The Capacity for Infinite Happiness

Chapter 5-1

Emily crept to the kitchen, then up the stairs and through the hallway, then down again toward registration. There must be a vault somewhere with all the family documents. The registration area was too wide open. Nobody would leave birth certificates here. She moved on. The first visit to the lodge that she remembered had been when she was six years old, when she’d visited with her parents. She remembered dragging a towel down this narrow stairway. Corners had been difficult. But still. The lodge had been fun.

She stopped at the shut office door.

On that same trip, she’d visited her grandfather, Papa Moshe, in his office. Every time he’d moved toward her, she’d cried, and her father had had to pick her up. All the adults minus Moshe had laughed. Jonah had been there too, of course, a little boy hovering in the doorway. The door was locked. That boded well. The filing cabinets were locked too, from what she remembered. That was also a good sign, but hard to work around. She’d never figured out how to pick the locks. There might be other hiding places around, however.

Emily crept to the room of windows next, then stopped. Jonah was in there. Jonah, no longer the little sapling of a cousin she’d followed around all the time. He was tall, and his sandy hair was blonder than she’d remembered, and he was tan somehow, even though the season hadn’t started yet. Emily felt something, that regular tug toward him, the slight pull of gravity that she must be feeling because objects in space always attract each other. Yesterday, her horoscope had said, “you will soon meet your deity, your perfect power, the person to whom you can tell all your stories.” If she could choose the one person she could tell all her problems to, it would be him. So she hid behind the door and searched her thoughts for a way to start: family (no), math (no), ghosts (nope), Harpo (absolutely not). She wanted so badly to tell him everything—that her mother regretted parenthood, that she was MIA from her job—but best not lead with those things. Nobody liked problem enumerators. Nobody liked other people’s problems at all, in fact. So she found nothing socially appropriate to say. Then she saw what he was doing, bending over to look at a notebook she’d left open on a table, and so Emily found herself walking right into the room.

Jonah stepped back abruptly, nearly tripping over a rug. “I was just wondering what you’re up to.”

“Math,” she said. If she grabbed the book, he’d notice. She wouldn’t have left it open at an inappropriate page. She wouldn’t have written his name, say, or a love note in mathematical notation or something equally bizarre, and just walked away. She was more careful than that. “I’m finishing my master’s.”

“What kind of math is it?” asked Jonah. “Or is math all the same?”

“It’s not the same.” His eyes were bright blue and shining, and was he teasing her? Emily looked down again. “There’s analysis,” she said, watching the swirling patterns on the hardwood floor. “Algebra. Topography type of stuff. Classification, I guess.” Classification could be considered math, and she’d spent the entire morning at it, quantifying the impropriety of noticing that a cousin was cute. It had to do with the degree of relation, she’d decided, the length of the shortest path that connected them on the family tree. Emily to her mother to her aunt to Jonah would be terrible, but she didn’t have an aunt, so that was out. The path had to be longer than four, and since path lengths have to increase by twos, they weren’t first cousins. At least she’d established that.

“So which one do you do?” asked Jonah.

“I study connections,” said Emily. “It’s called graph theory. I’ll show you.” She grabbed her book. She drew in vertices and edges connecting them, the most basic kind of graph, and felt a hot swell of relief. She had the notebook back at least. “You connect things, then count the degree of the vertices, the number of points they attach to. Then there’s calculations, statistics.”

“That looks like your family.” Jonah pointed to the open page and Emily saw Doran Baruch’s name and some half-completed diagrams, nothing incriminating though, that she could see. She’d also been piecing together how he might fit into the family, but he’d stumped her. She couldn’t figure out the connection.

“You can represent a family tree like a graph,” she said. “I’m kind of obsessed with that right now.”

“That’s a weird obsession.”

“Graphs aren’t what people say they are,” Emily said quickly. “Graphs are really just points and lines, called vertices and edges. You can draw one vertex to show all the members of a family. And then draw edges to show how they’re related, count the connections.” She drew vertices and connected them. Then she labelled them, with her name, her mother’s, her grandmother’s, up until her Papa William, because that was all she knew so far. “I want to use the family tree as an illustration for my thesis. But things weren’t making sense, so I came here, to figure out what’s off in my family representations.” She wanted to tell Jonah more than that, why she’d postponed her thesis defence and the start of her Ph.D.

She looked up at him again, hopeful.

“That isn’t right,” said Jonah.

“What isn’t?”

“That line. Edge.” Jonah touched the page. “That one.” He traced a finger along the Ayala-to-William edge, absently touching the side of Emily’s hand. Her fingers tingled.

“William,” Jonah said. “He doesn’t belong there.”

“He’s my great-great-grandfather. He was my great-grandma Ayala’s father.”

“William’s related to my family, not yours.”

Jonah took the pencil and drew his own graph. “I looked into my own family tree a while back. I wanted to see—I went back to, like, 1888 or something. No, earlier, because William was born in 1860, and I found his parents too. Anyway. William had one daughter, that’s my great-grandmother. Then he got a son-in-law. That’s all.”

“That can’t be right.” Emily studied the two graphs side by side. “But that’s exactly what I kept finding. Connections in the family tree just don’t make sense. Nothing was working out. We can’t be connected before that, because my side was in Russia then.”

“You know William had five brothers and three sisters? No, three brothers and five sisters.” He drew vertices but didn’t label them. “Anyway, a lot of siblings. They all died before they turned thirty, and their parents died right after that. William was left all alone on the island, except for his wife and kid. It must have been weird to go from a huge family all living together in one house to just a couple people.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Emily.

Abruptly, Jonah stepped back. “We’re not related,” he said. “You do know that, right?”

“Then what connects our families?”

“We’re neighbours. That’s all. I checked. That’s what I was looking into.”

“Our connection is geographic?” In her notebook, there were two separate tree graphs, no vertices touching, no physical connections at all.

“For God’s sake,” said Jonah. “Don’t look so stunned. Sometimes cousins is just a thing that people say.”

“Oh.” They weren’t really related. That opened up a new space of possibility.

“So why are you back?” he said.

“Because my mother just told me that she’d never wanted kids, that having me was her great regret.”

This time, Jonah looked lost. Why did she always just admit to everything? Other people found graceful ways to segue into conversations.

“I mean I came back for the Seder,” she said. “I wanted to be with my family.” Then Emily found herself walking again, drifting back to the dining room.

“Don’t believe everything your cousin tells you,” said Emily’s grandmother Blima, as she set the Haggadahs on the central dining-room table. “Relation is much more complicated than just biology.”

“I’m only asking about the biology,” said Emily.

“You can do the seating for tonight.”

“Fine, I can do that. I’ll print name cards. But I need information because I want to draw little graphs on them, family trees that represent the biology. You and Auntie Sonja were born to Ayala and Sam Kogan?”

“I’m the older sister,” said Blima. “Also wiser. Also, I know more.”

“I knew that you’re the eldest.”

“Old is old to young people. I just want to remind you that there are degrees of it.”

“Ayala had four siblings. Max, Robert, Efim and Raisa. You were born in Russia. And Auntie Sonja was born in Kingston?”

“I can vouch for your Auntie Sonja, but for me, I can’t remember. I was very young at the time.”

“Can you please be serious?” said Emily

And then Blima shuffled back to the table, carrying a big white box. “Blessed are the Pacific Tribes, for they dine with the saints.”

“You were born in 1924, and Auntie Sonja was born in 1929.”

“It’s a family tradition to use your Great-grandma Ayala’s good china for Passover’s extra setting.”

“I know—”

“It’s not every family who serves Elijah. You’ll find lots of Jews who only pour him a drink. But he needs something to line his stomach. That’s what our mother always said.”

“When was Great-grandma Ayala born?”

Blima rested the box on the table, then pulled out a big plate, a little plate and a delicate little bowl. “You know, sometimes you called her the old Bubbie. I was the new Bubbie. It’s been a long time since I was the new anything.” Dark hair, pink cheeks, perfectly put together in slacks and a sweater, she looked exactly the same as she’d always looked, if slightly more compact. She looked delicate now. And maybe she did look a little bit old. Maybe Emily had been away too long.

“I do remember Great-grandma Ayala, you know,” said Emily. She used to love to come here to see her. They’d watch Marx Brothers movies together in her bedroom. Harpo was Emily’s favourite, so great-grandma Ayala would make up stories about him, like the ones where he got lost in the woods, where he battled the anti-Semites, where he fell in love with the sad lady he saw crying in a dirty window. Emily had brought her Marx Brothers DVDs this visit, to continue the tradition.

“These plates were hers,” said Blima. “And now they’re mine, and when I die they go to you, so soon they’ll be yours.”

“Not that soon.”

“And they’re not for use by just anyone. Especially not guests. They have germs and who knows who raised them. These plates, they’re just for prophets and for anyone who isn’t corporeal enough to scratch good china. In case I die, now you know how we do things in this family.”

Emily fiddled with the cutlery. “Who is this guy who’s coming tonight?” she asked innocently, as if she’d just heard that he was coming.

“His name is Doran Baruch.”