The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

have been beautiful, Lillian thought, and it seemed a new thought, though her mother had been called beautiful and still sometimes was. During Isabel's prayer, you could almost see her as someone else, someone gracious. The house as that peppermint house. Then the blessings ended and Isabel's mouth reverted to a carp's and she took the carving knife to the chicken. “Nice you decided to visit, Lillian,” she said. “And for Shabbat. Who would have guessed?”

“I wanted to see you,” Lillian said, but the sentence came out as a question. The word “you” seemed to wobble.

“So you say. Shabbat shalom,” Isabel said. “You need money you go see your brother Moshe.”

Lillian felt a sharp prickle in her temples. Already, the beginnings of headache, her beautiful forgetting unraveling. How fast the turn-had it always been this fast? Had the Brunswick house ever been anyone's but Isabel’s? In the dining room's flat cool, fishmouthed Isabel slapped potatoes onto wedding plates, and below the aromas of dinner lurked the house's trace scents of ammonia and talc and chicken fat. As always. The absence of deeper voices as always, a bitter, heart-stopping always. How could Lillian have thought otherwise? In her belly she felt a sharp pull, an impulse to hit. “I don’t need money,” she said, and reached for the sweet wine.

“You going to bring me more of that?” Isabel said. “I got that from Rabbi Greenberg.”

“Moshe will. I brought you paper from the shop.”

“Paper I can buy,” Isabel said. “But thank you.”

“If you don’t want it, Ma, I’ll take it with me.”

“Did I say thank you? I like the paper. It's good what you bring.”

And maybe good suggested another opening, slim, evanescent, but still a crack in a door through which Lillian might see through her mother to her father. She waited, ate in silence. The chicken tasted of rosemary and onion and salt, there were roast carrots, and Isabel set out honey for the challah. Poppy cake. Strong tea which Lillian cut with lemon.

“You met someone?” Isabel said.

“No.”

“You going to tell me or not?”

“There's nothing to tell.”

Isabel sipped at her tea with exaggerated care. “He must be no good.”

“Ma, what did I just say?”

“Your brother Moshe, he's a good man. A schemer but a good man. Bertha too, you should take a lesson from her. Stop with the nogoodnik.”

Had her father's friends actually visited? Lillian couldn’t have made them all up. Couldn’t have made him up.

“Lillian? You hear what I’m telling you?”

“What else do you want, Ma?”

“You already got pearls.”

“What?”

“You think I don’t know you. I know you. You want more pearls, you ask your brother Moshe.”

She had not invented Abe Cohen, his hands moving over her, had not invented their coupling: these remained clear. What seemed slippery and opaque was the life he occupied without her. Lillian could only imagine it as a shell around blank air, the reasons for his absence spurious. And so, in the late weeks of winter, Lillian deliberately circled Abe's life, choosing the streetcar stop nearest his store, visiting his favorite bakery, buying from the pharmacy near his house. Twice she borrowed her brother's Packard and drove it up and down Abe's street. House lights on the first floor and often the second, occasional fluttery movements at the windows. Snowdrifts buttressed the side of the house. The front walk was cleanly shoveled. Ice shone on porch rails and shingles. The interior remained impenetrable, a kind of shadow into which she and Abe had disappeared.

She waited until March before visiting the jewelry store. The son, Irving, minded the counter. Beautiful boy, spitting image of his father but still soft, irresolute, except for that glimmer, the same pleasure lust she saw in Abe's private moments. In Irving the lust was more public but more diffuse. “Can I help you, Miss Schumacher?” A light purr in the voice.

No sound from the back room, where Abe set stones, though the door was ajar. She asked to see bracelets, and Irving opened up the case, pulled out a velvet card with four, let her hold them to the light and try them on. For her sister-in-law Bertha, she said. She’d have to confer with her brother, she’d send him over to look. And would Irving please give regards to his family, all best wishes for good health?

Two nights later, Abe returned to Lillian's flat, defeated and sad, his hands redolent of illness. Complied when she asked him, first, to bathe.

One thing Lillian knew: open the door to risk and the room will widen and stretch. The work of caution- automatic at first-becomes over time onerous and boring, another chore in a too-long list of chores. You can’t manage it all, defer whatever seems inessential. And this was how she explained Abe's about-face: almost nightly, he visited. Seemed, in fact, oblivious to risk, foggy with exhaustion and despair. He wept when she touched him, wept when she did not. The weeping, she knew, was hidden from his family. Seeing Abe this way-shaken down to boy, neck-deep in bewilderment and sorrow-moved her. But she also preferred him careless. He’d appear at her flat, late, and collapse on her bed, and after a time they’d make love without speaking. For an hour he might sleep. And though she knew better, some nights she’d meet him on Delaware, a few blocks from his house. Once, at two A.M. Lillian parked the Packard across the street from his house and he slipped out the back door and through the neighboring yard, crossing the snow-crusted lawns to the curb, her borrowed car.

They carried on this way until Rebecca died. During shiva, Lillian joined her brother and his wife when they paid their respects to the family. Red buds studded adjacent trees, crocuses bloomed in the Cohens’ front yard, the bright greens of the new grass mixed with the winter browns. For the first time, Lillian entered the house on Lancaster. In the foyer the dark wood shone, wallpaper pattern of spray roses spilling down the hallway and into the parlor. There was a faint scent of cedar and baked sugar and tea, and in the parlor visiting relatives sat quietly with the daughters-the crazy one, the paper thief, Celia, perfectly still and paler than usual, Irving slumped beside her; the married daughter elegant in black, whispering to Abe, her husband standing guard beside them, adjusting his spectacles and surveying the room. The other daughters were ragged and red-eyed, Jo meeting Lillian's condolences with a scouring stare. The pattern of roses dropped behind the upright piano; sheet music lay open, a sonata. Lillian retreated to the hall which led in one direction to the fragrant kitchen, the other to the front staircase, with its fat maple banister and Persian runner, silent invitations to push farther into the house. She passed the formal dining room (more roses) before two synagogue women arrived, arms loaded with platters and casseroles, a jumble of piety and whispers, noodles and fish. Lillian stole outside to the empty front porch, away from the windows, and waited for Moshe and Bertha to finish with their sympathy.

Lillian would not have chosen that wallpaper: the clipped pink roses girlish, sentimental, falling in dainty lockstep. Still, the papered rooms felt like sugar bowls, and after she left that day the image of the spray roses returned to her. Davenport in dark wood, upholstery the color of biscuits and linen, Abe's reading chair a fine pale green. Upright piano, the scatter of black notes across the white pages of the open score. She pictured the parlor empty of visitors, the davenport clear of Celia and Irving, open, inviting, a place to let the day hush, to gaze up at roses, light patterned by budding trees, lazy piano softening the afternoon. That night, Lillian imagined her own bed as a davenport, lulled herself to sleep with the pretense of thick petals and buttery air and Abe's weight upon her.

That was the beginning of a more deliberate daydream, the trail of roses leading up and back to both glimpsed and unseen rooms: the wide white kitchen, the polished dining room table, and the tall glassed cabinets, company china and Passover dishes, thin-stemmed goblets, heavy brass candlesticks, silver Kiddush cup. And upstairs? The carpeted steps leading to an unlit pocket of space. And to pass through such space? Like passing through night, perhaps. Lillian knew about the windows, stout rectangles facing the street, a round moon of glass above them, smaller windows on the sides. She guessed at the floor plan: front and back stairways, the windows suggesting a division of rooms. In some of the rooms there would be beds, dressing tables, chairs. Cream walls? Some ought to be cream, a base that would hold the light but allow you to add color. And in the master bedroom, there ought to be violet and royal blue bedcovers and chairs, which would suit Abe. She imagined herself and Abe coupling in pale blue sheets, his broad back and thick arms wrapping her, intermittent dark freckles on the white