A syrup of cologne clogged the air. Rosa heard the tearing of envelopes, the wing-shudders of paper sheets. Letters from children: the guests laughed and wept, but without seriousness, without belief. Report-card marks, separations, divorces, a new coffee table to match the gilt mirror over the piano, Stuie at sixteen learning to drive, Millie’s mother-in-law’s second stroke, rumors of the cataracts of half-remembered acquaintances, a cousin’s kidney, the rabbi’s ulcer, a daughter’s indigestion, burglary, perplexing news of East Hampton parties, psychoanalysis…the children were rich, how was this possible from such poor parents? It was real and it was not real. Shadows on a wall; the shadows stirred, but you could not penetrate the wall. The guests were detached; they had detached themselves. Little by little they were forgetting their grandchildren, their aging children. More and more they were growing significant to themselves. Every wall of the lobby a mirror. Every mirror hanging thirty years. Every table surface a mirror. In these mirrors the guests appeared to themselves as they used to be, powerful women of thirty, striving fathers of thirty-five, mothers and fathers of dim children who had migrated long ago, to other continents, inaccessible landscapes, incomprehensible vocabularies. Rosa made herself brave; the elevator gate opened, but she let the empty car ascend without her and pushed the cart through to where the black Cuban receptionist sat, maneuvering clayey sweat balls up from the naked place between her breasts with two fingers.
“Mail for Lublin, Rosa,” Rosa said.
“Lublin, you lucky today. Two letters.”
“Take a look where you keep packages also.”
“You a lucky dog, Lublin,” the Cuban girl said, and tossed an object into the pile of wash.
Rosa knew what was in that package. She had asked Stella to send it; Stella did not easily do what Rosa asked. She saw immediately that the package was not registered. This angered her: Stella the Angel of Death! Instantly she plucked the package out of the cart and tore the wrapping off and crumpled it into a standing ashtray. Magda’s shawl! Suppose, God forbid, it got lost in the mail, what then? She squashed the box into her breasts. It felt hard, heavy; Stella had encased it in some terrible untender rind; Stella had turned it to stone. She wanted to kiss it, but the maelstrom was all around her, pressing toward the dining room. The food was monotonous and sparse and often stale; still, to eat there increased the rent. Stella was all the time writing that she was not a millionaire; Rosa never ate in the dining room. She kept the package tight against her bosom and picked through the crowd, a sluggish bird on ragged toes, dragging the cart.
In her room she breathed noisily, almost a gasp, almost a squeal, left the laundry askew in the tiny parody of a vestibule, and carried the box and the two letters to the bed. It was still unmade, fish-smelling, the covers knotted together like an umbilical cord. A shipwreck. She let herself down into it and knocked off her shoes—oh, they were scarred; that Persky must have seen her shame, first the missing button, afterward the used-up shoes. She turned the box round and round—a rectangular box. Magda’s shawl! Magda’s swaddling cloth. Magda’s shroud. The memory of Magda’s smell, the holy fragrance of the lost babe. Murdered. Thrown against the fence, barbed, thorned, electrified; grid and griddle; a furnace, the child on fire! Rosa put the shawl to her nose, to her lips. Stella did not want her to have Magda’s shawl all the time; she had such funny names for having it—trauma, fetish, God knows what: Stella took psychology courses at the New School at night, looking for marriage among the flatulent bachelors in her classes.
One letter was from Stella and the other was one of those university letters, still another one, another sample of the disease. But in the box, Magda’s shawl! The box would be last, Stella’s fat letter first (fat meant trouble), the university letter did not matter. A disease. Better to put away the laundry than to open the university letter.
Dear Rosa [Stella wrote]:
All right, I’ve done it. Been to the post office and mailed it. Your idol is on its way, separate cover. Go on your knees to it if you want. You make yourself crazy, everyone thinks you’re a crazy woman. Whoever goes by your old store still gets glass in their soles. You’re the older one, I’m the niece, I shouldn’t lecture, but my God! It’s thirty years, forty, who knows, give it a rest. It isn’t as if I don’t know just exactly how you do it, what it’s like. What a scene, disgusting! You’ll open the box and take it out and cry, and you’ll kiss it like a crazy person. Making holes in it with kisses. You’re like those people in the Middle Ages who worshiped a piece of the True Cross, a splinter from some old outhouse as far as anybody knew, or else they fell down in front of a single hair supposed to be some saint’s. You’ll kiss, you’ll pee tears down your face, and so what? Rosa, by now, believe me, it’s time, you have to have a life.
Out loud Rosa said: “Thieves took it.”
And she said: “And you, Stella, you have a life?”
If I were a
