The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado Page B

and cows who still showed up every morning at the back window of Malaka Nazli, with their caretaker offering to fill up a pitcher for only a few piasters. Edith’s beverage of choice was coffee— café Turque —strong, black, with extra sugar to camouflage the bitterness. When she was done, she would turn the cup upside down and read her fortune in the coffee grounds.
    But the absence of joy played as much of a role in Mom’s decline as the absence of calcium. With the death of Baby Alexandra, my mother sank into a profound melancholy. The sadder she became, the more she neglected herself. It didn’t help, of course, that she had never been to a proper dentist, though there were several European-trained specialists practicing in Cairo in the 1940s and ’50s. When she was growing up, she was too poor to see a dentist. After she married my father, she was simply too frightened.
    If Edith’s prettiness had drawn my father to her, it was almost as if she were thwarting him now. In her anger, she seemed to be saying: “If you will not live up to your end of the bargain, I will not live up to mine.”
    My father’s reaction to the death of his daughter was entirely different. After a formal mourning period, he resumed his nocturnal routine. He went alone and never took his wife along, if only to console her, to pull her out of the thick shell into which she had withdrawn.
    For Edith, this was yet more proof of her husband’s selfishness, the fact that he couldn’t relinquish his pleasure-seeking even after a tragedy. Despite years of marriage, my mother had never understood Leon. My father’s habit of leaving home wasn’t much different than Edith’s retreat into the bedroom they no longer shared. Much as she coped by escaping from the world, he found comfort venturing into the world, finding forgetfulness in the endless nights of poker and dancing and solace in the company of other men and other women.

CHAPTER 5
The Prisoner of Malaka Nazli Street
    M y aunts rushed over to our house the instant they heard the news: Edith wanted a divorce. She was threatening to leave with the children, and Tante Marie, Tante Rebekah, and Tante Leila were beside themselves. It was simply unthinkable. This was a family that, in more than half a century in Egypt, had experienced madness, suicide, murder, adultery, apostasy, and the Holocaust. But divorce? Never.
    Well, maybe not exactly “never.”
    There were the failed marriages of Oncle Joseph’s teenage daughters, unions that had both ended in disaster. But they came from Zamalek, one of the richest and most elegant parts of Cairo. Maybe they tolerated failed marriages amid the mansions of Zamalek, but here in Ghamra, it was almost unknown.
    My aunts stood in the kitchen with my mom, trying to talk some sense into her, but also lending a sympathetic ear. Edith’s mourning may have been muted, almost secretive, but her anger was outsize. She blamed Dad—stubbornly, obsessively, and irrationally—for the events surrounding Baby Alexandra’s passing and her own brush with death.
    â€œChez nous, on n’a pas le divorce,” Tante Marie declared, while the others nodded gravely.
    Leon’s sisters were kind, caring women, even oddly modern in their own way, though it was true that Tante Rebekah’s thick coils of hair suggested a woman of another century, the way she wrapped them so tightly around her head. They were confident they could navigate the old world of Aleppo that my father stood for, where a woman’s desires counted almost for nothing, and the slightly more progressive world of a Cairene housewife in the 1950s.
    To their credit, they didn’t automatically take my father’s side. That’s what made them such wonderful women. They were deeply earnest and well-meaning, and my mother felt she could trust them. Though passionate about the need for families to stick together against