When Joseph brought his young wife Palabra to visit Grandmother, his brother Ned, worried by the warmth and expansion of his chest, avoided his wife Stacey’s eye, and Stacey understood that all eyes, male, female, old, young, were going henceforward to bypass her and settle on this new member of the family.
Palabra, close to thirty, had the figure of a fifteen-year-old, and when not in motion seemed to be always about to move, about to say something. She said, “You’ll find that I can be irritating.” Kissing the top of her teenage sister-in-law Martha’s head, she observed, “That was seven ‘likes’ in a single sentence! Don’t you like,” she continued, “how English uses ‘like’ to ask for a simile, a metaphor, maybe a story?”
“Crikey,” said Stacey humorously.
“What story?” said Martha.
“What do you mean?” Joseph asked his wife.
Palabra said, “What’s it like being married to me?”
“Like being looked up in a perpetual dictionary.”
“A simile!” said Palabra brightly.
Grandmother said, “Someone, fetch me my…what is the name of the—the—the—that I can’t remember the word for—the—that Uncle Paul gave me for my twentieth birthday, best present ever—” She shook her head impatiently. “That I look words up in…”
“Martha, you want to go get Gran’s Roget’s Thesaurus, from next to her bed?” Ned said to his sister.
“Thesaurus!” the old woman said.
“I’m going to go get coffee. Anybody?” Stacey said.
“Oh, please, yes!” said Palabra.
Ned said he needed a drink.
“Is there a Coke?” asked Martha, returning with Grandmother’s volume.
“Thesaurus! My thesaurus,” the old woman said. “There is not another copy like it in the world.”
“Looks like the one you gave me on my birthday,” said Martha.
“Open it and look up a word.”
“World is underlined with pencil,” Martha said. “Like why is worm underlined?”
Grandmother said, “In sixty years, I have never looked up a word without underlining it in pencil.”
“Look up word,” said Palabra.
Joseph said, “Palabra has an altercation about the word word with St. John.”
“With who?” asked Stacey.
“What about?” Ned asked.
Palabra said, “St. John says, In the beginning was the word, which is poetry and too beautiful to understand. Martha and I prefer the story.”
“Me? I don’t know a story.”
“Yes, you do. You know the story that says that there has to be a thing, a something, before there can be a word for it, so God made all the beasts and birds and the herbs of the field to bring to Adam to see what he would call them. Adam said, ‘Wolf, worm’—no, wait, a worm is a creeping thing. He said ‘Wolf, sheep, mouse, lion, zebra…’ Joe, look up how many animals there are in the world.”
Joe took out his phone. “Today there are eight point seven million species, give or take a million.”
“In my story, my midrash,” Palabra said, “Adam named the animals and the birds and might have let the rest go till tomorrow, but that would have been erev the seventh day, and the vegetables hadn’t got their names yet…”
“What is it with your wife and the Bible?” Ned asked his brother in an aside.
Joe said, “She likes the stories.”
Palabra said, “Adam said, ‘Apricocks, dewberries, purple grapes, green figs and mulberries, and of course the lilies in the field,’ and whatever he called a thing that is its name, so when Adam felt his eyes closing and the urge to stretch horizontally on the ground, he said, ‘I’m going to call this feeling tired.’ And a deep sleep fell upon Adam so that God could work on his rib. Here’s where it gets interesting,” continued Palabra. “Before Adam could call what he felt feeling tired, he had to have come up with the words feel, and urge, and stretch, horizontal, ground, on, and the, and and.”
“Adam was an English speaker, I take it?” mocked Ned.
“In my story,” Palabra said, “he mostly speaks the King James English translation. But in Chapter Eleven, on the Tower of Babel…”
“People were discovering charades!” said Stacey looking round for her husband’s approval.
Palabra pressed on, “There, the people were talking the new languages. Joe, how many languages are there in the world? Their mouths were speaking the words that mean the things we feel, we see, we know.”
Grandmother, with her thesaurus on her lap, said, ‘‘But no word that means losing the words I know I know but don’t find in my memory and that my mouth can no longer speak.”
“So what’s it like being married to me?” Joe asked Palabra.
“Like being the woman in the Song of Solomon who charges the Daughters of Jerusalem to let her love sleep.”
“Here we go again,” Ned said.
“And I,” said Joseph, “am like Shahrazad’s husband, telling stories to keep you awake.”
“Hold on there,” said Stacey. “It’s actually Shahrazad who tells the stories.”
“Does she, actually?” Palabra said. “The actual Shahrazad?”
Joe said, “Cut it out,” and patted Palabra’s behind, and she said, “I’m going to try.”
Joe said, “Palabra and I really like each other’s company and conversation.”
“In contrast,” Palabra said, “to liking each other’s conversation unreally. Sorry.”
“So it’s a shame,” continued Joe, “that our natural clocks are set to different hours.”
Palabra said, “Evenings, around nine o’clock, I get like poor Adam after he invented language. My eyes won’t stay open. I fall asleep, so that after a healthy seven hours I naturally wake at four in the morning and then I’m ready, by nine o’clock that night, to turn in…”
“At the hour,” Joe said, “when I am most totally and fully awake…”
“Because the Daughters of Jerusalem have let you sleep till noon.”
“The Bible again!” groaned Ned. He wanted Palabra and wanted Joe to notice him looking at his watch.
Joe said, “So to keep Palabra awake, I tell her all about the boy who would become our grandfather.”
“All. All?” Palabra mused. “All is a big—is the biggest word. Think what-all all encompasses…”
“Palabra,” Joe said, “let me talk! My mouth wants to say what it wants to say the way it wants to say it.”
“I understand that, I do!” Palabra said, “But words mean what they mean.”
“And I understand that, but,” Joe said, “anyway. Our grandfather’s older brother Michel…”
“Miklos,” said Grandmother.
“Had come to America and had done so well that he wrote back to Budapest: Send my younger brother Max…”
“That was my Maxl,” said Grandmother.
“Let him bring ten thousand dollars. And Miklos wrote them how he and Max would go into business together, but here’s where Palabra’s eyelids close over her eyes; Palabra is asleep,” Joe said. “So our grandfather won’t arrive on Ellis Island till the following night, and here is his brother waiting for him. Can you imagine the two boys—two men, incredibly happy…”
“Incredibly,” murmured Palabra, “is a lazy word. It means not to be believed.”
“The younger brother,” Joseph said, “brings the older brother up to date on what’s been going on back home. The older, the American brother, has figured out how they’re going to go about this: While the newcomer moves through the legalities and protocols of Ellis Island, Miklos will take care of the ten thousand and will be waiting for Max right here. But Palabra is fast asleep. So now it is the following night. Young Max has arrived back at the place of rendezvous, but where is Miklos? Where is his brother? He looks all over and he waits; he waits. How can Miklos have simply disappeared!”
“Simply,” Palabra said. “When is simply ever simple?”
“What can have happened to his big brother?” Joseph said.
Martha said, “Like it’s not that the older brother, like, I mean…” She stopped.
Stacey said, “But he couldn’t…he wouldn’t have…” and stopped.
Ned said, “And what exactly happened to the ten thousand dollars?”
“Exactly? When you ask what exactly happened to anything,” mused Palabra, “aren’t you saying has anybody the slightest idea?”
Grandmother said “Miklos was never heard of from that day to this.” She was beckoning Joseph, who bent down to her and she said, “Take her—what’s her name that begins with an ‘L’ but maybe not?”
“Her name is Palabra,” Joseph told her.
“Palabra,” said Grandmother. “Take—what’s her name again?—take her home.”
“I know,” Joseph said, “and she knows that she can be a pain in the neck, but she is right, you know, about words meaning what they mean.”
“Yes,” Grandmother said, “I know she is right, but take her away.”
Lore Segal’s fiction, children’s books, and translations include Other People’s Houses and Her First American. Her latest book, Ladies Lunch and Other Stories, came out this year on her ninety-fifth birthday.
