by Yoram Kaniuk
She came next day and I asked her out to a movie. She walked like a gazelle. Tall. Elegant. Gentle. We walked to Forty-second Street and the first show was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and I don’t remember the name of the second feature. Between movies I told her that she would be the mother of my daughter and how I’d had to restrain myself until Jo told me she wasn’t pregnant and I told her that we would get married soon, and she replied, All right, and smiled and asked when were we planning to do it and I said, In the spring. She said, Fine, and we walked for hours, I told her about myself and she, in a dozen words, summarized herself and gave herself to me and she was naïve but somehow also wise. In all the days of my two lives I’d never before had the honor and pleasure of knowing an angel, though now that I’d met one, I saw that angels weren’t exactly angels. Although she was rare and blessed with qualities that for lack of a better word might be called “angelic,” Miranda was all too human. And soon she would conceive and give birth.
She had a body, and therefore cast a shadow. She honored her father and her mother. She had not stolen. She had not committed adultery. She had not sworn falsely. She had not worshiped other gods. She had not killed. She had not borne false witness against her neighbor. She had not coveted her neighbor’s house. She had not coveted her neighbor’s husband. Nor his ox nor his maidservant nor his ass nor anything that was his. She was known as someone who never said no, but found a way nonetheless to be obstinate and always stand on her principles. She lived an autonomous existence. Her skin was transparent to the world. A donkey-foal would die in her house, years later. Its mother abandons it in a field in Ramat HaSharon after giving birth to it and turning away to feed. The foal waits. A factory worker passes through the field. The foal thinks the worker is its mother and hobbles after her. She gets to the factory where she works, pets him for a moment, and the foal, who knows that she’s its mother, stands and waits for her. At the end of the shift, because she’s having an affair, the factory worker exits the factory through the rear, and a married man—married, that is, to another woman—comes to pick her up in his car. The foal remains where it stands. It doesn’t eat and doesn’t drink. In the morning, a man on a delivery bike rides by and tries to load it onto his bike. Because he can’t quite manage, he leaves it in the field. Then Miranda passes through the field and sees it and draws near to talk to it, to stroke it, and it dances after her with nimble skips. After inquiries that take at least two days, the owner of the donkey, the foal’s mother, is located. It transpires however that the donkey will not take back her offspring, because there is a law with donkeys that stipulates the following: in the event that three days shall pass from the day of birth during which a foal is lost to its mother, when that mother sees her young again, she will kill it. So the beautiful foal, whose coat was soft as down, sleeps in Miranda’s bed, and because it’s never suckled on its mother’s milk (and hence was never immunized), only survives with the assistance of an old veterinarian and the aid of plenty of milk bottles with teats attached to them, but the poor thing gets sick nonetheless and dies. Miranda sits with it on the floor. A summer’s night. The children of the neighborhood are hanging in clusters from the windows of her house. They stare in amazement at the vision within. Relentlessly, for seven hours straight, Miranda gives the foal mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, until she turns blue and practically faints. The earth trembles in the presence of the Lord, who waits patiently, and with a certain admiration, but also with an unyielding determination, until He finally draws near to complete His task. The foal—whose eyes were the most beautiful ever seen, its coat the softest, the gleam of sorrow in its gaze as deep as a pool—will never be forgotten. Before being buried, it would even be given a name. The children would give it a beautiful funeral and a girl, whose father was a Marine at the American Embassy, would sing the Marine Corps hymn.
But, back in New York, 1958, Miranda and I went back to my place after work in the Cellar. The idea was that I’d speak to her parents. Before I could do so, Tony Scott called and said that Mike Nichols’s ex-wife, to whom I still taught Hebrew once in a while and who’d forget what she’d learned soon enough, had given him my number. I asked how he was and he replied whatever it was that he replied and said that Lady Day was going to give a performance, she was in bad shape, with seventy-five dollars in the bank, and she was sick, and this would possibly be her last concert and she could hardly hold herself up and that I should come and help. I went to Tony’s house and Billie smiled a broken smile at me and said, Hey, Yo! and put her head down on her hands that were crossed on the table. Percy Heath came and Prez and Oscar Peterson, but Lester looked bad too, gaunt and tired, his days numbered, and we decided what and where. I don’t remember whether the concert was at Carnegie Hall or in some other place.
Billie could barely sing, but even in her devastation she was a palace. There were some critics back then who said that she couldn’t sing anymore at all, but Tony and I and Prez and Mulligan who also came loved this tone of hers, the sad ironic whisper that could be heard in her voice. The rumor that she was doing a show spread like wildfire. There was no money for an ad in the paper. We brought her onto the stage. There was a microphone there, we fixed it to the floor with nails, we brought her in leaning on our arms and literally stuck her to the microphone stand which she clutched in her hands and then she stuck her mouth to the tip of the microphone as if in a kiss. A big crowd stood outside, mostly blacks, and several hundred were inside. I knew some of them. Everyone from the Minton Playhouse days who was still alive was there. Two whores that I recognized. Musicians. The bartender. Singers’ accompanists and tap dancers, Ben Webster and Percy Heath, and she started singing. Her voice sounded as if it had passed through a filter, she even sang a newer song, “Fine and Mellow,” and I remember Prez, who had come from Europe where he’d been living for several years now, and Coleman Hawkins, and Roy Eldridge joined in. She whispered, but forcefully, in the sweetness of her unique voice: a tender, miraculous scalpel. The audience sang with her in a whisper, and even outside, so I was told, the crowd sang along. She whispered the songs and the audience sang quietly and didn’t make a sound otherwise, and outside buses stopped and people got down and listened. She’d never had such a loving, enthusiastic, and devoted audience in her entire life. She sang for about an hour. Her arms ached and you could see it. We went on stage and brought her down and she sobbed. A few months later she found out that Prez had died. She used more and more heroin, her health deteriorated, and she was hospitalized in serious condition. From the depths of her weeping she managed to organize a delivery of drugs even there, I heard, smuggled in by means of a rock hurled through the window of her hospital room, and she was remanded on her deathbed by the police for possession of drugs. A few weeks later she died at forty-four years of age. In the Cellar we only played her songs that night. It was sad that Lady died.
Miranda thought it was time for a talk with her parents. I went to their apartment in a building on the East Side, near the Park, and I sat facing two attractive, tall people, just like their daughter. I could see a younger brother and sister in the back of the apartment who watched me inquisitively, then disappeared. The table was laden with bottles of Dewar’s and Cutty Sark, glasses, cookies, and Alfred Thornton Baker III, Miranda’s handsome father, was smoking a pipe which he filled with a tobacco I didn’t recognize called Walnut, and which I later went on to smoke for many years. The family’s good looks, the gentility and aristocracy that emanated from them, made me feel like a crook. We talked. Miranda’s mother remained silent most of the time and looked pained, but got over her anger with the help of the whiskey. Miranda’s father, who was a senior editor at Time magazine, did the talking. He was a warmhearted man and he liked me and said that Miranda was a big girl, older than her years, who knew what she wanted, and if she wanted to marry me, he’d give his blessing on condition that we waited eight months, until she turned eighteen. I sat facing them and said that I was Israeli. Jewish. Di
vorced. Twenty-eight years old. Trying to make a living from frozen falafel and a partnership with one of my friends—Hanoch had left by this time because of a falling out with his brother—in an Israeli café that owed all its profits to a crook by the name of Bernie. I said that I was writing my first book but it wasn’t finished yet. I said I knew I wasn’t a great catch and what I brought with me wasn’t much, but I loved their daughter. It took time. Miranda’s mother was badly shaken but tried not to let on. Things changed slowly. Miranda persisted. Gradually they accepted, they had no choice, the fact of our forthcoming marriage, and Miranda’s mother said that her mother, Miranda’s grandmother, had already demanded that our marriage be annulled, though she had no real authority in this matter, no more than did Miranda’s uncle, the giant Moose Morehead who was vice president of Gulf Oil, and had said that he ate “kummus” with Saudi sheiks and how would he explain that his niece was getting married to an Israeli, but, Miranda’s mother said, if I wanted I could go with Miranda to her grandmother’s because her grandmother loved Miranda very much and at least I’d be able to get some insight into a problem I was getting as a wedding present.
The grandmother lived in Sea Bright, New Jersey, in a not-too-large house between the ocean and the river. Whenever the river rose and flooded this strip of land, she’d be evacuated by helicopter. Sea Bright is a summer resort town, but the old lady lived there throughout the year. She was about five nine, a real beauty with violet eyes. Her hair was tinted blue and she had meticulously trained her three poodles to bark like German shepherds. They were small, irritable, and well groomed. She made a habit of spraying them with fine French eau de cologne. She called her house Malgré Tout, which in French means “in spite of it all.” Her last husband, or perhaps it was the one before last, had been a peacetime general who like most of the generals of the time didn’t know how to shoot and had lived with her for a few years in an American camp in the south of France. She was renowned for her escapades in her youth: for instance, a famous duel was fought because of her between a betrayed lover and a cuckolded husband and had been the talk of the town in Philadelphia, once upon a time. She had had several love affairs in her lifetime and had been ostracized by Philadelphia’s high society. And despite the fact that there was a Scots nobleman in her own family tree—Mary Queen of Scots’s right-hand man, in fact—she called the Puritans who fled to America in the seventeenth century “riffraff,” because her own ancestors, when they came, came as noblemen—not to seek refuge but to reign over the land. When Miranda’s mother and aunts got married, the old lady hadn’t been allowed to attend the weddings. She was obliged to hide outside the church windows and peek in. Her blend of arrogant nobility and ignorance seemed to be a legacy from several generations’ worth of relatives who did nothing but live lives of self-indulgence and alcoholism and tennis and cricket, and then the crash of 1929 pulled the rug out from under them. Her somber cuckolded husband, who owned a distinguished bank, lost everything in a single day, then climbed up his favorite oak tree and shot himself with a gun gripped in white-gloved hands. She kept the ancient pennant of a savage Scottish clan to which she felt kinship in her house in Sea Bright. She had a French companion living with her, an orphan named Nina, whose huge eyes blinked through the fog in her brain at the woman she worshipped and with whom she lived and of whom she was absolutely terrified. During an angry phone conversation the old woman told Miranda’s mother that it was inconceivable for Miranda to marry a Jew. She said—so Miranda’s mother told me—that she had never met a Jew in her entire life, and Miranda’s mother added that there was no need for me to go out to see her, but I wanted to and someone let us borrow their car so we drove to see the old lady. The windshield wipers struggled heroically against a heavy rain, the road was virtually empty, Miranda sat beside me in silence. I thought about Penn, after whom the state of Pennsylvania is named—Pennsylvania meaning, more or less, “the woods of Penn”—who was one of her ancestors, likewise one of Theodore Roosevelt’s wives, who was herself the descendent of Jonathan Edwards, who had been an important philosopher and theologian and had been one of the first presidents of Princeton University, and whose grandson Aaron Burr had been Washington’s Vice President, who in turn dueled with and shot dead America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who was in fact one of Miranda’s father’s forebears.
The flouncy dogs started barking as we approached and the rain was still beating down. The fog was thick and through its festoons materialized Nina, flickering in the mist, adorned as ever with her beautiful eyes and her perpetual sadness, which stood between us like a second shroud of fog. She waited at the door and asked who we were. Miranda kissed her on the cheek and said, This is Yoram, and Nina who had been reaching to shake my hand pulled hers back in fright and said, So, is that you Miranda? as if she’d never seen her before, and she felt obliged to ignore me with a coolness that was quite difficult for her, but her anxiety overwhelmed her politeness. I was wearing a suit for the second time in my life. I had borrowed it from Miranda’s younger brother, and I wore a tie at the advice of Miranda’s mother. We were shown in and stood shivering and wet in front of a blazing fireplace. Nina brought a tray with drinks while the old lady lurked upstairs. We could hear the rustling of her dress up there. She was waiting for the right moment to make her entrance. Nina was nervous and stared at me in alarm from the staircase. She apparently knew that she was supposed to ignore me, but the water dripping from me was the same water that was dripping from Miranda. The sound of the ocean intensified outside, becoming a roar and then abating, and at last the old lady started coming down the stairs. Her enormous conceit was perfectly encapsulated in her staged descent down those stairs, in perfect confidence. Even with her blue hair, she looked like an ancient Greek goddess of vengeance. Even from the topmost stair, she had already done everything she could to show me her scorn. Her every step was angry. Her height was emphasized by a light that shone directly down upon her. When she reached the bottom step, she didn’t even glance in my direction; she opened her arms and waited for Miranda to fall into them. She embraced her granddaughter as you might embrace a recently widowed woman. And after this embrace, she simply stared at Nina who was standing and trembling and shooting frightened glances at me and the old lady said aloud: You!—she used a quite correct tone of voice, she must have practiced for hours—you can see how difficult this is for me because of you. Please wait for me in the morning room, and Nina led me into a small room overlooking the ocean. Attractive old paintings. Books bought by the yard. Large windows that seemed to tame the storm. A cabinet and several old armchairs, and a large table with a huge jigsaw puzzle on it. She let me wait for a while and I heard the barking of the dogs outside the door and then she entered. She sat with her better side facing me. She asked me what time it was and I told her that it was twelve noon. And she waited a moment. Then she picked up a small silver bell and tinkled it gently. Nina came in carrying a tray with a bottle of bourbon, a small pitcher of water, and a glass with ice cubes. The old lady mumbled, poured a little water into a glass that she filled with bourbon, and swirled the glass gently so the ice cubes clinked. I looked at her glass and smiled. The great lady turned toward me and looked at me directly for the first time since we arrived. Something in my appearance disturbed her and I could see the furrows on her forehead deepen uncomfortably. She said, But you people don’t drink, do you? I said, If you people drink then sometimes we drink too. She gestured with her hand and Nina ran out of the room and I could hear weeping. Nina returned with another glass that had apparently been prepared in advance and mixed bourbon with water without asking me how I liked it. Then the old lady, who had apparently forgotten what she’d said before, grumbled that Jews probably drink first thing in the morning. Silence fell because I didn’t respond. She allowed Nina to leave and suddenly rose from her chair, went over to the table with the puzzle, picked up a piece, looked, found a place for it in the appropriate space, looked at me w
ith a sense of triumph, and sat down again. She waited for the right moment and said: I don’t understand why a Jew wants to force himself into our family. There’s never been a Catholic in the family, let alone a Jew. You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met. She sounded angry and afraid as she said it. Something about me didn’t sit well with her expectations. She looked disappointed and drank her bourbon. She leveled a glance at me, an almost personal glance I’d say, and said, You don’t look like you should. I told her that perhaps her education as to Jews was lacking and she didn’t respond. She began trying to make it obvious that she wasn’t listening to me. She began naming the presidents and generals and distinguished people and inventors that her family had been blessed with. She said she was proud of her pedigree. That that sort of thing couldn’t be bought with sycophancy or new money. She talked about the ear-locks of ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crooked noses and all the thieves and cheats who were my people and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She said nothing would help, we’d never be really respectable, that we had no brains or honor or heroes or leaders and now, she said, you’re pushing yourselves where you’re not wanted. She called Jews “Hebrews” and spoke to me only in the second-person plural. However, there was something off about her performance. I was getting a bit of a kick out of being referred to as “you people,” straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but at the same time she sounded a little embarrassed and wonder-struck. She kept asking if “you people,” namely me, if we weren’t by any chance French, if we weren’t perhaps Frenchmen impersonating Jews? She didn’t want me to marry her granddaughter, but if I were French, even a Catholic, she would reconsider, and since I looked French to her, But why are you people trying to infiltrate us, pretending to be Jews? I told her I had to be excused for a moment. She asked me where I thought I was going. I asked her if her bathroom had running water and toilet paper because otherwise I’d have to ask Miranda for some tissues. She tried to get angry, restrained herself, and said of course there was. She was serious. She wasn’t going to rise to my banter. In the bathroom I made an effort not to make a sound. I tried to make sure that not a single drop dripped onto the floor. With the tips of my fingers I took some of her soft pink toilet paper and then worried that maybe she’d prefer that I use some other paper just in case she or Miranda had to go in eventually and powder their noses.
