The Other Traitor (28 page)

The cemetery reminded Julian of a park. Low rolling hills, paths, benches, lots of thick-trunked trees that had probably been here for a hundred years. If not for the rows and rows of headstones, this could have been Central Park.

He had never been to a cemetery, at least not one where people he knew were buried. When his father died, there had been a service at a funeral home, but no burial. A few months afterward, his mother and sister had taken his father’s ashes to be scattered in the bay, but Julian had refused to go with them. He hadn’t wanted yet another reminder that his father was gone.

With Nana, though, it was different. Rather than upheaval, he had a sense of quiet, as though something significant had come to an end. Then why couldn’t he feel anything?

He stood arm-in-arm with his mother at Nana’s grave as they listened to the rabbi speak and recite prayers in Hebrew. Rhonda was on Julian’s other side, next to her husband.

Only a handful of other people had come. A couple of Mariasha’s neighbors. A man who introduced himself as a collector of her sculptures. Someone from a museum. Most everyone from Nana’s past was dead.

Julian hadn’t cried when his mother had called him with the news on Thursday evening. He hadn’t cried in the two-and-a-half days since he learned of her death. Would he ever mourn her? Ever forgive her?

A grave had been dug beside Aaron Lowe’s. Half the headstone read ‘
Aaron Lowe 1910-1984. Loving husband, father, and grandfather
.’ The blank side was for Mariasha, as per her instructions.

Nana had chosen to be buried beside her husband. Out of duty? Devotion? Love? Julian wondered where Isaac Goldstein was buried.

The weather had been unseasonably warm over the last couple of days, confusing a few of the trees where Julian noticed tiny green buds.

The rabbi finished his eulogy. Julian was surprised when his mother dropped his arm and turned toward the mourners.

“My mother was a complex woman, who had been faced with an impossible choice in her life,” she said.

Impossible choice.
Nana’s words, too.

“But she was human, which meant she made mistakes. But whatever she may have done wrong, I know in her heart, she loved her family. All of us.”

The rabbi picked up the shovel, scooped up dirt, then flung it into the grave, over the coffin. His mother did the same. Then Rhonda. Julian shook his head when the rabbi handed him the shovel. Maybe his mother and sister were able to move on, but Julian wasn’t quite there.

The rabbi led the group in the Mourner’s Kaddish, the traditional prayer for the dead. Julian remembered his mother reciting it when his father died.

The ceremony was over. The neighbors and the others came over to the family and expressed their condolences, then left.

Julian stared down into the open pit at the casket that held Nana’s physical remains.

“How are you doing, Jules?” Rhonda asked.

“Still numb.”

“Are you able to forgive her?”

“Are you?”

“It’s different for me,” his sister said. “I’d written her off years ago, but I know how much you loved her.”

“I haven’t cried,” he said.

Rhonda touched his shoulder.

Their mother was beckoning them. She was a short distance away with the rabbi, her hand on top of a dark gray headstone, which looked much older than the ones near Nana’s gravesite.

“I don’t think anyone’s visited these graves in many years,” she said, as Julian and Rhonda approached.

He read the headstone his mother’s hand rested on. Below several Hebrew letters, it said, ‘
Beloved Mother, Esther Hirsch. Died March 15, 1936, Age 42 Years
.’  There was a well-preserved photo in the upper right-hand corner of a young woman, hair piled on her head, a determined expression on her face. Very different from the sad, broken woman in the sketch Saul had made of her.

“Esther Hirsch was my grandmother. Your great-grandmother.” His mother’s voice caught. “I was named for her.”

That’s what Nana had written in her final letter.

“And this.” His mother touched the headstone beside it. “This was my grandfather.”

‘My Beloved Husband and Our Dear Father Abraham Hirsch. Died June 8, 1925. Age 34.’
There was a place for a picture, but it must have fallen out some time ago.

“They were both so young,” Rhonda said.

Woman Wearing New Hat, Man Reading
, Julian thought. Nana had kept them in her life right until the end. She had made them a promise to always watch over Saul.

“And here’s my uncle’s grave,” his mother said.

‘Saul Hirsch. My Brother. Died October 23, 1958. Age 36.’
And beneath his name, an epitaph, very likely written by Nana.
‘If only his dream to play baseball had come true.’

Boy Playing Stickball.

If only. Would Isaac Goldstein have been executed? Probably not. Without Saul at Los Alamos, it was unlikely Isaac would have been involved with the information passed on to the Soviets. Would Isaac have had an affair with Mariasha? That was something he could never know. But one thing he did know was that if Isaac and Mariasha hadn’t consummated their love, Julian wouldn’t now exist.

The rabbi was reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’mei raba

Julian didn’t know what the Hebrew words meant, but he found the cadence of the prayer comforting.

He thought about Nana losing both her parents when she was young. Only seven when her father had died. Then her mother. And all she had was her kid brother.

Impossible choice.

He was only just beginning to understand the complexity of what Nana had been faced with. Saul wasn’t simply her brother, he had been her responsibility. And so, she protected him up to the end, but in doing so she sacrificed the man she loved.

Oseh shalom bim’romav hu ya’aseh shalom

Aleinu v’al kol Yis’ra’eil v’im’ru

The rabbi met his eye. “Now say ‘
Amen
’.”

Julian’s mother and sister said, ‘
Amen,
’ but he said nothing.

“
Amen
,” said a shaky unfamiliar female voice behind them.

He turned to the woman, tall like his mother, who stood beside a tree. She wore a camelhair coat that hung loosely on her narrow frame, and had thin white hair and blue eyes. A petite woman in a long black coat came from behind the tree and slipped her arm through the woman’s.

It took a pulse beat for him to process her without the red ski jacket, then his heart lurched. Annette!

The two women approached. “I hope you don’t mind our being here,” Annette said to Julian’s mother. “I read that the funeral was today.”

“You’re very welcome here.” His mother stared at the tall woman. “Sally?”

“Essie,” she replied, in a small childlike voice.

The two women studied each other, perhaps trying to find something in each other’s faces of the children they’d been so many years before.

Julian felt something in the pit of his stomach he couldn’t identify. They were daughters of the same father. Two women whose lives might have been reversed had Nana chosen differently.

“I’m very sorry about your grandmother.” Annette was only inches from him. Agonizingly close. “Whatever she did doesn’t change that she loved you very much.”

He couldn’t bear to look at her or smell her now-familiar scent. “Thank you,” he said, focusing instead on their mothers.

The two women had taken each other’s hands. For an instant, he was reminded of the two little girls in the photo. Then Sally kissed Essie on both cheeks, and walked quickly away.

He felt the gentlest pressure on his chest. Annette’s hand. He wanted to clamp it against his heart with all his might, but he knew she would pull away.

Her eyes were shiny, brimming with sadness, maybe even regret. “
Au revoir,
Julian.”

“
Au revoir
,” he whispered.

“Remember,” she said. “Revoir means to see again, not goodbye.” Then she turned and hurried after her mother.

He remembered. Their first conversation about her name. Annette Revoir. She had said
revoir
meant to see again, not goodbye.

Would he ever see her again?

The blue sky, rolling hills, thick old trees, and rows and rows of headstones pressed in around him. It was quiet, as though something significant had happened and the world would never again be the same.

He sank to his knees by his grandmother’s grave, overwhelmed by a pain so crushing it took his breath away.

Nana was gone. Nana, who had watched over him when he felt he had no one else, who had always loved him unconditionally.

Gone.

He inhaled sharply, the smell of sweet, rich earth and budding trees filling his lungs. Then he threw a handful of dirt into her grave, and at last felt her release.

“
Au revoir
, Nana.”

Au revoir, Julian.

Annette and her mother hurried from Mariasha’s gravesite. No backward glances. Would she ever see him again or did
au revoir
really mean goodbye?

“Thank you for making me go to see Essie,” her mother said, as they stepped outside the cemetery gates. “
J’avais peur.
”

“I know you were afraid.”

“She’s my half-sister,” Mama said, more to herself than to Annette. “I thought it would be strange to see her, but it wasn’t. I think I always felt a special bond with her.”

“I’m glad.”

The heels of their shoes tapped against the sidewalk as cars sped by on the wide boulevard.

“I like her son,” Mama said.

Annette didn’t answer, afraid her voice might break.

When they got home from the cemetery, Mama sat on the sofa while Annette went to the kitchen alcove to make them
chocolat chaud
. She brought the milk in the saucepan to a slow boil, whisked in finely chopped bittersweet chocolate, then added a little brown sugar, just like Grandma Betty used to make it. Just as she’d herself done a few days before for Julian. The memory hurt, but she tried to ignore the pain. She and Julian had shared many beautiful things. Even if they never saw each other again, she wasn’t going to block out her sweet memories the way her mother had done of her own past.

She brought the two mugs of cocoa to the sofa, where Mama was thumbing through Grandma Betty’s photo album.

Her mother took a sip. “This tastes just like your grandmother’s.”

Annette nodded, and sat beside her, close enough to see the photos. The first time she’d shown Mama the album, just after Grandma Betty had died, her mother had been reluctant to look at the old photos. Now, she lingered on each one.

Mama turned slowly past her parents’ wedding photos, past the pictures of the Goldsteins with the Lowes, past pictures of family and friends long dead. Something slipped out from behind one of the pasted-in photos. It had apparently been stuck there all these years. Mama picked up the faded black-and-white snapshot, and Annette studied it over her shoulder. Her mother as a young child with her parents.

The three of them were sitting on an Adirondack chair, Grandma Betty on one of Isaac’s knees, Mama, her hair in two thick braids, on the other. Grandma Betty wore a halter and shorts and Isaac was in a striped T-shirt. They were all laughing.

Mama turned the photo over, read it, then handed it to Annette.

With the two loves of my life in the Catskill Mountains, July 1950.

The penmanship was stronger and less fussy than Grandma Betty’s, and Annette realized it was her grandfather’s handwriting. He’d probably put the photo into the album, perhaps intending to paste it in some day. She wondered if Grandma Betty had ever seen it or had known it was there.

The photo had been taken a couple of months before Isaac was arrested—so Mama was only five—and it was very likely the last one of her mother and grandparents together.

“I remember this day,” Mama said. “I remember being happy.”

With the two loves of my life,
Isaac had written.

Annette took a sip of cocoa, tasting the bittersweet chocolate.

Whatever Mariasha had meant to him, her grandfather had loved his wife and daughter, too. Annette believed that. And as much as he’d hurt Mama, and Grandma Betty, and even herself, she understood the impossible choice he’d been forced to make, and it saddened her that he’d been put through that.

Mama slipped the snapshot in her pocket, then closed the album and hugged it against her chest, as she stared across the room at the bricked-in fireplace.

That’s what Mama had always been, Annette realized. A bricked-in hearth without enough oxygen for fire to burn in it. Unable to love or be loved. But now, perhaps, that was changing.

For both of them.

Annette put her mug on the trunk and scooted closer to her mother. She slipped her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Her mother winced at the touch, then relaxed.

“You know I love you very much, Mama.”

Her mother looked at her, narrowing her eyes as though she was troubled. Then she reached out and touched Annette’s hair. “Would you like me to braid your hair like Grandma Betty used to do?”

Forever hugs.

“
Oui,
Mama. I would like that very much.”