Devotion. Michelle Herman

were there no women in this recitation? Hadn’t every one of these nephews and great-grandfathers had a mother?

      She was angry again. It was astonishing to her as she paused to consider—to appreciate—how angry she was, for there had been so many times she had told herself she should be angry with Bartha and hadn’t been. When he was short with her, when he spoke to her as if she were a small child, when he seemed to dismiss her—as if what she’d said was too foolish or trivial for him to think of taking seriously—or when he berated her for carrying the baby around “all day long” (“Put him down,” he would say, “please, for half an hour, even. This cannot be good for him, to be held in your arms for every minute”) or when he ignored her, lost in his own thoughts, so that she’d ask a question and he wouldn’t even look at her, much less give her an answer. At such times she would feel sorry for herself, but she would not be angry—although she would often think about how someone else would certainly be angry. She would think of Leah and Kathleen, to whom she hadn’t spoken in so long now, who would not have stood for being scolded, or for being lectured the way Bartha lectured her, or for being treated as if they could not be seen or heard—and inevitably she would think then of her mother, too, who would not have gotten angry but would have become depressed instead (infuriating Esther, who had always been able to see for herself when her mother should have become angry and had not). She would tell herself she had good reason to be angry, but it didn’t matter because angry wasn’t what she felt—she only felt unhappy. And because she’d started thinking of her mother, and of Leah and Kathleen, by then she would be feeling lonely, too. She was too sad and lonely to be angry. That was how it always seemed to her.

      And so instead of being angry as she knew she should be, she would start to cry. And when she did, she would sometimes make an effort to keep this hidden from Bartha, while at other times she would make sure he saw—depending on her mood (what she thought of as mood: depending on whether or not she wanted him to ask her what was wrong, which in its turn depended both on whether or not she wanted to have to answer him, and whether or not she thought it would make her feel worse if he saw her crying and then didn’t ask her what was wrong). If she wanted to be left alone to cry, she would lie down with the baby on the bed—Vilmos and Clara’s fold-out sofa, which since Alexander’s birth she had stopped bothering to close up in the morning—and, holding him tightly to her chest, his back to her, curl herself all around him, her knees almost to her forehead so that she came close to making a full circle with her body around his, and then silently she would begin to plan a letter to her family, which she would write hours later, after Bartha and the baby were asleep. Just thinking about what she would write made her feel better—although she had learned that if she didn’t actually write the letter in the first hours after midnight before Alexander woke up crying for her, the effects of having planned it would wear off by morning. Like a magic spell, she thought, although she couldn’t think of any fairy tales that had to do with writing.

      Sitting at the little table Vilmos had moved down into the basement for them, the desk lamp she’d bought at a garage sale (a spindly red Tensor lamp just like the one she’d left behind at home) making a tiny spotlight for the piece of paper and her moving hand, she’d write page after page on stationery she kept hidden in the bottom of the diaper bag, stopping only when she had run out of things to say. Then she’d hide the letter in her purse, and in the morning, when she took her first walk of the day with Alexander, she would mail it.

      She knew that no one would answer. None of the letters she had written had been answered, and while she had never counted them, she guessed that by now there had been at least ten, maybe fifteen of them. As far as she knew, nobody was even reading her letters—but as they were not returned to her unopened, someone might be (she thought someone—she couldn’t, even as she wrote them, bring herself to think Daddy, Mama, Sylvia), so it was not impossible that someone, sometime, would write back. Who, though? she wondered every time she caught herself thinking this way. Her father? Not a chance. Her mother? She’d have to defy her father, and it was impossible for Esther to believe she would do that. And Sylvia was only twelve—not even twelve yet when Esther had left—and they had never really liked each other in the first place. Chances were that Sylvia would not have answered letters from her even if she’d left home in a normal way. Chances were, anyway, that her parents didn’t let Sylvia see the letters, even though they were addressed to The Savarises, and Esther headed every one of them Dear Family.

      Either someone opened them and read them and then didn’t answer (decided yet again that there would be no answer), or they were discarded each time without being opened. Or placed in a drawer, just as they were? In books she had read, this sometimes happened, but because she could not picture herself doing this, she couldn’t picture anyone she knew doing this either. She could, however, easily—too easily—picture her father extracting an envelope he recognized as coming from her, separating it from the small pile of bills and advertisements, that week’s TV Guide, and perhaps a more welcome letter from somebody else, and holding it between two fingers as he carried it out to the trash can in the alley.

      Did it matter if nobody read them? She asked herself this sometimes, because when she wrote, she never thought about anyone reading what she’d written. When she was thinking of what she would say, she never asked herself, What will they make of this? She concentrated only on what she was saying—as if the letters weren’t, in fact, being written to anyone—and she hadn’t been surprised or even very disappointed when no one wrote back.

      She couldn’t say why she had written that first letter. She didn’t know how it had happened. In her memory, the pen was in her hand already, she was sitting at the table, it was just past midnight after the long day that was supposed to have been her due date. How or why it had occurred to her to write, or what she’d imagined the result of it would be, she didn’t know. As for why she had kept on after the first one—how could she account for that? It was a good thing, she had often thought, that there was nobody to whom she was obliged to give an explanation. She could not have said that she was comforted or calmed by her letter-writing (on the contrary, she would sometimes become so agitated as she wrote that the pen shook in her hand and she would have to stop for a while). The letters didn’t make her feel less lonely or less full of pity for herself—they didn’t make her feel less of anything bad that she was feeling. But somehow, although her writing didn’t lessen her unhappiness, it loosened it from her. All it took was for her to start writing a new letter in her mind, and the bad feelings that had seemed so settled in her would begin to shift and stir, as if they were becoming restless, and then bit by bit, as she went on, she’d feel them pulling loose—coming unstuck. As she lay coiled around the baby, thinking and rethinking what she meant to say this time and how she would say it, it was as if she saw her own unhappiness: it hovered everywhere around her, near enough to touch. It wasn’t until later, when she sat down at her little table with her stationery and her pen, that the bad feelings would begin at last to drift away—not out of sight but far enough away so that while she was still aware of them she couldn’t have reached out for them if she had wanted to.

      By morning they’d be gone. She would wake up feeling light, unbound, unburdened—almost weightless. Free. She would sing to Alexander and dance him around the room. “All I want is a room somewhere,” she’d sing, twirling until she was dizzy and the baby had begun to laugh. Sometimes she’d catch Bartha looking at her strangely. “What?” she’d say, as if she really couldn’t guess what puzzled him, but she would blush, and flutter over to him for an instant, long enough to kiss his cheek or touch his hand, then fly away again before he could reach out for her or look at her too closely—as if he could see what she’d been doing while he was asleep. He would shake his head and mutter, “Moods, such moods, who has the strength for this?” and, “But what a terrible song this is which you are singing.” But that was as much as he ever said. He never asked her any questions, and Esther supposed that he was pleased enough, or simply relieved enough, to see her happy once again so that he wasn’t troubled by, or even interested in, how this new mood might have come to pass.

      Like every other morning, after breakfast at the little table (tea and toast and jam for him, and for her—“to keep up your strength,” he said