The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman Read Free Book Online Page A

Abrams gave her money when she arrived in New York. She met him in his office on Fifth Avenue, an office paneled with dark red wood and with a swivel chair that he turned to face the park.
    She told me that when he turned to her, Mr. Abrams asked her where her sister was. He shook his head when she told him how Zora had not been allowed to board.
    “You were very brave to come alone,” he commended her. But she had not felt brave. She instead felt the weight of her betrayal, as if she had left her only sister for dead. He took some money from a drawer and handed it to her along with a piece of paper with the name of a Rabbi Stephen Wise. He promised he would help get her a job and a place to stay.
    The rabbi got her on her feet, setting her up with a seamstress on the Lower East Side, where she worked for twenty-five cents an hour sewing flowers to the brims of black felt hats. She saved what little money she could after paying her landlady for the room she shared with two other girls from Austria, in a vain hope of bringing her parents and sisters over one day. In the beginning, there were letters from them, ones that arrived with thick black lines applied by a censor. But eventually, after the war had begun in Europe, her letters began to be returned to her unopened. She heard her roommates repeat vague rumors of concentration camps and transports, hideous things she couldn’t possibly believe to be true. Gas and ovens, one girl even told her. But that girl, a Pole, was prone to drama. There could be little truth in her stories. Amalia told herself that girl was mad.
    She grew even thinner than she was before. So thin you could see right through her skin. Her hands began to bleed from working with a needle and thread so many hours, and her eyesight grew poor. She almost never went out, except to the library, where she practiced reading English, still saving every penny she made to fund her family’s future passage. That first day I met her there, I asked if I could take her to Café Vienna, a hole in the wall on the corner of West Seventy-sixth and Columbus Avenue. Every night it was filled with a hundred fragmented Jews; each of us had someone we were searching for. People showed photos and wrote names of the missing on matchbook covers. We were all adrift, the living lost, trying to make connections in case someone had heard of someone else who had arrived—who had survived—or who knew something. And when we weren’t shaking a hand of someone who knew a friend of a friend of a friend, we drank whiskey or scotch. Except my Amalia. She only ordered hot chocolate.

     
    So I eventually learned whose faces were in the locket, you see. Even though I never saw them until our wedding night, when she took off the necklace and laid it on our nightstand. I came back from the bathroom while my new wife lay sleeping, opened up the tiny gold circle, and silently peered inside.
    What do you do with black-and-white faces that do not speak but continue to haunt you? What do you do with letters that are returned to you from across the ocean? The dead do not answer their mail, but your wife still sends them letters all the same.
    So I think of what my grandson says about me, that I have no sense of romance.
    Did Amalia and I ever really speak of those we left behind? No. Because if we did, our voices would crack and the walls would crush us with the memory of our grief. We wore that grief like one wears one’s underclothes. An invisible skin, unseen to prying eyes, but knitted to us all the same. We wore it every day. We wore it when we kissed, when our bodies locked, and our limbs entwined.
    Did we ever make love with a sense of vitality, or unbridled passion and lust? It seemed to me that we were both two lost souls holding on to each other, fumbling for some sense of weight and flesh in our hands—reassuring ourselves that we were not simply two ghosts evaporating into the cool blankness of our sheets. We each could barely