Authors: Alyson Richman
The Lost Wife (2 page)
At the head table, the lone living grandparent from each side was introduced to each other for the first time. Again, the groom’s grandfather felt himself being swept away by the image of the woman before him. She was decades older then her granddaughter, but there was something familiar about her. He felt it immediately, from the moment he first saw her eyes.
“I know you from somewhere,” he finally managed to say, although he felt as though he were now speaking to a ghost, not a woman he had just met. His body was responding in some visceral manner that he didn’t quite understand. He regretted drinking that second glass of wine. His stomach was turning over on itself. He could hardly breathe.
“You must be mistaken,” she said politely. She did not want to appear rude, but she, too, had been looking forward to her granddaughter’s wedding for months and didn’t want to be distracted from the evening’s festivities. As she saw the girl navigating the crowd, the many cheeks turning to her to be kissed and the envelopes being pressed into her and Jason’s hands, she had to pinch herself to make sure that she really was still alive to witness it all.
But this old man next to her would not give up.
“I definitely think I know you from somewhere,” he repeated.
She turned and now showed her face even more clearly to him. The feathered skin. Her silver hair. Her ice-blue eyes.
But it was the shadow of something dark blue beneath the transparent material of her sleeve that caused shivers to run through his old veins.
“Your sleeve . . .” His finger was shaking as it reached to touch the silk.
Her face twitched as he touched her wrist, her discomfort registering over her face.
“Your sleeve, may I?” He knew he was being rude.
She looked straight at him.
“May I see your arm?” he said again. “Please.” This time his voice sounded almost desperate.
She was now staring at him, her eyes now locked to his. As if in a trance, she pushed up her sleeve. There on her forearm, next to a small brown birthmark, were six tattooed numbers.
“Do you remember me now?” he asked, trembling.
She looked at him again, as if giving weight and bone to a ghost.
“Lenka, it’s me,” he said. “Josef. Your husband.”
CHAPTER 2
New York City
2000
2000
She had slid the painting out of its cardboard tube the night before, flattening it like an old map. For over sixty years she had taken it with her wherever she went. First hidden in an old suitcase, then rolled into a metal cylinder and buried under floorboards, eventually pushed behind several boxes in a crowded closet.
The painting was created with thin black and red strokes. A kinetic energy shone through each line, the artist working to capture the scene as quickly as possible.
She had always felt it too sacred to be displayed, as if the mere exposure to light and air or, perhaps worse, the stares of visitors would be too much for its delicate skin. So it remained in an airtight box, locked away like Lenka’s thoughts. Weeks before, while lying in bed, she decided that the painting would be her wedding gift to her granddaughter and her groom.
LENKAWhen the Vltava freezes, it turns the color of an oyster shell. As a child, I watched men rescue swans trapped within its frozen current, cutting them out with ice picks to free their webbed feet.
I was born Lenka Josefina Maizel, the eldest daughter of a glass dealer in Prague. We lived on the Smetanovo nábřeži embankment, in a rambling apartment with a wall of windows overlooking the river and bridge. There were red velvet walls and gilded mirrors, a parlor with carved furniture, and a beautiful mother who smelled like lily of the valley all year long. I still return to my childhood like it was a dream. Palačinka served with apricot jam, cups of hot cocoa, and ice skating on the Vltava. My hair piled underneath a fox hat when it snowed.
We saw our reflections everywhere: in the mirrors, the windows, the river down below, and in the transparent curve of Father’s glasswares. Mother had a special closet lined with glasses for every occasion. There were champagne flutes that had been etched with delicate flowers, special wine goblets with gilded rims and frosted stems, even rubycolored water glasses that reflected pink light when held up to the sun.
My father was a man who loved beauty and beautiful things, and believed his profession created both using a chemistry of perfect proportions. One needed more than sand and quartz to create glass. One needed fire and breath as well. “A glassblower is both a lover and a life giver,” he once told a room filled with dinner guests. He lifted one of the water glasses from our dinner table. “Next time you drink from one of your goblets, think of the lips that created the subtle, elegant shape which you now sip from, and how many mistakes were shattered and recycled to make a perfect set of twelve.”
He would have every guest enraptured as he twisted the goblet to the light. But he had not meant to be a salesman or a spectacle that evening. He truly loved how an artisan could create an object that was simultaneously strong and fragile, transparent, yet capable of reflecting color. He believed there was beauty in both the flattest surface of glass and those rippled with soft waves.
His business took him all over Europe, but he always walked through our front door the same way he left. His shirt white and crisp, his neck smelling of cedar and clove.
“
Milačku
,” he would say in Czech as he grasped Mother’s waist between two thick hands. “Love.”
Milačku
,” he would say in Czech as he grasped Mother’s waist between two thick hands. “Love.”
“
Lasko Moje
,” she would answer as their lips touched. “My love.”
Lasko Moje
,” she would answer as their lips touched. “My love.”
Even after a decade of marriage, Father remained beguiled by her. Many times, he returned home with presents bought solely because they reminded him of her. A miniature cloisonné bird with intricately enameled feathers might appear by her wineglass, or a small locket with seed pearls in a velvet box might be placed on her pillow. My favorite was a wooden radio with a brilliant sunburst design radiating from its center that he surprised Mother with after a trip to Vienna.
If I were to close my eyes during the first five years of my life, I could see Father’s hand on that radio dial. The wisps of black hair on his fingers as they adjusted the tuner to find one of the few stations that featured jazz, an exotic and invigorating sound that was just beginning to be broadcast over our airwaves in 1924.
I can see his head turning to smile at us, his arm extending to my mother and me. I can feel the warmth of his cheek as he lifts me and brings my legs around his waist, his other free hand turning mother into a spin.
I can smell the scent of spiced wine wafting from delicate cups on a cold January night. Outside, the tall windows of our apartment are covered in frost, but inside it is warm as toast. Long fingers of orange candlelight flicker across the faces of men and women who have crowded into the parlor to hear a string quartet Father has invited to play for the evening. There is the sight of mother in the center, her long white arms reaching for a small canapé. A new bracelet at her wrist. A kiss from Father. And me peering from my bedroom, a voyeur to their glamour and ease.
There are quiet nights, too. The three of us nestled around a small card table. Chopin on the record player. Mother fanning her cards so only I can see. A smile curled at her lips. Father feigning a frown as he allows my mother to win.
At night, I am tucked in by a mother who tells me to close my eyes. “Imagine the color of water,” she whispers into my ear. Other nights, she suggests the color of ice. On another, the color of snow. I fall asleep to the thoughts of those shades shifting and turning in the light. I teach myself to imagine the varying degrees of blue, the delicate threads of lavender, or the palest dust of white. And in doing so, my dreams are seeded in the mystery of change.
LENKALucie arrived one morning holding a letter. She held the envelope out to Father, and he read it aloud to my mother.
The girl has no previous experience as a nanny
, his colleague had written.
But she has natural talent with children and she is beyond trustworthy
.
The girl has no previous experience as a nanny
, his colleague had written.
But she has natural talent with children and she is beyond trustworthy
.
My first memory of Lucie is that she looked far younger than her eighteen years. Almost childlike, her body seemed lost in her long coat and dress. But when she first knelt down to greet me, I was immediately struck by the warmth flowing through her outstretched hand. Every morning when she arrived at our door, she brought with her the faint scent of cinnamon and nutmeg, as if she had been baked freshly that morning and delivered warm and fragrant—a delectable package that was impossible to turn away.
Lucie was no great beauty. She was like an architect’s straight edge, all lines and angles. Her hard cheekbones looked as though they had been hammered with a chisel; her eyes were large and black, her lips tiny and thin. But like a dark forest nymph stolen from the pages of an old-fashioned fairy tale, Lucie possessed her own unique magic. After only a few days of working for my family, we all became enchanted by her. When she told a story, her fingers worked the air, like a harpist plucking imaginary strings. When there were chores to be done, she hummed songs that she had heard her own mother sing.
Lucie was treated not as a servant by my parents, but as a member of our extended family. She took all her meals with us, sitting around the large dining-room table that always had too much food. And although we did not keep kosher, we still never drank milk when we ate a dish that had meat. Lucie made the mistake her first week of work of pouring me a glass of milk with my beef goulash, and Mother must have told her afterward that we didn’t mix the two, for I never remember her making the mistake again.
My world became less sheltered and certainly more fun after Lucie’s arrival. She taught me things like how to trap a tree frog or how to fish from one of the bridges off the Vltava. She was a master storyteller, creating a cast of characters from the various people we’d meet during our day. The man who sold us ice cream by the clock in Old Town Square might appear that night at bedtime as a wizard. A woman, from whom we bought apples at the market, might later emerge as an aging princess who had never recovered from a broken heart.
I have often wondered if it was Lucie or my mother who first discovered that I had a talent for drawing. In my memory, it is Mother handing me my first set of colored pencils and it is Lucie, later on, who buys me my first set of paints.
I know it was Lucie who first began taking me to the park with my sketchpad and tin of pencils. She would stretch out a blanket near the little pond where boys sailed their paper boats, and lie on her back and watch the clouds as I drew page after page.
In the beginning, I drew little animals. Rabbits. Squirrels. A redbreasted bird. But soon I was attempting to draw Lucie, then a man reading a newspaper. Later on I began more ambitious subjects, like a mother pushing a pram. None of these first sketches were any good. But just like any young child who is first learning to draw, I taught myself by doing it over and over again. My observations eventually began to connect with my hand.
After hours outside of drawing, Lucie would roll up my sketches and bring them home to our apartment. Mother would ask how we had spent our day and Lucie would take the sketches she loved best and tack them up on the kitchen wall. My mother would carefully look at my work and then wrap me in her arms. I must have been close to six the first time I heard her say: “Lenka, you know I was the same way at your age—I always had a pencil and piece of paper in my hands.” That was the first time I ever heard my mother draw a comparison between us, and I can tell you, as a child, whose dark hair and pale eyes resembled more her father then her elegant mother, the thrill of the two of us sharing something struck me straight to my heart.
That first winter Lucie was with us, Mother wanted to come up with a gift that showed her gratitude. I remember her discussing it with Father. “Do what you think is best,
Milačku
,” he had said absentmindedly while reading the newspaper. He always gave her free rein when giving gifts, but she always felt she needed to ask permission before she did anything. In the end, she had a beautiful capelet made for Lucie in blue wool with velvet trim. I can still see Lucie’s face when she first opened the package—she was hesitant to accept it at first—almost embarrassed by the extravagance.
Milačku
,” he had said absentmindedly while reading the newspaper. He always gave her free rein when giving gifts, but she always felt she needed to ask permission before she did anything. In the end, she had a beautiful capelet made for Lucie in blue wool with velvet trim. I can still see Lucie’s face when she first opened the package—she was hesitant to accept it at first—almost embarrassed by the extravagance.
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