Textile Page 7

  The two girls had been on their way to New York, to spend their last week there. Hagit just wanted to pass through Ithaca, because she was a bookworm addicted to useless knowledge. She had read in the thick guide book that they had bought at the beginning of their trip, which was already tattered with use, that little Ithaca was full of secondhand bookshops, and she wanted to pick up a few classics. Her English was excellent, much better than Bahat’s, even though she had never lived in an English speaking country.

  For some reason Hagit was interested in the history of the United States, and at this point in the conversation she explained to Madeleine that in the past Ithaca had been called the city of sin, and even Sodom, because in its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, all kinds of lowlifes had lived there. Only after the Civil War between the North and South did the licentious town become a place of refinement, education, and beauty, with a highly developed community life, churches, and a great awareness of the importance of education in the life of the individual and the town. Ithaca’s educational institutions, especially Cornell University, were well-known today all over the world.

  As far as Hagit knew, Bahat’s lover, Randall McPhee, a good-looking guy with long, curly hair, was going to study at Cornell University, science or Italian, after graduating from college with distinction.

  “What does the place look like?” asked Madeleine.

  “It’s a beautiful place. Lots of atmosphere. There’s a big lake with a stormy river running out of it. Huge waterfalls. Lots of green. It’s very cold in winter. Randall promised your daughter she wouldn’t be cold. But there’s something strange about the place. It’s hard to explain. Have you ever heard of Rod Serling?”

  “No.”

  “Do you watch The Twilight Zone on television?”

  “Sure,” said Madeleine, who saw everything there was to see on television.

  “It’s he who wrote the script for the series, and he based it on the atmosphere there.”

  “What do you say!”

  “Do you know Nabokov?”

  “The writer?”

  “He taught at Cornell.”

  “And what did you say was Bahat’s boyfriend’s name?”

  “Randall. It’s a Southern name. The family is originally from Texas. You don’t know how hard I tried to persuade her to come back to Israel and not to stay in that place, and with a Texan too. Look, Mrs. Segal, your daughter slept with a lot of men in America, and when she met Randall I thought it was just another fling. I didn’t know it was eternal love.”

  “Eternal love?” asked Madeleine.

  “That’s what your daughter said.”

  “Do you think they’ll get married?”

  “I’m sure they will,” said Hagit.

  “Do you think I should go there and try to persuade her to come home?”

  “I can’t really see the point, Mrs. Segal. I tried everything. Your daughter’s head over heels in love with him. And you know her. There’s nothing anyone can do. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and come home, and maybe not. But I promise you that I’ll come and visit you sometimes,” she said when she spotted a tear in Madeleine’s right eye.

  “I haven’t even got the money for a plane ticket. And I don’t want to go there and impose myself on them. Reudor took everything, everything.” Now the tears were streaming down her face.

  Hagit stayed in the little apartment on Shimoni Street for another half-hour and ate dried fruits past their sell-by date. She didn’t have anything encouraging to say to Madeleine, and so she promised her again that she would come and visit her once a month. This promise brought no consolation, especially since her daughter’s traveling companion forgot about her promise and failed to keep her word.

  MADELEINE SANK into profound melancholy with fits of apathy, and spent the rest of her life watching television, which improved a lot over the years. The number of channels rose from one to two, and then to many, and together with this expansion the interchannel competition increased as well. Madeleine put on a lot of weight, and needless to say, she no longer did any twists or stretches, and standing on her head was obviously out of the question, even against a wall. Her head could no longer bear the weight. Things worked out well for Shoham in Eilat, she completed a course in deep-sea diving, talked all the time about corals and coral reefs, and said that when she had a daughter she would call her Coral. On the rare occasions when she came to visit her mother, she noticed that the thin, supple woman had turned into an overweight couch potato. She tried to talk her into moving to Eilat to be close to her, but she knew there was no chance. She would not move from that couch until her dying day.

  6

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SIXTIES, STANLEY AND SAMANTHA McPhee, Randall’s parents, came to Ithaca from a little town in Texas, because they wanted to give their children a good, Northern, enlightened education, without the oppressive complexes of the history of the South. They didn’t want their children to grow up with inferiority complexes, and to have to change their southern accent whenever they met anyone from the North and encounter forgiving, patronizing looks.

  After years of practice in the prestigious town, Stanley and Samantha succeeded in almost completely effacing their accent, and planned that the next generation, headed by Randall, would bury it forever.

  Stanley and Samantha wanted to invest in the northern branch of the McPhee family, and so they wanted five children, including Randall. But the only child born to them was Randall, because six or seven times Samantha miscarried in the third month of her pregnancy.

  The doctors in the Woman’s Health Center in Ithaca could not explain why such a healthy woman was unable to bring her pregnancies to term. And the doctors in New York they consulted for a second opinion couldn’t explain it either.

  THE FAMILIES OF BOTH Stanley and Samantha McPhee (née Griffith) were members of AHS (American Hibiscus Society), and in Texas where they lived, the members of these families were considered fanatics on the subject. After their day jobs they devoted themselves to breeding improved new strains of the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, and to inventing other exotic strains, in shades of near-black or pure white, with hearts that changed color three times over the summer.

  Stanley and Samantha had met at a big exhibition of new hibiscus strains, and fallen in love.

  When they moved to Ithaca, they took with them a few fine rare strains for their large garden, but most of them died in the first frost of November.

  Samantha was furious with her new husband for not thinking about it in advance and not setting up a hibiscus hothouse equipped with the heaters and humidifiers required for a tropical plant originating in Hawaii.

  In spite of her pregnant state, she carried the big pots containing the surviving bushes into the house, and instructed her husband to set up the above-mentioned hothouse in the big backyard and equip it with everything required.

  Setting up the hothouse and operating it cost the couple a fortune, and in order to pay for it and also to earn a living, they opened a florist shop in downtown Ithaca, and next to it a secondhand bookstore. They called the florist shop Some Flowers and the bookstore Book Report. The income from the two stores minus the high costs of the hothouse provided the couple and their son Randall with a good living, but they still felt an inexplicable emptiness.

  Accordingly they threw themselves heart and soul into a purpose—Samantha into Randall, and Stanley into the search for a hibiscus unlike anything ever seen before: as blue or black as possible, with a psychedelic heart.

  RANDALL MCPHEE KISSED Bahat Segal for the first time among the strange blooms produced by his father Stanley. Two days later Bahat drove her friend Hagit to the Syracuse airport to fly to New York City and from there to Israel. They didn’t speak the whole way.

  Randall’s parents weren’t crazy about their only son’s choice and stayed aloof. Bahat wasn’t bothered. After her alternative childhood in Shimoni street in the green suburb of Ramat Aviv, and in San Francis
co, she was a girl full of self-confidence and she knew very well how to get along on her own, and she even took a historical masochistic pleasure in the stupid condescension of her Presbyterian mother-in-law.

  Her father-in-law, Stanley McPhee, admired Richard Nixon with all his heart and soul, and a portrait of Nixon went on hanging in their home even after the Watergate scandal broke out. Bahat saw that her in-laws were hardcore Republicans, and nevertheless she went to study botany at Cornell University because she thought, who knows, perhaps one day she would succeed in creating new strains of hibiscus, to the delight of Stanley and Samantha, leading to the fall of the interracial barrier that Bahat actually did her best to encourage: she saw it fitting to begin many critical remarks about their thinking and way of life with the words, “We Jews . . .”

  Bahat did well in her studies, and got into the subject of the hibiscus as if there weren’t any other flowers in the world. Even though she found botany rather boring, she completed her first degree in two years. At the same time exactly, Randall completed his BA in Latin and Italian, and planned to get out of the hibiscus business to set up as a translator of these languages into English.

  At the end of these two years, during which she had also worked in the family stores, Bahat switched to zoology, where she found herself far more than in botany because everything was more dynamic and dramatic.

  Her master’s she did on arthropods, and her doctorate on the Nephila, weavers of the strongest webs in the world. Her sister Shoham had recovered from her arachnophobia by the time she completed her army service and the two of them corresponded, thus Bahat learned about Shoham’s success as a midwife on the coral reef in Eilat, where she had even developed a new technique.

  Two daughters were born to the mixed-race couple Randall and Bahat: the first was called Sara, and the second Ruth—two names which did not clash with either religion or descent, so that the girls wouldn’t have identity problems either in the United States, North or South, or in Israel, if and when they ever decided to go back, even if only on a trip to discover their roots.

  Obviously the girls received the best education in the world, thanks to the excellent educational system in the town which their grandparents migrated to for precisely this reason. They were both very spoiled, too much so in Bahat’s opinion, but she didn’t really have a say in the matter because Samantha took over Sara and Ruth as if they were her own daughters, and Bahat knew that even if she wanted to go back to Israel with the girls, they wouldn’t cooperate with her because of their grandmother.

  AFTER TEN YEARS of marriage, on her thirty-first birthday, Bahat caught Randall on a table in the family hothouse next to one of big heaters, screwing Emily Boston, his first love from the age of fourteen. The two of them had not anticipated her arrival, since Pa had gone to rest and Bahat was supposed to be in the store helping Ma, or at most, sitting at home and reading an academic article about capillary physiology.

  Later, Bahat discovered that Randall had returned to the bosom of Emily Boston soon after Ruth was born, in other words the affair had been going on for nearly seven years.

  Randall promised Bahat that he would stop seeing Emily, but he was wasting his breath, because Bahat wanted a divorce, and Randal married Emily Boston.

  After the divorce, Randall and Emily Boston moved to Boston, to a two-hundred-year-old house overlooking the river, where the plumbing kept breaking down and the repairs cost a fortune.

  Randall’s parents stayed in Ithaca until the day they died, which was not long ago, one after the other, and they saw it fit to leave their house to their granddaughters, but until the girls reached the age of twenty-one, their mother could do whatever she liked with it.

  Ostensibly Bahat could have gone back to Israel with her daughters, who had since understood that she was their real mother and they had better listen to her, but Bahat was deep into her research on the Nephila, funded by the Ithaca Municipality, Cornell University, the Pentagon, and the French Ministry of Health. This being the case, the girls went to college, one to study mathematics and the other fractal geometry, and they lived in a rented apartment, while downtown Bahat became acquainted with her loneliness. She operated the stores from a distance, by means of hired workers, and to tell the truth she didn’t really care about the business anymore, as long as they brought in what was expected of them every month.

  In those sad days a Reform synagogue called Tikkun v’Or was opened in Ithaca, and Bahat found some consolation in it, especially in the Kabbalat Shabbat at the beginning of the Sabbath and the Havdalah at the end, even though the latter was sometimes held before the Sabbath was actually over. She liked singing the prayers without an American accent and in a loud voice, so that all the Reform Jews would hear and learn.

  MCPHEE’S MAIN ACHIEVEMENT with the golden orb weavers to date was the doubling and tripling of the number of spinning glands on the abdomen on the female spinner, and she had even interfered with the control mechanism of the gene, forcing the female Nephila spiders to spin more and more, faster and faster.

  She worked day and night to increase the spinning rate, but she devoted her weekends to attending services at Tikkun v’Or, and recently she had even spoken to one of the regular worshippers, an architect by profession who had taken part in designing the synagogue, about saying a prayer to the Divine Presence for the wellbeing of her daughters and the success of a very important experiment, without going into detail about it due to the highly confidential classification of the project.

  Now the arachnologist McPhee stood in the arrivals hall of the Syracuse Airport, holding a yellow cardboard sign on which was written with a black marker in Hebrew “Irad Gruber,” with a drawing of a spider underneath it, spinning its web from the last r in “Gruber.”

  She was wearing her best clothes and her hair had been dyed to the roots, because she wanted their meeting to be something big.

  She was worried about the identification. Not that she was afraid of espionage or some kind of swindle, she just wanted to identify the Israeli as quickly as possible and drive him home with her so he could rest, the guy must be asleep on his feet.

  He had sent her his photograph by email, but photographs can be misleading.

  7

  BUT WHEN THE TIME CAME, BAHAT HAD NO DOUBT AT ALL. She would have recognized him even if he had arrived on a Jumbo Jet instead of the little blue American Airlines plane. He advanced toward her, full of aches and pains, barely able to carry himself and his briefcase, dragging the medium-sized wheeled suitcase behind him. Bahat threw the placard with his name on it into the litter bin, walked straight up to him, and said in Hebrew:

  “Shalom, shalom, welcome. Give me your case, you look exhausted. Soon everything will be all right, don’t worry.”

  Gruber looked at her with an astonishment that embarrassed her. What had he expected? she asked herself.

  They shook hands and felt a mutual aversion, stemming from the fact that they were strangers after all, but then, as if in response to a signal agreed upon in advance, they both began behaving according to accepted norms of a business meeting. Communication which was ostensibly personal, but on the most general and boring level.

  “Boy, am I exhausted,” replied Gruber, and noticed that she had dyed her hair, even her scalp was brown, “I feel as if I’m on my last legs.”

  “Everything will be all right,” said Bahat, and took over the job of dragging the wheeled suitcase, too. She tried to match her pace to his, which was slower than hers. “You have nothing to worry about. You can relax after all the tension of the journey.”

  “My problem is my back,” Gruber informed her, “I think that my entire spine is dislocated.”

  “We’ll see what we can do about it,” said Bahat and smiled at him.

  Naturally they got a bit lost, because even though Bahat had written down exactly where she had parked her car, and also the color of the row where it was parked, she had lost the note with all these important details on it. And s
o the inevitable moments followed, during which she stood still and felt the familiar foolish feeling while she searched miserably for the lost note, even the color of which she had suddenly forgotten. While not yet not admitting to herself that she was becoming sclerotic even before reaching the age of fifty, she let out an impatient breath and shook her head in a gesture of annoyance with herself because on no account did she want to expose her sclerosis to the visiting scientist. Luckily, in the end she found the note, in the back pocket of her jeans, the pocket in which she had kept important things as a child and as a girl in the army. She thanked some historical self and changed her mood completely, from nervous embarrassment to something new and challenging, and by the time they reached her beautiful car she was in high spirits and filled him in on the doubts she was having at that very moment: whether to take him home first and then to the masseur, or first to the masseur and then home. In the end she decided on her own initiative, since at that moment in time Gruber was simply passive. He wasn’t interested, he wasn’t listening to her, and she decided that while he was getting a massage, she would take the briefcase and the suitcase home. It wasn’t far, it was all downtown.

  IN THE CLEAN and freshened up car (for she had washed it that same day and thrown out all the rubbish that had accumulated on the back seat), she told him that lately she had been forgetting things and that she was worried.

  Her Hebrew sounded strange to him. Something about the accent seemed wrong. Her r was a little too pronounced, perhaps to hide the American r she had picked up. Her voice jarred on him too. He didn’t listen to what she was saying, and instructed himself to remain passive and hope for the best. This was the category of mental activity demanded of him. And the decision enabled him to sink into himself.