The Innocents (36 page)

Next to Rachel, curved and tiny and shining with health, Ellie seemed gaunt, like a spindly creature of an entirely different race. She had come in glasses that he had not known she needed, square tortoiseshell frames that emphasized the sharp angles of her face, and she wore an old sweater that he’d seen before, a huge woolen sack in funereal charcoal and black that hung off her frame in folds. If he picked her up in his arms she might fold perfectly in three, like a collapsible walking stick. And yet despite the glasses, the utter lack of adornment, she was spectacular. Her very carelessness was compelling.

Behind him he heard Jasper whispering over his shoulder, “It shouldn’t be allowed to be that hot. She’s a hot mess,” and Adam gave no answer, flinching as if a fly had buzzed past his ear. He stood rooted to the ground, staring recklessly and fixedly at her face so that she would have no choice but to acknowledge him.

Jaffa surged toward him and took his face between her hands, squeezing hard. “Ah, everything is beautiful. We will not stay long because my mother, you know, she will be very tired. But she is in good shape, no? And Ellie, she must travel very early, so just a
shana tova
to you both and we will have to go.”

“
Shana tova
, Jaffa,” he murmured. But it would not be a good year for her, he thought, and it would be his fault.

“
Shana tova, bubele
. She did a beautiful job with the party my girl, no? What a hostess.” Jaffa gestured around the room with a balletic sweep of her arm, a thick tube of plastic bangles clicking as she did. Her hair was a particularly bright shade of aubergine, freshly hennaed in honor of the High Holidays. “What a hostess,” she said again. Adam nodded. He wanted her away from him, this plump, smiling aggravation of his guilt.

“She gets it from you, Jaffa,” he told her, hating himself. He cast about over her head for something to draw him away.

“Yes, this I know. The cooking I gave her, and the shortness also, and the bust. But the beauty”—Jaffa looked across at Rachel who was offering a tray of mini bagels to the Wilsons—“the beauty she did not get from me. That is all her own. And the goodness, that is my husband.” She turned back to Adam and looked up at him intently. “It will be a good year for you both, I know,” she told him. It sounded like a command.

Across the room Ellie was sitting on the side of her grandmother’s deep armchair, leaning toward her so that they were touching, shoulder to shoulder. Ziva reached up and gripped her granddaughter’s hand, her head sinking toward her chest as if its weight was too much for her. Intermittently she would speak and Ellie would lower her own head, her ear close to her grandmother’s lips, never letting go of her hand. A group stood around them chatting idly, clinking teacups on saucers or forks on Rachel’s treasured lace-patterned side plates, but Ellie’s attention was only on Ziva. Occasionally she glanced up at someone to answer a question and then looked down again.

The throng that had formed was entirely composed of women who had never, to the best of Adam’s knowledge, spoken more than two nervous words to Ellie before now. Emboldened on her last night among them and no longer able to hide their fascination, they had all flocked to her side. Elaine Press and Leonora Wilson, Linda Pearl and Tanya Cohen, all asking enviously about life in Manhattan, about her apartment and her friends and the castings she went to—questions that they would never have dared to ask her until this, their final opportunity. Later, among themselves, they would discuss Ellie Schneider’s hair, her clothes, her manner; later they would remember and misremember things she’d said. They had enjoyed watching her and her return to America was depriving them of glamour, and of someone about whom they could be comfortably scandalized. Little did they know that her return was likely to prompt yet more scandal, though they would not be able to observe it at close range.

Adam leaned in the doorway and watched. He no longer imagined that he could be alone with her before she left—it was clear that she would not leave Ziva and even if she did, the others were unlikely to leave her. But still, she could not avoid his eye forever. All he needed was a single second to tell her that soon he would be following her. She might not even know that she needed rescuing but still, he would rescue her. They would rescue each other. “If I was lucky enough to move to New York,” Adam heard Tanya say to Ellie with possibly the first words they’d ever exchanged, “I’d never, ever come back here.”

Ellie did not respond but instead whispered to Ziva who laughed, softly. Tanya, who had evidently been about to say something further, fell silent. Elaine Press took the opportunity to tell Ellie about her own recent visit to New York with Gideon and Simon, where she and the boys had gone to a service at the gay and lesbian synagogue in the West Village and someone had thought she was only fifty. Can you imagine! Lawrence, standing beside his niece, was nodding politely at Elaine’s gesture-heavy anecdote and holding a plate of his daughter’s spiced honey cake, untouched. What happened next was unimaginable.

Adam knew Lawrence. For fifteen years he had watched him intently at dinners, at football matches, in meetings and on holidays, in celebration and in crisis. He had studied him to learn and he had studied him to emulate. He understood him. And at that moment Lawrence looked at Adam and the world realigned. In his eyes, Adam saw that Lawrence knew.

He could not say how he’d arrived in the bedroom. Yet somehow he was there, battling to open the window and choking down sharp, cold breaths of air. Coats were piled high on Rachel’s crisp, ironed sheets and on the bedside tables were two vases of blushing Stargazer lilies, with which Rachel had replaced their usual clutter of books and mugs, jars of moisturizer and hair clips. Her fluffy purple dressing gown, usually on a hook in the corner, had been hidden away in the closet; her fluffy purple slippers had been paired up, invisible under the bed. The room was faultlessly tidy and he felt certain that if anyone were to mistake a cupboard door for the bathroom they would find order within as well as without. His wife would have thought of everything.

Adam closed his eyes and steadied himself, leaning his cheek against the window frame. There was no longer a question of extricating himself carefully, of choosing the right time in the coming days to tell Rachel that his heart had left their marriage. Everything was different now. He might not know the whole of it—he could not know the whole of it—but somehow, Lawrence had sensed the danger. Adam knew Lawrence but Lawrence, in his turn, knew Adam. What could Lawrence think of him now? He had loved Adam devotedly, enfolding him in the warmth of his family, and Adam had repaid him by forfeiting everything. For the first time Adam understood, with a sudden, bright pain, that he was not entitled to a son’s unconditional love from Lawrence. His love was conditional, and it was conditional upon Adam’s loving his daughter. Adam felt an irrational flush of rage, as if it had been Lawrence who had somehow deceived him. But it was momentary, and he was then gripped by a deep, sickening shame. He felt dizzy with it. He could not bear to face Lawrence again. He would have to tell Rachel tonight. He would have to go immediately. He had only to make it through the next few hours.

31

“Bye!
Shana Tova
!” Rachel called from the window, waving with both hands at the last guests to leave. Uncle Raymond and Aunt Judith waved back up, and Aunt Judith raised the blue plastic freezer bag of bagels that Rachel had pressed on them at the door. Uncle Raymond was making room on the backseat for a Tupperware of chopped liver and for his wife’s boat-size hat.

Lawrence and Jaffa had driven Ziva home earlier, taking Ellie with them. Adam had not been able to bring himself to look at Lawrence again, though Lawrence had kissed him on both cheeks and had wished him, with gentle gravity, a
shana tova
. Adam had simply bent his head and nodded. He had not cried, as he’d feared he might.

And a moment after that, he had had his chance. He had watched Ellie take her jacket from Lawrence who had collected the family’s coats from the bedroom, had watched her slip it over her shoulders like a cape, and hold it tightly around her by crossing her arms. After an evening of willing her to turn to him, she had turned to him, at last, in the doorway. But when she’d looked back at him he’d felt frightened. In her eyes he’d seen such sadness—and something else, something fleeting that might have been longing, or pity.

He could hear Aunt Judith calling from the street. “Bye, Rachel! Bye, Adam!
Shana tova!
Thank you!”

Rachel left her post at the window and sank gratefully onto the sofa, wrapping her arms around a cushion and closing her eyes.

Adam swallowed. “Rach, are you falling asleep? Can I talk to you?”

“Oh Ads, I’m so tired, do we have to talk right now?”

He looked at her. She did seem tired; her earlier glow had gone and since her parents left she’d seemed uncharacteristically weary. She had emerged from the bathroom in tracksuit bottoms half an hour ago, even before Uncle Raymond and Aunt Judith had begun to take their leave.

“Yes,” he said. He had stood up and paced the room but now he sat back down on the coffee table in front of her. An image of Lawrence’s face swam before him and he fought to replace it with Ellie. It was easy to fill his mind with her.

Rachel struggled to sit up from between the soft cushions and wriggled a little, rearranging herself on the sofa. She had been curled in the center but now she sat opposite him, her knees between his, a serious expression on her face. He could smell the clean citrus of her hair.

“Okay. In which case I need to talk to you about something first.”

“Rachel, I—”

“Ads, I didn’t fast today. I ate. At lunchtime.”

He started. Her confession was so ludicrously minor, such a grotesque contrast to the one on his own lips. He felt the bubbling of a violent, hysterical laughter. Maybe there was more, he thought wildly. Maybe she didn’t fast because she’s feeling too guilty about leaving me tonight for her tennis instructor, or she’s going to tell me that she’s a lesbian, or that she’s always thought we met too young and she still loves me but thinks that we should both be free to see the world. Maybe she’ll hurt me so that I don’t have to hurt her. Maybe she’s letting me off the hook.

Rachel leaned toward him and took his hands between both of her own and gently, with a mother’s tenderness, she placed them on her stomach. Rachel looked at him, her dark eyes joy-filled, the same trembling diamonds on her lashes that had moved him at their wedding. She flung her arms around him and he held her, numbly, shielded from her gaze in the embrace.

Something was dawning on him, swirling and tickling at the edge of his vision, something too big, as yet, for him to see in its entirety. He strained to understand. It felt like trying to see a whale from the tiny porthole of a submarine; six inches at a time. But it might not be a whale. It might be a shark. Or a cruise liner. Or a mine. Or anything at all. He caught glimpses through the miasma, but the whole evaded him. He stayed like this for several moments, his chin still on her shoulder, her arms still tight around his chest. He did not yet trust himself to speak.

Rachel pulled away, wiping the tears from her eyes.

“Big news,” she said, smiling. Then she settled back on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath herself neatly and watching his face.

“Big news,” he affirmed. Somehow he was smiling back, though his face felt frozen. Rachel picked up the cushion again and began to toy with the fringing and her movement shocked him out of his paralysis. He heard himself ask her, “Who knows?”

Rachel flushed, twirling the little plaits of blue silk round and round her fingers. “Oh Ads, I know I should have told you first. But I wanted to give it another week to make sure sure sure—you know these things can be—It’s just so
early
. And”—she looked down at her nails—“I guess there’s just something so natural about talking to women, this instinctive thing.”

“So who”—he tried to repeat the question but it suddenly felt as if everything were moving very, very slowly, the vast bulk of something drifting in slow motion past the tiny window of his cell—“who did you tell?”

“Well,
Ima
guessed straightaway—she noticed when we were checking Granny out of the hospital two weeks ago; she could just tell, it was so strange. And so I had to tell her and I know she told Daddy, although she promised she wouldn’t, and Tanya and I have told each other everything since we were at school, you know we always have, and so I couldn’t not. And I was so worried about Granny, I really thought she’d die, Ads, and it would have been so awful if she’d never known, God forbid, so when I went round on
erev
Rosh Hashanah I told Granny and I know it was the right thing because it made her so happy, it made her want to get well again. And then that night she was in the bath and Ellie and I were—We had such a lovely talk. And I told her then.”

And there it was. His submarine had blown into a thousand pieces and he could see the whale—no more tiny glimpses through a window, because instead he was drowning. Ellie was leaving because Rachel had told her. And Rachel, staring at him unwaveringly though her fingers still combed idly through the fringing of the cushion, Rachel’s proud, straight posture and the light of triumph in her eyes told him all the rest. It was not only Lawrence who had guessed. Tonight, in that crowded room of friendship and family and history there had been no secrets—Tanya and Jasper and the Wilsons and Linda and Leslie and Elaine and Roger Press, and Ziva and Jaffa—they all knew, because that was how it worked. And they had all moved together like fronds of coral, to expel the predator. They were shielding Rachel. And no doubt, they thought, they were shielding Adam from himself.