He sat up and turned on the sound.
The child pictured had a mass of curly hair, deep-set dark eyes, a broad forehead, an expression of trust.
She wasn’t Julia.
Leah—he didn’t get her last name—a small and perfect black-haired angel—was one of four children who had died in Tel Aviv that morning, when a bus carrying families out of the city for a day’s holiday blew up, killing the children seated in the back of the bus.
In his mind’s eye, he could see the four of them scrunched in the backseat of the bus, giggling in unison, whispering back and forth, the way children do when they are just far enough away from parents to feel at once a sense of freedom and safety.
“You children sit in the back and have a good time,” their parents would have said to them, herding them down the bus aisle. “We’ll be sitting just ahead.”
And off they went to their holiday, maybe by the sea. The television report did not say where they had been going.
Julia. Leah. They were the same.
His heart leapt—he could feel it in his chest. And something like life, long absent from his company, came in a rush.
He got out of bed, pulled on his khakis, his socks and shoes, searched his closet for a starched shirt like the ones he’d always worn, the sleeves rolled up, the collar open. He got a glass of water. In the fridge, Charlotte had left applesauce and half a piece of herb chicken, which he ate. He needed nourishment. In the bathroom, he shaved for the first time in weeks, washing out the sink when he finished, forgetting the razor on the ledge. He packed his bookbag, filled a garbage bag with trash, threw out the dead flowers—Charlotte was always bringing flowers, sticking them in a vase on top of the television. He swept the floor of the apartment spotless, slung his bookbag over his shoulder, locked the door, and walked down the steps. At the newsstand on West Seventy-second Street and Columbus, he picked up a copy of The New York Times and walked in the direction of Central Park, light-headed, the blood warm against his skin.
Rebecca Frankel was at home.
Sam stood in the hallway of her apartment building on West Seventy-first Street while the doorman called upstairs.
“Nine D,” the doorman said. “You can go up.” He indicated the elevator.
Sam’s head was throbbing. He was so thin his trousers, even with a belt, were hanging on his hips, his shirt like a hospital sheet around—his shoulders, and in the lobby mirror—the first time in weeks he’d actually seen himself in the light of day—he had the impression of a cadaver. Nevertheless, in spite of his heart thumping against his shirt, so little flesh, he felt a promise of health.
He punched 9. When he stepped out of the elevator—running his fingers through his too-long hair, slipping his hands in his pockets, assuming, he hoped, an attitude of tentative confidence—Rebecca was waiting across the hall.
She was older than he’d imagined her. Plumper, wearing black slacks, wide in the hip, belted around her small waist, a black T-shirt with RANDOM in large white letters, her hair, in springy gray curls, piled up on her head, with pins sticking out like so many tiny birthday candles.
On second thought, he decided, she wasn’t exactly old. There were the childlike dimples Noli had described, the dark, fiery eyes, high color in her cheeks, a liveliness about her. She had been pretty, surely, just as he’d imagined her. But he had also imagined her young. His age, his love.
“Hello,” she said, putting out her hand, and as he reached to take it, she kissed him, wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing him firmly on both cheeks.
“Sam McWilliams.” She shook his shoulders gently. “You need to eat.”
It was as if she’d been expecting him. There was chicken salad with walnuts and grapes, thin slices of red roast beef, and thick slices of rosemary bread with grainy mustard, small honeycakes dusted with powdered snow.
“I loved the last episode of Plum & Jaggers with the smoke bomb,” she said, full of bright happiness in his company. “Bravo, I said to myself.”
He stayed all day, talking and talking, filling in the missing lines from years of postcards, watching the sun move out of the rectangle of her east-facing window, arriving as sheltered light on the other side of her apartment, the shadows changing as they fell across him as if he were part of an Impressionist painting, a study in changing light.
Rebecca gave him tea and bread pudding, salted a roast, which she then put in the oven for dinner.
“Don’t leave,” she insisted. “Stay the night.”
Staying the night was exactly what he’d had in mind that morning when he’d seen the frame of Julia become Leah, the fibrillators of desire recharging his heart, thinking of Rebecca as young.
And here to his great surprise, not disappointment, which is what he might have expected, but something sweeter, was Rebecca Frankel materialized as his mother, aging with Sam as Lucy Lucas hadn’t had the chance to do. And all along he’d been thinking of Rebecca, like his mother, locked in a perfect, crystal moment of youth, trapped in a bell jar beyond his reach.
“I don’t think you ever met my daughter, Miriam, who was a baby when you wrote me,” Rebecca was saying.
Sam laughed.
“I never met you.”
“I sometimes forget,” Rebecca said. “We’ve been so close by postcard.”
“I remember about your daughter. My grandmother saw her at the theater once.”
“She’s started medical school at Tufts in Boston. I just got back from taking her.”
She produced pictures of Miriam and spread them out on a glass coffee table. Miriam looked the way Sam had thought Rebecca would look, but her expression was sharper than her mother’s, her features more angular, her presence bolder, combative. There were a few pictures of Rebecca’s husband and son, who had been killed, pictures of West Jerusalem, of Miriam as an adult, standing at the Wailing Wall.
“I went back,” Rebecca was saying.
“To Jerusalem?” Sam asked.
She nodded. “I thought I never would, but last May, when Miriam graduated from college, we did. We went to the school where they died and just stood there outside the building in the play yard for the longest time, and then we went to the apartment where we’d lived.” She put the pictures back in the box. “You should do that.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“When it happened, you were on your way to Rome?”
“We were. Connecting with the past. My father loved that word. ‘Connecting.’ ” Sam said “connecting” with a Scottish accent, surprising himself with the familiar sound in his ear, as if only days ago he’d listened to his father’s voice.
Rebecca smiled. “Is that how he spoke?”
“As I remember, but I was only seven,” Sam said.
“But your memory has perfect pitch,” Rebecca said.
“I’ve never been to Rome,” he said.
“No, I haven’t either. I’ve actually not been anyplace since Saul was killed except that trip to Jerusalem with Miriam.” She smiled. “Miriam has been to Rome,” she said. “She’s been every place. A regular vagabond.”
It was late when he left Rebecca’s apartment, wanting to stay, wishing to say something deeply personal to her equal to what they felt—what he knew she felt—for each other. But it was after dinner; he had had too much wine, too much food after long abstinence, and was woozy in the head, without a plan for where he would spend the night. He didn’t want to go to the apartment on West Seventy-second Street where he’d been living with the memory of death, and he wouldn’t go home to his family.
As far as his family knew, and this was what Sam intended, he had disappeared without a trace. If they wanted to find him, they would have to follow.
He went to Penn Station by subway. When he arrived, it was 10:30 by the clock over the information booth and the next train to Boston left at 6:58 in the
morning, so he purchased a one-way ticket, found a bench in the passenger waiting section, and slept off and on, more than he had slept in three months, comforted by the company of strangers. Once after midnight, when he had been wakened by a homeless woman requesting money for coffee, he called the apartment on West Eleventh Street, but when Julia answered at the first ring, he hung up—pleased that she must have been sitting right by the telephone, at the kitchen counter perhaps, Charlotte and Oliver in the living room, still awake after midnight, worrying about him.
The smell of coffee brewing woke him before dawn with a kind of gnawing hunger, and he noticed a boy seated across from him, probably fifteen or sixteen, staring at Sam unembarrassed.
“Hi,” the boy said.
“Hi,” Sam replied.
“Are you Plum and Jaggers?” the boy asked, leaning across the aisle.
“I wrote Plum & Jaggers,” Sam said.
The boy smiled broadly.
“So in real life you talk,” he said.
“Sometimes I do,” Sam said.
“When the show stopped being on TV, I thought you might be dead,” the boy said.
“Well, I’m not dead,” Sam said.
“I’m very glad of that.” The boy got up, stood for a moment looking at Sam as if he wished to commit him to memory, and then wandered off in the direction of the trains.
Sam arrived in Boston at noon on the eleventh of August and went directly to the medical school at Tufts University, where he was given Miriam Frankel’s address on Beacon Street.
When Rebecca Frankel called on the afternoon of August 13, Charlotte had just returned from Sam’s apartment to check if he had possibly been back, although the super had told them he’d be glad to keep an eye out.
“It’s good for us to walk around Sam’s neighborhood, just in case,” Oliver said.
“In case what?” Julia was short-tempered, angry at herself.
“He could be wandering the neighborhood.”
“I don’t think so,” Julia said. “He isn’t in New York. You said so yourself.” She turned to Charlotte.
“So what did you see?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Charlotte said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“Don’t say ‘nothing,’ ” Julia said, pacing the apartment, wringing her hands. “I hate that word.”
“Cut it out, Julia.” Oliver put his arm over his eyes so he didn’t have to watch her. “This isn’t a hospital waiting room. Take a tranquillizer.”
“Leave her alone.” Charlotte had picked up Persuasion and was sitting on the kitchen counter, but she didn’t have the patience to read.
In the four days since Sam had disappeared, they had become irritable with one another. No one slept, even Charlotte, who counted on sleep as her defense against the uninvented world. They didn’t shop for groceries, ordering in chips instead and soft drinks, Oreo cookies, gallons of lemonade. They lay around the living room waiting for the phone, afraid to leave in case they’d miss a call, afraid to separate, too restless to stay.
“We have to have a plan,” Oliver said.
He’d talked about making a plan often, a sensible list of alternatives—one of them could go to Grand Rapids, another to Washington—but none of them could think of a reasonable plan worth leaving the apartment for.
When the phone rang, they jumped—each time it rang, they jumped. But this time Julia, pacing by the kitchen, was closest and picked it up.
“This is Rebecca Frankel.” The voice was soft and crisp. “I’m a friend of Sam’s.”
“Oh yes, I know. We know. We know all about you,” Julia said.
“And I know about you.”
Julia covered the receiver. “It’s Rebecca Frankel.”
“I just returned to work today and found a note at my office from your brother Oliver,” Rebecca said.
“Thank God, you called. We’ve been hoping you would.” Julia told her about Sam.
“I don’t know very much,” Rebecca said. “But I did see him.”
She told Julia what she knew. Sam had come by and spent the afternoon and evening—that would have been the day he disappeared.
Monday, August 10, she said. He didn’t seem entirely well. He was shaky and certainly too thin, but his mind was sharp. He ate, she added. He ate almost three meals in the short time he was there, as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks.
“You’ll think this is crazy, but did he seem as if he might be dying?” Julia asked. “That’s what we’ve been worried about.”
There was a long pause.
“When a person is ill, his pupils often become opaque.” Her voice was thoughtful. “You know that.”
“I didn’t know that,” Julia said. “Were his eyes opaque?”
“No, they weren’t opaque, but they were clouded,” she said. “I noticed that.”
“Clouded?”
“Milky. I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rebecca said.
“So what did she say?” Oliver asked, when Julia had hung up the telephone.
“She says Sam’s ill.” Julia dropped to the floor and buried her face in her hands. “She says his eyes are opaque, and how can she know what his eyes look like up close? Tell me that.”
“Shut up, Julia.” Oliver put a couch pillow over his face.
“What did she actually say?” Charlotte asked.
“I told you,” Julia said. “She said he ate and talked and seemed okay except for his cloudy eyes.”
The telephone rang and Charlotte picked up. It was Rebecca again. She was afraid that she had given the wrong impression.
“I had no idea Sam had disappeared until just now when I spoke with you,” she said. “When he came over to see me, I assumed of course that he had come from your apartment. I even mailed a postcard there for him the day before yesterday. I had no idea that things were as bad as you’ve described them.”
“They’ve been very bad,” Charlotte said. “He doesn’t speak to us at all.”
There was a long, soft silence, as if Rebecca were arranging the tone of her voice for absolute kindness.
“He was better than that when I saw him. He talked a lot.”
She asked them to keep in touch.
“We should check the mail to see if her postcard has come,” Julia said, and followed Oliver downstairs to the mailboxes.
The mailbox was, as usual, full. They got mail, often harassing letters forwarded from NBC.
“Don’t expect fan mail,” Jacob said. “The fans don’t write unless you’re on a winning team.”
There were bills and letters for Plum & Jaggers, an announcement of summer sales at local shops, a letter written in the slanted, curly printing of an older woman postmarked Grand Rapids, and the postcard from Rebecca.
Dear S,
I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to finally see you in the flesh. Miriam’s address—did you ask for it or is that my imagination?—is 420 Beacon Street, apt. 403, Boston, Ma. 02115. The summer has been awful for terrorism. We didn’t even talk about the embassies. Come again soon. R.
At the bottom, she had drawn a long, skinny heart.
“Think about it,” Julia said, sitting on the edge of the couch. “There he was, lying on that stupid futon, with his opaque eyes looking at the mute TV and then he sees—he must have seen—every terrible picture of the bombings in Africa.”
“And then he probably saw the picture of you,” Charlotte said, leaning on the counter next to the telephone.
“Her name was Leah,” Julia said.
“You know what I mean,” Charlotte said. “Rebecca Frankel told you his eyes were cloudy.”
The air in the apartment was still, rancid with the heat, the odor of aging produce, the sickly sweet smell of mice, and exhaust from the traffic floating in the open windows.
Oliver s
tood at the window overlooking Eleventh Street, his forehead against the glass, watching the slow-moving scene on the street below.
“I think I have a plan,” he said finally, opening a bag of chips. “So listen.”
Twice Sam had seen her from a distance, once coming out of her apartment on Beacon Street the first day he arrived in Boston and the second time that evening at a café downtown, sitting at an outside table. She was alone.
But at the time something had stopped him from going over to speak to her, a kind of physical paralysis, his legs limp, the old familiar breathlessness. Leaning against a building, he waited for the blood to travel to his extremities again, and by then the opportunity had passed.
So she came up to him.
He was sitting in the same café where he’d seen her the day before, reading the personals from the Globe, wishing he had a notebook, even though there was nothing he had to say in it. His head was down, so he didn’t see her until she had slipped into the wrought-iron chair across from him and said, “Aren’t you Sam McWilliams?”
“Yes,” he said with some hesitation, uncertain whether he wanted to be or not.
“In hiding, right?” She put her chin on her fists and smiled at him. “I think you know my mother, Rebecca Frankel.”
She looked exactly as he’d thought she would, a mass of black curly hair pushed behind her ears, dark lidded eyes, high cheekbones, full lips, a tiny mole or birthmark in the place where her mother’s dimple was.
“I’m Miriam.” She ordered ice cream from the waitress, double-dip vanilla swirl and butterscotch.
“I know about you,” he said, hoping to sound surprised but not too enthusiastic, hoping his voice wouldn’t tremble.
“I felt terrible about Plum & Jaggers,” Miriam said, taking a packet of sugar from the bowl, emptying it in her hand, licking the palm. “Energy,” she said. “I want you to know I think you’re an amazing writer.”
They talked. Mainly Miriam talked at first about going to medical school and how her choice to be a doctor probably had something to do with the deaths of her father and brother, but who could have saved them, certainly not a doctor. She told him about the trip she had taken with her mother to Jerusalem in the summer and how strange it was to be in the place where her family had died.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 20
