Love and Treasure Read online

  Also by Ayelet Waldman

  FICTION

  Red Hook Road

  Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

  Daughter’s Keeper

  NONFICTION

  Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes,

  Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Ayelet Waldman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,

  Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Waldman, Ayelet.

  Love and treasure : a novel / Ayelet Waldman.—First edition.

  pages cm

  “This is a Borzoi book”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-0-385-53354-6 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-53355-3 (ebook)

  1. Reminiscing in old age—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—

  Confiscations and contributions—Hungary—Fiction. 3. Holocaust,

  Jewish (1939–1945)—

  Hungary—Fiction. 4. Jewish property—Hungary—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.A42124L695 2014 813′.6—dc23 2012049781

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket image: A Still Life of a Tazza with Flowers by Jan Brueghel the Younger (details). Private Collection/Johnny Van Haeften Ltd., London/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  To Michael, only and always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Maine: 2013

  One: Salzburg: 1945–1946

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Two: Budapest; Israel: 2013

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Three: Budapest: 1913

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue: New York: 1948

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  JACK WISEMAN, IMMERSED AS EVER in the pages of a book, did not notice the arrival of the bus until alerted by the stir among the other people waiting in the overheated station lounge. The pugnacious chin he aimed at the coach’s windows had a bit of Kleenex clinging to it, printed with a comma of blood, and his starched and ironed shirt gaped at the collar, revealing pleats in the drapery of his neck and a thick white thatch of fur on his chest. He squinted, caught a glimpse of the glory of his granddaughter’s hair, and pulled himself to his feet. He tore a corner from the back page of somebody’s discarded Ellsworth American and tucked it between the pages of his old Loeb edition of Herodotus, measuring with a rueful snort the remaining unread inches. He had never been a man to leave a job unfinished, a fact on which he supposed he must have been relying, perhaps unconsciously, in undertaking to reread, for what must be the eighth or ninth time, this most garrulous of classical historians.

  As the bus disgorged its first passengers, Jack got momentarily lost in contemplation of the disembarking soldiers, home on leave from the very ancient battlefields as in the book he was reading, from Babylon and Bactria, their camouflage fatigues the color of ashes and dust, the pattern jagged, like the pixels of a computer screen. Then Natalie’s hair kindled in the bus’s doorway, and he held up the little green-backed volume to catch her attention. He could tell from the look of shock that crossed her face in the instant before she smiled that pancreatic cancer had taken even worse a toll on him than he’d imagined. Her lips moved.

  He lifted a finger, motioning her to wait. He pressed a button on his hearing aid and said, “Sweetheart! You made it.”

  “Hey, Grandpa.” Her eyes were bleary, the red dent in her cheek from whatever she had been leaning against reminding him of how she used to look as a child, waking from an afternoon nap. Or perhaps it was her mother he was remembering, an image coming from farther away and longer ago. He took note of her pallor, the bruised look of the skin under her green eyes, and thought that she had likely come to Maine as much to flee her own troubles as to lose herself in the alleviation of his. Indeed the possibility of her finding consolation in worry over him was one of the reasons—not that you needed a reason to want to see your only granddaughter—he had agreed so quickly when she first called to say that she wanted to make the trip.

  “Are you hungry?” he said. “There’s not much in Bangor, but if you can wait, the Grill’s open. I could take you there.”

  “You could take me? You drove?” she said.

  He just blinked at her, tempted to employ one of her own favorite childhood expressions: Duh. He had been expecting this line of inquiry.

  “How else would I pick you up?” he said.

  “I figured you’d call a taxi!”

  “Dave had a fare. Round-trip to Portland. I couldn’t very well ask him to turn it down, not in the off-season. Business is slow.”

  “Oh, is it?” She shook her head with disapproval that was affectionate but sincere. “So this isn’t about you being stubborn and proud?”

  “They make a great pumpkin pie at the Grill,” he said. “How’s that sound?”

  She reached for his chin, and with a mixture of tenderness and reproof picked the bit of Kleenex from his shaving cut.

  “Why didn’t you call a Bangor cab?” she said, having inherited the full genetic complement of Wiseman stubbornness, if not pride.

  “A Bangor cab!” he said, sincerely horrified by the notion. “Those guys only take Route One! We’d be stuck in mill traffic for hours, this time of day.”

  By now they had reached the car, a Volvo DL wagon that for twenty-three years, in the summertime, over breaks and sabbaticals, had ferried first Jack and his wife, then Jack alone, from New York City to Maine and back again. He wondered if it was worth leaving the blue behemoth to Natalie. Like all his possessions—like everything that chance or fate had ever entrusted to his care—he had kept the car in impeccable order. Properly maintained, it might run for years to come. But Natalie might not care to pay the steep New York parking fees. She might, once he was gone, never again care to make the long drive to Red Hook, Maine. And though she was, and would always be, his t
zatzkeleh, his little treasure, his love for her was as free of illusion as it was of reservation. There was little evidence in the way that she had recently conducted her life to suggest that she knew how to maintain anything at all.

  “Do you think you’ll want the car?” he said as he opened the driver’s-side door for her. He walked around, opened his own door, got in, and handed her the key. “Or should I put an ad in the paper?”

  “Don’t sell it right now. We’ll need it while I’m up here. Unless you’re planning on coming down to New York?”

  “There’s hospice here, same as there. Except here I’m in my own home, and in New York I’d be forced into some misbegotten nursing home. Thanks to the grateful generosity of Columbia University.”

  “Grandpa, you weren’t really living in that apartment. You were there like, what? Three months a year?”

  “More like four.”

  “They have so many full-time faculty members to house. You can’t blame them—”

  “Forty-six years, Natalie. It wouldn’t have killed them to make it forty-six and a half.”

  She started the engine and then let it idle, warming it up the way his regimen required. They sat listening to the engine in the chill of the car’s interior, giving him ample time to regret his bitter words. Having faced or lived through some of the choicest calamities, both personal and world historical, that the twentieth century had to offer, Jack Wiseman had rarely given way to bitterness until now. He supposed it must be a symptom of the disease that was killing him.

  “You could stay with me,” Natalie said at last. “There’s plenty of room now that Daniel’s moved out.”

  “I’m here,” Jack said. “And you’re here now, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Might I ask how long you plan to stay?”

  “As long as you need me.”

  “It shouldn’t be too long.”

  “Grandpa.”

  “Anyway. Good of the firm to let you go.”

  “I had vacation saved up.” She put the car into reverse with a show, again for his benefit, of checking the rearview and both side mirrors. Then she sighed and put the car back into park. “Actually, that’s not true.”

  “What’s not true?”

  “I’m not taking my vacation time. I quit.”

  “You quit?” He thumped his hand on the dashboard. “To take care of me? That’s absolutely unacceptable, Natalie. I won’t allow it.”

  “It wasn’t because of you. They would have given me leave.” She eased out into the street, speeding up slowly so as not to risk a skid on the icy road or, more likely, his reprimand for taking it too fast.

  “Why then?” he said.

  “Why.” She sounded exasperated, with his question, with herself, maybe just with having to tell the story again. “Well, I was in a coworker’s office, and she was responding to a set of interrogatories. Those are, like, questions from opposing counsel in a lawsuit.”

  He waited.

  “They were from Daniel’s firm.”

  “He wrote the questions?”

  “No. He’s in the corporate department. This was a litigation document.”

  “And?” He noticed that she had put her blinker on. “Not Route One,” he said sharply. “Keep going until you hit Forty-Six.”

  “Okay.”

  “Seeing a document from Daniel’s firm made you quit your job?” he asked, wondering if his brain was slowing, if there was some obvious connection here that anyone but a dying old fool could see.

  “It made me realize how entangled our lives are. He could end up at my office for a closing. Or I could end up at his for a settlement conference. I just don’t want that to happen.”

  “You quit a job making twice as much money as I made in my last year as a tenured professor because you were afraid you might bump into your ex-husband in a conference room?”

  “It sounds ridiculous.”

  “It is ridiculous.”

  “I just want a fresh start.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Is that okay?”

  He nodded. Not talking about things was always, in the view of Jack Wiseman, a viable if not preferable option. In this case, in particular, because all that he could think of that he wanted to say to his granddaughter boiled down, in the end, to: What the hell happened to you? She had always been so sensible, resilient, purposeful, even single-minded. But ever since her divorce—no, from the moment she had unaccountably decided on her hasty and ill-advised marriage to Daniel Friedman—the kid had been a fucking mess.

  “Turn right at the blinking yellow,” he said, but her turn signal was already on. In this regard, at least, she still knew her way.

  The Red Hook Grill, an arrangement of vinyl-sided boxes stacked like lobster traps alongside Caldecott Falls, was the only restaurant in town that stayed open all through the off-season. In the gathering gray twilight of a frozen afternoon it blazed like a gaudy promise of warmth and comfort, and though the bar was topped with Formica and the pie with Cool Whip, the locals depended on it—Jack depended on it, too—to cheer the endless dark tunnel of a Down East winter. Jack placed his usual order—fish-and-chips, with onion rings swapped for the fries—though he knew he wouldn’t be able to eat more than a bite or two. He hadn’t been able to tolerate much of anything for a while now, despite what the doctors had promised when they’d convinced him to have the stent put in to relieve his jaundice. He was dropping weight so fast he thought he might vanish before the cancer killed him.

  Natalie’s usual was a hamburger and a Diet Coke, but today she ordered a milk shake, a black and white, and, when Louise brought the food, dropped a straw into the frosty metal blender cup that the Grill always served alongside its shakes and slid it across the table toward Jack.

  “It might be easier to get that down.”

  He patted her hand and out of gratitude and good manners took a sip, with a show of relish, of the thick and saccharine confection. He loathed milk shakes.

  At the end of the meal, Louise came over with a piece of pie, on the house, baked that morning from blueberries frozen at the end of last summer.

  “Tide you over till next summer,” she said.

  She and Natalie exchanged a look. Louise put her hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  “How are you, Jack?”

  “Fine, Louise,” he said.

  And then he felt obliged to take a bite of pie. It tasted to his dysfunctional palate like vinegar and salt.

  “Very tasty,” he said.

  “Thank you, Louise,” Natalie said.

  As they watched Louise make her way back to the kitchen Natalie said, “Ever since Daniel left, everyone’s always asking me, ‘Natalie, how are you?’ like they expect me to break down crying or tear out my hair or something. I never know what to say.”

  “It’s for just such moments that the word ‘fine’ was invented.”

  “I guess. Daddy calls me every morning and says, ‘How bad is it today, Sugarbear?’ and I give him a number from one to ten. For the first month or two, I was pretty steadily in the ones and twos, but eventually I worked my way up to around a five.”

  “Your father does the same with me. Every morning.” Jack was fond of Neil Stein, his son-in-law, closer to him than he’d been to his daughter. Close enough, in fact, that this daily ritual of checking in comforted rather than annoyed him.

  “What number do you give him?” Natalie asked.

  “I try to stay above a six.”

  “Pancreatic cancer and you’re a six. My dumbfuck husband cheats on me, and I’m a one. Okay, that makes me the most selfish person in the world.”

  That made Jack smile.

  “I’m glad you’re here, darling,” he said. “Now come on.” He pushed back in his chair. “Let’s go out and look at the falls before it’s too dark to see anything.”

  “It’s probably really slippery. And it’s still snowing.”

 
Jack shrugged on his coat and pulled on his gloves. He handed her his scarf. “Put this on. I don’t know what you were thinking, bringing a coat like that to Maine in January.”

  “I wanted to look nice for you.”

  “You always look nice to me.”

  “I wanted to look nice for me, then. It, you know, it helps.”

  Because, she meant, she felt ugly and unwanted on the inside.

  “I understand,” he said. “Come on, gorgeous.”

  He took her arm as they walked through the snow to the edge of the water, whether to steady her or himself he wasn’t sure. They reached the falls, a mysterious tidal churn of seawater that reversed direction with each turn of the tide. It must have been slack tide; the water milled in the narrows between the near and far shores as if uncertain which way to turn. Natalie threw a stick into the water, and they watched it drift irresolute on the swell.

  “Your life is not over, Natalie. You will meet someone new.”

  “Will I? I want what you had with Grandma. That kind of great romance. The first time you saw her, you knew.”

  “Did I? How interesting. Tell me, what did I know?”

  He could see that he had shocked her.

  “That, you know. That she was the one.”

  “The ‘one.’ ” He shook his head.

  “Grandma wasn’t the one?”

  “Your grandmother was a beautiful woman with a good heart, and I loved her very much. Was she ‘the one’? That I don’t know. That strikes me as awfully simplistic.”

  “What happened with Daniel wasn’t too complicated, Grandpa. He loved me. Then he didn’t. Or maybe he just loved her more.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe he is just a little shit.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Is that simple enough for you?”

  She laughed so hard that she was obliged to take a Kleenex out of her pocket and blow her nose.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the water where a seal’s slick head had popped up. “That’s how seals sleep. With their bodies below and their heads like snorkels just above the surface.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “You never liked Daniel.”

  “I never liked Daniel.”

  “Why didn’t you say something before we got married?”

  “I didn’t think you were very likely to listen.”