The Gown(109)

VéL D’HIV

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

SPRING 1997

She couldn’t remember, now, how she’d learned that the embroideries would be exhibited in Canada. Most likely she’d heard it on the news. Their coming to Toronto was nothing short of a miracle, for she’d wanted to see them for years and years, and it had been hard to wait out the crowds. She hoped the gallery wouldn’t be jam-packed today.

Ann paid her entrance fee, politely declined the suggestion that she become a member, and made a beeline for the gallery where Miriam’s embroideries awaited her. According to the pamphlet she’d been given, the exhibition was set up as three separate spaces. First was the historical context for the embroideries; this she bypassed, for she already knew more about Miriam than any potted history could tell her.

The second space was set up like a small theater, with a short film that repeated every ten minutes. This, too, held little interest for her, particularly since Miriam herself had not been interviewed.

She was rushing, she knew she was, but she could come back to all of this later, after she had seen the embroideries. She walked on, drawn to the final room, and found herself before the first panel. Un d?ner de Chabbat, the one Miriam had first imagined while sitting at Ann’s kitchen table fifty years before.

Ann had seen pictures, of course, but nothing could have prepared her for the actual thing, so vivid and vibrant that the people it depicted seemed more real, somehow, than any of the strangers who surrounded her. She stood and stared, and suddenly she realized that she was staring at her own face. Her younger self, no more than twenty-five, her hair the color of marmalade, her skin unlined.

She lost track of how long she stood there, her heart alternately seized by joy and grief. Her friend had thought of her long after they had been parted. Miriam had not forgotten her.

She circled the room, admiring the other panels for long minutes, and when she was done she returned to Un d?ner de Chabbat, and only after every detail of it was fixed in her mind did she step back and away.

What would she say to Miriam, if ever she had the chance to speak with her again?

She would tell her friend that she had been happy. Her daughter was happy, too, and was married to a good man, and she had a daughter of her own.

She would tell Miriam about Heather, her only grandchild, and the light of her life. A single smile from that child was worth more than everything Ann had left behind, and she had never, not once in all the years since, ever had cause to regret what she had done.

So little remained of her life before Canada. A few pieces of her mother’s rose-patterned china, the cup and saucer from her nan, a handful of photographs, the heather in her garden. The embroidery samples, still packed away, unseen and unloved. She had never shown them to her daughter, for they would have provoked questions she couldn’t, even now, even after half a century, bear to answer.

She would leave them to Heather. As soon as she got home, she would take the box down from the top shelf of her linen cupboard, she would look through the samples one last time, she would let herself remember, and then she would put them away for good. Only this time the box would have a label. For Heather.

Outside the sun was shining and the air smelled like spring, even in the middle of the city. It was a beautiful day, the first day of spring, and soon the Balmoral heather would be in bloom.

She had a family who loved her, and she had made something of herself. She had survived. She had been happy. She was happy, now, in this sunshine, on this spring day, with the surprise and delight of Miriam’s embroideries a delectable secret to savor and cherish.

It was enough.

Miriam

October 2, 2016

Nearly everything was ready for dinner. With the help of Rosie, her home help who came in every morning, Miriam had polished her silver and rubbed the dust from her best wineglasses, and they had spread her best cloth upon the table. The cloth she had embroidered for the first Rosh Hashanah she and Walter had celebrated together. There were stains here and there, and her children often said she should hand it over to a museum to be cleaned and preserved for posterity, but in this she ignored them.

Most days she tried not to dwell on how much she missed him. She thought of Walter constantly, and when she was alone in the flat, she often spoke to him as if he were still at her side, listening as attentively as he had always done. Their life together had been good, and long, and she was very nearly certain she would see his face again.

Sometimes, in the early morning, in the long, quiet minutes between her dreams and the day, she let herself imagine that moment. He would be waiting for her, his shoulders stooping a little, his hair bright against the sun, and his cold, pale eyes would be ever so warm for her. And she would reach out to him—

But today was not a day for sadness. It was the beginning of the new year, and soon her children and grandchildren would be arriving for dinner, all of them including Daniel, who had come home for the holidays though he’d moved to New York City only two weeks before. It had been selfish of her to insist, but it was, she felt, her prerogative as matriarch.

Her guests would bring most of the food, excepting of course Grand-Mère’s Friday-night chicken, which Rosie had helped her make the day before. It wasn’t the most traditional dish to serve at Rosh Hashanah, but the prunes were sweet, as were the memories it evoked, and it was Hannah’s favorite.

Hannah was the youngest of her great-grandchildren, and she was little enough to still want hugs and kisses and cuddles in Walter’s big old Morris chair by the sitting room windows. When Hannah arrived they would sit in the Walter chair, as the child liked to call it, and they would speak in French together, and Miriam would tell her about Rosh Hashanah when she, Mimi, had been a little girl long, long ago.