Timothy glared at her.
“Stop it,” he said.
Lily turned. Timothy stood in the doorway, his face clouded, his blond hair glowing in the hallway light. Lily froze, hand on the picture frame.
“Why did you come upstairs?” she said, attempting to scold him.
He remained as omniscient and silent as ever. He would speak when he felt like speaking. His eyes did not seem to waver or even to blink. She had trouble meeting his glance.
“You eating and drinking too much! Greedy! Greedy! In our garden! Farmer McGregor come and eat you! Now you stealing Mummy’s things!”
Timothy stared upward into Lily’s nervous eyes. He pointed straight to the door. His mouth opened wide, the mouth of a dictator at an amphitheater.
“OUT!” he shouted.
From the sitting room rose strains of melody, infiltrating the void left by Timothy’s silence. The music grew louder, clearer; she recognized it.
Ein’ Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott
. A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Ours, as opposed to yours.
“OUT!” he shouted again, his arm outstretched, pointing. The strong BBC chorale made Lily crazy. She felt dizzy.
“No. You get out! You get out!!” Her own voice, wild, screaming.
Timothy did not budge.
“I tell my Daddy,” he said.
She was terrified. Tell him that she’d been snooping, or that she’d told his little boy to get out? His face told her that she was guilty of every crime, on the earth, and into eternity.
“Go ahead!”
She shoved him toward the door, not thinking, not looking at him, as though to look at him would spell her annihilation. His pajama-padded feet had no traction whatever on the floor and he skated madly. He fell at the doorway, unhurt.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” said Lily, stepping over to pick Timmy up.
“No touch me,” he said, standing up by himself. Then he pushed her back into his parent’s bedroom. “Now stay there until my Daddy get home and he punish you.”
“Hate you,” he added, turning and going back down the staircase.
He took the stairs two feet at a time. Lily heard the final thump of his feet on the lower landing. She noticed the music downstairs again, an endless flotilla of waves and stops, of mouths and fingers. She stood in the bedroom, shaking with tears.
Within minutes, it seemed, Julian was grabbing her. She thought she was dreaming; he towered over her. He kissed her, laughing and kissing at the same time. It felt impossible.
“How did you get here—what are you doing here?” she finally managed to say.
His body was freezing. He told her he’d walked. The ball was half a mile away. He had ice in his hair. There he was—it seemed so suddenly—white shirt, burning face, tumbling black hair, drooping lashes. Drunk.
“I missed you so,” he sobbed out. “Oh, Lily.”
“Is the party already over?”
Then she looked at her watch. It was only about 10 o’clock.
“Obviously not . . . . Obviously, I love you.”
A shade of pain emanated from his mouth; his lips turned down on the word “you,” like a baby tasting something new, foreign. And a baby’s surprise that the sweet world bore so pungent a core. His eyes peered openly at her, wonderingly. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him. His ornate bow tie, stiff shirtfront, the sharp crease in his trousers: these dressed his abandoned self, his love-tossed image.
“Oh, Lily, Lily, if you should hurt me now, I’d die, you know.”
They noticed their reflection in his mother’s mirror. They stared at the reflection for a long time.
“You are so beautiful,” he said, a trifle sadly.
They kissed again, and something passed between them, a painful intelligence each accepted of the other. Helena’s armoire was still hanging open, and Lily went to close it. The fragrant pastel frocks swung like censers as she buried her face in them impulsively. She crushed them to her body, inhaling the sweet sweat.
Julian was just behind her, circling her waist. He pulled her away from the dresses; the armoire stayed agape.
“What do you want in there, Lily?” he asked softly. “What do you want that I can’t give you?”
The tenderness in his voice amazed her. She looked at him. “What do you need, Lily?”
“Take me into your heart,” she said. “Take me all the way in and let me stay there.”
She let him take her over to the bed. The quilted satin coverlet was cold against her thighs. Julian’s hands were up her skirt. He gripped her hips. Lily twisted luxuriously, finding each hard finger with her rolling flesh.
“Should I?” he said.
They hadn’t yet; they hadn’t dared to, in this house.
She opened her eyes. “But what if?”
“I don’t care what they think anymore,” he answered.
She felt him ease her skirt up, slide her legs open, and rest his heavy head between. His hair tickled the soft innermost parts of her thighs. She could feel his breath, acute, between. Close. He was staring into her blind center. Lily must have said something.
“Hmmm?” said Julian. His voice was thrilling.
She was thinking of Timothy coming in on this, seeing the two of them like this on his parent’s bed.
“Timothy.” said Lily, slowly.
“Timothy,” said Julian, “is all right. I just saw him.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t see me. He was strutting about, down there, waving his fists madly, puffing his lips out, a regular dictator. He runs this house, you know. Got Archie wrapped around his finger.”
Julian got up and tiptoed over to the doorway. He opened the door and leaned out, listening.”
“Hear that?” he said. “Music. He’s conducting his chorus. His troops.”
Julian listened for another moment.
“No. Wait. Now he’s talking to old Archibald. ‘Daddy!’ ‘Daddy!’”
he imitated the boy’s high voice. “Thinks he can call his Dad at any hour, day or not, and he’ll come running.”
“Won’t he come upstairs?” said Lily. “He did before.”
“He’ll get sleepy soon. We’ll find him on the couch when we’re finished.”
Julian was back, moving his hands and his mouth over her.
“He said he hated me, Julian,” she said. Julian moved in a steady, domineering way that excited her.
“And
they
taught him to hate me.” As she spoke her eyes filled with strange, unbidden tears. What she was feeling, in his touch, was as strong as hate. As great. An antidote. Hate was washing away, conquered.
“I’m going to show you what love is,” he said.
“Can you?” she wondered.
“Oh, I will try.”
His free hand wrestled with his spiffy black trousers. Lily realized that he wasn’t “protected,” told him so, and tried to stop him. She heard her mother’s voice, chiding, “think with your head, Lily; think with your head.” No mother, I can’t. I won’t. And he wouldn’t let her, and she loved him for that.
“But what if?” was the last thing she said.
Julian echoed the sound of her words: “What if what if what if . . . .”
He struck up a rhythm with the words, swept her up in it. God weaves crazy plans in mortals. Spirits fantasize in women’s wombs. Dreaming of what to be. What if a soul came to visit, made of their love. Souls come into our ignorance, having their say. Steadily. Traveling into the blind center. What if they never came home? At the time, it seemed anything but scary; it was home.
When at last her womb stirred, she pulled him inward, and he cried out.
An answering cry from downstairs: “Daddy!” Julian chuckled softly.
22
Europe, 1944
L
ILY’S FATHER had been married before. His first wife and his son were dead. A “righteous gentile” had hidden his family when the terror reached Poland. They had been given refuge beneath a barn. A storage area had been built there, and a few cracks in the wood floor were enlarged to provide them with air to breathe. Straw covered the hinged entry from view. Overhead were the sweet cows, whose mooing offered company, and whose brown bodies, precious heat.
Each night the old gentile, Pavel, brought food and water to the family and removed their waste. He never complained. These acts of mercy occurred in the silent darkness; only the moonlight on the straw illuminated Pavel’s white head, hoary as that of a tired god, bowed to his huddled charges.
The cold was cruel to them. They could not get up and walk about to warm themselves. Their blood congealed in their veins. Only the infant boy could exercise his limbs in the narrow tomb; he stretched and twisted. The boy was a living hearth, warming them wherever he lay. He was a happy baby, ignorant of the world, for his mother’s milk was magically right, and her arms protected him.
Then the mother became ill. She developed a high fever that shook her bones up, but for all the rattling she was never warm.
Even the baby boy draped on her body could not keep her warm. The fever persisted for a few days, and then lifted as suddenly as it had descended. The reprieve was short, however. With the next blizzard, the sickness returned. This time it overcame her, and her soul flew away.
When Pavel came that evening, he saw a strange sight, under the glow of the moon through the open barn door. A baby at a man’s breast, tugging at the nipple and screaming with anger. The man’s eyes were tightly shut, and he cradled the small bald head in one hand. He did not pull the child’s mouth away from his breast. He let it make its demand. Pavel heard Josef speak:
“Try,” said Josef, with a strange, sad smile. “Maybe milk will come.”
Then Pavel saw that the Jewess had died. He pulled the dead woman out of the shelter and carried her outdoors. Josef could not follow. The last view of his wife: a pair of feet, silver in the moonlight. The mute soles of her feet. The dead mother of a screaming child.
Pavel cracked the earth outside the barn. He stood quietly, staring at her. She wore a thin shift, through which her breasts could easily be seen. She looked exceptionally young. Her breasts were still full, the nipples stiff. She smelled of milk, sweet and promising. He threw her into the ground, then threw the upchurned earth in after her, and crossed himself.
Pavel was frightened that someone would see him burying a woman. But what else could he have done? The body would soon have begun to stink in the hideaway. The cows would smell it after a short while, not to mention the two milkmaids who came each morning. Stupid they were, but God had given them each a nose.
The baby boy did not stop crying. Josef thought: now even an infant can know of horrors. Before, the world of men was crazy, but
nature was not. My child had a mother. But now, nature has gone crazy too. A baby needs milk, and I am dry as dust. I am only a man: dust.
Pavel returned.
Josef said, “Is there any milk to give my son?”
But Pavel was an old man. His children were grown. Pavel thought, if I take the child to a wet nurse, there will be questions. Where did he come from, they will ask. The heavens above? And who is the father? Pavel, a limping old man? Who, then? God the Father himself? They will laugh. And why is this lad circumcised, they will ask. Is the little one perchance a Jew, a
Zhid
? That I could never admit, thought Pavel, never. They would kill us both, by the Holy Mother! He went into the house, and after a minute or so, returned.
“Here,” he said to Josef, kindly. He flourished an earthenware bowl.
“This is cow’s milk, but it is all I have. Take this cloth and dip it in, then put it in the boy’s mouth, and he will suck.”
Josef soaked the cloth in the milk and brought the tip of it to his son’s mouth; the baby fed.
“Does it taste good, little baby?” Pavel coaxed, so caught up with the world under his ground that he might himself have crawled in to join the father and child. The baby sucked and sucked, and his father kept dipping the cloth into the cow’s milk.
“These are good cows,” said Pavel. “I raised them from when they were born, and sucked the milk of their mothers,” he prattled encouragingly.
It would have been a wondrous sight to the soul of the mother, if souls look on: the kind old farmer, kneeling by the open trapdoor, murmuring to her husband and her boy, and the cows asleep beside
them, and her own body, asleep outside, and the baby trying to live another day.
He failed. Did the mother see this, too? Did she hold out her arms and give him her breast to sleep upon again? Pavel opened the fresh grave and laid the baby down upon his mother. A tangle of bones.
Had Josef not been a learned man, he would not have been so furious with God. He remembered the story of Abraham and Isaac only too well; he had taken it too much to heart. God had told Abraham to take his son, his only son, his Isaac, and sacrifice him. And Abraham had been prepared to obey. But Isaac had been spared! God didn’t need the sacrifice; God didn’t want the sacrifice. He wanted only to know the extent of a man’s devotion. Abraham offered and God refused. Isaac, his Isaac, had lived!
The story made sense to a man: God was only testing Abraham. So when the little boy had asked his father where the sacrificial lamb was, Abraham had said, “God will provide,” and God made the words true. He had provided a real animal, and not a little boy, the light of his father’s old eyes. But what was a man to believe when no ram was found? When the sacrifice was the precious son himself? What then?
“My only son!” roared Josef, shaking his head from side to side like a wounded animal.
After a while, when his anger had tired him (he was only human, and could not bear a grudge against God forever), he tried with all his might to remember his sin. He kept trying to remember what he had done. He kept failing.
23
Europe, 1976
A
T ABOUT 11:15, Julian got up slowly and began dressing. “I’d better get back to the Ball before midnight.”