Love Saves the Day

One afternoon, when Laura was ten, Mrs. Mandelbaum had pressed a heavy brooch of silver and onyx into her hand. Laura had tried to give it back, thinking it would be bad manners to accept such a gift, but Mrs. Mandelbaum had said, Max and I love you as if you were our own granddaughter. This is so you’ll always have something to remember us by. Then she’d fixed the brooch onto Laura’s dress and combed her hair before the murky glass of the old mirror in their bedroom. See how pretty it looks on you? The two of them had walked hand in hand back into the living room where Mr. Mandelbaum waited with cake and tea things, Honey lying behind him on the back of the couch with one small paw resting on his shoulder. Hoo-ha! he’d said. I had no idea two elegant ladies were joining me for tea. Laura had blushed with shy pleasure at his praise. The brooch was long gone but Laura hadn’t needed it to remember the Mandelbaums, not even all these years later. Not even though she had failed them, in the end.

Of all the childhood places she had loved, the Mandelbaums’ apartment had been second only to her own bedroom downstairs from them. She’d loved its sheer lace curtains that Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn when Laura was still too young to remember such things, and the lovely watercolor wallpaper in deep blues and creams and purples that Sarah had picked out—pretty but not cloying. Perfect for a young girl’s room. Laura had been far less tidy in those days than she was now. She’d let dolls and books and clothing accumulate in large heaps until, finally, Sarah would be provoked into one of her rare displays of impatience. If you don’t clean this room soon, I’ll … But Laura had liked to let the mess build until even she couldn’t stand it anymore, because then she would have the intense joy of cleaning it up. Once she had everything perfectly arranged, the amber of late-afternoon sunlight slanting in through the delicate white curtains (it was important to time the cleaning so that it never started so early or so late as to miss this time of day), she’d walk around touching things and think, How lucky I am! I’m the girl who gets to live here.

On her way back downstairs, Laura passed the room she and Josh had intended for a nursery, now filled with Sarah’s boxes. Prudence, for reasons Laura couldn’t quite figure out aside from a general Well that’s cats for you, had recently developed the habit of throwing things from the boxes onto the floor. Last night, Prudence had unearthed part of the collection of funny little musical instruments—a harmonica, a Jew’s harp, a miniature drum on a stick with tiny wooden knobs attached to it by strings that would hit the drum if you spun the stick around—that Sarah had kept behind the counter of her record store for Laura’s amusement.

The harmonica had been Laura’s favorite, although she’d never really learned to play it. Sarah, discerning as her ear was, had smiled and never once winced whenever Laura had banged around the store blowing chaotic, discordant “music” through it. Laura had blown a few notes experimentally through the harmonica yesterday while Prudence observed her with grave attention. The noise had startled Prudence away at first, although moments later she’d returned to raise one paw up to it, as if to feel the air Laura blew through its holes or to push the noise back into the instrument.

Today Prudence had somehow uncovered Sarah’s old address book, the one Laura had told herself she’d never find among all Sarah’s odds and ends after Sarah had died and the question of how to contact Anise, currently touring in Asia, came up. She’d settled for sending a letter through Anise’s management agency. In truth, Laura had no desire to talk to Anise. It was Anise who’d first lured Sarah into her Lower East Side existence. And it was Anise who’d abandoned Sarah (and Laura) when that life fell apart.

Lately, though, looking through Sarah’s old things with Prudence, Laura had found herself recalling earlier days, when Sarah’s owning a record store and living with her in an old tenement had seemed like its own kind of charmed life. Even knowing that Prudence didn’t really understand her, speaking aloud about Sarah while Prudence regarded her solemnly had given those memories a substance they hadn’t had in years.