The Daughters: A Novel

by Adrienne Celt

  Later that night I climbed out of bed onto my toes. Hair still wet and starting to curl. He slept, the stranger, his face crushed against the pillow, while I pulled on snagged silk stockings and tugged a dress down over my nose. I picked up my purse, made sure my own hotel key was inside, and left him sleeping, empty and new.

  Now I clutch Kara, water rushing around my feet and down the drain, and beneath me my legs quiver with the unaccustomed strain of crouching. Resting the heel of my hand against the rim of the tub, I hoist myself into a standing position and wrap a towel around Kara, tufting it up the back of her head. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt so keenly the various strengths and pressures of my toes against the ground, the balls of my feet against the tile. I could easily slip.

  For some minutes I stand still, taking shallow breaths, afraid to move lest we both fall down.

  My daughter’s face reminds me of past lovers. How do you live with that? How do you let yourself feel that complicated rush of adoration and not lose your mind? It happens every day, every time.

  And of course she also calls to mind the better people I have known, the ones who wouldn’t cringe away from the task of singing to a newborn baby. The ones who were glad to sacrifice what they had so their children could live. Kara and I, we go on in spite of them. We breathe the air they gasped out with their last exhalations, swallow their dust by the happy accident of being in the world.

  So, I tell myself, think of a lesson. Something Ada taught you about living. I remember being six and frankly annoyed that my babenka had signed me up for the children’s choir at a church in Pulaski Park. Up to that point I’d only sung for her or my mother at home, and I wasn’t entirely sure that music should be so widely shared. Not when it made me feel so open, so undone.

  “It will be healthy for you, darling,” Baba Ada told me, “to sing in front of a crowd. You need to learn presentation.”

  She was right. Sight and sound have a natural link, since sound is a primal trigger, an indication of where to look for signs of danger, water, food. We peer into trees to find hiding predators and watch dancers to see how their limbs correspond to the strain of a cello, the beat of a drum. A deaf man, if properly trained, could track the progress of a song by the flicker of a singer’s throat, the clench of muscles around lymph nodes and collarbones.

  But I was young and single-minded and didn’t want to learn. Walking from the train on the way to my first rehearsal, I dragged my feet, scraping the toes of my once-polished Mary Janes. It was March, and gray snow still gathered in the corners of the streets where it had been thrown by snow blowers over the course of the winter. The sidewalk was perpetually wet and salted, and my shoes were already near ruin, white-streaked and saturated.

  Baba Ada seemed to have decided to ignore my attitude and walked in brisk steps, her nose pointed upward into the crisp air. She held my hand, my cotton gloves sticking against the mended suede of her own. And she quizzed me on sounds, quick, like a drill sergeant.

  This was a game Ada had devised, based on her assumption that my whole body—mouth, lungs, brain, and tiny ear bones—had operated as a precision instrument from the time of my birth, and perhaps before. Very likely she whispered to my mother’s pregnant stomach and listened for phantom reactions, as if her very hope was sonar.

  The game was simple. If we were sitting in a restaurant and someone accidentally struck their knife against a glass, Ada would turn to me with an expectant gaze until I said “B minor?” Or whatever the note might be. That was how I won.

  Perfect pitch, to Ada, was part of my birthright, written in my blood. Which wasn’t to say I could be casual about it. She was irritated if I hummed a song just a shade flat in her presence, even if I was mimicking something I’d heard on the radio. And since she was proud, she liked to show me off. In church I named the organist’s key changes; walking down the street with Ada and one of her friends, I called out the different pitches of car horns. People laughed and admired me and handed me candy. Adults, anyway; none of the hauteur or exactitude I learned from Ada earned me many friends at school. But I didn’t mind, because I had her. Once, when I was ten, a waiter in a café dropped an entire tray of glasses near our table, and when the shock in the room wore off I said to Ada, “Shostakovich?” She stared at me for a moment and then laughed so hard her eyes leaked tears, which cut tracks through the pale powder on her face. Then she signaled the clumsy waiter back and ordered a piece of chocolate cake, which we shared, occasionally breaking into renewed giggles.

  On this day, however, as I sulked along the sidewalk, she pointed to things—a squeaky gate hinge, a bookshop’s entrance bell—without so much as a command, and I named them in an insolent monotone.

  Near the entrance to the small rehearsal room, which we reached by way of an alleyway door and a dusty hallway that wove through the church, a round-cheeked woman stood, taking names as each participant arrived. She was particularly tall, milling around with the adult chaperones, so I could see the ribbed archway inside her mouth when she threw back her head and laughed. In the middle of such a laugh, without warning, she sneezed three sharp reports from her nose, and I felt a creeping sensation up the back of my neck. I turned to glare at Ada, hoping that my expression would communicate something cutting. See, I’m going to catch my death of cold. But she just shooed me forward.

  I placed myself on a low stool and watched the other children. The boys had formed a pack to one side, leaving only their backs visible from where I sat. The girls simply looked uninterested—one was zipping and unzipping her jacket, while another slowly unraveled her glove.

  “All right!” The sneezing woman, who seemed to be in charge, looked at her watch and walked to the front of the room, hopping up on a small wooden box. “I’m Mrs. Baker. You can call me Noreen, or Noree.” She beamed at us and wiped her nose with one finger. My stomach pinched slightly, but I stayed still. Baba brought me here, I thought. She must have known this woman, must have trusted her.

  “Hi, Noree.” The children around me all spoke in unison, as if they’d been prepared for this exact interaction, this bubbly woman standing before us. The boys had assumed seats, interspersed with the girls, and looked calm and composed.

  “Now tonight we’re not going to start with anything too tricky. Remember, we’re here to have fun.” I shifted in my seat. “I know it’s almost springtime,” Noreen continued, “so first I thought we’d do one of my favorites. You might know it. It’s called ‘I’ll Be a Sunbeam.’”

  As she spoke, Noreen hopped off her box and walked around the room with a stack of pink and yellow mimeographed papers. She handed one to each child and gave a few to the adults who were shifting from foot to foot in the back of the rehearsal space. My paper was yellow and slightly smudged. It smelled like old silverware. In the top right corner was a picture of a grinning sun, and below that was a list of verses intercut with the chorus.

  Ada was only beginning to teach me to read, but I didn’t need to read to see that something was wrong. I raised my hand.

  “Yes, sweetheart?” Noreen smiled at me and bent down, putting her hands on her knees. I tried to lean away imperceptibly, but this only caused her to move closer.

  “Where’s the music?” I asked.

  “Honey, it’s right there in your hand.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, honey, it is.” Noreen reached out and took the page from my fingers, wagging it in front of me. “See?”

  I pinched my lips together and nibbled on them slightly. Ada was always telling me to be polite, but she never let me talk nonsense to her either. And this woman was talking nonsense.

  “That’s just words.”

  Noreen stood straight and looked at me.

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Luscia.”

  “Well, Luscia, what a pretty name. You see, these are the words that go with the music. So I’m going to play the piano, and we’ll all sing these words along and make the song. Oka
y?”

  She smiled at me again, and I could tell she thought that I didn’t understand. But as I glared with all my childish might, her face took on an aspect of bland menace, something shifting below the surface and recategorizing me as trouble. Noreen gave a short nod and turned back towards the group, opening her mouth to give further directions.

  Well, fine, I thought. Or something like it. Some inarticulate, foot-stamping approximation of indignation and despair. If she wanted trouble I could certainly provide it.

  My hand shot, shaking, back into the air, but before Noreen could so much as acknowledge it, it was grabbed by a larger, softer version of itself. Baba Ada stood beside me, looking severe, and tugged me to my feet. She turned to Noreen only when we reached the door.

  “My apologies. We seem to be in the wrong place.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, once we were safely outside, safely on the train. My relief at escaping Noree and her sickly sweet voice had left me briefly giddy, and now I felt exhaustion creeping up. I was also a bit nervous, having openly and publicly defied my grandmother, rendering dead her plans for my choir career.

  I had expected to be dragged straight to my room and left there to think about what I’d done. But we didn’t seem to be heading home. The car creaked below us and I leaned my face against the cool window, watching brief snatches of apartments appear and disappear as we barreled past. People’s lives, here and gone.

  “What a revolting woman.” Ada sat beside me and squeezed my wrist. “Although,” she said, looking down at me, “you knew perfectly well what that sheet of lyrics was.”

  I took my hand away and fiddled with the collar of my coat, so it pushed my scarf up, warm over my chin.

  “I thought you might enjoy it.” Ada spoke as though in response to something I hadn’t said. Her brow was knit. “Your mother thought so too. We should have known.”

  “Mama did?” My mother’s moods and choices seemed to come like weather, blowing warm, then cool, then gray. She could, even then, be gone for days at a time, and I held any scrap of information about her close to my chest in the hope that it would lend some sense to her inscrutable patterns. Stretched-out hair ties left on the sofa arm, a broken teacup thrown in the trash: they were all meaningful to me. But Ada, who understood her better than I did, wasn’t interested in my archeology. She gave me a look, and I changed my question. “Known what?”

  We skittered past a brightly lit series of brownstones, and I made a mental list of what I saw. A man swirling something in a glass. A dog curled up on a blue couch, alone. Two women standing front to back, one pulling up the zipper on another’s dress.

  “That little group.” Ada gestured upward, away. “Such a silly thing to do. You don’t need anything to belong to.” She put her arm around my shoulder. “You’re already part of something bigger.”

  I saw a mostly dark building with one bright room. It appeared in the distance like a beacon and seemed to grow warmer and warmer as it approached. A radiant den in a stone tomb. Just as we slipped by, I saw there were gauze curtains hung across the window frame. Light blue curtains, moving slightly, as though unsettled by the train. I was seized by a sudden urge to reach out and touch whatever lay behind them, because it was alien, because it wasn’t mine. But though I looked hard, the world behind the curtains remained indistinct, and we were gone too soon for me to see if I could peer into the space between them.

  At some point in our ride I fell asleep, my cheek crushed against the hard plastic window frame. I awoke to Baba Ada pulling on my elbow, ushering me quietly to my feet. In sleep I’d tucked myself up into a circlet, knees and hands all compressed into my coat for warmth. The train’s lights flickered momentarily off as we pulled up to an elevated wooden station, and I stood on creaky knees, trying to maintain my balance.

  “This is Lawrence,” declared the car’s speaker.

  “Hmm?” I asked Ada.

  “I had an idea.” She tightened her grip on my elbow, and the cold night air rushed around us. When we reached street level, she stopped and instructed me, “Close your eyes.”

  I was still only at the edge of consciousness and followed her lead through the streets as through lukewarm water, not really paying attention. Ada took care that I didn’t slip on black ice or ever feel the looming of a mailbox or parking meter in front of my forehead, and I trusted her to do it. As though she were my own subconscious, ferrying me across the boundary of sleep.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” she said, as my senses were enveloped by a sudden breath of cigarette smoke and body heat and human noise. “Stay here for a second.”

  I stood blind and still in the middle of a wooden floor, swaying with the crowd, locking and unlocking my knees. “Who’s that?” I heard from a strange voice nearby, making its way out of the general bubbling of conversation. But if a reply came I never heard it. Ada returned and took my hand again, guiding me forward. Whispering, “Excuse me, excuse me,” I brushed by soft, invisible bodies. I banged my knee on something hard. And then I found myself seated in a too-tall chair, instructed to open my eyes at last.

  It was still like a dream. Except that around me every face was amused, as though my presence was some wonderful joke. I was in a large and low-lit room, surrounded by tables full of men and women in evening clothes, facing a stage. Behind me, as I saw when I craned my neck, stretched a long rectangular bar, backed by mirrors and stacked with many-hued bottles of varying heights.

  The conversation stilled and the hushing of a drum brush called my attention to the front of the room. Somehow, without my noticing, a band had taken up residence in front of the red curtain. A bassist leaned against his upright, picking his teeth, while the trumpet player and pianist opened up the room with a low tune, tossing handfuls of chattering notes out over the drumbeat. The bassist cracked his knuckles and started plucking away, layering his soft haum haum haum under the present melody.

  And then she came, slipping out from a slit in the curtains I hadn’t seen. Her dress green and shimmering with sequins. My mother slunk across the stage, saying hello with her hips. She leaned briefly over the piano, hopped forward with a smiling “Oh!” when the bassist plucked out a few loud notes behind her. She hummed along with the song, audible even though she trapped the music under her tongue, feeling it out like a hard candy.

  “Mama,” I said under my breath. She didn’t see me, and didn’t hear me. Instead she sang and tossed her hair—just a lock at a time over her left shoulder, as though keeping inventory or marking time. As the song rose—crescendoed, ascended the scale—she ran her hands, fingers open, down her hips and then lifted them slowly into the air with upraised palms. I felt the song invade behind my shoulder blades. Imagined her fingers on my cheeks.

  “I thought this might be a better way,” Ada whispered. Her breath a distraction, a hot intrusion in my ear. I twitched away from her, but she leaned in and lifted my chin to her face. “Now you understand.” Her voice was firm. “Presentation.”

  She tilted my head back towards the stage, using her thumb and index finger.

  “Presentation.”

  When the song was done, my mother melted back into the curtains, barely moving them as she slipped through. And we all sent our hearts back with her.

  Some of my memories are like this, half soft, half sharp. My whole small self leaning towards the stage, leaning towards the invisible whatever that lay behind it, hiding my mother. My mother, most beautiful, who is never in my mind without bringing her whole complicated self.

  She is awash in connotation. She is transforming. She doesn’t exist. She is the only real thing in the world. How can I still feel this way when I’m a grown woman, with my own child? It was the hidden truth of my life for so long—this love, this longing. Ada knew better than to let me bring it too close; even the night of her great presentation she kept my love on a string. Led me with eyes closed, ushered me to bed before my mother stumbled home.

  But now Ada is gone. And the
doors she guarded are coming unlocked. Who was Greta, really? What did she mean? And where did my mother go, and why?

  5

  Greta and Saul married in late fall, in the middle of a rainstorm. Ada told me about it every year on the anniversary of their wedding—November 15. It was important, she said, to understand that Greta and Saul were in love in light of everything that came after.

  The rain that day, according to Ada, was strange. It obscured the entire sky, including the clouds, with its sheer weight and its audacity. People huddled together inside, but the rain infiltrated after them. It slipped through their walls in the form of a mist and clung to their clothes, dripped on the floorboards. Outside the rain fell like sheets of needles, shivering, silver, and sharp. When anyone poked their head through the door to check for signs that the weather might yield, they saw nothing, nothing but those undulating waves.

  Until they saw Greta.

  If her guests were nervous about going outside, the bride was elated. No one could remember seeing an announcement, and certainly no one had been formally invited, but most of the town recalled catching sight of her, and once they did they were enchanted. Greta greeted the water like a friend and raised her nose to the mineral smell, the clean air each peal of rain left behind. With her white dress hugging her closely, she walked along the black dirt road and made no attempt to cover herself up in the face of the storm.

  The pounding of the water on the earth was a drum, and Greta paced its rhythm towards the forest. She didn’t seem to mind that she was alone. The cottage Saul had built for them was at the edge of town, and that was where she knew she’d find him. People peered out their windows and watched her go by: a speck of light, a candle flicker in the gloom. The vision of her drew them like the scent of fresh fruit. They followed her hungrily from pane to pane.