The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

“Well, of course I don’t mean a person ought to marry without thought,” retorted Mary, her voice quickening as though to tamp down Ester’s words. “Of course I mean we must choose sensibly in marriage. But I said love. And just because a thing is outside control doesn’t mean it’s folly. Maybe love is”—Mary waved vaguely—“good.”

  The word sat amiss with Ester. Without considering whether she ought, she spoke what prickled in her heart. “It’s a danger to a woman even to feel love.”

  In the silence, the sound of the dressmaker winding a length of thread.

  “You’re wrong,” Mary said.

  Was she? She knew she feared her own words to be true.

  Abruptly, with a brisk tug from the dressmaker’s hand, the world stiffened. As Ester attempted, gingerly, to breathe, Mary came and stood beside her.

  “You’re wrong,” Mary repeated softly. “And you know it—you’re lying to me, wicked girl.” She reached up and pinched Ester’s cheekbone, hard enough to leave a mark. Ester saw it in the dressmaker’s glass.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Ester said in a low voice. “Or I’ll leave you and not return. I’m not your servant.”

  Mary’s face flushed with confusion.

  At the faint sound of knocking from the front of the shop, the dressmaker disappeared.

  “Well,” Mary blurted after she’d gone, “do you think my mother a fool?”

  Ester drew a cautious breath. Was Mary in truth asking her to speak aloud what was whispered at the synagogue: that Catherine was choking on the air of a city her husband refused to leave?

  “Your mother,” Ester said slowly, “struggles to breathe in London. Yet for her husband—”

  But the words had hit too tender a spot. Pain bloomed in Mary’s eyes and Ester saw, too late, that Mary had wanted only the answer no.

  Mary turned on Ester now. “And what did your wise mother counsel you about love?”

  The dressmaker had returned. She dropped a cloud of fabric over Ester’s head and resumed her pinning. Ester endured it, her lips pressed tight.

  After a moment a soft tsk escaped Mary. Then Ester felt the pedestal take Mary’s weight. Positioning herself quietly behind Ester, Mary unpinned Ester’s cap.

  “A comb,” she said. The dressmaker produced one, then at a summons from the shop’s front room disappeared once more.

  Frowning with concentration, as though Ester’s hair had all along been the true subject of their conversation, Mary parted Ester’s locks above each ear. With inexpert gestures, she began to divide and gather, now and again nipping Ester’s ears with the wooden comb. “Sorry,” she muttered as she worked.

  Hands in her hair, stilling Ester. How many years since the housemaid Grietgen had plaited Ester’s hair, her hand lingering with affection on Ester’s finished braids? How long since Ester had had a friend? A strange submissiveness took her. The fine teeth of the comb Mary was using were never intended for hair so thick or wavy—yet despite Mary’s savage tugs, Ester closed her eyes. For a rushing instant, then, her spirit lifted, and she wished to explain all, so that Mary herself—with her airs and languid sighs—would hear Constantina’s drink-mudded voice, speaking on into the quiet night. Would understand exactly what love could wreak.

  “She counseled me,” Ester said, “not to be a fool.”

  Mary’s hands slowed. “My mother thinks I’m a fool,” she said. For a moment the comb stopped moving in Ester’s hair. “I’m not.”

  The comb resumed, its motions more tentative.

  “Do you wonder, ever,” said Ester quietly, “whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we’re determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?”

  Mary snorted. “I wonder only whether you expect anyone to understand when you speak that way.”

  “I mean,” Ester said, “do you think we can’t help what we are?”

  With a vigorous tug at Ester’s hair, Mary said, “I choose what I am.”

  She knew she oughtn’t answer. But pity for her own state was climbing dangerously in Ester’s chest. She’d no doubt love was real. Nor that it was a storm that flung a few to safety, but most to wrack. She wished that she, like Mary, could throw herself full-bodied at dreams. She wished to be Mary—to be any woman other than herself.

  Most of all, she wished not to recall her mother’s drunken voice.

  London. Constantina, swallowing the burgundy liquid in deliberate gulps that seemed to hurt. Constantina, throwing herself back on her bed, casting her long dark hair, loosened, across her pillow. London is where he lived.

  “My mother,” Ester said before she could stopper the words, “was born from an unwise love.”

  Mary’s mouth fell into an uncertain, half-mocking smile: Was this true? Was Ester confessing what none ought to admit, even if it were so?

  Sternly, Ester continued. “She told me it. Though wine blurred her telling.”

  At this further scandal Mary uttered a half-choked laugh, then stifled it. Something solemn flickered on her face: gratitude. She moved her hands gingerly about Ester’s head, as though not to disturb this unfamiliar, astonishing honesty.

  Ester watched in the glass as Mary worked. Yes—she’d speak the truth. The parts, at least, that she felt certain she recalled. Constantina, whispering in the quiet house—Samuel and Isaac away, the maids dismissed for the night. Constantina, uncorking a bottle with a grunt of effort. Long, tapered fingers on ornate cups—one for her, one for Ester. A few small, warming sips, and her mother’s silvery, conspiratorial laughter. Do you know, Ester, why I keep a book of English verse I no longer care to read? That book was my own mother’s, Ester. A gift from the man she loved. But she could no longer bear to open its pages. I claimed it, Ester, because I was certain England would be my home when he called for me. Constantina’s dark eyes, trained on the dim ceiling above the curtained bed. When he called for me. My true father.

  “My grandmother,” Ester enunciated, “hailed from Lisbon. Yet the man she married—a merchant twice her age—brought her to live for some years here in London. And while here, she loved an Englishman, not her husband.”

  Mary pulled the comb through Ester’s hair, making barely a sound.

  “My mother was born of that love,” Ester continued. “She was raised back in Lisbon, calling another man Father, yet her own mother whispered her the truth all her life.” In the glass, Ester found Mary’s eyes. “My mother was born of a great love, Mary. But that love failed to offer sustenance.”

  Constantina: her almond eyes, the extravagant dark tumble of hair on her shoulders. Pulling drunkenly at the cord to release the drapes about the bed. Bidding Ester to unlace her gown, which Ester did gingerly, afraid to touch her mother’s velvety olive skin lest this sudden intimacy vanish.

  Only once, Ester! I met my true father only once. My mother sailed with me to London to find him. And his eyes, Ester, my father’s eyes, weren’t mere brown. They were lit like jewels of moss and wood.

  Mary’s hands had forgotten their work. “Why?” she charged.

  Ester hesitated, then pressed on. “My mother said it was a love that made both rue that they were bound in wedlock to others. He was a man not high-born, but vaunted for his wit and perception in all he created. Yet he was restless in all that might cage him. As was my grandmother. But in the end they brought each other only torment. My grandmother, Lizabeta, returned to Lisbon with child.”

  “But then they saw each other again,” Mary demanded. “Didn’t they?”

  Ester nodded. “Though not for years. Only after the Inquisition in Lisbon took Lizabeta’s own father. She woke my mother in the middle of the night and they stole away without permission. They fled by ship to London, where they searched long for the Englishman. But his friends turned from Lizabeta and would not promise to bring him.”

  “But they found him, in the end?” Mary said. “They did find him.”

  “My mother was only a girl, Mary. Surely she invented or misunderstood much.�
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  “No, she didn’t.” In the mirror, Mary’s reflection was rapt. “Tell me.”

  For a moment Constantina’s whisper filled Ester’s ears, an ocean in a seashell. My own mother sang it to me as she rocked me through the stormy passage to England, Ester. My mother sang to me. “I know your father’s soul. He is a great man. You were born, Constantina, from a great love.”

  “She said she felt her true father’s goodness, though he was careworn. She said that standing between my mother and this man was like standing in the current of a river. She said it was a soft, endless . . . push, which slips you off your feet if you’re not anchored to something.”

  Mary was nodding; this was a tale of love such as she’d hoped to hear.

  It seemed to take a moment for her to perceive that Ester had fallen silent.

  “And then?” Mary said. “He took them in, didn’t he?”

  Ester turned from the mirror. Constantina’s long-ago words thrummed in her head. And I hated him for not breaking the world apart so he could be with us.

  “No,” Ester said.

  When she looked back at the mirror, she saw that Mary’s expression had curdled. “Didn’t he know the danger for them? In Lisbon?”

  “My grandmother chose not to tell him.”

  “But that’s—” Mary stopped, unable to stitch words to this absurdity. After a moment she said, simply, “Why?”

  “My mother herself could never understand it.”

  “Because it can’t be understood, Ester!”

  “I know Lizabeta charged her Englishman with all his old promises of eternal love. Yet though the man answered her in the same terms, he shrank from her and spoke of the constraints of his life, and begged time to consider. He even offered money for their support—but this Lizabeta in her pride refused. She said nothing of the seizing of Jews, the priests flaying my grandfather until ribbons of skin danced.”

  Ester could still recall Constantina’s voice, sailing high in wonder and bitterness. Why wouldn’t my mother tell him of the danger? Why, Ester? Was she determined to test love to the fullest? But Ester, the world had no stubbornness like hers!

  She stood behind me, arms about my shoulders, her heart beating against my back. And her Englishman wept on that street as I’d seen a man weep only at a death, and his eyes filled with the sight of me in my mother’s arms until the seeing harrowed his face, so that he seemed to wane and age.

  “My grandmother,” Ester said, “wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny. She said she wished the Englishman’s eyes to see her ever in beauty and joy, and never as something pitiable, for his memory of her was her greatest treasure.”

  Mary absorbed this. Then, defiant, she shrugged. “I would tell. And then, my love would save me.” With a vexed expression she returned to work on Ester’s hair, asking only after several moments’ silence, and then sullenly, “What then?”

  “Lizabeta and my mother sailed for Lisbon, and the Inquisition.”

  “And then?”

  “I believe,” said Ester, “my grandmother later had other loves, though not like her Englishman.”

  Mary tittered unkindly. “Other loves? Does your rabbi know what manner of lineage he’s taken under his roof?”

  Ester raised her head. “I believe so, Mary.”

  Mary returned to working the comb.

  But with a boldness that startled her, Ester spoke on. “My mother,” she said, “thought herself wiser than her own mother. She left Lisbon, and married my father without affection, because she thought him dull and therefore unlikely to spurn her. Nor did she remain faithful when faithfulness did not suit her. This she confessed to me freely.”

  Constantina, in the flickering candlelight.

  So you see, Ester, I learned from what befell my mother. I remade my heart. I learned to conduct myself in love so it could not betray me.

  Had Constantina believed, on that drunken night in Amsterdam, that she spoke to Ester of love? But there had been no love in her words, only rage. As dawn drew near, bringing to an end those strange candle-lit hours when the gates of her mother’s trust had inexplicably swung open, a stark sobriety had gripped Ester. Solemnly she’d listened to Constantina’s final recital of betrayal, and sealed it into memory.

  On my last visit before my mother’s death, Ester, do you know what she dared say to me? She chided me. Can you imagine, Lizabeta chided me for my anger? I, who was nursed on her sorrow. Yet she said she’d not succeeded with me—for she’d hoped to teach me to despise a prison, be it made at the hand of the Inquisition or by my own heart.

  I told her it was precisely to avoid a prison of the heart that I acted as I did. I told her: I act such that love will not fail again as it failed us before.

  But she shook her silver head as if I were the fool, and not she. She said, “Love didn’t fail, Constantina. Only one love did. It failed because we asked too much of it, he and I. We each, in our own time, asked it to remake the world.”

  She spoke as though she wished to burn this new truth into my heart, and in so doing erase the one already burnt there. She said, “I wrote to your true father just before he died, when you were but ten years of age and we were at last safely escaped from Portugal, and I told him all. He’d not known what was happening to us in Lisbon, Constantina. The full truth of our situation hadn’t been told of in England. His reply wept in words. He said he would have done all to help us if I’d but told him. But Constantina, I could not. For love does not set shackles, nor entrap. Nor could I live in his London as his shadow, a woman kept in secret, without him by my side. Don’t you see? It was the very shape of the world that defeated our love. There is no bitterness in my heart. Only sorrow.”

  In the dawn-silted room in Amsterdam, Constantina had drained her cup, vexed, and set it carefully on the table. She stared at it as though confused. Then, fiercely, she gripped Ester’s shoulder one final time. I shaped my heart, Ester, so as to be no fool.

  Drowsiness and wine must have unmasked Ester for an instant in that reeling room, allowing her emotions to show unbidden. She would always rue this. For Constantina had flinched, as though in the pity on her daughter’s face she’d finally glimpsed the bitter knot of her own spirit.

  It was the only time Ester would see regret drain her mother’s cheeks.

  Barely six weeks later, the fire.

  Samuel Velasquez, turning now on the stair, his dark eyes seeking the door where his wife slept. Racing the racing flames.

  Without meaning to, Ester lifted her hand as though to call them both back.

  At the sound of Mary speaking her name, she opened her eyes.

  “What of your mother?” Mary prompted.

  She could not now recall how much she’d spoken aloud. To satisfy Mary she said, simply, “She forgave nothing. Touching the mere hope of a great love misshaped her.”

  Her hand trailed in empty air. She lowered it.

  In the dressmaker’s glass now, she saw that Mary had finished. Ester’s hair was drawn back elegantly at the front, cascading at the sides. Soft spaniel ears brushed either cheek. A heavy bun weighted the back of Ester’s head.

  Behind her stood Mary, hands stilled at her sides.

  “There,” Mary said. Her expression was uncertain, as though she’d just been privy to something for which she had no name.

  The dressmaker’s shop was silent. They stood on the pedestal.

  Mary’s voice was barely a whisper. “Have you loved?”

  “No.”

  Mary shook her head slowly: nor had she.

  Slowly Mary straightened. She looked not at Ester, but at their reflection in the glass. She said, firmly, “We choose what we are, Ester. I choose.” After a moment she added, “And so do you.”

  Ester opened her mouth—she wished to argue with Mary: my mother believed herself in control of love, and the error consumed her. Yet her voice was stopped by a craving: To trust desire as
Mary did. To reach for love and call it good.

  There was a long silence. Mary’s hands rose to tuck an invisible strand of Ester’s hair, and lingered a moment as though in search of another. Yet as the moments passed the motion of her hands grew chary, then stopped altogether—as though she feared to touch for too long something so fascinating and so tainted.

  “There,” Mary repeated more lightly, and stepped off the dressmaker’s pedestal.

  She returned from the dressmaker as though fleeing a storm. The door of the rabbi’s house closed heavily behind her; she pressed it shut as though buttressing it against a wind. All her senses were rushing.

  A low fire burned in the hearth. The rabbi was asleep in his chair. At length, the pounding of her heart relented.

  On the table beside the door was a sealed letter, delivered in her absence and left there no doubt by Rivka for her to read to the rabbi.

  She took the small knife from the drawer and cut it open, and read the message penned in a cramped hand.

  To the Rabbi HaCoen Mendes of London,

  With the blessings of G-d I greet you. I, being a cousin of the late mother of Catherine da Costa, and so not unfamiliar with the better families of London’s Jews, though my own meager widow’s means permit me only a modest living here in the country, write to you with esteem and with a proposal that will delight you. In conversing with a member of your congregation at a gathering in which I was most graciously included, I overheard a tendency toward warmth in discussing a member of your household. To speak plainly: I suspect there may be fertile ground for a possible match between your charge, the orphan girl Ester Velasquez, and a young man of this London congregation. You will understand, of course, the boon to the Velasquez girl, whom I am told lacks even a dowry. Through this marriage she might enter into a life as a mother in Israel. Although the match be unlikely due to her poor means, I urge you to consider engaging my services, and as swiftly as you may, so that the young man not lose his interest, and in turn I will bend all my notable efforts to its success. The young man of whom I speak naturally wishes discretion—it seemed to me he was surprised by my offer of intervention in the matter, though perhaps it pleased him as well. May I then pursue this matter, and come to call when I am next able to journey to London? My fee for the match would be within bounds of what is properly accepted, though surely such a gift as a marriage for such a girl lacking prospects is without price.