But when she reaches for him, Baraz lays the boy in her arms and smiles. Has she ever seen him smile? Then he gives his torch a shake, nudging the flame higher and illuminating more of the room, which is larger than it first appeared. As Baraz walks backward, it grows larger still, and for a few suspended moments Esther believes that it could prove infinite if only Baraz and his torch would keep pressing into its borders. All we have to do is walk, she thinks, until we’ve reached the camp.
Baraz stops. In a far corner, there is a bed. A rug. A tall drawer. A chair. In the chair, there is a woman. She appears older than Esther, though by how much is hard to tell. Her features are youthful but her skin hangs slightly, as if living within the earth has shrunk her, and she sits with an ambiguous stiffness, as a young person might do in fear or an old person in pain. Her eyes rest dully on a middle distance. Darius squeezes Esther’s hand and Esther, squeezing back, wonders if the woman before them is dead. If her head is hanging from the ceiling by a rope Esther can’t yet see.
“If it were only my life,” Baraz says, “I would have …”
The woman turns. Her eyes fill with light. They are green eyes, set in a silt-brown face, surrounded by black hair that does not fall, like Esther’s, but rises, wild, its own crown. She is different. But she is also, Esther sees, the same. Beautiful in the way that Esther is beautiful, a way that cannot be changed. She is the queen.
Part ThreeReinvention
BROOKLYNLILY
Not a Good Influence
At the reception after the memorial service, Lily and her brothers let people squeeze their hands. A few come at them with hard embraces, undeterred by whether or not Ruth’s children know who they are. There are many they don’t know, more than they expected. People from Gloucester none of them remember. Women from Cambridge. Lily knows some of the local friends, especially those who belong to Ruth’s synagogue on Garfield Place, where the event is held, but there are at least a dozen other Brooklynites she has never met. The social hall has been set up in a manner that surprises and moves her: not plastic sheets, as there were on the occasions when Ruth dragged her to something, but substantial white tablecloths; not supermarket platters but cheese and fruit plates put together by a group of women who, based on the dates and figs they’ve procured and the way they say her name, clearly knew and loved Ruth. There is decent wine, and two tall vases filled generously with flowers. When Ian gave his eulogy in the sanctuary across the street, Lily cried; she had declined giving one herself because she did not trust she would get through it. But here, there is not a lot of grief to be felt, rather, a low-grade numbness in hand after hand, words after words. Her friends talk in one corner—she hasn’t seen them in a while, but they came with strong hugs and an unmistakable tenderness. In her peripheral vision she watches Rosie and June play dodge-the-mourners with their cousins as Adam and Lionel’s wife work to corral them. Early this morning, as Adam was getting the girls dressed, Lily heard fighting and walked in to find June sobbing, You said she was here! and Rosie shouting back, I said her ghost was here! Adam waved his hand at Lily: Get out of here, I’ve got this. But how could she not wait to hear what came next? What’s a ghost? June screamed. It’s dead! What’s dead? Gone! June stopped trying to take off the shirt Adam had just put on her. Does she have a face? No. Does she have words? No. Does she show up? No. June burst into tears. But now she races gleefully among the dark-clad grown people, who must seem to her like a woods, and what Lily wants more than anything is to walk the three blocks home and lie down with June, as she and June lay with Ruth, and watch her nap with her nose up and her mouth open.
An hour or so into the reception she and Lionel and Ian wind up in a corner, left to themselves. “An intermission,” Lionel observes. “For the inner mourners.” They stand silently for a while, drinking water handed to them by someone who somehow knows that this is the moment when inner mourners are struck by a terrible thirst. Their water is refilled and they drink more, and stand more, until Lionel says, “Oh god.”
A few seconds pass. Then Ian says, “Oh my god. Is that?”
“What?” Lily, ever the shortest, can’t see the room as they do.
“It’s that woman,” Lionel says. “The governor’s wife.”
“The senator,” says Ian.
“She’s a senator?” Lily asks.
“She was a senator’s wife. She did something to get thrown out, Mom would never say what. They were friends as kids. She came to live with us for a while. You were like three. Maybe four?” Ian brings a hand to his mouth.
“What?” Lily asks. “What’s the big deal?”
“She was Dad’s first affair,” Lionel announces.
Lily looks to Ian, who nods. “I’m about ninety-five percent sure that’s what happened.”
“That’s awful,” Lily says.
“He hated her, though,” Lionel says.
“That’s even worse. Why?”
“He blamed her.”
“For what?”
“Everything!”
Lionel’s voice has turned weirdly bright, and Lily sees that a nearby cluster of mourners has dispersed, making visible a petite, reddish-haired woman who stands more erectly than the other seventysomethings in the room. She wears a black collared dress, black tights, heeled boots in a navy suede. Lily is reminded of a photograph she once saw of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s not just that both women are small, with fluffs of red hair. There is a frankness in this
