Before she spoke, Faith Stillman looked down at her hands, which she had clasped in her lap. “I am—thank you for coming today. I—” She fixed her eyes on the table ahead of them where a small boy was banging his spoon on his plate and being ignored. That seemed easier than looking straight at Chaya. “I first—I would like to call you by whatever name you—prefer. Gregory refers to you as Ceil but you—I don’t—”
This was, somehow, her way of acknowledging that Chaya might not be exactly who she was said to be. “Thank you for asking” was the best Chaya could manage until she could calculate what answer would honor her thoughtfulness. “I am—I have always been Chaya-Libbe, though the Libbe part most often disappears, it makes the name so long. The Ceil is—” If she could not be truthful, why was she here? She allowed herself a modest wince. “I understand that Gregory worries that I would have to hear people mispronounce it but—” She would not acknowledge that what concerned him was how it identified her as a “Jewess.” Instead she gave him credit he did not deserve. “I really don’t mind how people say it, though. With or without the difficulty, that is my name.” She gave as challenging a look as she could. “As Faith is yours.”
“Oh, yes. Faith was my grandmother’s name, though I must say I remember very little evidence that she placed much faith in anything. Her religion. Her husband who was—” She laughed, mischievous. “Well, let us never mind that.”
The menus had arrived and Chaya was confronted with a dozen choices she could hardly picture. What decorated the tables at the Stillmans’ or the parties that Asher and she worked was beautifully nameless, picturesque but anonymous. She blindly ordered some sort of steak.
Faith Stillman plunged, then, so courageously Chaya nearly dropped her water glass. “You can eat the meat, then? That is not, um, what I think is—kosher? Special to your faith?”
She laughed, though Chaya supposed her daring was not funny to her. “Oh, many—I am not—I do not follow—yes, I can eat the meat. There are many of us who do not follow the—” They were, and more credit to them, getting right down to it. “The traditions. In many ways. Though we respect them. Some practice them, some do not.” How would her dear apostate father have answered? Chaya shrugged as if the question meant nothing to her, but she understood that Gregory’s mother needed to know how far outside her experience she fell, and how far this unfamiliar young woman might divert her son.
Faith Stillman, fanning herself delicately with her hand, claimed that she was eating as little as possible so she might fit into a dress she had bought for a wedding. She ordered an elaborate salad and Chaya was left thinking, Wedding, wedding, isn’t that why we are here? Hadn’t he told her?
But she had reminded herself as well. “And now you two . . .”
Chaya sat up straighter. “We two appear to be on the way to joining ourselves, yes, for the future, I suppose you would say.” She looked at her future mother-in-law, terrified to know whether she would oppose her outright or undermine her gently.
“Chaya.” She managed the ch as gamely as she could. “I—you need to know, first, that I trust my son utterly in all things.” She smiled. “Or should I say, nearly all things. No one has perfect judgment, wouldn’t you agree?” That confiding color, and a spray of freckles, rose on her cheeks again, an alternation of pallor and blush. She was not made for keeping her feelings secret. “Therefore, his having chosen you speaks all I need to hear. He has never been—irresponsible—in his relationships. Like some.” She might as well have named names. Astounding. “And I thoroughly—I dare to say thoroughly though that may speak only to my limited experience—I understand that you have weathered many—ah—changes in fortune very quickly.”
Their food was set before them, Chaya’s with the admonition to keep her hands away from her heated plate. She stared at her steak, swimming in pale blood, as if it might begin to dance. Here it comes, she thought. Here come her qualms and refusals.
“I so respect what you have had to master,” her future mother-in-law said to her, picked up her fork, and held it still. Her hand was shaking. “It must be extremely—challenging—to have learned a new language and new—what?—new ways of doing things.”
All Chaya could do was smile vaguely, look encouraging, and wonder, Does she think I come from deepest Africa or the provinces of China?
But that was not her point. “My own life has been—what you would call—bounded. Chaya. I—when I was a child I walked in the footsteps that had already been walked in, you see, and my feet fitted perfectly. I did not deviate. Nor, I suppose, has my Lallie. We have been—obedient.” She was looking into the distance. “Or no, that makes us sound like trained poodles. Let us say, obliging. We have accepted the terms offered us.”
Again Chaya said nothing to interrupt. Is every life a fabric of compromises, then? Warp what you love, weft what you must tolerate, an imperfect weave, however strong and lovely it might look?
“Sometimes it was not easy. I was tall, quite tall at an early age, and that was exceedingly uncomfortable. A girl is not supposed to—well, you may imagine. And I was—I was called goose neck all the years of my childhood.” Her hand went to the high pleated collar that covered her neck as she said this, as if in sympathy. Her pile of greens lay untouched. “Otherwise, let me say, I was not generally at ease but I did not dare go my own way.” She was smiling sadly. “And so I want you to know that I have great admiration for your—” She sighed. “What would you call it?”
This was not a rhetorical question; apparently she hoped for an answer. Was she as guileless as she seemed, so steeped in regret? Or should Chaya be suspicious that she wanted to trap her into admitting that she had vaulted herself up a steep precipice, using her son for a foothold? That her accomplishment was securing the Stillman fortune to save herself? Oh, naïf! Oh, cynic! This was a momentous choice and she dangled between the two. She stalled by cutting into her steak and watching its juices meander in little streams across her plate. “Gregory is . . . ,” she began. “I had no expectation when I came to Chicago with my brother that I would be—” Be what? What had she been? “I was for a long time very lonely, Mrs. Stillman. My situation was a bad one. A grim one. But mostly, I would say, I was just—alone and cold. I was—many times I wondered if I had made a mistake coming here, away from my family, away from everything I knew. I would not wish anyone to be so—” She wanted to say untouched but she did not dare.
She had not breathed since she began.
“He is such a good man, Gregory. He is kind and he—I think he is trying not to follow in the footsteps that were laid out for him.” She wanted to say, And so he is your son, but that felt like a raw attempt to plead for her favor. “And so he keeps me warm. I don’t know what else to say. I had not intended it.” Then, surprising herself, she asked, suddenly urgent, “What was he like as a boy, Mrs. Stillman? I wish I could imagine him before we met.”
“Ah, what was he like.” Gregory’s mother closed her eyes to contemplate the matter and then spoke slowly, sorting out her reflections as if she had never thought about them before. “You—I think the most important thing you must know about Gregory is that when he was little he was his brother Ned’s shadow. Ned was born strong and of a, what I would call, a contentious nature. He was never gentle. He was not given to conciliation. And he was not considerate of his little brother, who followed him around like a puppy.” She did not look happy, remembering. “Gregory had a tender soul, a sweetness that brought out the sweetness in everyone except Ned. Oh dear, he bore insult again and again, he was mocked for his softness. He was—how shall I say it? He was made of such a different texture, you could feel it if you touched them both.” She shook her head. “Ned mocked him for being so endlessly hopeful that they would be friends—and it was vain to try to protect him.” Again, she was looking into the middle distance, away from Chaya but, to her credit, not away from her question. “Therefore I would say that when Gregory was old enough to come into his own a bit—to
make his own judgments, to see how Ned’s words and actions were hurtful and how unnatural it was for him to emulate such—” She let the sentence dwindle, unfinished, while Chaya worked at grasping what emulate might mean. Mrs. Stillman finally managed, “I need to assure you that Ned is not always what he seems, he has his—he is passionate, he is intense and goes at everything full tilt. I do not want him to seem a cartoon, you know.” She sighed. “They are both my sons. But I do believe my boy did everything he could to mark a distance from his brother.” She looked at Chaya, then, with far too much implication. “In everything.”
Chaya was not glad to hear herself so used. But—sometimes second thought was kinder than first—that was too proud. She winced to think how harshly she had judged Gregory. There was sufficient pain to go around.
“You know, of course, that Gregory’s father—and his brother, it goes without saying—they are concerned that you are—”
“You needn’t put it delicately. I know what they think I am. What I want.” And Chaya knew from this most amazing conversation that if—if—this ally could do anything to calm their hostility it would be very covert, very subtle, and it might not succeed.
“Gregory may already have warned you that they are not kindly disposed toward—”
It was obvious that she stopped herself; she could not, Chaya understood, say you.
It felt rude to chew while she listened to something so weighty but she thought her meat and her pale, golden potatoes kept her from flying off, unmoored, toward the ceiling. The voices around them had disappeared.
“I worry that my husband is considering”—Faith Stillman had gone alarmingly pale—“cutting Gregory off if he proceeds with . . . that is such an ancient ploy I told him I was disappointed that he would follow such a tired sort of vengeance.” She pantomimed a yawn and smiled at her audacity. “But he has so little—relationship—with his son that he can’t, like the rest of us, you know, maneuver—manipulate—his behavior. He can’t, you understand, withhold—” She had the habit of looking ruefully resigned. “This is all he has for punishment, Chaya. His holdings. His balance at the bank.” She held her hands out, empty. “I wished at the least, as I said, for some originality in his threat. Talk about following in ancient footsteps!” That pained smile again. It made her eyes apologetic. “I suppose I shouldn’t speak this way, but, my dear, you are going to be one of us.” Truly! “It is appalling but, going back many years, the Stillmans have tended to treat each generation the way they treated their dogs, they have gotten their heirs to heel by yanking hard on their collars. And so my Edward and my Ned are simply doing what they consider their legacy. They consider themselves—protectors.”
Gregory had told Chaya no such thing. But she enjoyed her lie. “Yes, he has shared that fear with me, Mrs. Stillman. But it does not seem to have daunted him much. I don’t think his first thought has ever been his—” What an alien word! She could hardly say it. “His inheritance.” Those books Miss Singlet had given her, those heroines deprived of fortunes—she saluted Miss Austen and—she had a new word: the Austen emulators!—with her own small smile. What would Gregory’s mother think if she knew Chaya’s hesitations, her nervy vacillation about accepting the comforts of his class? Would she look ungrateful or braver still were she to confess? Oh, she would confuse matters mightily!
But this challenge could not go unanswered. “As for me, I can only repeat that I never sought anyone’s fortune and—please believe this even if it seems unlikely—I might very well be relieved if we were not to be—not to have that wealth to—” She came right up against her own confusions and there was her Asher drilling her with his furious eyes. “It would, to be honest, be simpler if we were without it.”
“Which simply confirms my admiration for both of you. Though you are young and may not appreciate the difficulties of doing without.”
Chaya could only laugh, with a kind of gaiety, at the absurdity of that. “Oh, Mrs. Stillman, I believe I would be an experienced guide at doing without.”
She ignored Chaya’s impiety. Perhaps she was embarrassed. “Well, you and your brother will bring some—variety—into our little lives, that is certain. And the more you confound them the better, though you must expect that you will bear as many insults as my dear boy bore.”
I will have him. The thought washed over Chaya like a warming light. Even if I am a pretext for his goodness, I will have her son for her sake as well as my own.
Those islands of pink had returned to Faith Stillman’s cheeks. “I hope we shall be able to meet your brother some time soon. Asher, isn’t it?” She said it as if he were a cinder. “Gregory tells me he is remarkable.” She seemed almost jolly. “Now let us pay some attention to our plates before they come to remove them!”
ASHER
28
ASHER KNEW the word boycott. Boy-caught. He considered it but he could not not come to Chai’s wedding, a boy caught by loyalty and traps of memory: her light hand on his back when they first lay down at Mrs. Gottlieb’s. Her tweaking his cap to set it right. Her pleading face and her startled face, all her faces turned to him. He wanted to shout, No, no, don’t go with him! He wanted to shout, Traitor! But he could not betray her in front of that family of Steal-man’s, stiff and silent, the more disapproving the more silent. He could not protect her but he could not run out on her either.
He had never seen a wedding, at least not one that he could remember, so he could not compare this one—Chaya and Gregory in the parlor of Miss Addams’s house, surrounded by smilers and weepers—to any other. Miss Gates, who also lived there, had set him to helping drag in baskets crammed with fall flowers, deep reds, yellows, oranges, small separate sunsets, which they set on every ledge and surface. The cat was permitted to attend. She sat patiently, Sphinx position, in the space between the bride and groom and—was it called an audience? They sat like viewers at an entertainment but did not applaud.
Chaya, wearing a white dress with tiny flowers caught in the weave, gazed out at them with a lost face, picturing, he knew without asking, her mother and father, her missing brothers and sisters. She looked hollow. If someone knocked against her where she walked, a piece of her might break off and shatter.
Gregory’s parents, instead, came in and sat themselves, looking as if it was all happening somewhere else. His mother’s cheeks might have been wet. His brother Ned smirked, in black, shirt and all, like a minister without a collar. He had two daughters, or the same daughter big and small, who couldn’t sit still. Lallie fussed and fussed with the belt of her layered pink dress, which she seemed unhappy with, unbuckling it, buckling it again. It took all her attention. Each of them seemed separate, like a portrait in a gold frame. That was what was strange about them—they looked as if they never touched. Only Ned’s wife, whose hat looked like a serving tray heaped with edibles, kept slapping viciously at her children’s knees and elbows to keep them from twitching, from bouncing and pinching each other.
A dark suit, his first, had arrived for Asher, hidden under a fog of tissue in a box with a scrawl of fancy silvery writing on top. It scratched his knees and felt like a nipping animal around his ankles. Chaya had held up one finger to warn him he could not refuse to wear it, but he didn’t open his eyes at the mirror because he knew he would not recognize himself. He was coming to this day as someone else. He remembered when Chaya wore that plummy dress Gregory gave her and it made her a lady. He had been a pasha at the Fair, soft fabric flapping around the tops of his boots. How could that happen—what you put on wasn’t your skin, only a different shape and color, different texture, but you were changed and never to be found again. Everyone in masquerade! What if we could walk around without clothes? Naked, could we be changed so easily? Who might we be if we were not quite ourselves?
THE OTHERS who lived in the house, this Hull of a House, came quietly downstairs. There were two not-young women, soft-skinned, soft-haired, who might be sisters, who smiled constantly and asked after everyone’s heal
th, and a very lively young man who rubbed his hands together impatiently, ready to begin whatever was coming next. There was a man with a monocle, professorish, whom Asher planned to talk to if he could. His teeth were yellow the way Chaya’s fingertips became when she rolled too many tobacco leaves in a day. The cook came in from the kitchen in her white apron and hovered in the doorway to watch.
But there were scant others. Seventeen, including the cook. He had heard Gregory’s sister say it was a scandal to be married in such a place—such? What was such?—but at least their friends were spared the spectacle. (People wore spectacles. Miss Addams and Miss Gates, Gregory’s father and that hawk-faced bother Ned. How could a wedding be a spectacle?) Oh, Sara from the cigar floor was sitting near the back, and Stuka with her jolly curls—they were holding each other’s hands with excitement—and Mrs. Gottlieb, crying quietly into a handkerchief he had filched for her from the Exposition. (Filched—word full of crunch that would exercise the mouth of anyone who said it!) She had found a grand dress somewhere, a blue-gray shiny as a steel pistol, and had done something to her hair that made her look like a woman one might see downtown, browsing in a shop window. Another masquerade. Before she sat down, she clutched Asher to her. She was happy and she was sad: They would not be coming back to her house, except as guests.
She was speaking into his hair—he couldn’t tell if she wanted him to hear and answer or just listen. “And you can’t even tell she’s a Jew, the kallah.” She tsk’d, shook her head and tsk’d again. “No chuppah, there won’t be a word, not a blessing. She gave it all over to him.” She squeezed him a little; it almost hurt.
The Lake on Fire Page 24
