The Namesake (38 page)

Ashima feels lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly, turned away from the mirror, she sobs for her husband. She feels overwhelmed by the thought of the move she is about to make, to the city that was once home and is now in its own way foreign. She feels both impatience and indifference
for all the days she still must live, for something tells her she will not go quickly as her husband did. For thirty-three years she missed her life in India. Now she will miss her job at the library, the women with whom she's worked. She will miss throwing parties. She will miss living with her daughter, the surprising companionship they have formed, going into Cambridge together to see old movies at the Brattle, teaching her to cook the food Sonia had complained of eating as a child. She will miss the opportunity to drive, as she sometimes does on her way home from the library, to the university, past the engineering building where her husband once worked. She will miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband. Though his ashes have been scattered into the Ganges, it is here, in this house and in this town, that he will continue to dwell in her mind.

She takes a deep breath. In a moment she will hear the beeps of the security system, the garage door opening, car doors closing, her children's voices in the house. She applies lotion to her arms and legs, reaches for a peach-colored terry-cloth robe that hangs from a hook on the door. Her husband had given her the robe years ago, for a Christmas now long forgotten. This too she will have to give away, will have no use for where she is going. In such a humid climate it would take days for such a thick material to dry. She makes a note to herself, to wash it well and donate it to the thrift shop. She does not remember the year she'd gotten the robe, does not remember opening it, or her reaction. She knows only that it had been either Gogol or Sonia who had picked it out at one of the department stores at the mall, had wrapped it, even. That all her husband had done was to write his name and hers on the to-and-from tag. She does not fault him for this. Such omissions of devotion, of affection, she knows now, do not matter in the end. She no longer wonders what it might have been like to do what her children have done, to fall in love first rather than years later, to deliberate over a period of months or years and
not a single afternoon, which was the time it had taken for her and Ashoke to agree to wed. It is the image of their two names on the tag that she thinks of, a tag she had not bothered to save. It reminds her of their life together, of the unexpected life he, in choosing to marry her, had given her here, which she had refused for so many years to accept. And though she still does not feel fully at home within these walls on Pemberton Road she knows that this is home nevertheless—the world for which she is responsible, which she has created, which is everywhere around her, needing to be packed up, given away, thrown out bit by bit. She slips her damp arms into the sleeves of the robe, ties the belt around her waist. It's always been a bit short on her, a size too small. Its warmth is a comfort all the same.

There is no one to greet Gogol on the platform when he gets off the train. He wonders if he's early, looks at his watch. Instead of going into the station house he waits on a bench outside. The last of the passengers board, the train doors slide to a close. The conductors wave their signals to one another, the wheels roll slowly away, the compartments glide forward one by one. He watches his fellow passengers being greeted by family members, lovers reunited with entangled arms, without a word. College students burdened by backpacks, returning for Christmas break. After a few minutes the platform is empty, as is the space the train had occupied. Now Gogol looks onto a field, some spindly trees against a cobalt twilight sky. He thinks of calling home but decides he is content to sit and wait awhile longer. The cool air is pleasant on his face after his hours on the train. He'd slept most of the journey to Boston, the conductor poking him awake once they'd reached South Station, and he was the only person left in the compartment, the last to get off. He had slept soundly, curled up on two seats, his book unread, using his overcoat as a blanket, pulled up to his chin.

He feels groggy still, a bit lightheaded from having skipped
his lunch. At his feet are a duffel bag containing clothes, a shopping bag from Macy's with gifts bought earlier that morning, before catching his train at Penn Station. His choices are uninspired—a pair of fourteen-karat gold earrings for his mother, sweaters for Sonia and Ben. They have agreed to keep things simple this year. He has a week of vacation. There is work to do at the house, his mother has warned him. His room must be emptied, every last scrap either taken back with him to New York or tossed. He must help his mother pack her things, settle her accounts. They will drive her to Logan and see her off as far as airport security will allow. And then the house will be occupied by strangers, and there will be no trace that they were ever there, no house to enter, no name in the telephone directory. Nothing to signify the years his family has lived here, no evidence of the effort, the achievement it had been. It's hard to believe that his mother is really going, that for months she will be so far. He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta he'd once resented—how could they have been enough? They were not enough. Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself. He had spent years maintaining distance from his origins; his parents, in bridging that distance as best they could. And yet, for all his aloofness toward his family in the past, his years at college and then in New York, he has always hovered close to this quiet, ordinary town that had remained, for his mother and father, stubbornly exotic. He had not traveled to France as Moushumi had, or even to California as Sonia had done. Only for three months was he separated by more than a few small states from his father, a distance that had not troubled Gogol in the least, until it was too late. Apart from those months, for most of his adult life he has never been more than a four-hour train ride away. And there was nothing,
apart from his family, to draw him home, to make this train journey, again and again.

It had been on the train, exactly a year ago, that he'd learned of Moushumi's affair. They were on their way up to spend Christmas with his mother and Sonia. They had left the city late, and outside the windows it had been dark, the disturbing pitch-black of early winter evenings. They were in the middle of a conversation about how to spend the coming summer, whether to rent a house in Siena with Donald and Astrid, an idea Gogol was resisting, when she'd said, "Dimitri says Siena is something out of a fairy tale." Immediately a hand had gone to her mouth, accompanied by a small intake of breath. And then, silence. "Who's Dimitri?" he'd asked. And then: "Are you having an affair?" The question had sprung out of him, something he had not consciously put together in his mind until that moment. It felt almost comic to him, burning in his throat. But as soon as he asked it, he knew. He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins. He'd felt this way on only one other occasion, the night he had sat in the car with his father and learned the reason for his name. That night he'd experienced the same bewilderment, was sickened in the same way. But he felt none of the tenderness that he had felt for his father, only the anger, the humiliation of having been deceived. And yet, at the same time, he was strangely calm—in the moment that his marriage was effectively severed he was on solid ground with her for the first time in months. He remembered a night weeks ago; looking through her bag for her wallet, to pay the Chinese food delivery man, he'd pulled out her diaphragm case. She told him she'd gone to the doctor that afternoon to have it refitted, and so he'd put it out of his mind.

His first impulse had been to get out at the next station, to be as physically far from her as possible. But they were bound together, by the train, by the fact that his mother and Sonia were expecting them, and so somehow they had suffered
through the rest of the journey, and then through the weekend, telling no one, pretending that nothing was wrong. Lying in his parents' house, in the middle of the night, she told him the whole story, about meeting Dimitri on a bus, finding his résumé in the bin. She confessed that Dimitri had gone with her to Palm Beach. One by one he stored the pieces of information in his mind, unwelcome, unforgivable. And for the first time in his life, another man's name upset Gogol more than his own.

The day after Christmas she left Pemberton Road, with the excuse to his mother and Sonia that a last-minute interview had fallen into place at the MLA. But really the job was a ruse; she and Gogol had decided that it was best for her to return to New York alone. By the time he arrived at the apartment, her clothes were gone, and her make-up and her bathroom things. It was as if she were away on another trip. But this time she didn't come back. She wanted nothing of the brief life they'd had together; when she appeared one last time at his office a few months later, so that he could sign the divorce papers, she told him she was moving back to Paris. And so, systematically, as he had done for his dead father, he removed her possessions from the apartment, putting her books into boxes on the sidewalk in the middle of the night for people to take, throwing out the rest. In the spring he went to Venice alone for a week, the trip he'd planned for the two of them, saturating himself in its ancient, melancholy beauty. He lost himself among the darkened narrow streets, crossing countless tiny bridges, discovering deserted squares, where he sat with a Campari or a coffee, sketching the facades of pink and green palaces and churches, unable ever to retrace his steps.

And then he returned to New York, to the apartment they'd inhabited together that was now all his. A year later, the shock has worn off, but a sense of failure and shame persists, deep and abiding. There are nights he still falls asleep on the sofa, without deliberation, waking up at three
A.M.
with the television still on. It is as if a building he'd been responsible for designing
has collapsed for all to see. And yet he can't really blame her. They had both acted on the same impulse, that was their mistake. They had both sought comfort in each other, and in their shared world, perhaps for the sake of novelty, or out of the fear that that world was slowly dying. Still, he wonders how he's arrived at all this: that he is thirty-two years old, and already married and divorced. His time with her seems like a permanent part of him that no longer has any relevance, or currency. As if that time were a name he'd ceased to use.

He hears the familiar beep of his mother's car, spots it pulling into the parking lot. Sonia is sitting in the driver's seat, waving. Ben is next to her. This is the first time he's seeing Sonia since she and Ben have announced their engagement. He decides that he will ask her to stop off at a liquor store so he can buy some champagne. She steps out of the car, walking toward him. She is an attorney now, working in an office in the Hancock building. Her hair is cut to her jaw. She's wearing an old blue down jacket that Gogol had worn back in high school. And yet there is a new maturity in her face; he can easily imagine her, a few years from now, with two children in the back seat. She gives him a hug. For a moment they stand there with their arms around each other in the cold. "Welcome home, Goggles," she says.

For the last time, they assemble the artificial seven-foot tree, the branches color-coded at their base. Gogol brings up the box from the basement. For decades the instructions have been missing; each year they have to figure out the order in which the branches must be inserted, the longest ones at the bottom, the smallest at the top. Sonia holds the pole, and Gogol and Ben insert the branches. The orange go first, then the yellow, then the red and finally blue, the uppermost piece slightly bent under the white speckled ceiling. They place the tree in front of the window, drawing apart the curtains so that people passing by the house can see, as excited as they were when they
were children. They decorate it with ornaments made by Sonia and Gogol in elementary school: construction paper candlesticks, Popsicle-stick god's-eyes, glitter-covered pinecones. A torn Banarasi sari of Ashima's is wrapped around the base. At the top they put what they always do, a small plastic bird covered with turquoise velvet, with brown wire claws.

Stockings are hung on nails from the mantel, the one put up for Moushumi last year now put up for Ben. They drink the champagne out of Styrofoam cups, forcing Ashima to have some, too, and they play the Perry Como Christmas tape his father always liked. They tease Sonia, telling Ben about the year she had refused her gifts after taking a Hinduism class in college, coming home and protesting that they weren't Christian. Early in the morning, his mother, faithful to the rules of Christmas her children had taught her when they were little, will wake up and fill the stockings, with gift certificates to record stores, candy canes, mesh bags of chocolate coins. He can still remember the very first time his parents had had a tree in the house, at his insistence, a plastic thing no larger than a table lamp, displayed on top of the fireplace mantel. And yet its presence had felt colossal. How it had thrilled him. He had begged them to buy it from the drugstore. He remembers decorating it clumsily with garlands and tinsel and a string of lights that made his father nervous. In the evenings, until his father came in and pulled out the plug, causing the tiny tree to go dark, Gogol would sit there. He remembers the single wrapped gift that he had received, a toy that he'd picked out himself, his mother asking him to stand by the greeting cards while she paid for it. "Remember when we used to put on those awful flashing colored lights?" his mother says now when they are done, shaking her head. "I didn't know a thing back then."