Cambridge

  “We have some princes back there,” Vishwa said. “Medieval robber-baron sorts. Maybe they were good at finance.”

  “Economics encompasses far more than finance,” Jagdeesh told Vishwa.

  “Oh, don’t bother,” my father said. “Nobody wants to know anything about economics. I suggest you stop trying.”

  “I have,” said Jagdeesh.

  “You haven’t,” said Vishwa.

  “You don’t have a grandfather who was a notable economist either,” my mother said, addressing my father for the first time since her huff had started. “Do you?” She wasn’t being friendly, but she was speaking to him.

  “Hardly,” said my father.

  “I know nothing of your antecedents,” said Jagdeesh.

  “Standard,” said my father. “The story of every Russian Jew.”

  “But what is this story?” Jagdeesh persisted. “This is not a story I know.”

  My father put his fork down. “One grandfather was a poor farmer in a village hundreds of miles from anywhere, the other was a peddler in a city.”

  “With a cart?” I asked. I hadn’t known about that. “Grandma’s or grandpa’s?”

  “My father’s,” said my father. “In Odessa, like everyone else.”

  “What did he sell on his cart?” I asked.

  My father looked at me. “I don’t know,” he said. “My father never talked about it.”

  “Let’s ask him!” I was excited.

  “Piano, piano,” my father said, dampening my enthusiasm with a downturned hand. He often “conducted” my behavior in this way. Maybe he was trying to participate more fully in the musical aspect of our family. The only direction he ever gave me, though, was piano, piano, with a rare lento, lento thrown in.

  “The peddler is the economist in embryo,” said Jagdeesh.

  “Dessert,” my mother said. “After all, we invited Jagdeesh for dessert, not watercress.” She stood up.

  I cleared the table and got the dessert plates from my mother. Before I’d gone two steps, she hissed: “Dessert forks.” So I took those too. As I was setting them out, my mother returned to the table with the beautiful disc of the cardamom cake centered on the Ginori plate spattered with birds and grasshoppers that Annemarie had given her when we left Italy: super special-occasion. It had to date appeared only for birthdays.

  “Here’s a Swedish specialty Frederika has made us,” my mother said.

  “Oooh,” said Jagdeesh. “I am such a softy for sweets.”

  Vishwa was definitely blushing now. “This is a very handsome cake,” he said to Frederika.

  Frederika pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Ah,” she said.

  “It’s supposed to have whipped cream,” my mother said, glaring at my father, “but we ran out.” She attacked the cake with a kitchen knife and in four swift chops cut it into eighths. “There,” she said, handing the plate off to Frederika.

  “It needs no whipped cream,” Jagdeesh said. “It is superb.” He took another bite. “Perfect,” he declared.

  Vishwa put his chin on his hand and looked at Frederika. “It tastes like home,” he told her.

  “That is odd,” she said. “Because to me it also tastes like home.”

  “Maybe we come from the same place?” Vishwa smiled.

  Frederika had no answer for that.

  My father and Frederika sat at the table cutting slices of cake so thin they fell apart, as if pieces that small didn’t count and therefore they weren’t really eating more cake. My mother was having her nightly struggle with the dishwasher, determined to stuff everything into it and failing. At least once a week she—or the dishwasher, depending on your vantage point—broke something. She felt it was malevolent: “Damned dishwasher,” she’d say. “You might have overfilled it,” Frederika would observe. “No.” My mother was adamant. “It’s a dishwasher. It’s supposed to wash the dishes, not break them.”

  It was past eleven. I should have gone to bed, but nobody had told me to, so I was snuggled into a dining room chair, uncomfortable and happy. What my mother called the “debriefing” was a process I usually missed or, hidden halfway up the stairs, overheard only in snatches.

  “Aren’t they different,” said my mother.

  “Amazingly,” said Frederika.

  “You still like him, though, don’t you?” My mother sounded a bit worried.

  “He’s a little …” My father searched for the adjective that would sum up without insulting. “Vague, maybe? Unfocused?”

  “He certainly doesn’t have Jagdeesh’s self-confidence.” My mother made that quality sound suspicious.

  “He does not have the same basis for being self-confident,” my father said.

  “It’s just another personality sort is my guess,” said Frederika.

  “Artistic,” said my mother, clanging a pot on top of a lot of glasses.

  “That’s right.” Frederika sounded relieved. “Also, maybe because the brother is so looking-good?”

  “Good-looking,” my father said. “It’s a bit much, I agree. Scarf and all that. Rings. It doesn’t matter, though. If he wants to wear rings, let him.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if Vishwa were wearing those rings,” my mother pointed out. “Then it would be, Too many rings!”

  “Look,” my father said. “Jagdeesh is really exceptional.”

  “So is Vishwa,” said my mother.

  “I predict Jagdeesh will get a Nobel. I’m sure of it,” my father said.

  “He’s only thirty-five,” my mother said. “Kind of young for that.”

  “Twenty years from now.” My father considered for a moment. “Or maybe thirty. By 1985, he’ll have one.”

  He was off by a bit—it was in the nineties—but his prediction was right.

  “I really like him,” Frederika said, looking out onto the backyard, addressing the night sky.

  “Thank god, Freddy,” said my mother. “I think he’s the one for you.”

  “I’ll have to learn more about music,” Frederika said.

  “Don’t think about that.” My mother closed the dishwasher with a bang. “All that having-things-in-common stuff is just rot. Anyhow, you like music.”

  “How do you know if someone is the one for you?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you gone to bed?” My mother came around the table to pry me out of the chair. “Go to bed.” She rubbed my head, roughly but in a friendly way. “Bed, bed, bed.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that yet,” she said. “My little chicklet.”

  My mother called me her little chicklet only when she was feeling very affectionate. She refused to explain what it meant. Was it a baby chicken, or was it the tiny sugar-coated squares of gum that rattled in their green-and-white box? “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she would say when I asked. “How am I going to find out,” I’d say, “if you don’t tell me?”

  “You’ll be singing a different song in a few years,” she’d answer. “You won’t think I know everything then.”

  Another correct prediction.

  For the moment, though, the little chicklet was content to go to bed, along with everyone else, all yawning, each privately pleased. Dinner had been a success; my father’s banishment to the doghouse had been brief; Frederika could see a sketch, a hint of her future—shimmering, unclear, but wonderful, perhaps even more wonderful for its lack of detail.

  The dishwasher, left alone at last, began to chew up a salad plate.

  The trouble with Jagdeesh was he wanted to please everyone. Since he had several girlfriends, this wasn’t possible. He started coming to my mother for advice. While Vishwa cooed in the kitchen with Frederika, Jagdeesh sat on the sofa with my mother and described his scrambles to clear evidence of his second girlfriend before the arrival of his first. Luckily, the first one, Delilah, lived in England and couldn’t get over much. But Lucy, the second girlfriend, was snoopy and suspicious, probably beca
use she was married herself and alert for infidelity in others.

  They would arrive together of an afternoon, Vishwa rumply and smelling of balsam or myrrh, Jagdeesh suited up and redolent of lime aftershave or perhaps the gin-and-tonic necessary to sustaining his complicated life.

  “It’s going to come to a bad end,” he said.

  My mother had to agree.

  “It happened quite naturally,” he said. “I didn’t intend to hurt anyone, really.”

  “It’s always like that,” my mother assured him.

  “Delilah is so stubborn about staying in Cambridge. She won’t even consider a half-and-half appointment. That’s where the trouble started, you see. When I came to Harvard.”

  “You felt rebuffed,” my mother suggested.

  “Not that there was an offer for her,” Jagdeesh went on. “But surely something could be arranged, no?”

  “Did you ask Carl?”

  Jagdeesh was uncharacteristically silent. Finally, he said, “Well, it isn’t exactly his department.”

  He meant that literally. Delilah was a philosopher, not an economist.

  “You hesitate to embroil him in private matters?” my mother asked.

  Jagdeesh nodded.

  My mother was what is called a good listener. She knew what people were really thinking and would encourage them by articulating the things they weren’t saying to show she understood. I didn’t like it. Everyone else who knew her adored it.

  “With Lucy, it was a sudden passion—you know the sort of thing.” Jagdeesh sighed. It was clear that sort of thing had happened to him more than once. “But now …” He stopped.

  “Maybe that’s all she’s interested in,” my mother said.

  “I’m afraid not.” Jagdeesh fiddled around with his cuff link. “She has told Ed.”

  My mother widened her eyes. “Hmm,” she said.

  “Hmm, indeed,” said Jagdeesh. “I really don’t know what to do.”

  “When is Delilah’s next visit?”

  “This weekend.” He put his hands into his luxuriant hair and pulled it. “It will be the showdown at the Not O.K. Corral, I fear.”

  “Can you take Delilah out of town?”

  “She arrives in New York, thank god,” Jagdeesh said. “I will go there to meet her. But we can’t stay there forever. I have a class to teach on Tuesday.”

  “I wonder why Lucy told Ed,” my mother said. “Do you think she wants to marry you?”

  “They both want to marry me,” Jagdeesh wailed.

  “And Lucy has no idea about Delilah?”

  “Delilah antedates her, therefore she is aware of her existence. She thinks …” Jagdeesh paused. “I gave her reason to think that Delilah and I parted several years ago. Because we did.” He nodded vigorously. “We did. Except we didn’t.”

  “How about Delilah?” my mother asked. “She doesn’t know about Lucy, does she?”

  “That,” said Jagdeesh, “would be curtains.”

  “Do you want to marry either of them?” my mother asked.

  Jagdeesh grinned.

  “I don’t feel the need for a wife at the moment,” he said.

  “I’ll bet you don’t,” said my mother.

  In the kitchen, Vishwa was studying a score and Frederika was making a Bolognese sauce. I was being the babysitter, balancing my sister in my lap while she tried to grab Vishwa’s pages. She was heavy now and almost too big for me to hold.

  “All set,” said Frederika, putting the lid on the pot and turning the flame down low. She held her arms out for the baby. “Oof! You’re getting big,” she said, and put her in a chair.

  “I am a big girl now,” said my sister. “I’m big.”

  The front door opened and closed. Jagdeesh had left. Soon, but not quite yet, the bang, crunch, bang, clunk of my father’s return.

  As always, my mother’s solution was to invite them for dinner. “That way,” she explained to Frederika, “I can get a feel for Delilah.”

  “What about this person Lucy?” Frederika asked.

  “I don’t think Lucy is a contender, somehow,” my mother said.

  “Have you met her?” Vishwa asked.

  My mother shook her head. “I met Ed a few times. He didn’t seem too formidable.”

  “Whatever it means to be a contender,” Vishwa said, “Lucy is one. She is not the sort of person you say no to.”

  “You don’t like her,” my mother said.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Vishwa.

  “What a diplomat!” My mother laughed. “Well, maybe if Ed is so mushy and Lucy is strong and really determined …” She trailed off. “What about Delilah?” she asked Vishwa.

  “Ah,” said Vishwa. “She is very nice.”

  Frederika frowned.

  “Nice for Jagdeesh,” Vishwa said to Frederika. “She is a good person. You would like her. Everybody would like her, I think.” He thought for a moment. “She is very nervous,” he added.

  “Sounds as if she’s got plenty of reasons to be nervous,” my mother said. “Well, we’ll see. They’ll be here for dinner on Tuesday with you, Vishwa.”

  “Who? Now who?” my father said.

  “You’re home,” my mother told him.

  My father had come to accept Tuesday dinner with Vishwa, with only a few grumbles about “extraneous” people. But his family dinner position remained firm. My mother would have had people to dinner three nights a week if he’d let her, even though the preparations made her anxious. “Oh, I’m doing too much!” she would say, putting her hand to her forehead as if she were going into a Victorian swoon. “Too many people!” my father would crow, delighted. “It’s not natural,” he’d say. “You’re not natural,” my mother would retort. “You’re a misanthrope.”

  He wasn’t. He was much more sociable and pleasant in company than she was. He just wanted to have dinner with his family.

  “I’m home,” he said. “Who is it this time?”

  “Jagdeesh,” my mother said. “So you can’t complain.”

  “You said they,” my father said.

  “And his English girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t know he had one of those.” My father took off his tie and dropped it on top of Vishwa’s score. “The department gossip is that he’s running around with Ed Barkey’s wife.”

  “The department is right,” my mother said. “He’s a ladykiller, that Jagdeesh.”

  “He kills them?” I asked.

  “It’s an expression,” my mother said. “It means that girls like him, a lot.”

  “Does Barkey’s wife know about the English girlfriend?” my father asked my mother.

  “Suspicious,” she said. “So don’t mention it.”

  “You mean Ed knows what his wife is up to?”

  “Apparently,” said my mother.

  “Can you be a mankiller?” I asked. “I mean, could a girl be one?”

  “There are other words for that,” my father said.

  Vishwa slid his score out from under my father’s tie, gently, deferentially, making an effort not to disturb it.

  “Off I go,” he announced. To Frederika, he said: “I’ll be done by ten. Shall I come back then?”

  “Okay, okay,” said Frederika.

  “Such night owls, the pair of you,” my mother said.

  They were, but we all were. None of us ever wanted to go to bed, including the baby, who lay in her cot talking to herself until ten-thirty and never woke up before nine the next day. This was lucky for my mother and Frederika. They could blaze away until one or two in the morning and still get almost enough sleep.

  My father and I suffered. I had to be ready for Ingrid to pick me up by seven-forty-five each day, and my father had to wake me. He started at seven and, like a frenetic cuckoo clock, popped into my bedroom every five minutes until, at about seven-twenty, he just lifted me out of bed and stood me upright. I would pretend to eat a bowl of cereal while putting on my socks. Then the bell, the search for my shoes, my fa
ther sticking his head out the front door to say, “Almost ready!” In the backseat with Roger, I usually fell asleep again, or tried to. My father had several times offered to share what was incorrectly called carpooling with Ingrid, but she always said, “I’m on the way to the office anyhow, and I know you people stay up late.” Ingrid pronounced people as if it were spelled pipple. “And also, there’s that stupid one-way,” she’d add, referring to our street, which ran one way down the hill from the Bigelows’ house to ours. If my father had ever driven me and Roger to school, rather than merely telling Ingrid he’d be happy to do it, he would have had to go entirely around the block first to pick up Roger.

  In her cranky, dismissive way, Ingrid was gracious to my father about being my chauffeur, but she often took advantage of the situation to register a complaint with me about what are now called parenting skills. “No mittens?” she’d ask, with disapproval. “Did you eat any breakfast?” was another frequent question. “I think you wore those clothes yesterday,” she’d say. “Peeyew!” Roger would yelp. “Smelly old clothes!” Then I’d poke him in the soft part of his side and he’d pinch me right above the knee. “No, no, no!” Ingrid would inform us.

  I knew, or at least I guessed, that it would be easier to pay attention at school if I’d had a good night’s sleep and a real breakfast. But I didn’t want to pay attention. I relied on my morning fog to protect me from the stupefaction I couldn’t avoid in the afternoon. By lunchtime I’d woken up, and I had to experience the boredom I skipped in those half-conscious mornings. There wasn’t any payoff in getting enough sleep. Anyhow, nothing at school could compete with the goings-on at home.

  By the time my mother invited Jagdeesh and Delilah for dinner, Tuesdays with Vishwa had matured into Wednesdays also with Vishwa. My father hadn’t complained until the week Vishwa came Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The next week reverted to Tuesday only in a peacekeeping effort. But my mother felt things got “crowded” when dinner followed my music lesson.

  “They really don’t have time to visit,” she said to my father.

  “They see each other every night!” he said.

  That was what kept me up.

  After dinner, while my mother tangled with the dishwasher, Frederika put the baby to bed. The bath, the pajamas, the tucking-in, the Swedish lullaby. My mother made a ceremonial nursery appearance, like the lady of a well-run British manor house, for a goodnight kiss. By then it was nine o’clock. If I kept a low enough profile, reading in the window seat, for instance, I could stay in the living room until about quarter to ten, when one of my parents would register my presence and shoo me to bed.