For a moment Constantina’s whisper filled Ester’s ears, an ocean in a seashell. My own mother sang it to me as she rocked me through the stormy passage to England, Ester. My mother sang to me. “I know your father’s soul. He is a great man. You were born, Constantina, from a great love.”
“She said she felt her true father’s goodness, though he was careworn. She said that standing between my mother and this man was like standing in the current of a river. She said it was a soft, endless . . . push, which slips you off your feet if you’re not anchored to something.”
Mary was nodding; this was a tale of love such as she’d hoped to hear.
It seemed to take a moment for her to perceive that Ester had fallen silent.
“And then?” Mary said. “He took them in, didn’t he?”
Ester turned from the mirror. Constantina’s long-ago words thrummed in her head. And I hated him for not breaking the world apart so he could be with us.
“No,” Ester said.
When she looked back at the mirror, she saw that Mary’s expression had curdled. “Didn’t he know the danger for them? In Lisbon?”
“My grandmother chose not to tell him.”
“But that’s—” Mary stopped, unable to stitch words to this absurdity. After a moment she said, simply, “Why?”
“My mother herself could never understand it.”
“Because it can’t be understood, Ester!”
“I know Lizabeta charged her Englishman with all his old promises of eternal love. Yet though the man answered her in the same terms, he shrank from her and spoke of the constraints of his life, and begged time to consider. He even offered money for their support—but this Lizabeta in her pride refused. She said nothing of the seizing of Jews, the priests flaying my grandfather until ribbons of skin danced.”
Ester could still recall Constantina’s voice, sailing high in wonder and bitterness. Why wouldn’t my mother tell him of the danger? Why, Ester? Was she determined to test love to the fullest? But Ester, the world had no stubbornness like hers!
She stood behind me, arms about my shoulders, her heart beating against my back. And her Englishman wept on that street as I’d seen a man weep only at a death, and his eyes filled with the sight of me in my mother’s arms until the seeing harrowed his face, so that he seemed to wane and age.
“My grandmother,” Ester said, “wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny. She said she wished the Englishman’s eyes to see her ever in beauty and joy, and never as something pitiable, for his memory of her was her greatest treasure.”
Mary absorbed this. Then, defiant, she shrugged. “I would tell. And then, my love would save me.” With a vexed expression she returned to work on Ester’s hair, asking only after several moments’ silence, and then sullenly, “What then?”
“Lizabeta and my mother sailed for Lisbon, and the Inquisition.”
“And then?”
“I believe,” said Ester, “my grandmother later had other loves, though not like her Englishman.”
Mary tittered unkindly. “Other loves? Does your rabbi know what manner of lineage he’s taken under his roof?”
Ester raised her head. “I believe so, Mary.”
Mary returned to working the comb.
But with a boldness that startled her, Ester spoke on. “My mother,” she said, “thought herself wiser than her own mother. She left Lisbon, and married my father without affection, because she thought him dull and therefore unlikely to spurn her. Nor did she remain faithful when faithfulness did not suit her. This she confessed to me freely.”
Constantina, in the flickering candlelight.
So you see, Ester, I learned from what befell my mother. I remade my heart. I learned to conduct myself in love so it could not betray me.
Had Constantina believed, on that drunken night in Amsterdam, that she spoke to Ester of love? But there had been no love in her words, only rage. As dawn drew near, bringing to an end those strange candle-lit hours when the gates of her mother’s trust had inexplicably swung open, a stark sobriety had gripped Ester. Solemnly she’d listened to Constantina’s final recital of betrayal, and sealed it into memory.
On my last visit before my mother’s death, Ester, do you know what she dared say to me? She chided me. Can you imagine, Lizabeta chided me for my anger? I, who was nursed on her sorrow. Yet she said she’d not succeeded with me—for she’d hoped to teach me to despise a prison, be it made at the hand of the Inquisition or by my own heart.
I told her it was precisely to avoid a prison of the heart that I acted as I did. I told her: I act such that love will not fail again as it failed us before.
But she shook her silver head as if I were the fool, and not she. She said, “Love didn’t fail, Constantina. Only one love did. It failed because we asked too much of it, he and I. We each, in our own time, asked it to remake the world.”
She spoke as though she wished to burn this new truth into my heart, and in so doing erase the one already burnt there. She said, “I wrote to your true father just before he died, when you were but ten years of age and we were at last safely escaped from Portugal, and I told him all. He’d not known what was happening to us in Lisbon, Constantina. The full truth of our situation hadn’t been told of in England. His reply wept in words. He said he would have done all to help us if I’d but told him. But Constantina, I could not. For love does not set shackles, nor entrap. Nor could I live in his London as his shadow, a woman kept in secret, without him by my side. Don’t you see? It was the very shape of the world that defeated our love. There is no bitterness in my heart. Only sorrow.”
In the dawn-silted room in Amsterdam, Constantina had drained her cup, vexed, and set it carefully on the table. She stared at it as though confused. Then, fiercely, she gripped Ester’s shoulder one final time. I shaped my heart, Ester, so as to be no fool.
Drowsiness and wine must have unmasked Ester for an instant in that reeling room, allowing her emotions to show unbidden. She would always rue this. For Constantina had flinched, as though in the pity on her daughter’s face she’d finally glimpsed the bitter knot of her own spirit.
It was the only time Ester would see regret drain her mother’s cheeks.
Barely six weeks later, the fire.
Samuel Velasquez, turning now on the stair, his dark eyes seeking the door where his wife slept. Racing the racing flames.
Without meaning to, Ester lifted her hand as though to call them both back.
At the sound of Mary speaking her name, she opened her eyes.
“What of your mother?” Mary prompted.
She could not now recall how much she’d spoken aloud. To satisfy Mary she said, simply, “She forgave nothing. Touching the mere hope of a great love misshaped her.”
Her hand trailed in empty air. She lowered it.
In the dressmaker’s glass now, she saw that Mary had finished. Ester’s hair was drawn back elegantly at the front, cascading at the sides. Soft spaniel ears brushed either cheek. A heavy bun weighted the back of Ester’s head.
Behind her stood Mary, hands stilled at her sides.
“There,” Mary said. Her expression was uncertain, as though she’d just been privy to something for which she had no name.
The dressmaker’s shop was silent. They stood on the pedestal.
Mary’s voice was barely a whisper. “Have you loved?”
“No.”
Mary shook her head slowly: nor had she.
Slowly Mary straightened. She looked not at Ester, but at their reflection in the glass. She said, firmly, “We choose what we are, Ester. I choose.” After a moment she added, “And so do you.”
Ester opened her mouth—she wished to argue with Mary: my mother believed herself in control of love, and the error consumed her. Yet her voice was stopped by a craving: To trust desire as Mary did. To reach for love and call it good.
There was a long silence. Mary’s hands rose to tuck an invisible strand of Ester’s hair, and lingered a moment as though in search of another. Yet as the moments passed the motion of her hands grew chary, then stopped altogether—as though she feared to touch for too long something so fascinating and so tainted.
“There,” Mary repeated more lightly, and stepped off the dressmaker’s pedestal.