Bridal Chair (22 page)

He placed his hand on her head, and she felt the pressure of his comforting touch even as the door closed behind him. She returned to the living room and stood beside her parents at the window, startled to see that cars continued to move at an unhurried pace down Riverside Drive although passersby looked up at the sky and quickened their steps.

Winter drifted into spring, spring into summer, each season dominated by news of the European theater, news of the Pacific theater. The war consumed Bella and Marc. It shadowed their days, filled their nights with fear. Ida bought black shades for the windows, mandated for use in air-raid drills, but they never raised them. The darkness of the apartment reflected the darkness of their mood.

The unremitting heat of the Manhattan summer and the discouraging war news unnerved them. They listened in heavyhearted silence to Hans von Kaltenborn’s rich gravelly voice reporting that there were unconfirmed rumors of mass murders of Jews in eastern Europe. The anonymous victims of those unconfirmed rumors might well be their relatives and friends, Marc’s sisters and their children, Bella’s brothers and their families. Names crowded Bella’s mind and memory. Was Mendel in Siberia? Where was Abrashka? Had Yaakov found a hiding place in Paris? The questions sapped her energy. Marc’s lips moved silently, mouthing the names of his sisters, his friends.

Ida avoided the apartment. She left early each morning, rushing from her art classes to Pierre Matisse’s gallery and then to the hospital where she volunteered. She went to parties given by new friends, young men and women she met in her classes or at the hospital. She returned home with her color high, the ghost of a smile lingering on her lips. Parties and friendship were new to her. Laughter in these desperate days was a gift.

She remained her parents’ mainstay, shopping for them, opening their mail, paying their bills, and answering her father’s correspondence. She arranged for their ration books from the newly organized Office of Price Administration, counting out the tiny color-coded stamps for the requisite amounts of sugar, coffee, meat.

She arrived home one summer evening, and sorting through the mail, she set aside an envelope emblazoned with Mexican stamps.

“Do we know anyone in Mexico?” she asked her father.

He shrugged.

“There are people everywhere who Marc Chagall does not know who think that they know Marc Chagall,” he replied enigmatically. “So perhaps there are such people in Mexico. It must be from someone who wants something from me. Something for nothing, I suppose. ‘Cher Monsieur Chagall, can you send us perhaps a small print for our charity’s auction.’ ‘Can you send us a small donation for our kosher soup kitchen?’” His voice rose to a mimicking falsetto, but he hovered close as she read the letter.

It did not surprise Ida that neither Bella nor Marc had dared to open the envelope. Any unfamiliar correspondence filled them with fear. Unexpected phone calls frightened them. They allowed the phone to ring until Ida answered it; they left letters unopened until she read them. She was their buffer against a frightening world. The compliant daughter, the once vulnerable child whom they had so obsessively protected, was now their protector.

“What is it? What does the Mexican want?” Marc asked impatiently.

He knew that with Ida’s aptitude for languages she had been able to translate the Spanish without difficulty.

“It’s an invitation,
Papochka
. A wonderful invitation. The government of Mexico invites you to Mexico City to work on the stage sets of
Aleko
.”

“Give it to me,” Marc commanded.

He seized the letter from her and stared at it impatiently as though the Spanish words might morph into Russian, Yiddish, or French. He discerned names and dates and understood their impact.
Léonide Massine.
Of course, Léonide, his old friend, the Russian choreographer he had met in Paris and then again, by happy coincidence, in New York. Their reunion had been productive. Throughout the spring, they had worked together, Marc designing sets for the Russian-inspired ballet as Léonide perfected his choreography.
Aleko.
The name of that ballet jumped out at him, repeated in each paragraph. “Palacio de Bellas Artes,” he read, silently mouthing the unfamiliar Spanish words. He remembered that Massine had told him that would be the venue for the ballet’s premiere.

His blue eyes glinted, and his narrow face glowed with pleasure. He grasped Bella’s wrists and waltzed about the room with her.

“To Mexico, Bella
meine
,” he sang. “To Mexico,
un
pays
magique
, a magical land.”

She laughed and tossed her head back, her graceful steps matching his. The depression of so many months was abandoned. They sang softly, a Russian song that Ida did not recognize. It was, perhaps, a song that they had sung as young lovers walking across the bridge that spanned the Western Dvina River.

Ida watched them with a twinge of envy and wondered when she and Michel had last shared such a moment. She watched her parents glide across the room, her father humming, her mother’s head resting on his shoulder. When their impromptu dance ended, she clapped as they sank down on the sofa, their smiling faces glistening with perspiration. Bella threaded her fingers through Marc’s gray curls and Marc wiped the beads of sweat from her face.

He picked up the letter.

“Massine will be overjoyed,” he said. “He often said that he wanted me beside him when the ballet went into rehearsal.”

“Of course,” Bella agreed. “He needs you. What would Léonide’s choreography be without your set designs? Don’t you agree, Idotchka?”

“Of course,” Ida said although she did not agree.

Ida knew that her father’s set designs were dependent on Massine’s translation of Pushkin’s poem and Tchaikovsky’s music into the inspired fluidity of dance. But of course, Marc, like a greedy child, with Bella’s encouragement, would claim the dominant role. She shrugged. Their reaction was irrelevant. What was important was that they had been invited to Mexico City, that they would bask in its brilliant sunlight, accept the adulation of its cultural elite, and immerse themselves in the theater work they had always loved. They would create sets and costumes, replicating their long-ago experience at the Jewish Theater in Moscow. She wanted them to sing again, to regain, however briefly, the world that had been lost to them, to emerge from the carapace of depression that held them prisoner in New York. And, she acknowledged, she herself wanted to be liberated, however briefly, from the burden of their melancholy, their constant neediness.

“But, Ida, how will you manage all alone? Michel is so often away,” Bella said worriedly.

It was true that Michel was rarely home. Since the United States’ entry into the war, Radio Free Europe had intensified its operations, and several times a day, listeners in occupied France tuned their clandestine radios to the station outlawed by the Gestapo and heard his reassuring introduction:
“C’est Michele Gordey, de La Voix d’Amerique.”
He traveled from state to state, conducting interviews, gathering information, offering insights. Even when he was in New York, he often slept on a camp bed in his office. When night fell in America, the light of dawn crept across embattled Europe. The war progressed at a frenetic pace, crisis following crisis, news stories exploding day and night. Michel was constantly on call, his work his priority. He and Ida, by mutual if unspoken consent, were no longer at the center of each other’s lives. When they shared a meal, it was more often by chance rather than design.

“I will manage,” she assured them. “Perhaps Michel will be able to spend more time at home.”

She did not tell them that his absence did not trouble her, that, in fact, she relished the idea of waking in an empty apartment, relieved of all responsibility, accountable neither to her parents nor to her husband. How wonderful it would be to be alone!

Within a week, Marc and Bella left for Mexico. They sent Ida exuberant letters. The journey, exhausting as it was, had energized them. They were working with Alicia Markova, the brilliant English ballerina, who loved the wonderfully imaginative scarlet costume Bella had sewn for her. They had had dinner with the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Bella had found some marvelous woven fabrics of subtle jade and brilliant blue, perfect colors to offset Ida’s fiery hair and radiant complexion.

Ida shared their letters with Elsa as they sat in the courtyard of Beth Israel Hospital where Elsa was on staff and Ida volunteered.

“Do you miss your parents?” Elsa asked. She herself choked on her loneliness. André had enlisted and was working in a field hospital “somewhere in Europe.” She understood that he could not tell her where. Silence on the home front was a weapon. Signs everywhere reminded them that “loose lips sink ships.”

“It is the least I can do for this country that has given us so much,” André had said when he told her of his commission, and she had not objected. Still, she missed him desperately. She took refuge in her work at the hospital, in her small son Daniel, who went to sleep each night with his father’s picture beneath his pillow and the small wooden car that Michel had fashioned for him clutched in his hand.

“No,” Ida said honestly. “I miss them not at all. This is the first time in my life that I have ever had the luxury of living my own life, of doing as I pleased. If I want to have a party, I have a party. If I want to stay out all night, I do just that. No excuses. No explanations. I eat when I please, I sleep when I please.”

“And do you sleep with whom you please?” Elsa’s tone was mischievous.

“If it should come to that, why not?” Ida replied defiantly. “I was eighteen when I married Michel. I was a child bride, a child wife. But I am no longer a child. I am a woman and I want to live a woman’s life. I want to dance. I want to laugh. Why should I not have the experience of other men, other lovers? I am not like you, Elsa. There is no André in my life. No Daniel. We are at a new place in our marriage, Michel and I. Together yet separated. Connected yet independent. Friends. Best friends. I haven’t taken a lover yet, but I’m not saying that it is not a possibility. Do I shock you when I say that I am not sure that Michel himself would object? You need not answer. I shock myself.” She fingered the button on the blue jacket of her uniform, her eyes bright with tears.

“You must be careful, Ida,” Elsa said. She understood that Ida’s words reverberated with loneliness.

“You gave me that warning once before,” Ida reminded her and the two young women smiled. Memories of their European past briefly banished the sadness of their uncertain present.

Ida’s hair fell across her shoulders in a cascade of radiance. Elsa smiled with the wistful benevolence that plain women often accord their more beautiful friends. But she did not envy Ida. She, after all, had her child, her career, a husband who was both lover and colleague. André would return to her. He had to return to her. She clung fast to that certainty. She pitied Ida for her restless yearning, her poignant need to dance, to laugh, to retrieve a life and love that had been denied her.

* * *

The parties, the desperate attempts at gaiety, continued. Ida danced herself into exhaustion. And she laughed; her forced merriment was nervous and high-pitched. She bought the short, brightly patterned skirts and sleeveless, pastel-colored blouses that were newly fashionable, a thought to be patriotic because fabric was needed for uniforms. Her long, graceful legs were bare because nylon and silk were needed for parachutes. She hosted parties, floating through the apartment barefoot, setting out plates of chips and dishes of sour cream and onion dips. In Bella’s absence, no cakes were baked in the Riverside Drive kitchen. Sugar and eggs were rationed and so was time. Everyone on the home front was either working or volunteering for the war effort. Ida’s new female friends took jobs in the post office, ran elevators, drove taxi cabs. The frivolity of their evenings and weekends was hard earned. They were determined to seize whatever fun they could. The soldiers and sailors with whom they danced in smoke-filled apartments and at USO clubs held them close and gave them their APO addresses. They dutifully wrote letters on flimsy V-mails as one troop after another was shipped overseas.

Ida’s parties were crowded. Friends and the friends of friends filled the room. Music blared from the phonograph. Bella’s oriental rugs were rolled back, the heavy furniture pushed aside as the young people danced Lindies and fox-trots on the hardwood floor. Ida learned to jitterbug to “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” She collapsed onto the brocaded sofa and joined in the wistful singing of “The White Cliffs of Dover” and the lustier “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” GIs in uniform arrived carrying raffia-wrapped bottles of Chianti that they poured into paper cups. Officers brought their PX purchases of scotch and vodka. They drank, but they did not get drunk.

One night, a young marine trailed Ida into the kitchen and pressed up against her, his lips seeking hers.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Ida. I’m shipping out next week.”

She heard the desperation in his voice, allowed him to kiss her, all the while wondering how it was that he knew her name when she had no idea who he was.

She smelled fear on his breath. How old was he? Twenty-one, perhaps twenty-two? She remembered the very young French soldier whose dying hemorrhage had saved Michel’s life.

“You’ll be fine,” she assured him and allowed his hands to travel nervously across her body.

His kiss, his touch, had not been unpleasant. They had merely been meaningless. She neither savored nor regretted them.

She occasionally went to dinner or a film with one young officer or another, but they soon bored her. They were so young, these Americans, untouched by life, unscarred by history. They were smooth-cheeked, innocent-eyed boys who wore the uniforms of men, players in a fantasy masquerade that would all too soon become a tragic reality. She pitied them and allowed them to touch her breasts, press their lips to her neck.

“But I have nothing to say to them,” she complained to Elsa. “And I am not interested in what they have to say to me.”

Elsa smiled. She wondered when Ida would find a lover, a man who would match her experience and passion.

Michel appeared at the apartment occasionally when a party was in progress. Ida danced with him, relaxed in his arms, surprised at his easy grace. They had been lovers who had never danced, a married couple who had seldom laughed. They sat in the kitchen together and traded fragments of their days with the ease of their long intimacy. She showed him her parents’ letters from Mexico, which he read with slight interest.