The Inn at Lake Devine (19 page)

I said, “You’re way ahead of yourself.”

“Why even be friends with a boy from that family? You spent one week at that place, less than a week, you come home, you never mention him, and now you’re pining for him?”

“I wanted to know he called. I’m not pining.”

“And what? All of a sudden we’re the enemy, because of a boy you’re not pining for?”

“It’s the principle of the thing, the cover-up. You lied to me and you lied to Kris—”

“I know who I’m dealing with! I know what kind of people they are and how they think. You don’t.” She raised her voice. “Not everyone grows up in Newton. My sisters and I got called a lot of names, by all kinds of kids—kids from nice families, kids whose fathers worked for my father.”

I said, “What happened to you in Fitchburg in the nineteen thirties is not a good enough reason to lie about who calls me.”

She was shaking her head, her eyes closed, but I persisted. “If you disapprove of someone just because he’s Protestant, Lutheran, whatever he is, then
you’re
prejudiced—”

“
I’m
prejudiced?” she yelled. “They don’t want Jews at their hotel but they’re going to welcome you with open arms? Because this isn’t my problem; this isn’t me worrying about another church
wedding. This is me hoping that at least one of my daughters marries into a family who’s thrilled to have her.”

I tried to stop her, but she was ranting: “Wait until he gets angry at you and calls you a name. What do you think will be the first word that comes out of his mouth in anger?
Kike? Dirty Jew?
” She dodged me and strode over to my bureau, to my silver-framed photograph of my teenage great-aunt. “What do you think she’d say?” my mother asked fiercely, shaking the frame in my face. “Whose side do you think she’d be taking?”

“Put her down,” I ordered.

She did, without rebuttal, as if she knew she’d gone too far.

I repositioned Nesha’s frame in its hallowed spot. Knowing my mother was watching, chastened, I took the first step. I slid my trunk out from under my bed and unlatched it. It was stuffed with the house supply of gaudy afghans, crocheted by my Bubbe Marx in the colors she favored, without regard to my mother’s decor. I dumped them out, then took one back, a child-size blanket in several shades of pink I had for a long time considered beautiful.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“Packing.”

“For where?”

“Israel,” I said. “Miami Beach.”

“Natalie—”

I said, “I want to hear you admit you were wrong.”

She didn’t move, and didn’t speak until she said, “I found you an apartment, didn’t I?”

“That’s right. And a job. Several jobs. Not to mention inventing Pammy’s entire career in real estate.”

She liked being reminded of that, of her powers and her salesmanship, and I knew if I turned around I’d see a pinched, pleased smile. I also knew that tomorrow she would show me the apartment, buy me lunch, and later—with my father’s truck transporting my few possessions and with all forgiven—they would together move me the half-mile to my new home.

I
ngrid didn’t know—or wasn’t saying—that her son’s first stop was Newton, Massachusetts, and from there an even more tribal place. He found Irving Circle from a street atlas, rang our doorbell, saw signs of life in the Loftus house, rang
its
doorbell, and asked Shelley, who had cotton batting separating her toes for a pedicure, where Natalie Marx might be at this time of day.

“I’ll call her mother,” said Shelley. “You wait on the porch.”

Reached at Audrey Marx Properties, my mother asked, “Who wants to know?”

Shelley put the phone down and returned to announce in its full
goyishe
glory, “Kristofer Berry.”

“Send him over,” my mother instructed.

Shelley offered to lead this Kristofer to Mrs. Marx’s office if he waited a few minutes so she could put on something decent, but he declined.

Not ten minutes later he walked into Audrey Marx Properties wearing a down vest over a red chamois shirt. My mother shook his hand and asked, “Aren’t you freezing like that?”

Kris told her no; he was from Vermont. She gestured toward the associate churning at her elbow: “My daughter Pamela.”

“I was looking for your daughter Natalie,” he said.

“Natalie,” my mother announced grandly, “is no longer helping us out because she’s accepted a start-up position in her own field, not far from Valle’s.”

Pammy pointed out that Kris wouldn’t know what that meant.

“One-point-six miles from here. A nifty, nifty location. We’ve got our fingers crossed.”

Kris asked if I was there now.

My mother glanced up at her
Better Homes and Gardens
wall clock. “My,” she said. “What time did you leave Vermont to get here so early?”

“Eight, eight-thirty. It’s not that far.” He tried again: Might he call me at work?

My mother explained I was home, gearing up for my not quite up-and-running marvelous new opportunity.

“She wasn’t there,” he said.

“She’s at her place,” Pammy volunteered.

Kris said he wouldn’t know; hadn’t seen or talked to me since December.

“It just happened.
Just
,” my mother said. “She moved in last night.”

He asked if he could make a call.

“No phone,” she said.

Kris looked over my mother’s head to the battery of phones. One rang on cue.

“The service will pick it up,” said my mother.

“She means
Natalie
has no phone,” said Pammy.

He asked for my address. My mother said, “It’s hard to find.”

He said all he needed was the address.

“I can take you there,” my sister offered. “I’m showing a house at eleven that’s two, three blocks from Natalie’s.”

Kris said later that they wore him down. Pammy was already in her coat, had collected her keys. “I’ll run upstairs and give her a
couple minutes’ notice,” she explained, “like I do when a seller’s at home and I’m dropping by unannounced.”

“If you insist,” said Kris.

O
ne Newton village away, I was bending at the waist, brushing my hair from the roots downward. Dressed in once-black corduroy jeans that had been mistakenly bleached and a simultaneously ruined black turtleneck, I had just shouldered my unmade Murphy bed up and into the wall. I heard running steps on my attic stairs at the same moment as Pammy’s coy, “You have your first visitor.”

I thought she meant only herself, so I yelled from underneath my hair, “Door’s open”—prompting a lecture on the unlocked door and the trusting heart. I said, “
Okay
, enough, hello. Welcome to my new abode.”

She shut the door behind her and hissed, “He’s here. Kristofer. Downstairs. He came looking for you. He’s adorable.”

I shot up at the mention of his name, to the obvious delight of double agent O’Connor.

“He came to the office after going to the house first, but no one was there, so he went across the street and guess who helped him out? Shelley.”

I led her to my door. “Thanks for bringing him. You can get back to work now.”

When she didn’t budge, I said, “If you’re waiting for a tour, I’d prefer another time.”

She put her hand on the doorknob, but turned back to me. “Aren’t you going to change your clothes? Or at least make yourself up?”

I said, “
Bye
, Pamela. Send him up on your way out.”

“He’s nice,” she said.

I walked her partway down my narrow stairs, held back until I heard brief good-byes and the back door bang behind her.

He didn’t gallop up the stairs, and I didn’t move. I took a few breaths to steady myself, then called his name.

“Can we talk down here?” he answered.

As soon as I walked across the kitchen threshold I understood that he was angry. His mouth and eyes had a downward cast to them, and his voice was combative. “I went to your house, but no one was there and a neighbor sent me to your mother’s office.”

“Pammy told me.”

Neither one of us moved from our opposite sides of the Zinler kitchen. I tried, “It’s nice to see you.”

“I thought we were friends,” he shot back. “I thought we’d be staying in touch.”

“I thought so too.”

“Your father said you were out for the evening, and always added something so I knew it was a date: ‘She’s at a movie. I assume they’ll be going out for a muffin after—’ ”

I laughed at “muffin.”

He said, “It’s not funny, Natalie.” He rattled a chair out from the square kitchen table and plunked himself down. “Is your father an idiot? Is he not capable of remembering a phone message?” He picked up the salt and pepper shakers—Kennedy and Khrushchev—and curled his hands around them as if they were cockpit controls.

I said, “I called the minute I got the postcard—the minute after I had it out with my parents. And I made up my mind that if your mother didn’t give you the message—”

“She told me! Unlike your parents, she left me a note—‘Natalie called at six-thirty while you were out. Call her tomorrow.’ ”

He jumped, or so it seemed, to an unrelated topic. “Did Nelson call you last night?”

I said maybe he tried my parents’—

“Of course he did! If I’d had another number, I would have tried it myself.”

I asked calmly why Nelson would have called me.

Kris closed his eyes and sighed with the sheer fruitlessness of it all. “An idiotic idea I had. To go someplace. The three of us.”

“Where?”

“Away. The Halcyon. A hotel in New York that a friend of his from Cornell runs.” He shrugged: stupid.

“New York,” I repeated. Neutral ground, and no parents coiled in the grass. Am I forgiven? I wondered. “Is it in Manhattan?” I asked.

Kris slouched in his seat, as if this were the delicate part that Nelson would have negotiated had he reached me. “Actually,” he said, “it’s in the Catskills.”

“The Catskills,” I repeated. “Is that where I come in?”

He waved that away. “All his friends from school work at hotels or run them. They majored in it. It was in the class notes, about Robin—‘It is with great sadness’ blah, blah, blah—and he got, like, a half-dozen invitations, some from people he doesn’t even remember.”

“Is this a Jewish hotel by any chance?”

Kris said, “I don’t know. What makes a hotel Jewish?”

“What’s his friend’s name?”

“Linette.”

“Linette what?”

“Feldman.”

I laughed. Kris said there was nothing funny about the name Feldman.

“It’s just a coincidence? You two guys head off for a kosher hotel and you decide, after all this time, to swing by and get me?”

He repeated “after all this time” acidly. “Like I haven’t tried? Like I wasn’t the one who called every other day, and now show up to get a reading on this thing? And so what if I talked him into it? What’s so bad about one brother enlisting another brother to rig up a weekend that might make one of us feel better?”

It was a signed confession, and one I should have accepted with grace. But I had inherited Audrey Cohen Marx’s tendency to keep
jabbing after the bell had rung. “Don’t you think it’s a little insulting?” I pushed on. “Like, ‘Here’s a place we could bring Natalie’?”

Kris stood up and, striving for a dramatic exit gesture, fastened the one open snap on his vest.

“Kris,” I said.

He didn’t look at me, but surveyed the room. “The last time we were alone?” he said. “In the kitchen? I had the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that you and I were going to kiss.”

I said, “That was my impression, too.”

“But you took off.”

“I know.”

“You shook my hand in front of twenty people and drove off with your parents and I never heard from you again.”

I was studying his face, having forgotten that his eyes were a light tortoiseshell brown and that there was a faint scar perpendicular to his upper lip. I saw a muscle twitch under one eye. “How mad are you?” I asked.

He said, his voice still hard, “It’s negotiable.” After hesitating, he sat down and folded his arms across his chest, not meeting my eyes.

“Want to take off your vest?”

He shook his head.

“Tea or coffee?”

He said, “No, thanks.”

I said, “You’re right. I did run out like a brat. I went home, I slept a lot. Watched TV. Then it was New Year’s. Had Chinese takeout with my parents—sweet-and-sour chicken. Awful. Then it was Valentine’s Day. My father brought me chocolate-covered cherries. I worked in my mother’s office. Cooked them dinner most nights. They brought me breakfast in bed on my birthday—poached eggs. I developed a rash on my hands that the doctor said was actually in my head.”

“Due to …?”

“Stress.”

“What kind of stress?”

“Personal,” I said. “Emotional. Romantic.”

He swallowed, still didn’t look up.

“I saw a couple of doctors and they gave me creams.” I held out my red hands. “See for yourself.”

He unfolded his arms, examined my hands unhappily, as if they were gift gloves of the wrong size and color.

“Neurodermatitis,” I continued. “The cream treats the symptoms, but I’m supposed to be working on the underlying cause.”