When Max left, Lizzie nosed around online. She looked up an old law school classmate, Jonathan Bookman, who she knew had moved to L.A. She saw that his firm had a small appellate department. She was thinking of writing him, to see if he wanted to meet for coffee, when her phone buzzed.
“It’s a miracle that I can even call you,” Rose said. “My phone has been tied up all morning. Bob: calling and calling.”
Bob. His name alone put Lizzie on edge. “What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “I haven’t been inclined to pick up the phone and speak with him.”
“You should, you know,” Lizzie said, breathing a little more easily.
“In due time. First, I wanted to apologize to you.”
“You don’t need to.” It wasn’t Rose’s fault, but still, it was reassuring to hear.
“Well, he was my guest. It was my fault that he was there. What he said was unconscionable and presumptuous, not to mention awful. He cannot blithely throw out theories like that.” Rose’s gravelly voice slowed. “I am sorry. It must have been very painful for you. But I am also calling to ask you a favor,” she added after a beat.
Rose barely said hello to Lizzie after she opened the door, and climbed on the stepstool in the hall. She stretched to adjust a thick strip of blue painters’ tape.
“What are you doing? You’re making me nervous,” Lizzie said. “Why did you ask me here if you’re just doing it yourself?”
“I’m putting up the tape; you’re doing the hard work of hanging the masks. I’ve never fallen yet.”
“That,” Lizzie said, “is not particularly reassuring.”
Soon enough Lizzie was the one climbing up, and before long her father’s masks were affixed to the wall. They looked good: the smaller one was a half bird, half reptile made out of a chalky-white wood. The larger one was also carved from wood, but a richer, darker color, and had a more stylized look, with an elongated nose and sidelocks hanging down (peyot, Joseph called them) where ears should be. Lizzie had paid little attention to the masks when they had been at her father’s house, and was dismissive of them when she had (Of course the only pieces of non-Western art he has are African masks, she could remember telling Claudia, such a cliché), but now she was struck by their delicate artistry.
Soon Rose made strong coffee that she topped off with cream. She served it in finely etched, pale green porcelain teacups that seemed at odds with the more utilitarian surroundings of her small living room. “Thomas bought them for us,” Rose said, even though Lizzie hadn’t asked. “They reminded him of home.”
“They’re beautiful.” And they weren’t the only beautiful things Lizzie noticed today. Above the club chair where Rose sat hung a framed stretch of silky blue-and-purple material. It featured a lovely pattern of birds, some perched on branches, others swooping through the air, wings outstretched.
“Not that he had china like this at home,” Rose was saying. “He didn’t come from money.”
“Where was Thomas from?”
“Brighton,” Rose said. “Do you know it? A seaside town, famous for its pier and promenade. His father worked for years maintaining some of the rides on the palace pier. He could be difficult. By the time I met him, his wife—Thomas’s mother—had passed away. He wasn’t particularly happy that Thomas was dating a Jewish girl. I remember he was trying to buy something on the black market, a television maybe, and he couldn’t get it. He blamed the Jews, of course. Everyone used to say that the Jews—Spivs, they called them—controlled the market. ‘You people love your money, don’t you?’ I remember him telling me the first time we met.”
“Wow,” Lizzie said. “A real charmer.”
“It wasn’t all that unusual then, his dislike of Jews. The fact that people get nostalgic for the time after the war amazes me. I love England, but it was a tough time, all around.”
“I would have just thought, after the war—” Lizzie didn’t finish. How could people blame Jews then, after everything they had been through? It wasn’t so long ago, and yet it felt light-years away from the world that she had grown up in. On the Westside, even her non-Jewish friends knew about seders, held forth on their favorite bagels and Woody Allen films. Whatever anti-Semitism there was (and she wasn’t naive enough to think there wasn’t any), was rarely spoken out loud, at least not directly to her. “So what happened when you got married?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Rose asked, frowning.
“I just meant—in terms of holidays, that sort of thing,” Lizzie said, already wishing she hadn’t. “Did you celebrate Jewish stuff, or . . . ?”
“I barely celebrated Jewish holidays with my family in Vienna. Marrying Thomas, a lapsed Anglican, didn’t change that. And you?”
“Me?”
“What are your religious beliefs?” There was decided arch in Rose’s tone.
“Oh. Well. We were major-holiday Jews: You know, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover. My father loved the seders. That was about it,” Lizzie said. She thought of the synagogue on the Venice boardwalk, the comfort she found there, but she couldn’t imagine telling Rose. How could she explain the consolation she felt? A prayer did that for you? she could imagine Rose saying.
“Have you gone through his things?” Rose was now asking. “That’s one of the hardest parts.”
“It was hard. I couldn’t—my sister did most of it.”
“And he had a lot of stuff,” Rose looked at her and there was sympathy in her gaze.
Lizzie took a long pull of her coffee, trying to steady herself. “Yes; we’re lucky, though. We have so many great things. He left me a Julius Shulman photograph—do you know his stuff?”
“Shulman! Of course. One of his nieces was a student of mine, years ago. Is it the photograph of the Case Study house?”
Lizzie shook her head. She knew the Case Study house, of course: Shulman’s most famous photograph, a nighttime shot of two well-dressed women coolly chatting inside a brightly lit modern house, cantilevered over the dark spread of Los Angeles below. Up until several years ago, you could still buy prints of it, but Joseph hadn’t been interested. Why would I want something that everyone else has? Lizzie could remember him saying. “No, it’s of downtown, the old Department of Water and Power building.” Less known but no less gorgeous: a haunting black-and-white photograph of a reflecting pool beside the office building, the sharp lines of downtown reflected in the water, the sky a moody knitted collection of clouds. It reminded Lizzie not of the L.A. that she grew up in, but something more classical, distant. “He bought it years ago, from Shulman himself.”
“Really?”