Great House (20 page)

We fought, though what we said, exactly, I can't now say, since in our arguments what began as something direct always, deflected by Yoav, became indirect. It only ever occurred to me afterwards: he had talked about something, reasoned with me about something, defended himself against something without ever really addressing or even naming the thing at all. But this time I dug my heels in and carried on. In the end, exhausted, or at a loss for further strategies, he grabbed my wrists, forced me down onto the sofa, and began to kiss me hard enough to silence me. Sometime later we heard the front door open and then Leah's footsteps on the stairs. I pulled up my jeans and buttoned my shirt. Yoav said nothing, but even then the pained look on his face filled me with guilt.

Weisz stood in the tiled entryway in polished shoes holding a
walking stick with a silver handle, the shoulders of his wool overcoat shiny with rain. He was a diminutive man, smaller and older than I'd imagined, scaled back in all dimensions as if occupying space at all were a compromise he'd accepted but refused to embrace. It was hard to believe that this was the man who wielded such authority over Yoav and Leah. But when he turned his face in my direction his eyes were live, cold, and piercing. He spoke his son's name, but his gaze didn't leave me. Yoav hurried down a few steps ahead of me, as if to intercept any conclusion his father might draw, or preempt it by a few quick strokes in a private language. Weisz took Yoav's face in his hands and kissed his cheeks. The emotion in it struck me; I'd never seen my own father kiss a man, even his own brother. Weisz spoke quietly to Yoav in Hebrew, turning back to glance at me—something to the effect of having intruded on something, I assumed, because Yoav hurried to deny it, shaking his head. As if to atone for this grievous misunderstanding, he helped his father off with his coat and took him gently by the arm to guide him further into the house. During all of this, Leah stood off to the side, as if to make clear that this little unfortunate incident, this mistake standing awkwardly in untucked shirt and sneakers on the stairs, involved her not at all.

This is Isabel, a friend from Oxford, Yoav said when they'd arrived at the stairs, and for a moment I thought he might keep walking, leading his father away down the hall, as though there were a houseful of guests to introduce him to, and I, by chance, the first. But Weisz let go of Yoav's arm and stopped in front of me. Not knowing what else to do, I stepped down off the stairs like some sort of clumsy debutante.

It's so nice to meet you at last, I said. Yoav has told me a lot about you. Weisz winced and took me in with his eyes. My stomach contracted in the silence. And yet he has told me nothing at all about you, he said. Then he smiled, or rather lifted ever so slightly the corners of his mouth in an expression that could have been either kind or ironic. My children tell me so little about their friends, he said. I
glanced at Yoav, but the man who only minutes before had been fucking me with such force had been transformed into something meek, subdued, almost childlike. With slumped shoulders he studied the buttons of his father's coat.

I was just leaving to catch a bus back to Oxford, I said. At this hour? Weisz raised his eyebrows. It's pouring out. I'm sure my son would be kind enough to make up a bed for you, won't you, Yoav? he said, without taking his eyes off of me. Thank you, but I really should be going, I said, because by now I'd lost all interest in sticking around to take a stand. In fact, I had to suppress the instinct to flee past Weisz and out the door, back into the world of streetlamps, cars, and London crosswalks in the rain. I have an appointment tomorrow morning, I lied. You'll take an early bus, Weisz said. I glanced at Yoav for help, or at least some guidance as to how to extricate myself without causing offense. But he avoided my eyes. Leah was also absorbed in staring at something on the cuff of her shirt. It really isn't any trouble to go tonight, I said, but weakly, perhaps, because by now I worried that to continue to protest might seem rude, and because I had begun to sense just how difficult it was to refuse their father.

We sat in the living room—Yoav and I each in a high-backed chair, and Weisz on a pale silk sofa. The walking stick with the silver handle, a ram's head with curled horns, rested on the cushion beside him. Yoav's gaze remained fixed on his father, as if being in his presence demanded all of his focus and concentration. Weisz presented Leah with a box tied in ribbon. When she opened it, a silvery dress fell out. Try it, Weisz insisted. She carried it off draped over her arm. When she returned, transformed into something lithe that shimmered and reflected light, she was carrying a tray with a glass of orange juice and bowl of soup for her father. You like it? Weisz demanded. Eh, Yoav? Doesn't she look beautiful? Leah smiled thinly and kissed her father's cheek, but I knew she would never wear it, that it would be relegated to the back of her closet with all of the other dresses her father had bought. It struck me as strange that, with
everything Weisz seemed to know about his daughter's life, he hadn't yet understood that she had no interest in the extravagant clothes he always bought for her, clothes for a life she didn't lead.

While he ate, Weisz asked his children questions to which they replied diligently. He knew about Leah's upcoming recital, and that she was now working on a Liszt transcription of a Bach cantata. Also that one of her music teachers, a Russian who'd taught Evgeny Kissin, had taken a leave of absence and been replaced by another. He asked about the new teacher, where he came from, whether he was good, whether she liked him, and listened to the answers with a gravity that struck me—listened, it seemed, with the suggestion that if his daughter's answers had implied anything less than her complete contentment, those responsible would have him to answer to, as if, with a single phone call, a dangled threat, he were capable of arranging for the poor new teacher to be sent away, and for the departed Russian, recovering from a breakdown in the south of France, to be forced back into service. Leah went to lengths to assure her father that the new teacher was excellent. When he asked her whether she had plans for the weekend, she said she was going to a birthday party for her friend Amalia. But I had never heard of any Amalia, and in all my time at the house I'd never known Leah to go out to any parties.

There was little of his children in his elongated, sagging features. Or if there had once been, it had been distorted beyond recognition by all that had happened to him in life. His lips were thin, the watery eyes hooded, the veins in his temples lumpy and blue. Only the nose was the same, long, with the high, curved nostrils that were permanently flared. If Yoav and Leah's auburn hair had come from him it was impossible to say: what was left of his was thin and washed of color, combed back from the high, smooth forehead. No, the burden of his inheritance was not easily detectable in his children's faces.

Satisfied with Leah's answers, Weisz turned to Yoav and asked about the preparations for his exams. Yoav's answers were fluent and polished, as if he were reciting something he had composed in
anticipation of such an interview. Like Leah, he made every effort to assure his father that things were going as well as they could, that there was no cause for alarm or worry. Listening to him, I was amazed. I knew perfectly well that Yoav thought his tutor was an arrogant fraud, and that the tutor, in turn, was threatening to put Yoav on academic probation if he didn't turn in some tangible evidence of the work he claimed to be doing. He lied with grace, without the slightest hint of guilt, and I wondered whether, if the need arose, he could lie like that to me. But worse than that, as I watched Weisz hungrily spoon the soup into his mouth holding the utensil between his long crooked fingers, I was filled with guilt about the lies I'd been telling my own parents. Not only about all of the wonderful things I was supposedly doing at Oxford, but that I was there at all. Exploiting my father's constitutional inability to pass up a money-saving deal, I made up a story about a cheap method of calling the States using a special phone card. In this way, I'd orchestrated it so that instead of their calling me every Sunday, I called them. They were creatures of habit, and I knew they wouldn't break from ritual unless something was wrong. To be sure, I called my answering machine on Little Clarendon Street every night. Thinking of them as I sat before Weisz, how they must have waited anxiously by the phone each Sunday morning, my mother at her station in the kitchen and my father in the bedroom, I felt a gnawing regret and sadness.

At last Weisz wiped his mouth and turned to me. A trickle of sweat slid down the hollow in my chest. And you, Isabel? What do you study? Literature, I said. An odd smile cracked across his bloodless lips. Literature, Weisz repeated, as if he were trying to put a face together with a name he knew from long ago.

During the next quarter of an hour Weisz interrogated me about my studies, where I came from, where my parents were from and what they did, and why I had come to England. At least those were how the questions were worded, but in truth (or so I believed) the words out of Weisz's mouth were only a code for something else he wished
to uncover. I felt as if I were trying to pass a test whose requirements were hidden from me, and struggled for the right answers, feeling that with each fanciful arrangement of the truth I was further trampling the love and dedication of my parents. I had lied to my parents, and now I was lying about them. Weisz took the shape of their representative, the counsel assigned to the poor and downtrodden who can't be relied on to defend themselves. As we spoke, all the sad and noble furniture in the room fell away, the Bavarian grandfather clock and the marble table, even Yoav and Leah, and all that was left in that cold and cavernous space was Weisz and me, and somewhere, hovering on a higher plane, my wronged and injured parents. He makes shoes? Weisz asked. What kind of shoes? From the description I gave of my father's business, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Manolo Blahnik came on bended knees to my father when in need of someone to manufacture his most extravagant, complicated designs. The truth was that he produced the uniform shoes for nuns and Catholic schoolgirls in Harlem. As I went on exaggerating my father's business, imbuing it with glamour and prestige, a memory came to me of an afternoon spent in my grandfather's old factory, which my father had carried on overseeing until it was run into the ground, and his only choice was to become a middleman between Harlem and the belching factories of China. I remembered how my father had hoisted me up to sit at his giant Herman Miller desk, while on the other side of the wall the machines clattered nervously under his command.

That night I slept in a narrow cot in a small room down the hallway from Leah's bedroom. I lay awake, and now that I was alone I was overcome first by humiliation, then fury. Who was Weisz to interrogate me, to make me feel I had to prove my worth? What business was it of his who my family was and what my father did for a living? It was bad enough that he cowed his own children into such a pathetic position, rendering them unable to strike out in their own lives. Bad enough that he had succeeded in coercing them into a form of
confinement of his own design, a condition they didn't resist because it was not within the realm of possibility for them to refuse their father. He ruled over them not with an iron fist or a temper, but rather with the unspoken threat, much more haunting, of the consequences of even the slightest discord. Now I had appeared to challenge Weisz's order, to unbalance the delicate triangle of the Family Weisz. And he had spared no time in making clear that I was wrong if I thought Yoav and I could go about our relationship without his knowledge or consent. What right did he have? I thought angrily, tossing in the narrow bed. He might be able to control his children, but I wouldn't allow him to bully me. Let him try: I wouldn't be frightened off so easily.

As if on cue, suddenly the door creaked open and Yoav was on me, coming at me from all sides like a pack of wolves. After we'd finished with every other orifice, he turned me over and forced himself into me. It was the first time we'd done it like that. I had to bite my pillow so as not to scream out at the first thrust. When it was over I fell back asleep against the heat of his body, a deep sleep from which I woke alone. Whatever I'd been dreaming receded, and all I could remember was finding Weisz hanging upside down in the pantry like a bat.

It was almost seven in the morning. I got dressed and washed my face in the child-sized Victorian sink decorated with pink flowers in Leah's bathroom. Tiptoeing down the hall, I paused in front of her room. The door was ajar, and through it I could see the enormous virginal white canopy bed, a bed as large and majestic as a ship, and thinking of it so I imagined her sitting aloft it in flooded waters. Standing there I suddenly knew that it, too, must have been a gift from her father, one that carried the same subtle message about the sort of life he expected her to live. She never brought home friends, though surely she must have had some at the college. Nor had I ever heard her make reference to a boyfriend, past or present. The demands her father and brother made on her loyalty and love left any
outside relationship with a man almost impossible. I thought of the birthday party Leah had invented the night before. I hadn't understood the point of such a gratuitous lie, but now I wondered whether it was her only way of resisting her father.

Yoav was still asleep in his bed on the floor below. My fury from the night before had abated and with it my confidence. I wondered again how long our relationship could last. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Weisz won. I'd forced Yoav into the first battle with his father over me and no sooner had he entered it than he had forfeited, grown pliant like a little boy, and then come at me in the dark with teeth and claws. The image of the hanging Weisz returned to me. Does one ever get free of such a father?