The Immortalists(12)

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says.





2.


May arrives in a blur of sunshine and color. Crocus shoots thumb the grass of Roosevelt Park. After her last high school class, Klara bursts through the door with her empty diploma frame. The diploma will be sent once the calligraphy is finished, but by then she will be gone. Gertie knows that Klara is leaving, so her suitcase sits in the hallway. What she doesn’t know is that Simon – whose suitcase is jammed beneath his bed – is coming with her.

He is leaving behind most of his belongings, bringing only those that are utilitarian or precious. Two collared, striped velour T-shirts. The red drawstring bag. The brown corduroy flares he was wearing when a young Puerto Rican man caught his eye on the train and winked: his most romantic experience yet. His leather-banded gold watch, a gift from Saul. And his New Balance 320s: blue suede, the lightest running shoes he’s worn.

Klara’s bag is larger, as it includes something that Ilya Hlavacek gave Klara during her last day of work. The night before they leave, she tells Simon the story of the gift.

‘Bring me that box over there,’ Ilya told her, pointing.

The box, made of wood and painted black, accompanied Ilya from sideshows to circuses until he contracted polio in 1931 – ‘Good timing,’ he often joked, ‘because by then the pictures had killed vaudeville anyway.’ He always referred to it as that box, though Klara knew it was his most precious possession. She did as he directed, hoisting it up onto the counter so Ilya wouldn’t have to get up from his chair.

‘Now, I want you to have this,’ he said. ‘All right? It’s yours. I want you to use it and I want you to enjoy it. It’s meant to be on the road, my dear, not stuck indoors with an old cripple like me. You know how to take it apart? Here, I’ll show you.’ Klara watched as he stood with the help of his cane and turned the box into a table as he had so many times before. ‘Here’s where you put your cards. You stand behind it like so.’

Klara tried it out. ‘There you go,’ he said, smiling his old man’s leprechaun smile. ‘It looks marvelous on you.’

‘Ilya.’ Klara was embarrassed to realize she was crying. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Just use it.’ Ilya waved a hand and hobbled to the back room with his cane – ostensibly to restock the shelves, though Klara suspected he wished to mourn in private. Klara carried the box home in her arms and filled it with her tools: a trio of silk scarves; a set of solid silver rings; a coin purse full of quarters; three brass cups with an equal number of strawberry-sized red balls; and a deck of cards so worn that the paper is flexible as fabric.

Simon knows that Klara is talented, but her interest in magic unsettles him. When she was a child, it was charming; now, it’s just strange. He hopes it’ll fade once they arrive in San Francisco, where the real world will surely be more exciting than whatever’s in her black box.

That night, he lies awake for hours. With Saul’s passing, an old prohibition has lifted: Arthur can run the business, and Saul won’t have known the truth about Simon. How, though, to account for his mother? Simon builds his case. He tells himself that this is the way of the world, the child leaving the parent for adulthood – if anything, humans are pitifully slow. Frog tadpoles hatch in their fathers’ mouths, but they hop out as soon as they lose their tails. (At least, Simon thinks this is so; his mind always drifts in biology class.) Pacific salmon are born in freshwater before they migrate to oceans. When it is time to spawn and die, they journey hundreds of miles, returning to the waters where they themselves were born. Like them, he could always come back.

When he finally sleeps, he dreams he’s one of them. He floats through semen, a glowing coral egg, and lands in his mother’s nest on the streambed. Then he bursts from his shell and hides in dark pools, eating what matter comes his way. His scales darken; he travels thousands of miles. At first, he is surrounded by masses of other fish, so close they brush sleekly together, but as he swims farther away, the pack thins. By the time he realizes they started home, he can’t remember the way to the old, forgotten stream where he was born. He has gone too far to turn back.

They wake in early morning. Klara rustles Gertie awake to say goodbye, then soothes her back to sleep. She tiptoes down the stairs with both suitcases while Simon ties his sneakers. He steps into the hallway, avoiding the plank that always squeaks, and carefully makes his way toward the door.

‘Going somewhere?’

He turns, his pulse leaping. His mother stands in the doorway of her bedroom. She is swaddled in the large, pink bathrobe she’s worn since Varya’s birth, and her hair – usually set in curlers at this time of day – is loose.

‘I was just . . .’ Simon shifts from one foot to the other. ‘Going to get a sandwich.’

‘It’s six in the morning. Funny time for a sandwich.’

Gertie’s cheeks are pink, her eyes wide. A glint of light illuminates her pupils: small knots of dread, shining like black pearls.

A shock of tears springs to Simon’s eyes. Gertie’s feet – pink slabs, thick as pork chops – are squared beneath her shoulders, her body taut as a boxer’s. When Simon was a toddler, and his siblings were in school, he and Gertie played a game they called the Dancing Balloon. Gertie set the radio to Motown – something she never listened to when Saul was home – and blew up a red balloon halfway. They boogied through the apartment, bopping the balloon from the bathroom to the kitchen, their only mission to make sure it didn’t fall. Simon was nimble, Gertie thunderous: together, they could keep the balloon in the air for whole radio programs. Now, Simon remembers Gertie lunging through the dining room, a candlestick clattering to the floor – ‘Nothing broke!’ she bellowed – and stifles a hiccup of inappropriate laughter that, if released, would surely have morphed into a sob.