The Lost Family

by Jenna Blum

  “Probably my grandmother,” said Elsbeth, “the potato.”

  Julian laughed. “Ruth? She’s hardly even a spud.”

  “Ruth’s not actually my grandmother—she’s my dad’s second cousin or something. They took him in after the war. I meant my real grandmother—his mom, the one who died during the Nazis.”

  Clickclickclick vssh. “Your dad was in Europe then, too.”

  “How did you know that?” said Elsbeth, forgetting herself and looking directly at the camera. Clickclickclickclickclick.

  “I saw his tattoo,” said Julian.

  Elsbeth sighed. She couldn’t believe he had noticed it—her dad was so careful to keep it hidden. Then again, as Julian had mentioned himself, he had unusual powers of vision.

  “My dad was in the camps,” she said, “Auschwitz and . . . There-sien-stadt.” She pronounced the name carefully, not at all sure she was getting it right; she’d had to look them both up in the school library, and she hadn’t wanted to ask the librarian.

  Clickclickclickclick vsssh click. “I figured as much,” said Julian. “For all his elegance, I sensed something very sad about him. I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  “For what?” Elsbeth said. She didn’t know why she was suddenly bristling, but she couldn’t help it. What did Julian know about anything? “What are you sorry about?”

  Julian clicked away, undaunted. “It must be hard,” he said, “to know somebody you love went through such an ordeal.”

  Elsbeth’s chest hitched once, twice, as though she had hiccups. “I lost sisters, too. My half sisters. Twins, Vivian and Ginger—the Nazis killed them. They were only three.” Elsbeth thought of sitting in Ruth’s pink bathroom, the mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors, Ruth brushing her hair with long, soothing strokes while telling Elsbeth about the little girls who’d burned in the ovens. “You know what else,” she said to Julian, “it’s pathetic, but I used to imagine they were still alive. In real life they’d be old now, like in their forties, so more aunts than sisters, but in my mind they’re still little, and I get to take care of them. I used to pretend I was giving them dinner and baths, and I’d braid their hair and read them stories, and we’d all sleep in the same bed, and wear the same nightgowns, and I had this place in the attic where we could go if the Nazis came again, where I could keep them safe.”

  Julian didn’t say anything; there was only the sound of his camera, clicking and whizzing, and Elsbeth realized she was crying. The tears seemed detached from her, as if she were a cloud that was raining, but they streamed down her cheeks nonetheless. Angrily she wiped them away.

  “Isn’t that the dumbest thing you ever heard?” she asked, and cried harder.

  The clicking stopped, and Elsbeth felt more than heard the big light go off; there was a sudden absence of warmth on her skin, making her realize how hot the lamp had been. They were done, she’d ruined it, crying like this; Julian would never use her as a model now. He probably thought she was a lunatic.

  But then he did a wonderful thing: he came to her with a dishtowel, gently prying her hands from her face. “Here,” he said, “it’s all right, Charlie,” and Elsbeth felt the material on her skin, stiff and a little musty. He gently daubed her cheeks.

  “Better?” he said finally, and Elsbeth nodded. She sensed him moving away, and when she opened her eyes, he was perched on the arm of the couch, lighting a cigarette.

  “Smoke?” he said, holding out the Camels, and then, when Elsbeth shook her head, he said, “That’s right, you don’t,” and tossed the pack onto the coffee table.

  “You did great today, Charlie,” he said. “I knew you would. Do you like the beach?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I thought we might go to the Hamptons,” said Julian. “I want to do a series on you, mostly outside. We could meet here, say on Saturday again, and if it’s nice weather we’ll shoot on location. Are you available?”

  “But—” Elsbeth stammered in her confusion. “But I didn’t even . . .” She pantomimed undressing, taking her suspender straps down.

  Julian looked a little startled. “Oh, no no no,” he said. “Sorry I wasn’t clear. Today was just a test shoot.” He smiled at her. “So what d’you think, are you free next week?”

  She’d have time to lose five more pounds—at least. “Next week should be fine,” Elsbeth said.

  * * *

  When Elsbeth got home, she was unhappily surprised to find her dad awake, puttering around the kitchen. What was he doing up? Normally—abnormally—Peter slept all day and cooked at night, testing recipes for what June called “the famous cookbook,” one that would feature dishes from Peter’s first restaurant, Masha’s, but updated for a new decade. Peter had been working on it for years, ever since the Claremont was sold; a publisher had given him a nice advance, and for a while even June was excited about it, but somehow the recipes were never quite ready, requiring more adjustments, and it had been so long that not only had the money been spent, the publishing house had gone out of business. Yet this was still all Peter did. Elsbeth stood in the doorway, watching her dad tend a stockpot on the stove. It was hard to reconcile this man—his baggy khakis, slight stoop, and neatly trimmed white beard—with the stern, polished fellow in a suit and hat Elsbeth had seen emerging from Masha’s in photos, or even her impeccably elegant, commanding-yet-kind chef dad of later years. Women still looked at Peter; he was still handsome, but in a more faded, ghostly way.

  Peter must have sensed Elsbeth measuring him or heard her come up the stairs, for he turned from the stove. “Ah,” he said, “the world’s greatest commis and taste tester! What luck.” He came at Elsbeth with a ladle. “I need your unparalleled palate.”

  Maybe after one spoon, he would let her go. Elsbeth sipped what turned out to be Peter’s mushroom soup, thick with cream and brandy, dolloped with crème fraiche. Her stomach, which had had nothing in it since last night’s fat-free yogurt, gurgled; her mouth filled with saliva. Danger, she thought.

  “It’s good,” she said, handing the ladle back.

  Peter’s brow, of which there was more than there used to be, furrowed beneath the waves of his hair, which crested higher on his forehead. “Not great?”

  “It’s the world’s most excellent soup,” said Elsbeth, edging closer to the hall.

  “I may not be fluent in sarcasm, but I recognize it when I hear it. Come, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing! Seriously, Dad. Put it in the book.”

  “Not enough thyme? Too much? Should I have browned the roux a bit more?”

  “Dad. I really have to go.”

  “But you just came home.”

  “I have to call the girls.”

  “Did you not just see them?”

  Elsbeth remembered the lie she had constructed to sneak into the city: “Gone to mall with Liza & Very, back later,” scribbled on one of June’s sticky notes—“Doe$ your hou$e need a face-lift? Call June Ra$hkin TODAY!”—and stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet featuring her mother’s face and phone number.

  “What could you possibly have to discuss in the fifteen minutes since you left them?” Peter was saying. “Come, have one bowl of soup with your old man.”

  “Dad,” Elsbeth said. Fury rose in her: Why now? Why had Peter chosen to notice her now, when all she wanted to do was pore over her glorious afternoon with Julian in peace and privacy? Not only was Peter’s attention inconvenient, it was years too late. Where have you been? Elsbeth wanted to shout at him—but as always, she tamped the anger down. It wasn’t Peter’s fault, she knew. It was the medicine, his beta blockers, his nitroglycerin, his angina pills. “He’s sweet as ever,” Elsbeth had heard June telling one of her tennis buddies on the phone, “but he’s just so vague; it’s like he doesn’t know where he is half the time. And his schedule’s completely upside-down.” There was no alternative, though; if Peter stopped taking his medication, he could die at any moment, and was that what Elsbeth wanted? She had thought she’d stopped mis
sing him long ago.

  He was holding out a chair now, one of the bistro chairs June had salvaged from the Glenwood dump and recaned herself. Elsbeth sat, resigned.

  Peter bustled to the stove and filled two bowls, bringing them to the table with a basket of baguettes.

  “Lo and behold!” he said, bowing.

  Elsbeth’s eyes filled with tears. She cleared her throat.

  “Lo and behold,” she repeated and bent to the bowl. She dipped her spoon and touched it to her lips so Peter would think she was eating. Crème fraiche melted in a puddle on the surface; the smell, of rosemary and chanterelles, was driving her mad.

  Peter joined her and took a thoughtful bite. He savored it, squinted, lowered his bifocals, and took his spiral-bound notebook from his back pocket, where he had carried it every day Elsbeth could remember.

  “Something is still off,” he said. “The onion? Should I have used Vidalias?”

  “I think it’s good,” said Elsbeth, though she could taste what Peter meant—but she didn’t want to eat more of the thousand-calorie soup, and besides, what did it matter? He’d never write the fucking cookbook. She began to tear a slice of baguette into pieces.

  “Good is never good enough,” said Peter. He put the notebook down and looked at Elsbeth. “How was your day?”

  Again, Elsbeth wanted to laugh—or to hit something, or to say Great, Dad, just great, I spent my afternoon with that photographer from Sol and Ruth’s house, the one that lady called a pornographer, the one who shoots naked kids, and guess what? Next week he’s going to photograph me. Nude. Then a truly horrible thought occurred to her: Was this why Peter was awake? Had some dormant parental radar alerted him to the fact of Elsbeth’s sneaking out to Julian’s apartment? She stuffed bread into her mouth.

  “Your note said you went to the mall with Very and Lisa,” said Peter, as Elsbeth chewed and chewed. “Remind me, who are they?”

  Elsbeth brought up her napkin and spat the bread into it. “It’s Liza.”

  “Is she the pretty Oriental?”

  “Dad! That’s so prejudiced. That’s Very, and she’s Asian.”

  “My apologies. So who is this Eliza?”

  “Liza.”

  “That’s what I said. Is she the tall one, with the rather provocative manner?”

  “Dad!”

  “What?” said Peter. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just seem to remember she has a certain air about her.”

  “Well, she is kind of a—she’s not shy,” said Elsbeth, who had been going to say slut. “She can’t help it, though. Her mom and dad are divorced, and her mom’s out all the time with different guys.”

  “Ah,” said Peter.

  Elsbeth pushed herself back from the table. “Anyhoo, I’ve got to—”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “With your friends.”

  “We went to the mall. I said.”

  “And what did you do there?”

  “Jeez, Dad, what’s with the inquisition?” But Peter was looking at Elsbeth so sadly that she relented. “We hung out.”

  “You hung.”

  “Yes, we just chilled. You know.”

  “Ah,” said Peter again. “I see.”

  He smiled at her. When had it gotten to be this way? After he’d gotten sick, around her eighth birthday, when the Claremont finally sold. Before that it had been just the two of them and nobody else, Elsbeth and her dad, the Fabulous Rashkins—that was to be the name of their restaurant, the one they would open together once Elsbeth was grown up and had gone to culinary school. At first it was a crêperie—Elsbeth, a big fan of the Magic Pan, was crazy for the thin sweet pancakes; later it was fine dining. Her earliest memories were of balancing on tiptoe on her special stool, her dad’s hand over hers as she stirred batter on the counter; of his small spiky handwriting in his spiral-bound notebook. The drawings he made for her, the tap of his pen against the words. Bread. Butter. Lemons. You see, Ellie? Peter and his favorite commis, standing beside him rolling dough, chopping celery, sliding eggs into boiling water: the Fabulous Rashkins against the world.

  Because the quiet was so awful, because her throat ached with everything she couldn’t say, Elsbeth dumped some soup on it. The flavor was rich and complex, with crème fraiche and Courvoisier, thyme and chives, slivers of chanterelles and Portobello. You have the best palate of anyone I know, Ellie, her dad used to tell her; you’ll be the top chef in the world, or food critic, if that is what you want. Suddenly Elsbeth couldn’t eat the soup fast enough. She gobbled it down, her eyes watering; she would have picked up the bowl and drank from it if she hadn’t known Peter would scold her.

  “It is the onions,” she said when she was done.

  “What do you mean?”

  Elsbeth pressed a belch against her wrist. Her shrunken stomach, now overloaded, groaned and gurgled; she could practically feel the fat invading her veins, her cells, plumping them up, making her bigger.

  “What you said before,” she said, “about Vidalias? I’d use shallots, the way you usually do, but I’d caramelize them first. To make them sweeter.”

  Her dad nodded slowly, stroking his beard. “Yes,” he said, “you’re exactly right, that’s what it needs. And perhaps I should add a dash of balsamic?” He grabbed his notebook. “Ellie, you’re a genius!”

  “De nada,” Elsbeth said.

  She got up and kissed Peter on the forehead while he scribbled away; his skin was warm, a little oily. She had to get upstairs. The sooner she got rid of the soup, the less chance the fat would have to pervade her system.

  Yet something made Elsbeth pause at the door separating the kitchen from the foyer. She looked through it at her dad. Peter was sitting at the kitchen table alone; his scalp gleamed beneath his hair in the glare of the overhead light. He ate more soup, paused to make some notations, then gazed straight forward again—at nothing. What was he seeing when he looked into the middle distance like that? His kitchen at the Claremont? at Masha’s? Masha herself? The little girls? Elsbeth took a last look at her father, then shut the door. She walked up the three flights to her attic suite, went into the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, and knelt.

  14

  The Hamptons

  On the morning of the first naked shoot, Elsbeth met Julian on the sidewalk in front of his apartment, where he was loading camera and tripod bags into the back seat of a car that looked very much like the General Lee in The Dukes of Hazzard—minus the Confederate flag on top. Elsbeth rather hoped Julian would vault through the driver’s window, but he instead came around to her side and opened the door. “Your chariot, Charlie,” he said.

  Elsbeth tried to drop gracefully into the low seat. “Thank you,” she said. Julian was in shorts and a ruffled tuxedo shirt today, the checked Vans on his feet. The sun haloed his hair, which was curling in the mid-July haze. Elsbeth had given up on hers, pulling it over to one side in a banana clip. Her white jeans skirt had ridden up when she’d gotten in the car, but she left it as it was: her legs, sturdy and curved from years of swimming, were her best feature.

  Julian drove them somewhat jerkily down Riverside Drive and across town, while Elsbeth tried to watch him without looking like she was. He was unshaven again, his eyes hidden behind Wayfarer sunglasses, and a tiny cross dangled from his right ear. Had he had the earring before? Elsbeth was sure not. She would have noticed. She tried to think of something sophisticated to say as they entered Central Park at Ninety-Sixth Street—Julian didn’t seem as inclined this morning toward sprightly conversation.

  “I like your car,” was the best she could come up with, having discarded an anecdote about her favorite childhood spot, the Whale Room at the Museum of Natural History a few blocks south.

  Julian took a sip from a to-go cup of coffee, and his hand shook. Some of the hot liquid spilled on his bare leg, and he swore. “Thanks,” he said. “It is bodacious, isn’t it? I don’t really drive stick, but a friend was putting it up
for sale and I just couldn’t resist.”

  Elsbeth wondered how many other girls had sat exactly where she was now, in the front seat of the non–General Lee en route to a shoot with Julian, their thighs adhering to the cracked vinyl. It didn’t matter. She was here now. She would be unforgettable.

  Julian slalomed the car along the curving road through Central Park, sunlight and shadow sliding over the windshield. Elsbeth tried to pick up what color mood he was in today. People’s hues, like those of numbers and letters, weren’t always immediately visible—thank goodness, because that would be distracting. But if Elsbeth concentrated, she could make the colors appear, and Julian, who was usually a supernova, a dark center surrounded by prismatic rays, was today preoccupied and refracted, so that his light spoked out at broken-umbrella angles.

  Elsbeth considered whether to share this observation with her fellow synesthete but decided to keep it to herself. Instead, as they passed her old building on East Ninety-Sixth Street, she said, “There’s my first apartment.”

  “Is that so?” said Julian, merging onto FDR Drive.

  “For real,” said Elsbeth. “We lived there until I was two,” and she twisted to watch the building as it disappeared. “I still remember that apartment,” she said. “I remember sitting on the floor under the piano, and I remember what the windows across the street looked like at night through my crib . . .” She could also remember shaking the bars and yelling like a tiny gorilla, with all her might, and nobody coming to her call.

  “My dad’s first restaurant was near here, too,” she said. “The very famous one. Masha’s. Did you ever go there?” But of course Julian hadn’t; Elsbeth knew from reading articles about him at the Glenwood library that Julian had arrived in the city long after Masha’s had closed. Elsbeth herself would have given anything to see Masha’s as it had been, just once, but every time she had walked past the building, scanning it for signs of former glory, she saw only what it now housed: a ladies’ shoe emporium.