The Marriage of Opposites
Page 82

I stopped in the kitchen on my way out of Madame’s house. The maid was still there, preparing dinner. She had made loaves of cassava bread that smelled heavenly. Her name was Helena James, she told me, and now that I seemed to be a fixture in the house, we should know one another. We shook hands solemnly. We were the only two people Madame had in her home. She went to services, and to meetings of the Sisterhood, but she liked to be alone in her house. However, Mrs. James told me that her employer looked forward to my visits. Madame had lost two children to fevers, and a third had left for Charleston and was rarely heard from. Her daughter had an entire family in America whom Madame Halevy had never met. I stayed for a while and sketched Mrs. James as she diced vegetables and fruit with a sharp paring knife. Mrs. James favored mangoes because they brought good health. She informed me that a person could live on mangoes alone and that the pirates used to do exactly that for months on end. Mrs. James was not a great cook, far from it, but her cassava bread was a miracle. I would be happy to have her bread for every meal. I enjoyed her unruffled manner, and the fact that she liked to talk. When I idly brought up Jestine, not imagining I would have any more information from the maid than I’d had from Madame Halevy, Mrs. James shook her head sadly. “I don’t talk about bad luck. Best forgotten about.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” I said.
Mrs. James laughed and said, “You’re too young to know what you believe.” She looked to make sure that we were indeed alone in the kitchen and wouldn’t be overheard. “Abduction,” Mrs. James whispered to me then. It sounded like a religious act. I thought it was perhaps a practice at the church or one of the African meetinghouses. I rolled that word around inside my head all that day. When I next went to Mr. Lieber’s to drop by so it would appear I was studying, he was napping. I took the opportunity to look through his library. I found the word in a small leather-bound dictionary. Capture. Abducción. Enlèvement. It was as Jestine had told me. Her daughter had been stolen.
Hannah had to direct me on how best to renew relations between our mother and her old enemy. I went to speak to my parents after dinner. They were sitting in the parlor on a settee, close to each other, deep in conversation. My mother had her hand inside my father’s sleeve. It was as if she was a vine encircling his arm beneath the white linen. It was an oddly intimate gesture, one that made me uncomfortable for reasons I didn’t understand. From the doorway they looked like the lovers I sometimes spied by the harbor who were so intent on each other they seemed to have forgotten there was a world outside themselves. I saw a smile on my mother’s face that surprised me. As soon as I stumbled near, she looked up. The smile quickly disappeared.
“Don’t you announce yourself?” she said to me. “You move the way thieves do.”
“I have an invitation,” I declared. “Friday night dinner at Madame Halevy’s.”
My voice sounded unsure, perhaps because of my mother’s darkening expression.
“Did I hear you correctly?” she asked.
“After services,” I said. “The two of you, and Hannah.”
“We’re not welcome at services,” my mother said. “And who asked you to interfere?”
“You’ll be welcome,” I said, enjoying the power of knowing more than my mother.
“Fine.” My father seemed pleased. “We accept. We’ll come to dinner. After services.”
ON THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY my sister took an hour to dress. I could hear conversation blooming down the hall as Rosalie helped her get ready. They laughed and talked about hats and shoes. My parents seemed nervous. In fact, they’d been quiet all that day, exchanging glances. I heard my father say, “What more can they do to us? Perhaps the time has come to move forward.”
“That time came and went,” my mother responded.
Perhaps whatever had happened in the synagogue was the seed of her bitterness. The shadows around her appeared green, lengthening along the mosaic floor as the hour grew later and the time for her to return to the congregation approached. For an instant I saw her as she must have been when she was young and unsure of herself. Her familiar features shifted and seemed vulnerable and unformed. I had the sense I was looking straight through time. Later I studied myself in a dim, silvered mirror. I didn’t like to think I resembled her, but our eyes were the same. Dark and filled with defiance.
I went to the synagogue for the first time that night. I had never walked inside before, only peeked in, and now I was stunned by how beautiful it was. A sort of hush stirred within me, and I thought about God abiding in a place, listening to the prayers that were sent to him. I wore a black suit and white shirt borrowed from one of my brothers. Everything was too big, so my father nodded for me to tuck in the tails of the shirt. “I hope you learned your Hebrew,” he joked.