A Castle in Brooklyn(53)

“Jacob!”

He came down the two concrete steps, took her arm, and led her into the house.

“I didn’t think you would be home before me,” she said, somewhat breathless from the surprise, as she hung her gray tweed jacket in the closet.

“It was much too sunny outside to be stuck working in the office,” he answered, taking a seat not in his recliner, but on the sofa.

“Besides, anything I have to do can be left for Monday,” he continued. He patted the spot next to him, adding, “Esther, come sit by your husband.”

She looked at him quizzically before sitting down and leaning back to settle into the crook of his arm. A faint smile appeared on her face. Until now, she had not realized how much she had missed, longed for, this moment. She closed her eyes, briefly inhaled the familiar scent of his cologne as the two listened to the silences of the household. Finally, after a few minutes, she felt him shift slightly, heard the sound of his voice before quite comprehending the words.

“The show you saw today—with the boy—it was good?”

Esther turned her head so she could see her husband’s face, and brightening, she responded, “The concert with Andrew, you mean? Oh, Jacob, if you could only see the smile on his face, the intense concentration he had just being there, watching the conductor, the musicians! It was as if he had seen a thousand such concerts, and yet such joy at his very first! The happiness as he joined in with the applause! Just like—like when we took our own child to his first baseball game at Yankee Stadium!” She felt Jacob’s fingers dig deeper into her shoulder, and she gulped the air. The words had come out without her realizing it, and a waft of sadness consumed her.

“Good,” he said. “I am sure the boy appreciated it a great deal.” Esther felt her muscles relax, her heartbeats slow. But before she had given herself a chance to fully review the delights of the day, at least in her mind, Jacob, still holding her, continued, “And that is why I think that now is the time to stop.”

Esther shifted again to take in his face, his eyes calm, gentle, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Stop? Stop what?”

“I think you should stop seeing him. Stop meeting with—” He swallowed before saying the name for the first time, “Andrew.”

The request, as simple and sedate as it was, seemed to slam into Esther, making her feel as if she had just been in a terrible car accident, broken and weak.

“I don’t understand. Why should I stop? I’m tutoring the child, an exceptionally talented child who has great potential which I am helping to nurture. Besides, I am bringing in some extra money, if only a little, and enjoying seeing him grow as a musician, even as a man. He’s having fun is all, and so am I.”

She watched as Jacob’s lips formed a stern line where a smile had been only moments earlier.

“That’s just the problem; perhaps you are enjoying this tutoring a little too much. Don’t you see what you’re doing? You have become a mother to this motherless boy, and for you, he has become like a son. But you are not his mother, and he is not—” He choked back the words.

“Gary,” she whispered. But as a surge of energy took hold of her body, she determined not to go to that place of sorrow. Instead, she allowed her eyes to remain on Jacob’s and steeled herself.

“Ridiculous!” she found herself spewing out the word despite her efforts to remain calm, but she was already on her feet.

“The idea that I’m substituting this boy for our own dear child makes no sense. And, Jacob, I’m so surprised that you would even propose such a thing! That you would try to take away this one bit of pleasure in my empty life.” And again, she regretted the words almost instantly as she watched a dark cloud sweep over her husband’s face. He stood to meet her eyes, his motions slow, defeated.

“Very well, then, my star,” he said, using the old pet name, “if this brings you happiness.”

Esther watched as he took the stairs as if he himself were carrying a great burden and disappeared into the bedroom.

That evening, Esther couldn’t sleep. She lay, eyes open, watching her husband of over thirty years, lips slightly parted as he took deep, measured breaths. Only in repose did Jacob resemble the young, spirited man she had met in class that day long ago. Tall and confident, with just the measure of shyness making him all the more attractive, he had seemed to her then a giant of a man who could lasso the moon if only she had asked.

And yet she knew that in a few hours his eyelids would open, revealing green eyes, but also a man with deep furrows down his cheeks, the dimple set in his chin, a brooding forehead topped with a still-full head of hair streaked each day more with gray. A man, slow, stoop shouldered; a man, just past fifty, defeated by life, looking much older than he was. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the twitch. It was the pinkie on his right hand, activated by a dream, no doubt. She allowed her own fingers to wander, touch the skin, feel the hand that was the one thing even after all these years that remained the same.

With both her parents gone, her mother descending into Alzheimer’s before her death, which came not as a shock, but as a relief, her one true friendship nearly dissipated, he was all she had. She wished for more; she yearned for it, recalled the dream that she did not dare bring to the surface, a relic of another time. It had appeared to her many times before, just on the edge of reality, when she was a bride, a new homeowner, a young mother. If only she could go back, return to that time when the world was, as the poet Matthew Arnold once said, “a land of dreams.” She was, she finally reasoned, irretrievably foolish. Esther curled her body into the fetal position, tried to make her mind go blank. But before she did, she had come to still another decision.