Among the two, it was Rosa who was better at keeping secrets. For example, she never told anyone about the time she had seen her mother kissing the Portuguese ambassador at a garden party thrown by her uncle. Or the time she had seen the maid drop a gold chain belonging to her sister into the pocket of her apron. Or that her cousin Alfonso, who was extremely popular among the girls because of his green eyes and full lips, preferred boys, or that her father suffered from headaches that made him cry. So it may not be surprising that she also never told anyone about the letter addressed to Litvinoff that had arrived a few months after the publication of The History of Love. It was postmarked from America, and Rosa had figured it was a belated rejection letter from one of the publishers in New York. Wishing to shield Litvinoff from any hurt, she slipped it into a drawer and forgot about it. Some months later, looking for an address, she found it again and opened it. To her surprise, it was in Yiddish. Dear Zvi, it began. So you don’t get a heart attack, I’ll start by saying it’s your old friend Leo Gursky. You’re probably surprised that I’m alive, and sometimes I am, too. I’m writing from New York, which is where I live now. I don’t know if this letter will reach you. A few years ago I sent a letter to the only address I had for you, and it got sent back. It’s a long story how I finally tracked down this one. Anyway, there is a lot to say, but it’s too hard in a letter. I hope you are well and happy, and have a good life. Of course I have always wondered whether you kept the package I gave you the last time we saw each other. Inside was the book I was writing when you knew me in Minsk. If you do have it, could you please send it back to me? It is not worth anything to anyone but me now. Sending a warm embrace, L.G.
Slowly, the truth dawned on Rosa: something terrible had happened. It was grotesque, really; it made her sick to her stomach just to think of it. And she was partly guilty. She remembered now the day she’d discovered the key to his desk drawer, opened it, found the pile of dirty pages in a handwriting she didn’t recognize, and chose not to ask. Litvinoff had lied to her, yes. But, with a dreadful feeling, she remembered how it had been her who’d insisted that he publish the book. He’d argued with her, saying it was too personal, a private matter, but she’d pushed and pushed, softening his resistance until he finally broke down and agreed. Because wasn’t that what wives of artists were meant to do? Husband their husbands’ work into the world, which, without them, would be lost to obscurity?
When the shock wore off, Rosa tore the letter to pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Quickly, she thought of what to do. She sat down at the little desk in the kitchen, took out a piece of blank stationery, and wrote: Dear Mr. Gursky, I am very sorry to say that my husband, Zvi, is too ill to reply himself. He was overjoyed to receive your letter, however, and to hear that you are alive. Sadly, your manuscript was destroyed when our house was flooded. I hope you can find a way to forgive us.
The next day she packed a picnic and told Litvinoff they were taking a trip to the mountains. After the excitement surrounding his recent publication, she told him, he needed a rest. She supervised the loading of the provisions into the car. When Litvinoff started the motor, Rosa slapped her forehead. “I almost forgot the strawberries,” she said, and ran back into the house.
Inside, she went directly to Litvinoff’s study, removed the little key taped to the underside of his desk, slipped it into the drawer, and took out a sheaf of warped, dirty pages that smelled of mold. She placed them on the floor. Then, for extra measure, she took the Yiddish manuscript written in Litvinoff’s longhand off a high shelf, and moved it to one closer to the bottom. On her way out, she turned on the tap of the sink and plugged the drain. She paused to watch the water fill the basin until it began to overflow. Then she closed the door to her husband’s study behind her, grabbed the basket of strawberries from the hall table, and hurried out to the car.
MY LIFE UNDERWATER
1. THE LONGING THAT EXISTS BETWEEN SPECIES
After Uncle Julian left, my mother became more withdrawn, or maybe a better word would be obscure, as in faint, unclear, distant. Empty teacups gathered around her, and dictionary pages fell at her feet. She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads. Letters came from her publishers asking if she’d be interested in translating this or that book. These went unanswered. The only phone calls she accepted were from Uncle Julian, and whenever she spoke to him, she closed the door.
Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. Once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs. But sometimes, at rare moments, a memory of him will return to me with such suddenness and clarity that all the feeling I’ve pushed down for years springs out like a jack-in-the-box. At these moments, I wonder if this is the way it feels to be my mother.
2. SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BREASTS
Every Tuesday evening I took the subway into the city and attended “Drawing from Life.” During the first class I found out what this meant. It meant sketching the hundred percent naked people who were hired to stand still in the center of the circle we made with our chairs. I was the youngest person in the class by far. I tried to be casual, as if I’d been drawing naked people for years. The first model was a woman with sagging breasts, frizzy hair, and red knees. I didn’t know where to look. Around me, the class bent over their sketch pads, drawing furiously. I made a few hesitant lines on the paper. “Let’s remember nipples, folks,” the teacher called out, making her way around the circle. I added nipples. When she got to me, she said, “May I?” and held my drawing up for the rest of the class. Even the model turned to look. “Do you know what this is?” she said, pointing to my drawing. A few people shook their heads. “A Frisbee with a nipple,” she said. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Don’t be sorry,” the teacher said, laying her hand on my shoulder: “Shade.” Then she demonstrated to the class how to turn my Frisbee into a huge breast.
The model for the second class looked a lot like the model from the first class. Whenever the teacher came by, I hunched over my work and shaded vigorously.
3. HOW TO WATERPROOF YOUR BROTHER
The rain started near the end of September, a few days before my birthday. It rained for a week straight, and just when it seemed like the sun was going to come out it was forced back in, and the rain began again. Some days it came down so hard that Bird had to abandon work on the tower of junk, even though he’d hung a tarp over the cabin starting to take shape at the top. Maybe he was building a meeting house for lamed vovniks. Some old boards formed two walls, and he’d stacked cardboard boxes to make the other two. Aside from the sagging tarp, there was no roof yet. One afternoon I stopped to watch him scramble down the ladder that leaned against one side of the heap. He was carrying a large piece of scrap metal. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know how.
4. THE MORE I THOUGHT ABOUT IT, THE MORE MY STOMACH HURT
The morning of my fifteenth birthday I woke up to Bird shouting, “UP AND AT ’EM!” followed by “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” a song our mother used to sing to us on our birthdays when we were little, and which Bird has taken upon himself to carry on singing. She came in a little while later and laid her presents next to Bird’s on my bed. The mood was light and happy until I opened Bird’s gift and it turned out to be an orange life jacket. There was a moment of silence while I stared at it, nestled in the wrapping.
“A life jacket!” my mother exclaimed. “What a great idea. Where did you ever find it, Bird?” she asked, fingering the straps with genuine admiration. “So handy,” she said.
Handy? I wanted to shout. HANDY?
I was beginning to seriously worry. What if Bird’s religiousness wasn’t just a passing phase but a permanent state of fanaticism? My mother thought it was his way of dealing with losing Dad, and that one day he would grow out of it. But what if age only strengthened his beliefs, despite the proof again
st them? What if he never made any friends? What if he became someone who wandered around the city in a dirty coat handing out life jackets, forced to deny the world because it was inconsistent with his dream?
I tried to find his diary but he’d moved it from behind the bed, and it wasn’t in any of the places I looked. Instead, mixed in with dirty clothes under my bed and two weeks overdue, I found The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.
5. ONCE
I’d casually asked my mother if she’d heard of Isaac Moritz, the writer the doorman at 450 East 52nd Street had said was Alma’s son. She’d been sitting on the bench in the garden staring at a huge quince bush like it was about to say something. At first she didn’t hear me. “Mom?” I repeated. She turned, looking surprised. “I said, have you ever heard of a writer named Isaac Moritz?” She said Yes. “Have you ever read any of his books?” I asked. “No.” “Well do you think there’s a chance he deserves the Nobel?” “No.” “How do you know if you haven’t read any of his books?” “I’m speculating,” she said, because she would never admit that she only awards Nobels to dead people. Then she went back to staring at the quince bush.
At the library, I typed “Isaac Moritz” into the computer. It came up with six books. The one they had the most copies of was The Remedy. I wrote down the call numbers and when I found his books, I took The Remedy off the shelf. On the back cover was a photograph of the author. It felt strange to look at his face, knowing that the person I was named after must have looked a lot like him. He had curly hair, was balding, and had brown eyes that looked small and weak behind his metal glasses. I flipped to the front and opened to the first page. CHAPTER ONE, it said. Jacob Marcus stood waiting for his mother at the corner of Broadway and Graham.
6. I READ IT AGAIN
Jacob Marcus stood waiting for his mother at the corner of Broadway and Graham.
7. AND AGAIN
Jacob Marcus stood waiting for his mother
8. AND AGAIN
Jacob Marcus
9. HOLY COW
I flipped back to the photograph. Then I read the whole first page. Then I flipped back to the photograph, read another page, then flipped back and stared at the photograph. Jacob Marcus was just a character in a book! The man who’d been sending letters to my mother the whole time was the writer Isaac Moritz. Alma’s son. He’d been signing his letters with the character of his most famous book! A line from his letter came back to me: Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone.
I got to page fifty-eight before the library closed. It was already dark when I got outside. I stood in front of the entrance with the book under my arm, watching the rain and trying to grasp the situation.
10. THE SITUATION
That night while my mother was upstairs translating The History of Love for the man whose name she thought was Jacob Marcus, I finished The Remedy, about a character named Jacob Marcus, by a writer named Isaac Moritz, who was the son of the character Alma Mereminski, who also happened to have been real.
11. WAITING
When I’d finished the last page, I called Misha and let it ring twice before hanging up. This was a code we’d used when we wanted to speak to each other late at night. It had been more than a month since we’d last talked. I’d made a list in my notebook of all the things I missed about him. The way he wrinkles his nose when he’s thinking was one. How he holds things was another. But now I needed to talk to him for real and no list would substitute. I stood by the phone while my stomach turned itself inside out. During the time I waited, a whole species of butterfly may have become extinct, or a large, complex mammal with feelings like mine.
But he never called back. This probably meant he didn’t want to talk to me.
12. ALL THE FRIENDS I EVER HAD
Down the hall in his room my brother was asleep, his kippah dropped to the floor. Printed on the lining in gold letters was Marsha and Joe’s Wedding, June 13, 1987, and though Bird claimed to have found it in the dining room cabinet and was convinced it had belonged to Dad, none of us had ever heard of Marsha or Joe. I sat down next to him. His body was warm, almost hot. I thought about how, if I hadn’t made up so many things about Dad, maybe Bird wouldn’t have worshipped him so much and believed he himself needed to be something extraordinary.
Rain splashed against windows. “Wake up,” I whispered. He opened his eyes and groaned. Light shone in from the hallway. “Bird” I said, touching his arm. He squinted up at me and rubbed his eye. “You have to stop talking about God, OK?” He didn’t say anything, but I was pretty sure he was awake now. “You’re going to be twelve soon. You have to stop making weird noises, and jumping off things and hurting yourself.” I knew I was pleading with him, but I didn’t care. “You have to stop wetting your bed,” I whispered, and now in the dim light I saw the hurt on his face. “You have to just push your feelings down and try to be normal. If you don’t . . .” His mouth tightened, but he didn’t speak. “You have to make some friends,” I said. “I have a friend,” he whispered. “Who?” “Mr. Goldstein.” “You have to make more than one.” “You don’t have more than one,” he said. “The only person who ever calls you is Misha.” “Yes, I do. I have plenty of friends,” I said, and only as the words came out did I realize they weren’t true.
13. IN ANOTHER ROOM, MY MOTHER SLEPT CURLED NEXT TO THE WARMTH OF A PILE OF BOOKS
14. I TRIED NOT TO THINK ABOUT
a) Misha Shklovsky
b) Luba the Great
c) Bird
d) My mother
e) Isaac Moritz
15. I SHOULD
Get out more, join some clubs. I should buy some new clothes, dye my hair blue, let Herman Cooper take me on a ride in his father’s car, kiss me, and possibly even feel my nonexistent breasts. I should develop some useful skills like public speaking, electric cello, or welding, see a doctor about my stomachaches, find a hero that is not a man who wrote a children’s book and crashed his plane, stop trying to set up my father’s tent in record time, throw away my notebooks, stand up straight, and cut this habit of answering any question regarding my well-being with a reply fit for a prim English schoolgirl who believes life is nothing but a long preparation for a few finger sandwiches with the Queen.
16. A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
I opened my desk drawer and turned it upside down in search of the piece of paper on which I’d copied the address for Jacob Marcus who was really Isaac Moritz. Under a report card, I found an old letter from Misha, one of his first. Dear Alma, it said. How are you knowing me so well? I think we are like two peas in a pod. It is true I like John more than Paul. But I have large respect for Ringo too.
Saturday morning I printed a map and the directions off the internet, and told my mother I was going to Misha’s house for the day. Then I walked up the street and knocked on the Coopers’ door. Herman came out with his hair sticking up, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt. “Whoa,” he said when he saw me. He stepped back from the door. “Do you want to go for a ride?” I asked. “Is this a joke?” “No.” “Oookaay,” said Herman. “Hold, please.” He went upstairs to ask his father for the keys, and when he came down he’d wet his hair and changed into a fresh blue T-shirt.
17. LOOK AT ME
“Where are we going, Canada?” Herman asked when he saw the map. There was a pale band around his wrist where his watch had been all summer. “Connecticut,” I said. “Only if you take off that hood,” he said. “Why?” “I can’t see your face.” I pushed it off. He smiled at me. There was still sleep in the corner of his eye. A drop of rain rolled down his forehead. I read him the directions and we talked about the colleges he was applying to for next year. He told me he was considering a major in marine biology because he wanted to live a life like Jacques Cousteau. I thought maybe we had more in common than I’d originally thought. He asked me what I wanted to become and I said I’d briefly considered paleontology, and then he asked me what a paleontologist did, so I told him if he took a
complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shredded it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, etc., and then he asked me why I’d changed my mind, and I told him I thought I wasn’t cut out for it, so he asked me what I thought I was cut out for, and I said, “It’s a long story,” so he said, “I have time,” so I said, “You really want to know?” and he said Yes, so I told him the truth, beginning with my father’s Swiss Army knife and the book of Edible Plants and Flowers in North America, and ending with my plans to one day explore the Arctic wilderness with nothing but what I could carry on my back. “I wish you wouldn’t,” he said. Then we took a wrong exit and stopped at a gas station to ask for directions and buy some SweetTarts. “These are on me,” Herman said when I took out my wallet to pay. When he handed a five-dollar bill across the counter, his hands were shaking.
18. I TOLD HIM THE WHOLE STORY ABOUT THE HISTORY OF LOVE
It was raining so hard that we had to pull over to the side of the road. I took my sneakers off and put my feet up on the dashboard. Herman wrote my name in the fog on the windshield. Then we reminisced about a water fight we’d had a hundred years ago, and I felt a pang of sadness that next year Herman would be gone to start his life.
19. I JUST DO
After looking forever, we finally found the dirt road to Isaac Moritz’s house. We must have driven past it two or three times without noticing it. I’d been ready to give up, but Herman wouldn’t. My palms started to sweat as we drove up the muddy drive because I’d never met a famous writer before, and definitely not one I’d forged a letter to. The numbers of Isaac Moritz’s address were nailed to a big maple tree. “How do you know it’s a maple?” Herman asked. “I just do,” I said, sparing him the details. Then I saw the lake. Herman pulled up to the house and turned off the car. Suddenly it was very quiet. I leaned down to tie my sneakers. When I sat up he was looking at me. His face was hopeful and unbelieving and also a little sad, and I wondered if it was anything like my father’s face when he looked at my mother all those years ago at the Dead Sea, setting in motion a train of events that had finally brought me here, to the middle of nowhere, with a boy I’d grown up with but hardly knew.