A Book of American Martyrs(152)
There was an embrace—slightly stiff, awkward, but eager—for which Naomi wasn’t prepared. The older woman’s arms were thin but strong.
Madelena was just slightly shorter than Naomi. Her striking silver hair was plaited around her head like a crown. She was dressed in rippling black pleats, trousers with flaring cuffs. The skin of her perfect-petal face was unlined and smooth as the skin of a woman decades younger.
Her eyes were veiled by large tinted glasses with chic black frames. In these glasses Naomi’s pale girl’s face hovered uncertainly.
“Let me take that, dear.”
Before Naomi could protest Madelena took her suitcase from her fingers and bore it to the opened door at the end of the corridor. As if, so much younger than Madelena, Naomi were not capable of carrying the suitcase herself. How embarrassing!
“And how was your flight?—and how are you?”
“Fine. I am—fine.”
“And is that how you are really?”—Madelena was smiling at Naomi with a kind of warm, teasing affection as if they were old acquaintances, or accomplices.
Was this her father’s mother, who had to be in her mid-seventies at least? It did not seem possible. Naomi was feeling dazzled by the vigorous straight-backed woman who’d snatched the suitcase from her fingers with the impetuousness of one whose will is rarely challenged.
She remembered her father ruefully joking that in time his youthful and energetic mother would be mistaken for his sister—“A slightly older, bossy sister.”
Madelena was saying that she hated plane travel. Hated putting herself in the trust of strangers. “Traveling is so passive. It’s a toss of the dice whether we survive the simplest flight. I’ve been checking your flight out of the Detroit airport, it was unsettling to be told that the plane was delayed while the wings were being de-iced.”
Naomi was surprised and touched that Madelena had cared so much. She could think to say, haltingly, “Yes. It was very cold and icy there . . .” She was smiling foolishly.
Inside the apartment Madelena insisted that Naomi drink a glass of water—“You’re dehydrated from traveling. It can’t be avoided. If you aren’t careful you will get a very bad headache. And tomorrow is your first full day in New York City—you must not be indisposed.”
“Thank you.” Naomi drank from the crystal-cut glass she was handed, dutifully. It was so, her head had been aching since before the plane had landed.
Madelena led her into a large, light-filled living room—floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a remarkable vista of rooftops, spires, streets, small patches of snowy parkland. “That’s the Hudson River—that blue haze at the horizon. And over there, just visible from this window, the arch at Washington Square Park.” Naomi stared but did not see—wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
“It’s so beautiful . . .”
“From a height, yes. ‘Distance enhances.’”
On the walls of the living room were large canvases that looked waterstained. Pale-pastel abstract paintings in (seeming) mimicry of the sky. Elegant contemporary furnishings, a rough-textured eggshell-colored rug on a polished hardwood floor. On a table, an antique stringed instrument. Sculpted figures, white marble heads. The living room opened into a dining room in which there was a long mahogany table, large enough to seat ten or twelve people; at the farther end were just two place mats set across from each other, with neatly folded colorful cloth napkins.
Naomi was naively touched. Thinking that her grandmother had set the table in readiness for her.
She recalled that, long ago when she’d been a young child, her parents had often had friends for dinner, friends and their children, informally, crowded around a table half the size of this table and with nothing of its formal elegance. These dinners had been boisterous, fun. It was true as people said—Gus Voorhees made you laugh. You would not have guessed how intense and often anxious the man was, for he delighted in making others laugh. The adults had drunk wine, beer—they’d quarreled about politics—they’d traded stories about their jobs, their bosses—they’d told jokes. Gus had not been reticent. But he had not dominated—usually.
Eventually at these protracted dinners the children had drifted away to watch TV or, if they were younger, to be put to bed by their mothers. She could not recall if she’d been one of these young children, or if she’d always been older, and spared the humiliation of being put to bed.
She wiped at her eyes. She had not thought of these dinners in some time. In Detroit, in Grand Rapids—of course, in Ann Arbor—but there had been few boisterous dinners in the rented house on Salt Hill Road, in rural Huron County, where (she saw now) things had begun to deteriorate in the life of their family.
On Madelena’s dining room table was an elaborately designed wrought iron candelabra bearing a half-dozen slender candles, each of a different height, and color; each candleholder was lavishly encrusted with wax, like something sculpted. Naomi remembered that her parents had had a similar candelabra, slightly smaller, very striking, but impractical; it was usually kept on a sideboard, unused. She wondered now if it had been a gift, an impractical gift, from Madelena Kein.
“It’s from Mexico. The candelabra. Does it look familiar?”—Madelena regarded her with bemused eyes.
Naomi wondered where her parents’ candelabra was now. What had Jenna done with the household furnishings? Put them in storage, sold or gave them away . . .