The Cookbook Collector (37 page)

Jess could not concentrate at all. She could not think about Jonathan. Her own questions interrupted every eulogy. Who was Gillian? And if Chaya was right about her, why had Gillian kept such a secret from her children?

How self-centered the imagination was. The living thought about the living, even when they had gathered to speak about the dead. Orion sensed Molly staring at him, considering him, possibly judging him, maybe even dangerously, expensively forgiving him. Rabbi Zylberfenig stroked his beard and rehearsed his remarks silently, while Lou produced his reading glasses and shuffled the typed pages of his poem. Orion’s father had his game face on. Lou understood that he was also clergy.

“Mel Millstein hired me at ISIS. He gave me my chance….” Sorel leaned over as she spoke, and her white usher’s-flower weighed down her décolletage. “He always looked after me….”

Lou told Orion, “I’ll bet he did.”

At the lectern Dave recalled, “The first time I met Jonathan, I thought, ‘Is this guy for real?’ Let me rephrase that. I thought, ‘Is this
kid
for real?’ I said to him, ‘What are your goals for ISIS?’ and he said, ‘World domination.’ I said, ‘You’re joking, right?’ He said, ‘I’m not joking at all.’

“It’s one thing to have confidence when the going is great. It’s another thing to feel that way when the going gets tough. That’s the mark of a leader, a hero if you will.” Dave coughed. “I don’t use the word
hero
lightly, but I’m not … I’m not exaggerating when I say that this young man was a hero to me.

“The last time I saw Jonathan, we were in a meeting and I felt, as I sometimes did, that I had to rein him in. I said, ‘The climate is challenging right now.’ He said: ‘The climate’s history. The point is where we’re going.’ He was already thinking ahead. Six months ago, even nine months ago, he thought his way into a new space. He came to us with that gleam in his eye. He stood at the whiteboard and he wasn’t moaning, he wasn’t whining—he never whined about anything. He was like a kid in a candy store. ‘I have a new paradigm. I have a new plan….’ He had no idea then how important his new plan would be—a new system for data tracking.”

Dave’s words overflowed with feeling, and in the audience tears flowed freely. Even Lou almost forgot his own performance. Only Emily sat up, dry-eyed. Others heard a tribute to Jonathan’s indomitable spirit. Emily understood that he had stolen her information, appropriated and built a version of electronic fingerprinting.

“He would never let us down,” Dave said. “He would never say die. He led as he lived, fearless, imaginative, excited about the future. How could we lose someone who loved life so much?”

But Emily thought, Jonathan, how could you betray me? All those conversations where you accused me of putting Veritech first. All those times you said I was inflexible. Had you sold me out already? Six months ago. Nine months ago. Had you already betrayed me then?

She heard the other speakers in a dream. She heard them all from far away. Rabbi Zylberfenig spoke of angels. “Our sages teach that for each of us on Earth, there is an angel. This is very interesting to think about. We are each one of a matching pair. Therefore in the universe, we are not alone….”

A baby wailed.

Aldwin read from Kahlil Gibran.
“When you part from your friend, you grieve not; / for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence….”

Sorel sat on a stool and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” accompanying herself on her guitar.
“Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord …”

Until, like the main event he was, Lou Steiner took the stage. Shuffling his papers, clearing his throat, he seemed to have lost his place somehow. Emily stared at him, but she didn’t see him. Orion glared at Lou, and he thought, My God, he’s drunk. But he underestimated his father. Lou knew his poem by heart, and the poem he recited was not the one promised. Not “Where Are the Bees?” but something else entirely, one of his old sixties flower poems.

When truth dies
No one comes
.
Truth passes without ceremony
.
Her friends can’t afford a proper burial
.
Truth’s enemies write her epitaph
And build her tomb
.
As for truth’s relatives
,
They’re estranged
.

How? Emily asked Jonathan. How could you?

When peace dies
Everybody comes
.
Peace plunges to her death
With fireworks and flags
.
Full military honors
.
Her friends hang their heads
.
Her enemies say they’ll bring her back
.
She was so beautiful
And much too young
.

This was not the villanelle printed in the program, not at all the short sweet poem Dave and the memorial committee had expected. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, Dave leaned forward to look at Orion.

Orion shook his head and smiled. With a grim satisfaction, he thought, Fuck you. Even you can’t tell my father what to do. He didn’t see Emily’s face, so pale, or hear her panicked thoughts: How could you? How could you?

Visit truth and peace together
.
They share a plot
.
In lieu of flowers
Please send bodies
To the war
.
In lieu of roses
Please send
Your Self-Addressed Stamped Sons
….

The audience squirmed and whispered as Lou shifted into higher gear. What did this have to do with Mel and Jonathan? Wasn’t he talking about Vietnam? Even in Cambridge, this was almost embarrassing. The poem was almost—well, it was sort of on the nose for a memorial service, wasn’t it? And it went on and on. Such was the case with Lou’s antiwar poetry, predating his late, great pared-down lyrics, the new minimalism which charmed before it stung.

Even as Lou recited, Emily rose from her seat and hurried down the aisle. Whispers rustled under Lou’s clarion voice.
Look. That’s the fiancée. It’s too much for her … too much for her
. Softly they whispered as she exited the auditorium, and watched her as she closed the door.

Jess and Richard looked at each other past Heidi who sat between them, and their eyes said: Should I go after her? No, let me. I will.

In lieu of lilies
Please send
Lies
.
In lieu of freesia
Please send
Funds
.

Had Emily overheard Chaya Zylberfenig talking? What had Emily heard? Jess rushed to the lobby, where she found her sister standing still and pale.

“What happened?” Jess pleaded.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to go? Was it something Lou said?”

“No.” Emily pushed open the glass lobby doors. “I just want to be alone, okay?”

“You were right, you shouldn’t have come,” Jess fretted.

“I’m glad I came,” Emily said grimly.

Then for the first time, Jess was afraid Emily would wander off and hurt herself. “Where are you going? Don’t go out there by yourself.”

Close-lipped, Emily smiled at the idea that Jess could come along, that anyone could travel with her to this new hell. The pain was entirely new, when she reconsidered all that went before. Where there had been no body, she’d held fast to Jonathan’s spirit. And now?

He had given her an enormously expensive ring, but she had given him information worth more than any diamond. She remembered his silence as they lay together in the dark and she told him about fingerprinting. He’d tried to stop her. He was overwhelmed, moved, shocked that she would say so much. Was that because he knew he could not resist making electronic fingerprinting his? Did he already know he would steal her idea?

But the idea had not been hers to tell. If she was accusing Jonathan, she should indict herself as well. Fingerprinting had belonged to Alex. Indeed, it belonged to Alex now. Even now, at Veritech, Alex continued to research fingerprinting for a project his team was developing to check for spyware: a project Emily herself had named Verify. What would Alex do when he heard what Jonathan had done? You were right, Jonathan, she told herself. You were right all along. You win. I’m just like you. You betrayed me, but I betrayed Alex first. She stood on the plaza in front of Kresge, and these ideas spread like poison through her body, numbing her fingers and toes, darkening her vision, blackening the sun.

29

T
hat night, Richard sat with Jess at the kitchen table and he said, “Your sister’s been through enough.”

“She has to find out sometime,” Jess said, and unconsciously Richard glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of Emily upstairs. “Were you really planning to keep us in the dark forever?”

“You treat this as some life-changing revelation,” Richard said. “It’s not. It doesn’t change anything about you.”

“Yes, it does! This means that I have Jewish aunts! Chaya Zylberfenig and Freyda Helfgott. And Rabbi Helfgott is my uncle! Why didn’t you tell us?”

Heidi poured three mugs of herbal tea.

“You shouldn’t have kept a secret like that,” Jess accused her father.

Richard met her angry gaze. “It wasn’t my secret. Your mother didn’t want you or your sister to have any contact with those people.”

“Those people are our family,” said Jess. “Even if they’re religious mystics and they look different and act different from you and me.”

Then Richard struggled a little with himself. He tried to speak and stopped. Heidi stood behind his chair and kneaded his shoulders with her small hands until he put his hands up onto hers. “When they found out your mother had married a non-Jew, they sat in mourning for seven days. When she chose to marry me, they declared her dead.”

“And Mom took that name—Gillian? And she went by Gold instead of Gould?”

“She wanted a free life,” said Richard. “She wanted to choose her own husband. She wanted a musical career.”

“Yes, but—”

“She associated those people with pain.”

“But you could have told
us,”
Jess said. “You could have told Emily and me.”

“I did what she asked,” Richard said. “She felt that they were dangerous, and I agreed with her.”

Upstairs, Emily stirred in her twin bed in the guest room. She heard the voices below and opened her eyes in the half-light shining through the open door.

She heard her father’s voice: “Your mother and I …” and … “Yes, these Bialystokers are open and welcoming to everyone outside, but they have another attitude toward those within the fold, and that attitude is repressive to the—”

“Dad.”

“I would not violate your mother’s last wish—”

“Her last wish!” Jess raised her voice. “Her last wish was, ‘Don’t tell my daughters who I really am’?”

“No, you don’t understand. She knew exactly who she was. All she asked was that I conceal who she’d been.”

“But who you were fits inside of who you are. Can’t you see that?” Jess cried out.

Then Heidi said, “You’ll wake the children.”

But the little girls slept on upstairs. Only Emily lay awake, heart pounding in the dark.

Catharsis was for strangers. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel least went to sleep that night chastened, but cleansed, blessed to come home to their own families and lie down in their own beds. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel best left the memorial service uncomforted. The memorial was something they suffered for the sake of others. They themselves felt queasy at Sorel’s “Hallelujah.” A service in October was too soon. A service next October might be too soon.

Barbara slept. Whenever possible, she slept upstairs, escaping her relatives from Philly, her divorced younger sister with her autistic foster child, a sweet ten-year-old named Dominique who whooped more often than she spoke, and wouldn’t sit in chairs. Barbara outslept her dearest friends, the ones who brought My Grandma’s of New England Coffee Cakes and wept in her kitchen, declaring that Mel never hurt anyone, realizing that the world was unfair.

She appreciated Rabbi Zylberfenig’s approach, proactive from his first visit in September, when he had arrived with a roll of blue duct tape. All that morning he had taped sheets over the numerous mirrors in Barbara’s bathrooms. “This is traditional in a Jewish home of mourning,” he had explained.

After the memorial service, even as Barbara was finishing breakfast, the rabbi drove over to study sacred texts with Barbara and whichever relatives and friends showed up.

“Mom,” Annie whispered when she spied Zylberfenig through the kitchen window. “Does he have to come here every day?”

“You know Dad thought the Zylberfenigs were creepy,” Sam reminded her.

Barbara could not deny this.

“He thought Bialystokers were a cult. That’s what he told me,” Annie said. Barbara saw her daughter take a breath and turn pale behind her freckles. “We think that Dad wouldn’t want them in the house.”

Barbara placed her coffee cup gently on the granite kitchen counter. She had been a devoted stay-at-home mother, an involved parent—overinvolved, Mel used to say, when she drove hours every weekend for soccer league, stayed up all night sewing costumes, troubleshooting projects for the science fair. She had been a weeper, crying at every milestone and graduation. Even after the kids had left home, she’d longed for them, rejoicing intensely in their triumphs, hurting and worrying for them when they stumbled. In a real sense she’d lived for them. And now? Grief changed her perspective. Trauma provided sudden distance. Now Barbara looked at Annie and saw a young woman needing a haircut, and probably a new young man as well, someone who might find a way to fly east for his girlfriend’s father’s memorial.

“We were just thinking of what Dad would want,” said Annie.

Oh, really, young lady, Barbara thought. You have a lot of nerve. Did you and your brother get together and figure out what to say? Not very sensitive. Not very thoughtful. Not very bright! But she said none of this. She told Annie mildly, “Your father would want me to do whatever helps.”

Do what you have to do. Whatever works. Whatever helps. People said this, Orion mused, but they didn’t mean it literally. They didn’t mean, for example, go out and get high, or buy a gun and shoot someone. They were thinking more along the lines of go ahead and eat ice cream for dinner, carve a pumpkin, drive to western Mass. for apple picking. None of which appealed.

His anger did not subside. The pain only increased. Losing Jonathan, he had lost a year’s work as well. His friend, mentor, and rival dead, his tools repurposed for millennial cyberwars, Orion left the memorial service in such a fury, he didn’t know where to go or what to do. He took his father to the train station.

“Take it easy,” Lou told him as they hugged good-bye.

“I can’t,” Orion said.

He sped back to Boston, but he didn’t get a ticket. His wheels screeched as he turned off Memorial Drive onto Vassar Street. He hit a pothole that nearly sent his car flying, but he didn’t spin out of control. He pulled over and parked illegally in MIT’s West Annex Lot. Train tracks ran behind the fence. Every night at nine-thirty a train shuffled past.

He paced the lot, waiting. An hour passed. Two hours passed. At last he heard the horns and jingling bells at the railway crossing a block away, and then the steady shuffling engine.

He sprinted through the parking lot to the cyclone fence that ran along the tracks, and pounced, clawing metal, cutting his right hand, as the train barreled past.
Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus
. The circus had come to town. He watched the long silver train snake past. What did those cars contain? Tents and tigers, ponies, acrobats, sequined costumes, feather plumes. His father had written a circus poem. “The Circus Animals Return after Successful Contract Negotiations.” How did it go?
The troupe returns / Those shopworn joys
 … His mother had taken him to the circus once, and he had learned to juggle. He had gone through a juggling phase as a child. In high school he got pretty good. He used to irritate his mother while she was cooking. He’d juggle a grapefruit and an avocado and a lemon. Sometimes a cantaloupe. Persimmons tended to explode.

He ran to the Store 24 in Central Square and looked for fruit. Store 24 was excellent because the fruit was so hard. None of it was ripe.

“Anything else?” the salesgirl asked, as she rang up four apples and a preternaturally orange orange.

At first he didn’t recognize her. He thought she was a new cashier. Then he saw that she was the same dark-eyed girl who always worked there. The same girl with one difference. She wasn’t wearing her head scarf anymore. Her hair was reddish-brown, bobbed to the chin. Couldn’t be, he told himself. But she was wearing her barrette with the tiny rhinestone diamond, fastened in her hair just above the ear.

She eyed him nervously. “Would you like a bag?”

He shook his head. He looked at the orange and the apples on the counter, and he didn’t want them. He had no desire to juggle anymore.

He walked out into the night, and he thought, Why not? Why not leave the store and the city with its muddy river and its squares of college students? He would leave. He would leave them all behind. His apartment with its splintering roof deck, his convenience store, his frightened cashier, his future in-laws who were already planning for Thanksgiving, his so-called friends who’d cut him loose. The so-called ISIS family. The so-called ISIS team. The company had never been his family, and he’d never understood the rules if, indeed, there were any.
Think like Jonathan
. He knew exactly how Jonathan thought: How do I raise hell today?

“I’m leaving ISIS,” he told Molly when he got home.

“I know.” She was sitting in the living room watching the news.

He took the remote and turned off the television.

“Really leaving.”

“You say that every day.”

“I can’t be there anymore. I can’t work there anymore.”

Wearily, Molly turned to look at him. “You can’t do anything,” she said. “You can’t cook. You can’t clean. You can’t move. You can’t grow up. What is the matter with you?”

Orion didn’t answer.

“You barely live here anymore.”

“You should talk,” Orion shot back.

“I’m working!”

“And I’ve been working too.”

“Right, and now you want to stop. What’s your plan, Orion?”

“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I don’t want a plan. That’s the difference between us. You’re the planner. Your parents are the planners. Not me.”

“It is eleven o’clock at night,” Molly said.

“So?”

“So it’s been five hours since the memorial service ended. Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” said Orion.

“Nowhere? Do you think you might have called me?”

“I might have,” said Orion.

“You knew I was home tonight. You knew that I’d be here.” She got off the couch and began brushing crumbs off the cushions onto the floor. “I am so tired of waiting for you. I’m always waiting for you. For six years, I’ve been working and training and waiting for you, and you don’t care, you don’t want to be with me, you don’t …” Tears started in Molly’s eyes. “We were best friends, weren’t we? We used to tell each other everything. When I was upset I could come to you. When you had problems you would confide in me. But now you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t even want to look at me. All you want to do is run away.”

“If I’d wanted to run, I would have run already,” Orion said.

“Would have? You did! You already have. You run away from me every day.”

You make it easy, Orion thought.

Molly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “What if the whole world were like you? What if everybody ran away? What if all the doctors said, ‘I can’t treat you because I’m afraid of blood’? And the Army said, ‘We can’t fight to defend you, because somebody could die’?

“Wake up, Orion. Life is messy! The world is messy. And I’m sorry, but people get killed. Even people you and I know. And you can keep on working and try to make things right, or you can give up and make some random tragedy into an excuse for following your original plan—which was to do as little as possible.”

He heard his mother in Molly’s voice. He heard his mother’s anguished pragmatism.
Please don’t sit around. Don’t sleep the day away. You’re wasting light
. Molly’s words were angry, but also heartfelt, and he heard their truth.

The truth was not nearly enough. His mother’s admonitions were not enough. The old goat, his father, stirred within him. Don’t stay, his father whispered. Leave now. Don’t ground yourself with Molly, fly away.

“I’m leaving ISIS,” Orion said again.

This time Molly heard him differently. He saw the knowledge in her face, which seemed to swell with pain: He’s not just leaving ISIS. He’s leaving me.

“I’m sorry,” Orion told her. “I don’t deserve you—obviously.”

He was sorry, but that last qualifier carried a sullen little sting.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Molly said wonderingly.

“You’re in love with that girl. The one in the lobby.”

“No.”

“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”

“No!” Orion answered truthfully.

“You are such a coward,” she gasped. “Standing there like you’re having some kind of existential crisis! You’re totally involved with her.”

“I’m not,” Orion lied.

“You were afraid I would find out, and you got scared.”

“I’m not scared at all,” Orion said.

Before dawn, he knocked on the door of Sorel’s house. When she didn’t answer, he dialed her number, and her phone rang, but all he got was voice mail.

He stood on the porch and tapped on the window. Then he banged on the door until he heard her sleepy voice on the other side. “For God’s sakes.”

“Sorel,” he said, “it’s me. Open up.”

“No,” she groaned on the other side of the door. “I’m too tired. I’m too sleepy. I’m drunk.”

“It’s an emergency,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you call me?”

“Sorel, please.”

She opened the door and stepped outside, shivering. She was wearing woolly socks, and a long Phish T-shirt with a sweater over it.

“I missed you.”

“Is that an emergency?”

“I’m going away.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know. I’m leaving ISIS.”

“And Molly?”

“Yes.”

For a moment she didn’t speak. Then she asked, “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s sure.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Really?”

She nodded very slightly and she kept her eyes fixed on him, so that even without her white robes and wings and paint, she looked like the angel in the square. “You’re at sea,” she said.