The Family Tabor Read online

  He laughed at her, but let her speak her prayers aloud on Shabbat, brought her beeswax candles to light, wine to drink so she could bless the fruit of the vine. She learned to shear sheep, to milk the old, thin cow whose milk was surprisingly sweet, to churn its milk into butter, to feed the scratching hens that laid large eggs, to assess the ripeness of fruits and berries growing in the farmer’s small orchard. And when her work was done for the day, she placed her daughter on the old mare’s back for gentle rides, and her daughter’s baby teeth pierced gums that soon regained a fresh rosy hue, a bloom rising in her hollowed cheeks, her fragile bones lengthening.

  Time passed in that false idyll, in a fraught charade, in a mockery of harmony, and one rainy afternoon the farmer displayed his treasure, eighteen gold 25 Rouble coins issued by Imperial Russia, of which, although she did not know this then, only one hundred pieces had been struck. He had been someone much grander before Alexander II’s assassination, although he never explained what that grandness encompassed, or why he had given it up or had it taken from him, and said only, and only once, “I used to have the ear of the tsar in important matters.”

  For eleven years Tatiana was his helpmate, his servant, his partner in farming and husbandry, his lover forcibly taken only forty or so times. And never once did either she or her daughter ever call him by his name, or by any name at all.

  And they didn’t call him anything on a gorgeous August morning in 1916 when Russia’s national flower, the chamomile, with their lemony centers and white petals, were swaying in the hot breeze, the purple crocuses with their yellow eyes not yet dying, the orange-pistiled arnica waiting to be picked for poultices, and in the small orchard, the apple, peach, pear, plum, and cherry trees and the raspberry bushes were all denuded, Tatiana and Inessa having picked them clean, wrung the juice into liquid kompot, stewed the skin and the meat into thick compote they bottled.

  That morning, as he had never done before, the farmer turned his eyes on Inessa, whose name meant chaste, his red-veined piggy eyes growing round and large and glazed, and he licked his bovine lips, and Tatiana understood, as she always had, the ever-increasing price of survival. She moved slowly into the barn, picked up the sheep shears, and came back into the warmth of the sunshine, and smiled at the farmer, and came close, right up to his chest, as if to kiss him, and she felt his prick, already risen from his lascivious thoughts about the girl he liked to think he raised, and Tatiana leaned in close, and she touched him, then rubbed him, and when he let out his horrible hmmmmmmm, she stabbed him through the heart, watched him fall, his prick deflating like one of the old cow’s emptied udders.

  Then she removed the gold roubles from their secret place. Mother and daughter packed their few belongings quickly and left, the coins jangling in Tatiana’s pockets as they began the long walk back to the Pearl of the Black Sea for the first time since the terrifying flight Inessa was too young to remember. For some time, the farmer’s vizsla trotted alongside. This same dog was with the farmer that long-ago dusk, when he found her and her baby under the tree. When he had pointed and said, “This is Turgenev, the love of my life,” she had hoped that a man whose dog shared a name with her favorite author might be decent, or at least decent enough.

  As they walked on, away from the farm and the orchard and the barns and the small wooden house, Turgenev refused to turn back even when Tatiana barked the farmer’s commands she had never needed to use, and finally she had no choice; she bared her teeth until it tore off for home, unaware it was now alone, and she wondered how much time the sheep, the cow, the mare, the hens had left, how vicious that kind dog would become when it finished gorging upon the farmer.

  She sold the coins for nearly their value, and paid their way out of hell. Up the gangway they walked, boarding the white ship anchored in port, missing the Revolution of 1917, and all the following revolutions and the subsequent battles and skirmishes that would alter repeatedly the country in which Odessa was located, see the ongoing persecution of the Jews, and the internal exile of anyone not considered a true Russian patriot worthy of the name comrade.

  Steerage, the between deck, the tween-deck, was where they slept, but Tatiana had enough cash to keep their bellies filled, and the waters were calm as they sailed away from their abortion of a motherland, to a distant country in which all were, ostensibly, welcome.

  Somehow, mother and daughter managed to prevent the infection of hatred, the wallow of sourness, and in their adopted America, they learned how it felt to smile authentically, to laugh, to make money, to buy clothes and find friends, but not to forgive.

  Never again did Tatiana or Inessa speak a word of Russian, not even a nyet when they refused to teach “that ugly rambunctious language” to Roma. Never again did Tatiana or Inessa raise a glass of fruit juice to their mouths, or bite into an apple, a peach, a pear, a plum, a cherry, a raspberry.

  This was the totality of Tatiana Kahanevna Marat Jacoby’s life story, which she parceled out to her granddaughter in tiny chapters when she came for her monthlong visits. She attained the climax, the murder of the farmer on whom a name would never be bestowed, when Roma was twelve, the same age Inessa had been when Tatiana prayed to God and then did what she had to do to save her daughter for anything that might be better in some other world. The telling of the denouement took the next half year, in elegant words that could cut the carotid, and then the brave woman Roma called Baba was dead.

  The guilt, about surviving when every member of her family did not, about killing the farmer who once was someone grander, whose attempts at foreign kindness never outweighed his frank brutality, the fear of being branded again, blamed again, made a target again, revisited nightly in excruciating detail while Tatiana tossed and turned in an imitation of sleep—that history was passed down from Tatiana to Inessa to Roma, who is now sixty-eight, with a husband who has gone missing. A man who is a Jew who has helped Jews for three decades.

  That’s why Roma hid the survivor cash.

  HER NEED TO REVISIT all of her history with Harry, to unravel this catastrophic mystery, is reaching obsessive proportions: her brain is locking down, traveling the same territory, already, so soon, too well rutted. It’s the road to a certain form of madness. She’s seen it, treated it, and heal thyself is what she commands, or all will be lost. Follow Tatiana, she thinks, who returned to her past only when telling Roma her tale.

  Here is Elena, coming from somewhere, sandals softly tapping the concrete, kissing Roma on her cheek, hugging her tight, kissing Lucy and Isabel, then Phoebe and Camille, taking a seat at the table by the big pool.

  Roma sees in Phoebe, Camille, and Elena fragility, vulnerability, and fear identical to her own. Their smooth faces seem to have aged since seven o’clock last night, light wrinkles where there were none before, a bruising staining their clear and radiant skin. They are all shaky, the firm ground swaying and threatening to give way beneath their feet. This is an earthquake for them all.

  Her granddaughters in swimsuits, shorts and tees, are quiet, aware of the tremors in the air, too young to understand what they are sensing. Perhaps years from now, they will revisit this moment, wonder about it, and Roma breathes in hard, hopes it will remain merely a moment of interest to them, for which they will never find any clues.

  Bagels and cream cheese that hadn’t been in the house have been set out prettily. Camille must have picked up these things, sliced the onions, cut the tomatoes, poured glasses of orange juice for the girls, fresh coffee for everyone else. There is no platter of lox, which Harry likes to slice until one can see through to the other side, no pitcher of his mimosas, no centerpiece of silvery ferns from last night’s truncated gala, no Harry, no Simon, no men at the table. They are like Tatiana and her mother and sisters, facing each other in tragedy.

  A warm, comforting yeastiness rises from the large basket in the center, the aroma of onion and garlic, the scent of normalcy. For her own mental health, and for that of her children, they must not sit here stunned,
unspeaking, pondering endlessly.

  Lucy and Isabel glance up at their mother, a plea for their hunger to be recognized, those bagels sliced open and spread thickly with cream cheese. Elena reaches for the serrated knife and begins cutting.

  What direction can Roma take to bring Harry into the conversation without frightening the little ones, who know nothing, will know nothing about their sabba’s disappearance—unless there is no other option?

  She intended to take her children aside one by one today, to understand what is going on in their lives, using a mother’s love, a psychologist’s acumen, her personal insights as a scalpel, if needed. She knows more than she did yesterday, though not from their own lips, but this is not the time for that. Asking for a revelation of truths here and now would not effect what she is after. If only she knew what that was.

  And then she understands how to bring Harry into this day, as if he is indeed just at the office, handling last-minute issues for his newest wave of émigrés coming from—? She can’t remember where the three families are coming from, although she knew at the beginning of the week.

  Her breath stills. CST without Harry? CST is his baby. It has never been merely an organization, but one made of frail flesh and spillable blood, people’s lives, their chances at measurable happiness, all dependent on Harry. What will happen in his absence? The men who have recently come aboard CST are intelligent and far-thinking, but do they possess the hearts to become its loving foster parents?

  The locks in her brain are turning, then lifting, letting her out of the cage. She is thinking again of others, and although the foreseeable future only extends to the duration of this breakfast, not fully en famille, she formulates in her mind what she wants to say: “I’d like to ask each of you to share a special personal memory of your father and your sabba. A conversation that was of import, or amusing, or an experience shared by just the two of you, and that you have carried in your hearts. Which of his lessons have meant the most, that you haven’t forgotten, that you find yourself using daily?” She wants to make Harry a living presence gone only temporarily, soon to return. But will her request be interpreted as a memorial? That’s not her intent, and she is concerned her children might think she’s already assumed the worst, that soon they will be burying him, which is not what she is contemplating at all, not what she wants them to contemplate either. Is there a different way to spin this, to get what she needs, a way to quell her desperation by hearing her children expressing their love for their father?

  It is her eldest who clears her throat, as if intuiting her mother’s wish. Phoebe, who requires more security than her upbringing would have suggested or demanded, who needs to renew within herself the sense of thrill she has not experienced nearly enough in her still-young life, who might be lying, Roma thinks, about the state of her love life.

  Phoebe’s dark eyes, even darker than Harry’s and Simon’s, roam across the faces around the table, briefly meeting everyone’s eyes, and then she says, “In light of last night’s Man of the Decade honor, I want to tell a story about Harry Tabor, husband, father, father-in-law, and sabba.

  “He once told me that one could not assume the big world meant your own world was large. He said that to make your world large, you needed to hold something back, to keep some things for yourself. If everything about you was known to another, you would feel smaller than you actually were, and you would come to accept that smallness, and in turn, you would inevitably shrink. But holding close to your heart your hopes and your dreams was like owning the key to the universe. He said, ‘Certain secrets you must not keep, but other secrets are liquid gold, manna from heaven, will serve to create infinity within you.’”

  When Phoebe finishes, her mother is staring at her, her sister clutching her hand. Until she opened her mouth, she’d forgotten entirely that conversation with her father when she was in law school, in love with Elijah, debilitated by the split she saw in herself, her inability to break free of the shackles she had placed on herself, her reluctance to soar.

  A percussive bolt of truth runs through her.

  She is aware, her mother and sister and sister-in-law are aware, of the meaning of what she has shared, what it says, not about her, but about the loving husband and father and sabba, the absent Harry Tabor, a counselor, it seems, of secret keeping.

  The young women look inward, contemplating their own private secrets.

  Roma stares at her daughters’ fingers knotted tightly together.

  The heavy silence continues until Lucy breaks it, quietly asks, “Savah, can it be my turn now?”

  Roma looks at the child and inhales and nods.

  “One time Sabba took me for a long drive in his convertible,” Lucy says, speaking with a new overt confidence.

  Have the disturbances in the air shaken something out of Lucy, set her free? Are Elena and Phoebe and Camille hearing what Roma is hearing?

  She waits for the next sentence, wondering what might happen, if Lucy’s tongue will catch and trip again, or instead glide the words into the air.

  “We drove way out in the desert.”

  There it is, and joy expands Roma’s constricted heart.

  “It was sunny and hot.”

  This is Lucy speaking perfectly constructed sentences, using the punctuating period, no longer a wound-up parrot worrying a captured word.

  “It was last year when I was four.”

  No one else seems to be noticing this miraculous alteration in Lucy’s speech, this developmental leap that Roma was concerned wouldn’t arrive, a leap that might coincide for all time with Harry’s disappearance.

  “He told me a story.”

  No, they are entirely missing this astonishing phenomenon, too rapt in Lucy’s story that winds and wends and winds some more, but makes perfect sense about everything her sabba told her, the entire mythology of her birth, the origin story about the day she was born.

  FORTY-NINE

  BREAKFAST IS LONG OVER, the dishes cleared, the uneaten food put away, but only the children have left the table. Lucy and Isabel are sitting on the side of the pool, splashing their feet in the water, occasionally giggling.

  Elena looks at them and quietly says, “I’ll get the girls out of the way. So you don’t have to be careful talking in front of them. I’ll take them to that hotel with the purple pool and the waterslides. They can play, and I’ll give them lunch there. I’ll need to borrow a car, Simon has ours.”

  Phoebe and Camille nod, and all three turn to Roma.

  Roma is in her chair at the table, but somewhere else entirely.

  “I’ll put the extra car seats in mine,” Phoebe says. “Why don’t you and Camille put together what you need.” She excels at orchestrating plans, getting things done, and to be away from the table is a reprieve.

  From a closet in the laundry room, Phoebe pulls out the car seats her parents keep for the girls, and drags them to her car parked at the top of the drive. Five attempts and a slightly smashed thumb before she figures out how they work and snaps them in.

  Elena is right to whisk the girls away, but what is the hotel’s liability if a child drowns in that dark royal-hued water, which renders the pool bottom invisible? How can anyone tell if a child’s gone under?

  She lifts and lowers her shoulders, twists her neck, wanting to release the tension from her body and the prospect of death from her mind. But death is jammed in tight, forcing her to view even a pool with purple water through its lens.

  “They could stay away a week,” Camille says when she appears. Tote bags hang from her arms and she plops them into the trunk.

  Lucy and Isabel are skipping, and Lucy runs to Phoebe and says, “We’re going to the purple pool,” and Phoebe picks Lucy up and says, “Say that again.”

  “We’re going to the purple pool.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. And what are you going to do there?”

  “Play on the slides.”

  “You’re going to have the best time,” Ph
oebe says, then secures Lucy into her car seat, while Camille handles Isabel’s.

  Elena hugs them both. “You’ll call if anything—”

  “Of course,” both sisters say.

  “Bye-bye,” the girls yell, waving madly out the windows, and Elena gives a soft toot of the horn, and down they go and turn onto Agapanthus.

  ELENA AND THE GIRLS left for the purple pool a while ago, but Phoebe and Camille are still at the top of the drive.

  “Did you notice Lucy isn’t repeating everything she says?” Phoebe asks Camille.

  “It started at breakfast.”

  “Really? Why didn’t I notice?”

  “Because we’re all very emotional and because you’re used to her repeating everything. The ear fills in what’s missing.”

  They look at each other.

  “What do you think has happened to Dad?”

  Camille exhales. “I don’t know. My mind goes in circles.”

  “Mine, too. When we were searching last night, I kept seeing him dead, and I was sure I’d be the one to find him.”

  On the kitchen floor this morning, she’d been calmed only by the thought that her father might have believed she was in love with Aaron Green, that there was the possibility she wouldn’t be alone all her life. But since then, Phoebe keeps seeing him on a coroner’s slab, with a tag around a toe identifying him as John Doe.

  How long would it take before they figured out that body was Harry Tabor?

  Camille touches Phoebe’s shoulder. “That must have been awful.”

  Phoebe shudders. “It was. It is.”

  “Earlier, with those detectives in Dad’s study, I was thinking about the Trobrianders’ rites of—”

  “Rites of what?”

  “Too complicated right now. But at breakfast I kept thinking of Dad taking us with him to visit some of his families, how he was as gentle with the parents and the children as he was with us. And how the kids didn’t seem very different from you, me, and Simon. Then he’d take us for ice cream sundaes and explain how difficult their lives had been in their own countries, and describe the new careers the parents were making for themselves, and how well the kids were doing in school.”