Read Online The Houseguest by Kim Brooks - Free Book Online Page A

figure next to hers.
    â€œI was told there’d be a house here, warm water. A little food.”
    â€œYes,” he said. “My wife is cooking, so more than a little.”
    Her suitcase was light in his hand. The energy of the moment swept him along, making him feel as though he could carry three bags and a trunk on his back. He led her away from the tracks toward the main staircase of the station. When he glanced over his shoulder, she was lingering behind, looking up at the sky. He wondered if maybe a few screws had been shaken loose by whatever trauma she’d endured. Hestopped and waited for her. When she’d caught up, he said, “It’s not far to the house. Nothing’s too far from anything in Utica. We have the mountains nearby. Parks. Even a racetrack. When the horses get too old in Saratoga, they send them here. Really, they plod more than race, but we all enjoy it.”
    She didn’t answer. She didn’t move.
    â€œYou have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” he said.
    She shrugged. “I feel a bit . . . I don’t know the word in English.”
    â€œSay it in Yiddish.”
    â€œI can’t think of it in Yiddish, either.”
    â€œ Tsemisht ? Confused? Exhausted? Uncertain?”
    She gave a weary smile then nodded. Then she did something he was not expecting, something for which he couldn’t have prepared himself. She reached for his hands, took his short, wide fingers with her long, slender ones. They felt smooth, cold, and bloodless, just the opposite of the air around them, which was warm and damp. They reminded him of the metal of the train on which she’d ridden, the steel railing surrounding the deck of the ship that had carried him across the sea more than two decades ago, his own body when he’d first arrived in New York, always cold, always hungry. Were all things that came from that other world cooled to the temperature of the contraptions that carried them? The journey drained youth and hope, the very things it was meant to restore. Why not warmth?
    â€œYou’re very kind,” she said. “I can tell already. A kind man. Imagine it. I didn’t know there were any of you left.”
    â€œI do my best,” he said.
    â€œI’m grateful,” she answered. “The world has not been kind to Ana Beidler.”
    He paused for a moment, absorbing the fact that she was talking about herself. Then he nodded and led her down the steps to the street below.
    WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the Auers’ house, Ana Beidler’s hat was taken and hand shaken by each member of his family almost before she’d walked through the front door. Abe mumbled introductions that were rendered superfluous by his wife and daughter’s boisterous greeting, by Max Hoffman, whose unending smile revealed his unease as much as the sweat on his forehead. Her suitcase was taken upstairs. She was shown to her room to wash up and settle in while everyone else moved toward the dining room to wait.
    For dinner, Irene had prepared a leg of lamb, and alongside the lamb, she’d prepared a roast. For side dishes, she’d prepared carrot tzimmes and cabbage stuffed with rice. She’d prepared a kugel as thick as a brick, and a salad made of beets, and for dessert she baked a rhubarb pie and a chocolate cake. Abe and Irene and Judith and Rabbi Hoffman stood nervously in the parlor as the food sat cooling on the dining-room table. Their guest had gone to bathe. “I must bathe,” was how she put it, following Irene to the spare room. Abe had assumed she meant a twist of the handle and a toss on the face of whatever come from the spigot, but Ana’s definition was more continental, more languorous.
    They sat around the living room waiting, and while they waited, Abe forgot about himself, made his actions mechanical. He smoked a cigarette, poured himself a second glass of cream sherry. Finally, they heard the water drain