After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman Page A

that to a kid, but I don’t like rules . Just because my father was a cantor doesn’t mean I have to do everything by the book.”
    “Your father was Eddie Cantor?”
    “Oh, my sweet little shiksa, the things I have to teach you. That’s a secret, between us, by the way. No one knows about my dad, not even my wife.”
    That had been two years ago. Two years.
    She took a deep breath and submerged. She wasn’t scared of water, but she had never learned to swim properly, just knew a paddling kind of motion, the better to keep her hair above the water.
    When she came up, she was surprised at how beautiful the singing was, how it really did make her feel holy and changed. The rabbis’ eyes were on the ceiling, as if they didn’t want to catch a glimpse of her in her bathing suit, modest as it was. I’m a Jew, she thought in the locker room, as she combed her hair back into its ponytail, changed into her clothes, and went to collect Susie. “Drinks on me,” she said. “Gampy’s.” It was a place all the dancers favored because it stayed open late. Felix came here a lot. She had a cheeseburger, which was pretty funny, not that Susie picked up on the joke. Felix didn’t come in, but she didn’t really expect him to. She and Susie went to the Hippo and danced until 2:00 A.M. Then she went back to her apartment, which, like the pool, also overlooked the prison, and stared at her phone until 4:00 A.M. , wishing she dared to call him at home. She knew the number, of course. Knew the number, knew the house. Back when she was living with Andrea, she would take the VW in the middle of the night and drive by it, risking so much—Andrea’s wrath, Felix’s discovery. It was a lovely house. Felix had such good taste. That’s why he would choose her, eventually.
    She had hoped to make a ceremony out of telling him about her conversion, turn it into something special. But it happened that several days went by without her seeing him, and when he stopped by the club in the early evening, the news had been too pent up and she blurted out: “Hey, I’m a Jew!”
    He laughed. “You’re not a Jew. You order the lean corned beef at Jack’s.”
    “No, seriously,” she said, lowering her voice. “I converted. Susie was there and everything. She was, like, a witness.”
    Not exactly true, but she knew Susie would cheerfully lie for her. Susie believed women had to stick together. Another way in which she was naïve.
    “Really,” he said, as if she had commented on the weather. A few minutes later, he had gone upstairs to his office. She didn’t see him for a week. Oh, she saw him, but there were no late-night coffees at the Coffee Pot Shoppe, no visits to her apartment. Well, it was Passover now. He had to be with his family. After the holidays, they started up again, as if there had never been a break at all.
    A few weeks later, she was window-shopping at an antiques store on Howard Street when she saw an interesting plate. She was pretty sure she knew what it was, but she asked the owner to be sure.
    “It’s an old seder plate, very rare. There’s a place for all the things that matter during the ritual—the lamb shank, the bitter herbs.”
    “I know,” she said, although she had not yet sat at anyone’s seder table.
    “It’s made in France,” he said, showing her the unmarked back, as if that proved it was made in France.
    She knew she was being sold, but that was okay. She was in sales herself, helping to move the weak drinks at the Variety. The plate was $65, no small sum, but she bought it and put it in an old trunk at the foot of her bed. There, the plate joined china and silverware she had begun to assemble, piece by piece. There was a large serving dish that dated to Revolutionary War times, the kind of item one would expect to find in a house such as the Brewer home in Sudbrook Park, although, of course, Julie would never live there . Mount Washington, maybe. Guilford if the divorce didn’t leave Felix too