“A jeweler!”
Jess watched, amazed, as Emily whipped out her laptop and began typing. “How do you spell ‘Leib’?”
Two hours later, Emily was still bent over her keyboard, typing. She’d stopped only to plug her power cord into the wall behind the couch as she continued to pepper Chaya with questions. “How did he die?” And, “Where are those children now?” With a kind of manic energy, she added to her family record, while Chaya talked and Jess sat back and watched, overwhelmed by this sudden cousinage in London. Jess knew that there were stages of grief. Was this one of them? The genealogical stage? The note-taking, fact-finding, photo-album stage?
“This is the house where we grew up.” Chaya opened her crimson, leather-bound album to a picture of a tall brick town house. “This is my older sister Beyla, who raised us and who lives there now. She knew your mother well. These are my middle brothers, Menachem and Reuven … or maybe not.” She squinted at the picture. “Maybe that’s not Reuven. That could be Cousin Mendy.”
Emily studied the pictures. “We need to scan these in. If we digitize everything, then we can share the files.” Turning to Jess, she asked, “Did you see the picture of the house?”
“Uh-huh,” Jess said weakly from the corner of the couch.
“You’ll stay for lunch?” Chaya asked them. They adjourned to the kitchen, and the children gathered, blowing through in a little storm of elbows, arms, and knees. Chaya served cold cuts, which Jess didn’t eat. The boys tried to touch their noses with their tongues. These are my cousins, Jess thought. These are Rabbi Helfgott’s nephews, and his nieces, just like me. Emily kept typing, her face aglow.
“You in particular look like a Gould,” Chaya told Emily. “You have the Gould eyes.”
“Hazel?” Emily asked.
“Determined,” said Chaya. “This is very much a Gould trait.”
“Very much so!” Shimon agreed as he came in from the garage.
“Shimon, meet our nieces, Emily and Jessamine,” Chaya said.
“Baruch Hashem. Here you are!” said Shimon and he did not look in the least surprised.
“Clear your places!” Chaya called after her boys as they ran off. They doubled back again and threw their paper plates into the trash.
“Life is strange,” Jess murmured, looking at her uncle in his black frock coat.
“Life is very, very beautiful.” Shimon washed his hands and said a blessing, after which he sat down and fixed himself a sandwich. His blue eyes sparkled as if with news he couldn’t tell. Two new nieces, two beautiful souls in his own kitchen in Canaan, and one of them—He didn’t think of Emily as rich. He never used that word, even to himself, but she had means. She had capacity to illuminate everything around her. Like Barbara, Emily had much to give.
“Will you join me for my class?” he asked Jess and Emily. “My brother-in-law Rabbi Helfgott tells me that you, Jessamine, are one of his best students. Very philosophical.”
“Oh, I’m not,” Jess demurred. She didn’t feel philosophical at all.
All day and night, Emily continued in her hectic phase. Thoughts of her mother’s true identity had unleashed in her a million schemes and plans. She was sending e-mails to Aunt Freyda in Berkeley and Aunt Beyla in London. She was already telling Jess that evening that they should fly to London. The sisters sat on their twin beds in the guest room and Emily said, “We’ll go to Golders Green and see the house. We’ll see the house where she grew up and meet the family.”
“We could,” Jess said.
“There might be some of Gittel’s papers there, or school reports. Or maybe we can find a diary.”
Gently, Jess suggested, “From what Dad and Chaya say, I’m not sure you’re going to find any diaries or mementos.”
“You never know,” said Emily.
She had a new idea to pursue, and she held fast to it. She would not let go. Richard sat with Emily in the living room as she searched for fares to London.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Richard said.
“You knew your grandparents, and you knew your mother,” Emily said calmly. “If you hadn’t known them and suddenly you got a chance—wouldn’t you go?” She seemed strangely happy, and also feverish, downloading Family Tree software and finding it wanting. “The interfaces are terrible,” she told her father.
In her first weeks of bereavement, Emily had been quiet and small, almost childlike, retreating into herself. She had tried to contain what she felt, to keep calm, and whenever possible, comfort her own comforters. Now she asserted herself, brooking no dissent, dismissing her father’s concerns about “those people” as he called them.
“Look, they’re controlling,” Richard told her. “They’re manipulative.”
Emily raised an eyebrow and tilted her head ever so slightly, as if to say, You weren’t controlling? You didn’t manipulate my sister and me?
“You have a lot of money,” Richard reminded Emily.
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Emily asked, irritated.
“You’re rich,” he said. “They’re poor. They have to provide for dozens of children, and you need to keep your eyes open.”
“How dare you tell me to keep my eyes open,” Emily said. “When all these years you kept me in the dark.”
Jess had never heard her sister and her father fight before. Jess and Richard had been fire and water, and of course he always won. Emily and Richard were like an ice storm, sparkling, deadly.
“You’re in a vulnerable position,” Richard said.
“A position you created.”
Suddenly something broke in Richard. Emily froze. Jess looked up, horrified to see her father crying. She had never seen her father cry before, and now his eyes were red and he was sobbing. He couldn’t stop himself. “I’m afraid for you, Emily!”
Heidi rushed into the room, and she seemed almost as surprised as Emily and Jess. She wrapped her arms around Richard, and he buried his head in her sweater and cried and cried.
“Dad, I’m sorry you’re upset …,” Emily began. “I’m sorry!” But now that he was crying, Richard could not stop.
Jess couldn’t watch. She slipped out the back door and tried to catch her breath. Hugging herself, she sat on Lily’s big-girl swing. It was getting cold, but she didn’t want to return for her jacket. She stayed out, swinging gently, trying to calm herself, listening to the squeaking chains.
At last she took out her new cell phone and called George.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Jess. How are you?”
“Where are you?” she asked at the same time.
“In my kitchen,” he told her. “Missing you. Where are you?”
“On the swing set in the yard.”
“Missing me?”
“What do you think?”
Her voice was muffled, weary, terribly sad. “What’s wrong now?” George asked. “What happened?”
“I have to go to London.”
“No! No, you don’t. If your sister wants to go and see all those relatives, then you go ahead and let her. She’s a grown woman.”
“I have to go,” Jess said. “She’s in a bad way. I can’t let her go alone.”
“Why not? Why can’t you? You’ve been with her almost a month. Come home.”
“I can’t,” said Jess. “I can’t.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’m helping her. She needs me.”
“I know,” George said. “But what about you?”
Jess demanded, “Can’t you look at this from Emily’s point of view?”
Then George was honest, much too honest. He knew even as he said the words that they would anger Jess, but he missed her so much that he could not help himself. “I’m not interested in her point of view.”
Silence.
“Jess? Are you there?”
“You’re very good at that,” Jess said.
“Good at what?”
“Triaging. You’re first, and I’m second, and everybody else is a distant third.”
“You’re overwrought,” George said. “This situation is poisonous for you.”