Reversible Error (18 page)

Karp felt again a familiar painful emptiness. He defined it to himself as missing Garrahy and the ability to speak his mind frankly to a man he respected, but at some level he understood that it was more than that, something injured and missing behind the deepest defense. Now, and unusually, he thought of his father. He would have to do something about his family. He was getting married, after all.

He imagined visiting his father, and his father's hot young wife, and telling them. His father would take him aside. "They got any money?" he would ask confidentially, meaning Marlene's family, feeling for the business possibilities. No? Then he would grin conspiratorially and say, "She's a good piece of ass, huh?" Money and sex, the twin poles of existence. He might also say, "Schmuck! Rich girls got pussy too," one of his favorite expressions.

Dan, the younger of Karp's two older brothers, would say the same thing, probably in the very same words. He had abraded his own personality into a pathetic clone of the old man's, in a suicidal search for a morsel of attention. Richard, the eldest, had gone off the other end, seeking purity in a return to the faith. Assuming that Rabbi Richie could even bring himself to see Butch the Apostate, Karp imagined himself sitting in his brother's musty living room, in which even the thick air had been passed as strictly kosher, and telling him that he was-the final infamy-marrying a shiksa. They would hear the blast in Tel Aviv.

So much for family. Karp shook his head, as if clearing it after a physical blow. Why did he have to be alone like this? He was going to be a father soon, for God's sake! What the hell did he know about being a father? What could he teach the kid? Shooting hoops? Cross-examination? He was the one who needed a father.

But this thought, which might have occasioned much profitable internal dialogue, and also explained a good deal about Karp's career thus far, was cut short by the arrival of the taxicab at its destination, a large apartment house on Central Park West.

"That's four-eighty," said the cab driver.

"Ground control to Butch," said Marlene. "We're here."

Karp snapped to, fumbled for his wallet, paid, and left the cab. Marlene looked up at him, a worried expression on her face, and squeezed his arm. "Where were you?"

Karp shrugged. He really didn't know. "Just tired, I guess. Let's go up."

The woman who opened the door was half Karp's size, and to Marlene's eye Sophie Leo-noff bore scant resemblance to her grandnephew. Karp immediately swept her up into a hug that raised her shiny little shoes several inches off the ground. She kissed him loudly on both cheeks.

"Uhh! What a monster!" she cried. "My ribs are broken. Come in, come in!"

She ushered them out of the dim hallway and into a large brightly lit living room. Karp made the introductions, and Marlene could now examine her hostess more clearly. The face bore the deep lines and pouches of seventy or more years, but the huge black eyes that shone from their deep nets of wrinkles seemed younger, humorous and sharp. She was heavily but carefully made up. Her hair was dyed dark red, and she wore it in a tight nest of permed curls.

On her thin frame she wore a marvelous dress of black silk, netted across the front and decorated with sequins, the kind they sell in the little appointment-only dress shops that dot the Fifties off Fifth Avenue.

Aunt Sophie also wore a simple string of pearls and a clinking assortment of bracelets and jeweled rings. A rich New York matron in a remarkable state of preservation, thought Marlene, and was preparing herself to undergo an evening in her patented nice-to-old-ladies persona, when she became aware of being subjected to a scrutiny sharper than the one she herself had applied.

Aunt Sophie had cocked her head back and was examining Marlene through shrewd and narrowed eyes, a quizzical smile playing on her lips. She fondled the material of Marlene's suit jacket briefly, felt the lining, then made a little turning motion of her hand, jangling her bracelets. "Turn around for me, dolling," she said.

Marlene rotated obediently. "A nice five," said Aunt Sophie. "Very nice. So tell me, when you're expecting?"

Marlene blushed and uttered an astounded laugh. Aunt Sophie patted her arm reassuringly. "Dolling, pardon me I'm calling a cat a cat. I was in the business. I made more wedding gowns than I got hairs left. You ain't the first, believe me."

Marlene looked at Karp, who was standing like a phone booth, examining the ceiling. "December," she said.

"That's nice," said Aunt Sophie. "I'll be a great-great-aunt, I should live that long." She clutched Karp by the elbow. "You, momser, come with me to the kitchen, you can help take out from the oven. I don't like to bend down so much, I maybe can't stand up straight again." To Marlene she said, "Make yourself comfortable, dolling. There's a bar there, have what you want. You could make me a little Scotch and soda with ice, denk-you."

The tiny woman hauled Karp away and Marlene walked over to the bar, taking in the living room as she did so. It was furnished in the taste of the late thirties, art-deco-painted furniture in beige and pale gray, bas-relief plaques featuring sharp-eyed women with their wooden hair carved in buns, a white baby-grand piano covered with photographs in silver and wooden frames.

The thick carpeting was beige, as were the walls, which held two large lithographs, framed and signed, one by Ben Shahn and the other by Picasso. Everything shiny and well-cared-for, without mustiness or fuss, as in the kind of museums where people actually live in costume among colonial antiques.

The bar was also a reminder of an age when the upper middle classes poured enormous quantities of hard liquor down their throats at every occasion in which more than two people were in a room for more than three minutes. Marlene made a Scotch for Sophie and a Coke for Karp. She restricted herself to a white wine, in deference to the Little Embarrassment.

Sipping her wine, she inspected the pictures on the piano, at first idly, then with fascination, as she realized they cast a hitherto unavailable light on the mysterious stranger to whom she had bound herself. Here were Aunt Sophie and another woman, in their twenties. Sophie, lovely as a young bluebird, was laughing, while her companion, less well-favored but still handsome, looked out at the camera suspiciously with a face full of unerring righteousness: Karp's ferocious late grandmother.

A wedding portrait from the thirties: a tall man, looking determined and confident, bearing Karp's wide cheekbones, and a beautiful woman with Karp's gray eyes, eyes that were not at all confident, in a beautiful, gentle, and introspective face. The dead mother and the estranged father. The thought exploded into her mind that all this was now growing within her body. It rocked her like the surf and she grew momentarily dizzy.

Her vision cleared, and she reached for another frame. Three boys, aged about eight, ten, and twelve, the youngest her own lover. The other two were showing the false smiles encouraged by commercial photographers; little Butch, in contrast, was holding out, just the ghost of a secret smile on his lips and his little chin defiantly raised. Unaccountable tears stung her eyes.

She dabbed at them and went on. A portrait of a continental-looking man with a pearl tie pin and an Adolphe Menjou mustache. Husband? Brother?

In a black ebony frame, a small sepia photo taken before the turn of the century, a large family in front of a farmhouse in summer, the men hatted and heavily bearded, the women in long white dresses, the boys in sidelocks, the little girls in pinafores. The Old Country. Marlene's grandmother had stacks of pictures like this one, from another Old Country. For the first time since she had begun with Karp, it came home to Marlene that the difference might be important.

The rest of the photographs showed a younger Sophie with other people, dressed elegantly in the fashions of the twenties and thirties, usually at cafe tables covered with food and bottles, and in the street, in trios and couples, clutching one another and laughing at the camera. The streets were in Europe somewhere-ah, it was Paris-the signs in French, a typical Metro entrance in one background.

Marlene smiled and inspected one of these photographs more closely. In this, Sophie was holding the arm of a sharp-faced woman with large intelligent eyes. With a start, Marlene recognized Colette.

Thus was Marlene's curiosity unbearably piqued, and after the excellent dinner, during which two bottles of an unearthly Montrachet followed the supreme de volaille down the hatch, oiling the tongues of the two ladies, while reducing Karp to grinning stupefaction, she brought up the subject of Sophie's speckled past.

"Colette, yeh," laughed Sophie. "Another size five. Yeh, yeh, of course, dolling, I knew them all. We was in New York, from Poland, me and my sister may she rest in peace, five years sewing, and I run off with a dencer. A bum, but from gorgeous, quel beau, you never saw. Then after-who knows?-a year, he ran off with a putain, who knows where?

"So, nu, I wake up, I'm in Paris, with no money, what I'm gonna do? Thank God, I could use a needle. I worked for Worth, for Mainbocher. Also, later, I had my own place on Rue Champollion.

"They all came to me, the actresses, the girlfriends, the writers. Why not? I was good and I was cheap. Ma petite juive, they used to say."

She giggled. "You know what I done? I had a friend, fancy-schmancy, tres beau mondaine, versteh's? A very fine lady. We used to go to the salons for the shows. I was the servant, the little mouse in the back. I would see the dresses. Then I would run back and buy material and take it to the shop and make the dresses. For my friend and her friends."

"You made them? From memory?"

"Of course, from memory-what you think? Every stitch, better than Dior and half the price. You couldn't tell the difference. That's how I met Max. Max, my husband, he should rest in peace. He had businesses in New York. When he found out what I did, he said, 'Sophie, this is millions here, what you can do. Make the dresses, cut patterns, I'll send them to New York, I got there people can make thousands with machines.'

"So I did, and he was right, we got rich. Cousu d'or! Every year, I would go back and forth, back and forth, boats, airplanes. All first-class. In Paris, at the George V all the time. And we got married. He said, why not mix business with pleasure? A mensch, aimable! That was Max. You would've loved him. Roger, you remember Uncle Max?"

Karp stirred, mumbled something, and resumed his grinning stupor.

"Our first season, he gave me this." Aunt Sophie stretched her arm across the table to show Marlene a bracelet on her wrist. It was a thick wide band of gold in the art-nouveau style, decorated with a line of jaguars running through a jungle. The jaguars' eyes were diamonds and the jungle was constructed of close-packed emeralds. Marlene examined the bracelet. "It's incredible," she exclaimed and then froze briefly. Just above the bracelet on the thin wrist was a line of blurred blue numbers: 75955. Below these, a tiny solid heart had been tattooed in red.

Aunt Sophie caught the change in expression. "Yeh, that. He begged me, he said, 'Sophie, don't go this year, I got a bad feeling. But me, what did I know from this? I forgot I was Jewish already. I went for the spring show in 1940, and bang, comes the Nazis. I'm caught. Two years I'm hiding. I'm sewing, I'm starving. Then I get picked up-don't ask! Un tour de cochon! I was in the camps two years, four months, thirteen days. I don't know the minutes. Also sewing, for the Nazis, they want nice clothes for the girls too.

"So. I got on my wrist a souvenir. I come back on the boat, Max is there. 'In my heart I knew you would come back,' he says to me. He wants me to get rid of this, but I say, no, we should never forget. But I put in this heart myself, to cover up, you know, the swastika.

"Roger, here, he was always interested, so interested. His mother, she should rest in peace, would say, 'Leave Aunt Sophie alone, she don't want to remember these times,' but he would ask. One time, cute! You could die from it. He brought out a little wet rag and soap. I'll clean it off, Aunt Sophie.' So he was scrubbing, scrubbing, and the more he was scrubbing, the more it wouldn't come off, and he was crying and scrubbing. You remember that, Roger?"

Marlene saw that Karp was now alert, not smiling, grave. "Yes, I do," he said.

Sophie went on. "He would ask me, how come they put the little mark across the seven like they make, and I would tell him, they're very careful, the Nazis, they don't want to mix it up with a number one, God forbid they should kill the same person twice." She laughed and shook her head.

"So, dolling… quel mignon! You was going to grow up and get those Nazis for your old Aunt Sophie. So tell me, Roger, what do you hear from Daniel and Richard? I never hear from them."

Karp and his great-aunt began speaking of family, reminiscences mixed with news of births, deaths, college graduations, professional success or failure, speculation about missing persons, the occasional maledictions on the clan's bums. Marlene sucked on the remains of the wine and listened to the hearthfire legends of the paternal Karps and the maternal Gimmels. It had not sunk in on her until this moment that Karp sprang from the same sort of limitless immigrant circus from which she herself had sprung, with its stars, its clowns, its humble shovelers-up after elephants.

That Karp had depths, she knew; she had never glimpsed before this evening the creatures that inhabited them, and was by turns fascinated and frightened, as she had been when studying the pictures on the piano.

Karp seemed so isolated as a man, so himself, a creature sui generis, that Marlene had let herself imagine that Karp's origins meant as little to him as they did to her: an interesting fact, an exotic spice; occasionally, as with the wedding preparations, a mild pain in the ass. She saw Karp as a perfectly melted New Yorker, as she was. Now it began to dawn on her that there might be a chunk of some more refractory metal buried in the melt, something ancient and hard as diamond.