Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

In the photographer’s window glass, a faint shape passed across the portraits of the children: the flash of a green woolen coat, the gold sheaf of a braid. The reflection crossed the street in his direction. As it approached, its anonymous features knit themselves into a form he knew: Elisabet Morgenstern. She gave him a hard tap on the shoulder and he turned.

“Elisabet,” he said. “What are you doing in the Latin Quarter on a Thursday afternoon? Going to meet Paul?”

“No,” she said, and gave him her hard stare. “I came to find you.” She pulled a tin of pastilles from her bag and shook one into her palm. “I’d offer you one, but I’m almost out.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, his insides clenching. “Has something happened to your mother?”

Elisabet rolled the pastille around in her mouth. When she spoke, Andras caught a whiff of anise. “I don’t want to talk here on the sidewalk,” she said. “Can’t we go somewhere?”

The Blue Dove was close by, but Andras didn’t want to meet his friends. Instead he led her around the corner and up the hill to the Café Bédouin, where he and Klara had met for a drink what seemed a lifetime ago. He hadn’t been back since that night. The same toothy row of liquor bottles stood behind the bar, and the same faded lilac curtains hung at the windows. They sat down at a table along the banquette and ordered tea.

“What’s this about?” he said, once the waiter had left them.

“Whatever you’re doing to my mother, you’d better stop,” Elisabet said.

“I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

“That’s exactly my point! To put it bluntly, Andras, you’re acting like a cad. My mother’s been miserable. She hardly eats. She won’t listen to music. She sleeps all the time. And she’s at me for every little thing. My marks in school aren’t high enough, or I’m not doing my chores properly, or I’ve taken the wrong tone with her.”

“And this is somehow my doing?”

“Who else’s? You’ve dropped her entirely. You don’t come to the house anymore. You sent back all her things.”

In an instant his grief rushed back as if it had never left him. “What was I supposed to do?” he said. “I stood it as long as I could. She wouldn’t write to me or see me. And I did go to her. I went after Rosh Hashanah, when everyone was talking about an evacuation. Mrs. Apfel said your mother wasn’t receiving anyone, least of all me. Even after that, she didn’t send word. I had to give it up. I had to respect her wishes. And I had to keep myself from losing my mind, too.”

“So you walked away because it was easier for you.”

“I didn’t walk away, Elisabet. I wrote to her when I sent her things. I told her my feelings were unchanged. She didn’t write back. It’s clear she doesn’t want to see me.”

“If that’s true, then why is she so unhappy? It’s not as though she’s seeing someone else. She never goes out. At night she’s always home. On Sunday afternoons she lies in bed.” The waiter delivered their tea, and Elisabet stirred milk into her cup. “She never gives me a moment alone with Paul. I have to sneak out in the middle of the night to see him.”

“Is that what this is about? You can’t get a moment alone with Paul?”

She glared at him, her mouth tight with disgust. “You’re an ass, do you know that? A real ass. Despite what you think, I do care how my mother feels. More than you do, apparently.”

“I care!” he cried, leaning across the table. “I’ve been going mad over this. But I can’t change her mind for her, Elisabet. I can’t make her feel for me what she doesn’t feel. If we’re going to speak, she’ll have to be the one to contact me.”

“But she won’t, don’t you see? She’ll stay miserable. She can keep it up, you know. She’s made a project of it all her life. And she’ll make me miserable, too.” She glanced down at her hand, where Andras noticed for the first time a ring on her fourth finger: a diamond with two leaf-shaped emeralds. As he studied it, she gave the band a contemplative twist.

“Paul and I are engaged,” she said. “He wants to take me to New York when I’m finished with school next June.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Does your mother know about this?”

“Of course not! You know what she’d say. She wants me to wait until I’m thirty before I look at a man. But I’d think she wouldn’t want me to end up like her, alone and old.”

“She doesn’t want you to end up like her. That’s the point! She was too young when she had you. She doesn’t want you to have to struggle like she did.”

“Let me tell you something,” Elisabet said, and gave him her granite-hard look. “I would never end up like her. If I got pregnant by some man who didn’t love me, I know what I’d do. I know girls who’ve done it. I’d do what she should have done.”

“How can you speak that way?” he said. “She gave up her whole life to raise you.”

“That’s not my fault,” Elisabet said. “And it doesn’t mean she can decide what I do once I turn eighteen. I’ll marry whomever I want to. I’ll go to New York with Paul.”

“You’re a selfish child, Elisabet.”

“Who are you calling selfish?” She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him across the café table. “You’re the one who dropped her when she got depressed. A person in that state doesn’t invite people to lunch or send love notes. But you probably never cared for her at all, did you? You wanted to be her lover, but you didn’t really want to know her.”

“Of course I did!” he said. “She was the one who pushed me away.” But as he said it, he experienced a kind of pressure change, a quiet shock that thrummed in his ears. She had pushed him away, had done it more than once. But he had pushed her away too. At Nice, at the Hotel Taureau d’Or, when she’d seemed on the verge of speaking to him about her past, he’d left her alone at the table rather than hear what she might say. And later that night at the cottage, when he’d demanded she tell him everything, he had done it so roughly he’d frightened her. Then he’d packed her things and driven her back to Paris. He had tried to see her exactly once since then. He’d written a single postcard and returned her things, then set about erasing her from his mind, his life. Their love would have a neat, sad ending: a box of things dispached, a note unanswered. He would never have to hear the revelations that might hurt him or change the way he thought of her. Instead he’d chosen to preserve his idea of her-his memory of her small strong body, of the way she listened and spoke to him, of their nights together in his room. As much as he’d told himself he wanted to know everything about her, part of him had retreated in fear. He thought he’d loved her, but what he had loved wasn’t all of her-no more than the silvery images on those long-ago cards had been, or her name on an ivory envelope.

“Do you think she’ll see me?” he asked Elisabet.

She looked at him for a long moment, a faint wash of relief warming the cold blue pools of her eyes. “Ask her yourself,” she said.

IN THE NINE WEEKS since he’d seen her, time had not lain dormant. The earth had continued its transit around the sun, Germany had marched into the Sudetenland, and change had worked its way into the smaller orbit of his life. There was the raw feeling of wind at the back of his neck; he had cut the hair he’d grown long at her request. His morning tutorials with Vago had ended, and last year’s graduates were gone; the new first-year students paid mute attention when he and his classmates gave their critiques in studio. He had mastered the French language, which had crossed the boundary of his unconscious mind and established itself in the territory of his dreams. He had begun his internship at the architecture firm, his first job in his chosen field. And there were new set designs at Forestier’s (for Lysistrata, a foreshortened Parthenon and a forest of column-like phalluses; for The Cherry Orchard, a drawing room whose walls, made of sheer scrim fabric and lined with hidden lights, became increasingly transparent throughout the play until they disappeared to reveal the rows of trees beyond).