Bella finished her onion soup. She left most of her lapin. She gave all of her crème brûlée to Robin. Afterward — after Bella had paid and tipped with the lovely chance money — they walked out of the restaurant only slightly tipsy, passing the three women taking the last dinner of their last annual reunion, passing Dr. Hartmann’s empty chair.
“What a wonderful trip,” Robin sighed. She wanted to go to the final party. Bella would read in their room for a while — she’d finish that story about the magician — and then join her cousin.
Tagged suitcases stood in the corridor. All of the luggage would be collected at 2:00 a.m. Bella and Robin would put out their own suitcases at bedtime. Now she entered the stateroom, took off her shoes, removed the candy from her pillow and tossed it onto Robin’s, and lay down. She didn’t read, though. She thought instead about the three afflicted friends, about Dr. Hartmann, about the double life of the Golden Swan. She awarded a moment of compassion to the graceless Luke. She considered Melinda, experienced in solicitude at an early age, destined to enter one of the helping professions.
She had neglected to close the door. The maid passed, carrying an empty basket — it must have contained the candies. Bella leaped up, and from the doorway watched the narrow form slip along the corridor, avoiding the suitcases. At the end of the corridor were service stairs. The maid opened the door leading to those stairs. It swung closed behind her.
Curiosity…it was a new form of hunger. Bella, shoeless, closed her own door and ran to the service one, and paused—uno, dos, tres—and opened it.
The stairs were spiral, winding around a central post, enclosed within a rough yellow cylinder that matched the color of the maid’s uniform. There was a groove at shoulder level for the hand to grasp. The dark head was one revolution below. Bella paused on the top stair as if it were a plank. Then, fingers within the groove, she plunged after the maid. The funnel of stairs drew them silently downward. The maid ignored doors indicating new levels. All at once, she disappeared. Bella saw that the stairs had ended. Then she herself was at the bottom, looking into a…place.
It was a large room with no portholes. Its light was the same reddish brown of the library, the casino, her stateroom — light that had been stored, rinsed in rusty water, and then released. Shades of blue were unknown here. Sky and ocean seemed miles away. There was a trestle table in the middle of the room, bolted to the floor, and two benches on either side of it. There was the smell of baking — that heavenly bread she’d grown to detest. From tiers of bunks attached to the walls came snores. Beneath the room, the ship’s engines — diesel these days, Dr. Hartmann had mentioned, not steam — throbbed. Otherwise, no sound at all.
A bowl of peaches stood at one end of the trestle table, and a pitcher of foaming liquid. Several people were playing a card game near the peaches. They did not speak, Bella realized, but rather made occasional motions with their free hands. At the other end of the table sat a woman and a man, rapidly signing. In one corner of the room, where bunks met bunks, there was a shipboard oddity — a rocking chair. In it sat a young long-haired Indian woman with a child in her arms, an infant of six months, maybe eight. Robin would have known its age.
Bella remained in the recess at the bottom of the stairs. She was grateful that she was wearing black. The maid paused to hang the basket on a hook. Then she rushed to the chair. With fluttering fingers she addressed the rocking young woman, who slid an arm from beneath the baby and answered in the same way. Then she stood and handed the child to the maid, and the maid sank into the rocker, unbuttoning the top of her uniform and unhooking an undergarment as well. She put the baby to her breast. She bent her head to meet the baby’s eyes, but not before Bella saw that her face had finally attained expression — a kind of meager exaltation.
The girl who had been rocking the child was the same one who’d been sweeping in front of the infirmary the day the cousins got lost. Now she crossed the room, skirting the trestle table and the card players and the animated couple. She entered Bella’s hiding place. This time she had no trouble giving directions. Go away, commanded the beauty wordlessly, her index finger pointing upward.
Bella allowed herself a long final look at the deaf-mute servants, whose employment here was either a kindly move on the part of a paternalistic ship company or a sensible one on the part of a smuggling racket. She took an even longer look at the hungry child, the stowaway whose presence everyone in the room and now Bella too was bound to protect. After these informative looks, she climbed the helical stairs — a journey less difficult than it would have been five pounds ago.
Somewhat later she had finished her own packing and had placed Robin’s empty suitcase on Robin’s bed. Certainly she could pack Robin’s gifts, bathing suits…The key turned in the lock and her cousin entered, pale skin splotched, hair awry, one shoulder strap broken.
“Bella! You don’t have to,” she giggled. She rapidly laid clothing in the case, along with the hammock she’d bought, and a little mahogany box. Meanwhile she hummed, apparently not wanting to ask Bella what she’d been up to. And so Bella kept to herself the Golden Swan’s secrets, and its secret within those secrets. And her sudden distress — envy, wasn’t it — she kept that to herself too.
The cousins stowed their suitcases in the hall and got undressed and went to bed, all without further speech, without gesture, though from time to time Bella glanced at Robin, and, she supposed, Robin glanced every so often at her.
Cul-de-sac
I.
Daphna invaded and then detonated whenever it suited her. Never on Fridays, though. Friday evening was Sabbath, and her husband expected a proper meal; Daphna’s preparations, however slipshod, kept her busy. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she taught Hebrew at a local synagogue. As for Mondays, when the weekend had lost its affirmative pull — Mondays were days of sapped energy even for Daphna.
So Wednesdays, by default, were likeliest for her unannounced visits. On Wednesdays her husband taught two classes at the university — an afternoon seminar for graduate students, an evening survey for adults. He took his dinner at the university cafeteria, so Daphna could forget about cooking altogether, could toss tuna fish and a plate of sliced tomatoes onto a kitchen table already burdened with homework and half-eaten apples and Israeli newspapers. That table was so littered that sometimes the children dined on the floor. The newspapers were days old. “Stale news,” Daphna said, “news that has been superseded or even proven false, lifts me to dizzy heights, like the works of magic realism. Have you read García Márquez, Ann? Saramago?” She didn’t pause for a reply; I could have slipped away.
The kids often ate the tuna right out of the can. Three smart and pretty girls — eleven, thirteen, and fifteen at the time the family moved in. They had adapted to their mother’s habits, had learned to take over from her. It was they who set up and then reminded her of parent-teacher conferences, they who organized shopping expeditions for school clothing, they who commanded the housecleaning on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they made additions to the Wednesday-night cuisine — raw carrots, buckwheat kernels. While the buckwheat boiled on the back burner of the ancient stove, the oldest girl sautéed the onions. I saw her doing it one night when Daphna pulled me in for a consultation about the kitchen fan — it was on strike, she said. The girl’s dark hair was bound loosely at the nape. Her lovely, long-nosed profile bent toward her task. When the telephone rang in the hall the youngest picked it up and then called the oldest’s name, and the middle girl took over the onions without a word.