American Stranger Read online

  “I don’t.”

  And he said, “By you,” and his smile was beautiful.

  He was to become a monk, and monks were not meant to be seductive. Not knowing how to respond, and thinking, Why am I so silly? Nancy asked, “Will you get my coat for me, please?”

  He went to his closet, unhooked a hanger, and slipped her trench coat from it, then returned to her, holding it open. She turned and inserted her arms into the sleeves and put the wad of wet tissue into a pocket.

  “My scarf?” she asked.

  “It’s around your shoulders.”

  She raised the triangle from her shoulders and covered her head with it and tied the ends of the corners in a knot under her chin. She did this slowly, slowly buttoned her trench coat, and buckled her belt. She thought of herself as a woman in control.

  “Well, then,” Nancy said, “I don’t suppose there’s any reason for us to see one another again,” and she held out her hand.

  He took it, but he said, “Maybe not.”

  She was the first to withdraw her hand from his. “Don’t come downstairs with me,” she said. “I can go on my own.”

  He went ahead of her to open the door to his room.

  “Well then,” she said, “bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She reached out and, leaning towards him, put her arms around him. It took him a moment to raise his arms to hold her as she held him. She pressed her face against the side of his face.

  He kissed her on a cheek, then for a moment held her more closely to him before he let his arms drop, and she knew she must let him go and stand back and turn away. When she reached the top of the stairs on the landing she heard the door to his room close. Halfway down the flight of stairs, she stopped and sat on a step for a moment.

  Leaves fallen in the gutters were wet, and the leaves on the trees were dripping.

  As she walked, she sensed that music she had never heard before was going round her mind and she couldn’t hum it.

  Nancy spent Sunday evening in with her parents, which surprised them. Because she was thinking about Aaron, it occurred to her at dinner that he would have been a very strange presence at the table with her parents, and because she couldn’t see him there, she said, as if urged to confront her parents with someone she doubted very much they would have known, “Vinnie introduced me to a Hasid.”

  Her mother asked, “How is Vinnie? He makes me laugh.”

  “He tries,” Nancy said. “He sends his best.”

  Surprised, her father asked, “Where did you meet a Hasid?”

  “In a bar in the Village.”

  “You met a Hasid in a bar in the Village? Seems unlikely to me.”

  “Well, Vinnie said he’s Hasid.”

  Nancy’s mother said, “Maybe he was joking.”

  “He’s becoming a Catholic,” Nancy said.

  Her mother, who never quite concentrated on what was being said, asked, “Vinnie is becoming a Catholic?”

  And Nancy’s father, who always tried to counter the vagueness of his wife by stating the facts, as if the facts were a little judgment against her, said, “Vinnie is a Catholic.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Vinnie,” Nancy said. “I said that I met a Hasid who’s becoming a Catholic.”

  “Where on earth did you meet a Hasid?’ her mother asked.

  “As I said, in a bar, in Greenwich Village.”

  “How could you have met him in a bar in Greenwich Village?” her mother asked.

  “You have vague ideas about Greenwich Village,” Nancy’s father told his wife.

  Nancy knew that her parents loved each other, but she did think her father sometimes taunted her mother.

  Her father said to her, “If the person you met is a Hasid converting to being a Catholic, he would be a very lonely man. His family would sit shiva for him, and he’d die to them.”

  “I think Aaron is lonely,” Nancy said. “Yes, he is.”

  “Aaron?” her mother asked.

  “The Hasid I met.”

  “I’m sorry for him,” her mother said. “Do you know him well enough to invite him to a meal?”

  “I don’t think he’d come.”

  “Does he imagine we’d object to him?”

  “No, no, not that. He’d just feel that somehow he doesn’t belong. In fact, I think he never feels, or has ever felt, that he belongs.”

  “What else do you know about him?” her father asked.

  “Not much. He was wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt, so maybe he was a student there.”

  “That would mean he’d already come a long way from being a Hasid.”

  “I’ve heard,” Nancy’s mother said, “that the clothes they wear are from the eighteenth century.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard,” Nancy repeated, and she thought, as she had thought before: there was nothing in the family apartment that she could have identified as Jewish, not a mezuzah on the jamb of the door to the apartment. She didn’t believe that her parents had done this intentionally, but that it happened, nor did she know what had happened to her parents before they came to New York—what had happened to them in Berlin, what had happened to their families in Germany. She knew this: that when her father learned that he would be banned from university, he quickly went home and with her mother packed two suitcases and locked the door and they went to the train station and boarded the next train to Amsterdam.

  But Nancy did not know how her parents had arrived in New York or how the Biedermeier furniture and the Berlin ice buckets had followed them, and she did not know why she held back from asking.

  After dinner, her mother asked her if she was going out, and, again, she said no, and she joined them for coffee in what was called the office, where her father sat at his desk in a leather chair. On his desk were international magazines on wine, and on bookshelves, books in English and French and German and Russian (her father was born in Russia but moved to Berlin with his parents when he was a boy); and there were books on viticulture and vineyards, some of them large, bulky presentation copies. Nancy knew this much: that after her parents arrived in New York, her father was hired by a refugee family who had reestablished in New York their old family wine business from Germany, and as the family died out her father, as though a surviving member, became the head. But the business was now running down and Nancy’s father thought of selling, but didn’t. Her mother sat in a small, upholstered armchair in front of the desk. She was born in Berlin.

  And because of Aaron, because of the continuing loneliness that she felt isolated him as a Jew, a loneliness that maybe was also hers because she, too, was a Jew, she wanted to know more from her parents about what had happened to them before New York, what had happened to them as Jews among Jews, but she didn’t know how to engage them.

  She asked, suggesting that the thought came to her incidentally, “Don’t I remember you once trying to search for some relatives?”

  “We’re still trying,” her father said.

  Her mother abruptly said, “Nan, darling, ask Vinnie to come to dinner with us while you’re away. He does make us both laugh.”

  She took the cup of coffee Nancy held out to her and said, “Thank you,” and Nancy thought, too, that her parents’ rather formal after-dinner coffee in her father’s office was from a past Nancy knew little about.

  Then it occurred to Nancy that there was something so obvious in all that her parents didn’t tell her about their Jewish pasts that she wanted to expose it, and she said curtly, “Well, thank you both for what you won’t tell me.”

  Her father picked up a letter opener and held it between both hands, and said, “We really don’t know.”

  Nancy said, “I don’t want any coffee. I think I’ll go lie on my bed and read. I have a lot of reading to do for my courses.”

 
“Oh, don’t go, Nan,” her mother said.

  She knew that she had hurt her parents, and she was sorry, for how could she blame them for not telling her what they themselves couldn’t know? Her mother said, “Tell us what you’ve been reading,” and this made Nancy feel they were trying to make up for having hurt her, though she had hurt them.

  No, Nancy thought, her parents weren’t interested in hearing about her reading, not now, and she herself was not interested in telling them; but she and her parents were in that strange mode when nothing that was said was meant, and there was no way of knowing what was meant, not, certainly, when Nancy said that she had noted something in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl that she wondered about and if it had been noted by anyone else. As she spoke she thought, what possible relevance could there be between Henry James and the past history of her parents, who didn’t know about their lost relatives and their lost friends?

  Her father said, “Your mother is tired.”

  “No, no, I’m not. Tell us, Nan darling, tell us, we want to know.”

  In her mother’s vagueness there was a deep, stunned calm, and in the deep calm a sense of always trying to understand all that was beyond understanding, and so the apparent lack of focus in her eyes.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nancy said.

  “Please,” her mother said.

  They were, Nancy thought, all of them, being stilted.

  “Here it is. In the novel, the Roman prince, about to marry in London, expects his relatives to arrive from Italy for the wedding, and among them is his younger brother, whose wife, ‘of the Hebrew race, with a portion that had gilded the pill, was not in a condition to travel.’ And this is the only reference to a Jew in the book.”

  Maybe her parents didn’t comment because they wondered why their daughter made such a point of the reference in Henry James, but Nancy persisted. “I keep asking myself what he meant by ‘with a portion that gilded the pill’?” She thought, here she was trying to find anti-Semitism in Henry James to get her parents talking, and she knew that she was, with a righteousness that had to do with an inner opposition to Aaron, stressing the text, looking for a subtext that was probably not there. But as they drank their coffee, Nancy sensed there was some subtext in her parents’ silence, and if it was not about their being Jewish, she could not imagine what it could be about.

  There was still something not said, all of them waiting for what was not said to be heard, maybe to be said by someone who was not in fact present, and yet somehow present.

  Her mother appeared to go into a reverie, and, leaning her head to the side and looking away, she said quietly, “Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, und ruhig fließt der Rhein.”

  Her father said, “The air is cool and darkens, and the Rhine flows calmly on.”

  Nancy asked, “Heine?”

  And her father said, “Yes, Heine.”

  And her mother smiled at her for recognizing the name of the poet who wrote that beautiful line.

  Nancy kissed them both and said good night, and left them to go to her room, where she lay on her bed in the dark, until she told herself not to, and she switched on a light to read.

  Early the next morning, she breakfasted with her parents, who had come from their bed to be with her before she left for Boston, and she felt more lonely than she had ever felt on her way from them.

  She had a student apartment on Beacon Hill. The house, like many of the houses on Beacon Hill, was brick, with a black door and a brass knocker, but where she lived the old Yankee families didn’t live any longer; the house was on the somewhat dilapidated side of the hill, the door scuffed and the brass knocker askew.

  The apartment had a bedroom in the front and a kitchen at the back, with a striped Indian blanket nailed to the architrave of the doorless doorway between the two, and beyond the kitchen was the bathroom. As soon as she dropped her suitcase on the floor at the end of her bed, she sat on the edge and telephoned Manos, who was supposed to be expecting her. The bed faced a small fireplace, and while the telephone at the other end of the line was ringing she looked at the BU white ceramic beer stein, the incense sticks in a hand-thrown vase, the branch of maple leaves that had been on the mantelpiece when she’d left two months before. Manos answered and said he’d been waiting for her to telephone. There was a student party that night they could go to.

  She said, “I was hoping to see you on your own.”

  She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to see her on his own, or maybe she did understand, or would if she figured it out. She was feeling too light-headed to think about it.

  Darkness had fallen by the time Manos arrived and found her, barefoot and in jeans and a sweatshirt, reading a scholarly book on the novel that she should have read over the summer. She really, really didn’t want to go out, she said, but she made herself get up and change and go out with him. He was a big man, with small hands and feet and dark circles around his darker eyes. He was a premedical student. At the party, he talked for so long with the friend who was giving it, also premed, that Nancy wandered off on her own, as she guessed he wanted her to.

  She made the tour, a drink in a raised hand, looking for someone who had a story to tell her. Not finding one, she returned to Manos and said she really, really wanted to go home, and he said, sure, he’d drive her. In his car he rested his hand on her thigh as he drove, and she wondered if this meant he wanted to spend the night with her. But in the street he didn’t park his car, didn’t even shut off the engine, so she knew he wasn’t going to come in with her.

  He said, “Nancy, things have changed.”

  She reached out and put her arms around him and kissed his forehead and said, “Sure,” and felt an odd sense of relief. She stumbled on the way to the door. He waited until she had opened it and closed it behind her before he drove off.

  For two weeks, she devoted herself to her studies, especially the work of Henry James. She didn’t go to any parties, and when Manos telephoned her, which he did often, she said she felt they shouldn’t see one another for a while.

  Four weeks into the semester she decided to go to New York for the weekend to be with her parents. She missed them, she missed New York. She cut one class and left Friday afternoon, and on the way noted that the leaves of the birch trees along the highways had turned autumn yellow.

  Her parents were both in their sixties. Nancy had been a latecomer in their marriage. At dinner, she told them what she’d been doing at BU but not what she planned to do with a master’s degree in English when she got it. When her father asked, “How’s Manos getting on with his medical studies?” Nancy said, “I’m not dating Manos anymore,” and her father, with a severe frown, asked, “Why?” Nancy shrugged. Again, her father asked, “Why?” but her mother, looking steadily at him, stopped him from asking more about Nancy’s love life. He said, “Funny the way Greeks are always studying to be doctors or lawyers.”

  Early snow fell lightly, and Nancy went out on Sunday afternoon to walk in the falling flakes. She found herself walking across Central Park, where the snow was settling on the withered leaves still on the trees. Flakes hit her face as she stood in front of the house where Aaron had lived, and where he might still live, or where someone might know about him. But as she, blinking, looked up the snow-covered stairs and stoop, on which there were no footsteps, it came to her as a matter of fact that while she had been away she had exaggerated whatever meaning he had had for her. Maybe she had come to the house just to look at it and by looking at it to understand just how much she had exaggerated the meaning she’d had for him, a meaning that had suddenly gone, whatever the meaning had been.

  Yet she climbed the stairs, her footsteps the first to be made in the thin snow. The doorbell, she remembered, had no name under it, and she rang it. After a long wait, during which she thought she could hear the snow falling around her with a slight seething sound, she turned t
o descend, stepping in the footsteps she had made coming up. Halfway down, she heard the door open behind her, and she turned back to see an older man in what appeared to be a clerical black cardigan standing in the doorway, a hall light lit behind him. Nancy climbed the stairs again to the man, who wore large, gray felt slippers and had a soft, white face.

  He said, quietly, “Come in out of the snow.”

  Nancy did, and in the hall of that silent house he looked at her without asking what she wanted.

  She said, “The last time I was here it was to see Aaron Cohen.”

  “He’s at the novitiate,” the man said.

  “Does that mean he’s been baptized?”

  “He has, yes, he has.” The man had an Irish accent.

  “So he’ll become a monk?”

  The man smiled weakly. “You could say that.”

  As Nancy was walking back through Central Park, a sudden gust of wind made the snow whirl around her, and she felt that this had some meaning: it appeared to her that everything had some meaning.

  Two

  In Boston, Nancy turned Manos down the first few times he asked her to one of the Saturday night parties he often gave in the basement rumpus room of his parents’ house, excusing herself, with a forced laugh, by saying she wasn’t up to meeting his new girlfriend. He insisted that he didn’t have a new girlfriend, but that though things were different between them, he still liked her company a lot. They went out on dates to a restaurant they had gone to when they were more of a couple, and sometimes they went to Symphony Hall for a concert or to a play, and when they parted Manos always kissed her on her cheek. She hesitated about going to his parties, but he persisted.

  Soaking in her bathtub, up to her chin in foam, she raised her body up through the foam to look at it as she hadn’t, it seemed to her, in a long time, or, maybe, not such a long time, but since she had stopped longing for Manos, or, better, stopped longing. The suds ran down between her breasts and slid from her thighs, and as she examined her body, long and thin and shining, she saw herself as a cadaver without thought or feeling or a soul, and then it occurred to her that Manos had once described dissecting the cadaver of an old man.