heart so that she whispered, “We can’t go.”
I had never seen my father so angry. “But this is too much! Now we have reached the limit!” Leonora and I gazed in astonishment, but he went on, “Who is this man, what does he think?” Then—“Tomorrow he leaves! No today! Now! Hop!” He made straight for Yakuv’s door, and had already seized the handle when Leonora grasped his arm. They tussled—yes, my parents physically tussled with each other, a sight I never thought to see. She pleaded, he insisted, she used little endearments (in German) until he turned from the door. His thinning grey hair was ruffled, another unprecedented sight in my serene and serenely elegant father. In response to Leonora’s imploring looks, I joined in her pleas to postpone this expulsion, at least until they returned from their trip. “Our second honeymoon,” Leonora pleaded, until at last, still red and ruffled, he agreed.
But later that night he came to my room. He told me that by the time they returned from their cruise, Yakuv would have to be out, pronto, bag and baggage, and it was up to me to see that this was done. His mouth thin and determined—“Bag and baggage,” he repeated, and then, in another splutter of anger: “Ridiculous. Unheard of.”
They were to be away for six weeks and during that time I had to get Yakuv to pack up and leave. But he gave me no opportunity to talk to him. He stayed in his room, and all day the apartment resounded with music of storm and stress. Only sometimes he rushed out to walk in the Park; once I followed him, but there too it was impossible to talk to him. Hunched in an old black coat that was too long for him, he appeared sunk in his thoughts. His hands were in his pockets and he only took them out to gesticulate in furious argument with whatever was going on under his broad-brimmed hat.
I had to turn to Kitty for help. The change in Kitty was as marked as it was in Leonora, but in the opposite direction. It was Kitty who looked calm, and though no longer young, she now appeared younger than before. Instead of her long skirts and dangling loops of jewelry, she wore a flowered artist’s smock that made her look as wholesome as a kindergarten teacher. Her eyes had lost their inward brooding look and were clear and intent on the proof-sheets she was holding up to the light. She made me admire them with her—they were all of pretty little girls posed on her tree-stumps—and she only put them down when I told her of the task my father had imposed on me.
She laughed in surprise: “I thought Rudy was so proud of keeping his own little Paderewski.”
“He thinks Leonora is getting too nervous.”
Now she really laughed out loud: Leonora nervous! It was the word—together with neurasthenic, or later, neurotic—that had always been applied to Kitty herself.
“And Yakuv too,” I ventured.
She put down her proof-sheets: “Oh yes. He’s in one of his moods. The other night I was busy in my dark room and that made him so mad he stamped and roared and tore down the pictures I’d pinned up. He said he couldn’t stand the way I live. Well, nothing new—I’ve heard it a thousand times before . . . But Leonora? Are you telling me he misses Leonora?”
It was then that she offered to tell Yakuv to get out of our apartment. I was glad to be relieved of this task and to have time to go about my own business. After all, I still had a divorce to take care of, as well as deciding whether to go back to college or to find a job. And what about all those existential questions that had so troubled me? I needed to become involved again with my own concerns rather than those of my parents and my aunt. I decided that, as soon as Rudy and Leonora returned, I would look for a place of my own. Picking up some old connections and making new ones, I was out and about a lot and continued to see nothing of Yakuv. I’m afraid I neglected most of what Leonora had left me to do for him, but he didn’t complain and perhaps didn’t notice. Whenever I was home I heard him playing a lot of loud music. I assumed he was preparing for his next tour and hoped that he would have left on it before my parents returned. He showed no intention of moving out but presumably he would as soon as Kitty had talked to him. Meanwhile he continued to thump away behind his closed door; he seemed to be there all the time now, even at night.
Then late one evening Kitty herself showed up. It was pouring with rain, but it turned out she had walked all the way from downtown. When I tried to make her take off her wet clothes, she waved me away—her attention was only on the sounds from Yakuv’s room. “So he’s still here,” she said, partly in anger, partly in relief.
It may have been because she was so drenched, with her hair wild and dangling as it used to be (though dyed a more violent shade of red), that she had reverted to the Kitty I used to know. And her mood too was charged in the old way. She told me how she had tried to call Yakuv all day and every day, though she knew he hardly used the telephone and certainly never answered it. The last time she had seen him was when she had told him of Rudy’s ultimatum. Without a word and waving his hands in the air, he had rushed out of her loft and had not returned. She had begun to fear that he had packed up and left our apartment in offended pride, abandoning not only my parents but Kitty too. Tormented by this thought—that he had taken himself out of our lives for ever—she had come running through the dark and the rain: only to hear his piano as usual in the room he had been told to vacate.
Suddenly she rushed in there. I was surprised and apprehensive: even when they had still been living together in the brownstone, Kitty had rarely dared to enter his room while he was playing. If she did, there would be a fearful explosion, with objects flying down the stairs until Kitty herself came running down them, declaring, “He’s a madman, just a crazy, crazy person;” and Yakuv would appear at the top of the stairs, shouting the same thing about her. But now there was no explosion. The playing stopped abruptly. All I heard was her voice and nothing from him at all. I went to bed, expecting them to do the same. And why not? Two people who had been living together, on and off, for over twenty years.
Later that night they woke me up. They sat on either side of my bed; they appeared exhausted, not as after a fight but after long futile talk. It was almost dawn and it may have been the frail light that made them look drained.
“He claims he can’t live without her . . . He used to laugh at her!” She turned on him: “Now what’s happened? Because it’s you she cooks for now, all her potato dishes, is that what you can’t do without?”
He shook his head, helplessly. He didn’t have his glasses on and looked as I remembered seeing him in bed with Kitty: mild, melancholy, his grey eyes dim as the dawn light.
“My aunts always told me, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’ I thought they only meant people like my fat uncles. I didn’t know artists were included. If that’s what you are!” she cried. “You thump your piano loud enough: what’s all that about? Passion for food or for the housewife who cooks it?”
He remained silent—he who was always so flip, so quick with his sarcastic replies. He stretched across me to touch her: “Kitty,” he said, his voice as sad as his eyes.
“Let me be!” she cried, but obviously this was the last thing she wanted.
My parents returned two weeks earlier than expected. Their second honeymoon had not been a success. They had sailed through the classical world, and for him it had been an enchanted return to civilization: his civilization, of order, calm, and balance. But she, who had upheld this rule of life with him, had seen it crumble away. She wept, she suffered. He held her in his arms, which he couldn’t get entirely around her, she was so much larger than he. While promising nothing, he began to consider means of adjusting to their new situation.
It was amazing how well he managed to restore the harmony of our household. His relief at finding Yakuv still installed in the apartment was almost as great as hers. Her husband’s forbearance evoked Leonora’s
