“When do you think you’ll be able to remove the genutza?” Bridgette pressed.
“Genizah,” Helen said. “And as I explained to Ian over the phone, we don’t yet know that’s what this is. All we know is that the documents include some that are in Hebrew. And”—she drew a deep breath, forced her voice to assume an indifferent tone—“some correspondence between seventeenth-century rabbis.”
Bridgette laughed prettily. “It’s a fact that there were Jews in the building’s early history—my aunt always said so, and the records confirm it. But rabbis?”
Bridgette had the long, tensile body of a dancer and, Helen noted, the habit of arranging herself in her seat rather than sitting in it.
“We don’t know yet,” Helen said very slowly, “whether any rabbis lived here. The papers could have been moved from another location. As for when we can relocate the documents to allow for your renovations, that depends on the condition of the papers. They need to be assessed before they can be safely moved.”
Bridgette shook her head tersely: this was unacceptable. “The Richmond Preservation Council hasn’t forgotten, you understand, that my aunt refused their invitation to make her home part of their annual walking tour. We’ve been ready to do these renovations for over a year, but the council has made things impossible at every turn. Delays of months for the simplest approvals. It’s not as though we want to change anything major”—Bridgette waved her fingers dismissively—“but apparently they’re still hysterical over Orleans House getting bulldozed in the 1920s.”
“Of course, their concern is understandable,” Ian interjected. “We all value the local history.”
Bridgette, her white blouse crisp, a sheer green scarf knotted at her neck, pursed her lips and leaned forward to pour tea. The amber liquid was loud in the silent room. “My aunt lived here alone, and she never added so much as a coat of paint to the place. There’s been a preposterous amount of labor involved in making this house presentable. Any additional delay at this stage would be”—Bridgette stopped stirring her tea for just an instant. Her narrow wrist, with its delicate bottle-green bracelets, was flexed, the small spoon poised midair as though she were trying to choose the precise words with which to warn Helen against any further attempt to thwart her.
“Quite regrettable, really,” Ian finished for her.
Bridgette, displeased, gave her husband a significant look.
And now Helen remembered Ian Easton: a boyish student trying to fit his lanky body at a seminar table that would never suit him. One of those affable young men from a mildly wealthy family, well-liked and serviceable on a rugby field, smart enough to suffice in secondary school but not university. Still, she recalled, he’d labored hard in her class despite his clear lack of talent.
On shelves behind the Eastons were piles of sun-faded leather spines: books that might have been valuable if only they’d received proper care, here and there topped by sloppily stacked design magazines with covers featuring monochromatic furniture and jarring abstract art. One long stretch of shelving was littered with worn paperbacks, doubtless dating from the aunt’s tenure in the house—soon to be discarded, Helen guessed. Helen’s upbringing among her parents’ circle might have been one relentless tutorial in how to categorize strangers in a heartbeat—but she couldn’t deny there were moments when the training was useful. Already she’d taken the measure of Bridgette’s fading old-money family—who, Helen guessed, approved of everything about Ian, except, not that they mentioned it except when drinking, his undeniably middle-class upbringing. They’d be the sort of family that was quite liberal in word, but in deed was unlikely to stray far from its privileged roots. And gallery plans notwithstanding, Bridgette herself didn’t strike Helen as the sort inclined to make sacrifices for art. Perhaps Bridgette was merely keen on the imprimatur of sophistication—or even the income—a seventeenth-century showplace would bring. Somehow, though, Helen doubted that even establishing a successful gallery would quell Bridgette Easton’s restlessness.
Was it the towering height of the windows or simply Helen’s own weariness that made them seem so like children to her? Ian and Bridgette Easton, seated at the narrow table in the downstairs room of their long-awaited inheritance. Unaware that the real treasure in the house might well be the very papers they were so eager to be rid of.
“I’ll begin,” Helen said, “with just one of the many possible explanations for what your electrician uncovered behind that staircase panel.” Bridgette’s face tightened. No matter; pedantry, in this case, might be to Helen’s advantage. She began at the beginning. She explained how the biblical fourth commandment—yes, the one about name of the Lord in vain—had been interpreted in Jewish communities from antiquity to mean that any document that contained the name of God could not be thrown out, but instead had to be buried as a person would be buried (the Eastons’ eyes glazing over at the word antiquity, but Helen was accustomed to this). How synagogues and religious communities, from antiquity onward, stored these document troves, called genizahs, until such time as burial could be arranged. How the richest of these troves contained not only worn-out prayer books and drafts of sermons, but nonreligious material: letters, business ledgers . . . any document at all could qualify, given the traditional Jewish practice of opening all correspondence with the phrase With the help of God.
“The tea,” said Bridgette. “It’s too hot?”
Without raising a hand from her lap, Helen offered a narrow smile. “Soon enough,” she said. As though it were the temperature of the tea that kept her from lifting the delicate cup to her lips, rather than her certainty that the sight of her trembling, tea-spilling hands would give everything away . . . that somehow the Eastons would see in that tremor not only Helen’s ill health but her very heart, beating inside her as it hadn’t in years.
Raising her voice just enough to be commanding, she pressed on, and Bridgette subsided warily. Had the Eastons heard of the Cairo genizah, with its evidence of daily Jewish life going back more than a thousand years, its findings still being sorted by shamelessly possessive scholars though the genizah had been opened in 1896? (The Eastons shook their heads, two reluctant schoolchildren accepting a scolding.) She’d continued, her words rapid, aware she was gaining the upper hand, aware she mustn’t falter. She impressed on them the astonishing good fortune of finding these documents, be they a genizah or some other manner of collection, in the center of the house, rather than in the fluctuating humidity of a basement or the heat of an attic. Explained the durability of flax-based paper, unlike modern wood-pulp paper, with its fatally acidic lignin.
The Eastons exchanged subtle glances as they assessed her: the gray-haired, blue-eyed scholar they’d conjured—perhaps unwisely?—from the university, lecturing them about document conservation while sitting unnervingly still at their table. Hands pressed into her lap, tea untouched.
It was Ian who asked the question Helen had been waiting for, though she hadn’t known in what guise it would arrive. Setting his teacup in its saucer, he lifted his eyebrows slightly as though the question were of no importance to him.
“Will you take the papers to your community, then?” They watched her.