The Oriental Wife (30 page)

“Are you crying for him?” She had meant to sound kind, but blood was rushing to her head; her voice came out harsh and angry. “You shouldn’t cry for him. You shouldn’t. He didn’t cry for you.” Louisa stared at her, her mouth a round O. “Never mind,” Emma said. “Never mind.” And then, squeezing shut her eyes, “He wasn’t happy.”

“No?” Louisa asked, bewildered. For a moment Emma hesitated. It was too late to tell her mother what had gone on for all those years in the house in Connecticut. Back when she used to phone Connie to make arrangements about Emma, Louisa had always spoken admiringly of Connie’s energy, her efficiency, her outgoing nature. In the dream that was her mother’s substitute for a life, other people were happy, other people were good.

“How could he be happy,” she asked furiously, “after what he did to you? How could he?”

But Louisa only shook her head. “The poor man … the poor man.”

The wind was rising on the water; papers rustled along the path. Emma’s breath came faster and faster. “Why do you always see it from his side? What about you?”

“It was so long ago,” her mother said mournfully, her head still turned away. “Years and years. You shouldn’t think about it any more.”

“He should have asked your forgiveness. He should have come to you and said he was sorry, he could have done that much, just once.” She did not like the sound of her own voice, shrill and childish; she wished that her mother would stop her, but still she went on. “I hope he rots in hell,” she said then, even as the image came to her of her father in the
hospital, the sweat pouring down his face, trying to pretend for her sake that he wasn’t in pain.

Her mother was struggling to stand, pushing herself up off the bench with her good hand; it took three tries, but then she was on her feet, walking away.

And in that moment Emma saw the two boys walking across the grass in their shiny orange jackets, their sunglasses pushed up onto their heads. One of them was carrying a radio and snapping the fingers of his free hand; the other was doing an exaggerated, mocking jive walk, almost a dance, as they veered toward Louisa, shambling along the path. Their eyes scanned the horizon briefly, as though to ensure there was nobody around.

Emma got to her feet, running, her shoulder bag knocking against her hip; she arrived, breathless, at her mother’s side just as the two boys stepped onto the path. The radio was blaring out a harsh staccato music; they stood there grinning. “Leave her alone,” Emma screamed, “you leave her alone.” The boy with the radio reached into his pocket, laughing; the knife in his hand flashed in the sun as he cut the strap of Emma’s bag, in one graceful slash; the other one caught it as gracefully, and off they ran, yodeling in triumph, leaping into the air. “Come back,” Emma sobbed, racing after them but falling farther and farther behind. “Come back here, I’ll get the police, you bring that back.” The boy holding her bag turned for a moment and said without malice, almost kindly, “Fuck you, lady.”

She stumbled back along the path, gasping, to where her mother stood, with that stricken look Emma knew so well. “It’s all right,” Emma said, out of long habit, “it doesn’t matter,” her breath coming in ragged sobs. “I’ll just have to
change the locks, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.” For her mother had suffered enough; she had to pretend, for Louisa, that all was well. Only she could not seem to stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said, on a shuddery breath, “I’m just tired, that’s all. I haven’t been sleeping.” And then she felt her mother’s hand on her arm. Her mother never took her arm, her mother never initiated any contact. Louisa’s grip was tentative at first, and then stronger and stronger; somehow, in her impractical shoes, she was steering Emma down the path, out of the park, along the street, to the door of Mrs. Rafferty’s house. And then, without the usual fumbling for her keys, the usual unearthing of wads of shredded Kleenex and old cash register receipts, she was opening the door.

“Come in now,” she said soothingly, as though talking to a child. “Come on.” And Emma followed her to the stairs, past the door to Mrs. Rafferty’s parlor, up to Louisa’s room.

“You need a cup of tea,” Louisa said, disappearing, still in her coat, into the little alcove with the hot plate and the crooked shelf, covered in oilcloth, that held the row of pink plastic cups. Emma, meanwhile, circled the room, unable to sit. As she reached the bookcase for the third time, her eye was caught by a green leather volume on the bottom shelf that looked vaguely familiar. Squatting down, she saw that it was Goethe, volume XXII. It was then she remembered the scalloped envelope.

She had put it in her bag, along with the letters, on her way out that morning; she had wanted to show the photographs to Louisa, and leave the letters for her to look through on her own, so that the following week she could tell her what they said. The cameo too: she had placed it carefully, in its blue tissue paper, into the inside pocket of the bag. At that
thought she began crying harder than ever, still kneeling by the bookshelf; she rocked on her heels, powerless to stop.

A shadow passed over her; she looked up to see her mother standing there, still in her nubby coat, a dish towel draped over her bad arm. She did not speak; she only bent down clumsily, gripping Emma’s shoulder with her good hand.

“It’s just …,” Emma said, and then more sobs came, horrible ragged breaths. “It’s just …” She clenched her hands, digging her nails into her palms to steady herself, until she could speak. “I had some things in that bag I took from his study. That I brought to show you. Some letters in German, I think they might have been from the First World War, there was a postcard too, showing men in uniform. Sent to Trudl Furchgott on some street in Nuremberg that began with
N
. Do you know where that was?”

“Neutoragraben. Where your grandparents lived.”

“I couldn’t read them, I thought you could tell me what they said. Plus there was a whole bunch of photographs.” She burst into tears again. Her mother released her grip to take the dish towel off her arm and hand it to Emma, but Emma waved it away, wiping her snotty face with her hand instead.

“There was a little pin. A cameo. I think it was the one you were wearing in that painted photograph Grandma had. Only I wasn’t sure. And it was wrapped up in tissue paper, with my name on it. Someone had written it there a long time ago, the ink was all faded. I wanted to ask you”—she had to stop again, to gulp back the sobs—“who had written it. Whose handwriting it was.” Louisa was silent; when Emma looked at her, she was staring out the window, from which the faint sounds of the announcer of the football game at Baker Field could be heard. “Do you know who it was?”

Her mother looked around helplessly, as though trying to pluck the answer from the air. “I think so.”

“Who? Who was it?”

“Your grandfather,” Louisa said. “He wanted you to have it.”

“Because it had been yours.”

“Yes. And there was a story behind it.”

“What story?”

Louisa looked down, bewildered, at the towel she was still holding. “When the Nazis came, and took him away to Dachau, they ransacked the house, everything they didn’t steal was smashed. But when he came back, he found the cameo on the floor of my old room. It must have rolled into a corner. It was his mother who had given it to me, right before she died.”

“And he brought it with him to America?”

“Yes. He would have given it to your father to keep until you were older.”

Emma stood up. “Then why didn’t he give it to me? My father, I mean.”

Her mother shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want you to think about that time.”

“But now it’s lost,” Emma said, on a fresh wave of tears. “They’ll sell it on Broadway for two dollars, they’ll throw all the letters and pictures away.” She put her head in her hands, sobbing. “I’ll never even know who those people in the photographs were.”

“Never mind,” her mother said, with unwonted firmness. She smiled faintly. “You would have found them very boring.”

“How can you say that?” Emma wailed. “They were my relatives.”

“That wouldn’t have made them any less boring.”

“And the letters … We’ll never know what was in them now.”

“I remember what the men used to write during the war. ‘We have marched seven miles today, and it is very cold. I think of you and the child constantly, and pray for your safety. Don’t forget to order the coal early, before the bitter weather sets in.’ And then the women wrote back and said, ‘Tante Lotte was here for tea, I’m afraid her digestion is still very poor. Margarethe’s daughter Elise is engaged to a nice engineer who is with the army in the west; she came and played the piano for us on Tuesday, all the old songs, she plays so beautifully.’ That was the kind of thing they wrote each other.”

“Then what about the cameo? I would have kept it always, I would have given it to my daughter.”

“It was only a thing,” her mother said, with that firmness in her voice again, that Emma did not recognize. “There’s no point crying about things, they come and go. You should cry for your father.”

“I am crying for my father,” Emma said, and realized it was true. She sank back down onto the floor, and her mother went away again. When she came back she handed Emma a clean tissue, which Emma took blindly; she buried her face in it, stifling her sobs, she rocked back and forth. A few minutes later, her mother returned, bending over her, holding out a cup of tea in its pink plastic cup. Emma stretched out her hand for it and set it down beside her as she wept and wept.

T
he burial of the ashes took place after a week of thunderstorms, when the ground was pure mud. In the new Jewish cemetery, opened a few months before on a hilly slope above the interstate, there were only about a dozen gravesites, scattered, seemingly at random, on an irregular diagonal. Some decision must have been made, a plan drawn up, but its logic escaped her.

She stood on the tussocky grass with her stepmother and the rabbi and four members of the hospital’s Committee for the Future. The rabbi’s voice, as he read the psalm, was snatched away by the wind and almost obliterated by the roar from below; over and over, a car approached, grew louder, faded away in the direction of Hartford, then another came along, and another. On the other side of the highway was a row of squat metal buildings housing car repair shops, bargain outlets, fast food places.

He would have said it didn’t matter where his ashes were laid to rest. After his eyes had been taken, and his kidneys, after the medical students had dissected his organs, he would not have cared what happened to the remains. But Emma was remembering the prints on the wall of his study, the spires and bell towers and ancient walls.

Three days before, she had finally heard from Khim. “Forgive me,” he had written, “for what I am going to tell you.”
He had been married back in Cambodia, he said; they had a child, a son. He had been told that the boy and his wife were both dead, but on the Sunday when he had last seen her in New York he had heard that his wife was alive; she had escaped from the detention camp and after a terrible journey arrived in Paris. That was why he had left so abruptly.

“She has suffered very much,” he wrote, “but now we are together. Perhaps we will have another child. She is not sure it is possible, after what she has been through, but that is what she wants, more than anything. And so I too want it for her. Please try to understand. I am ashamed that I never told you these things, but I could not speak of them. Now I wanted to tell you I have loved you. But this is the center of my life.”

She read the letter twice, three times, unable to envision him writing it, so that she almost thought his wife had done it for him. “I can’t forgive you, I won’t, don’t ask me that,” she wrote to him, on and on, a whole page of accusation, which she tore into tiny pieces.

An engine misfired on the road below, in a series of sharp staccato bursts. Her stepmother’s black mantilla flapped in the wind, its corner blowing into her mouth, from which she kept brushing it away. “His name,” the rabbi said, “means ‘fear of God,’ but it was through the mercy of God that he arrived in this country. He did not mourn for his past, he looked to the future instead, and he would want us to look to the future now, to go on working toward that future he believed in.” But Emma was thinking of the future he had lost, back in that walled city; she was trying to see the man he would have been. And then there was his other future, the American one, taken from him when the knife had slipped in the surgeon’s hand.

That was the final photograph in her mother’s album, the one that would always be missing: a man, a woman, their child between them, seated at a table. Ordinary happiness: French windows, a garden beyond, the Sunday papers, daffodils in a blue-and-white jug, a pot of jam, orange juice in a glass pitcher. The mother in the photograph has two good hands, two good eyes, the father is reading aloud to her from the paper. The daughter goes into the kitchen, yawning, to fetch the coffee. For years, it seemed—until the day her father told her about the cancer—she had been carrying that other life inside her, waiting for it to begin.

Soon she would answer Khim’s letter. She would tell him that her father was dead; she would tell him she hoped he’d have another child: perhaps this time it would be a daughter. She would imagine him, she’d say, with his wife and little girl, there in Paris. But he must not write to her any more. Please understand, she’d say, as he had done. Love, Emma.

For the gift of time and (beautiful) space, I am grateful to the Spiti tis Logotechnias in Paros, to the Corporation of Yaddo, to the Château de Lavigny, and to the Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes. Heartfelt thanks to my agent, Marly Rusoff, for bringing me onto her raft, and to Judith Gurewich and all the lovely people at Other Press for paying such close attention.

To smooth out my narrative, I have had to take some minor liberties with dates, bringing certain historical events forward in time and condensing others into a shorter period. I have also anglicized the spelling of some German names.