No One Must Know (9 page)

We walked up the steps to the porch.

“As long as you like me, I don’t care what anybody else thinks,” Jacob said.

He was standing close to me, smiling, his breath fanning my cheeks. As I looked up at him to return his smile, his head lowered and our lips met. At that very instant, the front door swung open. I pulled away with a gasp.

“Get in the house, Alexandra! At once!” Mom cried. Without another word, she was gone, the door slamming behind her with a loud bang.

“Let me talk to her and explain,” Jacob said.

“No, you’d better go. I’ll speak to her myself. I’m sorry, but she’s been behaving strangely lately.”

I watched him turn the corner before I went into the house. Mom was washing dishes at the sink, her back to me. “How dare you disobey us,” she said without turning around.

“I don’t care what you think,” I answered. “We weren’t doing anything wrong!”

She finally turned to face me. Two deep lines etched the corners of her mouth and made her look much older than her years. “You will not see that boy again,” she said simply before turning back to her dishes.

Anger loosened my tongue. “You can’t stop me!” I shouted. “I won’t let you!”

She didn’t turn around, did not respond, just kept on washing the dishes.

I
stayed in my room for the rest of the day. When Mom called up that dinner was ready, I yelled back that I wasn’t hungry. I was sorry later on, though; the three pieces of gum that I found in my pocket didn’t stop my stomach from grumbling. I was so hungry that I had trouble falling asleep.

I woke up early the next morning, and the smell of breakfast drew me downstairs like a magnet. Mom was standing by the stove in the quilted gold robe that Dad and I had given her for her birthday. She heaped food on my plate and sat down beside me at the kitchen table but did not speak. When I stole a glance at her profile, she
seemed absorbed in puffing on one of her interminable cigarettes. I knew I had to tell her how I felt.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have snuck out behind your back.”

She flicked her cigarette ash into a crystal ashtray and turned to me. “You
should
be sorry, Alexandra. I’m very surprised at your behavior. I thought I could trust you.”

“You can, Mom. You can. But you and Dad weren’t fair to me. I just wanted to go to a matinee with Jacob. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

She inhaled deeply before speaking. Her hand was shaking so much that the cigarette wobbled. “You must let your father and me judge what’s appropriate for you,” she finally said.

“Even if you’re wrong?”

She sighed and took hold of my hand. “Listen, dear, I know what I’m doing. I know what’s best for you. Promise me that you won’t go out with this boy again.”

“I do promise that I won’t sneak around behind your back ever again. But I can’t promise not to see Jacob, Mom. I like him. And anyway, you don’t even know him.”

The doorbell rang. “That must be Olga. I’ll let her in.” She stood up and hobbled to the door. “We’ll finish this conversation another time,” she said. “Put a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, please.”

She was back a minute later with our Ukrainian cleaning lady hot on her heels. Olga had been coming to our house for as long as I could remember. The woman’s round face brightened when she saw me.

As Mom made her way to the counter, the toast popped up with a loud ping. She spread butter and homemade strawberry jam on it, then handed a slice to me.

“Would you like a piece of toast, Olga?” Mom asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Olga said, sitting down beside me.

Before she joined us at the table, Mom poured steaming hot cocoa into my mug and filled her own cup and Olga’s with rich, black espresso.

“Good strong coffee,” Olga said. “It wakes you up. Not like weak coffee my Canadian ladies make.”

Olga had immigrated to Canada the same time as my parents did. She made her living cleaning houses in our neighborhood.

“How many ladies do you clean for, Olga?” I asked.

Olga took a sip of her coffee before answering. “I busy,” she finally said. “I have four ladies. They like me.”

“I’m not surprised. We like you too, Olga,” Mom said.

“Thank you. Mrs. Wallace on Queenston Street, she ask if I work for her new neighbor, Mrs. Pearlman.”

“I know the Pearlmans,” I said. “Their son, Jacob, is my friend.”

Olga frowned. “I refuse job at their house.”

“I guess you don’t want to work every day,” Mom said.

“It’s not that. I need money. But Mrs. Wallace tell me Mrs. Pearlman is Jew. I Christian woman. I don’t work for kikes.”

“What are kikes?” I asked.

“Hush,” said Mom. The blood drained out of her face. “I never want to hear you using such language!”

Olga scratched her head. “What you mean, Mrs. Gal? You think Christian woman should work for kikes?”

Mom stood up so quickly that her cane fell to the floor with a loud clatter. I picked it up and handed it to her. She grasped its handle so tightly that her knuckles turned white. “I’m sorry, Olga. I won’t be needing you today after all,” she said in a quiet voice.

The cleaning women stared at her, her mouth wide open. “What is matter, Mrs. Gal? I always come to you on Mondays.”

“Not today, I’m afraid.” She made her way over to the drawer where she kept her shopping money and pulled out a handful of cash. She shoved it into the pocket of Olga’s apron. “This should cover what you would have earned here today.” Suddenly, she seemed to notice that I was still there. “Alexandra,” she said, “please leave for school immediately.”

“I don’t have to. It’s still early.”

“Do what I say!”

She was using her “I will be obeyed” voice, so I did as I was told without any further argument.

When I got home in the afternoon, there was no sign of the cleaning woman.

“What happened with Olga?” I asked.

“She’s gone,” Mom said, a stern expression on her face. “She won’t be coming back.”

“You
fired
her? But she’s been working for us for as long as I can remember!”

She cut off my words with a wave of her hand. “Never mind,” she said simply, then she walked to the door and closed it quietly behind her.

T
he Saturday morning sun streamed through the kitchen window and warmed our faces. Mom and I had arranged Tupperware bowls and wooden spoons on the kitchen counter. Now we were measuring out the ingredients my friends and I would need for our baking session. I put a dozen eggs into a glass bowl and placed a slab of butter on a wooden chopping board.

“Could you please check if the mail has arrived?” Mom asked as she dipped a measuring cup into a large brown flour canister decorated with daisies.

I took the key off a hook by the door and went to open the mailbox. There was only one envelope, a thin one with Mom’s name written on it in a spidery handwriting.
It was addressed to 39 Ash Street. Our house number was 43. I turned it over. It was from somebody called Judit Weltner.

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Mom had poured flour into one of the bowls. She’d also taken a cookie sheet and a couple of baking pans out of the cabinets.

“Everything’s ready,” she announced. She saw the envelope in my hand. “So who is writing us?”

“Somebody called Judit Weltner. Who is she, Mom? I’ve never heard you mention her.”

She grabbed the envelope out of my hand. “Impossible!” she cried. “Jutka is dead!” She tried to tear the envelope open, but her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn’t loosen the flap.

“Let me help you,” I offered.

“I’ll do it myself!” she said, taking out a pair of large scissors and cutting the envelope open. She sank down on a chair and pulled out a sheet of paper that was filled with the same spidery writing I’d noticed on the envelope. She scanned the page anxiously. “She’s alive. Thank God!” she cried, her voice full of joy. But suddenly, all the color ran out of her face. “No, no! She mustn’t come here. She mustn’t!” She broke off and bit her lip, as if to stop herself from saying more.

I peered over her shoulder and tried to read the letter. “What does she say, Mom? What language is she using?”

“Hungarian. I–” Just then, the doorbell rang. She folded up the letter and shoved it into her pocket. “Please answer the door,” she said. “Your friends have arrived.”

By the time I’d led Jean and Molly into the kitchen, Mom wore her usual serene expression. Nobody could have guessed that anything had upset her as she went from girl to girl to supervise what we were doing. Before long, I was mixing the ingredients for a cheesecake while Molly was stirring the batter for a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Jean was the most ambitious of all of us. Mom was showing her how to stretch out the thin dough for a strudel.

“Don’t be afraid that the dough will have holes in it. The thinner you can get it, the better your strudel will turn out,” she explained.

Jean followed her instructions, her face scrunched up in concentration. “My dough looks perfect,” she finally crowed.

Mom then showed her how to use a pastry brush to paint egg white onto the dough. “All that’s left is to fill it with apples and walnuts and raisins,” she said. “You can do that by yourself.”

“I wish my mother was as much fun as yours,” Jean said after Mom had left the kitchen.

“She isn’t always like this, believe me. Sometimes she drives me crazy.”

I concentrated for the next few minutes on mixing my batter. I had so much to tell my friends that I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to tell them about Mom’s reaction to the photos we’d found. I also wanted to tell them that she disliked Jacob, even though she’d never met him, and that I was running out of excuses to stop him from coming over to my house. There was so much I wanted to say, but the memory of the misery on Mom’s face when I’d questioned her about the photos stopped me from speaking. I settled for telling them what Mrs. Cowan had said to Jacob at the yard sale and describing how upset he’d been.

“Poor Jacob,” Molly said. “I never thought about the meaning of the term ‘jew me down.’”

“Me neither.”

“I don’t blame him for being insulted,” she added.

Jean was silent.

I kept stirring the gooey mixture in the bowl on the counter. It was somehow easier to talk if I didn’t have to look right at them. “I wonder if I should quit Guides. I don’t want Mrs. Cowan for a captain.”

“Alex, no!” Molly cried. “You’ve been wanting to join for years.”

Jean put the pastry brush on the kitchen counter and faced me. “I don’t see why you’re blaming Mrs. Cowan,” she said. “She couldn’t have known that Jacob would be so touchy.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Touchy? How can you say that? She’s a grown-up. She should know what she’s saying,” I cried. “You would have felt just like Jacob, Jean.”

“Come on, Jean,” Molly said. “You don’t mean that.”

Jean shrugged, picked up a spatula, and became engrossed, once again, in the pastry in front of her. Molly and I just stared at her. Finally, Molly broke the silence.

“What’s wrong with you, Jean? You didn’t mean that, did you?” she repeated.

“I guess not,” Jean mumbled.

I knew that somehow I had to ease the tension in the room. “Let’s talk about something else,” I said in a determinedly cheerful voice. “Do you want to go to the movies tonight?”

“What do you mean?” Molly said. “Did you forget that it’s Christie Sutherland’s party tonight? What are you going to wear?”

“I told you she didn’t invite me.” I looked from Molly to Jean and back again. “You said you weren’t going either.”

Molly stared at me with a crestfallen expression. “She came up to Jean and me after school yesterday and asked us to come. I took it for granted that she’d asked you too.”

“Well, she didn’t, but I couldn’t care less.” I spoke in a casual voice, although I would have given anything to go to Christie’s party. All the popular kids would be there. “She’s probably jealous that I have a boyfriend.”

“That’s no reason for her to act like that,” Molly said. “It’s a mean thing to do. Well, if you’re not going, we won’t either. Right, Jean?”