Storm Tide (10 page)

Judith was desperate to be done with schooling. She had been deferring her life. She needed a vacation and she needed to see Europe, finally. She had always felt only partly American, with her mother so European, so multilingual. She had a heritage she barely understood, like the legacy of a diary in a language of which she knew just an occasional word. She had only a vague notion of her quest, what she must find to complete herself. She should be studying to pass the Massachusetts bar, but she would do that when she returned.

I did what I set out to do, she thought to herself: I conquered. But there’s no
I
left. She had five weeks. She had to be back in Boston by July first to move into the apartment she had rented, to get ready for
the bar exam and to begin her new job at poor pay and long hours in Dorchester.

The charter flight put them down in Amsterdam, which was pleasant. She got by on her bad German which was really Yiddish, scanty, rich in curses but poor in daily phrases like “Where is the women’s toilet?” They went on to Paris. There, a sublet and a temporary job had been arranged for Hannah. Stephanie and Judith lived in a cheap Latin Quarter hotel, famous for a nineteenth-century French poet Judith had never read. Every day they walked miles. Stephanie was eager to notch every museum, but Judith found she liked best to wander the neighborhoods. To sit in cafés staring at passersby. She felt like someone in a movie, a young woman vacationing in Paris, waiting no doubt for romance. But she did not fall in love with a Frenchman. She fell in love with a village.

It was in the mountains of Provence. Stephanie and she were staying at a small inn set in vineyards belonging to the inn family. The inn had only six guest rooms. In the middle distance were cliffs studded with juniper and pine. The local houses seemed to sprout from rock. Red rocks, beige rocks, gray rocks, black rocks. The sound of goat bells came into her bedroom. Bougainvillea grew up the side wall, spilling its luminescent blossoms everywhere. Doves cooed under the red tile roof.

She was in the middle of a large self-involved family. The wine served was grown in the surrounding vineyards. The food was cooked by Madame, mistress of the house. One of the daughters was pregnant and lay out by the pool like a beached whale, sunning her belly. They were always laughing together, the married and unmarried sisters and a sister-in-law. They all looked somewhat alike, about the size and coloring of Judith, with dark brown eyes and black hair. She had grown up hearing many languages, and she picked them up quickly. Unlike Stephanie, she was not afraid to use her French. The sisters normally ignored the guests as if they were made of glass, but gradually they found her acceptable. They began to include her in their gossip and their games. They had names for all the men who came by. They strolled in the vineyard. They shelled beans. They picked flowers and decorated the inn. They mended, they knitted, they read, they talked, they swam in the pool.

Judith and Stephanie had been supposed to move on in three days. Stephanie did. Judith canceled the rest of her reservations and persuaded the family to let her stay. Gradually she began to do small tasks. Her rent was reduced. She spent the next three weeks as part guest and
part servant and almost family, not a daughter certainly, but almost a cousin.

Partly it was a fantasy, a big family in place of the isolation in which she had grown up. A female-dominated family full of singing and laughter and in-jokes, full of grooming and flirting. She was studying something at least as interesting as anything she had learned in law school. What Judith saw that caused her to stay was that these were people who knew truly how to live in a daily, ordinary way. They were rich in small pleasures.

Madame could turn any scrap fish or tough old hen into a sumptuous repast. They worked hard but they also had much time simply to sit and talk, to sip wine and enjoy. There was a casual grace to their lives that was partly the beauty of the sunburnt landscape, partly the closeness to peasant life but with enough money to provide little luxuries, partly the climate and the habits of the place. She did not idealize them. They had no idea she was a Jew, and she was careful not to tell them. She was a spy in the house of comfort. They were parochial people who despised the tourists and vacationers they catered to. Madame would not let any of them near the stove when they were menstruating, since she held as an article of faith that a menstruating woman would curdle milk and spoil wine. Madame believed in sympathetic magic and tried to cure most ailments with herbs and what seemed to Judith voodoo. Gradually Judith learned to cook most of Madame’s dishes, from watching, from making notes. She understood that the cooking style of Madame was not so much a matter of recipes as of overriding formulae. Nothing was measured; nothing was ever quite the same twice. But there were general rules and she learned them. She knew what to do with a firm fleshed fish and how to make a marinade or a sauce from olive oil, tomatoes, a few herbs and a little wine or vinegar or lemon.

Stephanie called her from Florence. “I hate traveling alone. Italian men are driving me crazy! What are you doing there? It’s not even the beach.”

“I’m resting,” she said. “I’m exhausted. I never want to move again.”

She could not explain her pleasure in scraping carrots and washing rice, watering the kitchen garden, picking caterpillars off the roses: hardly Stephanie’s idea of a vacation. Hannah would think she had lost her mind. Yet Judith was almost, almost happy. She had not been happy since Yirina died. Stephanie and Hannah were two women who had been part of her study group all through law school. She was as close to them as she was to anyone, a slightly frightening thought because now they seemed to have nothing in common.

She still did not know who she was, but she had found a part of herself that had been lost, the part that had flavor and a body and tastes and knew, as Yirina would say, how to enjoy an orchard in a flower pot.

She observed how these women dressed, how they laughed, how they held their bodies. Her particular mentor was the sister-in-law, Yvonne, who was a little the outsider too, married to the older son. The younger son was off in Toulouse in hotel school. Soon he would be working in Switzerland for a couple of years. Yvonne cut Judith’s hair and restyled it, critiqued her wardrobe, showed her tricks of coddling the skin with strawberries and milk. It astonished Judith how comfortable she felt with the Barbière family. This was not her life, just a pause for healing and rest. Yet she felt more at home here than she ever had with Mark or her various roommates. It was not that she felt truly intimate, for they did not know her and did not even ask the sort of questions that might have led them to understand. She told them her mother was Czech. Czech refugees were not uncommon. They assumed her mother had left her country to escape the Communist regime. For years she had let people make what assumptions they chose about her background.

The younger son was home for a weekend, on his way to Switzerland. He flirted with her. “You’re so beautiful,” he told her. “You’re like a perfectly ripe peach, delicate and suave.”

Like all the family, he was handsome. They seemed to radiate a sensual health that was attractive and unrefined, like the coat of a well-groomed, glossy and well-fed horse. He kissed her under the arbor. She did not let it go further. She had had only one affair since her marriage. Men her own age seemed callow to her, a regiment of Marks; she did not believe in getting involved with her professors, although two pursued her mildly. She had had a romance with an older man the summer between her first and second years, where she was interning. He said he was separated from his wife; it turned out he meant, by several miles, from the suburb where he lived. She let it go on in a desultory manner until she returned to school. It was mildly educational and sexually all right. She had backed into it and could not extract herself gracefully.

The son left. An Italian on vacation kissed her under the same arbor. He left and she stayed on. She asked Yvonne if she was beautiful, since Mr. Vetter and the son Armand had both said she was. Yvonne cocked her head.
“Bien sûr,”
Yvonne said, “you’re pretty enough …
assez jolie
.” She had not classic features, Yvonne explained. Her chin was a trifle sharp. She was short of stature. Her nose was a little long, perhaps. “But,” Yvonne said, waving her finger, “what does that matter? You must
have confidence that you are quite pretty enough for any man you want. That’s what matters. That you feel you are desirable and that you act desirable. A woman does not have to be a classic beauty to get exactly what she wants, little Judith. She just has to act as if she is one.”

Finally the pregnant daughter went to the hospital and the tempo of the house increased and withdrew from her. Judith understood it was time to leave. She phoned Stephanie in Athens and said she would meet her in Paris. Her French had vastly improved, even though French vacationers told her she had a Provençal accent. “You must get rid of that!” they said, but she did not want to.

She had a week before she was due in Amsterdam to catch her flight home. She stayed with Hannah in her small flat. She had not spent as much money as she had expected to. She spent it now on clothes, on accessories—exotic panty hose, a stylish bag. She experienced a frantic desire to shop, to bring home souvenirs of what she felt she had learned. I want to live well, she thought to herself. I will work hard but I want something different. I want a graceful life. A life that satisfies the senses and the brain. Yirina would have understood perfectly. She knew she would not be able to put any of her desires into effect for years, since she must establish herself as an attorney. She would be working at least sixty hours a week. But she knew what she wanted, and she would not forget. Eventually, eventually, she would reach that pleasant shore.

J
UDITH

    Judith thought that the mother or perhaps both parents might come in with her client, but the family group that trekked into her office was larger and noisier than she had expected. There were four other adults and a child. She had one of the smaller offices at Birch and Fogarty, a Boston law firm she had joined after two and a half years at Legal Aid, and she had to borrow chairs from the other associates.

Her eyes went first to her client, looking surly and messy. When it came to court, she would have to make him clean up his act, or the judge would punish him. He was a kid from an affluent respectable family, and he had to look like one, not a bad imitation of a ghetto runner. “In this office, you will remove your hat,” she said firmly, not smiling, gesturing at the greasy wool cap he had pulled down almost to his eyes.

“What for?”

“To get used to looking like someone the judge should take pity on. They don’t like drug cases. It’s going to be a battle to make sure you don’t do time. The sooner you get used to taking my advice, the better our odds are.”

Larry Stone was pouting, oozing self-pity. He was tall like his father, but looked rather water-softened, slumping in the chair. His attitude was just as it had been the first time she sat down with him, petulant and put upon. Being caught was something he shouldn’t have to endure.

“Larry can’t go to jail!” That was his mother, now Mrs. Caldwell, talking. She was a well-kept woman with short crisp blond hair and nails that matched her pale blue designer suit. Judith was sure her gold was twenty-four karat and her earrings were real pearls. Her current husband said nothing. He looked extremely bored, glancing at his Rolex every two minutes. He was a Texan in a beige suit who resented every second he spent in her modest office.

Her eyes kept being drawn against her will to her client’s father, Gordon Stone. Years ago when she was an undergraduate, she had gone to hear him speak. He was still an impressive presence. So far he was mostly listening, yet the room seemed to revolve around him. He was a tall lean man with dark hard blue eyes, fierce, hawklike, but his mouth was full and sensual. He had what people called good bones, meaning
his face would photograph well and his features had an edge, a definition she had to call attractive, charismatic. While she was talking, she caught herself trying to figure out his age. Fifty maybe? No, he had to be older.

She lectured on the seriousness of Larry being caught selling marijuana at B.U. He had done a sloppy job of it and someone who did not like him had reported him to the campus police. It was probable that if Gordon had a better history with the college administration, the matter would have been quietly dropped. But Gordon Stone had always been too famous for his own good, controversial, often being quoted on topics the administration would have preferred he ignore, and he had been fired from B.U. before being hired by Brandeis.

“Larry has to say he’s very, very sorry, right?” That was Natasha, eleven and bright. She seemed to be trying to take care of her half brother, who did not even look at her when she spoke. Natasha was a forthright child with whom Judith had immediately fallen a little in love. She could be my child, Judith thought, although of course that was not literally true: she was only sixteen years older than Natasha. But Natasha was the child she could wish for.