If I Told You Once: A Novel (34 page)

I suspected she was hiding something. The stories were her way of disguising something she did not want to face.

I wanted to know what was hidden behind her shabbily fantastical peasant past.

And finally one day I couldn’t bear it any longer.

I waited till she left the house on one of her scavenging strolls through the neighborhood. (I have seen her digging through trash cans, seen her pulling people’s wet clothes off laundry lines, casually palming lemons and apples off grocery stands and strolling away. She lives by her own laws, my mother.) I went into her room and unearthed the truth, and proof.

Quite literally unearthed: I had to dig down under the spreading debris in her room, under old molding blankets, cardboard boxes, pots of tired-looking plants, the spent matches and rolling papers and plastic bags of marijuana she buys from the boy in the hooded sweatshirt on the corner (she calls it a medicinal herb and says it is good for her cough. I simply look the other way). The curtains at the windows, yellow with age, gave the light an antique sepia evening color, though it was barely midday.

I know it was wrong to do, invade her privacy. But look what I found.

A Fabergé egg, the genuine article, just like the ones you see in museums. It was covered with jewels on the outside; I tested them against my teeth, scratched them against the window. There was a cunning little diorama inside, impossibly detailed. I did not have time to look carefully, I was too excited. And anyway, the outside of the egg, the jeweled surface, captivated me more. The thing was priceless.

And to think she had it buried beneath the bed, like trash. How could she have gotten it?

Right then I realized the truth, after all this time, the mystery of her family. They hadn’t been peasants at all, they must have been very wealthy. Part of the aristocracy, even. One of the old noble families. Here was the proof, right here in my hands.

Funny, how in a way I had always known. Or at least suspected. I had sensed that I was something special; noble blood cannot be denied.

I wondered: did they have an estate? A country home? Servants, horses, elaborate many-syllabled names? Why had she given all that up? Had they been forced to flee the revolution?

And then I found something more. In the fourth cardboard box I looked through, filled with crumbling yellow papers and small brown spiders scurrying from the light, I found the documents, bluntly scrawled in a foreign language. I was able to translate, roughly, and I saw that they were identification papers. My mother’s and father’s, folded together.

I gasped then, inhaled dust and choked.

My parents were brother and sister.

My own parents? Living in incest all these years?

I squatted there, squinting in the dust studying the two papers so brittle with age they seemed on the verge of cracking rather than tearing.

Brother and sister? Perhaps it was a mistake, a deception born out of confusion or convenience or simple ignorance. But the more I studied on it, the more it seemed to make sense.

Brother and sister. A forbidden love. No wonder they had fled their home, moved to a new country where no one knew them. No wonder they had to leave the family estate, the servants and carriages and elaborate balls (I had already begun imagining my lost birthright). They had come here with their sinful love, to live secretly.

My mother? I asked myself. Living in sin with her brother? Incest?

Look at those eyes. She’s capable of anything.

I
was
looking, for there she stood above me, her head still wrapped in a scarf, staring as I squatted on my heels beside the bed. Those eyes. She snatched the papers from my hands, gave me a nudge with her foot so that I fell sprawling backward. I looked past her then, at the dust motes hanging in the sunlight, glinting, floating in the air, never settling, like those Bible-era wasps you see in museums, frozen for centuries, suspended in amber.

Her eyes were frozen like that.

I scrambled from the room like a chastised child.

But satisfied. I had found out the truth, her royal family, her incestuous desires.

No wonder she wanted to disguise it all in fairy tales and magic.

I stood in the bathroom studying my face. I thought of velvet gowns, jewels in my hair, painted portraits. I turned to see the profile. I definitely saw traces of nobility, a Hapsburg chin, it belonged on a cameo pin.

Yes, it did occur to me that my brothers and I were the products of incest.

But the realization did not trouble me overmuch. It’s historical fact, you know, that royal families often married within themselves to keep the blood pure. It had been done for centuries. My parents’ union was not such a tawdry illicit thing; to me it was the height of refinement.

I had uncovered her secret. And there was proof, incontestable proof that you could hold in your hands. Tangible evidence, that was the only way to be sure of anything. Tangible evidence that you could wave in someone’s face.

I felt I understood her better than I ever had before.

I would not tell her I knew her secret. I would let her continue to hide her past in shadows, in poverty and death and fairy tales.

But Nomie, I thought, Nomie should hear the truth. Nomie should be allowed to know.

*   *   *

I went to the museums quite often now. Almost every day. I would put on my gloves, and my pearls (faux, but you could not tell), and the small violet hat, and I would go to the museums and wander the endless huge rooms full of antique furniture and paintings in thick elaborate frames.

I looked at the bed where a king had strangled his seventh wife. I looked at the portraits of sickly angelic heirs, propped up stiffly like dolls, who would die before they inherited their thrones. Paintings of ladies in bejeweled gowns, men in stiff ruffled collars or brocade waistcoats.

Mostly I went to the rooms of the Fabergé-style eggs. I basked in their glow, I could dream there.

I was happier than I had been in years.

Joe? He had been a weak man, a common man. I had intimidated him. He had not been worthy.

The museum rooms were vast and echoing, like churches, like ballrooms.

The line would continue, I thought. An indelible line continuing into the future.

I thought of certain sections of the Bible, the endless dull passages of who begot whom, and who then begot whom, down and down through the generations.

It seemed important, now. Having children had never seemed such a lofty thing to me before. Now it did.

Then I saw the portrait and nearly fainted.

Truly, I did, I wavered on my feet and a kind museum guard leaped forward and grabbed my arm.

A portrait of my mother.

I
swear
to you. Hanging in a museum.

In the portrait she was much younger than I had ever known her, she must have been close to Nomie’s age. But I recognized her immediately, it was unmistakable.

The features. It had to be her. The girl in the portrait had my mother’s birthmark next to her mouth, a pink smear like misapplied lipstick. That mark had a very peculiar shape, very distinctive, I had been staring at that mark on my mother’s mouth for all my life, and now here it was on the face in the painting.

There were other distinguishing marks too, bumps and scars. My mother had many. As a child I’d once asked her to tell me about them; she’d said only that she’d had a rough childhood. From looking at her face you’d think a rough childhood meant tumbling down stairs several times a day.

But the most decisive thing was the eyes staring out of the paint.

Those were her eyes, there were none other like them.

Frozen in time, a wasp in amber.

Those eyes, fierce and fearless, capable of anything.

In the portrait she wore a dress like I had never seen before, embroidered and jeweled all over the bodice, long full sleeves. Her hair—there had been so much of it then—had been arranged in loops and ringlets and flounces, an elaborate dark mass atop her small head.

I hardly need to add that the girl in the portrait had her jaw clenched, her hands curled into fists. Both were habitual, unconscious gestures of my mother’s.

Don’t you see, it
had
to be her? Women in brocade dresses simply do not pose for portraits with their fists clenched. There was not a single other portrait, in that entire museum filled with hundreds, with hands like that.

I wandered for hours, seeing nothing, my head floating.

I went home that evening and there was my mother, peeling potatoes in the kitchen with Nomie beside her. There it was, the same mark on her mouth. The same crooked scar at the corner of her eyebrow. Those hands, so tight around knife and potato, as if the potato needed to be subdued.

I did not know what to say to her. I felt a kind of awe, different from the kind I had felt for her before. I had always sensed that she had some kind of power hidden away, but I had always assumed it was dark and conniving rather than a tragic noble sort.

Watching her I had an ugly feeling then. I was jealous of her, I admit, jealous of the shining elegant past she had had, the kind of elegance I had always longed for and never found. And I was angry, too, that she had not shared it, had not shared the treasures of her past with me. Not just the tangible things, but the wonderful memories she must have had of that time. She’d kept them all to herself, selfish woman. She’d been silent so long.

And now when she opened her mouth it was to spew rubbish.

She put on this charade of peasants and poverty just to taunt me.

I was not angry for myself. Oh no. I was angry for Nomie’s sake.

Nomie who sat there fingering potato peelings as my mother withheld the truth, the magnificent shining truth, and fed her up on unwholesome make-believe and lies.

Ilana

Today I was telling about my parents’ courtship. I was remembering how my mother’s face looked when she was possessed by the dybbuk, so weirdly slack and empty. I remembered the hoarse foreign voice forcing its way out of her throat, and the way everyone in the village drew away from her and even my father with his scarred cheeks looked afraid.

I was remembering how the chickens followed her, and the worms sprang up from the ground.

Later, on their wedding day, she wore a blue dress and flowers in her hair and I had never seen anyone so beautiful. She and my father fed each other wedding cake, and his mouth was so wide she could place her entire hand inside with ease.

And I remembered Shmuel’s parents, how their faces lit up when their daughter married the baker. The daughter had a walleye, and prematurely graying hair, so she felt blessed to be getting married at all. The baker was painfully shy and stuttered when he spoke, so he felt equally blessed. I remembered how happy we were for them, how we all joined hands and danced the minute he crushed the glass with his heel. I remembered how their children came so quickly, one after the other. Seven children all smeared with flour.

I remembered how they died, their bodies stacked with others high as a haystack. The sight was familiar. My family had been piled up the same way.

Today I was telling the story of my grandmother’s wedding night. She was still a child then, my grandmother. She still wore her hair in braids and had nothing sticking out of her chest but ribs the night she knelt before my grandfather’s chair and washed his feet for the first time in a bowl of milk. She kept her head bowed and shivered when he drew one finger slowly along the shining white part in her hair.

I could see it so vividly, as if it had happened the night before. My grandfather’s chair, his emptied boots, the shutters drawn against the cold, the red blanket on the wide low bed that waited ominously in the shadows.

I finished telling these stories, and others, and then went to bed feeling content.

It was not until hours later that I started awake and realized I could not possibly have witnessed these things.

But I could picture them all so clearly! As if I had been there!

It frightens me that I can no longer tell which tales have been told to me by others and which I have witnessed myself.

They all have the ring of truth.

Nomie

I have been having these dreams lately.

In the dreams there is a ladder that reaches from the ground to the stars, with children climbing up and down and the smell of burnt sugar.

I dream of a dress shop where all the salesgirls wear large oval mirrors attached to their hats. They stand in a circle as I try on the dresses, so that every direction I turn I see myself, framed above their fawning faces.

In the dreams there are men raining from the sky and crumpling to the ground, cursing their commanders and the war and the manufacturers of their faulty parachutes.

I dream of a ship at sea, of sheets piled up like snowbanks, of a black-haired man whose shoulders are so broad he cannot fit through the doorway.

I dream about things I have never seen, only heard about, but they are more real to me than anything.

People say you should believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.

To live by that you would end up with nothing to believe in, and what would be the use of that? You might as well lie down and die, because that will be the only sure thing left you.

I can believe anything. For a little while.

*   *   *

I have no mother, or three, depending on your point of view.

There’s Mara, who when I was younger would hold me too tightly, press my face against her bony hip. She used to say: You can call me mama, if you want. It’s almost the same word.

She told me endless stories about my father and showed me postcards he had sent her from various port cities: Lisbon, Sidney, Miami. In her stories my father was sometimes a sailor, sometimes a doctor, and always on his way back to us.

Later I looked at those postcards, saw that they were blank on the back.

She was dark and angular, her eyes so deep-set they were always in shadow. Her hair was coarse and long and she left bits of it everywhere: black hairs in the sink, on the seats of chairs, clinging to her clothes, stuck between the pages of books.