Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Chicken soup did lie lightly on his stomach — Jews were right about that. Wulf ’s, the only kosher market left in town (there had been half a dozen during his childhood), cooked up a batch every few days and put it in jars. Jay bought a jar on Sunday, ate what he could during the week, threw out the rest. Sunday after Sunday the bearded man at the cash register looked at Jay without recognition. His mind was on higher things, maybe his inventory.

Jay’s clothes had grown roomy. On one of his rare good days he bought two pairs of chinos, apparently back in style, at the local Gap. And a navy blazer, size what? — small, God help him. His daughter dropped in every day to say hello and straighten the apartment. They were both silently waiting for the doctor to mention hospice. Meanwhile he could still make his weekly trek to Wulf ’s.

And it was at Wulf ’s, on a Sunday morning, that he saw Yamamoto again, and the Yamamoto family, four children in total. Jay stepped behind a rack of spices. From this hiding place he inspected the dentist-wife. She was surprisingly pretty, and slender despite many pregnancies. She was wearing a felt hat with an upturned brim. Fetching. He recognized it as the substitution made by modern Orthodox for the matron’s wig. Rich brown hair curled below the hat. She was pushing a cart in which a two-year-old lorded over groceries. Yamamoto walked behind her, wearing an infant in a sling. Two little boys marched in the space between their mother and father, and talked in light voices — English, he noted. The children, even the infant, had the straight black hair of Woody’s little son; they had similar dark eyes, too, angled more gently than if their blood were pure. The boys wore yarmulkes. Likewise Yamamotosan, their Yiddische chichi.

So this was the current trajectory of an immigrant’s career — this leap from one ill-favored group into another. What had happened to those necessary decades — generations, even — spent dissembling among the Yankees? Jay the commissioner, Glickman the judge, Fessel the surgeon — how delicately they’d mingled with the favored. And bold Feivel Ostroff, applying himself to pagan texts, had managed a complete metamorphosis. Somewhere a bishopric was no doubt waiting for his daughter the priest … And here, where shelves of canned mackerel faced shelves of boxed kasha, the Yamamoto children, crossbred progeny of two outcast clans, confidently trotted. Assimilation had become as passé as the jitterbug.

Forgetting to conceal himself behind the spices, Jay stood up as straight as his pain allowed. He was still what he was born to be — an Anti-Defamation Jew; a citizen of Godolphin, Mass; a loyal Harvard man. Papa Yamamoto was perhaps immune to the lure of the Houses across the river. But in this new world of interchangeable gods, and of females dressed up in priestly robes like drag queens … in this world where nations who’d tried to obliterate each other ended up in the same bed, and where your offspring hurled themselves across the planet and forgot to return … in such a world the enduring things, really, were bricks and bell towers, a library and a stadium. They remained, they steadied you until the end — flow’rs in your wilderness, stars in your night. He’d reveal this truth to the rabbi when she made her dutiful visit to the almost dead.

A nearby church bell chimed. With his jacket floating around what was left of him, Jay moved from spice rack to register. “Chicken soup,” he said, in a voice just audible above the call to the faithful. He received the jar and put money into the impassive hand. “I’ll see you next week,” Jay promised, or maybe pleaded. It was all the same to the man with the beard.

“GOOD MORNING, Mrs. Lubin.”

Silence.

“Professor Lubin,” the doctor corrected, consulting his clipboard.

Silence.

“How are you feeling?”

Contemptuous silence.

“Do you know why you are here?”

Strenuous silence.

“You have suffered a neurological event, a transient ischemic attack …”

“Stroke,” she said at last. She was lying on a hospital bed whose aluminum side bars were half raised. An unused IV pole stood in a corner of the room. The second bed was unoccupied. A fuzzy Cézanne print hung on the mustard wall.

“Stroke? Well, not yet, we hope not at all. I’m pleased that your voice is so strong. I am Dr. Mortimer Lilyveck and this is Dr. Natalie White and this is Dr. Eric Hauser. Dr. Hauser will ask you a few questions.”

Silence.

Dr. Hauser cleared his throat. “What month are we in?”

Her eyes strayed to the window, to the snowy Chicago sky. They returned to Dr. Hauser with a glare.

“Who is the president?”

The glare intensified.

“What is your age? Where were you—”

“Ninety-two,” she said. “It should be on your records. I was born in 1914. In Brooklyn.” Young Dr. Hauser produced a grimace probably meant to be heartening. It might have earned him the firing squad years ago, far away. “My father was born in Russia,” she said, more slowly. “He was the … He was … He was the …” and the voice, suddenly aged, quavering, slipped into a different language. There it regained its strength.

He was the tsar. Little Father.

She spoke rapidly now, in this other tongue.

“ He dressed simply and bathed in cold water. He carried a metal pocket case containing a portrait of his wife, the empress Alexandra. He loved the forceful empress. My mother was not forceful. He did not love my mother.

You don’t wish to hear this history, you indifferent Americans. But there will soon be another ischemic attack … ”

“Ischemic attack …” Dr. Hauser, with a second ghastly smile, seized the familiar words.

“… and so I wish to … tell. I am not the last of the Romanovs — there are collateral descendants here and there, one operates a cleaning establishment — and I am not even a legitimate Romanov, and I am not even legitimate; but I am the sole surviving offspring of Nicholas II and Vera Derevenko. I could, if I were so inclined, claim the treasure supposedly residing in a French Bank. I could claim the crown now under glass in Moscow. I could claim all those eggs Fabergé made for my family.

My mother, Vera Derevenko, was the daughter of a doctor in the royal household. She had trained as a nurse. She and Nicholas copulated in the woods surrounding Nicholas’s favorite residence, Tsarskoye Selo, in June 1913, when the world was at peace. And then Vera went back to her St. Petersburg hospital and discovered she was pregnant. She fled to America. There I was born. My father knew nothing of me, he was the tsar.”

“Professor Lubin, it would help if you spoke English,” said Dr. Lilyveck.

“Whom?”

“…?”

“Whom would it help?”

“US.”

She made a weary gesture. “The empress Alexandra and the children, my half siblings, destined to die in a basement, were away at the time, on holiday, in the Crimea. The doctors and tutors, too. Rasputin was drinking and fornicating in another province. Nicholas, head of state, remained in Tsarskoye Selo to examine documents and sign them, to read letters and answer them. Ministers visited him continually. The duma was a joke.

My mother, too, had stayed behind to arrange some matters for her father the doctor.

The tsar walked alone every day in the woods. She also. Theirs was not an assignation but an accident. I happened by chance.

Have you seen our land in the spring? I myself have not, nor in any other season; but my mother described it to me during her final illness fifty years ago. Mud; well, the mud is famous. A sweet confusion in the woods, young leaves furring the birches, immense red pines, willows. You can hear the new blackbirds. They will be shot …”