I made a mental note that if Alma Mereminski was a real person, Litvinoff most likely fell in love with her when they were both ten, and that twenty was probably how old they were when she left for America, which must have been the last time he saw her. Why else would the book end when she was still so young?
I ate the English muffin with peanut butter standing up in front of the toaster. “Alma?” my mother said. “What?” “Come give me a hug,” she said, so I did, even though I didn’t feel like it. “How did you get so tall?” I shrugged, hoping she wouldn’t go on. “I’m going to the library,” I told her, which was a lie, but by the way she was looking at me I knew she hadn’t really heard, since it wasn’t me she saw.
3. ALL THE LIES I’VE EVER TOLD WILL COME BACK TO ME ONE DAY
On the street I passed Herman Cooper sitting on his front stoop. He’d been in Maine all summer, where he’d gotten a tan and his driver’s license. He asked me if I wanted to go for a ride sometime. I could have reminded him of the rumor he spread about me when I was six involving being adopted and Puerto Rican, or the one he spread about me when I was ten involving me lifting my skirt in his basement and showing him everything. Instead I told him that I got carsick.
I went back to 31 Chambers Street again, this time to find out if there were any marriage records for Alma Mereminski. The same man with black glasses was sitting behind the desk in room 103. “Hi,” I said. He looked up. “Miss Rabbit Meat. How are you?” “Finethankyouhowareyou?” I said. “OK, I guess.” He turned the page of a magazine and added, “A little tired, you know, and I think I might be getting a cold, and this morning I woke up and my cat had puked, which wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t done it on my shoe.” “Oh,” I said. “On top of which, I just found out that they’re cutting off my cable because I happened to be a little late paying the bill, which means I’m going to miss all of my shows, plus the plant my mother gave me for Christmas is going a little brown, and if it dies I’ll never hear the end of it.” I waited in case he was going to continue, but he didn’t, so I said: “Maybe she got married.” “Who?” “Alma Mereminski.” He closed the magazine and looked at me. “You don’t know if your own great-grandmother got married?” I considered my options. “She’s wasn’t really my great-grandmother,” I said. “I thought you said—” “We’re actually not even related.” He looked confused and a little upset. “Sorry. It’s a long story,” I said, and part of me wanted him to ask me why I was looking for her, so I could tell him the truth: that I wasn’t really sure, that I had started out looking for someone to make my mother happy again, and even though I hadn’t given up on finding him yet, along the way I began to look for something else, too, which was connected to the first search, but also different, because it had to do with me. But he just sighed and said, “Would she have gotten married before 1937?” “I’m not sure.” He sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose, and told me they only had records in Room 103 for marriages up until 1937.
We looked anyway, but we didn’t find any Alma Mereminski. “You better go to the City Clerk’s Office,” he said glumly. “That’s where they have all the later records.” “Where is it?” “One Centre Street, Room 252,” he said. I had never heard of Centre Street, so I asked for directions. It wasn’t that far so I decided to walk, and while I did I imagined rooms all over the city that housed archives no one has ever heard of, like last words, white lies, and false descendants of Catherine the Great.
4. THE BROKEN LIGHTBULB
The man behind the desk at the City Clerk’s Office was old. “How can I help?” he asked when it was my turn. “I want to find out if a woman named Alma Mereminski got married and changed her name,” I said. He nodded and wrote something down. “M-E-R,” I began, and he said: “E-M-I-N-S-K-I. Or is it Y?” “I,” I said. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “When would she have married?” “I don’t know. It could have been anytime after 1937. If she’s still alive now, she’s probably about eighty.” “First marriage?” “I think.” He scratched a note into his pad. “Any idea the man maybe she married?” I shook my head. He licked his finger, turned the page, and took another note. “The wedding—would’ve been civic or a priest or any chance maybe was a rabbi married her?” “Probably a rabbi,” I said. “That’s what I thought,” he said.
He opened a drawer and took out a roll of Life Savers. “Mint?” I shook my head. “Take,” he said, so I took one. He popped a mint into his mouth and sucked on it. “She came from Poland maybe?” “How did you know?” “Easy,” he said. “With such a name.” He rolled the mint from one side of his mouth to the other. “It’s possible she came ’39, ’40, before the War? She would have been . . .” he licked his finger and flipped back a page, then took out a calculator and punched the buttons with the eraser of his pencil. “Nineteen, twenty. Most I’d give her is twenty-one.”
He wrote these numbers down on his pad. He tutted his tongue and shook his head. “Must have been lonely, poor thing.” He glanced up at me with a questioning look. His eyes were pale and watery. “I guess so,” I said. “Sure she would have!” he said. “Who does she know? Nobody! Except for maybe a cousin who doesn’t want to know from her. He lives in America now, the big macher, what does he need with this refugenik? His boy speaks English without an accent, he’ll be someday a rich lawyer, the last thing he needs is the mishpocheh from Poland, skinny like the dead, knocking at his door.” It didn’t seem like a good idea to say anything, so I didn’t. “Maybe she is lucky once, twice he invites her for shabbes, and his wife grumbles because they don’t even have for themselves what to eat, she has to beg the butcher to give her again on credit a chicken, This is the last time, she tells her husband, Give a pig a chair, and he’ll want to get on the table, which is not even to mention that back in Poland the murderers are killing her family, every last one, may-they-rest-in-peace, from my mouth to God’s ear.”
I didn’t know what to say, but he seemed to be waiting, so I said: “It must have been terrible.” “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said, and then he tutted his tongue again and said, “Poor thing. Was a Goldfarb, Arthur Goldfarb, someone, the grandniece I think it was, came in a couple days ago. A doctor, she had a picture, handsome fellow, was a bad shiddukh, turns out he got divorced after a year. Would’ve been perfect for your Alma.” He crunched on the mint and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. “My wife tells me it’s no talent to be a matchmaker for the dead, so I tell her if you always drink vinegar, you don’t know anything sweeter exists.” He got up from his chair. “Wait here, please.”
When he came back he was out of breath. He pulled himself back up onto his stool. “Like searching for gold, so hard to find was this Alma.” “Did you?” “What?” “Find her?” “Of course I found her, what kind of clerk am I that I can’t find a nice girl? Alma Mereminski, here she is. Married in Brooklyn in 1942 to Mordecai Moritz, wedding performed by a Rabbi Greenberg. Lists also the parents’ names.” “This is really her?” “Who else? Alma Mereminski, right here says she was born in Poland. He was born in Brooklyn, but the parents were from Odessa. Says here his father owned a dress factory, so she didn’t do so bad. To be honest, I’m relieved. Maybe was a nice wedding. In those days would break a lightbulb under his foot the chassan because no one could spare a glass.”
5. THERE ARE NO PAY PHONES IN THE ARCTIC
I found a pay phone and called home. Uncle Julian answered. “Did anyone call for me?” I asked. “I don’t think so. Sorry I woke you last night, Al.” “It’s OK.” “I’m glad we had that little talk.” “Yeah,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t bring up becoming a painter again. “What do you say we go out for dinner tonight? Unless you have other plans.” “I don’t,” I said.
I hung up and called Information. “What borough?” “Brooklyn.” “What listing?” “Moritz. First name is Alma.” “Business or residence?” “Residence.” “I have nothing under that listing.” “What about Mordecai Moritz?” “No.” “Well, how about in Manhattan?
” “I have a Mordecai Moritz on 52nd.” “You do?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. “Hold for the number.” “Wait!” I said. “I need the address.” “Four-fifty East 52nd,” the woman said. I wrote it down on my palm and caught a subway uptown.
6. I KNOCK AND SHE ANSWERS
She’s old with long white hair held back by a tortoiseshell comb. Her apartment is flooded with sunlight, and she owns a parrot that talks. I tell her about how my father, David Singer, found The History of Love in the window of a bookstore in Buenos Aires when he was twenty-two, while traveling alone with a topographical map, a compass, a Swiss Army knife, and a Spanish-Hebrew dictionary. I also tell her about my mother and her wall of dictionaries, and Emanuel Chaim who goes by the name Bird in honor of his freedom, and his having survived an effort to fly that left behind a scar on his head. She shows me a picture of herself when she was my age. The talking parrot squawks, “Alma!” and both of us turn.
7. I’M SICK OF FAMOUS WRITERS
Daydreaming, I missed my stop and had to walk back ten blocks, and with every block I felt more nervous and less sure. What if Alma—the real, live Alma—actually answered the door? What was I supposed to say to someone who’d walked off the pages of a book? Or what if she’d never heard of The History of Love? Or what if she had, but wanted to forget it? I’d been so busy trying to find her that it hadn’t occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want to be found.
But there was no time left to think, because I was standing at the end of 52nd Street outside her building. “Can I help you?” the doorman asked. “My name is Alma Singer. I’m looking for Mrs. Alma Moritz. Is she home?” I asked. “Mrs. Moritz?” he said. He had a weird expression when he said her name. “Uh,” he said. “No.” He looked as if he felt sorry for me, and then I felt sorry for myself, because what he said next was that Alma wasn’t alive. She’d died five years ago. Which was how I found out that everyone I’m named after is dead. Alma Mereminski, and my father, David Singer, and my great-aunt Dora who died in the Warsaw Ghetto, and for whom I was given my Hebrew name, Devorah. Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
The doorman had been talking, but now he stopped. “Are you OK?” he asked. “Finethankyou,” I said, even though I wasn’t. “You want to sit down or something?” I shook my head. I don’t know why, but I thought of the time Dad took me to see the penguins at the zoo, lifting me up onto his shoulders in the dank and fishy cold so I could press my face against the glass and watch them get fed, and how he taught me to pronounce the word Antarctica. Then I wondered if it ever really happened.
Because there was nothing left to say, I said, “Have you ever heard of a book called The History of Love?” The doorman shrugged and shook his head. “If you want to talk about books, you should talk to the son.” “Alma’s son?” “Sure. Isaac. He still comes in sometimes.” “Isaac?” “Isaac Moritz. Famous writer. You didn’t know that was their son? Sure, he still uses the place when he’s in town. You want to leave a message?” he asked. “No, thank you,” I said, because I’d never heard of any Isaac Moritz.
8. UNCLE JULIAN
That evening, Uncle Julian ordered a beer for himself and a mango lassi for me, and said, “I know sometimes things are hard with Mum.” “She misses Dad,” I said, which was like pointing out that a skyscraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded. “I know you didn’t know your grandpa. In lots of ways he was very wonderful. But he was also a difficult man. Controlling would be a nice word for it. He had very strict rules about how your mum and I should live.” The reason I didn’t know my grandfather very well was because he died of old age while on holiday at a hotel in Bournemouth a few years after I was born. “Charlotte got the brunt of it since she was the eldest and a girl. I think that’s why she’s always refused to tell you and Bird what to do or how to do it.” “Except for our manners,” I pointed out. “No, she doesn’t restrain herself on the subject of manners, does she? I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I know she may seem distant sometimes. She has her own things she needs to work out. Missing your dad is one. Arguing against her own father is another. But you know how much she loves you, Al, don’t you?” I nodded. The way Uncle Julian smiled was always a little lopsided, with one side of his mouth curling up higher than the other, as if part of him refused to cooperate with the rest. “Well, then,” he said, and raised his glass. “To you turning fifteen, and to me finishing this bloody book.”
We clicked glasses. Then he told me the story about how he fell in love with Alberto Giacometti when he was twenty-five. “How did you fall in love with Aunt Frances?” I asked. “Ah,” said Uncle Julian, and mopped his forehead, which was shiny and damp. He was going a little bald, but in a handsome way. “You really want to know?” “Yes.” “She was wearing blue tights.” “What do you mean?” “I saw her at the zoo in front of the chimpanzee cage, and she was wearing bright blue tights. And I thought: That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” “Because of her tights?” “Yes. The light was shining on her in a very nice way. And she was completely transfixed by this one chimp. But if it hadn’t been for the tights, I don’t think I would have ever gone up to her.” “Do you ever think about what would have happened if she’d decided not to wear those tights that day?” “All the time,” said Uncle Julian. “I might have been a much happier man.” I pushed the tikka masala around on my plate. “But probably not,” he said. “What if you would have been?” I asked. Julian sighed. “Once I start to think about it, it’s hard to imagine any kind of anything—happiness or otherwise—without her. I’ve lived with Frances for so long that I can’t imagine what life would look or feel like with another person.” “Like Flo?” I said. Uncle Julian choked on his food. “How do you know about Flo?” “I found the letter you started in the trash bin.” His face turned red. I looked up at the map of India on the wall. Every fourteen-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was. “I see,” said Uncle Julian. “Well, Flo is a colleague of mine at the Courtauld. And she’s a good friend, and Frances has always been a little jealous of that. There are certain things— How to say this, Al? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example?” “OK.” “There’s a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It’s at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. We took you there when you were little. Do you remember?” “No.” “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It’s one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There’s a hurried intensity in the strokes—you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It’s as if he knew there wasn’t much time left. And yet, there’s a serenity in his face, a sense of something that’s survived its own ruin.” I slid down in the booth and swung my foot, accidentally kicking Uncle Julian’s leg. “What does it have to do with Aunt Frances and Flo?” I asked. For a moment Uncle Julian looked lost. “I really don’t know,” he said. He mopped his forehead again, and called for the check. We sat in silence. Uncle Julian’s mouth twitched. He took a twenty out of his wallet and folded it into a tiny square, then folded that into an even smaller square. Then very quickly he said, “Fran couldn’t give two shits about that painting,” and put his empty beer glass to his lips.
“If you want to know, I don’t think you’re a dog,” I said. Uncle Julian smiled. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, while the waiter went back for his change. “Of course.” “Did Mom and Dad ever fight?” “I suppose they did. Certainly, sometimes. No more than anyone else.” “Do you think Dad would have wanted Mom to fall in love again?” Uncle Julian gave me one of his lopsided smiles. “I do,”
he said. “I think he would have wanted that very much.”
9. MERDE
When we got home, my mother was out in the backyard. Through the window I saw her kneeling in a pair of muddy overalls, planting flowers in what little light was left. I pushed open the screen door. The dead leaves and the weeds that had been growing for years had been torn out and cleared away, and four black trash bags stood by the iron garden bench that no one ever sat on. “What are you doing?” I called. “Planting mums and asters,” she said. “Why?” “I was in the mood.” “Why were you in the mood?” “I sent off some more chapters this afternoon, so I thought I’d do something relaxing.” “What?” “I said, I sent off some more chapters to Jacob Marcus, so I thought I’d relax a bit,” she repeated. I couldn’t believe it. “You sent the chapters yourself? But you always give me everything to take to the post office!” “Sorry. I didn’t know it meant so much to you. Anyway, you were gone all day. And I wanted to get it off. So I just did it myself.” DID IT YOURSELF? I wanted to shout. My mother, her own species, dropped a flower into a hole and started to fill it with dirt. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder. “Dad used to love to garden,” she said, as if I’d never known him at all.
10. MEMORIES PASSED DOWN TO ME FROM MY MOTHER
i
Getting up for school in the pitch-dark
ii
Playing in the rubble of bombed-out buildings near her house in Stamford Hill
iii
The History of Love Page 18
