he hadn’t yet understood that she had no interest in the extravagant clothes he always bought for her, clothes for a life she didn’t lead.
While he ate, Weisz asked his children questions to which they replied diligently. He knew about Leah’s upcoming recital, and that she was now working on a Liszt transcription of a Bach cantata. Also that one of her music teachers, a Russian who’d taught Evgeny Kissin, had taken a leave of absence and been replaced by another. He asked about the new teacher, where he came from, whether he was good, whether she liked him, and listened to the answers with a gravity that struck me—listened, it seemed, with the suggestion that if his daughter’s answers had implied anything less than her complete contentment, those responsible would have him to answer to, as if, with a single phone call, a dangled threat, he were capable of arranging for the poor new teacher to be sent away, and for the departed Russian, recovering from a breakdown in the south of France, to be forced back into service. Leah went to lengths to assure her father that the new teacher was excellent. When he asked her whether she had plans for the weekend, she said she was going to a birthday party for her friend Amalia. But I had never heard of any Amalia, and in all my time at the house I’d never known Leah to go out to any parties.
There was little of his children in his elongated, sagging features. Or if there had once been, it had been distorted beyond recognition by all that had happened to him in life. His lips were thin, the watery eyes hooded, the veins in his temples lumpy and blue. Only the nose was the same, long, with the high, curved nostrils that were permanently flared. If Yoav and Leah’s auburn hair had come from him it was impossible to say: what was left of his was thin and washed of color, combed back from the high, smooth forehead. No, the burden of his inheritance was not easily detectable in his children’s faces.
Satisfied with Leah’s answers, Weisz turned to Yoav and asked about the preparations for his exams. Yoav’s answers were fluent and polished, as if he were reciting something he had composed in anticipation of such an interview. Like Leah, he made every effort to assure his father that things were going as well as they could, that there was no cause for alarm or worry. Listening to him, I was amazed. I knew perfectly well that Yoav thought his tutor was an arrogant fraud, and that the tutor, in turn, was threatening to put Yoav on academic probation if he didn’t turn in some tangible evidence of the work he claimed to be doing. He lied with grace, without the slightest hint of guilt, and I wondered whether, if the need arose, he could lie like that to me. But worse than that, as I watched Weisz hungrily spoon the soup into his mouth holding the utensil between his long crooked fingers, I was filled with guilt about the lies I’d been telling my own parents. Not only about all of the wonderful things I was supposedly doing at Oxford, but that I was there at all. Exploiting my father’s constitutional inability to pass up a money-saving deal, I made up a story about a cheap method of calling the States using a special phone card. In this way, I’d orchestrated it so that instead of their calling me every Sunday, I called them. They were creatures of habit, and I knew they wouldn’t break from ritual unless something was wrong. To be sure, I called my answering machine on Little Clarendon Street every night. Thinking of them as I sat before Weisz, how they must have waited anxiously by the phone each Sunday morning, my mother at her station in the kitchen and my father in the bedroom, I felt a gnawing regret and sadness.
At last Weisz wiped his mouth and turned to me. A trickle of sweat slid down the hollow in my chest. And you, Isabel? What do you study? Literature, I said. An odd smile cracked across his bloodless lips. Literature, Weisz repeated, as if he were trying to put a face together with a name he knew from long ago.
During the next quarter of an hour Weisz interrogated me about my studies, where I came from, where my parents were from and