The Imposter Bride Page 3

  “What kind of work is this for a man like you?” Bella began to ask. An endless parade of coloured buttons, and Joseph a man who had once tempered the steel that built bridges and ships.

  Joseph couldn’t explain it. Not to Bella. Perhaps not even to himself. “It’s calming,” he said finally. More calming than the hot milk laced with rum that Bella prepared for him each night before bed. More calming than the prayer he had given up as a youth and resumed again now in the dark mornings before he left for work. He was a man who had thought he would not be able to go on after the deaths of his children, would not be able to find the strength to bear himself through his life. Forgive me that you and the child are not enough, he implored Bella, though not in words, never in words. He had found his reassurance, Bella understood, in the meaningless work he now performed. In the ceaseless turning of the conveyer belt: a reminder that life would continue with or without the strength of Joseph Kramer. She had not found it in her heart to forgive him.

  Who is that? she wondered now as she lifted her eyes from the past to look around the room. She had noticed the woman earlier; she was the only stranger in the room, she and her sulking daughter, whom Sol had just taken outside. Probably a relative of the Eisenbergs, who had been kind enough to host the bride after Sol’s misstep at the station. Everyone else in the room, though, Bella recognized. She had not done too badly, she thought, to be sitting here in a room full of people wishing her and her family well.

  “I wish your father were here,” she had told Nathan earlier, and she had meant it. There’s a force to life that sweeps you along, she thought now, as she watched her son dance with his bride. It was a force not unlike that of the guests who had swept her long ago to her wedding and her future. It would have picked Joseph up again if he had been given more time. It would pick Lily up too, Bella thought. Lily was stricken, Bella knew. She recognized grief when she met it. But she’ll come along. People come along. It’s the nature of our species to come along, she thought. Maybe this really would turn out all right.

  She rose from the empty table to join the dancing.

  CHAPTER 2

  The first package arrived on April 27, 1953. I remember the date because it was my sixth birthday. I had learned to read that year, so I could piece together the letters on the wrapping of the little box that the mailman had slipped through the mail slot. Ruth Kramer, I read. My name. And below it the address on Cumberland in N.D.G., Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, where we lived at that time, my father and me in the upper half of the duplex, and my aunt Elka and uncle Sol downstairs, with Jeffrey, my cousin, who was a year old then. I remember my excitement. I had never received anything in the mail until then. Not a letter, certainly not a package, and so nicely wrapped. The paper was sky blue with different coloured polka dots, and a patch of white like a cloud on the front where my name and address had been written.

  Elka was in the kitchen when it arrived. She was baking a cake for the party we would have that evening. My real party had been the day before, which had been a Sunday. All the children from my kindergarten class had been invited and they’d all come, except for one or two. It had rained the whole day, so the outside activities that Elka had planned were cancelled—the treasure hunt in the backyard, the game of Red Rover—but we’d played Pin the Tail on the Donkey and we’d watched a puppet show put on by my aunt Nina, who had recently moved back to Montreal from Israel, where she had been a famous actress, and we’d had cupcakes that Elka had bought specially from the kosher bakery because some of the children in my class were more kosher than we were and wouldn’t eat the cupcakes with the pink icing and silver sprinkles from Woolworth’s that were my favourite. The party we were going to have that night was just for family: me and my father, Elka, Sol and Jeffrey, Elka’s mother Ida Pearl, and my grandmother Bella. Nina wouldn’t be at this party because she lived downtown and was very busy.

  It was still raining—the rain hadn’t stopped in two days—which is why I was playing inside instead of in the yard or on the street with Murray or Steven, who lived next door. The package was sitting on the floor by the front door with the other mail that had come that day. I didn’t usually pay attention to the pile of letters that lay scattered as they had fallen from the mail slot until Elka picked them up and put them on the table in the front hall, but the sky blue package caught my eye.

  When I saw it was for me, I brought it to Elka. To make sure it really was for me, I suppose. Or that I was allowed to open it.

  Elka was just putting the cake into the oven. The bowl with the last bit of batter was already on the kitchen table for me to lick clean, though she would insist I use a spoon to do that because we didn’t live in a barn.

  I held out the package to her.

  “What’s that?” she asked. She examined it closely, gave it a little shake. There were stamps in the upper right corner. One was of a Canada goose taking flight. “It came in the mail?”

  I nodded. “Can I open it?”

  Elka had a thing she did with her mouth when she was thinking—a bit of a twist. She did that now.

  “Let’s wait for your father to get home.”

  SOL ALWAYS ARRIVED HOME from work at five thirty. He was the head of sales for a company that sold buttons. The evening of my sixth birthday was no exception. He came in the kitchen door, which was the back door but the one closest to the driveway, took off his hat and coat and hung them on the hook by the door. He kissed Elka, then picked me right up out of the kitchen chair where I was colouring with the new set of crayons and colouring book that one of my friends had given me the day before.

  “How’s my angel?” he asked. He always asked that. “My birthday angel. Ooow. You’re getting to be so big now, soon I won’t be able to lift you.”

  I told him about the present that had arrived for me and the way he said “Another present?” made me think it was he who had sent it and that it was a bell for the new bicycle—a two-wheeler with training wheels—that he and Elka and my father had given me for my birthday.

  In the commotion of Sol coming home, my cousin Jeffrey had pulled himself upright in his playpen, which was in the corner of the kitchen beside the table. He was bobbing up and down as if jumping, but he couldn’t jump—he couldn’t even walk yet—and he was squealing. Sol put me down to scoop him up, and as he was kissing the rolls in Jeffrey’s neck, my grandmother Bella and Ida Pearl came into the kitchen from the front hall entrance.

  I got up from my chair to kiss them both, as Elka had taught me. They were both formal and didn’t like a lot of hugging or slobbering. Or noise. Or children, I sensed. But they had each brought me a present, small packages that Elka suggested I put beside my place setting in the dining room, which was where we were eating instead of in the kitchen, because it was my birthday. I put Ida’s and Bella’s presents beside my plate, and then I went to the front hall to get the present that had come in the mail and I put that beside my plate too.

  When my father came home he didn’t scoop me up or call me his angel the way Sol did. He wasn’t like that. I don’t know if we even said anything when we first saw each other at the end of each day. What I remember is the way he would touch my head, his hand half on my ear, half on my hair, and hold it there for a bit. Then he would ask if I had a good day or something like that. On that day, he probably asked if I was having a good birthday. I don’t remember his greeting. What I do remember is Elka telling him that something had arrived for me in the mail that day.

  What was it about Elka’s announcement that brought a sudden quiet to the room? I knew something important had happened and that it had to do with the present wrapped in polka-dotted blue that was now sitting with my other presents on the dining room table. I ran to get it and Elka didn’t yell after me No running in the house, which was also unusual, and when I showed the gift to my father, he nodded the way Elka had. I saw Bella and Ida look at each other.

  “Can I open it?” I asked.

  My father looked at Elka and Sol. El
ka and Sol looked at my father.

  “After supper,” Bella said. “With the rest of your presents.”

  I don’t remember what we ate, what we talked about, the wish I made on the candles. Bella gave me a book, I’m sure. She always gave me books. That year’s could have been 1001 Riddles for Children. (The books she gave me were always a little too advanced for me.) Ida’s present was a bell for my new bicycle. I rang it a few times to show her how happy I was with it. And the present in the blue wrapping? When I took off the wrapping there was a little box from Birks jewellers. There was a card too, but I didn’t look at that. Elka reached for the card, while I opened the box. I lifted the layer of cotton that lay over the top, and there, sitting on another layer of cotton, was a pink rock.

  It was a beautiful rock. Smooth and shiny on top, and almost transparent in places, with jagged little nooks on the underside. A beautiful rock, yes, but it was still just a rock. I was disappointed, and wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it. I lifted it out of the box to show it to everyone. No one seemed excited. No one said anything, in fact.

  “South shore of Gem Lake, Manitoba, 08:45, April 12th, 1953, clear, 31 degrees F, light wind,” Elka read out loud from the card that had accompanied it. Not a birthday card with balloons on it like the one that had come with my new bicycle, but an index card of the sort Elka used to write down recipes she found in magazines.

  “Let me see it, Elka.”

  That was my father, asking for the card. He read it. He let out a big breath of air.

  Did I already know who had sent it? There was an excitement growing in me as I held the stone. There was something about the way it fit into the palm of my hand, a warmth, as if there were a light bulb inside it.

  “Can I see it?” Ida asked. She was talking to me and referring to the rock.

  I didn’t want to give it to her, was afraid she wouldn’t give it back. I was afraid I wouldn’t be allowed to keep it, just as I hadn’t been allowed to have the rifle I had seen in a toy store. But neither was I allowed to disobey adults. I handed it to Ida. She looked at it the way I had seen her look at jewels in her store.

  “Quartz,” she said. She offered it to Bella, who shook her head.

  Elka took it, and looked at it.

  “Who’s it from?” I asked. Did I already know?

  “It’s from your mother,” my father said, and as he spoke the words I became a different person.

  All my life I had been a girl without a mother. She had left soon after I was born, and no one knew where she had gone. She had not stayed in touch, she would never be back. In a way it was as if she had never existed for me. I didn’t miss her, had never missed her. I would not have known what to miss. Her absence was more a background to my life than anything else. It was a given, a stable fact of life that was definitional, not dynamic, like the hole in the centre of a bagel, without which a bagel would be something else—a dinner roll, maybe, a challah—but which is in and of itself static, not dynamic, certainly not an active force that might exert its own momentum on the dough.

  Now, though, I had a mother. She had been at Gem Lake, Manitoba, fifteen days earlier. It had been cold, but clear. There had been a light wind. She had seen a pink rock and picked it up. And when she did, she thought of me.

  I could see her pick it up, though I had never seen her before—there were no photos of her in our home. She was dressed in a long black coat with high-heeled boots and a matching black hat with a little half-veil. It was a glamorous look, more suitable for an evening at the theatre in Montreal, perhaps, than an outing to some lake in Manitoba, but it was the first view of her I had ever had, in my mind or anywhere else. I saw her by a lake that looked a lot like Beaver Lake in Montreal at that time of year: half covered with slushy-looking ice, the ground around it bare with patches of old, dirty snow, the trunks of the surrounding trees expanding at the tops into intricate webs of bare branches. She bent to pick up the rock—it must have been the colour that caught her eye, the only pink in all that white, brown and grey. She held it in her hand—that only bit of pink in the whole world around her. She thought of me. My birthday was coming. She must have remembered. My sixth. She slipped the rock that made her think of me into her pocket to take it home. And then she sent it to me.

  “Can I keep it?” I asked.

  My father looked at me. Had I missed something? Had there been a conversation while I was lost in my daydream?

  “Of course you can keep it. It’s yours.”

  It’s mine, I thought. He had said it in front of everyone at the table. Elka was still holding it, but she gave it back to me then. Because it was mine. From my mother. And now, for the first time, I wanted more.

  I KNEW THE STORY about how my mother had left, because neither my father nor Elka and Sol believed there was any reason that I shouldn’t. They had talked about that often, I later learned: over coffee late at night at my father’s apartment on Côte-des-Neiges in those first months after she left, over smoked meat sandwiches and cherry Cokes at Levitts on the Main. They had planned how they would deal with the issue of my mother having left, how they would talk to me about her in a way that was honest and natural, how they would answer any questions I might have, assuming that they could. Their own parents hadn’t been that way with them, but they would do things differently—in a better way—with me.

  On that principle they had each recounted their own version of my mother’s departure, from which I, in turn, had created my own, the main point of which was that one afternoon during the second month of my life my mother had walked out the front door, ostensibly for a quart of milk, and simply not returned.

  Elka had been over. My mother had invited her for coffee. It had been a nice surprise, that invitation, because Elka had thought until then that my mother didn’t like her. (My mother was sad, my father told me, and often when people are very, very sad it’s hard for them to act friendly all the time. She was sad because her whole family had died in the war.) It was a warm day in June, one of those days when the house fills with warm, heavy air and opening the windows doesn’t help because the air outside is just as warm and heavy. My father and mother lived on the third floor, and the stairway to their apartment was even warmer than outside. Like an oven, Elka said. She was sweating so much by time she climbed to the third floor that she had to stand outside the door for a few minutes to try to cool down, because it’s not nice to arrive somewhere dripping with sweat. It’s also not nice to arrive anywhere, ever, without a little gift for the host or hostess, so Elka had made sure not to arrive empty-handed. She had a rag doll for me—the one Bella had just sewn up for me when her belly split open and her stuffing started falling out—and flowers for her hostess, irises that she had bought at the florist next door to her mother’s jewellery shop. “May Flowers,” Elka elaborated. That was where we still bought our flowers every Friday afternoon those eight months of the year that we couldn’t cut them from our own garden.

  My mother welcomed Elka with a kiss on both cheeks. “That’s what they do in Europe,” Elka explained. She also thanked Elka for the doll and flowers. “She was always very polite, your mother. You could tell she’d been well brought up.”

  “Please,” my mother said, indicating the couch in the living room where Elka should take a seat as my mother went into the kitchen with the flowers to arrange them in a vase. There was a cake on the coffee table, which surprised Elka, she had to admit. My mother wasn’t much for cooking or baking. There were evenings … and here Elka hesitated, but it had to be said. For the sake of honesty and full disclosure. Quite often my mother would slice a tomato and a couple of hard-boiled eggs, place them on the table with a pitcher of iced tea and call that dinner, Elka revealed. (Quite often when people are very, very sad they lose their appetites and it’s hard for them to eat, my father said.) “It’s possible she had servants growing up,” Elka said.

  Elka didn’t have a seat. She went over to the crib by the window, where I lay sound
asleep like a little doll. That’s how I seemed to Elka, at that time: like a little doll, perfect and beautiful. My mother brought the flowers into the living room, placed them on the coffee table beside the cake, smiled at Elka, and then went back into the kitchen to put the coffee on. She may have exclaimed when she opened the fridge, may have slapped her head for dramatic effect, may even have made some comment about her own absent-mindedness. Elka was too noisily cooing at me to hear what was going on in the kitchen, did not become aware of my mother again until she re-emerged from the kitchen apologizing for her forgetfulness. She had run out of milk, she explained, and would have to dash across the street for a minute to buy some.

  “I can go,” Elka offered.

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “When I invite you for coffee I don’t send you out to buy your own milk. Will you be all right with the baby for a few minutes?”

  (She may not have said it exactly like that—she was from Europe and had only been in Montreal a year by then. But she also might have, because she was an expert at languages, even English. On that point everyone in my family agreed.)

  Elka was a little nervous to be left alone with me. She had never been alone with a baby so young before. With any baby, actually. “You’ll never have that problem,” Elka assured me. Because of Jeffrey, she meant. I’d been helping her take care of him since he was born. “She’ll be fine,” Lily assured her. Me, she meant. “I just fed her before you got here.” Elka nodded and said that she too would be fine. And so my mother put on her hat with the veil that covered half her face, pulled on the long gloves without which she never ventured out into the sun, tucked her purse under her arm and left.

  And at first everything was fine. I slept. Elka waited. She was sure it wouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes or so. But fifteen minutes passed, then a half-hour. I was still sleeping, but Elka was beginning to wonder what was keeping my mother. Maybe there was a really long lineup at the store, Elka told herself. Maybe there were a few other things my mother had to get once she was out. But finally, when a whole hour had passed, Elka knew something was wrong. She called her mother, who did not say Don’t worry. She said she would be right over, though it took her an entire half-hour to close up her jewellery shop and make her way over to the apartment, by which time I was awake and crying and Elka was crying too and my mother had still not returned with her quart of milk.