Saving Grace (48 page)

Someone knocks on the door, and she starts, but it’s only room service. The waiter wheels in a table, pours the wine, palms his tip, and leaves.

The omelet is warm and good, but Gracie eats insensibly, lost in thought. What will she tell her son? She cannot lie to him. Though little remains of her childhood, the pain of being lied to is indelible.

The truth, however, is not hers to give. That night she reread her old diaries. They told her little, evoked nothing but pity and impatience toward the child who wrote them. What happened to her family went beyond personal tragedy; Jonathan’s disgrace was resonant with the falling-away of a generation. None of this, however, emerged from the journals, in which all is filtered through the prism of her adolescent angst. And that girl wanted to be a writer, Grace thinks mockingly, forgetting, for a moment, that she became one.

Grace writes fiction because fiction has form to it, fiction makes sense. Her books are political, set for the most part in the Middle East. Grace has never written about her father’s fall from grace, though her publishers have hinted on more than one occasion that such a book, even in the form of a
roman a clef,
would be welcome. The fall of Jonathan Fleishman has not been forgotten.

The idea exerts a powerful fascination, composed equally of attraction and repulsion. Now and then over the years, she’s played indirectly with the story, tunneling below and above and around it, like a mole faced with an impassable boulder, but her explorations went nowhere.

Gracie’s not a coward, but she’s no fool either. Writing is a process of naming things that may or may not have existed before they are named, but do after. (One may ask whether a tree that falls unheard in the forest makes a sound, but there can be no such doubt about a tree whose fall is witnessed.) Grace fears the application of that process to her family. As a mother, she recognizes magical thinking when she sees it; and yet she fears that to write their story would be to visit upon it another mode of reality, an even greater immanence. To write it, she would have to conjure up her father, her mother, even Barnaby. Such visitations are easier to invoke than to exorcise.

In any case, she doesn’t much care for the story’s conclusion, which offends her novelist’s sense of justice. If she
were
writing the story, it would end with the judge being so moved by Jonathan’s confession that she refused to send him to prison. The family would then draw together in a grand epiphany of reconciliation, the children cleaving to their father, the aged mother forgiving her son; and if Grace could find some way to bring Lily back from the dead, she would do that too. Gracie likes happy endings; she believes they provide more of a sense of closure than sad ones. In real life, too much is left unresolved; not every problem has a solution; and terrible mistakes go unrectified.

In real life, Judge Malina was affected by her father’s confession, but not enough to set him free. Nevertheless, she was charitable. Citing his confession, his obvious remorse, she sentenced him to three years on each count, to be served concurrently. In addition, the judge recommended early parole. Jonathan ended up serving less time than Michael Kavin, whose deal with the U.S. attorney netted him a two-and-a-half-year jail term.

Clara was devastated by Jonathan’s confession to crimes that, in her view, he never committed, and that even if he had, were not crimes at all. He was still her son and she loved him; she visited him in prison and befriended his guards, whom she bribed with home-baked babka and apple strudel; but honest, from-the-heart forgiveness was beyond her power to bestow. After Jonathan’s release from prison, Clara moved to Florida. They wrote, visited, but never again lived together.

An odd consequence of their breach (one that Gracie as writer would have scorned to use) was to throw Clara back on the other branch of her family. After Jonathan’s sentencing, she wrote to Yaacov, breaking a silence that had lasted decades. Her letter was reproachful: she blamed Jonathan’s confession on Yaacov’s quixotic long-distance influence.

He replied: “Where did he get the idea that money is so important you should do anything to get it? Not from me,” an outrageous allegation Clara could not allow to pass unanswered. Thus, after a hiatus of nearly forty years, they were quarreling again, a kind of geriatric War of the Roses that gave them both a little something extra to live for.

They all survived, each in his or her own way. Life does go on. When her first existence ended, Gracie fashioned a second; and if traces of the old remain, they are not, for the most part, the kind that require noticing. They are small things, like the care Gracie takes to keep her house bare, her dislike of burdensome acquisitions. She is one of the few for whom it truly is more blessed to give than to receive—not on moral or religious grounds, but rather because giving brings relief from ownership, whereas receiving is fraught with anxiety.

She visited her father in prison only once, early in his term. For thirty minutes they sat on hard benches and talked awkwardly. Gracie told him he looked well, surprised to find it true. Jonathan had regained some of the weight he’d lost during Lily’s illness; he seemed fit and relaxed, the tension around his eyes and mouth gone. But the sight of him in prison clothes upset her deeply. The ill- fitting coveralls diminished him, made him seem what he had never been to her, a man like any other. Gracie found it hard to look him in the face. When their time was over, he kissed her good-bye and asked her not to come back, but to get on with her life.

Grace could have argued. She could simply have disobeyed. Instead, she agreed and went abroad.

She wanted to be a good daughter, to support her father in his hour of need; but we cannot always be what we want to be. Her family had exploded. Grace had no more control over her life than a piece of shrapnel.

She flew to London and set out from there, tramping through England and much of Europe, working when she needed money, carrying her possessions on her back. Once she began moving, she couldn’t stop. From Europe she went to Africa, and from there she slowly made her way up the Sinai coast, through Egypt and into Israel, where she came to a sudden and profound halt. For the first full year of her stay in Ein Gedi, Gracie never ventured out of the region, much less the country, but rather burrowed her way deeper and deeper in. Tamar said it was all the same, the burrowing and the running; but the observation implied no criticism. She was deeply pleased that Grace had come back, and with nothing left to stand between them.

Micha was smug, certain she’d returned on his account. Yet it took him well over a year of unreasonably stubborn persistence to consummate the promise of their last meeting; and when Gracie finally did sleep with him, it was only to prove once and for all that he didn’t really want
her,
he just wanted to have her.

It didn’t work. She’d neglected to take account of her own reaction. Micha proved to be a wonderful lover. He lifted her out of herself, he made her forget her name. There was a whole side to Micha that came out only in bed, and Gracie fell in love with that side.

They stayed together. Eventually she moved into his room. The kibbutz acknowledged them as a couple. But Gracie wanted nothing to do with marriage. She had lived five years on the kibbutz (four of them with him), become a member in her own right, and published her first book before she consented to marry him. And even then, he told their friends, only half-joking, she agreed only to mollify Tamar, and with the understanding that he would remain in the army and she on the kibbutz. It was not the kind of marriage Micha had ever envisioned for himself. But he knew that in her own cautious way, Grace loved him; and he was content.

The waiter knocks, enters, and removes her tray. Somehow the omelet has been eaten, the wine drunk. Gracie lies on the bed and reads over her lecture, entitled “Politics and Fiction.” It is the same lecture she’s delivered in four cities so far, apparently to her listeners’ satisfaction, but now, knowing who will be listening, she reads more critically. It seems to her a paltry thing, bare-boned and passionless, nothing like her real work. Though she enjoys the traveling and, yes, the fuss and attention paid to the Visiting Author, she feels like a fraud. If her work were nonfiction, if it emanated from some area of expertise, that would be different. But novels, if they’re any good at all, invariably speak better for themselves than their authors can for them. After attending numerous lectures and readings by well-known writers, Grace had concluded that however brilliant their work, novelists themselves were rather stupid creatures who had much better stay home and write than go abroad and pontificate.

At last she puts the text aside and, turning out the lights, sinks into the darkness as if into a warm bath. In the vestibule of wakefulness and sleep, her children’s faces dance before her. She smells the dust on David’s hair, baby Talia’s sweet, milky breath. She drifts into a dream. It is children’s hour on the kibbutz, the time between the end of work and the start of dinner. Micha is home for the harvest. He enters the house in his blue work clothes, smelling of sweat and oranges, to shower and change and play with the children. These are precious moments and she does not take them for granted, not even in sleep; for Grace is her mother’s daughter, and there is that in her that waits and watches and does not presume.

Then Micha and David are gone, and Grace is with her daughter and Lily, who is seeing the child for the first time. Talia has fallen asleep. Her round head, too heavy for the plump little body, lolls against the side of her infant seat. Mouth open, she snores lightly. Grace watches her with a love so exquisite it hurts. Lily gazes adoringly over her shoulder. “All good things come to an end,” she says with a sigh.

“Not necessarily,” Grace answers quickly, and suddenly the dream ends and she wakes in a strange bed, soaked with sweat. Lily, more substantial in memory than in life, has evoked the fear that in Grace lies close to the surface. Once, when she was very young, she saw a movie about a young servant girl who feared she was turning into a witch. The harder she tried not to, the more witchlike she became. The movie had terrified Grace. Its vision struck the shore of her childhood like a bottled message from the adult world: that which we most dread, it said, we become.

The telephone rings. Eyes shut, Gracie reaches out for it.

“Good morning,” a man’s voice says.

“Good morning.”

“Shall I come get you? We could have breakfast.”

“No, thanks. I have to go over my notes.”

“All right,” he says reluctantly. “But afterward... ”

“Yes, yes; as we planned.”

She washes, dresses, and puts on her writer’s face. At two o’clock that afternoon, she sits on a stage in the auditorium of the State University at Albany, gazing queasily at a sea of young faces. Her hands are shaking, and her body is dank beneath her respectable author disguise. A distinguished-looking gray-haired man stands at the podium. Clumps of words pierce the fog of her panic. “Critically acclaimed...
 
new realism...
 
escape from escapism and brand-name minimalism...
 
political consciousness... ” He turns toward her and holds out his hand.

“I’m very proud to present my daughter, Grace Fleishman.”

She crosses the stage and stands beside him. “Laying it on a bit thick, Dad,” she murmurs. The microphone picks it up, and the audience responds with friendly laughter.

Ordinarily Gracie’s stage fright dissipates the moment she begins to speak. Her lecture touches only lightly on her own work, focusing instead on her elders and betters, her favorite writers: Nadine Gordimer, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Walker Percy.... This time, however, her father’s unseen presence saps her authority. Grace feels like an imposter.

She picks out a few faces from the crowd and concentrates on those. There’s a restless boy in the front row, who crosses and uncrosses his arms and legs every minute, an intense young woman in the third row who takes notes feverishly, a blond girl, glowing with hostility, who stands in the back. A red-and-white keffiyah is wrapped around her neck. That one will be heard from during the Q-and-A.

She recites her lecture by heart, feeling like a zombie, but when she finishes, the applause is sincere. Jonathan comes to stand beside her. He gives her an incandescent look, then turns to the audience and raises his hands for silence. “Ms. Fleishman will take questions now.”

Hands shoot up. Gracie points to the back: best to get it over with. The girl in the keffiyah takes a combative stance, legs spread, arms akimbo. “How do you reconcile your ostensible humanism with your choice to live in a racist country?”

Gracie answers: “There are racists in Israel, as there are everywhere. The disease is endemic. No one is immune. I suggest that if you examine the premise of your question, you will see that.”

“Do you deny that you’re a Zionist?”

“No, why should I deny it? It’s perfectly possible to be a Zionist and still favor a separate Palestinian state. Lots of us do.”

“What you
do,”
the girl says shrilly, “is shore up a fascist, racist regime with your facade of liberalism,” and she storms demonstratively out of the room. No one else stirs. Grace points to the boy in the front row, who is waving his arm.

He stands. “All your books are political, and most have to do with corruption of one sort or another. Yet you had a front-row seat at one of the biggest corruption scandals in New York’s history, and you’ve never written about it. Why?”