How to Fall (25 page)

“Oh Yes The Coat,” said Sonya.

“My ex-husband's. I kept it out of malice, he loved it so. I think I'll give it to the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop.”

“Our organization distributes clothing to the needy.”

“I'll remember that,” said Erika. She'd forget it before the elevator reached the lobby.

On the sidewalk, Roland pointed to the tuxedo, which Sonya carried over her arm. “I'll never wear that thing again.”

“Who knows? ‘With proper care you can live another twenty years,'” quoting his doctor.

“Proper care does not include after-dinner speeches in a monkey suit.”

“Yes, well.” And the coat, the coat . . .

“The tuxedo . . . will do for a shroud.”

. . . the coat: she would haunt the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop until the thing appeared. She'd buy it and stash it in the Finnish chest; maybe in that relic the Old World would find repose. And if not, let it writhe. Love, love... “A shroud? Up yours,” snorted Sonya, startling him, making him smile. “I intend to keep you around. Darling, let's have dinner out.”

She took his arm and led him to a new Italian place on East Twelfth, one which the courtly old gentleman in the fur-collared coat had never had a chance to patronize.

P
redictably,” said Judith da Costa.

“Oh . . . hopeful,” said her husband Justin in his determinedly tolerant way.

“Neither,” said Harry Savitsky, not looking for trouble exactly; looking for engagement perhaps; really looking for the door, but the evening had just begun.

Harry's wife Lucienne—uncharacteristically—said nothing. She was listening to the tune: a mournful bit from Smetana.

What these four diners were evaluating was a violinist, partly his performance, partly his presence. The new restaurant—Harry and Lucienne had suggested it—called itself The Hussar, and presented piroshki and goulash in a gypsy atmosphere. The chef was rumored to be twenty-six years old. The Hussar was taking a big chance on the chef, on the fiddler, on the location, and apparently on the help; one busboy had already dropped a pitcher of water.

“It's tense here, in the dining room,” Judith remarked.

“In the kitchen—don't ask,” said Harry.

In some accommodating neighborhood in Paris, a restaurant like The Hussar might catch on. In Paris . . . but this was not Paris. It was Godolphin, a town that was really a western wedge of Boston; Godolphin, home to Harry and Lucienne Savitsky, retired high-school teachers; Godolphin, not so much out of fashion as beyond its reach.

One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the Army/Navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was Occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a Frenchwoman's flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in nineteen-fifties Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money; and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she'd bought for a friend's grandson's bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.

In the da Costas' disciplined presence Harry was always a little embarrassed about their appetites, his and Lucienne's. Certainly they had nothing else to be ashamed of: not a thing! They were well-educated, as high-school teachers had had to be in their day (she'd taught French, he chemistry). Lucienne spoke three languages, four if you counted Yiddish. Harry conversed only in Brooklyn English, but he understood Lucienne in all of her
tongues. They subscribed to
The New Yorker
and
Science
and
American Heritage.

These da Costas, though—they were very tall, they were very thin. Judith with her pewter hair and dark clothing could have passed for a British governess. Justin was equally daunting: a high brow, and a lean nose, and thin lips always forming meaningful expressions. But there were moments when Justin glanced at Judith while speaking, and a spasm of anxiety crossed his face, getting entangled with the meaningful expressions. Then Justin and Harry briefly became allies: two younger brothers who'd been caught smoking. One morning at breakfast Harry had described this occasional feeling of kinship to his wife. Lucienne looked at him for a while, then got up and went around the table and kissed him.

 

Paprika breadsticks! The waiter's young hand shook as he lowered the basket. Judith took none; Justin took one but didn't bite; Lucienne took one and began to munch; Harry took one and then parked another behind his ear.

“Ha,” said Judith mirthlessly.

“Ha ha,” said Justin.

Lucienne looked at Harry, and sighed, and smiled—her wide motherly smile, reminding him of the purpose of this annual evening out. He removed the breadstick, brushing possible crumbs from his shoulder. “What do you hear from our kids?” he said to Justin.

“Our kids love it out there in Santa Fe. I don't share their taste for the high and dry,” Justin said with an elegant shrug.

“You're a Yankee from way back,” said Harry.

The da Costas, as Harry well knew, were an old Portuguese-Dutch
family who had begun assimilating the minute they arrived in the New World—in 1800, something like that—and had intermarried whenever an Episcopalian would have them. Fifty years ago Justin studied medicine for the purpose of learning psychiatry. His practice still flourished. He saw patients in a freestanding office, previously a stable, behind their home, previously a farmhouse, the whole compound fifteen miles north of Boston. Judith had designed all the conversions. The windows of Justin's consulting room faced a soothing stand of birches.

The Savitskys had visited the da Costas once, three years ago, the night before Miriam Savitsky's wedding to Jotham da Costa. At that party they discovered that there were back yards in Greater Boston through which rabbits ran, into which deer tripped; that people in the mental health professions did not drink hard liquor (Justin managed to unearth a bottle of Scotch from a recess under the sink); and that the severe Judith was the daughter of a New Jersey pharmacist. The pharmacist was there on the lawn, in a deck chair: aged and garrulous. Harry and his new son-in-law's grandfather talked for a while about synthetic serotonin. The old man had died last winter.

 

Cocktails! The Hussar did provide Scotch, perhaps knowing no better. The fiddler's repertoire descended into the folk—some Russian melodies. Harry guessed that Lucienne knew their Yiddish lyrics. The da Costas ignored the tunes. They were devotees of Early Music. To give them their due—and Harry always tried to give them their due—they perhaps did not intend to convey the impression that dining out once a year with the Savitskys was bearable, but only marginally. Have pity, he told himself. Their
cosseted coexistence with gentle wildlife must make them uncomfortable with extremes of color, noise, and opinions. And for their underweight Jotham, who still suffered from acne at the age of thirty-seven, they'd probably wanted somebody other than a wide-hipped, dense-haired lawyer with a loud laugh.

“The kids' apartment out there . . . it's adorable,” said Lucienne.

“With all that clutter, how can anybody tell?” said Harry.

“Mostly Jotham's paints and canvases, that clutter,” Justin bravely admitted.

“Miriam drops her briefcase in one room, her pocketbook in another, throws her keys on the toilet tank,” said Lucienne. “I raised her wrong,” in mock repentance.

“They like their jobs. They both seem happy,” said Judith, turning large khaki eyes to Harry—a softened gaze. Justin said, “They do,” and Lucienne said “Do,” and for a moment, the maitre d' if
he
was looking, the fiddler if he was looking, anybody idly looking, might have taken them for two couples happy with their connection-by-marriage. Sometimes what looked so became so. If Jotham was a bit high-strung for the Savitskys, if Miriam was too argumentative for the da Costas, well, you couldn't have everything. Could you? “Many people have nothing,” Harry said aloud, startling Judith, alerting Justin's practiced empathy—“Yes?” the doctor encouraged—and not at all troubling Lucienne, who was on her fifth breadstick.

 

The appetizers came—four different dishes full of things that could kill you. Each person tasted everything, the Savitskys eager, the da Costas restrained. They talked about the Red Sox, at least the Savitskys did. The team had begun the season well, and would
break their hearts as always, wait and see. The da Costas murmured something.

The main course arrived, and a bottle of wine. Judith poured: everyone got half a glass. They talked about the gubernatorial race. The da Costas were staunch Democrats, though it sometimes pained them. “No one cares enough about the environment,” said Judith. Harry nodded—he didn't care about the environment at all.

The fiddler fiddled. They talked about Stalin—there was a new biography. None of them had read it, and so conversation rested easily on the villainy they already knew.

Harry finished the rest of the wine.

They talked about movies that both couples had seen, though of course not together.

There were some silences.

 

Lucienne would tell the story tonight, Harry thought.

She would tell the story soon. The da Costas had never heard the story. She had been waiting, as she always did, for the quiet moment, the calm place, the inviting question, and the turning point in a growing intimacy.

Harry had heard the story scores of times. He had heard it in Yiddish and in French and occasionally in Spanish. Mostly, though, she told it in her lightly accented English.

He had heard the story in many places. In the sanctuary of the synagogue her voice fluted from the bima. She was sitting on a Survivor Panel, that time. She wasn't technically a Survivor, had never set foot in a Camp, but still. He'd heard it in living rooms, on narrow back-yard decks, in porches attached to beachfront bungalows, in restaurants like The Hussar. Once—the only
instance, to his knowledge, she'd awarded the story to a stranger—he'd heard it in the compartment of an Irish train; their companion was a priest, who listened with deep attention. Once she'd told it at the movies. They and another couple arrived early by mistake and had to occupy half an hour while Trivia questions lingered on the screen. That night she had narrated from his left, leaning toward their friends—a pair of Lesbian teachers—on his right. While she spoke she stared at them with the usual intensity. Harry, kept in place by his wife aslant his lap, stared at
her:
her pretty profile, her apricot hair, the flesh lapping from her chin.

Whatever language she employed, the nouns were unadorned, the syntax plain, the vocabulary undemanding: not a word that couldn't be understood by children, though she never told the story to children, unless you counted Miriam.

He could tell the thing himself, in any of her tongues.

The dessert came. Four different sweets: again they shared.

Lucienne said, “We will go to Santa Fe for the Holidays.”

Judith said, “We will go for Thanksgiving.”

“And the kids will come East for... in December,” said Justin.

The young couple spent half their vacation with one set of parents, half with the other. “More room in their place,” Miriam told Harry and Lucienne. “More food here.”

The bill came. They paid with credit cards. The nervous waiter hurried to bring their outerwear—two overcoats, and Judith's down jacket, and Lucienne's fur stole inherited from her mother.

“Judith,” said Lucienne. “I forgot to mention your father's death.”

“You sent a kind note,” said Judith in a final manner.

“My own father died when I was a little girl,” said Lucienne. “But when my mother died—I was fifty, already—then I felt truly forlorn, an orphan.”

“Dad's life satisfied him,” said Judith.

The fiddler had paused. A quiet moment. Justin leaned toward Lucienne.

“You were a little girl?” he said softly. “What did your father die of?”

The patrons were devotedly eating. A calm place. A growing intimacy.

“Where?” he asked.

She lifted one shoulder, and lifted her lip too. “Overseas,” she said. She stood up and wrapped herself in her ratty stole; and Harry had to run a little, she was so fast getting to the door.