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

object—Alexandra’s piano. There it stood, stately amid the squalor. Edith and Félix were left to their own devices, neglected and forlorn and, at times, ravenously hungry as Alexandra played and played.
    It wasn’t that my grandmother was uncaring, my mother would always insist. At her core intensely kind and loving, Alexandra was simply one of these people who couldn’t cope on their own, who needed others to get through one day to the next. My grandmother had received a wonderful education in her years at the convent, knew how to converse fluently in Italian, and had a finely honed literary sensibility in additionto her musical skills, but the nuns hadn’t prepared her for a life as a wife and mother.
    This wasn’t what Isaac had bargained for in a wife. Their life together unraveled, and more and more, he left her alone with the children and took off for destinations unknown. Still, those times he was home, he managed to be affectionate to his son and daughter, and Edith, in particular, adored him. If he had harsh words to dispense, they were directed only at his wife. He had come to hate the very qualities that once drew him to Alexandra—her vulnerability, her delicate and intensely fragile nature.
    Another child, a boy, came into the world even as my grandparents’ marriage was dying. The bonnie baby had soft dark hair, blue eyes, and a gleeful, hopeful disposition. His Hebrew name, after all, was Eliezer, which means “God will help me, God will take care of me.” My mother, a little girl of seven or eight, watched over him while her parents sparred, more absorbed in their hatred of each other than in their love for their children. Fights at home grew more bitter, the scenes of recrimination became more frequent.
    It all came to an end one morning.
    Isaac announced he was taking the infant out for some fresh air. “Edith, cherie, could you please dress the baby?” he asked his daughter very sweetly. The child was only a few months old at the time, and couldn’t walk or talk. She put him in a fresh cloth diaper—only a cotton diaper, my mother remembered, not even shorts or rompers—and une flanelle, a white cotton T-shirt.
    The diaper wouldn’t stay up, so Isaac offered one of his ties as a makeshift belt. It was wide and red and silk, so incongruously long that it went around the baby twice, at least. Edith gently combed his soft hair and rubbed the popular eau de cologne Arlette on his arms and legs; babies were known to love the refreshing scent.
    The baby was gurgling and smiling, clapping his chubby hands. He seemed delighted at all the attention; he played with the tie, trying to undo it.
    â€œOn va faire une promenade,” Isaac announced, placing the infant in the carriage—We are going for a stroll. My mother kept fussing and fussing over her little brother, not quite willing to let him go, maybebecause he was especially sweet and loving that morning. Alexandra kissed the baby as she had done a hundred times, a bit distractedly, absorbed by a novel she was reading.
    Isaac returned later without the child or his stroller, and informed his wife what he had done. He had sold their blue-eyed baby boy at the souk, the Arab marketplace.
    They simply couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. There was no way she could handle another child. It was for Alexandra’s own good, he said. Then he turned around and left, never to be part of the household again.
    That is when Alexandra began screaming. She screamed so loud that her cries reverberated across the neighborhood. Her sobs were heard in the kuttabs, the small, homelike synagogues where men gathered to pray at any hour of the day or night, and echoed across the dusty alleyways and shabby streets, and were heard in the communal baths, where women came to wash away their impurities.
    Egypt was a country where professional mourners were often heard crying in the streets. “Someone