She is blessing the pictures. Photographs of me that Ezra sent when we got engaged, mounted in silver frames. The wedding is in New York, she explains to everyone, just about now, because of the time difference. Mad little Polish woman. Whatever is good in Ezra came from her. Boasts like peasant, showing pictures around: her daughter-in-law, pretty like a movie star, the father a professor—a psychoanalyst, she adds impressively after a glance at her husband who looks away, pained, his mouth puckered, afraid she’s spilled the beans; poor Sosie never got further than that: embarrassing Herr Rabbiner with the wrong word, lint on her dress, serving meat carelessly in a milchig dish. Bride’s father is son of lamented chief rabbi of...Her husband elaborates pompously while she polishes glass on picture with her sleeve.
Nicholas has just come in, his chest in a cast, apologizes for being late; broke a rib skiing in St. Moritz.
“Goyim naches,” he laughs.
Getting more Jewish every day. Fooled even Ezra as a freshman in his Hegel seminar. Had a wedding cooked up with a girl from a wealthy Sephardic family. Surprised to discover his star pupil was a pure Polish Catholic (son of a small-town New England pharmacist—corrupted by Marxist piano teacher, Nicholas explained with cynical Semitic shrug). Ezra decided his mistake was not a mistake. Claimed he could smell a Jew, developed trans-racial theory. Nevertheless, the wedding didn’t materialize.
“At last!” Ezra embraces him. “I was waiting for you.”
“Were you worried about the papers?”
“It’s all settled,” Ezra assures him. “Yes, you may smoke.”
Nicholas leans over the coffin, he stares like a man looking down a well for something lost. What is it? Afraid his eyes will fall out. His mouth moving without a sound. Kiss me? Well do it. Kiss me on the forehead like the years you slept on the living-room couch, calling me sister. Remember you in long shirttails falling over hairy thighs. A brother to count among my blessings. The third time you came to visit at night, Ezra was out. “Have you come to see the master or the master’s wife?” I asked and caught your hands as you came toward me. It was in New Haven in 1954 but it could have happened in a Polish ghetto in the seventeenth century—the strange slow-motion dance, only our fingers clasping—it happened in a book: you were holding my hands up high like in a minuet; you kissed me on the forehead and smiled. “Good night, sister,” you said and let go. I went to my room.
You were kind. Read to me aloud from Hölderlin and the Greeks. When you kissed me in the grass years later it was another book: My eyes were closed. Your hand slid under my coat, up my bare side, you took my breast; you said “Wurm.” Why? It was startling. Woman’s flesh brought to mind the wages of sin? Or did you mean something good? Because we were lying on the damp, loose ground in April, the earth wet and cold, the last year’s dead grass and new grass just beginning. I remember coals strewn gray and black on the path leading to the bank of the river, and our slow-motion descent to the ground. You stared at me (like you do now) as I lay there; my face felt painted on, the damp coming from the earth up my back. The sky baby-blue with white clouds over the campus, looking up through the willows—the whole thing fell straight out of Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen. “Wurm,” you said. “Why?” I asked but you only repeated “Wurm.” Didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended. Did you mean death? Is that why you are staring? I wish you’d say something. My name. Anything. A quote. Once when we sat on another patch of grass and I asked you what you were thinking you said, “I’m thinking that I
