by Cary Fagan
HER PARENTS LIVED IN a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farm house in Newmarket. The lawn sloped down to the river where her father kept his canoe and rowboat. Some of the surrounding land was being developed into suburban housing but in back of the house, with the surrounding spruce trees and the willows by the water, it was possible for her to have the illusion that little had changed since her childhood. Her father was a retired high school science teacher; her mother had taught physical education and home economics. Their house, with its mismatched farm-sale furniture, worn rugs, and books, had long ago set her own tastes. Every friend she had ever brought here had immediately fallen in love with both the house and her parents, and when her father would start handing out the martinis at four o’clock, the friend would invariably ask to be adopted. What her friends saw, Chloe always thought, was no more or less valid than how any other household presented itself.
She found her father reading Scientific American in a Muskoka chair, their golden lab at his feet. Her mother, in rubber knee pads, was weeding the garden. She and her father hugged lightly while her mother took off her gloves, saying she was glad for an excuse to stop. Her father asked whether she had decided yet about Princeton, giving her his “patented” look, meaning that he couldn’t imagine what was holding her up. Her mother changed the subject to Chloe’s sisters — to May, who had given up trying to get pregnant and was hoping to adopt a baby from China, and to Lauren, who had just started to date a year after her divorce.
They asked her about Tim, who she had made the mistake of bringing up to visit and who had made almost too good an impression. She said nothing about Daniel, of whom they were less likely to approve. After an hour or so she grew restless and announced an intention to take out the canoe. “You won’t enjoy it,” her father said. “You can see all those new houses along the way. And now there’s always trash floating in the river.”
She went anyway, the dog wagging anxiously from the shore as she pushed out. Her father was right about the garbage: she saw a floating Coke can, a broken chair, plastic bags snagged on the willow branches. She was an elegant canoeist and her strokes were almost silent. It didn’t surprise her when she started to cry, for she had felt it building for a couple of days. She drifted until she grew quiet again and then she turned around. By the time she reached her parents’ house, she had recovered.
ON MONDAY MORNING, SHE RODE her old Schwinn bike to work in the rain. Liana put an Aretha Franklin tape on the stereo and made Chloe laugh by lip-syncing as she carried platters of eggs and home fries. The rain came down harder, pounding on the plate glass windows. All day, people threw themselves in through the doorway, hanging up their dripping coats. Cleaning up her last table, Chloe found an umbrella hooked to the back of a chair.
“We scored a Gucci,” she said to Liana. “Unless it’s a fake.” “There must be four in the box already. Take your pick.” “I can’t see holding up an umbrella while I’m riding.”
She went into the back storage room and pulled the lost-and-found box from under the counter. Amidst the single gloves and key chains and empty wallets she saw a Penguin edition of Robinson Crusoe. She reached in and picked it up, holding it close to her face. Carefully she turned the cover and saw the initials GL written on the corner of the first page.
OF COURSE IT WAS HER duty to return the book to Gerry Lembeck’s family. It might only be a paperback, but it was one of his last possessions and might mean something to his wife or his children. In the white pages she found a listing for a G. Lembeck on Ava Road. She picked up the telephone receiver and hesitated. Perhaps it was the wrong moment, coming so soon after the funeral. She could mail it, but wouldn’t that look weird? No, she would have to phone. She started to dial when a knock sounded on the door.
“Who is it?”
“Daniel. I’ve brought take-out Chinese and beer.”
She smiled and, putting down the receiver, hurried to let him in.
SHE SAW DANIEL EVERY DAY for rest of the summer. They slipped easily into one another’s lives, spending the night either at her place on Clinton or his on Baldwin. They went to old films at the Bloor, browsed in used bookshops on Harbord. One weekend they took the bus to a music festival in Guelph. She cared for him more than she had for anyone before, but was it enough, what she felt?
Not enough, in the end, to keep her from going to New Jersey.
AT PRINCETON, SHE HAD a miserable affair with a professor, failed to end it several times and worried that it was the guilt and terror rather than love that held her. Deciding that she had to get away, she applied to the Ph.D. program at Berkeley.
What healed her was the beauty of northern California and an increasing passion for her work. For a time, that was enough; but in her second year she had two relationships in quick succession and then a third, all with fellow students and none of lasting significance. In her final two years, while writing her thesis, she became involved with an instructor on contract named Amjad Far. He was handsome and very sharp and with a solemn temperament that made her feel very safe, and, feeling that she might start to love him, she agreed to move in. She defended her thesis, and as she began to apply for jobs Amjad returned to Iran for two months. A tenure track position at the University of Toronto came up and she flew in to give a guest lecture. Amjad returned, but having a new beard wasn’t all that had changed about him. His eyes would turn hard if she spoke to another man at a party. He insisted that they both abstain from drinking. One day he grew angry over the skirt she wore, the first time he had ever raised his voice. She developed insomnia and became so thin that her former thesis advisor drew her aside and suggested that she seek help at the eating disorder clinic. What she finally did made her feel ashamed for its cowardliness: winning the job in Toronto, she waited until Amjad left for a weekend retreat with some friends, packed up her things, and took a taxi to the airport.
HER MOTHER UNDERWENT HIP REPLACEMENT surgery and afterwards her father began to talk about moving to a place that was easier to look after. Her older sister had split from her husband and the two were in a custody fight over their adopted daughter. Her other sister, the most wild of the three, had quit her job to become a fitness instructor.
Chloe reworked her thesis, which was accepted by Duke University Press, and began a new manuscript. At thirtytwo she had a few fine lines around her mouth, the first strands of silver in her hair, but her friends said that she was only growing more beautiful. She remained determinedly single, glad for the silence of the small house she had found on Major Street. In the afternoon she heard children coming home from school. Her days were full with teaching, research, new administrative duties, and more than her share of graduate students to advise.
She met Lester at a small dinner party given by her department head. A friend of the host, he was a sous-chef at the Sutton Place Hotel and had offered to cook. Perhaps there was something irresistibly romantic about watching a young chef (he wasn’t yet thirty) hurrying from the kitchen, telling everyone to eat while the food was hot, laughing as he swept up his own glass of wine before heading back. Finally he sat down next to her. At the end of the evening, she was trying to work up the nerve to ask for his phone number when he asked for hers.
He was half Jewish and half Irish-Catholic, one of six children. Six months later she knew that she loved him with a certainty that was no more explainable than the doubt in all her previous relationships, and she asked him to move into her house. Their first daughter was born in the spring of 2001, and their son two years after that. She took year-long maternity leaves and afterwards they shared parenting duties.
Work on the second book slowed to a crawl and did not pick up again until the fall that her younger one started daycare. A new semester was beginning and it was her turn to teach the dreaded introductory course. She had to lecture from a stage with a microphone, but her first-class jitters were not as pronounced as they had once been and before long she was hardly glancing at her notes. It was only after she had met with th
e teaching assistants and was packing up her satchel that she had a chance to scan the names on the class list. Halfway down the second column, she saw: Lembeck, Naomi.
Her heart began to race even before she understood what the name might mean to her. She gathered her notes, walked to her bike, which was chained in front of Victoria College, and rode home. Inside, she dumped her things and hurried up to the study. The attic ran the length of the house and the walls were lined with double-rows of books, but although she hadn’t seen it in years and couldn’t even remember bringing it with her from Toronto to Princeton to Berkeley and back to Toronto again, she went to the back wall, leaned down to the bottom corner shelf, pulled out the books in front, and found the Robinson Crusoe.
SHE FOUND IT STRANGE THAT she even remembered his name, and that she was so certain this particular Naomi Lembeck was the daughter of the man she had briefly known. She brought the book to her lectures and kept it with her during office hours. She rehearsed the scene in her mind, how Naomi would come up to her at the lectern or knock at the office door, asking about the last lecture or the next essay, and how she would ask her to sit down and then in the briefest manner possible tell her about this small connection to her father. Then she would reach into her satchel and draw out the book, handing it over without ceremony. Of course it might not go as she hoped; instead of astonishment and tears, the young woman might become angry or resentful. But she was willing to suffer what came.
Although she didn’t know what Naomi Lembeck looked like, and could not really remember the father either, she would sometimes scan the rising tiers of seats looking for some glint of recognition — the shape of a mouth, something in the eyes. Then, during a lecture a third of the way into the semester and when Chloe was starting to consider sending Naomi a note via email, a woman got up and left the lecture hall. Not unobtrusively but noisily, fumbling her things, pushing her way past the row of knees, stumbling on the stairs. Chloe glimpsed only the side of her face, the dark hair, and then when she was on the stairs, the heavyset body in shiny jacket and jeans and boots, but she knew, she just knew. She had to stop herself from running up the stairs after the woman. But after the lecture she thought: my imagination is overheating itself.
The following Monday, she received by university mail a revised student list. Naomi Lembeck was one of three students who had withdrawn from the course.
CHLOE SENT HER AN EMAIL, simply asking that Ms. Lembeck come and see her. When after a week she had still not received a response, she sent another, only to have it bounce back as undeliverable. She checked with the admissions office and was told that the woman had dropped out of school.
She could have persisted, asking the admissions office for a telephone number, Googling her name or joining Facebook. She had this sickening feeling that she had failed Gerry Lembeck, that the reason she had met him all those years ago was so that she might now reach out to his daughter. But of course she knew this was nonsense, a delusion to place oneself at the centre of every story. Chasing Naomi Lembeck would have been excessive and even weird. Who was to say that this Naomi Lembeck really was the daughter of Gerry?
She did, however, continue to carry the book in her satchel until the end of the semester, after which it was returned to the low corner shelf, back row.
THEY WERE HAVING DINNER ONE evening in early April — Lester cooking for her and the girls and their neighbours, Allan and Lynn and their two boys, along with the teenage sitter, Odile, who picked the kids up from school and was having a bad day because of an argument with her boyfriend. Apropos of nothing, she thought of Gerry Lembeck’s daughter. She couldn’t remember her name at the moment but that same sickening feeling came back to her. She had to make herself breathe evenly.
She said aloud, “I find I am not alone on the island.”
Nathalie, their girl, said, “Are we going to an island?”
Lester said, “It sounds like one of your mom’s literary quotations.”
“Are we supposed to guess where it’s from?” Odile said. “It sounds like poetry.”
“I haven’t read a poem since the end of high school,” Allan said. “That one by T.S. Eliot. With the ragged claws. I was nuts about that poem.”
“I used to know this man a long time ago,” Chloe said. “He showed me that line in a book. Gerry Lembeck.”
“That’s a funny name,” said Jack, their son. “Lempeck? Lempuck?”
“Who was he?” Lester said.
“I don’t really know that much about him. He liked cream in his coffee. He must be dead sixteen or seventeen years now.”
“Mommy, do we have to talk about dead people?”
“Doesn’t the food look delicious?” Lynn said. “Lester, you spoil us all. How are the kids ever going to go to McDonald’s with their friends?”
“I like McDonald’s better,” Lynn’s older boy, Danny, said.
“Ouch,” said Lester, putting his hands to his heart. He leaned towards Chloe and said into her ear, “Are you okay?”
“Sure.” And then more loudly, “What are we all waiting for? Let’s eat.”
“I’m already eating,” Natalie said with her mouth full. Chloe made a face at her, picked up her own fork, and took a bite. “It’s heaven,” she said.
Wolf
HE COULDN’T SLEEP ON THE plane, despite the eye-mask, the earplugs, the pill. He only managed another ten pages of the Heinrich Böll novel before he gave in and watched not one but two Adam Sandler movies on the overhead screen. At seventy-seven it wasn’t so easy travelling — this was his last thought before finally falling asleep, only to be awakened as the plane thumped onto the runway at Frankfurt. Then he had to gather his things and rush to make his connecting flight. Landing again at Tegel Airport, he felt as if he couldn’t add three numbers together. But nobody asked him anything, not even the slight German customs agent in the unthreatening green uniform, like a postal clerk, who merely stamped his passport and wished him a pleasant stay. The luggage arrived on the sleek conveyer and an educated-sounding German in a cardigan loaded it into his spotless cab.
Anywhere else, Bernie would have chatted with the driver about his family, his native land (at home they were always immigrants), but here he didn’t know how to begin. I’m Bernie Feinberg, a Jew from Toronto who’s here to visit his granddaughter. She’s writing a thesis on Heinrich Böll who, between you and me, I’d never heard of before. The driver gave him a smooth ride to the front of the Sofitel in the Gendarmenmarkt. Even in his exhaustion he took in the lovely square, how a woman crossed the cobblestones in long strides, one hand holding closed her long coat. The October sky was the colour of aluminum.
In the hotel room, he saw the red light blinking on the telephone: instructions from Sarah on how to get to a Turkish restaurant for dinner. She hadn’t sounded all that enthusiastic when he phoned to tell her of his visit, and he was relieved to hear her recorded voice, as if there had been the possibility that he might not be able to find her. She was the first grandchild. They had been close when she was little, he and Ida taking her for afternoons and later whole weekends. But when she got a little older she preferred overnights with her friends, and then came the harrowing teenage years, the details of which they had been denied. She had turned into a poised and beautiful adult, but the closeness had never returned. If Ida were alive, maybe things would be different, but what could he, a retired box manufacturer, have to say that would be interesting to a university student who was “into” philosophy, literature, politics, and who knew what else? Still, she was his granddaughter, his oldest boy’s first child, and surely he had a duty to come and see her.
He unpacked his suitcase, putting his pressed shirts, ties, underwear, and socks in the drawers and hanging up his clean suit. He took a shower in the gleaming bathroom and lay down on the bed where he immediately fell asleep.
Stirring awake, he was sure that Ida lay under the blanket next to him; he even reached out to touch her broad back, before she vanished. He
forced himself up, shaved in the bathroom, telephoned the front desk to ask for someone to pick up the suit he had travelled in, dressed, and went out.
His hotel was in Mitte, the neighbourhood that had once again become the centre of Berlin. He spent the afternoon within its invisible boundaries, walking the broad Unter den Linden, looking up at the cobalt-blue mosaics of the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum. He visited two smaller memorials: the red sandstone sculpture on Rosenstrasse and the empty shelves beneath a square of glass in the ground in Bebelplatz. Then he set out for the new Holocaust memorial south of the Brandenburg Gate, a field of rectangular concrete blocks standing on undulating ground. A maze, a work of sculpture, a makebelieve cemetery, a playground for the children clambering over the blocks. This was somehow supposed to show how sorry they were?
He imagined what he might say to Sarah: I didn’t feel qualified to judge it. He felt as if all his responses were caught in a little glass bowl somewhere to the right of his heart. He went into a newsstand for a paper, but could find only an English magazine called ExBerliner, which he took to a café, sat at a little table by the window, and ordered a coffee. Perhaps she hadn’t sufficiently prepared himself for the trip, although he wasn’t sure what he ought to have done. The first article he read was a profile of a woman, a well-known Berlin journalist in her sixties, who had just published a memoir that tried to come to terms with her father having been in the SS. When she had been ten years old, the article said, her father had stood up in church, denounced modern Germany, called out a farewell to his fellow officers, and shot himself in the head.
