The Matchmaker's Gift(44)

“Ms. Morgan has already told me that, but I’m afraid I can’t do anything to change her decision. I’d be happy to speak to your lawyer…”

“I don’t have a lawyer. That’s why I called you.”

“As sympathetic as I am to your situation, it isn’t appropriate for us to be talking—”

“Did Evelyn tell you why she wants to divorce me?”

Abby’s muscles forgot that she had stretched them. Her twenty-six-year-old body felt eighty-five. She didn’t want to be speaking with Evelyn’s husband. She didn’t want to know any more personal information. And yet, as much as she didn’t want these things, she felt powerless to end the conversation. When she didn’t answer, Michael Gilbert continued.

“Evelyn is going blind. Or, at least, she thinks she is. She refuses to consult with a doctor. She’s convinced she has the same eye disease as her father, and she says she won’t put me through what her family endured. She doesn’t want to be dependent on me. She doesn’t want me to see her helpless.”

Abby remembered the look on Evelyn’s face when she asked her to read the summons. Evelyn was embarrassed to be asking for help. It didn’t matter that Abby pretended not to notice—–Evelyn’s humiliation had filled the room.

But then again, so had her feelings for her husband. Their mutual ardor was a palpable thing, and because Abby had felt it, she could not forget it. It was in the thickness of Michael’s voice when he pleaded with Evelyn to come home; it was in the way Evelyn bent toward her husband, like a flower bending toward the sun; it was in the radiance emanating from them both when the light from the window enveloped them.

“Ms. Silverman? Are you still there?”

Abby cleared her throat. “Yes, I’m here. As much as I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Gilbert, I don’t see how this changes anything.”

“Couldn’t you try speaking to Evelyn? Convince her to slow things down a bit? Suggest she see a doctor at least, to make sure she isn’t making a terrible mistake?”

Abby tried to imagine how Diane would have responded if Michael Gilbert had called her instead. Diane would have said, I cannot help you or You’re out of line or Evelyn is my client, Mr. Gilbert, not you. She would have said, I’m a lawyer, not a therapist or How dare you ask me to do something like that. She would have been indignant; she would have been furious. Diane would have already hung up the phone.

But Abby was still holding the receiver to her ear, thinking of the way her mother’s fingers had trembled when she pulled the legal papers from the process server’s envelope. Almost fourteen years had passed since that day, but Abby hadn’t forgotten her mother’s nail polish color—Toasted Almond, it was called, and her mother had never worn it again.

Abby wondered what Michael Gilbert would remember from today—the day he learned that love could be papered over like a wall with a few short paragraphs of boilerplate language and one signature line on a clean white page. To a man who wrote poetry, the realization that such lifeless words could wreak such havoc must have been all the more painful to bear.

Abby’s mother had known divorce papers were coming, and Michael Gilbert had known it, too. Both of them had been shaken to the core despite not being the least bit surprised. Abby rubbed her neck again, but her muscles were stiff and full of knots.

“I’ll try,” Abby whispered. “But I won’t make any promises.”





ELEVEN

SARA




1918

A Drop of Love Sometimes Brings an Ocean of Tears




Sara’s last month of her freshman year was nothing like the eight months that preceded it. After the other girls saw her at the show—collapsing into laughter and dancing with Nathan—they decided she wasn’t such a stick-in-the-mud after all. Sara Glikman, they said to themselves, was finally coming out of her shell.

The truth, Sara knew, was more complicated. From the day she had first arrived at Barnard, she felt guilty about leaving her family behind. While she had a room all to herself, they slept crowded together on tables and cots. While she ate three meals a day that someone else cooked, they haggled every morning for soup greens and eggs. While she studied Shakespeare and scientific equations, their minds were filled from morning to night with the business and burdens of making ends meet.

Sara had gone to college because it was her father’s wish. She had gone because her family had begged her to accept the gift of a grateful, generous man. But her acquiescence did not mean that a tide of remorse had not almost drowned her along the way.

It was one thing for Sara to go away to school. It was another thing, entirely, for her to enjoy it.



* * *



The day after the War Show, Nathan Weisman invited her to the Copper Kettle Tearoom on Amsterdam Avenue. In the light of day, he was as much of a gentleman—an edel mensch—as the night before. When Sara couldn’t decide between cake or pie, he asked the waitress to bring her both.

He wanted to hear Sara’s “life story,” so she told him about the steamship to New York, her sister and brothers, and her father. She told him about Mr. Tunchel’s pushcart, the lemon-ice man, and New Year’s prayers on the bridge. She did not spare him the unsavory details of her crowded apartment, her noisy neighbors, and the one shared bathroom down the hall. The only part of her life that Sara left out was the gift she’d been given for making matches. She did not want to lie about who she was, but that was the one thing she could not say.