Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

midnight flight. In her odious room two floors above, her bags were packed and ready.
    “He thinks you’re going to crucify him,” Iris said. “Fatten him up for the slaughter, serve his head on a platter.”
    Her ears had reddened; she was emptying glass after glass — it was soon evident that the three convivial bottles Bea had ordered wouldn’t suffice. Julian, his mind on his meat, went on feeding as if he had been famished for months. The boy was a carnivore, the boy had an appetite! And beside him Lili, half screened by the heavy curtain that secluded this corner of the dining parlor and overhung the heaped-up bowls and bubbling sauces and tubs of dumplings and trays of tarts sent parading around them. Fragrances of what was yet to come flowed in from the kitchen. Bea had been extravagant!
    But a fiasco, all of it. A futility from beginning to end. She was glad enough to be on her way. Goodbye to their mysteries, their entanglements, their concealments — she had been drawn in and kept out. In the subdued light Lili dwindled into a fragile little old woman in a shawl. Bea saw again that double crease etched in her forehead: two cut-off railroad tracks. She was picking at a lone lettuce leaf. Glancing over, Julian ladled out a large potato and set it on her plate.Steam, and the honeyed scent of some unfamiliar herb, spiraled upward.
    “Madame Bones,” he said, “eat.”
    And to Bea, abruptly: “Do you know how my mother is?”
    These were the first words he had spoken to her.
    “Your father tells me she’s in a rest home.”
    “A rest home? You mean a storage bin. An asylum.”
    Iris said, “She agreed to it, Julian, I told you. The place is absolutely posh, with all the amenities. She was perfectly happy to go.”
    “He
put
her there. Dumped her.”
    “She was sleeping all day, she didn’t know what time it was. She was getting sort of . . . confused. You don’t have to bring this up now —”
    “Why not? He’s the one who makes her crazy, isn’t he?” And once more to Bea: “He’ll make you crazy too. What’re you going to tell him?”
    “That his son is a stubborn loafer,” Iris said.
    “No, really,” he pursued, “when he starts grilling you. You’ll have to say
some
thing, right?”
    “What would you like me to say?”
    But Lili — disquiet in her quiet — intervened. “You should say what you know.”
    “What Bea knows,” Iris said, “is that we got away, we’re on the lam. Like Hansel and Gretel. Only we never intended to drop any idiot crumbs.” Belligerent. Erratic. Erratic? The girl was smashed!
    “Iris, you’re having too much wine,” Julian said.
    “Julian, you’re having too many cakes,” she answered.
    The nettling, the bickering, the ingrained impatient intimacy (Bea could hardly tell one from the other) went back and forth between them, while Lili sat gazing at the drenched potato in her dish like an augur reading a fate. She seemed as distant from these American offspring as that ebony cabinet in the Louvre, with all its little hidden compartments. Lili herself was obscurely recessed and crannied — and was it collusion, or else some mystical tie between them,that compelled the brother to lash out a charge as biting as his sister’s?
Interrogation at headquarters
. And what
would
Bea tell Marvin, and what might come of it? Was this the incessant worry of the house almost from the hour Bea broke into their lives? Surely they murmured together, they turned it over, they pecked at the possibilities; what
would
she tell Marvin? They asked it uneasily, they asked it urgently, because Julian was homeless and jobless and reckless and rash. Did they hope, if only Bea could deliver a fitting story, that Marvin would soften and shower his capricious boy with money? Was some clandestine chance of it couched in the darkling groove between Lili’s eyes?
    Lili said sharply, “She knows.”
    “How, how?” — Iris’s wine-dyed mouth a red hole. Julian staring,