or farther from here than Gem Lake?”

She thought about that awhile before answering. “Closer,” she said.

SHE DIDN’T COME ANY CLOSER
, though. Or if she did, she didn’t let me know, because another whole year passed without anything from her.

And then one Sunday evening my father told me to go put on a dress because we were going out to eat. We usually only went out to eat for special occasions, but it wasn’t unheard of for Elka to announce that she didn’t feel like cooking on a Sunday night, or for Sol to announce that he was taking us out on the town. Then we’d all pile into Sol’s car or my father’s and we’d drive either to Ruby Foo’s on Decarie, which wasn’t kosher, so we could only eat the fish or vegetable dishes there, or farther, all the way across town to my father’s and Sol’s old neighbourhood to go to Green’s, which was kosher, so we could eat anything and everything that was on the menu, though I always ate the same thing, chicken fricassee, and always made Jeffrey cry by telling him that the chicken’s necks in the dish were the fingers of little boys who had snooped in their older cousin’s things.

“Stop that,” my father reprimanded me. We had gone to Green’s that night and, like always, I told Jeffrey that he was eating a little boy’s fingers.

“She’s just fooling with you,” Sol told Jeffrey, but Jeffrey was still snivelling.

My grandmother Bella and Ida Pearl hadn’t joined us that night, which was unusual, because we always stopped to pick them up when we went out to eat. My aunt Nina never joined us because she was very busy.

I wiggled my fingers at Jeffrey in a creepy crawler sort of way, which set him wailing again, but no one saw me do it, so no one knew what had set him off. Sol told him sharply that that was enough now, which made him cry harder.

“Really, Sol. Do you think that’s a help?” Elka asked, but she was busy with Mitch, who was two then and also making a racket. She shoved a large piece of a dinner roll into Mitchell’s mouth just as he opened wide for a good howl and pulled Jeffrey over onto her lap.