“And sort of tragic,” their son-in-law Peter offered. “That she’ll never see any of this.”
“But is it maybe,” their daughter Hannah said, “just a little bit tacky, putting her name on everything?”
“What it is,” Wendy said, finally looking up, “is so unbelievably her.” They were all at the dining table now, which no one had sat at in years — everyone always ate in the kitchen, even with company — but which had felt so fitting to spread the legal documents across, as if they were in a boardroom in some glittery high-rise and not a Victorian fixer-upper on Cedar Street.
“Always flying out to Europe, or lunching with some refugee scholar,” Wendy said. “Always — always — letting everyone know just how generous she was,” she said, walking into the kitchen to answer the phone. Standing in the doorway, twisting the cord around her elbow, Wendy resembled her late father, with her short, disheveled hair and sleepy green eyes, as if perpetually startled from a nap. Then she hung up, walked back into the dining room and said, “That was the Israel Museum. They’re planning another event next month in her honor.”
Her eyes filled up, that fast. “We’re all invited,” she whispered. “The entire foundation.”
Larry came behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders, keeping them there as the first cry, and then the second, escaped her throat. “It’s halfway across the world,” he said. “And you just got back. The museum would understand if you said you were busy.”
“Right,” Wendy said, swallowing. “I am busy,” and everyone nodded, though just a few weeks before she’d been talking about how unnerving it was to have both her children grown and married, and to only be working halftime now — that it felt strange and decadent, at fifty-six, to begin cultivating hobbies. But as soon as she said it, it turned out everyone was busy. Mira, of course, was out of the question — no one had heard from her in days. Larry couldn’t leave his grad students last-minute, and Hannah couldn’t pull the kids out of school so early in the year — it was only October. There would be other events, they reasoned, in which to honor Eva—many other events, they were certain — and since construction on the museum wing and the absorption centers wouldn’t be completed until summer at the earliest, it made sense, they decided, to wait until then. They could fly out for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies and turn it into a big family trip, maybe rent that apartment in Baka they’d liked so much for Larry’s sixtieth, and enroll Hannah and Peter’s girls, now that they were old enough, in kibbutz camp in the north. So they’d miss this one event, they said. What was the harm, and really, who at this point was keeping tabs?
Unless — and that was when Wendy turned to her son-in-law Boaz, who had been silent the entire night, sitting at the end of the dining table. Unless he wanted to go. He could treat it as a free vacation, Wendy said, make a quick appearance at the museum, then relax in Jerusalem for a couple weeks. Or get some free research out of it, spend time with that Ladino poet he loved whose name they were always forgetting. And when Boaz, surrounded by all of his in-laws except his wife Mira herself, who, only six weeks along, had up and left him for another man last Monday, calling him and saying she was sorry, but she needed some time away — when Boaz, who had been wondering if there was something seriously wrong with him for obsessing over the life and death of a woman he barely knew, poring over every obituary he could find, then driving here tonight, as if he too had a stake in the matter — when Boaz said he felt a little funny being the only one to attend given, you know, the circumstances, all four present members of the Eva Kaplan Foundation turned to him and said that he was family, always and forever, and that they all just had to be patient while Mira got this last tantrum out of her system before the baby came and she finally had to start acting like an adult.
THAT NIGHT, the calls and emails from Israel kept coming. It seemed Eva had given every organization she’d donated to a sneak preview of her will and they all wanted to be the first to extend their gratitude. The director of the Israel Museum, one of Eva’s closest friends, offered to pick Boaz up from the airport; the absorption center’s development officer wanted to take him to lunch; the youth village coordinator invited him to Afula to tour the grounds. And on and on. By the time he said good night to his in-laws and began the long and silent drive up I-89 back home to Vermont, he’d agreed to eight site visits for the foundation, as well as meetings with the lawyer and the real estate broker and a full morning at Eden Storage, where Eva had an extra unit no one had known about, filled with cast-off belongings Boaz had somehow agreed to sort through. He’d also agreed to stay at Eva’s house, however creepy that might be, to keep an eye on the contractors’ work before the place went on the market. Most of her furniture had already been sold, but he told Wendy he was happy to sleep on the mattress they’d left for him, that he was happy to do it all. He’d suggested he fly out as soon as possible, and while Wendy kept thanking him for taking the brunt, Boaz knew it was tacitly understood why he was so eager to get on that plane: anything to flee his present situation.
But when he pulled into the driveway, when he saw the darkened windows of his and Mira’s little white house, when he opened the door and yelled “Hello?” and nothing came back, he wondered if he wasn’t traveling to the one place that might make him feel worse. Not because he’d grown up in Israel — he’d been back half a dozen times since moving to the States — but because Mira had accompanied him on every one of those trips. That was where they’d met, a decade ago, on a graduate translation fellowship in Jerusalem. He was twenty-five, Mira twenty-two. He’d met Eva that year as well — he remembered Mira dragging him along on what she called “the obligatory visit to her royal highness.” Boaz had been excited by the invitation — they’d only been together a couple months and this was the first of Mira’s relatives he was meeting — but as they walked through the hills of Talbieh and onto Hovevei Tzion Street, every home more coiffed than the last, he’d felt a stab of panic. He was from Kiryat Gat, a tiny city in southern Israel that Mira, who considered herself an expert on Middle East geography, had never heard of and had, only half-jokingly, accused him of making up — and until that day, Boaz hadn’t known streets like Eva’s existed: not even the prime minister lived like that. Jerusalem had seemed to him a city where people didn’t simply live on top of each other, they lived right on you, sitting on your stomach, pinning you down by the arms so you had no choice but to smell the soup on their breath and hear their opinions on the bus strikes, the housing crisis, your career choice. And yet here were old stone homes with rosebushes and sculpted citrus trees and gleaming cars visible only through electric gates — not apartments but actual houses, perched so high above the city that even the garbage fumes no longer existed, as if the mayor had allotted these people better air.
Mira must have sensed his discomfort, because right outside her grandmother’s house, beige stucco and relatively modest from the street, she turned to him and said, “Fine. They’re rich. But that doesn’t mean I am.” And then she did a strange thing: she patted her jeans, as if her entire life’s worth could fit within those frayed, faded pockets, and Boaz wondered if only people comfortable around money felt the need to prove to the world that they had gone without it.
Then Eva opened the door and Boaz stood there staring: it was Mira exactly, if he were to fast-forward fifty years. The same wide brown eyes and tall, muscular frame and cheeks that would never, it appeared, thin with age. The same face (not pretty, exactly, but stately) and the same proud, purposeful stance — shoulders back, head up — even as she kissed both their cheeks, took their coats and flung them across the mail table.