The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Read Free

wedding went on as planned, though the incident gave Leon pause.
    The ceremony was held at the Gates of Heaven, the stateliest temple in Cairo. Afterward, the couple traveled by horse-drawn carriage to Jean Weinberg’s photography studio to have their portrait taken. Weinberg, who had worked at the court of Atatürk, was the most talented photographer in all of Egypt. Yet even he was worried when he positioned the couple side by side for their official portrait. The bride was so small she risked being completely overshadowed by her husband.
    Weinberg slid a small velvet footstool beneath Edith’s feet. It promptly vanished under yards and yards of hand-sewn lace and satin.
    The portrait came out so perfectly that Weinberg placed it at the center of his shop window in downtown Cairo, where it remained for months.
    He signed his name in black ink, like an artist who has produced a masterpiece.
    It is indeed a wonderful shot. Leon has abandoned his trademark white suits in favor of a classic double-breasted black tuxedo. He carries a top hat and white gloves and wears a sprig of lily of the valleytucked inside his lapel. Edith, a mist of dark hair framing her small, porcelain features, smiles slightly as she holds a large bouquet of white flowers—dozens of lilies and roses that trail from her hands.
    The two are standing almost shoulder to shoulder.
    It is an illusion, a scene from the same movie that opened at the café. No Selznick or Wilder could have scripted it better, this wartime romance. The last shot is of the couple embracing as they ride in their horse-drawn carriage around one of the most alluring cities in the world, a city touched by World War II yet at the same time shielded from its ravages.

    Edith and Leon’s wedding portrait, signed by Jean Weinberg.
    Except it wasn’t a movie, because Leon and Edith were my parents. And the aftereffects of their café courtship would reverberate years later and thousands of miles away.
    The account of their first encounter in the spring of 1943 would hold me in thrall long after I learned that much of what I’d treasured was make-believe, as illusory as their standing shoulder to shoulder in Jean Weinberg’s photograph.
    I held on to the glamorous image even when all glamour had gone from their lives and mine, and colonial Cairo was no more, and Jewish Cairo was a distant memory, and we had been banished to a string of shabby hotels in Paris and New York, until finally ending up in a corner of Brooklyn no wider than ten blocks, where thousands of other refugees from the Levant had also fetched up.
    As we moved from country to country, from city to city, I learned to find solace in the fable of my parents’ love affair. I would ask my mother to tell me of the romantic encounter again and again, I’d grill my father for details about that magical first meeting with Edith at La Parisiana.
    â€œI find you very beautiful. Would it be possible for us to meet?”
    What had drawn him to Edith? Why had he decided to marry her after spurning so many other women? Like so much of the lore that surrounded my father, Leon, each facet of his life took on a sheen and luminescence akin to the garments he favored, and I was never able to discern what was real and what had been artfully woven.
    â€œLoulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer,” my mother would tell me when I was a little girl; We must rebuild the hearth. It was a line from one of her favorite books, a work of fiction. At first, I didn’t know what she meant. We were living in a cramped city apartment, not some country house with a fireplace.
    Eventually, I came to understand that I was the chosen one, entrusted with the impossible task of taking our shattered family and our lost home and restoring them.
    My point of reference became the photograph, so that I found myself always trying to recapture the promise of that wedding portrait, and more potent still, the vision of that