Abigail got up and set about making a drink for Lila. “Teddy,” she said, finally turning to look directly at her again, “do you want one, too?”
“Well, yes,” said Teddy. “Thank you.”
Abigail and Teddy looked at each other for an instant. There was nothing in Teddy’s expression but uncomplicated amicability. Abigail felt herself relax. What was there to be upset about now? Oscar was dead. It was all over.
“Goddamn it,” said Maxine, “give me another one, then.”
When everyone had her glass of whiskey in front of her, there was a general sense of this meeting’s being called to order, along with an implicit acknowledgment that Maxine, on her home turf, was the chairman of this meeting, and Teddy was a visiting enemy, equal in stature to Maxine. Ethan sat quietly, as expressionless as a judge.
Maxine cleared her throat. “Well, so this is why we’re all here,” she said. “We need to discuss these biographers, what we’re going to tell them. We need a united front. And this united front must be that we won’t tell the truth about the painting Helena.”
“I don’t care about Helena,” said Teddy. She shifted in her chair, curled one long elegant leg around the other like a cat around a pole. “I have no need to tell anyone anything. Doing so would be to your benefit and no one else’s. I can’t for the life of me imagine why you’ve refrained from trumpeting it to the world.”
“She made a deathbed promise to Oscar,” said Abigail.
“Abigail!” said Maxine sharply.
“Ah,” said Teddy.
“Sorry,” said Abigail, surprised at herself.
“Oscar asked me to keep his secret before he died,” said Maxine. “That’s why I want it kept. If it were up to me, of course I would let the truth be known. I’m not an idiot.”
There was a brief silence and then Lila, her eyes slightly averted from Maxine’s, said, “I have been wanting to say this for many years, Maxine. When I learned that you had painted Helena, I was angry. We didn’t speak after that, so I had no chance to tell you that I’d changed my mind. I think the truth ought to come out. I think everyone should know. If it were me, I would really just burn to have it known.” She flushed.
“Lila,” said Teddy, “you need to write your novel.”
“Are you a novelist?” Abigail asked.
“No,” said Lila, “but I always meant to be one.”
“She is one,” said Teddy. “She just hasn’t written anything yet.”
“Gosh, that’s great,” said Abigail. She looked down at her hands on the table. They looked garish and gauche to her, covered in diamonds and veins. “I’m a big reader. I’d be first in line to buy it.”
Maxine looked around at all three of their faces, as if, Abigail thought, she were wondering how Abigail had become allied so easily with the enemy. Where was her allegiance to her sister-in-law? Abigail realized, to her own astonishment, that now their rivalry was out of the way, she was developing something of a little crush on Teddy. Teddy and Lila reminded Abigail of the pretty, fun shiksas she had always yearned to befriend in college. Next to them, Maxine looked like an old warthog.
“I don’t want the truth to come out, Lila,” Maxine said. “I take my promise very seriously. Here I am at the butt end of my life, and having that known will make little difference to me now.”
Abigail sensed, or hoped she sensed, an effort in Lila and Teddy to turn their attention back to the topic at hand.
“Yes,” said Lila, “I respect that.”
“Well, I frankly don’t care one way or another,” said Teddy. “I’m here for another reason.” From her bag she pulled a small package carefully wrapped in white cloth.
Maxine stared at the package, then at Teddy. “The tefillin,” she said.
“You probably didn’t know it,” said Teddy, “but I’ve had them all these years.”
“I thought they got lost in the shuffle when Oscar died,” said Maxine. She stood up and went over to the kitchen counter and leaned on it with her head down. From the back, she looked to Abigail like a fireplug-shaped city bus driver or plumber.
“He left them at my house,” Teddy said. “My old house, twelve years ago, when his studio was flooded from upstairs. He said for safekeeping, but he never bothered to take them. When I moved, I took them along. But ever since he died, I’ve intended to give them back to you.”
“All this time, you had my tefillin?” Maxine said, turning from the counter and returning to her chair. She didn’t touch the package, but she looked at it again, there on the table in front of her.
“Yes,” said Teddy. “Oscar was so clear about not wanting you to have them. I was torn, but finally I decided that this was the right thing to do.”
“What are tefillin?” Lila asked, but everyone ignored her.
“He didn’t want me to have them because I’m a woman,” said Maxine. “They belonged first to our grandfather Avram Feldman, and then to our father, who brought them to America. Our father left them to me, but Oscar never handed them over.”
“He thought they should be passed down from father to son,” said Teddy. “He was sure his father had made a mistake, leaving them to you. Oscar would have given them to Ethan if he had thought that Ethan could understand what they were.” They all looked at Ethan, who appeared unperturbed by this news. “I brought them today to give them to you,” Teddy went on. “I would have done it sooner—”
“Then why didn’t you?” said Maxine. “It’s a little late now.”
“Well, why the hell is this my responsibility?” Teddy snapped. “It’s a long trip across the river, and Lila was generous enough to drive me, but I didn’t owe you a goddamned thing. I brought them today out of nothing but goodwill. These biographers have stirred up a lot of old silt, and I wanted to make things right. I should never have bothered.”
“What are tefillin?” asked Lila again. “I know they have to do with the Judaic tradition, but I’ve never been clear on what they are exactly.”
“‘And you shall bind them as a sign on your arm, and they shall be as frontlets on your head between your eyes,’” Abigail said.
“They’re the things Jewish men use to cut off the circulation in their arms so they don’t think about sex all the time,” Teddy said. She looked nettled by Maxine’s accusations, both implied and actual.
“Tefillin are holy,” said Abigail. “Jews wear them on their weaker hands and on their heads to remember their liberation from Egypt, to think of God, to stop lustful and sinful thoughts, to control and redirect those thoughts to spiritual matters. The making of tefillin is a complicated and mysterious process; the writing on them has to be perfect or the tefillin are invalidated, even if just one letter is too rounded or pointy. You can’t go to the bathroom or pass gas if you’re wearing tefillin. You have to be absolutely clean. These old family tefillin are sacred. If only Ethan could wear them.”
Everyone looked at Ethan. He studied the air in front of his face, calm and mute as a Nepalese mountaintop guru.
“Why couldn’t Ethan have them?” asked Lila.
“Because they’re mine,” said Maxine. “God fucking damn it.”
“That,” said Abigail. “And also he can never wear them because he can’t perfectly control his bodily functions and he can’t think of God, as far as we know.”
“There’s also my grandson, Buster,” said Teddy. “I mean Peter. He’s three. He happens to be another male descendant of Avram Feldman.”
“They’re mine for now,” said Maxine. “When I die, you can squabble over them.”
Teddy and Abigail looked at each other.
“You can meet Peter, if you want,” said Teddy. “He has a little sister, too.”