The Two-Family House: A Novel

by Lynda Cohen Loigman

  But he wasn’t. When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her. Staring straight at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. An expression that she recognized only because she had seen it on the faces of other people’s parents. He was proud of her.

  “May I?” he asked, pointing to the letter. She handed the pages over to him and held her breath as he read them. When he was done, he handed the pages back to her. “Congratulations,” he said. “English literature?” She nodded, and he went on. “This is a tremendous accomplishment, Judith.”

  She was stunned. Claire had been right—her father had surprised her. She wasn’t sure what to say next. But she had to say something. “Did you ask me to have lunch with you today because of the letter?”

  He took another sip of coffee. “I found that picture a few days ago. And then yesterday the letter came. I thought we should talk.”

  “Where did you find the photograph, anyway?”

  “Natalie found it in one of my old books.”

  “Natalie?”

  Her father sighed. “It’s a math book. Teddy and Natalie found it in the garage last fall. I started teaching them some simple equations. Teddy really enjoyed it. Then after the accident, Natalie wanted to keep studying with me. Abe brings her to the office on Thursdays.”

  “Natalie comes to your office every week to study math with you? Really?”

  For a moment her father looked like he might cry. “Sometimes we talk about Teddy, about the things he liked—comic books and baseball cards.…”

  Judith could not believe what she was hearing. It was too much to take in, too many revelations in one day. She couldn’t put all the pieces together or reconcile the man she had grown up with her whole life with the one sitting across from her in the booth.

  “I suppose your mother needs to be told about Radcliffe.” Her father was back to practical matters. “Would you like to tell her, or would you like me to do it?”

  “Maybe it’s best if we tell her together.”

  “All right,” he agreed. “We’ll do it tonight.”

  Judith checked her watch. “I really should go, or I’ll be late for my two-thirty class.” She got up from the booth and adjusted her sweater. “Do you want to walk back with me?”

  “You go ahead. I think I’ll stay and have a piece of pie. I used to love the apple pie here.”

  Judith stared at him. “You know, I love apple pie too. I used to always look forward to Aunt Helen’s pie on Thanksgiving.”

  Judith’s father shook his head. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s something we have in common then.”

  Chapter 48

  ROSE

  (September 1957)

  Rose still couldn’t believe Judith was leaving, but Mort was adamant. “We can’t hold her back,” he said. Rose knew it wasn’t so much the fact that Judith was going away that bothered her. It was the fact that Mort and Judith had decided it together. There was something between them that night, an easy solidarity Rose had never sensed before. She didn’t like it.

  “You had no problem holding her back last time!” Rose snapped at him after Judith was out of the room.

  “Last time we didn’t know a lot of things that we know now,” he answered.

  “So you know things now? What could you possibly know?”

  “I know how hard Judith is willing to work for her education. How much it means to her.”

  “If you didn’t know those things when she graduated from high school, you were a fool.”

  “Then I was a fool, Rose.” Mort held up his hands in defeat. “But five years ago she was a child. This time she’s a grown woman, and she’s determined to go. She has a full scholarship. She doesn’t need our permission or our help.”

  “Then why are you so quick to give her both?”

  Mort cleared his throat. “Before Teddy died, you told me I didn’t pay enough attention to Judith, that I didn’t encourage her. Do you remember that?”

  Rose wouldn’t answer him. “Look, Rose. We both know how bright Judith is. We can’t keep her from this kind of opportunity just because we’d rather have her at home.”

  It’s not because I want to keep her home, Rose thought. She walked away from Mort and went upstairs to Teddy’s room.

  After Teddy died, Rose hadn’t been able to go into his bedroom. She kept the door closed and pretended not to notice if Mort or one of the girls wandered into it. It was only a few months after the funeral that she was finally able to muster the strength to go inside. She had been surprised by how neat the room was, until she remembered that Teddy had died on a Thursday. On Thursdays she usually made the beds and tidied up the bedrooms. She must have done that the morning before he died.

  That first time she was in Teddy’s room, Rose had wandered around in circles. She wanted to touch everything. Did the bedpost feel different? The desk? What should she do with his books and his clothes? Rose had opened the door to Teddy’s closet and found the tall wicker basket that served as his hamper spilling over with dirty clothes and sheets from that morning in December. She picked up the basket to carry it downstairs to the laundry room, but on the way down the steps, the scent emanating from the sheets overpowered her, and she let the basket drop. She watched it fall, tumbling down the steps and knocking into the walls of the stairway, until it landed at the bottom with a thud.

  Rose never washed the sheets or the clothes. Instead, she folded them neatly and placed them, unlaundered, in the back of Teddy’s closet. Teddy’s scent was all she had left of him, the last tangible trace that could conjure him to her.

  After that day, Rose went to Teddy’s room every now and then when she wanted to be alone. She would pretend she was dusting if anyone asked, but the girls never did ask, and Mort never questioned her. She would sit at Teddy’s desk and stare out the window, and sometimes, when she was particularly upset, she would open up the closet and pick up the sheets. She would hold them close to her chest and breathe in the scent she had almost forgotten. Sometimes in Teddy’s room, as surprising as it was to her, Rose almost felt like she wanted to pray.

  Rose had never paid attention to the prayers that were spoken at the services she attended. She was not a religious person, and, like many women her age, she had never learned how to read Hebrew. After Teddy died, however, she found that bits and pieces of certain prayers started popping into her head at different moments. Some fragments had tunes and some were just words. Tidbits from holiday prayers and arbitrary blessings would come together in combinations that made no particular sense to her. Most of the time she didn’t even know the meaning of the Hebrew words she was humming.

  After her argument with Mort, Rose felt a new incantation composing itself. So she went into Teddy’s room and opened the closet door. She clutched the worn sheets and let the words fill her head. This time they came to her as a melody, something she had learned as a young girl, from the end of the Mourner’s Kaddish. Oseh shalom bim’ro’mav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, V’al kol Yisrael V’imru, V’imru amen. The melody repeated itself over and over, until part of the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer the rabbis read every year on the High Holy Days, interrupted it. This time it was in English. Who shall have rest and who shall wander, Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued, Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented …

  There was no question that she was being tormented now. And somehow Mort was the one finding peace. How could that be the result after all the trouble she had gone to, all the sacrifices she had made to give her husband what she thought he wanted, and all she had lost in that terrible process?

  * * *

  A few months later, when the time finally came to take Judith to Boston, Rose tried to avoid making the trip with her and Mort. But Helen had offered to take Mimi and Dinah for the night, leaving Rose no excuse for missing the ride. She could express to no one why she wanted to stay home or why her participation in the excursion would be so painful. Soon they were leaving tog
ether, bound for Massachusetts to give Judith the education and the adventure that Rose always thought had been reserved for Teddy alone.

  Rose watched the miles go by through the dusty patches on the car window. Mort navigated the road and Judith sat behind them in the backseat, carrying on a conversation with her father as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Rose sat in silence, listening to them talk, listening to the familiarity that had sprung up between them like weeds through a sidewalk crack. And all the while Mort drove and all the while Judith chattered, Rose gripped her hands together on her lap and clamped her lips together. She was afraid to open her mouth, even to breathe, because in the car’s small space, stuck between her husband and her eldest daughter, Rose felt the anger brewing inside her push its way out of her chest and into her throat. She could feel it, twisting and bending, like smoke on her vocal chords, ready to burn its way up to her tongue. She pursed her lips tighter in an effort to stop it, for if she couldn’t, she knew, the truth would burn its way out of her and escape from her mouth in one inexhaustible scream.

  Part Four

  Chapter 49

  NATALIE

  (May 1961)

  “I’m never getting married,” Natalie announced. She was standing on a small wooden box while Mrs. Tuber, the tiny seamstress in an ancient housecoat, pinned up the hem of her bridesmaid dress. The pale blue fabric was stiff and itchy. The skirt was too full, the neck was too low and the waist was uncomfortably tight. She couldn’t wait to take it off.

  “Mmm hmm.” With a mouthful of pins poking out in all directions, Mrs. Tuber was unable to respond. Her gray head was bent over the hemline of Natalie’s skirt, and Natalie was afraid the woman might never make her way back to an upright position. “Are you sure you’re good all hunched over like that?” she asked.

  Mrs. Tuber shuffled forward and bent down further. “Mmm.”

  This was Natalie’s first time at Mrs. Tuber’s. The shop consisted of one small room, with a rack of clothes on one side and an old wooden table on the other. Two sewing machines were set up on the table, and spools of thread in every color were strewn across the top. Natalie wanted to leave. She didn’t like how people passing by on the street could see her through the shop’s picture window. She kept her back to the glass while she stood on the box, but she could see the reflections of the people walking past in the mirror that ran the length of the shop’s rear wall. One little boy pressed his face up against the glass and stuck his tongue out at her. She glared back.

  Finally the seamstress rose from her spot on the floor. She stood back a little from the mirror and clucked approvingly at the fit. With the pins out of her mouth and tucked into the bottom of the dress, Mrs. Tuber was free to speak at last. “Soon it will be your turn to be the bride!” she told Natalie.

  “I already told you. I don’t want to get married.”

  “You’re only thirteen,” Helen interjected. She was sitting on an old wooden chair in the corner of the shop. “You’re too young to say things like that.”

  Mrs. Tuber agreed. “When my daughter was your age, she wanted to be a dancer. She swore she’d never get married. Then the right fella came along, they fell in love and then she got married—just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “Real love isn’t that simple,” Natalie protested. “It doesn’t just happen all of a sudden.” She was tired of talking nonsense with some woman she had only just met. The room was getting hot and she was starting to sweat in the dress.

  Mrs. Tuber shrugged. “What’s so complicated? You meet a fella. You either love him or you don’t.”

  “You can’t just say that. What about Antony and Cleopatra?” Natalie wanted to know. “Or Guinevere and Lancelot?” She threw up her hands in frustration. “What about Bonnie and Clyde?”

  Mrs. Tuber stared at Natalie like she had two heads. She turned to Helen. “I thought you said she was only thirteen. Already she’s an expert on heartache?”

  Mrs. Tuber hadn’t known their family for very long. She didn’t know what kind of heartache they’d been through. Natalie watched her mother stand up, fish a tissue out of her purse and blow her nose. Natalie calmed herself down and tried to salvage the conversation. “Fine. I might get married someday.” Her voice was artificially bright. “When I’m older.”

  Mrs. Tuber nodded. “Now you’re making sense.” She took a ticket from a stack on the table and stuck it on a hanger. “Tell me again, who’s getting married?” She waved Natalie into the small changing area that was marked off with a curtain in one corner of the room. “My cousin Mimi,” Natalie called out. “I’m one of the bridesmaids.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Tuber said. “The cousin. Pretty girl. Looks like you. She came here last week with her sister. I told her I would fix her wedding dress, but she said it didn’t need fixing. Some fancy store did it for her.”

  Natalie came out from behind the curtain and handed the dress to Mrs. Tuber. Then she walked over to her mother and took her by the arm. “Mimi likes everything fancy, right, Mom?”

  Helen agreed. “Lucky for her, she’s marrying a rich man. His family insists on paying for everything.”

  “Good!” Mrs. Tuber said. “She should live and be well.”

  “She should live and be well,” Helen repeated.

  * * *

  Three weeks later Natalie was in the itchy dress again. The bride and groom had just finished their first dance, and Natalie was hiding, sitting on a chair she had dragged to a corner of the cavernous room, behind a pillar and a pair of potted palms. She couldn’t bear the thought of speaking to one more stranger or having to smile for one more photograph.

  “I can see you, you know.” Natalie recognized the voice. She peered out from behind a clump of fronds.

  “Johnny? Is that you?” she whispered.

  “Yup.”

  “You weren’t at the ceremony. I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Where were you?”

  “My mom took forever to get ready, so we got here late.” He tugged gently at the black bow tie that topped off his tuxedo. “What are you doing?”

  “Hiding.”

  “From who?”

  “Everyone. Being a bridesmaid is awful. Edward’s mother is worse than Aunt Rose. She’s so bossy. She wouldn’t even let me sit down before the ceremony. She said my dress would wrinkle.”

  “Who the heck is Edward?”

  “The groom! Didn’t you read the invitation?”

  “Nope. Never even saw it.”

  Natalie snorted. “Of course you didn’t. I guess it’s no use asking whether you read the engagement announcement in the newspaper.”

  “Who reads the newspaper?”

  “For Pete’s sake, Johnny, your father owns a newsstand!”

  “Never mix business with pleasure. Besides, who cares which rich guy Mimi married? I just want some food. Come on out of there. Please.”

  Natalie sighed. “All right. But if Edward’s mother comes near me, I’m going back.” Natalie stuck one arm out through the greenery. “Can you help me? It’s tricky in these shoes.” Johnny grabbed her hand and pulled gently, but after she emerged he still didn’t let go of her hand. He held it and stared at her.

  “What? Is my dress ripped or something?” Natalie took her hand away and looked over her shoulder to see whether the back of her skirt was torn. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “You look really … nice.” Johnny’s voice sounded strange. He was probably making fun of her. They always teased each other.

  “Ugh. This dress is awful. It’s so tight and the skirt is too puffy, and—”

  “No. It’s nice.”

  “It is?” She squinted her eyes, trying to read his expression, but he only looked down at his shoes. “Thanks.” The silence became uncomfortable.

  Johnny recovered first. “Let’s head over that way.” He pointed across the dance floor. “There’s a waiter with those tiny lamb chops.”

  Natalie stood up on her toes to look and gr
abbed his hand as soon as she saw the tray. “Let’s go,” she told him, already running. “I’m starving!”

  Chapter 50

  JUDITH

  “I’m never getting married,” Judith said. Her cousin Harry raised his eyebrow at her. “How come? You don’t like any of those Harvard boys?” They were moving slowly around the dance floor, neither of them particularly graceful. Harry’s wife, Barbara, was dancing with Uncle Abe.

  “It’s not that,” Judith tried to explain. “I just don’t want all of this.” She gestured to the ballroom and the couples dancing around them. “I don’t want a big wedding with everyone looking at me and lots of people I don’t even know. Mimi likes being the center of attention. But I would never want something this elaborate.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Harry told her. “Not unless Mr. Moneybags has a brother.”

  Judith shook her head. “Just Lillian, his sister. Over there.” She pointed across the room to a young woman wearing the same bridesmaid dress. It was obvious that the color had been selected to flatter Lillian rather than Judith. Mimi was by the girl’s side, and the two of them were laughing and sipping champagne.

  “No offense or anything, but Mimi fits in much better with Edward’s family than with yours,” Harry observed.

  “Hmmph,” Judith snorted. “Did you know Edward’s parents bought them an apartment in their building as a wedding present? Mimi never stops talking about how wonderful they all are. Or about all her shopping trips with Lillian and Mrs. Feinstein to pick out her gown. She didn’t bother inviting me or Dinah.”

  “Did she ask your mom?”

  “No, but my mother wouldn’t have gone even if they had invited her.”

  The music stopped and the bandleader approached the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “it’s time for the bride and her father to have their dance.”