Bridal Chair (24 page)

She taught him the recipe for “Automat wartime lemonade,” adding the free slices of lemon to cold tap water. He pronounced it delicious and she smiled. Everything he tasted was delicious. Everything he saw was
wunderbar
, wondrous.

They went to Central Park where the trees wore the tender leaves of early spring, the newly blossoming forsythia glowed golden in the sunlight, and on the playground, children scrambled merrily across jungle gyms and raced toward swings and seesaws.

“A country at war, a city at peace,” he murmured, and there was admiration rather than bitterness in his voice.

One afternoon they strolled through the halls of the Museum of Modern Art where she showed him two of her father’s lithographs. They bought pretzels from a street vendor. Grains of salt glistened on her lips and he wiped them off, smiling benignly. In Coney Island, they rode the Ferris wheel and hugged each other with the delight peculiar to small children. Neither of them had ever before ridden on a Ferris wheel.

Ida went to hear him speak at fund-raising rallies and applauded vigorously. She noticed that the same two bored-looking young men, wearing identical cheap gray suits, their hair cut short, turned up wherever they went.

“FBI agents,” he explained. “They think that I am a spy. Do I look like a spy, Idotchka?”

She thought for a moment, took off his glasses, and replaced them. “A very plump, nearsighted spy, perhaps. But spies are never plump and nearsighted. They’re supposed to look like Clark Gable or maybe Humphrey Bogart,” she said.

“Who is this Clark Gable? Who is this Humphrey Bogart?” He waved his hand dismissively.

“A good spy would have to know who they are,” she said sternly, and they both laughed.

At a party in Harlem, handsome Paul Robeson embraced him.

“We are together in this war against racism,” the tall, muscular black singer said. “Your people and my people have much in common.”

“But Robeson’s people aren’t getting gassed,” Ida murmured as they left.

“He is a good man. Naive, like all Americans, but essentially good,” Itzik retorted.

In the Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway, he ordered borscht and kasha varnishkes and spoke Yiddish to the elderly waiter whose hands trembled when he brought them a platter of onion rolls for which he refused payment.

Itzik broke off pieces of the roll, which he fed to Ida.

“You are my little bird,” he said. “I am feeding my little bird.”

“That is what my father used to call me,” she said. “In fact, you are very like my father.”

He laughed.

“No. I am, in spite of everything, a happy man. Your father, in spite of his good fortune, is a melancholy soul.”

“I think more discontented than melancholy,” she protested. She doodled on the paper place mat, wrote her name, Itzik’s name, her father’s name, and encased them in a jagged square.

“But, of course,” he added, “we are both passionate about you. In very different ways.” All lightness left his voice. “Can I say that much to you, Ida?”

He looked hard at her, as though to memorize every contour of her face—the arch of her eyebrows, the curve of her lips, the subtle gold the spring sunlight had brushed across her skin. She did not flinch from his gaze. She matched it with her own. Their eyes locked. He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. She trembled and leaned toward him, aware of the sudden hardness of her breasts, the tympanic beat of her heart.

They took the subway uptown and walked across Broadway to his small hotel.

“Room three forty three,” he told her. “Wait five minutes and then come upstairs.”

She waited then walked through the small lobby, her head held high, her step determined. She entered the small room and walked into his open arms. He undressed her swiftly, knowledgeably, a careful paternal lover who folded her blouse so that it would not crease and draped her skirt over the chair. She unbuttoned his shirt, stroked the graying hair of his chest; he slipped his trousers off and she marked the narrowness of his hips although he had the round stomach of a middle-aged man partial to food and drink. Her father had the beginnings of such a paunch, she thought absently as she stretched out across the narrow single bed.

He traced her body, each touch of his fingers tender and restrained. He kissed her gently, now on her forehead, now on her cheeks, and then, with a swift surge of daring strength, on her lips, his tongue entering her mouth even as he plunged deep into her welcoming and compliant body.

He was a swift and skillful lover, his cry of triumph exultant. “
Meine
liebe
maidele
,” he said in Yiddish as he lay back in exhaustion against the pillow. “My beloved little girl.”

The endearment was poignantly familiar. Throughout her girlhood, in the quiet of the night, she had heard her father say those very words to her mother, his voice penetrating the thin walls that separated their rooms.

She rested her head on his chest, fingered the strands of gray hair that covered it. She had taken a lover who was as old as her father, who shared his background, and she understood, with sudden clarity, that that was why she had chosen him. The new reality they shared banished her dark and dangerous fantasies.

“Idotchka,” he murmured.

“Don’t call me Idotchka,” she said peevishly. “I am not a child. I am a woman, a married woman.”

“Yes. Of course. You are married.”

“In my own fashion,” she said, tossing his words back at him.

They were inseparable for the rest of that summer. They spent long afternoons in his small hotel room. He came and went from the Chagalls’ apartment as though it was his own home. Bella mended the pastel shirts he favored, the pink ones that matched his cheeks, the pale green ones he selected with great care, the color close to the celadon of his eyes. Marc and Bella welcomed his presence, listened avidly to the stories he told in the languages of their childhood. He assuaged their loneliness, soothed their longing. They praised Ida for helping to make his stay in New York pleasurable. They did not speak of the obvious closeness between their daughter and their old friend.

Michel arrived one evening at the dinner hour and slid with ease into his own chair at the table. He smiled at Itzik, asked him questions about events in Russia, and invited him to be interviewed on a Voice of America broadcast.

“Perhaps you could mention that you were pleased to meet the son of your old friends, the Rapaports, here in New York,” he suggested. “I know, of course, that you never met my parents, but it might be a way of letting them know that I am alive.”

“I would be pleased to do that,” Itzik agreed. “I am not opposed to telling the occasional white lie when it can do some good. Deception is one of my talents.”

Ida dropped her fork. It clattered against her plate, but neither her husband nor her lover glanced at her, lost as they were in a heated political debate. Itzik argued that Churchill was bluffing when he warned the Axis that an intensive Allied assault would soon be launched. Michel insisted that the British prime minister rarely bluffed. The Allies were advancing; the second front was successful. Sweden reported that women and children were being evacuated from Berlin.

“We are winning the war,” Michel said.

“But the Jews have already lost it,” Marc countered bitterly.

Itzik and Michel shook hands cordially at the door. Itzik, as always, kissed Bella’s hand and placed his hand lightly on Ida’s head.

“I knew your wife when she was a beautiful little girl,” he told Michel.

“And now you know her as a beautiful woman,” Michel replied and pulled her close.

“He is very charming, this Itzik Feffer,” Michel said when he and Ida were alone in her room, seated beneath the painting of
The
Bridal
Chair
.

“Yes. Everyone says so,” she answered carefully.

“He is very like your father, don’t you think?”

“Yes. I suppose he is,” she said softly. “He is a very good poet, Itzik Feffer.”

She turned away so that he could not see her face, but he heard the tenderness in her tone as she said the name.

“You must be careful, very careful.” His voice was heavy with concern. He drew her close and she rested her head gratefully on his shoulder. It was Michel, she acknowledged, who understood her, who discerned her secret yearnings, her nocturnal fears. He intuited her feelings for Itzik, but he did not resent them. His silence was eloquent. They had reached a new crossroads in their odd and ill-starred marriage.

“I am careful,” she assured him. “He leaves New York in October.”

“Another chapter closed,” he said.

She nodded.

He looked up at
The
Bridal
Chair
and wondered who would take possession of it when he and Ida parted. That time would come, he knew. He would be sad, she would be sad, but their hearts would not be broken. They would always and forever remain connected.
The
Bridal
Chair
would be Ida’s. He would never want to own an artifact of a wedding at which he, the bridegroom, and Ida, the bride, had been reluctant ghosts.

Ida slept in his arms that night and she did not dream.

* * *

Itzik prepared for his return to Russia as an autumnal chill spread across the city. Bella made a farewell dinner in his honor. A bowl of autumn foliage was her centerpiece. The brilliant red and gold leaves, so brittle and vulnerable on their slender branches, matched her mood. She wore her favorite green velvet gown and frowned when Ida swept into the room in a dress of bridal white, a spray of baby’s breath wrapped around her long braid.

“White is for summer,” Bella said reprovingly.

“White is for when I choose to wear it,” Ida replied. She did not tell her mother that Itzik loved to see her dressed in white, that he had more than once presented her with a white flower for her hair, a camellia or a lily, that inevitably lay nestled between her breasts in the peaceful aftermath of their coupling.

The dining room was crowded, the table laden with platters of pirogen, tureens of borscht, bowls of compote, the foods of all their childhoods. Michel did not attend. Ida noted that he had never arranged for the promised interview with Itzik.

The invited guests were the Yiddish- and Russian-speaking artists and writers, Marc’s coterie of intimates in exile. New York was their Babylon, Paris their Jerusalem. The women wore the gem-colored velvet and satin gowns of another continent, another era. Their husbands smelled of liquor and tobacco, neither of which erased the sadness in their eyes. They offered extravagant toasts to Itzik and lifted their glasses; they proclaimed their commitment to peace and friendship, to brotherhood and solidarity, then downed the vodka in single gulps. Itzik, as always jovial and smiling, his cherubic face pink with pleasure, thanked them for their hospitality and generosity. He turned to his hosts and beamed.

“I thank you for all that you have done for me,” he said. “We will see each other again when peace is restored.”

He walked around the table and kissed each of them in turn. Ida sat very still as his lips brushed her cheek, as he lifted her braid playfully. She loved him and hated him for his joviality. He was anticipating his return to Russia. She was dreading his departure from her life.

Gifts were exchanged. Itzik gave them specially bound copies of his poems. Marc gave him a charcoal drawing of Ida.

“I will treasure this. I will always treasure it,” Itzik said.

“Of course you will,” Marc said.

Ida wondered how much her father knew, how much he had guessed. Whatever his speculation, he would not share it with her mother, that dutiful daughter of Vitebsk, forever concerned with convention and respectability.

It was Bella who walked Itzik to the door. She wept as he embraced her one last time.

“Will I ever see you again?” Bella asked plaintively. “Will I ever see Europe again?”

“Strength, Belloshka. Strength,” he said and bowed his head.

The door closed behind him, and Ida and her parents stood in silence, a trio of lonely mourners whose last comforter had departed.

“Itzik never answered me,” Bella said softly. “Because he knew. He knew that I will never return to Europe. Poets see the future.” Unshed tears glinted in her eyes as she walked slowly into her bedroom.

Ida cleared the table, weeping as she worked. Her father touched her shoulder, but she brushed his hand away.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said bitterly. “I am always fine, am I not?”

“You are,” he agreed. “And you are strong.”

She turned away and opened and closed the book that Itzik had given her. He had not inscribed it. She lifted the glass that remained at his setting and licked the clear beads of vodka that clung to its rim.

Bella’s sadness deepened as the seasons drifted by and the war in Europe continued unabated. She remained indoors except when Ida persuaded her to leave the apartment for short walks. She worked for hours on the memoir, writing with a febrile verve, her pen racing across page after page as though she were in a race against time. She wrote and revised, wrote and revised, working until she was exhausted, and then fell onto her bed and turned her face to the wall, willing herself to an evasive sleep. She drank tonics in pursuit of strength, but weakness overcame her. Marc, once again painting furiously, paid her little attention.

Ida returned home on a May evening to find Bella in bed, still wearing her faded nightgown, her face parchment pale, dark circles beneath her eyes, her black hair oily and uncombed. Manuscript pages littered the night table; the cup that had contained her morning coffee remained half full and the single slice of toast that Ida had placed there in the morning was cold and stiff as cardboard.

“Have you been in bed all day?” Ida asked, her voice trembling with both fear and anger.

“I was too tired to get up,” Bella said. “Too tired to work. Too tired of life.”

She pointed to the scattered pages, words blotted, paragraphs crossed out.

“The words do not come, and when they do, they do not say what I want them to say,” she continued. “I am writing through a fog, struggling to write of that which is no longer. Vitebsk is gone. I see it only as a shadow.” Her voice lilted in the cadence of a sorrowful prayer.

“But Vitebsk has been liberated. The tide of the war has changed,” Ida said impatiently.

“Yes, I know. But what does that liberation mean to me, Idotchka? What is left of my father’s house, of the synagogue where your father and I were married? Is the Hotel Brozi still standing, do farmers still sell their produce in Padlo, our poor little market square? Last night I dreamed that brides, still in their wedding dresses, sat shivering around a fire. Their bodices were torn, a symbol of mourning, because they were widowed only minutes after they became wives. They sat amid the embers of the synagogue, the embers of the bridal chair. Why should I have dreamt such a dream? What does such a dream mean?”

Ida knelt beside the bed, took Bella’s hands in her own, and struggled to find words of comfort.

“It was only a dream. It means nothing. You are exhausted because you have been working too hard. You are doing your best,
Mamochka
, as you always do. And your best is wonderful. You are a good writer, a marvelous storyteller. I still remember the stories you told me when I was a little girl. Your book will be important. When you are rested, the writing will come easier. Give it time.” She spoke with a certainty she did not feel, but Bella grew calmer.

“But do I have time?” Bella asked. “I think that the embers of my dream are the words I need to kindle the burning lights of my story. But I cannot reach them. I am too weak, too tired.” She leaned back against the pillows, her face as white as the counterpane.

“Soon you will be strong enough,” Ida replied, and very gently, she helped Bella out of bed.

She eased her into the shower, startled by the pallor of the flesh that hung so loosely on her skeletal frame. She sponged her milky skin, shampooed her dark hair, and helped her into the colorful robe Marc had bought in Jerusalem, a garment he had said was fashioned for a Semitic queen. Ida had recognized the narcissistic implication of his words. If Bella was a queen, then he himself was a king, and Ida was, of course, a princess.

“Tomorrow,
Mamochka
. Everything will be all right tomorrow,” Ida promised.

Softly, she repeated the lying mantra. She knew, as Bella knew, that nothing would be all right, not ever again. Fighting her own tears, she heated a pot of soup, ladled it into a bowl, made sure that Bella ate it, and then sought her father out in his studio.

She saw that he had been working for hours. The room was harshly lit, and streaks of varicolored paint ribbed his oversized shirt. Bright droplets had rained down from brushes impatiently shaken, speckled his cheeks, and rimmed the edges of his thick gray curls. Oblivious to her entrance, he stood motionless before his easel, absorbed in his work. She waited until he lifted his brush and dipped it into the puddle of aniline black on his palette then leaned closer and stared at the work in progress. He had painted Bella, her face deathly pale, her eyes wide with fear, her body mysteriously attached to a sleigh. Ida watched as he deftly wafted his brush and darkened the hair to the exact jet shade of Bella’s layered bob. Suffused with anger, she lurched forward and planted herself in front of the easel.

“You should be taking care of
Mamochka
, not painting her,” she shouted harshly.

He turned and looked at his daughter, his gaze desperate rather than angry.

“I try,” he said sadly, placing his brush carefully in a jar of turpentine. “Do you really think me so heartless, so uncaring, Idotchka? I go to her and she closes her eyes. She turns away from me. She says she is sick. She says she is weak. I have no medicines to give her. It is this war that sickens her. What can I do for her, Ida? Can I end the war? Tell me what it is I must do and I will do it.”

She heard the naked pain in his voice and spoke more softly.

“She needs to go out, to leave this apartment.”

He sighed. “She does not want to go out. She hates the city, this New York with its noise, its crowded streets. You know that yourself. Everyone hurrying on their way to nowhere. The cars with their headlights painted black, the newsboys shouting the headlines of this battle, that battle. She cannot bear to see the gold star banners in the windows of the apartments. Every star means death and she imagines weeping mothers, keening wives. She told me that she can hear the screams from the death camps. And I believed her. Sometimes I hear them too. Sometimes I think that I myself am screaming. She says that the very air she breathes in this New York chokes her. Can I rebuild New York so that my Bella can walk down quiet streets?”

He sat down, his shoulders hunched in defeat, and lifted his paint-stained shirt to his face. His voice broke. He, the great Marc Chagall, wept.

Ida glanced around the studio, focusing on the watercolors balanced against the walls, the series of landscapes in gouache. Scenes from Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks, the sylvan enclave where her parents had vacationed the previous summer. She had spent a few days with them there. Bella had been happy there. They had strolled together beneath the birch trees beside the shores of the sparkling lake that reminded both her parents of the Western Dvina River in Vitebsk. The answer to her father’s question came to her. He had to take her mother back to the quiet of the forest, the beauty of the gentle lake. Peace and beauty were what her mother craved.

“This is what you must do,” she said with quiet certainty. “You must take her back to Cranberry Lake. She herself said that the countryside in the north reminded her of Russia, of her family’s dacha. She will feel the cool mountain breezes, walk in the shade of the trees, the quiet of the forest. She is sure to feel better there.”

“All right. We will go to Cranberry Lake,” he agreed, but there was no hope in his voice.

He turned back to his painting.

* * *

Bella was resistant. She complained that the long car ride was tiresome, claustrophobic. She had felt ill during their journey the previous year.

“It was as though I were in a coffin,” she said. “As though I was being driven to my own burial. I am not yet dead. Soon but not yet.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Ida retorted. “A car is a car, not a coffin. Don’t indulge yourself with such foolish ideas. I have found a wonderful hotel. Everything will be done for you. Your meals, all the housekeeping. Fresh linens each day, and you know how you love the scent of sheets that have been dried in the summer air.”

Bella nodded.

“The sheets in my mother’s house always smelled of sunlight,” she said dreamily.

Ida sensed triumph and spoke more quickly.

“Think of the cool winds, think of the wonderful woodland. Think of the lake, your Western Dvina River here in America.”

“But what of my work?”

“You can take your work with you. You can take your pens, your ink, all your manuscripts. They sell writing paper in the Adirondacks,” Ida assured her, coaxing forth a smile and, at last, reluctant acquiescence. They left the city, Bella weeping, Marc’s face frozen into a stoic mask of acceptance.

* * *

Ida remained in New York. She had her classes, her volunteer work, invitations to dinners and to parties. She was once again in pursuit of gaiety.

She had felt oddly emancipated since Itzik Feffer’s departure. She would never regret loving him. He had gifted her with a latent vibrancy, awakened her to the excitement of sensuality. Their togetherness had been a catharsis, a release from forbidden yearnings. Her girlhood had ended with Michel. Her womanhood had begun with Itzik.

Newly aroused, newly confident, she lived at a frenetic pace. She went to parties and basked in the admiration of young officers, danced until dawn with men she would never see again. She slept late each morning, her curtains drawn against the new brightness of June sunlight.

She was deep in such a late morning slumber when the ringing of the phone jarred her into wakefulness. It was Michel, his voice electric with excitement.

“It’s happened. It happened this morning. D-Day, Ida! Allied troops have landed on Normandy. Europe is going to be liberated. We are going to win this damn war!”

“Oh, Michel. Is it true? Tell me it’s true.” Trembling, she clutched the phone.

“It’s true. I heard Eisenhower’s broadcast. Thousands and thousands of ships, planes, American, English, Canadian, all on the attack. De Gaulle himself is in London. They say that within months, perhaps within weeks, all of France will be free.
Vive
la
France
!”

His voice broke and she knew that he was weeping. All of France included Nice, where his parents might still be alive.

“
Vive
la
France
,” she repeated as her own tears fell.

“I will call again when I can,” he assured her. “It will be difficult because I will be broadcasting nonstop today. Pierre is flying to London to meet with Free French leaders. I may go with him. Everything is uncertain.
Au
revoir
, Ida.”

“
À bientôt
, Michel. Be careful, stay safe,” she rejoined, but the phone was already silent.

She called Marc and Bella, who had heard the news on the hotel radio.

“How long will it take until Paris is liberated, until it is safe for us to return home?” Marc asked excitedly. “As soon as that happens, we will go back to France, your mother and I.”

“Home. Home to Paris,” Bella added in a quivering voice. “Think of it, Ida. We will see our Paris again.”

“The invasion has just been launched. It will be some time before Paris is liberated,” Ida warned. “But we are on our way to victory. Our France, our Paris, will soon be free.”

“
Vive
la
France
,” they said in unison.

Ida called Elsa, who was joyously effusive. She knew only that André was somewhere in Europe. The invasion meant that the war would be over sooner rather than later and he would be demobilized.

“Your parents must be ecstatic,” Elsa said.

“They are strangers to ecstasy, as you know. Pessimism is what they know best. But yes, they are happy. As happy as they know how to be,” Ida agreed.

She went to the window, looked down, and saw that the boats sailing down the Hudson had hoisted American flags to their masts. Men and women, meeting along Riverside Drive, embraced each other. A young girl hurried up to a GI, offered him a full-petaled rose, and planted a kiss on his astonished face.

Tears filled her eyes. She wept for all the young soldiers who would never feel a young girl’s lips against their cheeks, for all the gold star mothers whose mourning would never end. She wept for the Jews of Europe, for the aunts and uncles and cousins she had never known. And then she dried her eyes, dressed quickly, and hurried to the hospital. The war was not yet over. There was work to be done.