Devotion
a novel
by Michelle Herman
Outpost19 | San Francisco
outpost19.com
Copyright 2016 by Michelle Herman.
Published 2016 by Outpost19.
All rights reserved.
Herman, Michelle
Devotion / Michelle Herman
ISBN 9781937402815 (pbk)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919178
cover art by Glen Holland
For my brother
one
Esther Savaris was halfway through her senior year of high school, a pretty girl, seventeen years old and still growing (according to the doctor, who had known her all her life—who had delivered her into her life—and who, on the morning she turned up in his office, tearful and pleading with him to keep this visit a secret from her mother, measured her as if she really were still just a child and then announced that she had grown three-quarters of an inch since her last visit), when she ran away with János Bartha, her singing teacher, who was nearly seventy then, and by whom Esther, Dr. Azogue had confirmed, was three months pregnant.
When she turned eighteen, Bartha married her. By then, they were thirteen hundred miles away from Esther’s family and the studio on Ocean Parkway where Bartha had been giving singing lessons for more than twenty years—as far away as Esther had ever been from Brighton Beach, from the apartment she had lived in all her life above her parents’ candy store, from Abraham Lincoln High School and the glee club, the girls’ chorus, the Drama Society, and her girlfriends (there were no boyfriends; she was not allowed to date, not until after her high school graduation—“and now I’ll never be allowed,” she had said cheerfully to Bartha, trying to cheer him up, for he was grim and silent as he sat beside her on the train that was to carry them halfway across the country): they were in Omaha, Nebraska, where there was a cousin, Vilmos Bartha, who had offered to help them get settled. It was October, 1965. The baby, Alexander, was fourteen weeks old.
The marriage ceremony was brief and disappointing. Esther had been thinking of it as something like the graduation she had missed in June, something official that would mark the start of her new life. But as the justice of the peace mumbled his few words, with Vilmos and his stern, blonde, Middle Western wife acting as witnesses, and Alexander sleeping in his carriage in a corner, she could see that she had expected too much.
Nothing had changed. It was like a magic trick at a birthday party, when the magician, who was really just somebody’s uncle or next-door neighbor, said Abracadabra but nothing happened. Then some of the children would laugh, and others would shift around uncomfortably in their folding chairs and sneak glances at one another: Was this supposed to happen? Was this a joke?
Toward the end of the ceremony, Esther almost asked, “Is that it? Are you sure?” It seemed to her that the justice of the peace, a plump little man with a long fringe of uncombed reddish hair, in a too-tight brown suit, no tie, and black, exhausted-looking penny loafers (a penny in the left shoe only, Esther noticed; the right one was empty), looked as if he might be absent-minded, as if he really might have left out some important part. Even the exchange of vows, so familiar to her from movies and novels, went by too quickly. The promises that she agreed to make seemed as routine as the pledge of allegiance she had recited every schoolday morning of her life. It did not seem possible that she was meant to take them seriously.
To have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health.
But if she didn’t take them seriously, she worried, she could not expect that she would be taken seriously. And this was the point, after all. Proving that she knew what she was doing, that she was a serious person. Because even Bartha seemed sometimes in doubt of her ability to understand what she “had done.” As if she were too stupid to see clearly the results of her own choices! “Stupid, no,” he had said when she’d made this accusation, in the first days after they’d arrived in Omaha. “Not stupid in the least—indeed, too smart, some would insist, to give away your future as you have.” “Not give,” she told him. “You must mean throw away.” At that time she was still in the habit of correcting him when he misused—when she assumed he had misused—an idiom in English. Lately she had come to think that he said, always, what he meant, and if it sounded odd it wasn’t his fault but the fault of her own listening, that language (usage, as it was so unpleasantly called in school) was more complex and interesting than she had been taught.
This was her chance to make it clear that she had made decisions, that she had not just let things happen, and also that she was willing, that she wanted, to stick by them.
And his chance to prove the same.
This was a startling thought, because it had never crossed her mind before that Bartha had anything to prove (and prove to whom? she asked herself. Only himself, since she had never doubted him—since it had never crossed her mind, either, that he might not have known what he was doing).
It was all done with now. They were on the street outside the office of the justice of the peace, and Vilmos was shaking Bartha’s hand and beaming. His wife, the imperious Clara, was looking bored and impatient. “We must make a celebration!” Vilmos said. “Clara and I will take you to lunch! Where shall we go? Esther, what is your choice?”
“You choose,” Esther said. “Wherever you like will be good.”
Bartha looked at her curiously. She usually claimed to like eating at restaurants, and she liked being asked which restaurant—and more often than not Bartha forgot to ask her, and then she would have to point this out to him later. But she couldn’t think about restaurants now. She was busy with the idea that had come to her—that today’s ceremony was nothing but the two of them, her and Bartha both, proving that they were serious, that they were grown up. She remembered what her father had said (not said, but bellowed, fists pounding the kitchen table) on the night she broke the news of her pregnancy, of her relationship with Bartha itself. The night before they’d fled. “Half a century he’s got on you! He should know better, should know how to act, how to be. A grown man, an elderly man, and he’s acting like an idiot boy.”
No—she would not let herself think of her father.
Not her father. Not anyone. No one but the two of them. No one else mattered. There was no one to whom it was necessary to prove anything—no one but themselves.
No one in all the world except Vilmos and Clara and Mr. One Penny even knew that this marriage had taken place. And no one but she and Bartha—and perhaps Vilmos, who, out of kindness, would insist he did too—cared that it had taken place.
It struck her now that this must be why people had elaborate, extravagant weddings. They forced other people to care. (And even if the fifty or a hundred or more relatives and friends attending, all dressed up and bearing gifts, could not in fact be made to truly care, the commotion was sufficient so that the private cares of the two people at the center of it seemed to be important, at least for a few hours.)
It was not as if she’d wanted, even if she’d had a choice, that other kind of wedding—what her friends at home would have called a real wedding, with a white lace dress and veil, music and flowers and a tall, many-tiered white cake, a ring-bearer and a flower girl and bridesmaids in taffeta, dancing until past midnight, and finally a fat leather-covered book of photographs on the coffee table. But all in all, this wedding, in that too-small, poorly heated, poorly lit, windowless room in what passed for an office building in Nebraska (both she and Bartha had made jokes about this on their way in, and Vilmos had smiled and sighed and rolled his eyes, as he did every time they made their “New York bigshot joke remarks,” and Clara had, also as usual,