The Children's House Read online

  ‘Earl Grey fumé,’ Jacob had said with a flourish when he had brought her a cup of tea earlier that morning. They had become part of the currency of their marriage, these carefully made cups of tea. He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, his hands on her shoulders. ‘How did you sleep?’ Jacob asked this every morning, with the same slightly perturbed look of concern.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, trying to disguise the trace of impatience that crept into her voice at the question. ‘I got up early because I wanted to get started on some work.’

  ‘At four?’

  ‘You know me. Mornings are my best time. It’s harder to feel hopeful about the book in the afternoons.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a sleep after lunch?’

  ‘Perhaps I will.’

  Even when she had not slept well, Marina did not confess this to Jacob. He saw it, she knew, as a symptom of the things that had harmed her, had compromised her happiness. She took a sip of her tea and looked at him standing in the doorway in his checked linen shirt, sleeves rolled up, his hair still damp from the shower. One of his buttons was hanging from a thread; she should mend it for him. This lovely man who believed in people’s fundamental goodness, who cared deeply and earnestly about whether she had slept well or not. She still swelled with gratitude, and amazement, too, at her great and narrow escape from an entirely different kind of life. Everything between them still felt so pure and definite that summer. It was baffling to her sometimes, the immensity of her love for him, the impossible good luck of their marriage.

  As he walked away down 120th Street, Marina could just see the small coin of baldness among Jacob’s dark curls. It made her feel curiously tender, this circle of pale, unprotected skin.

  For nearly eight years they had lived on the Upper East Side, on Park Avenue. It was Jacob’s apartment, bought after the end of his first marriage. Marina had always felt like an imposter among the genteel stone buildings with their bottle-green canopies and gleaming brass doors. The streets were full of doormen and dog-walkers, women in fur coats slipping into sleek black cars, dark-skinned nannies pushing blond children in strollers. On every corner brightly coloured daisies sprouted from carefully tended planter boxes. There was a dreary uniformity to it all that Marina hated, a cold sort of nowhere feeling. The neighbourhood felt so removed from the heart of the city that they might as well be in one of the smug suburbs. In the mornings the laundry room of their building was full of maids chattering in Spanish as they folded clothes. The help. Marina was the only one in that building who seemed to do her own laundry. At night the empty streets felt like an apocalyptic scene; the strange, pallid light on the buildings and the sense of furtive life all around her. There were no hidden lanes, no boarded windows, nothing derelict or mysterious.

  Marina wondered if it was her desire for camouflage that had brought them to Harlem. She had spent the first years of her life in Israel, never away from the kibbutz where she was born. That distant childhood had displaced her somehow, and since she had come to America she had courted foreignness, always more at ease in neighbourhoods full of forsaken worlds, the ghosts of other places hovering above the streets. El Barrio was to their east, Black Harlem beyond their strip of brownstones on the edge of the park. Marina took comfort in knowing that even the locals were once strangers here. A railroad ticket and a suitcase, and you could be transplanted from a cornfield to the 125th Street station.

  In their first week in Harlem, caught in a sudden downpour, she had ducked under the awning of one of the small Pentecostal churches. Three old women in fur coats stood beside her, purses clutched under their arms. The rain blurred the street beyond them and they recited the names of their hometowns for her. Scotland Neck, North Carolina. Yazoo City, Mississippi. Tiger Bend, Louisiana. The names sounded to her like charms. Afterwards she wrote them down in her notebook; the private core of a memory, words she might come back to one day.

  At times in that first summer, with no classes to teach, Marina did not leave Harlem for days in a row. Old men in their under-shirts sat around plastic tables playing dominoes, and people congregated on street corners, outside the bodega or the liquor store. She came to recognise certain faces, a half-smile or a particular stare as a group parted wordlessly to let her pass. In the mornings she walked along Second Avenue, turning down streets at random. A window box full of dusty geraniums, a thin dog leaping out of sight behind a fence, a young Mexican woman waiting in a doorway, the smell of frying. All these half-lit lives. She would often walk as far as the East River and stand staring out at the factories across the water, streaks of cars flashing past on the expressway, the rumble and hiss of trucks loud in the blazing morning. Sometimes there were fishermen casting lines out into the brown water. It seemed improbably hopeful to fish in such a river.

  After Jacob left for work in the mornings Marina would sit on the front stoop, drinking her cooling cup of coffee, the morning sun glinting off the silver filigree of the mezuzah on the doorframe. It was ornately worked with birds and leaves, the Hebrew letter shin nestled into the stamen of a flower. The design was based on a Scroll of Esther from nineteenth-century Poland, the woman in the silver shop told them. This pleased Jacob. His father was born in Poland; his aunt’s name was Esther. He bought a second mezuzah for his mother, saying the blessing for her after he hammered the tiny nails into the doorframe of her apartment. He was full of these small kindnesses; a lovely solicitude for all of them. Late at night poring over one of Ben’s calculus textbooks so he could better understand the new language his son brought home from college.

  ‘A deep-cut ellipsoid algorithm,’ she remembered Jacob musing once. ‘Have you ever heard of one of those?’

  ‘It sounds like a weird kind of poetry.’

  ‘It does. Ben always says there’s a poetry to pure mathematics.’

  She had come to depend on Jacob’s care, Marina realised, as she had once depended on her brother’s. Her husband’s hand against her cheek as he brought her a cup of tea in bed on a Sunday morning, strong and smoke-tinged, tea leaves carried back from the Mariage Frères teahouse in Paris. All these clues to the life they shared: the shining black canisters like secret talismans, the knowledge of precisely how long to steep the leaves, the pale blue of the deep Limoges teacup she loved. ‘Marriage tea’, Jacob called it.

  A strange word, marriage. A clipped sound, stern and serious, no quiet sibilance to it. Strong casing, the proper shape of it around them. Her cream silk dress, a clutch of peonies, Ben’s little blue blazer, his serious young face. The ring-bearer, he had appointed himself, so solemn between his grandmother and his aunt under the flag at City Hall. Their cluster of five, arms linked as they walked to a restaurant for lunch afterwards. It was unfashionable, really, the regard in which they held each other, the closeness they had nestled into, their delight in the raucous games of canasta around the kitchen table in the apartment on the Upper West Side where Jacob had grown up and his mother still lived.

  Marina had stepped tentatively into the circle of Jacob’s family, expecting suspicion. She was so young. She had no family. Surely his mother would disapprove. But she was befriended in a way that was both mysterious and welcome to her. Within a few months there were kitchen conversations with Rose, a circle of old photographs or a recipe book spread out before them. Weekly lunches with his sister, Leah, who would walk up to Columbia to meet her on her day off from the social service agency in East Harlem where she worked. ‘Little sister’, she called Marina, conspiring with Rose to tend to her. Flowers sent to Marina’s office every week of the winter semester after she had once said she needed a clutch of yellow jonquils to see her through the grey four o’clocks of January. Every paper she published, every book review, clipped and catalogued, sent to Rose’s friends and relatives in Israel, Delaware, Miami. The joke among them that Rose was her greatest publicist.

  Marina submitted happily to their kindness. No one had ever made her chicken soup when she was unwell, or knitted sweaters
for her. At first Marina thought that their love must come from their relief. Jacob’s first wife, Leni, had left him and Ben when the boy was only three years old, moving to London with a colleague of Jacob. ‘On Jacob’s dollar,’ Rose told Marina mournfully. It was the disaster she had predicted from the first day Jacob had brought Leni home, this terrible wounding of her beloved son. It had become a dark thread through the family: Leni’s unsuitability, her inadequate mothering, her unforgivable defection. The shamefulness of it, Ben’s confused grief, the greyness that had crept into Jacob’s skin. And then, after nearly three years of absence, Leni’s return to New York and the court battle that led to a joint custody arrangement.

  Jacob only managed to communicate all this to Marina as a kind of shadow play, a shaky and unsatisfying recounting. He kept his sadnesses at a distance – from her and perhaps also from himself. It was Rose who told her the terrible details of Jacob’s first marriage. The catch and sob in her son’s voice on the end of the telephone on the Sunday evenings after he dropped Ben at Leni’s house, his misery at the empty stretch of hours, the silent apartment, the childless week ahead. The clattering house of Jacob’s heart.

  On the day of the wedding, Rose held Marina’s face between her hands and kissed her solemnly on both cheeks, like a formal benediction. Marina remembered the moment so clearly; the smell of Rose’s powder and the violet perfume dabbed above the collar of her paisley silk blouse, the crepey softness of her cheeks. The world was offering her the figure of a mother at a time when she thought she had stopped looking behind her for what had been lost. Gizela, her own mother, lost. But absence still feeds, Jacob would say. All those damaged children he worked with, the wounds festering through the years, his own son searching for a mother in the terrible months after Leni had left. Three years old, four years old and calling every nursery teacher ‘Mommy’.

  The doorman in their old building insisted on calling Marina ‘Mrs Kaufman’ after the wedding, beaming as he rushed to hold open the door for her, to take whatever packages she carried. The whole production made Marina uneasy: his starched uniform, gleaming epaulets and white gloves, the absurdity of this elaborate costume of service. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ his voice calm and sweetly lilting. It seemed unkind, churlish, to point out that she had not changed her last name. The doorman was from Trinidad. Once, he had shown her a photograph of his wife and son. He wanted to bring them to New York, he told her, but his wife was from a small village and was terrified of the city, was sure that she would be robbed or murdered there. One day he would convince her to come, he said. One day.

  No doorman in Harlem, just the wide stoop and the curving black trellis of the fence on to the street. In the spring semester she would set off early for Columbia. It was only a few blocks west and a walk through Morningside Park to the university. It soon became a ritual, those ten minutes immersed in the craggy wildness of the park, the unexpected rush of the waterfall down the cliff face, the fretted shadows of the trees. Marina would stop to drink a takeaway coffee on a bench in the park if she did not have an early class or a student expecting her, peering anxiously through the small glass window in her office door. She hated that window, the feeling it gave her that she was constantly on display. For some reason it made her think of Schumann locked in his cell in the asylum in Bad Godesberg, the mind that had produced all that sublime music unravelling profoundly. She had read that when Schumann’s wife, Clara, came to visit her husband towards the end of his life, she was only permitted to look in at him through the small window in the door of his cell. It seemed such a poignant story – that the only thing left to Clara was to watch Schumann from behind a closed door. Marina often imagined the young woman standing at the door, her husband’s suffering something her love could not touch. She wondered if the act of looking at him had brought Clara any solace. She could not imagine so.

  There were panels of glass in the dormitory doors in the Children’s House on the kibbutz, too. The nurses on night duty would peer in to see if the children were sleeping. So many nights Marina lay awake staring up at that small, illuminated square, closing her eyes when she saw a nurse’s face looming at the window. Sometimes it was her brother’s face. He calculated the times the nurses carried out their checks and knew when it was safe to slip down the hallway to see her.

  She and Dov never shared a dormitory. On the kibbutz children were grouped according to their age, and Dov shared a room with several older children. Late at night he would sit on the edge of her bed and tell her stories: fairy tales recounted in a whisper, or narratives of his own invention. So many years later Marina could still remember the hushed sound of her brother’s voice whispering to her on those late nights, the other children around them sleeping. All the stories he wove for her under the palest skin of early morning while their parents slept in their own room far away on the other side of the kibbutz.

  ‘Dova’leh’, she had called her brother. Little Bear. They spoke to each other in Hebrew in those days. It was the language of the kibbutz and of the country, but it had slipped away when they came to America. Marina could barely recall it these days. It was a strange thing, to feel the language in which you had first known yourself to be gone from you. But in so many ways the child she had been in Israel was like a figment of a dream. The little girl who had waited anxiously to see her brother’s face at the window seemed as far from her as the language in which she had called out for him. In New York they had reinvented themselves in English, as their mother had when she was taken away from her own country.

  On the mornings of their first spring semester in Harlem, Marina would sit on the bench in Morningside Park and look down at her watch, allowing herself just a little more time before she resumed her walk to Columbia. Some mornings even the thought of delivering a lecture or meeting with one of the graduate students she supervised felt like an insuperable obstacle. The measure of impersonation involved seemed too monumental. She did not love teaching in the way Jacob did, did not believe she had his skill for making people feel they had been allowed into the secret room of his imagination. Her students were mostly clever and conscientious, but they required so much of her. Patience, kindness, a considered display of interest in their lives. And a need to be entertaining, captivating, to inspire and amuse. It was not enough simply to impart knowledge to them. Many students signed up for her classes because of the small circle of fame her first book, on the Romani people, had brought her. She had become known as the ‘Gypsy scholar’, the very name conjuring up some sort of glamour. A mystique or foreignness was expected from her, as if she might come to class with gold coins braided into her hair.

  ‘They’re all in love with you,’ Jacob said once after she had been complaining about the relentless neediness of her students.

  ‘Oh, hardly.’

  ‘I would fall in love with you if I were an angst-ridden undergrad.’

  ‘Would you? I think you would have found me bookish and boring when you were nineteen.’

  ‘Bookish and beautiful.’

  Perhaps students were drawn to Marina because they saw her as someone who contained secret histories, a translator of sparse and hidden knowledge. They thought her mysterious. The success of the Romani book beyond the academic world had coaxed her out into the open, and the festival appearances, a New Yorker article, the interviews and the invitations to speak at conferences had made her position at Columbia possible. Universities loved a small circle of fame, the promise of prestige. Her friends from graduate school had been offered jobs in North Dakota or Ohio, been forced to travel to some distant prairie town for a tenure-track position, or scramble for sessional work in the cities. Professor Hirsch. Still the sound of it was strange to her. It made her think of stately chambers and cut-glass inkwells. A respectable life, orderly and faintly smug. Something far from a barefoot young girl standing at the edge of a field.

  If Marina naturally migrated away from the fray, for Jacob it was the opposite. Despite his natural reticence, he lo
ved the world’s embrace. Like hers, his real work took place in secret, but over the years he had become a public figure, feted and admired. Resented, too, and subject to the small cruelties and envies that fame, no matter how minor, brings. Already when she had met him a decade earlier in California he was being heralded by some as a rising star in the world of child psychotherapy, criticised by others for his lack of scientific rigour. Jacob said that he saw psychoanalysis not so much as a science but an art, that the abstractions and certainties of science were contrary to the complexity of the human being. He trusted his unconscious to supply the idea that could be fashioned into a way of treatment. A kind of working blind. And there was the success of his clinical work, the undeniable success of it. All those children.