As the four of them drank together, Ben Yakov laid himself bare without shame. Not only had his marriage with Ilana fallen apart; the beautiful Lucia, tired of waiting, had left him too. She was spending the summer under the tutelage of a master architect in New York, and there were rumors that the architect had fallen in love with her and that she might be leaving the École Spéciale for a design school in Rhode Island. The rumors had arrived through a string of mutual friends. Lucia herself hadn’t written to Ben Yakov since she’d left Paris.
At the end of the evening, after they’d spilled onto the sidewalk outside the Blue Dove, Andras volunteered to take Ben Yakov home. Rosen and Polaner clapped Ben Yakov on the back and expressed the hope that he’d feel better in the morning.
“Oh, I’ll feel grand,” Ben Yakov said, and the next moment he bent over beside a lamppost and sent a stream of vomit into the gutter.
Andras gave him a handkerchief and helped him clean himself; then he put an arm around Ben Yakov’s shoulders and led him home. At the door there was some fumbling for a key, and as Ben Yakov searched he came dangerously close to crying. At last he located the key in his shirt pocket, and Andras helped him upstairs. The place looked exactly as Andras had imagined: as though the person responsible for making it habitable had departed weeks before. Dirty plates choked the sink, the geraniums on the windowsill had died, newspapers and books lay everywhere, and on the unmade bed there were croissant flakes and piles of discarded clothes. Andras made Ben Yakov sit in the chair beside the bed while he stripped the linens and replaced them with fresh ones. He made Ben Yakov take off his soiled shirt. That was as much as he could manage; the rest of the place saddened and daunted him. Worst of all was the little table with its empty teacups and its crust of bread: Andras recognized a tablecloth edged with forget-me-nots, Klara’s wedding gift to the bride.
Ben Yakov crawled into bed and turned off the light, and Andras picked his way to the door. The ancient lock confounded him. He bent to it and fiddled with a rusted latch.
“Lévi,” Ben Yakov said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Andras said.
“Listen,” he said. “Write to your brother.”
Andras paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“I’m not an idiot,” Ben Yakov said. “I know what happened between the two of them. I know what happened on the train.”
“What do you mean?” Andras said.
“Please, don’t-don’t try to shield me, or whatever it is you’re doing. It’s insulting.”
“How do you know what happened on the train?”
“I know. I could tell something was wrong when they got here. And she confessed, one night when I’d said some cruel things to her. But it was already obvious. She tried-to fight it, I mean. She’s a good girl. But she fell in love with him. That’s all. I’m not the sort of man he is, Andras, you ought to know that.” He stopped and said, “Oh, God-,” and then pulled the chamber pot from beneath the bed and threw up into it. He stumbled to the bathroom in the hallway and returned, wiping his face with a towel. “Write him,” he said. “Tell him to come see her. But don’t tell me what happens, all right? I don’t want to know. And I can’t see you for a while. I’m sorry, really. I know it’s not your fault.” He got into bed, turned over to face the wall. “Go home now, Lévi.” His voice was muffled against the pillow. “Good of you to look after me. I’d have done the same for you.”
“I know you would have,” Andras said. He tried the stubborn latch again; this time the door opened. He went home to the rue des Écoles, took out a notebook, and began to draft a letter to his brother.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR. The S.S. Île de France
ELISABET’S ELOPEMENT was not really an elopement in the true sense of the word; by the time it happened, Klara had known of her impending departure for months. Paul Camden came to lunch nearly every Sunday afternoon in his quest to earn her trust and favor. In his slow French with its flattened vowels, he told Klara about his family home in Connecticut, where his mother raised and trained show horses; about his father’s position as the vice president of an energy conglomerate in New York; about his sisters, who were both in school at Radcliffe and who would love Elisabet. But the problem remained of what Camden père and mère would think of their son’s returning home with a moneyless Jewish girl of obscure parentage. The best solution, Paul thought, was for the wedding to take place before they left for New York. It would be simpler to travel as husband and wife; once they reached America, the fait accompli of their marriage would make everything clear to his parents, whatever their objections. Paul believed they would welcome Elisabet once they’d gotten to know her. But Klara begged that they wait to get married until after they’d arrived, until Paul had revealed everything and had a chance to bring them around to the idea. If he married Elisabet without consulting them first, Klara was certain they’d react by cutting off their son. In any case, as a safeguard against that eventuality, Paul had begun saving half of the astonishing sum his father’s accountant sent him each month. He had moved to a smaller apartment and begun to take his meals at a student dining club, rather than having them sent in by restaurants; he had stopped adding to his wardrobe and had bought used books for his classes. He had learned these economies from Andras, who had found him to be profoundly ignorant of the most basic principles of frugality. He had never heard of buying day-old bread, for example, and had never polished his own shoes nor washed his own shirts; he was amazed that a man might have his hat reblocked rather than buy a new one.
“But everyone will see it’s your old hat,” he protested, and then repeated the last words in English: “Old hat. In the States, it’s a pejorative. It’s what you call something predictable or trite or démodé.”
“All you have to do is change the hatband,” Andras said. “No one will know it’s your ohld het. If you think anyone looks that closely at what you’re wearing, you’re mistaken.”
Paul laughed. “I suppose you’re right, old man,” he said, and let Andras show him where a hat could be taken to be reblocked.
Often, on those Sundays when Paul came to lunch, Andras would see Klara retreat into watchful silence. He knew she was observing her daughter’s intended, sizing him up, taking note of how he treated Elisabet, how he responded to Andras’s queries about his work, how he spoke to Mrs. Apfel as she served the káposzta. But she was also watching Elisabet. There seemed to be a kind of urgency in her watching, as if she had to record every nuance of Elisabet’s existence. She seemed acutely aware that these were the last days her daughter would live under her roof. There was nothing Klara could do to stop it; Elisabet had been on her way out for years, slowly but unmistakably, and now she would be gone for good, across the ocean, into a fledgling marriage with a non-Jewish man whose parents might not accept her. To make matters worse, there at the same table sat Ilana di Sabato, newly divorced: evidence of how a marriage between two very young people might go wrong. Ilana sat in lonely despair, hardly touching her food; she’d cut her gorgeous dark braid at the nape of her neck when she’d married Ben Yakov, and her hair clung forlornly to her head like the kind of close-fitting cap that had been fashionable a decade earlier. Old hat, Andras thought. It was painful to look at her. He had not yet received a reply to his letter, and didn’t want to speak to her about Tibor until he did.