Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  Lay my burden down. In front of the kitchen laptop casting its frail glow on her face, saucepans, the night. She types a few words and clicks Send. And drifts back toward bed, where she lies sleepless, searching the backs of her eyelids until dawn.

  Produce a match. Was that her goal?

  Why do we insist on a plot for our lives?

  Dark curling hair in the oldest photographs. When I knew her short severe and flat, grayed gamine, bobbed. Tracked back in time from heavyset to voluptuous to slender: can it be the same woman? Produce the body. Sits in ashes, listening to the voice thunder: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? How a woman suffers. I hope you never have to suffer the way I’ve suffered. Drama: bangles tilting on a wrist, the bob a little longer, A-line. Thrift shops, colorful voluminous fabrics at her heaviest. Her breasts, ample, tucked away, one breast, swaying heavy that time in the bath, and then, none. The years between cancers in which she grew up. Was I breast-fed? Is she accountable? Like me she hated her ankles and short waist. Dark large heavy-lidded eyes quivering with hurt or scorn. Arched eyebrows she used to pluck. The elegantly hooked unignorably Israelite nose that answers mine in the mirror: Shulamit, shalom. She was proud of her strong arms and shapely calves. Her lips like mine of an exaggerated fullness, particularly the lower. Dimples. I never wore bangs again. Eleven years old in the locker room of the Jewish Community Center, white of cheek, wadding a towel between my legs that I threw out later, in the dark. You’re like me, I also bled early. Matter of fact, I almost said matter of fat: the endless diets: she was contemptuous of daytime TV and slick magazines and self-help books, lived in a self-imposed bubble of the most elevated culture, the operas whose scores she studied, I, Claudius on PBS, tunneling every weekend to the city for doses of theater, ballet, visits to the Met: but somehow she always knew about and followed the latest diet, the latest fad: liquid, raw food, low-carb, no-carb. I always had to diet with her but not Papa, she insisted that he eat what he liked, she cooked separate meals for him and for us; staring across the table at his plate of paprikas swimming in sour cream and down at my own plate where half of a single seared chicken breast kept company with cooked carrots. He was decently embarrassed about it and took his dessert into his study, a dish of ice cream or pastries she’d baked that afternoon, sometimes I’d find the plates and lick them. Then when I went to college she gave it up and ate what she liked. Her voice, I’ll think about that later. Produce a comparison: I’m two inches taller, my hair is lighter, my boobs are smaller and so, oddly, are my feet. Her shoulders slope slightly, I’m wide as a linebacker, played for the volleyball team. Her skin is milk pale and mine runs to sallow. We both feel the cold. The last time I touched her in New York, an awkward hug, lips brushing one another’s cheeks. The last time I sat in her lap, the last time she held me in her arms. The last time we raised our voices at each other. The last time she approved of something I’d written. The last time she saw my husband, never, the last time she saw my daughter, never. The last time she expressed her disappointment. The last time she expressed her disappointment with me. The last time the three of us were together, a week before she departed for Europe with Papa, never to return. An Indian restaurant on the Upper West Side. On the phone with Ben in the ladies room, crying. The awful bitch, I said. How dare she? The awful cunt. Ben at his best then not saying anything, just breathing on the other end of the line. I don’t know what I’m crying for, I said. I don’t need her any more, I’ve never needed her. I’m a grown woman. She’s dying, Ben, do you understand? She’s dying and now she’ll really be gone. Fuck her. Fuck her.

  She’s going away, but she’ll come back. Of course she’ll come back.

  I wish I knew, I said. I wish I knew if she were telling the truth. About anything, ever.

  Papa glancing up at me for just a moment with his dark sad brown eyes, dropping then his gaze to study his glass of Kingfisher. On his side of the table but sitting apart, regal, solitary. Fixing her make-up, as I had been doing moments before in the bathroom, erasing all trace of grief, self-contempt, homicidal rage. Smiling for both of us.

  We ordered the saag paneer, she said. I remembered how much you love it.

  Produce the evidence, all of it damning. Shards of a life, her life, in me. What do you call a mother who is not one? This compulsion to repeat.

  Touching my belly then, not yet showing. In six months I’d be a mother. In ten months I’d be married. Within a year she’d be dead. She was cheerful about it.

  Call it a vacation, she said. A long vacation. I want to see them again, all the places I loved. Papa does too. The old country.

  Shrugging, embarrassed, meeting no one’s eye, least of all that man, almost invisible from embarrassment.

  No one knows how to die in this country. As if she knew.

  My baby.

  We’ll be home in time for the baby. Of course we will.

  Of course, Papa echoes.

  You should stay. The doctors…

  I’m done with doctors.

  Then you’re done with trying.

  Trying? I have tried, Elsa. I’ve tried my whole life. It’s time for a new life of not trying.

  Ruth is my name.

  Of course it’s not so easy to find good curry on the Continent, she says dreamily. At least it didn’t use to be. You have to go to England for that.

  And where do I have to go? Swallowing the words.

  But this is not the conversation. These are the gestures and countergestures, the motions of forks and glasses, the perfectly ordinary congratulatory words and details of a trip long dreamed of, the trip of a lifetime. Without her.

  Smiling, reaching a hand to stroke my cheek. I suffer the touch but look away. Couples, families, eating. The sky’s traffic. The city.

  I’ll write you, she says, motherly, faraway.

  Eaten behind the eyes, both of us.

  Produce a threat.

  The image of Elsa Ruth, sixteen years of age, rising listlessly into view of the full-length mirror in her mother’s bedroom. Outside it’s the suburbs, New Jersey, birdsong and acid rain. Empty Saturday afternoon, the well-made bed. Tears for Fears playing somewhere. Plucking at her shapeless nightshirt and shapeless skin with thumb and forefinger, watching red marks fade on her neck, cheeks, arms. Without bothering to shut the door moving to the bureau, opening and shutting drawers, the dressing table where elaborate earrings hang from a sort of tree, glint of the silver and turquoise New Mexican jewelry her mother favors. Passing over a photo on the nightstand of a young woman in off-white, another somewhat older posing with a man and little girl, this woman in a gray suit next to a big placid bespectacled man with a daylily in his buttonhole, the little girl like a solitary bookend between them holding a little basket of daisies, the background bare and institutional, a courtroom Ruth remembers, no not a courtroom, just an office, a judge’s chambers, a long time ago, a hollow in the grit of the matchstick decade of her birth, New York. Drifting out at last down the upstairs hall, listening for voices from below, the radio mumbling in the kitchen, a few sharp scrapes of cutlery on a plate. Into her own room, shuts the door. Lies down on the bed, arms and legs outstretched and stiff, sweaty, clutching the strip of paper in her palm, wondering if her mother knows, down there in the kitchen, why doesn’t she call me, how doesn’t she know, is there still time to get out of bed and brush my hair and come down smiling, like none of it happened, return the paper to its hiding place in her mother’s nightstand. The door was opening. Eyes squinted shut, the sun was on her, her mother leaning in.

  So?

  And when Ruth says nothing:

  You’re sick? You do remember that it’s Saturday, don’t you? Being sick isn’t going to get you much.

  Steps in briskly to put a cool hand on Ruth’s burning brow. Ruth’s hand holding the piece of paper relaxes, opens, like a flower inviting the wasp. Creak of bedsheets.

  It’s that time of the month, is it? her mother croons softly. You stay in
bed then if you want.

  It’s not that, Ruth manages to say, though of course on top of everything else it is that, that very thing. The cramps churning at the center of her body like the lobsters she’s seen in the tank at the supermarket, trying to unclench their rubber-banded claws.

  You don’t have a fever, you’re just hot, her mother decides. Take a bath, that always helps.

  I’m fine.

  Her mother shrugs. Suit yourself. Remember we’ve got Papa’s birthday dinner tonight, we’re going to John’s. I do hope you at least remembered to buy him a card. If not, take one from my desk and sign it. I’m off.

  And she is off, leaving without having noticed Ruth’s paper or closing the door after her, a terrible habit of hers. Ruth waits a long moment then leaps out of bed, slams the door histrionically, dives back under the covers and waits. But there is nothing. No: the garage door opener is shaking the house with its prodigious yawn, how many times has Ruth reacted to that signal, her parents coming home, stubbing out the cigarette or the joint, urging the boy back into his jeans and out the back door as fast as his skinny deer legs will carry him. But now she is still. The car starts. Her mother driving away. The sun begins its long trek down the wall as she lies there staring at the ceiling. Closes her eyes for just a moment. She must have slept, her eyes open to the sun striking full on a poster of Morrissey inscrutable and dead-sexy in his chaste removal, his aerie. After a while she gets bored listening to the neighborhood, the radio still mumbling downstairs (she never turns it off), her bedroom stereo singing tinnily to itself at low volume every body wants to rule the world. I do so have a fever, she insists weakly. She reads the paper again with its dates and numbers, its signatures, its blank spaces for missing names. Feels the raised indentations of the notary’s seal. It’s thin paper, waxy, inflammable. Why did you keep it? she asks her silently. Keep me. Keep me twice. She considered the possibility that somewhere sometime there had been another daughter with the same name, a secret sister who’d died, and she, Ruth, is the hasty replacement, a bridge over the river of grief. My sister Elsa, beyond the sea. She can see her, just fifteen months older but infinite in her experience, wearing the short tulle skirt that her mother had scorned to buy her, made-up, sitting at the end of Ruth’s bed. More developed than Ruth, heavier breasts, hips wider, lighting a joint with practiced aplomb, offering it to Ruth after taking her own deep appreciative drag. Slightly hunched, sitting up in bed, searching the shadows of her eyes. Where is my father? Give me my father. What is he like?

  Kind. Steady. Honest. The other says these words with her mouth twisted, as if she intends the opposite. Mocking the question.

  This paper says you were never born.

  Elsa shrugs, blows smoke. Here I am.

  My papa is kind too. But sad.

  Our father isn’t sad, beyond the sea.

  He’s European?

  Of course.

  Is he French? English? He’s not German, is he? Where does he live?

  Very far from here.

  Can I go to him?

  He’s in the dark, Elsa says mysteriously. She’s up now, walking around Ruth’s room, looking at her things.

  You mean he’s dead?

  Elsa picks up a record album. No deader than I am.

  Is he good-looking?

  He’s not handsome if that’s what you mean.

  What I mean is…

  His face?

  Yes. What’s his face like?

  He eats too much. Sometimes he wears a beard.

  Does he know about us?

  If he did, he’d come looking for us.

  But you live with him, I thought.

  In the dark.

  She puts the record on, turns the volume up. Immediate voices, harmonizing lonelily.

  So he is dead. Or he never existed, like you.

  I was never born, Elsa says. It’s not the same thing. Anyway, of course Father exists. You’re here, aren’t you?

  I’m here.

  Well, that’s your problem.

  Singing along with the record, eyes shut. Hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over. Hey now, hey now, when the world comes in.

  She didn’t hear him come in. A knock on the door. Elsa?

  Open the window, turn on the fan, get the smoke out. One minute!

  Your mother says you’re sick, says Papa through the door.

  I’m much better now.

  Can I come in?

  Spritzing the room, spray droplets hanging in the sun. Yes.

  There is Papa, his face like a moon swelling over his gray turtleneck, wincing slightly at the loudness of the music. He turns down the knob.

  I just wanted to ask if you were coming to dinner. It’s getting late.

  Yes of course I’m coming. I just need to get dressed.

  Awkward, hands in pockets, smiling. If you’re sick of course you should stay in bed. I’ll bring you something. A doggie bag.

  Woof. No it’s all right, I’m coming. Do I have time for a shower?

  You must hurry.

  Papa, wait. Can you do me a favor?

  Of course.

  He is not a big man and she has shot up in the last year. It’s possible by now that’s she’s more than an inch taller.

  Can you call me Ruth from now on? I don’t like Elsa.

  But that’s your name.

  It’s not. It’s really not.

  Wary, shrugging, unsurprised. What does he know?

  All right. Ruth.

  Thanks, Papa. Happy birthday.

  Thank you, Ruth, he says, trying it out. He walks away down the hallway, almost singing it in his deep voice. Ruthruthruth.

  When she shuts the door Elsa is there. No, she’s gone. Elsa is gone.

  She sings it softly to herself down the hall to the bathroom to the shower. Don’t let them win.

  Following the figure of a man, her man, ours, his back, walking away from the camera and taking our vision with him. We want to look at a man looking at the Alps, a battlefield, the sea, the sublime cityscape, an image consuming itself. The scene that includes him does not include us, and that is its perfection. We see him as part of the landscape, landscape defined as that portion of terrain that the eye can comprehend at a glance. And if an itch crawls up his spine to tickle his neck and the head hunches, snaps backward to peer over his shoulder, accused or accusing, what will he see? We are the audience. We are not there.

  Poet or assassin, we follow the man. The camera is a gun, the gun is a microphone, the microphone is a pen, the pen is a telephone. Calls in the small hours, between two and four, gone straight to voice mail. In the morning she deletes them without listening, noting only the times and the country codes. Two fathers, one father, then no fathers at all, no mothers any more. M. Tense and alert before the page, the phone downfaced on the bed beside her, on vibrate. Her husband sleeps.

  Fathers are depressing.

  Mother of invention, asleep or awake, she dreams him, Lamb: a black-and-white man in a simple lineless suit, gray raincoat over it, a fedora, out of the airport, out of a cab, pulling a black wheeled bag behind him over the cobblestoned streets of a nameless European city. Call him anything, she did not pay for his name. She quit smoking so he still smokes; she rarely drinks so a bottle stands by the bed in they small dry hotel room, where a single window overlooks a trellis or an alley or a canal or a blank whitewashed wall. Tethered to her by cords of time: the mother, the daughter: she needs a man without appendages, masculine and alone. The camera is close enough to smell the back of his neck: tobacco, cornstarch, bay rum. On audio: waves’ scumble, foreign voices, a kicked ball, shouts, a busker accompanied by electronic orchestra, handclaps, bumblebee scooter engines whistling and whining. He sits with his back to her, us, smoke drifting from his left hand, its bandless fingers. The right hand, the writing hand, the knowing hand is still. Rests tarantula on his knee. If we look closely at the back of a man’s head, whose face we have only seen in a dream, seeing only the skin of h
is neck and the pattern of hair (black flecked by gray) and the two ears standing wide astraddle, and the barest movement, fleck of tension. Is he listening. Is his breath, in exhale, part of the mix.

  A woman’s fantasy. A man.

  He goes out and takes care of things.

  Exterior. A narrow street, black ribbon in a yellow canyon of blank-faced apartment buildings. Too narrow to be an American street, too few cars. Lamb in medium shot, seen from behind, wearing a black-brimmed hat, someone’s idea of the eternal past. His pace is unhurried, almost unmodern: he slouches, he ambles, like a man with no destination or agenda. But he has the crucial thing, a knowledge he bears in his body: how to ignore the camera that follows his every move. As he walks or shambles along there’s a rasping sound, a grating noise, and as he shrinks in the frame we can see the plain black rolling suitcase that bounces and drags and skitters on the pavement as he pulls it behind him. Something paper in his hand, completing the image of a lost tourist. He pauses at a doorway, a wooden door with flaked green paint, a brass mailslot like a tarnished mouth. He folds the map and slips it inside. The map is a letter. The letter vanishes.

  Interior. A woman in a severe black dress, in late middle age, bends down with a little grunt and picks up her mail where it lies scattered on the ragged tile floor. The strange envelope doesn’t register at first because she flips through the letters looking at their right corners so that the postmarks blur by, and the hand-delivered letter of course has no postmark, and no stamp for that matter. Tight shot of the bundle of mail in her hand as she goes back up the dark wooden stairs, and drops the letter on the mat in front of a door, and keeps climbing. The camera retreats suddenly, staggers back like a drunkard and points up the stairwell to the next floor where another woman, also in black, stands watching. It could be the same woman, climber and watcher. We hear a door shut and the sound registers in her eyes.