what they did, and why I had come to England. At least those were how the questions were worded, but in truth (or so I believed) the words out of Weisz’s mouth were only a code for something else he wished to uncover. I felt as if I were trying to pass a test whose requirements were hidden from me, and struggled for the right answers, feeling that with each fanciful arrangement of the truth I was further trampling the love and dedication of my parents. I had lied to my parents, and now I was lying about them. Weisz took the shape of their representative, the counsel assigned to the poor and downtrodden who can’t be relied on to defend themselves. As we spoke, all the sad and noble furniture in the room fell away, the Bavarian grandfather clock and the marble table, even Yoav and Leah, and all that was left in that cold and cavernous space was Weisz and me, and somewhere, hovering on a higher plane, my wronged and injured parents. He makes shoes? Weisz asked. What kind of shoes? From the description I gave of my father’s business, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Manolo Blahnik came on bended knees to my father when in need of someone to manufacture his most extravagant, complicated designs. The truth was that he produced the uniform shoes for nuns and Catholic schoolgirls in Harlem. As I went on exaggerating my father’s business, imbuing it with glamour and prestige, a memory came to me of an afternoon spent in my grandfather’s old factory, which my father had carried on overseeing until it was run into the ground, and his only choice was to become a middleman between Harlem and the belching factories of China. I remembered how my father had hoisted me up to sit at his giant Herman Miller desk, while on the other side of the wall the machines clattered nervously under his command.
That night I slept in a narrow cot in a small room down the hallway from Leah’s bedroom. I lay awake, and now that I was alone I was overcome first by humiliation, then fury. Who was Weisz to interrogate me, to make me feel I had to prove my worth? What business was it of his who my family was and what my father did for a living? It was bad enough that he cowed his own children into such a pathetic position, rendering them unable to strike out in their own lives. Bad enough that he had succeeded in coercing them into a form of confinement of his own design, a condition they didn’t resist because it was not within the realm of possibility for them to refuse their father. He ruled over them not with an iron fist or a temper, but rather with the unspoken threat, much more haunting, of the consequences of even the slightest discord. Now I had appeared to challenge Weisz’s order, to unbalance the delicate triangle of the Family Weisz. And he had spared no time in making clear that I was wrong if I thought Yoav and I could go about our relationship without his knowledge or consent. What right did he have? I thought angrily, tossing in the narrow bed. He might be able to control his children, but I wouldn’t allow him to bully me. Let him try: I wouldn’t be frightened off so easily.
As if on cue, suddenly the door creaked open and Yoav was on me, coming at me from all sides like a pack of wolves. After we’d finished with every other orifice, he turned me over and forced himself into me. It was the first time we’d done it like that. I had to bite my pillow so as not to scream out at the first thrust. When it was over I fell back asleep against the heat of his body, a deep sleep from which I woke alone. Whatever I’d been dreaming receded, and all I could remember was finding Weisz hanging upside down in the pantry like a bat.
It was almost seven in the morning. I got dressed and washed my face in the child-sized Victorian sink decorated with pink flowers in Leah’s bathroom. Tiptoeing down the hall, I paused in front of her room. The door was ajar, and through it I could see the enormous virginal white canopy bed, a bed as large and majestic as a ship, and thinking of it so