Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Listen, Grandpa, Ruth said, not quite impulsively. You don’t have to go back to that place. You could come home with me.

  He didn’t seem to be listening. He was humming tunelessly under his breath, eyes on the spoon with which he was stirring his coffee, making little clinking sounds.

  I don’t have much space, but you could sleep in my bed until I find someplace with two bedrooms. With your Social Security we could afford it.

  That’s very sweet of you, darling, he said at last, looking up and nodding. She felt guilty relief, understanding his refusal.

  She has to take you, then, she burst out, as if they’d been discussing M the whole time. She doesn’t know what that place is like, she can’t. She has the money, she must. If she won’t bring you home she can at least afford to put you somewhere nicer, with a private room for God’s sake.

  That’s not going to happen, darling.

  Why not?

  Your mother, Istvan said, and began to cough, a prolonged, hacking, convulsive series of coughs that turned his face bright purple. It seemed to go on and on: people at the other tables were looking, an old woman frowned and put her hand over her mug of tea, as though to protect it from germs. The waitress, who stood at the end of the short counter jawboning with the cook, looked over at them but didn’t move. Istvan coughed some more. Ruth slid out of her side of the booth and bent over him, touching his back hesitantly, feeling the slight hunch there. He waved her off, so she just stood there tableside and watched him cough and cough into a handkerchief on which the monogrammed letters OF were just visible. Finally the coughing subsided enough for him to drink some of the water Ruth pushed at him. He sunk and sighed.

  Grandpa....

  Sweetness, he said loudly, addressing the waitress. She shuffled over.

  You want some water?

  The check please, sweetness, but don’t rush, Istvan told her. Do you want more coffee, darling?

  No, Grandpa.

  The waitress smiled sourly, took the check out of her apron, scribbled something on the back (Ruth discovered a moment later it said “Have a nice day!” and “Marie” with a heart to dot the i), and put it on the table. Istvan took out his wallet: a thick, worn, patched leather monument to the man her grandfather had been, a man with a place in the world though not one of consequence, bulging with business cards and shoppers’ club cards and folded papers, very few of them green.

  Let me get this.

  A man doesn’t let a woman buy him dinner, her grandfather said hoarsely. He carefully extracted a pair wrinkled twenties and smoothed them on top of the bill.

  She swept up the bills and went to the register to pay, glancing back to see if he was watching her, but he was staring at the cable again. She handed her credit card to the slack-jawed sallow-faced man who served as cashier, trying to think of how she could slip the money back to him somehow. For a moment she thought her card had been declined, but then the cashier handed her a receipt to sign with a gravelly and distant thank you.

  When she returned to the table her grandfather looked up at her as if startled and then smiled: it was not a sad smile, she thought either, certainly not a happy smile. It was a patient smile.

  Your mother, Istvan said, and again, more softly, your mother, looking into Ruth’s eyes so she could see his own, brown and rheumy. She wants to help. She tried to help. She sent me a check, even. You want to see it? Before she could answer he’d taken a folded slip of paper from his wallet. He handed it to her and she unfolded it just enough to make out her mother’s signature and some zeroes and the date. She looked at him.

  This is six months old. You haven’t deposited it?

  No, darling. I have nothing, do you understand? Her only inheritance will be what I don’t take from her. I want her to spend it on herself. Or on you. Look at this.

  He’d extracted another piece of paper from the wallet: it was a Polaroid, folded and curled at the edges. He held it in his hands and slowly opened it like someone drawing open a curtain, to reveal a picture of Ruth as a baby toddling with her hand tucked in Istvan’s. They were walking away from the camera toward the waves—it was a beach shot, and her grandfather looked tanned and strong in a pair of Bermuda shorts and an unbuttoned shirt. The setting sun heliographed in her hair, which had been a reddish blonde until a little after her third birthday. She tried and failed to remember what it must have been like to be that little girl, tiny smooth hand in his large rough one (but his hands strike her now with their mottled smallness, their delicacy), sand burning the soles of her feet, and who had been the photographer? She tried to picture Papa with the camera and dismissed the image immediately: he would have been under an umbrella somewhere with one of the thick volumes of military history that he used to devour on vacations. It must have been M, young and beautiful, in that two-piece suit that tied at the neck she used to wear, fully made up with lipstick and mascara even though it was only a daytrip to the Jersey Shore. There were books and books in the apartment filled with the pictures she’d taken of little Elsa, mostly Polaroids—they suited her brusque impatience in the long-ago age before digital photography, and Ruth could easily picture her standing there waving the undeveloped photo back and forth as though fanning herself.

  Did she take that? she asked her grandfather.

  Istvan seemed surprised by the question: he took the photo back and looked at it. I thought Louisa took it. She liked to take pictures. This is Jones Beach, summer of nineteen seventy-three. I remember because it was the day your mother told me she and your father had gone and gotten married that day.

  Ruth remembered this story: they had lived together in common-law fashion for several years before and after her birth. It was only when she was three or so that they had decided to make it official with a trip to City Hall. There was another photo somewhere of the two of them in a picture eerily similar to the one she remembered of Istvan and Klara’s picture, except that this one was in color and standing very small between the happy couple was Elsa Ruth, the only one in a white dress—M had worn a shade of blue that the passing of the years had rendered a muddy turquoise.

  Were you surprised?

  Her grandfather had taken the cigar out of his pocket and was clenching it between the second and third fingers of his right hand. Nothing your mother does surprises me, darling. She was always her own girl. You’re the same.

  I’m not the same, Ruth heard herself say, but her grandfather doesn’t respond, for the waitress was bearing down on them. You can’t smoke in here, she declared. The grandfather looked up at her with an air of injured pride.

  I can’t smoke anywhere, sweetness. I’m dying in the lungs. Probably be dead before I haul this out the door. He gestured with the cigar at the oxygen tank crouching at his feet like a surly pet. The waitress’ mouth opened and then closed. She looked at Ruth as if for help, but for once in her life Ruth didn’t apologize for anything, she just gave her a level look. The waitress retreated without saying anything.

  They’re trying to kill me, he said to Ruth. Let’s get out of here. It’s time to go home.

  Some home.

  Ruth took her grandfather’s arm and slowly, painfully, bumping the tank wheels down the short flight of steps from the dirty glass door, they stepped out together into the humidly teeming July evening. Step by step they made their way to the end of the block and around the corner to where the Hopeview dankly loomed.

  We have to get you out of this place.

  I’ve been in worse places.

  Yes, I know. I wish you’d tell me more about your experiences.

  There’s nothing more to tell.

  What if I came back with a tape recorder, Grandpa? Would you tell me then? It’s history. People ought to know.

  It’s enough, darling. It’s another life.

  You don’t remember?

  That’s right. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, as though to plug it.

  It was summer in the city, sticky, infernal. She squeezed his skinn
y hand in her own. By autumn she’d be sitting shiva for him in the old over-airconditioned house in New Jersey, where polite conversation was fueled through the night by endless cups of coffee until Ruth was nauseous in her belly and sick in her soul. He’s buried now and I never heard his story, she thought. I never really touched him. But she remembered then returning him to his room; he’d wanted to say goodbye in the lobby but she had insisted on accompanying him up the antiseptic peeling elevator to the room he shared with a frail snoring black man with tubes in his nose, only a plastic curtain between their beds. At least she’d turned down the roommate’s television and sat there for a while with him, and he’d taken out a bottle of some sort of medication.

  It’s for my eyes darling, perhaps you could help me with it. I have to sit in the chair.

  He sat in the chair and took off his glasses and leaned back. She studied the thin gray skin of his face, bunched at the ears and neck, the turkey neck folding loosely above the white hairs sticking out from the top of his undershirt. His eyes were open, looking up at the ceiling, not registering her, little tremulous orbs. What these eyes have seen. She positioned the dropper over first one eye and the other, just a couple of inches. He blinked tears and she touched, for a moment, the sparse oily hair of his head and felt the warmth of his scalp.

  Thank you darling.

  Gently replacing his glasses on his face. Holding for one more moment that papery hand. I would see for you, Grandfather, if I could. Still dressed, he lay down with difficulty in the bed, stretched out with a sigh, rested his hands on his sternum and smiled his goodbye. At the door she looked back, saw the light from the TV reflecting in the lenses of his glasses. His eyes were open or they were closed. She shut the door.

  The past is a succession of Russian dolls, each smaller than the last, with finer features, fainter colors, receding into something, many somethings, that’s too small to hold, cascading through open fingers like water or sand. Lucy on the swing, riding gently back and forth, singing the words mommy and daddy to a tune of her own invention. The lake heaves and simmers in the autumn breeze to Ruth’s right. To her left the other mothers are clustered by benches and strollers, exchanging gossip and childrearing advice: they look absurdly young to Ruth, none of them a day over thirty. Ruth’s eye is drawn to the only other woman here standing apart: quite tall, of Slavic appearance, with reddish blonde hair and tight designer jeans, silently assisting her silent toddler son up onto a metal horse mounted on a spring and then, with an open-hipped and masculine gesture, rocking him on the horse with her foot. She’s the youngest woman there but seems somehow older than the rest: something clings to her, a preoccupation that isn’t distraction, there’s a special slowness to her, like royalty must have, a woman used to being looked at, with enviably unlined skin that Ruth guesses is not the result of Botox. The woman notices Ruth and simply looks back at her for a moment without changing her expression; Ruth drops her gaze. Up, up, Lucy demands, so Ruth picks her up and perches her on the slide, a bit nearer to the woman in jeans. She hears herself addressed finally.

  How old is yours? says the woman. The accent is Russian, maybe Ukrainian.

  Almost two, Ruth says, suddenly relieved to speak to someone, hoping against hope that the subject won’t be cloth versus disposable. She remembers, with difficulty, to ask about the woman’s son.

  Two and a half, the woman says, giving her son’s blond curly head a kind of pat that Ruth’s familiar with, a touch that doesn’t communicate affection so much as presence. His name is Boris. His father’s name is also Boris.

  Ruth doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. That’s Lucy, she says at last.

  A very beautiful girl. Like her mother.

  Ruth feels the heat in her cheeks. Um, thanks. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.

  We moved here recently, the other woman says, up from the city. My husband thought it would be better for Little Boris. Better for Big Boris too, I suppose.

  Is it better for you?

  The woman shrugged. I like the water, she said. And there are many trees here. But it’s dull. Don’t you think it’s dull?

  Sometimes. The city’s not that far off, but it seems like I never go there. Except sometimes on weekends the three of us will go downtown or to Lincoln Park. Or when visitors come, we go to the Art Institute and things like that.

  Do you work? the woman asked. My husband doesn’t want me to work.

  The matter-of-factness of the statement momentarily displaces Ruth’s anxiety about the question. How many times has Ruth had that conversation with other women who themselves had either given up or sidetracked their careers or who still doggedly and with a distinct air of superiority continued to follow their bliss as lawyers, Realtors, administrative assistants? But this woman came from another world, an older world. She took a breath.

  I’m an attorney. But I’m not practicing right now. I mean, I do a little bit on the side, edit briefs and that sort of thing for my old firm. A glorified paralegal, really.

  What sort of law did you practice? the woman asks eagerly.

  The boring kind. Corporate contracts. I wanted to do criminal, actually.

  Criminal?

  Yes, I wanted to go after the bad guys, Ruth says, smiling a little at the absurdity of it. Actually, I wanted to work for the International Criminal Court, in The Hague.

  Interesting, the woman says, in a tone that makes it impossible to know if she truly finds it interesting or not. Myself, I have no profession. I am still getting used to America.

  The sun is shining, children are shrieking, the wind off the lake stirs Ruth’s hair and plays with the collar of her blouse. Why, then, does the strange woman’s presence feel like an intrusion from her old life, when she was free, like cold water pricking and stippling Ruth’s skin into wakefulness?

  Boris has climbed off the metal horse and has moved a short distance to the slide, impelling his mother to follow him; Lucy is clamoring for Ruth to pick her up. She follows the Russian woman to the play structure, where she’s holding her son’s hand as he goes down the slide.

  I’m Ruth.

  Nadezhda is my name. You can call me Nadia. Everyone does. She studies Ruth for a moment. Why The Hague? You do not have enough American bad guys?

  Oh we do, for sure. It’s just, ah. I’ve always been interested in European history. My mother came from there.

  Conscious of the imminent reveal of her Jewishness. Ruth rarely thinks of or directly encounters anti-Semitism, but Nadia’s coolness, her foreignness, has her antennae up.

  Her parents were in Auschwitz. My grandparents I mean.

  How terrible, Nadia says simply.

  Yes.

  So you would like to go after the Nazis then. But the Nazis are all dead.

  No, Ruth says, shaking her head. There are always Nazis.

  Nadia stares past Ruth at the waters of the lake for a moment. It is why I agreed to come to America. Why I am standing here talking to you with my American son. Because of what my own grandmother told me. She survived the siege of Leningrad. You have heard of this?

  Yes, I have.

  And in my own country there are bad things. I wanted to live somewhere that wars don’t happen. Somewhere normal.

  I can understand that.

  Bad things happen here, says Nadia as if to herself. Terrible things. But they do not mean in the same way. You understand my English?

  Nadia’s eyes are a pale and crystalline shade of blue that makes the pupils startlingly dark. Ruth smiles, reflexively, and looks away.

  Perhaps you can. Americans are so, so comfortable mostly. I have noticed this.

  Ruth smiles with one corner of her mouth by way of acknowledgment, and Nadia laughs suddenly, a snapped-off sound.