Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

COCKTAILS! The Hussar did provide Scotch, perhaps knowing no better. The fiddler’s repertoire descended into folk — some Russian melodies. Harry guessed that Lucienne knew their Yiddish lyrics. The da Costas ignored the tunes. They were devotees of early music. To give them their due — and Harry always tried to give them their due — they perhaps did not intend to convey the impression that dining out once a year with the Savitskys was bearable, but only marginally. Have pity, he told himself. Their cosseted coexistence with gentle wildlife must make them uncomfortable with extremes of color, noise, and opinions. And for their underweight Jotham, who still suffered from acne at the age of thirty-seven, they’d probably wanted somebody other than a wide-hipped, dense-haired lawyer with a loud laugh.

“The kids’ apartment out there … it’s adorable,” Lucienne said.

“With all that clutter, how can anybody tell?” Harry said.

“Mostly Jotham’s paints and canvases, that clutter,” Justin bravely admitted.

“Miriam drops her briefcase in one room, her pocketbook in another, throws her keys on the toilet tank,” Lucienne said. “I raised her wrong,” she continued, in mock repentance.

“They like their jobs. They both seem happy,” Judith said, turning her large khaki eyes to Harry — a softened gaze. Justin said, “They do,” and Lucienne said, “Do,” and for a moment, the maître d’ if he was looking, the fiddler if he was looking, anybody idly looking, might have taken them for two couples happy with their connection by marriage. Sometimes what looked so became so. If Jotham was a bit high-strung for the Savitskys, if Miriam was too argumentative for the da Costas, well, you couldn’t have everything. Could you?

“Many people have nothing,” Harry said aloud, startling Judith, alerting Justin’s practiced empathy—“Yes?” the doctor encouraged — and not at all troubling Lucienne, who was on her fifth breadstick.

THE APPETIZERS CAME — four different dishes full of things that could kill you. Each person tasted everything, the Savitskys eager, the da Costas restrained. They talked about the Red Sox, at least the Savitskys did. The team had begun the season well, and would break their hearts as always, wait and see. The da Costas murmured something.

The main course arrived, and a bottle of wine. Judith poured: everyone got half a glass. They talked about the gubernatorial race. The da Costas were staunch Democrats, though it sometimes pained them. “No one cares enough about the environment,” Judith said. Harry nodded — he didn’t care about the environment at all.

The fiddler fiddled. They talked about Stalin — there was a new biography. None of them had read it, and so conversation rested easily on the villainy they already knew.

Harry finished the rest of the wine.

They talked about movies that both couples had seen, though of course not together.

There were some silences.

LUCIENNE WOULD TELL the story tonight, Harry thought.

She would tell the story soon. The da Costas had never heard it. She had been waiting, as she always did, for the quiet moment, the calm place, the inviting question, and the turning point in a growing intimacy.

Harry had heard the story scores of times. He had heard it in Yiddish and in French and occasionally in Spanish. Mostly, though, she told it in her lightly accented English.

He had heard the story in many places. In the sanctuary of the synagogue her voice fluted from the bimah. She was sitting on a Survivor Panel that time. She wasn’t technically a survivor, had never set foot in a camp, but still. He’d heard it in living rooms, on narrow backyard decks, in porches attached to beachfront bungalows, in restaurants like the Hussar. Once — the only instance, to his knowledge, she’d awarded the story to a stranger — he’d heard it in the compartment of an Irish train; their companion was a priest, who listened with deep attention. Once she’d told it at the movies. They and another couple had arrived early by mistake and had to occupy half an hour while trivia questions lingered on the screen. That night she had narrated from his left, leaning toward their friends — a pair of lesbian teachers — on his right. While she spoke she stared at them with the usual intensity. Harry, kept in place by his wife aslant his lap, stared at her: her pretty profile, her apricot hair, the flesh lapping from her chin.

Whatever language she employed, the nouns were unadorned, the syntax plain, the vocabulary undemanding: not a word that couldn’t be understood by children, though she never told the story to children, unless you counted Miriam.

He could tell the thing himself, in any of her tongues.

I was four. The Nazis had taken over. We were desperate to escape. My father went out every morning — to stand in line at one place or another, to try to pay the right person.

That morning — he took my brother with him. My brother was twelve. They went to one office and were on their way to a second. Soldiers in helmets grabbed my father. My brother saw the truck then, and the people on it, crying. The soldiers pushed my father toward the truck. “And your son, too.” One of them took my brother by the sleeve of his coat.

My father stopped then. The soldier kept yanking him. “Son?” my father said. “That kid isn’t my son. I don’t even know him.” The German still held on to my brother. My father turned away from them both and started walking again toward the truck. My brother saw one shoulder lift in a shrug. He heard his voice. “Some goy,” my father said.

So they let my brother go. He came running home, and he showed us the ripped place on his sleeve where they had held him. We managed to get out that night. We went to Holland and got on a boat for Argentina.

THE DESSERT CAME. Four different sweets: again they shared.

Lucienne said, “We will go to Santa Fe in September, for the holidays.”

Judith said, “We will go for Thanksgiving.”

“And the kids will come east for … in December,” Justin said.

The young couple spent half their vacation with one set of parents, half with the other. “More room in their place,” Miriam told Harry and Lucienne. “More food here.”

The bill came. They paid with credit cards. The nervous waiter hurried to bring their outerwear — two overcoats, and Judith’s down jacket, and Lucienne’s fur stole inherited from her mother.

“Judith,” said Lucienne. “I forgot to mention your father’s death.”

“You sent a kind note,” Judith said, in a final manner.

“My own father died when I was a little girl,” Lucienne said. “But when my mother died — I was fifty already — then I felt truly forlorn, an orphan.”

“Dad’s life satisfied him,” Judith said.

The fiddler had paused. A quiet moment. Justin leaned toward Lucienne.

“You were a little girl?” he said softly. “What did your father die of?”

The patrons were devotedly eating. A calm place. A growing intimacy.

“Where?” he asked.

She lifted one shoulder, and lifted her lip, too. “Overseas,” she said. She stood up and wrapped herself in her ratty stole; and Harry had to run a little, she was so fast getting to the door.

ONE AUTUMN DONNA’S LADLE — A soup kitchen for women, operating out of the basement of the Godolphin Unitarian Church — became all at once everybody’s favorite cause. “There are fashions in charity just as in bed slippers,” sniffed Josie, who had been working as a part-time volunteer since the Ladle’s beginning, six years earlier. “Don’t count on this popularity to last, Donna.”

Donna never counted on anything to last. But she was grateful for the new help regardless. A group from a local synagogue undertook to deliver cooked delicacies. The members of Godolphin Helping Hands raked each other’s closets for clothing contributions. Maeve, a nearby Catholic women’s college, posted the Ladle’s flyer on its bulletin board. As a result, a few eager students appeared almost every day in the lower depths (Josie’s phrase) — the big basement dining room with its scabby walls, the ancient kitchen presided over by a black oven, a couple of side rooms whose high windows let in little light. Some students needed firsthand material for term papers on poverty. The others showed up out of simple good-heartedness. “Mother Theresas in designer jeans,” Josie said privately to Donna. But to the Maeve students, Josie was a model of patience, repairing the Cuisinart whenever they broke it, and demonstrating a restrained kindness toward the guests that the girls meant to emulate, really they did. They just couldn’t help overreacting to the tragic tales they heard. They were frequently in tears. Their eyes, even when red with weeping, were large and lovely.