An Uncommon Education (38 page)

She set the plate of cookies in front of us before asking me again how long I expected to stay.

“I have a friend who’s in trouble,” I said, avoiding her stare.

“So you came home?” she asked.

“She’s asked me to stay out of it,” I said.

My mother nodded. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “You’re looking thin. Have you been sleeping well?”

I told her that I had. There is something awful in being so well in the face of upheaval. She asked what play was on the docket for the next fall; I told her it was
The Tempest
.

“A beautiful play. I like to think of you doing those plays. You seem happier, more like you were when you were very small.” She hesitated.

“Before Dad’s heart attack, you mean,” I filled in. “And Teddy.”

“Before all that, yes.” She took a deliberate sip of her tea. “Has it been cast yet?”

I told her it had, that I had not auditioned.

“Why is that?” she asked.

I wasn’t sure I knew how to answer her. I feared that since my mother had become sick I had been using the stage as a veneer to cover the pain I felt when she’d fallen ill. But it was still there. And with it the tumbling sensation that I was losing ground on who and what I thought I needed to be. I was beginning to feel a desperate pull to walk around in my own life with my eyes uncovered, depending, up until then, on seeing the world by peeking through my fingers. “My schoolwork is slipping,” I said. “But that’s not why, really.” I wanted to be home with her, I suddenly realized. That’s what I had wanted all along. I watched her face for signs that she’d just read my mind; the thought had been that clear.

“Mmm.” She nodded. “It must take a lot of time from your work.” She paused, grappling with some inner conflict over how to talk to me. “You know what I want to know? There are so many sons and fathers in those plays, but where are all the mothers?” It was a good question, but she asked it almost facetiously, almost to prove a point she thought she should make. I felt sure she cared nothing about mothers in plays. She was so without artifice that the question took me by surprise. It could have been that she was, for one of the first times I could remember, attempting to make conversation.

I nodded, catching on. “I guess they’re implied,” I said, making us both smile.

“Not in
The Tempest
, though, are they? I think one feels the need for a mother in that play. Maybe they wouldn’t have all gone rushing out into that storm.” She looked distracted. I wondered when she had read it. I wondered if she had read far more than I had ever realized. The veins on her hands as she sipped her tea stood out. “It’s strange that you girls would be so excited about plays that have so few mothers,” she continued. “It seems like you’re so busy looking to lead the sort of lives that men have led, like that’s a rare privilege. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not locked up in just as tight a frame as we were. Despite all the opportunities you have now.” Her mouth had turned down at the edges, pulled by invisible twin weights.

I moved closer to her. “Do you remember, when I was little, how mad you would get at Dad when he’d go off on one of his Rose Kennedy riffs?” She smiled a little. “I don’t think I fully understood his obsession, either,” I said. “Well, maybe that’s not true. But I wasn’t always that sure about her.” I spoke softly, for fear she might shut me out in an instant. “I remember when you said she’d just about killed her daughter.” I took in just enough air to breathe out the next question: “Do you remember?” And then I suddenly felt that I had asked her several other questions, including ones about mothers tiring of the lives of those around them, perhaps even their own.

I knew I’d have to wait a long time for her to respond, and it seemed for a moment that she might not respond at all. So after a while I just began speaking again; I told her about what I found that one day, under the piano, and still had, and she listened, her face fixed in an indecipherable expression. And then, just briefly, she smiled.

“She had an Earhart photograph under there?”

I nodded.

“And you think that proves something?”

My heart caught in my throat. “I do,” I said.

“What, exactly?” she asked. Her voice was almost clinical in tone. “When did she have the lobotomy, Naomi? Do you remember?” Her tone was sharp.

“Nineteen forty-three,” I answered.

“And the house was restored when?”

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” I replied, the stone hitting its mark and sinking into my stomach. “You think she couldn’t have put it there?” I said out loud. Then I looked up at my mother, a wave of anger passing through me. “Who did, then? Who else would have taken the trouble to hide it away?”

My mother pressed her lips together. “I’m not sure it matters so much, Naomi.” I could see that she was as upset as I was, and I hated that she could fool us both with such thin imitations of herself. She began collecting our dishes.

“It does matter,” I said, defensive. “It mattered to her. It mattered to Rosemary.”

“How do you know that?”

I tossed my napkin on the table. “I don’t. But you don’t, either. And who the hell else would have put them there?” The heat rose in my face and suddenly I was a young girl again, feeling sick on a piano bench, playing the game of what my mother might say if she didn’t stop speaking for once.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe her mother did. But you’re probably right,” she smiled at me too kindly. “Hard to imagine Rose crawling under the piano, isn’t it? Harder to imagine than Rosemary herself, no matter how far gone she was.” She brought the dishes to the sink and turned the water on, then turned it off a moment later, thinking better of what she had been about to do.

“You know they found Earhart’s body, right?” she said after a while. “Long ago, in 1940. The bones of a Caucasian woman of her height, on the Polynesian island where they thought she went down. But people still must insist that she was never found. They don’t believe it could have been her.”

“You do?” I said.

“Well, as you might say, who else could it be?” She left the sink and sat back down at the table with me. “I guess I believe that when a person becomes heroic, the only thing we don’t want to accept from her is her death.” She smiled, wryly. “The poor woman has been dead for fifty years and no one will bury her.” She began worrying her hands and then her fingers. She was nervous. “I suppose it could have been,” she said then, so softly I could barely hear, “Rosemary, as a young child. It was her mother’s piano.”

“Yes,” I said. “It might even have been later. She didn’t go away completely. She was just different.”

“Naomi. How can you know that?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I’m just guessing.”

“It’s a nice guess,” my mother admitted after a moment. Her voice when she did was almost inaudible. “You’ve always had a nice way of seeing things. You learned that from your father.” I let her take my hand in hers and work my fingers gently, searching for something with them.

“You know, I used to have a memory like yours,” she finally said. “When I was a girl, they called it ‘photographic,’ though I guess they don’t like to use that word anymore. I hated it. I didn’t want to remember everything I read or saw. I think that’s part of why I left school. Your grandmother couldn’t believe ‘who she was raising’ when she found out I had.” She sighed and rubbed her hands over her eyes. “I believe you’ve hated it, too, Naomi, despite how well it’s served you?”

I didn’t answer her right away. I took in what she’d told me, wondering if I’d already known. There was suddenly a gentleness between us where a tension had recently been. “I suppose it’s been helpful, at times. I wish, sometimes, that there were things I could forget.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Of course.” For the first time in my life I saw her face break, looking into mine. It was like watching a crack wind down a statue. “Oh, Naomi,” she said. “There’s so much I’ve wished you could forget. And I tried to keep the worst things from you, just so you wouldn’t have to remember. It was a mistake to think I could do that. Such a mistake.” She stood up suddenly. “I have to show you something.” She steeled herself, looking at me directly in the eye. “You won’t forgive me for it,” she said before turning her back to me and walking to the mudroom behind the kitchen. I heard her twisting the dial that locked the safe there.

She came out clutching something close to her chest. “Maybe you’re right,” she said quietly, trying to compose herself. “Maybe I’ve kept too much to myself.” She put a thin stack of letters down on the table. “But there was so much to protect you from.” She gestured to them without saying another word.

The return address on all three was a New Jersey one.

8/10/90

Dear Mrs. Feinstein,

There have been problems with my boy. The doctor say he have stroke. I do not understand what to do. I know we have not been friendly, but I have no assistance and I think to write to you. We will be at the hospital for some time, but I will look for your letter.

Sincerely,

Chava Rosenthal

8/22/90

Dear Mrs. Feinstein,

Thank you for your reply. I do not mean to ask you for anything. The boy is being sent to mental hospital for good. Thank you for your time.

Mrs. Avraham Rosenthal

10/1/90

Dear Mrs. Feinstein,

I should not have sent these letters. You are a kind woman. I am sorry I am not more pleasing. I have returned to live in Brookline again. The boy is at LEMUEL SHATTUCK Hospital. He has blood disorder, and strokes. He does not know me mostly, or anyone else. The doctors say he has brain damage. My address is:

1648 Beacon Street

Apartment 3

Brookline, MA

Mrs. Chava Rosenthal

“Oh, no, Mom.” I put my head down on the table. “Oh, no.” I could find no other words.

I heard the scrape of her chair as she pulled it next to me. I was suddenly sobbing, the shock and grief I thought had dulled suddenly springing from a place I hadn’t known was still there. My mother was stroking my hair, tentatively. “I’m so sorry, Naomi. I’m so, so sorry. I thought it was best you didn’t know. I thought it wouldn’t help to know.”

She had made me doubt what I knew was true. I knew then that I had never let go of Teddy. I had only moved forward, dragging him behind me, unseen. Once broken, the heart will always remain able to split along its fault lines.

“Please, Naomi,” my mother was saying. “I just couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t do that to you. And then”—she was stroking my hair, as though I were an animal that might be soothed—“when you came home yesterday, I could see. You had been hurt anyway. And I knew I’d have to tell you. Even if it was so long overdue.”

I pulled her arms around me, over me. She leaned in, her body resting on mine. “He was there all along,” I said, again and again. She held me. In my mind’s eye, I looked back at him, seeing him fade away from me all over again. It was the first time since that night she came to bring me home from the train station that I felt anything like hate for my mother. How could she ever think that keeping so much to herself would be the way to keep me safe. How could I believe that she had wanted to protect me?

Twenty-Eight

I
took the letters back to campus with me that afternoon. I didn’t know what else to do. The meeting with the dean was the next day. I was just holding everything close, as Mrs. Rosenthal had held her misery, as my mother had held herself.

The moment I got to campus, I retreated to the house. We were planning a particularly expansive production of
Tempest
, and Ruth had already begun the preparation of sets and costumes, despite the fact that most of them would just sit there over the summer. She stationed me at the kitchen table with piles of navy fabric, a sewing needle, and thread. We had no sewing machine, and I knew only one stitch. The work was painstaking and mercifully distracting.

I am sure that at that moment, no students other than Tiney, Jun, Elena, and me knew what had happened. It came as no surprise to me that both Jun and Tiney wouldn’t want to speak of it, and Elena was nowhere to be found. But Ruth sat watching me for a few hours as I sewed beads onto the skirt, wrists, and neck of a dense costume. When my neck grew tired, I sat back against Mrs. Rosenthal’s letters, tucked into the bag I’d hung on the back of my chair.

Just as we were getting ready to wrap things up, Ruth sat down across from me. When I didn’t speak to her, she picked up a swath of fabric and began to work it, settling in to wait me out. After a while, Julie walked in through the back door, the one that led off the kitchen. The rest of the house was empty.

Julie sat down, watching us work. She had come for Ruth, but Ruth was making no move to get ready. I wanted to stand up and get her coat, find her books and bag and hand them to her. She always carried so many things, so that it was a series of movements that took her or left her anywhere. And at that moment she was reclining, ignoring Julie sitting upright, her coat still on, telegraphing her desire to get going.

“Naomi was just about to spill the beans,” Ruth announced. She began to recite a record of everything she’d noticed that Jun, and maybe I, had thought would go unnoticed: that Jun hadn’t been seen for days; that neither one of us had shown up for auditions; that Elena was sick with a flu in May; that I had stationed myself at the house for the better part of an afternoon to work on costumes when I couldn’t sew. Julie nodded, accepting Ruth’s case for suspecting that something was up, and looked at me.

I told them. It suddenly became clear to me that it wasn’t a secret I was keeping for Jun alone; it was one that Tiney wanted me to keep as well. I became angry at them both for the way they had pinned themselves and me to it, as if we had all agreed that this whole, terrible thing would be done, above all, with discretion. I know now there was more to it than that. But I was more afraid, too, than angry, afraid enough to think if I called for help it might just come. So I told them, as well as I could.