“Run away.”
“On stilts?”
“I’m quite fast,” she said.
“Wait, let me get this straight …,” he began.
She pulled him toward her and kissed him freely, joyously. “What was the question?”
“I don’t have a question.” He sighed. “This is so much better than the stairwell.”
“You liked stairwells.”
“I did, but—”
She interrupted him. “Come in.”
30
While the family slept, Emily tiptoed out of the guest room she shared with Jess, down the hall past her father and Heidi’s bedroom door, past Maya’s, past Lily’s. Softly, she glided down the stairs to the glassed-in sunroom where she wrapped herself in the pink and purple afghan on the couch. There she sat and gazed at her sisters’ plastic groceries, their books piled on the floor: Princess Stories, My Body, The Book of Me. She looked at Lily’s miniature dinette, her pink and white play kitchen. She had heard every word of her father’s conversation with Jess.
Jonathan had concealed his plans for the future, and Gillian had concealed her past. She had loved them both, and this news made her feel entirely alone.
Or had she loved them? She had loved aspects of Jonathan, and tested him; adored her idea of Gillian, and studied her. She doubted now that she had known either. In the end, she was not a good judge of character—least of all, her own. How strange that people had looked up to her. She was supposed to be the sage one, the stable one. Emily had always told Jess what to do.
She turned and turned her sparkling diamond ring. She could not quite bring herself to take it off. What proof would she have, then, what physical evidence, that what she and Jonathan had was real?
She thought of her mother’s ring clinking against the bowl as she kneaded dough. Emily had been the conservator of her mother’s memory, keeping the birthday letters on her computer. Reading and rereading them. In the end what did those letters say? My hope for you and Jessie is that you go on to live your lives happy, independent, unafraid. Well, what did that mean? Isn’t that what everybody wanted? Guilt and regret are a waste of time. Think about the future. Tears started in Emily’s eyes. Think about the future? Her mother was telling her to play a game with only half the pieces.
Emily had assumed a transparency in people, expected it of everyone, even herself. But why? What basis did she have for such assumptions? She saw in her own case that they were ungrounded. She herself, supposedly so careful and straightforward, so reasonable, had betrayed Veritech’s secrets to Jonathan, made a gift of them, a token of love mixed with hope mixed with doubt. In the end her motives were hardly rational, hardly clear. That realization frightened her, but she was reflective, rigorous in her thinking, and she tried to think her way out of this morass. Bewildered, adrift in her father’s house, she tried to find a way forward. She was her father’s daughter, and she thought like an engineer.
First thing in the morning, she resigned from Veritech. She sent an e-mail to Milton, Alex, and Bruno: Today, after much thought, I have decided to resign as CEO. My time with you has been challenging, rewarding, and above all, interesting. As you know, I had been planning to step down in January. However, after the events of—she paused here, and then typed—the past month, I cannot continue to work at Veritech. I will miss your company, and I will miss the company we have built together, but I realize that now is the time to leave, to think about the future, and spend time with my family….
No excuses, and no confessions either. Emily’s sense of responsibility was strong, but her need for privacy was stronger. She sent the message from her laptop, and then proceeded to the next order of business—helping Heidi prepare breakfast for the children. The nanny arrived. Heidi took the train to Providence to teach, and Emily took a walk with Jess and Richard.
It seemed to Emily that the leaves had changed overnight. Suddenly, trees of ordinary green were scarlet, gold, spectacular. When she’d arrived in Canaan, she must have been too distraught to notice.
“I heard everything you said,” she told Richard, as they walked down Pleasant Street.
Jess took her hand.
“Now I want to know the whole story,” Emily told her father.
Richard didn’t answer.
“You have to tell us, Dad,” said Jess.
Richard kept moving, eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. “Well, what do you want to know?”
“I want you to start at the beginning,” said Emily.
“Your mother and I met at Cambridge,” Richard said. “I was on a Fulbright, and she was a choral scholar.”
“We knew that before,” said Emily. “I want you to begin at the beginning, with her mother and her father.”
But Gillian’s parents were not the beginning for Richard. Those dark-costumed people were not the story of his wife. Gillian began with him at Cambridge, where he bicycled with her through golden autumn fields and listened to her sing in the Girton College Chapel Choir. She had applied to college without her parents’ knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion.
Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn’t understand. Their mother’s life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. “It’s like a fairyland here,” she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her own gown for the Emmanuel College ball, dancing until dawn, and then slipping barefoot onto the velvet lawns reserved for Fellows. As a soprano she sang for services and feasts. As an adventurer, she tried champagne for the first time and pork loin and frog’s legs. In summers she and Richard punted on the river Cam. On vacations she stayed in his apartment, and when he got the job at MIT, she married him. Her Hasidic family had nothing to do with it. They would not even meet Richard, much less look at their runaway daughter. She came to America, and took Richard’s family for her own.
Emily shook her head. “But don’t you see, Dad? That’s not good enough. Those are our relatives too. You can’t pretend they don’t exist.”
“How productive is this line of inquiry right now?” Richard asked her. “How will these questions help with what you’re going through?”
“Come with us to the Zylberfenigs’ house,” said Emily.
Richard’s jaw tightened. “Absolutely not.”
Undeterred, Emily took Jess that very afternoon to Alcott Street. Laptop in hand, she rang the bell. Then she knocked on the door. Seconds later, Chaya Zylberfenig welcomed the sisters with open arms.
“I knew I was right!” Chaya cried. “Come in, come in! The doorbell’s broken. Come sit!” She ushered Emily and Jess into her living room filled with bookcases of tall Hebrew books. She seated the young women on her slip-covered couch, under her picture of the Rebbe. Brushing tears from her eyes, Chaya said, “Welcome, nieces.”
“Is it really possible you’re our aunt?” Jess asked. “It’s so strange.”
“Ah.” Chaya smiled. “My husband always quotes the Rebbe. There are no coincidences.”
“You’re so young,” Emily said shyly.
Once again Chaya explained. “There were nine of us. Your mother, Gittel, oleha shalom, was the oldest. I was the ninth, and so I was much younger. She left home when Freyda and I were babies.”
Emily could not hide her disappointment. “So you didn’t know her.”
Chaya shook her head, “We were told unfortunately that she had died—even before her real death.”
“Don’t you think that was wrong?” Jess couldn’t help interjecting.
Emily touched her arm in warning.
“It was many years ago,” Chaya said diplomatically. “What she did and what our parents did is all said and done. But I can tell you all about the family. Your grandfather Leib, zichron l’bracha, was a jeweler.”