The Cookbook Collector

  “No,” she groaned on the other side of the door. “I’m too tired. I’m too sleepy. I’m drunk.”

  “It’s an emergency,” he said.

  “Then why didn’t you call me?”

  “Sorel, please.”

  She opened the door and stepped outside, shivering. She was wearing woolly socks, and a long Phish T-shirt with a sweater over it.

  “I missed you.”

  “Is that an emergency?”

  “I’m going away.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know. I’m leaving ISIS.”

  “And Molly?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment she didn’t speak. Then she asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. Everybody’s sure.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded very slightly and she kept her eyes fixed on him, so that even without her white robes and wings and paint, she looked like the angel in the square. “You’re at sea,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he told her. “I’m not at sea at all. Not when I’m with you.”

  “I like living alone,” she said. “And I like traveling. I’m planning an opera! And I’m spending the weekend working on a film in Somerville. A bunch of us from MIT are putting it together. I’m a twelve-foot bride.”

  “I’d support you in all that,” he said, and he was totally serious.

  “I have stilts,” she said, matching his earnest tone. “I don’t need support.”

  He laughed and folded his arms around her.

  “It’s a silent movie,” she told him. “I wrote the script. It’s sort of a feminist Perils of Pauline, so when she’s angry, she grows really, really tall. We’re filming in Union Square.”

  “Do you have a permit?”

  “No! Of course not. Do you think we have that kind of money?”

  “So when the cops come you … what?”

  “Run away.”

  “On stilts?”

  “I’m quite fast,” she said.

  “Wait, let me get this straight …,” he began.

  She pulled him toward her and kissed him freely, joyously. “What was the question?”

  “I don’t have a question.” He sighed. “This is so much better than the stairwell.”

  “You liked stairwells.”

  “I did, but—”

  She interrupted him. “Come in.”

  30

  While the family slept, Emily tiptoed out of the guest room she shared with Jess, down the hall past her father and Heidi’s bedroom door, past Maya’s, past Lily’s. Softly, she glided down the stairs to the glassed-in sunroom where she wrapped herself in the pink and purple afghan on the couch. There she sat and gazed at her sisters’ plastic groceries, their books piled on the floor: Princess Stories, My Body, The Book of Me. She looked at Lily’s miniature dinette, her pink and white play kitchen. She had heard every word of her father’s conversation with Jess.

  Jonathan had concealed his plans for the future, and Gillian had concealed her past. She had loved them both, and this news made her feel entirely alone.

  Or had she loved them? She had loved aspects of Jonathan, and tested him; adored her idea of Gillian, and studied her. She doubted now that she had known either. In the end, she was not a good judge of character—least of all, her own. How strange that people had looked up to her. She was supposed to be the sage one, the stable one. Emily had always told Jess what to do.

  She turned and turned her sparkling diamond ring. She could not quite bring herself to take it off. What proof would she have, then, what physical evidence, that what she and Jonathan had was real?

  She thought of her mother’s ring clinking against the bowl as she kneaded dough. Emily had been the conservator of her mother’s memory, keeping the birthday letters on her computer. Reading and rereading them. In the end what did those letters say? My hope for you and Jessie is that you go on to live your lives happy, independent, unafraid. Well, what did that mean? Isn’t that what everybody wanted? Guilt and regret are a waste of time. Think about the future. Tears started in Emily’s eyes. Think about the future? Her mother was telling her to play a game with only half the pieces.

  Emily had assumed a transparency in people, expected it of everyone, even herself. But why? What basis did she have for such assumptions? She saw in her own case that they were ungrounded. She herself, supposedly so careful and straightforward, so reasonable, had betrayed Veritech’s secrets to Jonathan, made a gift of them, a token of love mixed with hope mixed with doubt. In the end her motives were hardly rational, hardly clear. That realization frightened her, but she was reflective, rigorous in her thinking, and she tried to think her way out of this morass. Bewildered, adrift in her father’s house, she tried to find a way forward. She was her father’s daughter, and she thought like an engineer.

  First thing in the morning, she resigned from Veritech. She sent an e-mail to Milton, Alex, and Bruno: Today, after much thought, I have decided to resign as CEO. My time with you has been challenging, rewarding, and above all, interesting. As you know, I had been planning to step down in January. However, after the events of—she paused here, and then typed—the past month, I cannot continue to work at Veritech. I will miss your company, and I will miss the company we have built together, but I realize that now is the time to leave, to think about the future, and spend time with my family….

  No excuses, and no confessions either. Emily’s sense of responsibility was strong, but her need for privacy was stronger. She sent the message from her laptop, and then proceeded to the next order of business—helping Heidi prepare breakfast for the children. The nanny arrived. Heidi took the train to Providence to teach, and Emily took a walk with Jess and Richard.

  It seemed to Emily that the leaves had changed overnight. Suddenly, trees of ordinary green were scarlet, gold, spectacular. When she’d arrived in Canaan, she must have been too distraught to notice.

  “I heard everything you said,” she told Richard, as they walked down Pleasant Street.

  Jess took her hand.

  “Now I want to know the whole story,” Emily told her father.

  Richard didn’t answer.

  “You have to tell us, Dad,” said Jess.

  Richard kept moving, eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “I want you to start at the beginning,” said Emily.

  “Your mother and I met at Cambridge,” Richard said. “I was on a Fulbright, and she was a choral scholar.”

  “We knew that before,” said Emily. “I want you to begin at the beginning, with her mother and her father.”

  But Gillian’s parents were not the beginning for Richard. Those dark-costumed people were not the story of his wife. Gillian began with him at Cambridge, where he bicycled with her through golden autumn fields and listened to her sing in the Girton College Chapel Choir. She had applied to college without her parents’ knowledge, and when she got her choral scholarship she broke from childhood, choosing music as her religion.

  Emily and Jess pressed him, but they didn’t understand. Their mother’s life began when she came up to Cambridge on her own. “It’s like a fairyland here,” she used to say, when they walked through the ancient cloisters. She was a quiet rebel, buying a Liberty-dress pattern and sewing her own gown for the Emmanuel College ball, dancing until dawn, and then slipping barefoot onto the velvet lawns reserved for Fellows. As a soprano she sang for services and feasts. As an adventurer, she tried champagne for the first time and pork loin and frog’s legs. In summers she and Richard punted on the river Cam. On vacations she stayed in his apartment, and when he got the job at MIT, she married him. Her Hasidic family had nothing to do with it. They would not even meet Richard, much less look at their runaway daughter. She came to America, and took Richard’s family for her own.

  Emily shook her head. “But don’t you see, Dad? That’s not good enough. Those are our relatives too. You can??
?t pretend they don’t exist.”

  “How productive is this line of inquiry right now?” Richard asked her. “How will these questions help with what you’re going through?”

  “Come with us to the Zylberfenigs’ house,” said Emily.

  Richard’s jaw tightened. “Absolutely not.”

  Undeterred, Emily took Jess that very afternoon to Alcott Street. Laptop in hand, she rang the bell. Then she knocked on the door. Seconds later, Chaya Zylberfenig welcomed the sisters with open arms.

  “I knew I was right!” Chaya cried. “Come in, come in! The doorbell’s broken. Come sit!” She ushered Emily and Jess into her living room filled with bookcases of tall Hebrew books. She seated the young women on her slip-covered couch, under her picture of the Rebbe. Brushing tears from her eyes, Chaya said, “Welcome, nieces.”

  “Is it really possible you’re our aunt?” Jess asked. “It’s so strange.”

  “Ah.” Chaya smiled. “My husband always quotes the Rebbe. There are no coincidences.”

  “You’re so young,” Emily said shyly.

  Once again Chaya explained. “There were nine of us. Your mother, Gittel, oleha shalom, was the oldest. I was the ninth, and so I was much younger. She left home when Freyda and I were babies.”

  Emily could not hide her disappointment. “So you didn’t know her.”

  Chaya shook her head, “We were told unfortunately that she had died—even before her real death.”

  “Don’t you think that was wrong?” Jess couldn’t help interjecting.

  Emily touched her arm in warning.

  “It was many years ago,” Chaya said diplomatically. “What she did and what our parents did is all said and done. But I can tell you all about the family. Your grandfather Leib, zichron l’bracha, was a jeweler.”

  “A jeweler!”

  Jess watched, amazed, as Emily whipped out her laptop and began typing. “How do you spell ‘Leib’?”

  Two hours later, Emily was still bent over her keyboard, typing. She’d stopped only to plug her power cord into the wall behind the couch as she continued to pepper Chaya with questions. “How did he die?” And, “Where are those children now?” With a kind of manic energy, she added to her family record, while Chaya talked and Jess sat back and watched, overwhelmed by this sudden cousinage in London. Jess knew that there were stages of grief. Was this one of them? The genealogical stage? The note-taking, fact-finding, photo-album stage?

  “This is the house where we grew up.” Chaya opened her crimson, leather-bound album to a picture of a tall brick town house. “This is my older sister Beyla, who raised us and who lives there now. She knew your mother well. These are my middle brothers, Menachem and Reuven … or maybe not.” She squinted at the picture. “Maybe that’s not Reuven. That could be Cousin Mendy.”

  Emily studied the pictures. “We need to scan these in. If we digitize everything, then we can share the files.” Turning to Jess, she asked, “Did you see the picture of the house?”

  “Uh-huh,” Jess said weakly from the corner of the couch.

  “You’ll stay for lunch?” Chaya asked them. They adjourned to the kitchen, and the children gathered, blowing through in a little storm of elbows, arms, and knees. Chaya served cold cuts, which Jess didn’t eat. The boys tried to touch their noses with their tongues. These are my cousins, Jess thought. These are Rabbi Helfgott’s nephews, and his nieces, just like me. Emily kept typing, her face aglow.

  “You in particular look like a Gould,” Chaya told Emily. “You have the Gould eyes.”

  “Hazel?” Emily asked.

  “Determined,” said Chaya. “This is very much a Gould trait.”

  “Very much so!” Shimon agreed as he came in from the garage.

  “Shimon, meet our nieces, Emily and Jessamine,” Chaya said.

  “Baruch Hashem. Here you are!” said Shimon and he did not look in the least surprised.

  “Clear your places!” Chaya called after her boys as they ran off. They doubled back again and threw their paper plates into the trash.

  “Life is strange,” Jess murmured, looking at her uncle in his black frock coat.

  “Life is very, very beautiful.” Shimon washed his hands and said a blessing, after which he sat down and fixed himself a sandwich. His blue eyes sparkled as if with news he couldn’t tell. Two new nieces, two beautiful souls in his own kitchen in Canaan, and one of them—He didn’t think of Emily as rich. He never used that word, even to himself, but she had means. She had capacity to illuminate everything around her. Like Barbara, Emily had much to give.

  “Will you join me for my class?” he asked Jess and Emily. “My brother-in-law Rabbi Helfgott tells me that you, Jessamine, are one of his best students. Very philosophical.”

  “Oh, I’m not,” Jess demurred. She didn’t feel philosophical at all.

  All day and night, Emily continued in her hectic phase. Thoughts of her mother’s true identity had unleashed in her a million schemes and plans. She was sending e-mails to Aunt Freyda in Berkeley and Aunt Beyla in London. She was already telling Jess that evening that they should fly to London. The sisters sat on their twin beds in the guest room and Emily said, “We’ll go to Golders Green and see the house. We’ll see the house where she grew up and meet the family.”

  “We could,” Jess said.

  “There might be some of Gittel’s papers there, or school reports. Or maybe we can find a diary.”

  Gently, Jess suggested, “From what Dad and Chaya say, I’m not sure you’re going to find any diaries or mementos.”

  “You never know,” said Emily.

  She had a new idea to pursue, and she held fast to it. She would not let go. Richard sat with Emily in the living room as she searched for fares to London.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Richard said.

  “You knew your grandparents, and you knew your mother,” Emily said calmly. “If you hadn’t known them and suddenly you got a chance—wouldn’t you go?” She seemed strangely happy, and also feverish, downloading Family Tree software and finding it wanting. “The interfaces are terrible,” she told her father.

  In her first weeks of bereavement, Emily had been quiet and small, almost childlike, retreating into herself. She had tried to contain what she felt, to keep calm, and whenever possible, comfort her own comforters. Now she asserted herself, brooking no dissent, dismissing her father’s concerns about “those people” as he called them.

  “Look, they’re controlling,” Richard told her. “They’re manipulative.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow and tilted her head ever so slightly, as if to say, You weren’t controlling? You didn’t manipulate my sister and me?

  “You have a lot of money,” Richard reminded Emily.

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” Emily asked, irritated.

  “You’re rich,” he said. “They’re poor. They have to provide for dozens of children, and you need to keep your eyes open.”

  “How dare you tell me to keep my eyes open,” Emily said. “When all these years you kept me in the dark.”

  Jess had never heard her sister and her father fight before. Jess and Richard had been fire and water, and of course he always won. Emily and Richard were like an ice storm, sparkling, deadly.

  “You’re in a vulnerable position,” Richard said.

  “A position you created.”

  Suddenly something broke in Richard. Emily froze. Jess looked up, horrified to see her father crying. She had never seen her father cry before, and now his eyes were red and he was sobbing. He couldn’t stop himself. “I’m afraid for you, Emily!”

  Heidi rushed into the room, and she seemed almost as surprised as Emily and Jess. She wrapped her arms around Richard, and he buried his head in her sweater and cried and cried.

  “Dad, I’m sorry you’re upset …,” Emily began. “I’m sorry!” But now that he was crying, Richard could not stop.

  Jess couldn’t watch. She slipped out the back door and tried
to catch her breath. Hugging herself, she sat on Lily’s big-girl swing. It was getting cold, but she didn’t want to return for her jacket. She stayed out, swinging gently, trying to calm herself, listening to the squeaking chains.

  At last she took out her new cell phone and called George.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Jess. How are you?”

  “Where are you?” she asked at the same time.

  “In my kitchen,” he told her. “Missing you. Where are you?”

  “On the swing set in the yard.”

  “Missing me?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her voice was muffled, weary, terribly sad. “What’s wrong now?” George asked. “What happened?”

  “I have to go to London.”

  “No! No, you don’t. If your sister wants to go and see all those relatives, then you go ahead and let her. She’s a grown woman.”

  “I have to go,” Jess said. “She’s in a bad way. I can’t let her go alone.”

  “Why not? Why can’t you? You’ve been with her almost a month. Come home.”

  “I can’t,” said Jess. “I can’t.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “I’m helping her. She needs me.”

  “I know,” George said. “But what about you?”

  Jess demanded, “Can’t you look at this from Emily’s point of view?”

  Then George was honest, much too honest. He knew even as he said the words that they would anger Jess, but he missed her so much that he could not help himself. “I’m not interested in her point of view.”

  Silence.

  “Jess? Are you there?”

  “You’re very good at that,” Jess said.

  “Good at what?”

  “Triaging. You’re first, and I’m second, and everybody else is a distant third.”

  “You’re overwrought,” George said. “This situation is poisonous for you.”

  “Maybe it is,” said Jess. “But I’m the only one she has.”

  “What about your father?”

  “You don’t understand. He’s half the problem.” Jess glanced back at the house. “I’m the one who has to go.”