skin, black eyelashes against the blue, and the steady rhythm and near ache of Abe moving inside her. Butterscotch and white for the front guest room, perhaps some fleur-de-lis.
She considered colors for other rooms, tending toward blues and greens, inventing a complete house the shape and size of Abe's house on Lancaster. Downstairs, the rose wallpaper stayed, the piano stayed, the parlor furniture stayed, and at moments the invented house and the real one seemed indistinguishable. In the fantasy house, Abe's children did not appear; presumably they had moved to another invented house, or, better, another city. That could happen, in the mind. The arrangement seemed beyond Lillian's will, as if Abe's house had chosen to occupy her and she could not refuse it. The invented house hummed, waiting to be manifest in the physical world.
You begin, of course, with where you are. Begin with the life you know, begin with sex. Try a simple request, and make the request late at night, after he has climaxed. A Thursday. Lillian and Abe were spooned together in her bed, Abe's hand still on her breast, when Lillian asked, “Shall we go to a restaurant next week?”
Simple and not simple, a meal in a restaurant. Or tea? Wasn’t it what he had once proposed? A table, a waiter, a menu. Polite conversation. Nothing, compared to what they’d done. Tea but tea in public and now: a signal of earnest courtship or of scandal. He closed his eyes, sighed. She had seen him respond this way to Celia's incessant
A week later, she cooked a dinner at her flat. Abe arrived harried and distracted, and she poured him gin, set the table with a blue-bordered cloth, carried out plates. Roast beef and sweet potatoes, glazed carrots, salty bread. Tea and linzertorte. By dessert he was back to the Abe she wanted: alert gaze, body tipped in her direction, his cheeks slightly pink. “Does this feel like home?” she asked, and he answered yes. She stroked the back of his hand. “You don’t invite me to your home.”
“Oh but Lillian. You know why.”
“Good reasons,” she said. “Before.”
“
She hesitated. The blue-bordered tablecloth seemed part of a past life, and she thought of that other polished table, and the imagined linens and the glass bowls, a basket of pears. The invented house seemed wholly real and she did not know what this meant. “Not forever,” she said. She loosened her fingers from his and rose, cleared the dinner plates and the empty serving platter and the used glassware. Then she offered him chocolate from the box he’d brought, square pieces decorated with waves of green.
“Tell me,” Lillian said to her brother, “how a person buys a house.”
Moshe had always been a big man, but here at his law office he seemed even larger than usual. An enormous, round-bellied suit, sighing at her. “Lilly, would you like a cigarette?”
She took one from him, allowed him to light it, noted the resemblance of his fingers to the cigar he lit for himself. “A little house?” he said. “Just for you?”
“Maybe that.”
“Or maybe you’re thinking a bigger house?”
“I think all sorts of things. Let's say any house.”
“Are you asking can I buy you a house?”
“No. I want to know how a person buys a house.”
“First,” Moshe said, “a person needs to have money. Lilly, sweetheart, you do not.”
“But if I did?”
Moshe squinted, as if he were adding numbers in his head. Pursed his lips, not unlike a fish. “A very large if. You understand that? You be careful, Lillian.”
You cannot rush fate, Lillian told herself, no matter how sure you are of your path. For now, she was in God's hands; she imagined a light touch on the top of her head and refrained from talk of houses. Surprisingly, this seemed to work. In the spring of 1929, Rebecca Cohens gravestone was unveiled, and two weeks later Abe again asked Lillian to tea. A Wednesday afternoon. They took a table in Jocelyn's tearoom, surrounded by middle-aged women. Abe bought tea and sweet cakes, inquired about her mothers health. Asked about the stationery business, where the paper was shipped from, if the shop owner traveled to New York, as Abe often did. Mentioned that her brother's law firm was growing admirably. Lillian watched his lips as he talked. This was a strange game, Lillian thought, but a pleasant one. She sipped her tea and folded her hands in her lap and spoke about her fondness for, of all things, gardens; she imagined kissing him in the tearoom. After an hour he asked if he might secure a taxicab for her.
Among the gossips there was murmuring the next day, there always would be murmuring about Lillian, despite the legitimacy of the tea with a widower. But Lillian's faith in God seemed justified. She felt a surge of hope: Why shouldn’t she be happy? Why shouldn’t Abe? On his next visit, he brought flowers to her apartment, and there seemed a new lightness to his mood. Now he wanted to make small but definite plans: tickets to the theater, an afternoon at the Falls. In May he suggested a restaurant dinner with Moshe and Bertha, followed by dessert and coffee at his house.
The evening they went to Little Paris, Lillian wore black silk and pearls, her hair cut that day in shoulder-length waves. Abe brought corsages for Lillian and Bertha. At Moshe's house, they drank illicit champagne, then drove to the restaurant, Bertha carrying Moshe's gin in her handbag. A waiter arrived with savory tarts, then with soup. Four courses. They drank the gin over ice. Through the dinner, Abe joked with Moshe and squeezed Lillian's hand and seemed purely happy; by midevening, Lillian was awash in grand hope. The soft night air seemed a confirmation, and on the drive to Abe's house, she leaned her head out the side window-the elms and maples in full leaf, the breeze pushing her hair from her face, Abe holding her hand, kissing her on the cheek and pulling her back into the car. And when they reached Abe's house it was quiet, the lilacs swaying in the light wind, perfuming the parlor, which was as Lillian envisioned: falling roses, empty davenport, pale green chairs. There was a bakery cake, chocolate, and Bertha brewed tea. In the china cabinet, Lillian found dessert plates: gilt edged, the inner pattern a ring of grapes on the vine, the fruit precise and dense and violet blue.
Would the evening have gone any differently if, instead, she’d taken down the everyday china, left the grapevines dutifully in place, stubborn tribute to the dead? Abe and Moshe lighted cigars and patted each other on the back, and Bertha-round and affectionate and drunk-concerned herself with cake, which she served in thick slices. Lillian sipped the milky tea, savored the chocolate. Abe sat beside her on the davenport, and it seemed that another life was beginning, that grief had fallen away and time had stopped, leaving them forever in this bright soft evening, this parlor, this house. Abe's fingers circled and circled Lillian's palm, sweet measured pressure he might later move to the rest of her body.
If the others sensed the presence of Abe's daughters in the house, they didn’t think much of it. Why would they? Moshe and Bertha commonly entertained, their children and housekeeper discreetly migrating to the upper floors. Here on Lancaster, there had been little entertaining for years, but Abe-admittedly flushed with alcohol- seemed completely at ease, affectionate and unworried. It was after all Abe's own house, his parlor, his evening with Lillian and Moshe and Bertha. And the parlor seemed fully the parlor Lillian had imagined.
They were still eating cake when Lillian heard steps on the back stairway, an uneven thudding, the steps approaching from the kitchen through the long hall to the parlor. A muttering. And then in the parlor doorway stood Jo and Celia-Jo in another of her mud-colored dresses, Celia puffy-eyed, her thick hair disheveled. They stared at Lillian, Lillian and Abe, Lillian again. Celia swung her left arm back and forth.
Jo snorted. “You seem pleased,” she said to Lillian.
From across the room, Moshe cleared his throat, and Jo registered his presence and placed her hand on Celia's swinging arm. Moshe smiled his expansive, warning smile and gestured at the cake, “Would you girls care for some dessert?”
“Mr. Schumacher,” Jo said. “Thank you, no. Hello, Mrs. Schumacher. We’ll go upstairs. Celia?”
“Hello.” Celia relaxed her arm, then fixed her gaze on the dessert plates, and in that moment the evening tipped. “Those aren’t yours.”
“No,” Lillian said.
“Celia,” Abe said.
Bertha, drunk, traced the grape pattern with her index finger. “Beautiful,” she said.
And Celia stepped into the parlor, her arm swinging again. “Not yours.” She yanked Bertha's plate from her hand, then Lillian's from the table, bits of cake still on them.
