The Capacity for Infinite Happiness

Chapter 5-2

“Is he a relative?” Emily had thought that he was one of Auntie Sonja’s old boyfriends, but she might have misread the signs. He might be some long-lost relative, although romance and blood relations might not be mutually exclusive in this place. In all her research into lodge history, his was the name that had come up the most. That’s all she really knew. “Would he be included in a family tree?”

“How is your work coming along?” said Blima.

“Fine,” said Emily.

“It’s your thesis, your mother said. What is it about?”

“I’m studying connectivity.”

“That’s not what I heard. Your mother said it was about the Internet.”

“I did research on the Internet.”

“That’s fine,” said Blima, and then she stared.

Emily didn’t know what to say next. Did her grandmother want an explanation? Most people didn’t. “I’m looking at the connectivity of people,” she said after a moment. “I’m quantifying how people change each other.”

“Go on.”

“Oh,” said Emily. Nobody ever asked her to do that. “Okay. I’m measuring social influence. The Knights of the Round Table were all influenced by King Arthur, and that’s why they all went looking for the grail. That’s a bad example. I don’t know why I even thought of that one.” She needed a central analogy for her work, some image that readers could understand, but that was a bad one. She’d been banking on the idea of family trees, of course, or of lodge history, that’s the real reason she’d come, but she certainly couldn’t tell her grandmother that.

“The writers of the Algonquin Round Table all influenced each other,” Emily said suddenly. “That’s probably a better illustration of what I’m doing.” She might even look into that example more, because non-writers were part of that round table too. Harpo Marx was a part of it, even though he wasn’t even thinking of writing at the time. He was only doing crossword puzzles and correspondence then. Maybe Emily could track the development of all the writing, or how Harpo’s comedic sensibilities leaked from person to person, or maybe she’d just focus, like her advisor kept begging her to do, on the actual math.

“It’s math,” said Emily “It’s really just math.”

“Your mother said it was about social networking,” said Blima. “On the Internet.”

“That’s where I get my data.”

“Well you must be almost finished. Your mother said you just needed the quiet, and the lodge is just opening for the season. There aren’t even guests yet. There’s nothing here but quiet.”

“I just got here. But I’m almost done. I’m working some last things out, I just need some help—”

“Maybe my Eliyahu can help you.” Blima shuffled around the table again, straightening the napkins one by one. “Except if Elijah’s spirit can find his way to our table after all that wine, then it really would be a Passover miracle. You see, lovie, every year, Elijah drinks with the Pacific Ocean Jews, whose geographic location allows them to dine first and be most blessed. Because that’s where the sun sets first!”

“Are there even Jews on the Pacific Islands?”

“It’s hard to find a safe place, I know. Even here. The Kingston folks are okay, but the people in the townships, well, you know. They’re always closer than you think. Anyhow. Soon after the nightfall of the Tasmanian Jewish populations, Elijah gets lost in the region of the Himalayas. Every year, the same. He’s shikkered, you see, because of all those families and all that wine, and most of it, I hate to tell you, is Manischewitz It reflects badly on our people, but there you have it.”

“I like Manischewitz.”

“Elijah generally wakes up in late April, in either a cave or in a motel with coin-operated beds.”

“Can you please stop being weird?”

“Elijah has to drink with every Jewish family,” said Blima, handing Emily the regular plates. “That’s a lot of sacramental wine for just one prophet.”

“Oh, of course,” said Emily, as she snuck one more plate for her cousin Jonah and put it next to hers. She wanted to be close to him, to see what this lack of connection might mean.

“Hang on,” said Blima, eyes narrowed. “Are you setting more places now?”

“Can we leave a place setting for any ghost?”

Blima brightened. “Of course we can set places for ghosts.”

Emily smiled. Although if she could set a place for a ghost, Emily would invite Harpo Marx. Her thesis advisor might be right about her focus. She had to remember why she was here. “Do we have any old documents? I mean like passports, marriage records, birth certificates, death certificates.”

“We might have kept some of those things. If they’re important, we would have kept them in a safe place.”

“Okay,” said Emily. In her family’s weird crossword-puzzle world, that probably meant that they were kept in a hidden safe somewhere. Then she felt the need to move well up in her, and then she was walking, and Blima, she saw out of the corner of her eye, was on the move too, creeping right out the door.

As Emily passed through the great hallway a few minutes later, she heard her grandmother again. “But this year is different,” Blima was saying. “This family is different. Most of our history shouldn’t be remembered. Things are hidden here, don’t forget, and I don’t know why I’d reconsidered that.”

Emily stopped. There were hidden things.

“Do you remember when we got death threats?” said Blima “They still throw rocks, paint on the walls. There will always be angry voices right outside the door. Why had I thought the world would be gentler now?”

Emily crept on. If one person hides a thing, it’s another person’s job to find it. Hadn’t that always been the rule?

“Are you still following Jonah around?” Emily’s great-aunt Sonja called from inside the bathroom.

“I don’t follow him,” said Emily.

“You used to.”

“Are we related to Papa William?” Emily sat down in Great-aunt Sonja’s sitting room, on the overstuffed chair that had always been her favourite in the whole place. Then she shot up again and crept from one glass-topped table to another, from bookshelf to bookshelf. This was a perfect room for hidden things. She picked up a book, flipped through the pages. “Jonah seems to think we’re not related.”

“Related means a lot of things.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.”

“Oh but you used to follow Jonah everywhere! Don’t you remember? He’s a very proficient young man now. Not educated, but he’ll do okay in his own sort of way.”

“Auntie!”

“We just have to remember not to use our standards when we think about him, that’s all.” Emily could hear the clink of ice in a highball glass. “Not everyone can aspire to the same things. And he’d be uncomfortable if we made him sit down. Anyhow, why doesn’t your mother come to the Seder?”

“She knows she’d drink too much and argue with everyone.”

“I wouldn’t fight with Rebecca.”

“She would probably fight with you.” Maybe she regretted the entire family, not just her daughter.

“It’s funny to think,” said Sonja, “but Jonah used to follow you around too. Do you remember that?”

“Some things are starting to come back, I guess.” There were little things that Emily was starting to remember, feelings mostly, colours. Certainly, she remembered him.

“Lovie,” said Aunt Sonja, “could you help me in here?”

Emily followed the wall into the bathroom, touching the framed etchings lightly. They were too skinny to be safes. But even so. She used to do this a lot. She’d run her fingertips along the walls, to feel the textures and to look absorbed when she didn’t want Jonah to know that she was feeling left out.

“I’m all in a state,” said Sonja.

Emily blinked into the bright yellow bathroom. There was the powdery smell she remembered, the big oval mirror in its blue and gold mosaic frame. Sonja puttered from the sink to the cabinet to the sink again.

“Doran Baruch is coming tonight,” said Sonja.

“Doran Baruch,” said Emily. The name that showed up over and over. “Is he Jewish?” Because for some reason she thought that he might not be, yet another detail that had made his file stand out. The whole family was Jewish, obviously. All the old guests had been Jewish too. That had been the point.

“Is who Jewish?”

“Doran Baruch.”

“He’s close,” said Sonja.

“What does that mean?”

“He’s a goy with a Jewish last name. That’s something that can happen. But you have to remember not to call him goy because we don’t say that word in polite company. You can call him a Gentile, I think.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“I haven’t seen Doran Baruch in so many years. Maybe I should tidy.”

“He’s not going to see the inside of your bedroom.”

“I don’t know if he’ll recognize me. Maybe I should put more makeup on my face. I’m feeling atticky, all of a sudden. Maybe I should clean more in here. That might help.”

“Why would he see the inside of your bathroom?” Emily looked at her great-aunt’s reflection—red cheeks, hair that was still blond, or dyed blond maybe, perfectly pressed jacket sleeve leaning against the gleaming countertop. She remembered sitting on that counter, lifting her arms and Auntie Sonja patting her stomach with a powder puff, the powder filling the air around her like a cloud.

“Well,” said Sonja. “Your bubbie, her eyes are going, I think. She wears blue eyeshadow, and I don’t think she knows what colour it is. It’s blue like bluebells. That is not a colour for a face.”

“Blue eyeshadow is in,” said Emily.

“Usually, I tell her. But if she wears it tonight, I’m not going to say anything. I’ll look better beside her if she looks like a Picasso portrait.” Sonja turned back to her own reflection and clucked at it. “Anyhow,” she said, “I need all the help I can get. I’m not what I was.”

Emily’s eyes wandered around the room, at the yellow tiles, the sparkling shower and the bath with clawed feet.

“This is just what happens when you get older,” Sonja said. “You stop growing hair on your head, and you start growing a hair on your chin. Not many of them. Just the one. And it’s long like a vine. That’s what you have to look forward to when you get old.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I don’t want Doran to think I didn’t take care for his visit.”

“I thought he invited himself,” Emily muttered.

Sonja smiled at Emily’s reflection then cupped her cheek, her hand cool and soft. “That beautiful face,” she said, “and those cheeks. I’d give anything for cheeks as red as those. You wouldn’t know it now, but your bubbie and I were lookers too, when we were young. We were the legendary Kogan girls. There were songs written about us, but they weren’t particularly good ones, so that was that.”

“There were songs?”

“Lovie, I was known for dating every handsome young gentleman who came to the lodge.”

“No!” said Emily, but of course she remembered. It was a story she loved.

“Oh yes. One man would drop me off at the front door, and then I would have to run to the back door to meet my next date there. And so it went every night until I met your great-uncle.”

“What about Doran Baruch?”

“What about him?”

Emily had thought at first that Doran Baruch must have been one of the front-door suitors, a shy young man carrying a single daisy night after night. But he’d invited himself to a Seder, and that was too brazen for a man with a daisy. When she’d tracked him down over the Internet, she’d just asked for an interview, hadn’t suggested he invite himself here before the season even started. Maybe he used to bring a rose. Roses were dangerous flowers. Maybe he was one of the back-door boyfriends, who dressed in fancy clothes and was exciting but had no scruples, who Great-aunt Sonja had had to trick and run away from in the night, leave lost in the woods while she giggled about them with her sister, safe in their bedroom. “Did you have a love affair with him too?”

“Who wasn’t in love with him?” said Sonja, pulling out a tube of mascara. “It was hard not to be in love with Doran Baruch.”

Emily pushed herself off the counter. She’d hoped for a no and a retelling of one of the lodge love stories, she’d wanted her aunt to say that he was certainly in love with her—that was how they all started. “Who is this guy that you put mascara on for him?”

“He’s miraculous. He got to Canada first and then to the States from Communist Russia, and he came all alone. I want you to like him, Emily. No matter what else happens in your life, you have to love him.” Sonja pressed her mascara pen to her eyelashes. “He’s been missing for so long.”

“Where has he been?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. And anyway that makes no sense. You can’t just automatically love someone.”

Sonja just blinked at the mirror, her eyes flashing wetly. “The heart has two ventricles,” she said, “the left ventricle and the right ventricle. And each of the ventricles holds an equal amount of love.”

“The ventricles hold blood,” said Emily. “They’re part of a pump system.”

“We need two ventricles for love, because everyone has at least two kinds of love in their life.”

“That’s just not true.”

“You have your opinion and I have my opinion. We could argue until the end of the night and who would be right?”

“I took human biology courses in university.” Emily pushed out of the bathroom. “I would be right.”