14. The Person from Corporate

THE PERSON FROM CORPORATE

I was using the toilet when there was a knock at my door. This was not unusual. At Shady Glen there were always people knocking on my door. The aides to help me shower or bring me pills. Julio to take me to physical therapy. Before she went on bed rest, Etta to drop off sewing. And, now that I was talking, Minna to invite me to walk with her to trivia. And, of course, the boy.

It took me a moment (or many moments) to finish my business, wash my hands, get myself decent. When I came out of the bathroom, someone had made themselves at home in my easy chair.

"Mr. Kravitz," the someone said, "I work for Shady Glen's parent company. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

No niceties. No introductions. And before I could say anything, gestured for me to sit down on my bed. While I did that, she pulled out a folder of papers, saying, "First, I'm going to read you a list of numbers. I'd like you to say them back to me in numerical order. Do you know what that means?"

Did I know what numerical meant? I knew what it meant in three languages.

"Sixteen, forty-nine, eleven, one hundred and two," she said.

I didn't answer. Why would I? What a stupid thing to ask.

"Let's try something else. Can you name these animals?" She held up some large photographs—clearly she hadn't read the part in my chart about me being legally blind. What a nincompoop! Still, had I been able to see them at the time, I'm sure I could have named them. They were pretty common as animals went: lion, rhino, duck. I could also name some rarer animals: chinchilla, mink, crocodile, ostrich, emu, beaver, leopard. Back before it became unfashionable, I used to procure skins and pelts from such animals for coats, purses, and shoes.

"Can you tell me what a banana and a peach have in common?" she asked.

Bananas, with their mealy consistency, I never cared for— still don't—which was unfortunate because Leyla was a big fan of the fruit, with its potassium levels and easy chewability, and sliced them into all her fruit salads. Peaches, on the other hand, are delicious. Like sunshine in a fruit.

"Can you tell me what a blouse has in common with a vest?" she asked.

Oof. That depended on so many things: What kind of fabric were you using? What kind of stitching? What kind of finishing? A blouse, by definition blousy, should have a looser fabric: silk, rayon, chiffon. Anything sturdier, a combed cotton or Egyptian linen, was a shirt in my book. Meanwhile, a vest required some internal structure and a fabric to support it—a wool gabardine, say, or a flannel. I didn't tell her any of this out loud. Because if she didn't know the difference between a vest and a blouse, she was both a fool and a lousy conversationalist!

"I'm going to read you a series of words, and I want you to repeat after me: leg, cotton, school, tomato, white ."

I didn't answer. I heard as she scratched something down with her pen and then said, "Thank you, Mr. Kravitz. This has been most helpful."

Helpful? I failed to see how that was possible, but I was not one to argue. I was just glad to see the end of her.

It might've been the end of me at Shady Glen. Except that when she opened the door to leave, the boy was there, about to knock.

"Oh, I didn't realize Mr. Kravitz had a visitor," the boy said. "I'll come back later."

"No need," I replied. "My guest was just leaving."

"You can talk?" the Person from Corporate asked. She did not sound happy about it.

"If I have something worth saying." I beckoned to the boy. "Do you know the difference between a blouse and a vest?"

"Uh, I think so."

"Well, I happen to know that there are as many differences between a blouse and a vest as there are between a peach and a banana."

"What did you say?" the Person from Corporate asked.

"I said what you said: leg, cotton, school, tomato were the words, I think. The animals you showed me I can't see because I'm legally blind. It says so in my chart. But I'm not mute or brain-dead or any of those things. By the way, the numbers in numerical order are eleven, sixteen, forty-nine, one hundred and two."

"Eleven, sixteen, forty-nine, a hundred and two?" the boy repeated. "Are you two playing a game?"

"A foolish game," I said, "that we just finished with."

"I'm sorry, young man, who are you exactly?" the Person from Corporate asked the boy.

"I'm Alex."

"Are you related to Mr. Kravitz?"

"No. I'm just listening to him."

"Listening to him?"

"Yeah," the boy said. "He's telling me the story of his life."

"Not all my life. Just a few pivotal years." I turned to the woman. "We are up to the summer of 1939, eighty-four years ago if my math is correct," I added, throwing in an arithmetical flourish that thoroughly dispirited her. "And about to get to the first time I told my beloved that I loved her."

"Gross!" the boy muttered under his breath. "There better not be kissing."

"Love is most certainly not gross, and there will be kissing," I told the boy before turning back to the woman. "You see, my hearing is fine. As is my memory. You have any other questions?"

"No," she said stiffly. "I'll move on to the other residents."

After she left, the boy sat down in the easy chair. "Who was that?"

"I have no idea." And I didn't. Not the slightest clue that she was the person corporate had sent to Shady Glen to cover for Etta but also to complete the task Etta had been avoiding, which was to identify two people to move out of Shady Glen and into the Garden. The two names at the top of her list had been the same ones on the top of Etta's list: mine and Dickie's.

Those silly questions I had refused to answer were some kind of test to see if my faculties were intact, and I had failed it spectacularly. Had the boy not walked in, she might've sent me to the Garden. And without any family to complain, who could have stopped her?

Of course, neither the boy nor I knew what he had just saved me from. Much the way that neither you nor I knew that you teaching me to sew or me teaching you German would save both our lives.

Some things you only know in retrospect.

MY GRANDMOTHER, MY BABCI, WAS what mother diplomatically called eccentric and my father less diplomatically called meshuggeneh . Truth was, she was neither. After my father's father died, Babci handed complete control of the store to my father and moved into a rustic stone cottage in a small mountain village. "From now on, I only want to be beholden to the morning sun," she said.

When I was a child, in summer Mother would travel to Paris and Milan to see what the latest fashions were, while Father stayed at work and I went to Babci's. Though my parents thought the house was too basic, too rustic, too goyish—my father wanted to build her a house in Zakopane, the more fashionable mountain town where Jews summered—I thought Babci's cottage was heaven on earth. Nestled in a valley of lakes and meadows, surrounded by fruit orchards, the cottage was simple, but it was the only place I ever felt truly free, and that was thanks to Babci. She didn't care if I ate cake for breakfast or fruit plucked from the orchard for dinner. She let me sleep when I wanted and get as dirty as I wanted. In the country I never had to wear a suit or take a bath, though when I returned home at the end of a summer, Mother would make me soak my hands in water and lye to get the dirt out from under my fingernails.

Those days were over, but I still tried to spend time with Babci each summer. And in the summer of 1939, I convinced Olka to join me.

We set out for Babci's on a perfect August afternoon, meeting at the train station, me carrying one small bag—the country did not require much of a wardrobe—and Olka bearing a trunk.

"What's in there?" I asked, hailing a porter. "A body?"

"Books," she said.

We disembarked in Zakopane and were met by Karl, my grandmother's caretaker, driver, and sometime model. "Josey," Karl said, ruffling my hair, "you are looking well." He cast a glance at Olka and winked at me.

"Josey?" Olka asked.

"My grandmother calls me that."

"Josey," she repeated. From that moment on, she never called me anything else.

On the drive to Babci's cottage, Karl caught us up on all the news: whose mare had just foaled, whose daughters had foaled too soon after marriage. The arrival of the new priest, scandalously young and bringing all the old ladies to mass several times a day. Babci's latest series of paintings, for which she had asked Karl to model naked, until Karl's wife, Sylwia, who cleaned and often cooked for Babci when she forgot to feed herself, suggested that perhaps a loincloth would keep all parties more comfortable.

As we wound along the mountain road, Olka cranked her window down, leaned out, and gulped at the air as if to eat it. "I've never seen a sky so blue. I've never smelled air so fresh."

In no time, Karl pulled off the road and onto the gravel track leading through Babci's orchard. He turned the bend by the enormous alder tree, where the swing I'd spent hours in as a child still hung. Babci's stone cottage was in the clearing beyond.

"We're already here! I look a mess." Olka panicked and pulled a compact from her purse. "Why didn't you tell me? I can't meet your grandmother looking like a ragamuffin."

Through the mirror, I could see that Karl was chuckling.

"Oh no. Do I look that bad?" Olka cried.

"You look fine," I replied.

"Then why is he laughing?"

It was the first, and perhaps last, time I would see Olka look truly scared. It had not been easy convincing her to come with me to the country. We'd had to concoct a lie for her uncle about her going away with a girlfriend for a few days when the store would be closed for the Jewish New Year—never mind that Rosh Hashanah was in September, not August. The harder part was convincing Olka herself. She was worried Babci wouldn't like her. But I knew my grandmother better. And I knew she would love her.

"You look beautiful," I reassured her.

Olka frowned. By then I found even her frowns beautiful. I took her by the hand back into Babci's orchard to give her a moment to calm down. The cherry trees were in full leaf, their fruit long since picked and canned. But the peaches were just starting to blush into ripeness. I pulled two down and offered one to Olka, who shook her head.

Her nervousness gave me the excuse to continue holding her hand as we walked down the gravel path, through Babci's garden of Alpine thistle, to the front door, the top half of which was open, as it always was on warm days. Babci sat at her kitchen table, wearing one of my grandfather's old dress shirts, her hair half up and half down, the picture of a ragamuffin.

"Josey!" she cried, jumping up to embrace me. She was a sparrow of a woman with the grip of a falcon. "Let me look at you." She held me at arm's length, inventorying every little new freckle, every extra pound.

"What happened to your hands?" she asked, tapping the pinpricks.

"I'm learning to sew."

"Why would you learn to sew?" Babci asked.

In nearly every other aspect of our relationship, Olka would be the brave one, by a long shot. This was the lone exception. Babci had not yet seen Olka, cowering in the corner of the room. I had told her I was bringing a friend but had not elaborated.

"Why would I learn to sew?" I asked my grandmother while reaching for Olka. "Because of love."

Babci embraced Olka, calling her bubaleh , a Yiddish term of endearment one would use for a relative. Because that was all it took for my grandmother. If I loved someone, so would she.

We sat around the table and ate warm pear-and-pecan cake while I told Babci how we'd met. Before I had licked up the crumbs from my plate, Babci announced that she needed to paint Olka. Now. She dragged her into the garden to find the perfect place to pose her. I didn't see her for the rest of the afternoon. By dinner they were talking excitedly about books and art and philosophy and economics, like old friends.

By the second day Olka was spending as much time with Babci as she was with me. Her books went unread. The days flew by in a blur of ease, and before I knew it, it was time to return to Krakow. On our last morning, I arranged for us to take a sunrise hike. But when I went to fetch Olka from her bedroom, it was empty. I found her in the orchard, with Babci.

"I thought we were going for a hike," I said.

"Sorry." Olka gestured to my grandmother, who held her paintbrush between her teeth as she scrutinized the canvas. "She insisted."

"Babci, I told you I had something planned for us this morning."

"But, Josey," she replied, putting the paintbrush down. "This light is so perfect."

"You've said that every morning."

"Well, today it is most perfect. And you're leaving. It's my last day with her."

I looked at Olka beseechingly. She shrugged and smiled, unable to resist my grandmother.

I had planned the morning so well. The meadow we would walk to. The tree we would stand under. The flowers I would pick before I asked her to be my wife. But as I was about to learn, life doesn't bend to you; you bend to it.

"Fine," I muttered, and walked up to the stool Olka was perched on.

"Josey, you're in my way!" Babci said crossly.

I got down on one knee.

Olka gasped.

"Must you do this now?" Babci grumped. "The light is waning and it's your last day."

"Exactly. It's our last day," I said to my grandmother before turning back to Olka. "But I don't want it to be. I want every day to be like this, with you. I want to grow old with you and rise to the occasion with you and—"

Behind me came Babci's heavy sigh. "Well, where's the ring?" she asked.

"I don't have one yet."

"This is not a very well-thought-out proposal," Babci scolded.

"It was!" I replied. "I packed champagne and apricots. But then you stole Olka."

Babci twisted a paint-smudged opal ring off her finger. "You can get her a proper one back in Krakow. I'll send you to Maurice Kaplovitz. He'll give you a nice deal."

Babci placed the ring in my palm and I turned back to Olka, taking both her hands in mine. "Will you marry me?" I asked.

Without hesitation, she said yes.