Evergreen (84 page)

Still, Paris was what it was the first time. It pleased her that the room had the same view and that there were tall gladioli in the lobby. With delight she heard again the sound of the language, crisp sound of taffeta, ripple of water plunging into water. She watched the people going in and out: businessmen walking briskly, carrying their briefcases; women with poodles in rhinestone collars, patient little animals yawning under the tea tables.

Laura arrived. Darling Laura! Thoughtful enough to have worn a dress, for which Anna was grateful. Although, to tell the truth, if she had appeared in that handsome lobby in her dungarees with the backpack, Anna would have been so overjoyed to see her that she would have forgiven her.

She wanted a bath. Like a waif, she exclaimed over the enormous tub in the enormous bathroom. She came out of it all fresh and fragrant with Anna’s bath oil.

“Nana, is it all right if I invite a friend to dinner?”

“Is it all right! I’ve been expecting you to. Several friends, if you want.”

“Just one. We’ve been traveling together all summer.”

“Fine. Do I know her?”

“Not her. Him.”

And that was how Anna learned about Robby McAllister.

Laura opens her eyes and blinks into glorious light. Her skin is moist and pink with sleep, like a baby’s when he wakes from his nap. And that boy, Anna thinks, that boy sees her like this every morning, takes it as his right, as if he owned her! Anna is outraged at the boldness of him and outraged at Laura.

Fool! Fool! Wrecking your life when you have everything and are too stupid to know you have it!

I sound like Joseph.

“Did you sleep well, Nana? I’m starved,” Laura says.

“Well, don’t take too long stuffing yourself. The driver will be here for us at eight-thirty,” Anna orders, hearing the sharpness of her own voice.

Laura gives her a strange look and says nothing. She dresses and eats a quick breakfast in silence.

The cemetery is on top of a hill. Having been guided through the kibbutz—nurseries, library and dining hall (here he walked, ate, worked)—past the cattle barns, the great, clumsy, gentle animals staring solemnly as they go by, they begin the climb.

It seems that everything you want to see in foreign countries must be reached by a mountain of steps. Still, she’s doing well enough, trying not to hold too hard to Laura’s arm.

“Careful, Nana,” Laura says. She has been told to watch out, that old women fall and break their hips and get pneumonia. Anna almost hears Theo’s warnings and cautions to watch for failing heart, exhaustion, stroke. The young must take care of the old.

But unbeknownst to the young, the old also take care of them. Anna has been watching Laura, never leaving her alone with the room waiter at breakfast or with male guides; guarding her against bold eyes and impertinences (there’s an old-fashioned word that you never hear nowadays: impertinence). Although to guard a girl who has tramped all through Europe with a boy she’s not married to does seem rather absurd, doesn’t it?

The graves lie in a level square of grass cut out of an evergreen grove. Laura finds the marker.

“What does it say?” Anna asks.

“Just the name and the dates of birth and death according to the Hebrew calendar.”

The guide says in English, “You know Hebrew, and your grandmother doesn’t?”

“In my time,” Anna replies, “the sacred tongue was for boys to learn.”

She tries to sort out what she feels. This is, after all, the true reason she has come so far. She remembers how she and Joseph spoke of coming here, how they dreaded the moment when they would stand where she is standing now.

“Did you by any chance know him?” she asks the guide.

“No, I wasn’t here then. But I heard about him.” His hands move in a gesture both rueful and fatalistic. “Our history is ongoing, you see. We need to remember our brave ones. And so on this place we all know about the American boy and what he did that night. Although it was a long time ago.”

It was almost noon. A voice calls in the barnyard and another briefly answers. Birds, which have been flurrying and whistling through the morning, fall still. Heat pours on the scrap of earth where Eric lies, and all over this hard-held land between Syria and Lebanon, whose very tree tops can be seen from where they stand.

“So terrible.” Laura speaks into the stillness. “So terrible, when he had finally found the place where he was happy.”

“He wouldn’t have stayed,” Anna says, with sudden knowledge. “He would have become disillusioned with this, too.”

“You surprise me, Nana. I should think you would have thought this was the right place for him.”

“No. He was looking for something. He would have spent the rest of his life looking for a place to belong, a perfect place, and never finding it.”

“Does anyone?”

“Find it? Oh, yes, some people never even have to look. Your grandfather was one. He was blessed that way.”

Laura’s mouth opens, as if to ask, “And you?” But she doesn’t ask it.

Anna stretches her hand out into the burning air. Blue veins and brown spots disfigure the hand, as with some disease. But it is only age. My flesh, she thinks, mine lying here. Joseph’s and that of his old mother whom, for no reason at all, I never liked. And Agatha’s. Delicate Agatha and her people with their cool, Gentile austerity. Out of that poor young pair, their love and their anguish, came this boy.

“I don’t understand very much,” she says out loud and clearly.

Laura and the guide turn to her in surprise. Then the guide says, “Your driver’s waving. It’s time to go if you’ve a plane to catch.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m coming.”

The others walk to the gate. With consideration and respect they leave her alone. Memorize it before you go: loose sweep of evergreen branches over the wall; two half-grown laurels at the right and a row of geraniums along the path.

Peace, Eric, son of my son, wherever you are and if you are. Shalom.

“It’s always sad to leave a place that’s so beautiful,” Laura remarks, “even when you’ve only been in it a few days.”

They are coming down out of the hills in late afternoon. Below lie the Mediterranean and orange groves cleft by a highway, along which traffic is speeding toward the airport.

“So it’s meant something to you, being here?”

“Oh, yes! You feel, you can’t help but feel, there’s something here. After thousands of years! It’s lasted so long, it gets to you. I didn’t think it would,” and Laura touches her heart.

“Yes,” Anna says. “Yes.”

“Nana, tell me something. I’ve been feeling that you haven’t said anything because you wanted harmony on this trip, but that you’ve been very angry at me all the same. Have you been?”

Anna turns to her. “I was. But I’m not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“It just all went away, the anger, hurt, or whatever you want to call it.”

“I’m glad,” Laura says simply.

As always, Anna sees both sides of the question. (Joseph used to complain that she never kept firm opinions.) She knows one thing, though, that you can’t live by slogans. What’s honest for one is a lie to another.

The main thing is to live. Foster life. Cherish it. Plant flowers and if you can’t pull the weeds up, hide them.

“L’chaim,” she says, speaking aloud for the second time that day.

The driver smiles through the rear-view window. “You’re right, Mrs.,” he says. “I’d drink to that if I had anything to drink. L’chaim. To life.”

It was not what anyone could call a “proper” wedding. Joseph would have been horrified for more reasons than one. Still, Anna thought, it’s very moving. Laura had wanted to be married in Anna’s garden and she hoped Iris’ and Theo’s feelings weren’t hurt, although they didn’t seem to be. But Iris had never brothered about a garden and Anna’s was lovely, the pears heavy on her famous espaliered trees, the phlox full-crowned in mauve and violet, and on the air a sweetness like cinnamon or vanilla, the bouquet of summer.

The judge was a woman, mother of one of Robby’s college friends. The two young people stood before her, hand in hand, he wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt, she in a long white cotton shift, with her red braids hanging over a white shawl. Like me as a greenhorn, Anna thought. Laura’s face turned up to Robby in simple worship. Just yesterday Iris had stood like that, her solemn gaze framed in lace. Robby began to speak the poem which they had chosen for their wedding service, while Philip played very softly on the portable organ.

“Oh the earth was made for lovers, for damsel and hopeless swain. For sighing, and gentle whispering, and unity made of twain. All things do go a courting, in earth, or sea, or air, God hath made nothing single but thee in His world so fair!”
“Emily Dickinson’s one of our favorites, Nana,” Laura had said. “You’ve read her poems, I’m sure?”

Flattering that her granddaughter had been sure! It just happened that she had read some, Emily Dickinson having been one of Maury’s favorites, too, along with Millay, Robinson and Frost.

Now Laura answered.

No one stirred. The judge began to speak. One wondered what the assorted guests might be thinking of all this. Iris had been terribly troubled, Theo not as much so, yet more than one would have expected from a man who claimed to have no beliefs and no allegiances.

“There’ll be none of us left at the rate things are going,” Iris kept saying. “And when I think of Papa I could cry.”

It was true. Joseph, watching his darling Laura married in such fashion, Laura for whom he had no doubt already imagined a stately wedding of the ancient tradition in the chapel he had built!

But Robby was a remarkable young man, and Joseph was dead. There was no fighting the times; it would be like fighting the tides to try. This was the way it always had been, in greater or lesser degree. Waxing and waning. Some stayed, some went.

For Robby’s people, conservative small-town folk standing quietly in their print dresses and white gloves, for them too this surely was not a first choice. But this was a different time and generation. People didn’t fight to the death for their first choices anymore.

Anna’s eyes roamed over the group, over the young New York girls with flat shoes, and long, straight hair. Their
faces were as unmade-up as in Anna’s own youth and as different from their fashionable mothers’ as it is possible to be. Full circle.

Ah, there were the Malones, come all the way from Arizona! He must be—let’s see, Joseph would be eighty-two, so Malone must be eighty-five. And Joseph always worried so about his health, always said Malone wouldn’t last.

Too bad that one had to wait for a funeral or a wedding to see people whom one didn’t see for years, or never had seen. She had seen the twins—twins again after two generations!—when they had visited Mexico in 1954, but Rainaldo and Raimundo had only been a little more than one year old.

Anna had had a letter a month before, enclosing, as always, snapshots of the increasing family. So many of them, generation after generation! Prospering, too, to judge by the façade of a house which looked more lavish than the ones they had visited, and those had been very handsome houses, indeed. Dena looked very old. The paper was splotched; her sight was failing. But she had wanted Anna to know that her granddaughter’s twin sons were going to be in New York on their way to Europe, and wouldn’t Anna like to see them?

So here they were, one of them speaking no English at all, the other just able to understand and be understood. They also spoke a little Yiddish, learned from their grandparents, but only a little, and Anna’s Yiddish was rusty enough. In their fine, dark suits with black velvet yarmulkes on their curly hair, they stood courteously and correctly. From where she was Anna could watch their dignified, skeptical expressions. She was ruefully amused. They were strictly Orthodox: what could they be thinking? Thinking it wasn’t a real wedding at all, no doubt.

“And so, by the authority vested in me by the State of New York—”

Man and wife. They kissed, as if nobody else were there. Oh, my! And then the congratulations and laughter, more kissing, and it was over. Darling Laura.

She’d wanted bare feet, said she liked the natural look of it in a garden. There had been such a fuss over that, Theo being the most scandalized. “How far out can you get?” Iris had wailed, Iris who was always the first to excuse the innovations of the young. Fortunately, a pair of sandals had come as a present from Steve, handmade white sandals, with a bag and belt to match. He was “into”—loathsome expression—leather handwork on the commune. And because Steve had made the sandals, Laura wore them, which had settled the matter, thank goodness.

Theo walked beside Anna into the house. “It was very lovely after all, Theo,” Anna said.