The Invisible Bridge (46 page)

"The drinks are on me today," Polaner said. "Did you hear about the Polish flag?"

"I heard it's scheduled to be replaced," Ben Yakov said. "I hear they've come up with something in black and white on a red ground. Rather ugly, if you ask me." He drained his glass and filled it again. "Congratulate me, boys, I'm going to see the rabbi."

They'd never seen Ben Yakov drunk in public. His handsome mouth looked blurred around the edges, as if someone had been trying to erase it.

"Going to see the rabbi?" Rosen said. "Why should we congratulate you for that?"

"Because it'll make me a free man. I'm going to get a divorce."

"What?"

"An old-fashioned Jewish divorce. I can do it, you see, because we've got a note from the doctor saying Ilana's barren. That means we qualify. How's that for chivalry?

She can't bear children, so I can cast her off." He bent over his glass and rubbed his eyes.

"Have a drink, will you?"

None of it was news to Andras. For the past month, Ilana had been living under Klara's roof again, occupying the other half of Klara's bed. Klara had offered to take care of her while she recovered; Ilana had gone to the rue de Sevigne when she'd left the hospital, and hadn't gone home since. She was miserable, she told Klara; she'd come to understand that Ben Yakov didn't love her, at least not as he once had. She understood that he felt caged by their marriage. She'd long suspected that he was seeing someone else. When Ben Yakov went to visit her at Klara's, they would sit together in the front room, scarcely saying a word; what was there to say? She was often inconsolable with grief over the baby, a grief Ben Yakov was surprised to find he shared; he grieved, too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself. And then there was the unanswerable question of what might be next for Ilana. On the other side of her recovery was a blank page. There was nothing to keep her in Paris now, but she didn't know how her parents would receive her if she went home. Her letters to them had gone unanswered.

Andras hadn't mentioned Ilana's situation in his own letters to Tibor. He hadn't wanted to worry his brother, nor, on the other hand, to raise Tibor's hopes. But a week earlier, Ben Yakov and Ilana had met at Klara's to discuss how they might extract themselves from their marriage. Ilana told Ben Yakov they might be granted a divorce if the doctor would attest that she could no longer bear children. It was uncertain whether that was really true, but the doctor might be persuaded to say so. Ben Yakov had agreed to pursue that avenue. Once they'd made the decision they both seemed to feel some relief. Ilana's health began to improve, and Ben Yakov went back to the studio to make up the work he'd missed that spring. But now that the first meeting with the rabbi was approaching, Ben Yakov had broken down. The possibility of divorce would soon become reality, evidence of what a disaster he'd made of Ilana's life, and his own.

As the four of them drank together, Ben Yakov laid himself bare without shame.

Not only had his marriage with Ilana fallen apart; the beautiful Lucia, tired of waiting, had left him too. She was spending the summer under the tutelage of a master architect in New York, and there were rumors that the architect had fallen in love with her and that she might be leaving the Ecole Speciale for a design school in Rhode Island. The rumors had arrived through a string of mutual friends. Lucia herself hadn't written to Ben Yakov since she'd left Paris.

At the end of the evening, after they'd spilled onto the sidewalk outside the Blue Dove, Andras volunteered to take Ben Yakov home. Rosen and Polaner clapped Ben Yakov on the back and expressed the hope that he'd feel better in the morning.

"Oh, I'll feel grand," Ben Yakov said, and the next moment he bent over beside a lamppost and sent a stream of vomit into the gutter.

Andras gave him a handkerchief and helped him clean himself; then he put an arm around Ben Yakov's shoulders and led him home. At the door there was some fumbling for a key, and as Ben Yakov searched he came dangerously close to crying. At last he located the key in his shirt pocket, and Andras helped him upstairs. The place looked exactly as Andras had imagined: as though the person responsible for making it habitable had departed weeks before. Dirty plates choked the sink, the geraniums on the windowsill had died, newspapers and books lay everywhere, and on the unmade bed there were croissant flakes and piles of discarded clothes. Andras made Ben Yakov sit in the chair beside the bed while he stripped the linens and replaced them with fresh ones. He made Ben Yakov take off his soiled shirt. That was as much as he could manage; the rest of the place saddened and daunted him. Worst of all was the little table with its empty teacups and its crust of bread: Andras recognized a tablecloth edged with forget-me-nots, Klara's wedding gift to the bride.

Ben Yakov crawled into bed and turned off the light, and Andras picked his way to the door. The ancient lock confounded him. He bent to it and fiddled with a rusted latch.

"Levi," Ben Yakov said. "Are you still there?"

"I'm here," Andras said.

"Listen," he said. "Write to your brother."

Andras paused with his hand on the doorknob.

"I'm not an idiot," Ben Yakov said. "I know what happened between the two of them. I know what happened on the train."

"What do you mean?" Andras said.

"Please, don't--don't try to
shield
me, or whatever it is you're doing. It's insulting."

"How do you know what happened on the train?"

"I

know
. I could tell something was wrong when they got here. And she confessed, one night when I'd said some cruel things to her. But it was already obvious.

She tried--to fight it, I mean. She's a good girl. But she fell in love with him. That's all.

I'm not the sort of man he is, Andras, you ought to know that." He stopped and said, "Oh, God--," and then pulled the chamber pot from beneath the bed and threw up into it. He stumbled to the bathroom in the hallway and returned, wiping his face with a towel.

"Write him," he said. "Tell him to come see her. But don't tell me what happens, all right?

I don't want to know. And I can't see you for a while. I'm sorry, really. I know it's not your fault." He got into bed, turned over to face the wall. "Go home now, Levi." His voice was muffled against the pillow. "Good of you to look after me. I'd have done the same for you."

"I know you would have," Andras said. He tried the stubborn latch again; this time the door opened. He went home to the rue des Ecoles, took out a notebook, and began to draft a letter to his brother.

The S.S.
Ile de France

ELISABET'S ELOPEMENT was not really an elopement in the true sense of the word; by the time it happened, Klara had known of her impending departure for months.

Paul Camden came to lunch nearly every Sunday afternoon in his quest to earn her trust and favor. In his slow French with its flattened vowels, he told Klara about his family home in Connecticut, where his mother raised and trained show horses; about his father's position as the vice president of an energy conglomerate in New York; about his sisters, who were both in school at Radcliffe and who would love Elisabet. But the problem remained of what Camden pere and mere would think of their son's returning home with a moneyless Jewish girl of obscure parentage. The best solution, Paul thought, was for the wedding to take place before they left for New York. It would be simpler to travel as husband and wife; once they reached America, the fait accompli of their marriage would make everything clear to his parents, whatever their objections. Paul believed they would welcome Elisabet once they'd gotten to know her. But Klara begged that they wait to get married until after they'd arrived, until Paul had revealed everything and had a chance to bring them around to the idea. If he married Elisabet without consulting them first, Klara was certain they'd react by cutting off their son. In any case, as a safeguard against that eventuality, Paul had begun saving half of the astonishing sum his father's accountant sent him each month. He had moved to a smaller apartment and begun to take his meals at a student dining club, rather than having them sent in by restaurants; he had stopped adding to his wardrobe and had bought used books for his classes. He had learned these economies from Andras, who had found him to be profoundly ignorant of the most basic principles of frugality. He had never heard of buying day-old bread, for example, and had never polished his own shoes nor washed his own shirts; he was amazed that a man might have his hat reblocked rather than buy a new one.

"But everyone will see it's your old hat," he protested, and then repeated the last words in English:
"Old hat
. In the States, it's a pejorative. It's what you call something predictable or trite or
demode."

"All you have to do is change the hatband," Andras said. "No one will know it's your
ohld het
. If you think anyone looks that closely at what you're wearing, you're mistaken."

Paul laughed. "I suppose you're right, old man," he said, and let Andras show him where a hat could be taken to be reblocked.

Often, on those Sundays when Paul came to lunch, Andras would see Klara retreat into watchful silence. He knew she was observing her daughter's intended, sizing him up, taking note of how he treated Elisabet, how he responded to Andras's queries about his work, how he spoke to Mrs. Apfel as she served the
kaposzta
. But she was also watching Elisabet. There seemed to be a kind of urgency in her watching, as if she had to record every nuance of Elisabet's existence. She seemed acutely aware that these were the last days her daughter would live under her roof. There was nothing Klara could do to stop it; Elisabet had been on her way out for years, slowly but unmistakably, and now she would be gone for good, across the ocean, into a fledgling marriage with a non-Jewish man whose parents might not accept her. To make matters worse, there at the same table sat Ilana di Sabato, newly divorced: evidence of how a marriage between two very young people might go wrong. Ilana sat in lonely despair, hardly touching her food; she'd cut her gorgeous dark braid at the nape of her neck when she'd married Ben Yakov, and her hair clung forlornly to her head like the kind of close-fitting cap that had been fashionable a decade earlier.
Old hat
, Andras thought. It was painful to look at her. He had not yet received a reply to his letter, and didn't want to speak to her about Tibor until he did.

Elisabet would sail at the beginning of August, and many things had to be prepared for the voyage. Her clothes were a schoolgirl's clothes; she had to assemble the wardrobe of a married woman. Paul insisted on contributing to the preparations, at first presenting Elisabet with the kind of extravagances he had only ever thought of as necessities: a linen tennis costume with a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes; a pearl necklace with a platinum clasp; a set of traveling cases made of fawn-colored leather, her initials stamped upon them in gold. Each purchase devastated the savings he'd accumulated by practicing the small economies Andras had taught him. At last Klara suggested, as gently as one could, that Paul might ask her how the money might best be spent. Elisabet needed things like cambric slips, nightgowns, walking shoes. One of the fillings in her teeth had to be replaced. She wanted her long hair cut into a short style. All of these things cost money and took time. When Andras left in the evenings, Klara would always have her sewing basket out; he imagined her as a kind of Penelope by proxy, each night tearing out the work she'd done so that Elisabet would never have to marry. It terrified her, she'd told him, to think of Elisabet setting out across the ocean while Europe stood on the brink of war. It was not uncommon for civilian ships to be torpedoed.

Couldn't Elisabet wait another few months at least, until the situation in Poland had quieted down and the problems with the Anglo-French Mutual Assistance Agreement with Russia had been resolved? Did Paul and Elisabet really have to sail in August, that month when wars traditionally began? But Elisabet had insisted that if she waited, France might indeed go to war; then the journey would be impossible. The subject had sparked arguments that had brought Klara and Elisabet close to emotional collapse. Andras had the sense that this was their last great opportunity to demonstrate their love in the way they'd practiced most, through a struggle in which neither party would yield and neither could win, a conflict whose subject was not the matter at hand but the complicated nature of mother-and-daughterhood itself.

On the rare nights when Klara came to him at his garret during those weeks, she made love to him with an insistence that seemed to have nothing to do with him at all. He had never imagined he might be so lonely in her arms; he wanted her unfocused eyes to settle upon him. When he stopped her once and said, "Look at me," she rolled away from him and broke into tears. Then she apologized, and he held her, unable to suppress the selfish wish that this would all be over soon. On the other side of Elisabet's departure was the fulfillment of the promise they'd made last fall: They, too, would be married, and would live together at last. In her grief over the loss of her child, Klara had ceased to talk about what would happen once Elisabet was gone.

...
21 July 1939

ModenaDear Andras,

I am sorry, truly sorry, to hear that the marriage between Ilana and Ben Yakov has ended
so sadly. It grieves me to consider the role I may have played in their unhappiness. If
regret could mend that error, it would have been undone long ago
.
When I first received
your letter I thought I couldn't possibly cometo Paris. How could I face Ilana, I asked
myself, knowing how I had wronged her? Love insists upon its own expression; it tells us
it is right simply by virtue of being love. But we are human beings and must decide what
is right. My feelings for Ilana were so acute that I failed to govern them. I hardly deserve
a second chance to prove myself her friend; still less to plead my case as a lover
.
But,
Andraska--and perhaps you'll consider me a scoundrel for saying so--I find that my
feelings for her are unchanged. How my pulse raced when I read that she'd asked after
me! How it moved me to hear that she'd spoken of me with tenderness! You know me too
well to have mentioned these things lightly; you must have known what they would mean
to me
.
And so, finally, I am coming. I am ashamed, but I am coming. At least you'll never
have reason to doubt my constancy; neither, I hope, shall Ilana. By the time you receive
this letter I will have reached Paris. I will take a room at the Hotel St. Jacques, where
you can find me on Friday
.
With love,