All Other Nights (10 page)

It was a sunny Saturday morning, and he and Philip were returning from the synagogue—or more accurately, from the little rented house near the bakery that served as one. Philip was hardly the sort to attend services regularly, but that week it was the anniversary of his wife’s death. The entire household seemed to droop. Even the girls had curbed their usual exuberance, their movements and chatter in the front room limited, quieter, as if they were aware of another person seated in the room with them, watching and judging. When Philip mentioned where he would be going that morning, Jacob offered to join him, and was delighted to see Philip actually smile at the prospect. During the service Philip seemed cheered by his presence, though the entire morning was difficult for him. Jacob listened as he stammered through the mourner’s prayer.

But now they were on their way home, and Jacob’s attempts at small talk had failed. In the silence, he had finally dared to broach the subject.

“About Eugenia?” Philip asked. He looked up at Jacob briefly, then continued walking. “Don’t tell me she’s been embarrassing you.”

“What do you mean?” Jacob asked, as innocently as he could.

“I suspect you’ve noticed by now that Eugenia has a certain fondness for embarrassing everyone in sight,” Philip said, his voice fierce. “Me in particular, of course. No one has any idea how much I’ve done for those girls. And Eugenia is completely intent on destroying everything I’ve ever tried to do for her.” He was walking with his hands low at his sides, but Jacob saw how he had balled his fingers into fists.

Jacob thought of what Jeannie had said, how her father had never trusted her, how she and he disagreed about everything. But he had to proceed. He swallowed, and dared. “Then perhaps you would be pleased to know that I would like to take her off your hands,” he announced. “Mr. Levy, I would be honored to have your permission to marry Miss Eugenia.”

Philip was stunned. He stopped walking, and turned to face Jacob. “You—you can’t possibly be serious,” he stammered.

“Of course I am,” Jacob replied.

Philip turned red. “You must be out of your mind.”

This was not exactly the reply Jacob was hoping for. He paused, thinking it through. It had not occurred to him that a strategy would be required. But nothing at the Levy house had gone as he had expected. “It seems that I have approached this with a somewhat different perspective,” he said delicately.

“Do you intend to get behind that other fellow, William William Williams the Ninth?” Philip spat.

“Oh, Eugenia isn’t interested in him,” Jacob said, with a smile.

Now Philip paused. “You think she’s merely leading him along somehow,” he said, eyeing Jacob. “Rather unlikely, if you ask me. Though I suppose a young man is entitled to his delusions.”

“No, I don’t think she’s merely leading him along,” Jacob said brightly. “I
know
she’s merely leading him along. She’s made that quite clear to me.”

Philip’s back straightened, almost imperceptibly so. Jacob saw his opportunity, and seized it. “Mr. Levy, I think that your daughter Eugenia is a beautiful, bright, talented young lady,” he said, “and I hope that I may be privileged to take her as my wife.”

“You’re mad,” Philip said, and kept walking. But Jacob could see, creeping through his blushing face, the tiniest of smiles.

Jacob kept pace beside him. “Mr. Levy, if there is something about me that displeases you, I hope you will be forthright enough to tell me so,” he said. In a moment of sudden panic, he wondered if Philip somehow knew.

“Other than the insanity of your plans, no,” Philip huffed. “Frankly, I just think you need to know what you’d be involving yourself in. Eugenia is not an ordinary lady.”

“I am quite aware of that,” Jacob said. Then he added, at considerable risk, “And I hope you don’t believe that I am an ordinary man.”

Philip pushed his pince-nez back up on his nose, then stopped walking again. He looked up at Jacob, considering him. The pause was long, almost unbearable. At last he spoke.

“The real shame,” he said, “with this awful war, is that your parents won’t be able to come to the wedding.”

Jacob was quite surprised to find tears gathering in his eyes. Philip took him by the shoulders and kissed his cheeks. Philip’s own face had become wet with tears.

“I don’t know if my wife would have loved what has become of Eugenia,” Philip said, “but I know that she would have loved you.”

Jacob ought to have been disgusted with himself then. But at that moment, he persuaded himself that it was true.

T
HE WEDDING PLANS SOON TOOK ON A LIFE OF THEIR OWN. THE
officers would have preferred that the marriage be immediate, but Jacob had proposed in the thick of summer—days, for Hebrews, of mourning the destruction of ancient Jerusalem; there were three whole weeks when the wedding was forbidden to take place. The girls were thrilled about the delay; it gave them more time to gossip, to plan, and to add names to their father’s list of invited guests. But Jacob grew more and more nervous.

The messages from the bakery since his betrothal had been pleased, but expectant.
FAILURE IS TREASON
, he was reminded. In his head he heard the three officers endlessly repeating:
We doubted your trustworthiness at first. But you are impressively reliable, Rappaport. Clever. Convincing. Devoted to the cause. We know we may depend on you for anything. With no exceptions.
He heard their smug laughter behind him each time he touched her. And theirs was not the only presence he sensed. When he sat beside her in the front room, he imagined that he saw her mother watching him, immobile and silent, beside the patched wall near the door. His nights became exquisite, repulsive, fear and desire dissolving together into liquid dream. In his dreams he would pull a bridal veil back from her face like a curtain and reveal, to his revulsion, the face of Harry Hyams, vomiting black bile. He dreamt of their wedding night, of trying to remove her gown, his hands unsteady between her shoulderblades as he undid an excessively complicated series of buttons, panting as he freed her body from its bonds. But when the dress loosened, her flesh finally visible and shimmering in lamplight, he saw papers dropping from beneath her skirt like molted skin. He crouched on the floor to retrieve them and found that they were his own letters from the command, still damp with her sweet sweat. He woke as she laughed in his face.

One day during those three weeks, Philip sent Jacob back to the house in the middle of the day for some important papers he had left behind in his study. At first as Jacob walked toward the house, he anticipated a visit with Jeannie, his blood humming within him. Only as he stepped into the silent house did he remember that the girls had gone off to the dressmaker to find patterns for Jeannie’s wedding gown. The boarders were out as well. He was in the Levy house alone.

It occurred to him to search the sisters’ rooms for evidence, but he had done that several times and had discovered nothing but novels, magazines, pots of face powder, clutches of hairpins, innocuous letters from cousins somewhere in Mississippi—and the far more haunting and delectable evidence of petticoats, stockings, garters, girdles, knickers, corsets. If the sisters had secrets more intriguing than their undergarments, they had hidden them beyond his reach. Instead he hurried through the front door and on to Philip’s study. Then he noticed something resting in the corner of the front room, the corner that Jeannie had consecrated with their first kiss. It was a riding crop, with a delicate carved handle, and something about it looked familiar to him. Then he recognized it: it was the wooden handle Phoebe had made, for William Williams.

The cur, of course, had not dared approach the house while Jacob was home since Jeannie’s engagement; at least he had the sense for that. But the mere presence of this object in the house alarmed Jacob, enraged him—and his heart pounded as he understood that William must have left it in the house deliberately, when no one was home, as some sort of sign for Jeannie.

He looked around the room, considering. The girls had planned to visit the dressmaker at noon; at the moment it was only a quarter past. Looking around once more to be sure no one was home, he hurried into the corner and took the riding crop in his hand. Carefully he unscrewed the handle. There, in the hollowed-out space that Phoebe had whittled, he found precisely what he expected—a rolled-up piece of paper, a letter, for Jeannie. He read it through:

The entire letter unnerved him. The man was a rather awful correspondent, for one thing. Jacob was nineteen years old and had never written a love letter of his own, but if he were writing one to Jeannie, he liked to think that he would have had the dignity to congratulate her and be done with it, without sobbing all over the page and dragging in her vengeful God. The idea of “Eternal Tarnation” almost made him laugh out loud, and he suspected that Jeannie would find it rather amusing too. If she and he and the rest of the unconverted Hebrews were really going to hell, he thought, at least they would know a lot of people there.

But what disturbed him most was the very last phrase after William’s signature, “A parrot’s pappy.” Clearly it was some sort of private pet name. The idea of the two of them sharing pet names with each other nauseated him. He was about to tear the letter to shreds when he looked at it again.

A scrap of paper was sitting on the secretary desk in the front room, with one of Rose’s charcoal pencils beside it. He sat down in the chair by the desk, seized the pencil in his hand, and printed across the paper, in large block letters:

A PARROT’S PAPPY

He looked at the words for a moment. Then he began moving the letters around, recording every attempt at a recognizable word below the phrase:

STOP, PAPA, OR, PRY, APART, PARTY, TRAP, ROT, PAY, TOP, STORY, TRY…

He kept trying, and came up with quite a few possibilities, but it quickly became tedious. It occurred to him that he needed Rose’s help, though he could hardly ask for it. Then he remembered Rose once screaming something, a lifetime ago, the moment he first arrived at the Levys’ house.

He crossed out the words he had scribbled at the top of the page and wrote out:

RAPPAPORT

Then he looked at the letters that were left. He didn’t need to try all the possibilities this time. The answer glared at him like Jeannie had the very first time he saw her. He wrote the remaining four letters slowly, until their meaning sliced the page open like a gleaming knife:

RAPPAPORT A SPY.

His heart stopped.

When he regained his senses, he considered his options. The wedding was still ten days away. Clearly he needed to flee. But for reasons he didn’t allow himself to understand, he knew that he wouldn’t. Instead he held the letter in his hands, along with his page of scribbled words, and walked, slowly, as if in a trance, toward the kitchen.

The worn rugs on the impeccably swept wooden floor gave way to splashed bare boards and rutted red bricks beneath his feet. He had almost never been in the kitchen before. It was the Levy girls’ domain, and he could sense their recent presence there, the room’s surfaces moist and expectant. As he crossed the threshold and stepped onto the wet floorboards, he breathed in the smell of them, the sweet ripe scent that rose in delicate threads through the air, laced through the odors of stove polish and soot.

He struck a match from his pocket and incinerated the page of scribbled words at the back of the stove. Then, holding the letter, he moved, hypnotized, toward a wooden tub resting on a bench in the corner, filled with a thin skein of clear water. He dipped a finger into the water and held it above the letter like an ancient high priest sprinkling blood, watching as the drops fell on the words beneath the signature of William Wm. Williams, III. He rubbed the water gently into the paper until the script beneath the signature dissolved, transformed into a stain of tears shed by William for his beloved lost Jewish girl. He placed the letter back inside the handle of the riding crop, gathered the requested papers from Philip’s study, left the house, and hurried back to the office, where the father of his bride was waiting for him.