Not exceptional, but steady. Solid. The almond extract is a nice touch, and brings out the muskiness of the cherries, so they’re more than just sweet.
Varya grinned at the postcard and read it twice more. Unexceptional but steady and solid was not the worst thing one could be, she thought, and she went to the pantry to retrieve her own jar, which she had waited for his reply to open.
“Where, then?” says Gertie now, looking at her own lap. “You can’t sit around all day, like me. Eating pickles.”
Immediately, Varya hears her siblings. As if you really have to worry about that, Klara would say. Then Daniel: Yeah—Varya, sitting around, eating pickles? I don’t think she’s capable of such a thing. Lately, Varya sees them everywhere. A teenage boy, running past her apartment after dusk, will remind her of Simon, racing around 72 Clinton on cool summer nights. She sees Klara’s smile—sparkling, sharp—on the face of a woman at a bar. She imagines herself going to Daniel for advice. He was always right behind her: in age, in his ambitions, in his support of the family. She knew she could count on him to care for Gertie or to try to bring Simon home.
For so long, she stifled these memories. But now, when she calls them up in these sensory ways, so that they feel more like people than ghosts, something unexpected happens. Some of the lights inside her—the neighborhood that went dark years ago—turn on.
“I think I might like to teach,” she says. In graduate school, she taught undergrads in exchange for tuition remission. She hadn’t thought she could do such a thing—before her first class, she vomited in a sink in the women’s restroom, unable to reach the toilet—but she soon found it invigorating: all those upturned faces, waiting to see what she had up her sleeve. Of course, some of the faces were not upturned but sleeping, and secretly, those were the ones she liked best. She was determined to wake them up.
• • •
On the last night of Ruby’s visit, Varya comes for the magic show. While Ruby is setting up in the dining hall, Varya and Gertie eat dinner in Gertie’s room. Varya is thinking of the Golds, what her siblings and Saul would think to see Ruby onstage, and then, in the strange half-light of dusk, she begins to share something she thought she never would: she tells Gertie about the woman on Hester Street. She describes the blanketing heat of that July day, her anxiety while climbing the stairs, the fact that each sibling entered the room alone. She shares the conversation they had on the last night of Saul’s shiva, which she realized in hindsight was the last time the four of them were ever together.
As Varya talks, Gertie doesn’t look up. She stares at her yogurt, bringing each spoonful to her mouth with such bland focus that Varya wonders if this is a bad day, if her mother is absent. When Varya has finished, Gertie wipes her spoon with a napkin and sets it down on her dinner tray. Carefully, she closes the yogurt container with its aluminum foil lid.
“How could you believe that junk?” she asks, quietly.
Varya opens her mouth. Gertie puts the yogurt container beside the spoon and folds her hands in her lap, looking at Varya with owlish indignation.
“We were kids,” says Varya. “She frightened us. And anyway, my point is that it isn’t—”
“Junk!” says Gertie, decisive now, leaning back in her chair. “So you went to see a Gypsy. No one’s stupid enough to believe them.”
“You believe in that kind of junk. You spit when a funeral goes by. After Dad died, you wanted to do that thing with the chicken, swinging a live one around in the air while reciting—”
“That’s a religious ritual.”
“And the funeral spitting?”
“What about it?”
“What’s your excuse?”
“Ignorance. What’s yours? You don’t have one,” she says when Varya pauses. “After everything I gave you: education, opportunity—modernity! How could you turn out like me?”
Gertie was nine when German forces took Hungary. Her mother’s parents and three siblings in Hajdú were sent to Auschwitz. If the Shoah had solidified Saul’s faith, it had only diminished hers. By the time she was six, even her own parents were dead. God must have seemed less likely than chance, goodness less likely than evil—so Gertie knocked on wood and crossed fingers, tossed coins into fountains and rice over shoulders. When she prayed, she bargained.
What she gave her children, Varya sees: the freedom of uncertainty. The freedom of an unsure fate. Saul would have agreed. As the only child of immigrants, her father had few options. To look forward or back must have felt ungrateful, like testing fate—the free present a vision that might vanish if he took his eyes away from it. But Varya and her siblings had choices, and the luxury of self-examination. They wanted to measure time, to plot and control it. In their pursuit of the future, though, they only drew closer to the fortune teller’s prophecies.
“I’m sorry,” says Varya. Her eyes swell.
“Don’t apologize,” Gertie says, reaching out to swat Varya’s arm. “Be different.” But when she’s finished swatting, she grasps Varya’s forearm and holds on, as Bruna Costello did in 1969. This time, Varya doesn’t pull away. They sit in silence until Gertie fidgets.
“So what’d she tell you?” she asks. “When are you gonna die?”
“Eighty-eight.” It now seems very far away, an almost embarrassing luxury.
“Then what are you so worried about?”
Varya bites her cheek to keep from smiling. “I thought you said you don’t believe in it.”
“I don’t,” Gertie sniffs. “But if I did, I wouldn’t be complaining. If I did, I’d think eighty-eight was just fine.”
• • •
At seven thirty, they walk into the dining hall for the magic show. A raised platform acts as the stage; two lamps, set on either side, are spotlights. One of the nurses has hung red sheets over a clothing rack for curtains. Gertie and her friends have dressed up for the occasion, and the dining hall is teeming. An electric anticipation binds everyone in the room, invisible as dark matter. It pulls them together and toward the stage, toward Ruby.
Then the curtain parts, and she appears.
In Ruby’s hands, the stage transforms. The curtain becomes a real curtain, and the lamps become spotlights. Klara excelled at rapid-fire patter, but Ruby has an unexpected gift for physical comedy and a way of including everyone in the room. There is something else, too, that sets her apart from her mother. She has an easy grin, and her voice never wavers. When she drops a ball she was meant to catch, she spends a moment in self-deprecating pantomime before recovering her even keel. It’s confidence, Varya sees. Ruby looks more comfortable—in her skills, in herself—than her mother ever did.
Oh, Klara, Varya thinks. If you could see your child.
All night, Gertie looks at Ruby like a movie she never wants to stop watching. It’s nearly eleven by the time the last residents filter out of the dining hall. Though Gertie agreed to ride in the detested wheelchair, her chest is puffed like a turkey’s. Varya knows that stopping aging is as improbable as the idea that a compulsion can keep something bad from happening. But she still wants to shout: Don’t go.
• • •
Ruby wheels Gertie back to her room. Soon, she’ll turn her attention to other miracles: how to suture a wound, to tap a spine, to deliver a child. Tonight, though, there was a bond that linked her to everyone in the room, a network of emotion, and Ruby didn’t let go. When she stood onstage and looked out and felt that feeling, it made her think of the preschool children she sometimes sees walking past her apartment in Los Angeles. To make sure they don’t stray, the children walk in a line with the rope in their hands. Tonight was like that, Ruby thinks. One by one, they came to the rope. One by one, they held on.
“Why would you want to be a doctor when you could keep doing this?” her father still asks. “You bring people so much joy.”
But Ruby knows that magic is only one to
ol among many for keeping one another alive. When she was a child, Raj told her the four words Klara always said before a show. Ruby has recited the very same ones ever since. Tonight she stood behind the curtain with her hands clasped. On the other side, she could hear the audience whispering and fidgeting and rustling their cheap printed programs in anticipation.
“I love you all,” she whispered. “I love you all, I love you all, I love you all.”
Then she stepped through the curtain to join them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am profoundly grateful for the many people who helped bring The Immortalists to life.
This book would not have been possible without the belief, labor, and advocacy of two incredible women. To my rock star and soul sister of an agent, Margaret Riley King: thank you for your faith, your loyalty, and your biweekly therapy sessions. Every time, it starts with you. To my editor, Sally Kim: your brilliance, passion, and integrity shine so brightly. Working with you has been one of the great honors, and pleasures, of my life.
I couldn’t have dreamed of more superb teams at WME and Putnam. It’s a privilege to work with Tracy Fisher, Erin Conroy, Erika Niven, Haley Heidemann, and Chelsea Drake at the former, and with Ivan Held, Danielle Dieterich, Christine Ball, Alexis Welby, Ashley McClay, Emily Ollis, and Katie McKee at Putnam, as well as the full Penguin team. My thanks, too, to Gail Berman, Dani Gorin, Joe Earley, and Rory Koslow at Jackal for their work in the TV arena.
I am indebted to the many writers, filmmakers, scientists, and other professionals whose work was pivotal to my research process. Essential sources include A subtle craft in several worlds: Performance and participation in Romani fortune-telling (Ruth Elaine Andersen); David Weissman’s documentary I Was Here; Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (Jim Steinmeyer); and the life of Tiny Kline, a groundbreaking circus performer who originated the Jaws of Life and inspired the character of Klara Sr. (Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline, Janet M. David). Lt. Scott Gregory served as a crucial advisor for Daniel’s military career; Erika Fleury, Deborah Robbins, and Bob Ingersoll kindly shared their experiences with primates. The Drake was inspired by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, though my version is, besides building features and general mission, entirely fictionalized. Finally, I couldn’t have written Varya’s section were it not for the many scientists whose longevity research informed her own, and who were so generous as to speak with me, including Drs. Ricki Colman, Stefano Piraino, and Daniel Martinez, as well as staff from the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. Varya’s research emerged from this background but is, like the Drake, fictionalized and not meant as commentary on specific existing work.
Eternal love for, and thanks to, the family members and dear friends who served as early readers and offered assistance. My parents are my fiercest and most faithful supporters; I am so grateful, and so lucky, to be your child. My beloved grandmother and guiding light, Lee Krug, was the first person to read this novel. Among my brilliant friends, I am thankful for Alexandra Goldstein’s editing genius and lifelong devotion; Rebecca Dunham’s intellectual companionship; Brittany Cavallaro’s passionate solidarity; and Piyali Bhattacharya’s wise, beating heart, as well as the sisterhood of Alexandra Demet and the brotherhood of Andrew Kay. Marge Warren and Bob Benjamin gave me the gift of insight into immigrant and mid-twentieth-century life in New York City. Judy Mitchell continues to be a mentor and dear friend.
To Jordan and Gabriel, my siblings: this book is for you, too.
And, my God, what is there to say for Nathan? It isn’t easy to be the partner of a writer, but I would think you do it effortlessly if I didn’t know how much mind-bending conversation, editorial work, and emotional support it requires. You have the most abiding heart and the quickest brain and the kind of panoramic perspective that steadies even fluttery birds like me. Forever, thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Nathan Jandl
Chloe Benjamin is the author of the novel The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A San Francisco native, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and of the University of Wisconsin, where she received her MFA in fiction. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists
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