The Fury of Rachel Monette Read online

  “Really?” She set her glass on the coffee table. A little wave of whiskey broke over the side and cascaded to the table, forming a golden pool.

  “You seem astonished.”

  Angela picked up her glass and drank half of it down. “That a father should attend his son’s funeral? No.” She searched through her alligator purse until she found cigarettes, set one on fire with a gold lighter, and inhaled the fumes. “Where is he?”

  “He wanted to see Dan’s office. You know him, don’t you?”

  “I’ve met him. When I went to Paris to get Dan.” Angela sat on the couch with the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other, balanced like the scales of justice. “Is he staying here? In this house?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, what are the arrangements?” Angela said sharply, crushing her cigarette in a copper ashtray. “Oh dear, forgive me. I’m sorry.” She patted Rachel’s hand. “Don’t listen to me. I’ve always resented him. It’s a failing on my part, I know. Margaret and I were very close.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Of drowning.” Angela finished her drink and went to the liquor cabinet.

  “In Paris?”

  Angela paused at the liquor cabinet and looked at Rachel. “Yes, you could say that, I suppose. Drowned in Paris.” She took the bottle from the cabinet and carried it to the table. She filled her glass and poured a little in Rachel’s.

  “Margaret fell from a bridge into the Seine some time before dawn on New Year’s Day 1948. She was on her way from one party to another. Evidently it was some kind of stunt. Margaret had a wild streak. We were very different.”

  “Was her husband with her when it happened?”

  Angela looked deep into the liquid in her glass. “Yes. Dan was there too.”

  “Dan?”

  “That was Margaret for you. She had a lot of theories about how a child’s first few years should be rich in experience. Partly it was to make up for what she considered her own deprived childhood. If you can call private schools, music lessons, and sailing at the Cape deprived. Somehow Margaret could. That’s why she went to Paris in the first place.”

  “Dan never told me.”

  “He never knew. At least he was never certain. He must have been half asleep at the time. He asked me about it once or twice when he was very young, and I told him he’d been at home in bed. No sense in giving him a thing like that to brood over, I thought. Anyway, he forgot about it after a while.”

  “Still, it seems odd to drag a little boy around on New Year’s Eve.”

  Angela laughed. “Oh, Margaret didn’t do the dragging herself. She hired a babysitter to come with them. She had a highly developed sense of style. That’s how I heard the whole story: from the babysitter. I met her when I went to take Dan home.”

  “It sounds like they had some money.”

  “They weren’t rich. But they weren’t poor, either. Margaret had an allowance. It wasn’t very big, but it was in American dollars. They went a long way in Paris in those days.” Angela shook her head. “Now you have to own an oil well to afford to stay there overnight.”

  The late afternoon sun slanted into the room in low-angled rays that illuminated the dust hanging in the still air. Rachel felt claustrophobic, as if she were trapped in a paperweight of the kind that snows inside when you turn it upside down. She had a sudden clear picture of two widows sitting in a paperweight and talking about the past. She didn’t like it. She thought that her life could start again. Especially if she found Adam.

  “I realize that I have no business at all resenting him,” Angela said, returning to her earlier thought as though it were a train that had disappeared for a while in a tunnel. “I only met him the one time. It’s just that he didn’t seem very upset by her death. It’s always bothered me, but it shouldn’t. That’s one of the hardest things there is, to know how upset a man is about something. They have such crazy values. They’ll fly off the handle about the littlest thing, and then with something big they’ll tuck it in an inside pocket and you’ll never know. I suppose that’s the way he is. Also he must have seen a lot of death in the war. The war changed a lot of men I knew. When they came back they were like icebergs, seven-eighths underwater.” She smoked her cigarette and thought about it.

  “In fact, I’m rather grateful to him. Henry and I couldn’t have children of our own, you know. The years we had Dan, before he went away to college, were the happiest years of our lives. For the first year he even slept in the bed with us. In the beginning it was on account of his nightmares but then it got to be a habit.”

  “I didn’t know Dan had nightmares,” Rachel said.

  “Oh yes. Almost every night when he was little, and then off and on until he went away to college. After that I don’t know. If he never mentioned it to you, I guess he outgrew them. Thank God. I’ve never seen a child so frightened. Screaming inconsolably. The strange thing was it was the same nightmare over and over. He dreamt he had shrunk to a tiny size and he was in his sandbox. His parents stood in the sandbox towering above him and shouting at each other. He thought he was going to be trampled.”

  In the night Rachel had an uneasy dream of her own. She lay on a narrow cot in an endless maternity ward. She felt desperate because she was twelve months pregnant. No one paid any attention to her, huge and bloated on the cot. Finally she began to push. She pushed and pushed as hard as she could, her muscles knotting with the exertion, but it was no use.

  She woke up to find that she had wet the sheets. Webs of a drugged sleep—Angela had made her take a strong tranquilizer—still clung to her mind and a few moments passed before she was aware of what had happened. A pang of self-disgust hit her above the stomach where those pangs do, and she was about to get up to change the bedding when she heard a sharp metallic noise from somewhere in the house.

  The sound caused a spurt of adrenaline to pass through her, washing out the remnants of sleep. She lay on the bed, listening, feeling the dampness against her thighs. She heard another sound, softer, like the shuffling of papers. She got up, put on her robe and went into the dark hall as quietly as she could.

  There was nothing to see except a narrow band of weak yellow light that had managed to squeeze under the door of the study at the end of the hall. Rachel walked carefully to the door, her bare feet soundless on the carpet. Slowly she turned the doorknob and pushed the door half open.

  Xavier Monette stood beside a filing cabinet, still wearing his gray trench coat. In his hands he held a copy of the American edition of Dan’s book. He was staring at the photograph of Dan and Garth. After a few moments Rachel felt him become aware of her presence. He sighed and turned very slowly toward her.

  “It’s so sad,” he said in a whisper. “So sad. I was a fool to imagine I could reconstruct a whole life from silly pictures.” His eyes filled with tears and he averted his head.

  “You should get some sleep,” Rachel said.

  “I am not very tired,” he replied, keeping his head turned away.

  “Are you hungry? There’s some ham in the fridge. I can fix you a sandwich.”

  Monette looked at her in surprise. “Ham?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You have ham here?” Rachel nodded, feeling slightly puzzled.

  He studied her face. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m Jewish. Some Jews eat ham.”

  He reached up to replace the book on the shelf. A corner of the dust jacket caught and made a ripping sound. In the silence that followed Monette spoke softly: “But they are still Jews.”

  “Of course,” Rachel said, surprised at his naiveté. “It’s like any other religion. Some people practice it and some don’t.”

  “I see,” he said.

  When Rachel awoke for the second time it was mid-morning. As she rolled over to get out of bed she remembered something, almost as if the physical act had spilled an image out of her brain. It was Dan on the front lawn, smudges under his
eyes, telling her about a nightmare. The image shocked her. Dan was gone, but still his personality seemed to be capable of disembodied change and growth. She was afraid of losing her fix on him, and of losing herself too, in the nightmares of a dead husband.

  When she got up she found that she was alone in the house. There was no sign of her father, Angela, or Monette. Like strangers who had gathered to attend a wedding they had gone their separate ways after the ceremony. Rachel went to the telephone to call Ed Joyce.

  9

  On the night of March 15 blue and white posters were pasted on walls and telephone poles all over Israel. In the morning people awoke to find them stuck on tar-paper shacks in the little villages of Samaria, to the glass and steel doors of boutiques in Tel Aviv, to the crumbling limestone of Jerusalem. In Hebrew and Arabic they said:

  Major Rally of the Sephardic Movement

  Special Speaker Simon Calvi

  11:00 A.M. April 2. The Hebrew University

  Jerusalem

  Defend the Rights of Oriental Jews!

  That morning Simon Calvi went early to his office near the Knesset. It was a suite of simply furnished cubes in a new government building which contained hundreds of other cubes just like his. He rode in the elevator with a young man in a hurry and a young woman carrying three cups of coffee. One of them was wearing too much perfume.

  Sarah Cohn was already at work, typing a letter and dealing with someone on the telephone, the receiver wedged between her uplifted shoulder and tilted head. She was always first to arrive, usually the last to leave. A trim fit-looking woman crowned with tight auburn curls, she ran the office in the same pleasant efficient way she ran Moses Cohn’s life. He thrived under it, and so did the office.

  As Calvi moved toward his inner cube Sarah held up her hand to catch his attention and then pointed with exaggerated significance at his private door.

  “Who?” he mouthed, approaching her desk.

  She wrote a word on a sheet of paper and turned it so he could see: Grunberg. Calvi nodded. Sarah crumpled the paper and tossed it into a wastebasket.

  On the lemon-colored walls of Calvi’s inner office were hung framed photographs. All were handshaking studies: Calvi with Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Golda; with chairmen of the United Jewish Appeal; with the chief Sephardic rabbi; with five of the last six presidents of the United States. Richard Nixon was represented by a lighter colored rectangular patch on the wall. Sarah had removed him the day the American people had done the same.

  A big uniformed man was standing before the picture of Eisenhower. He turned when Calvi entered the room. He was not as tall as Calvi but as broad, perhaps broader, and at least twenty years younger. He was deeply tanned with thick black eyebrows hanging over sunken dark eyes that had seen it all. On his epaulets he wore the single oak leaf of a major.

  They looked at each other.

  “Do we have an appointment?” Calvi asked in a polite but slightly puzzled tone.

  “We should.”

  “Then we shall, by all means,” said Calvi affably. He gestured toward one of the old wooden armchairs by the desk. The Major sat down. Calvi eased himself into the dilapidated swivel chair on the other side.

  “What should we talk about, Major …?”

  “You know who I am,” the man replied in the kind of bored voice people use on children when explaining something for the twentieth time.

  Calvi didn’t like it. “I suppose you must be Major Grunberg, Army Intelligence. My friend Moses Cohn told me what an early riser you are. Still, I think that even rudimentary security procedures require that I see some identification.”

  The Major gazed thoughtfully at Calvi. There was not the least sign of anger, fear, or even annoyance in his black eyes as he unbuttoned his shirt pocket. He handed Calvi a photostat encased in plastic. Calvi looked at the picture on the photostat. He saw the same calm deep-set eyes, eyes that seemed capable of penetrating any screen his own eyes could raise, eyes that Calvi would not easily forget.

  “You’re very photogenic, Major Grunberg,” said Calvi, handing it back.

  “So are you, Mr. Calvi. I’ve had many opportunities recently to see your face in the newspapers. You must be pleased with all the publicity.”

  “Yes, I am,” Calvi said. He reached in the desk drawer where he kept his cigars and came out with two, offering one to Grunberg. Grunberg waved it away. Calvi lit the other and blew a little cloud into the air between the two men. “But not for me personally. I am pleased for the movement. I myself have no political ambitions. Furthermore, Major Grunberg, I never have had any. I am here by circumstance. I hope you believe that.”

  Grunberg’s head moved slightly forward on his thick neck, perhaps no more than a millimeter or two, but it seemed to Calvi as aggressive as a shaking fist. “I don’t give a damn about your career, your politics, or you,” Grunberg said. “On all that I am neutral. Absolutely neutral.” But Calvi knew he was lying from his tone. Grunberg despised him and he wondered why. “All I’m interested in is the effect you have on our Arab neighbors.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Don’t pretend to be naive. It doesn’t go with your face. The Arabs have been watching you for a long time because they dream of turning the Oriental Jews into a fifth column. They want you to be a big success. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Calvi brought his chair forward and put his elbows on the desk, further narrowing the space between them. “Are you calling me a traitor?” he asked quietly. “Are you making that accusation of a member of the Knesset?”

  A long moment passed before Grunberg said no.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Calvi said. He didn’t feel glad.

  They watched each other through the smoke. From the street rose a short auditory drama—a honking horn, colliding steel, shattering glass, and a policeman’s whistle, after the fact. Calvi heard, but it was only unrelated noise.

  “Anyone who thinks that the Sephardim could be used as a fifth column doesn’t know us at all,” Calvi said. “I’m surprised you would treat such an absurd notion seriously. Have you ever seen us fight the Arabs?”

  For the first time the dark eyes looked annoyed. “I’ve been in every war since 1956.”

  “Then you know that the Sephardim are without doubt the crudest in battle. If the Arabs think they can use us they should talk to their own soldiers.”

  “Then why have you said that Oriental Jews should look to the east?”

  “I’m talking about eastern culture in general, not the Arabs. You should look at the map more often, Major, and see where we are.”

  Grunberg slapped the back of his hand through the smoke. “Eastern culture?” he said. “Forty percent infant mortality? Wasteland instead of orchards? Is that what you want?”

  Calvi stood up angrily. “I don’t have to listen to this bigotry in my own office. Get out.”

  Grunberg rose and approached the desk. He faced Calvi. “Very well. But before I go I’m sure you’ll be interested to hear a little piece of information which came my way. The Egyptians have decided to agree to no further commitments at the peace talks until after April the second. It’s a secret, of course. They plan to attend, to seem enthusiastic, to be friendly. But to do nothing.”

  Calvi felt his mouth go dry.

  “April the second.” Grunberg spoke like a man musing idly to himself. “That’s the day of your next rally, isn’t it?”

  Calvi ignored his question. “How do you know about this—this secret, as you call it?”

  Grunberg laughed in his face. “That’s my job, the way yours is making philosophy out of lines on a map. Let’s just say that someone in Cairo has a secretary who likes to talk.”

  “You don’t get information like that from secretaries.”

  “No,” Grunberg admitted.

  “Who, then?”

  “Who?” Grunberg repeated. “Now we’re entering the area of my own little secrets.” He leaned forward. “Every man is entitl
ed to keep some things to himself, isn’t he, Mr. Calvi? Such as where he goes on cold dark nights?”

  “You’re not making much sense, Grunberg,” Calvi said. In his mind he saw two soldiers. But it could have been the waiter. Or the felafel vendor. Or all of them.

  Grunberg leaned across the desk, looking up from under his luxuriant eyebrows: “Must everything always make sense? Does it make sense that a man who says he’s not political becomes more radical than his mentor? Does it make sense that a man who arrives from Morocco at the age of twenty-eight, and with enough money to soon buy his own farm, brings no family?” Grunberg pushed himself away from the desk and walked toward the door.

  “Life wasn’t easy in Morocco,” Calvi said to his back.

  “Remember that when you write your speech,” Grunberg replied as he went out.

  Calvi sat at his desk for a while and then stood up and began pacing past the American presidents on the wall. He paused in front of the one showing him and Kennedy saying hello or goodbye on an airport runway. Kennedy was smiling warmly. He had taken Calvi for someone else. He looked at the photograph for a long time before an idea came to him.

  The telephone rang. Calvi went to the desk and lifted the receiver. It was Cohn.

  “What the hell is going on?” His voice was tight and angry.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Those posters weren’t supposed to go up until next week. And I thought we had decided on a small printing. They’re all over the God-damned place. Why this big production?”

  “It’s not a big production. I thought it was important to attract a big crowd, that’s all. You always say that yourself.”

  “What about paying for all this? Where is the money going to come from?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be more economical from now on. I promise.”

  “I just don’t understand the way things are being done lately. I don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  Calvi could hear the shreds of other conversations in the wire. The voices sounded distant, and had the tinny high-pitched tone of mice in American animated cartoons. He wondered whether his telephone was tapped.