Authors: Allegra Goodman
“You could wait till Sunday. Then I’ll help you,” Elizabeth says, alarmed at the thought of causing Beatrix to transgress.
“Not at all,” Beatrix says. “Division of labor. Leave it to me. Leave it to the secular arm.” And she stretches out a sinewy bare arm.
W
HEN
the long day ends and the evening settles over the trees, the men walk back to the synagogue for services. The women sit in their glider rockers and their porch swings and they look into the fading light and talk. They talk about their children and their husbands and the traffic from the city. They talk about berry picking, the blackberries now in season and the blueberries to come. Then they lower their voices so the children will not hear. They speak of Israel and the hijacking of the Air France flight. The hostages in Uganda. The talk of politics mixes with the scent of roses.
Elizabeth sits with Regina on Cecil’s porch. “Can’t you stay a little longer?” she asks.
“No,” Regina says, “I have to get back to the lab.”
“Tell me about California,” Elizabeth says.
Regina smiles. “Why don’t you come out and see for yourself?”
“Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to go to Los Angeles,” Elizabeth says. “Tell me what it’s like to live there.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s the Jewish community like?” Elizabeth asks. Her question sounds parochial, but it isn’t meant that way. She asks out of intense curiosity. She wants to know what it is really like to live there,
and so she tries to imagine herself in that place, a part of that community.
“We live in the Pico Robertson area,” Regina says. “On a beautiful flat street with palm trees.”
“All lined with palm trees?” Elizabeth asks.
“Yes,” says Regina, and she looks out at the great trees on Maple, and the tiny jagged pieces of sky cut out between the leaves.
“And where do you daven?” Elizabeth asks.
“In a synagogue that used to be a movie theater.”
“No!”
“Really. It’s a grand old movie palace with the lights and the curtains and everything. And the women sit in the balcony. The name of the shul is outside on the marquee. And believe me, there isn’t any coatroom like there is here.”
“No one wears coats?” Elizabeth asks.
“Maybe light jackets in the winter—or a sweater.”
Elizabeth laughs in delight. “You must love it there.”
“No,” Regina says. “I love it here.”
R
AV
Kirshner’s house has a closed look; the porch glassed in. The rooms are cool and quiet; the furniture dark wood. The upholstery and curtains are heavy and floral, with dust in the pleats—dusty Schumacher prints of roses. They have not been changed since the rebbetzin, Jeremy’s mother, was alive. Rav Kirshner’s daughter-in-law Rachel keeps up everything herself. She cooks and cleans, with only a little outside help once a week. Jeremy’s brother, Isaiah, bears the brunt of the Rav’s secretarial work, but it is Rachel who must run the household.
Rachel is a thin woman, almost childlike, with her slight figure and slender, nervous fingers. Her deep-set eyes are blue, her skin pale. She suffers from migraines so terrible she must take to her bed and lie in a completely dark room for hours until they pass. Rachel is the only child of the famous Rabbi Guttman, and her father gave her everything—even sent her to college at Barnard. She commuted each day to the college from her home in Brooklyn. Music was her subject, and she studied piano. Of course, her goal was never a performing career. She does not play for anyone, although she still plays exceptionally well. Her husband listens to her sometimes. He sits with his books and listens to her practice at the old Steinway in Kaaterskill or on the Bosendorfer in the city. Isaiah is not musical, but he admires Rachel’s skill.
Rachel and Isaiah have only one child, a thirteen-year-old boy,
who is not spoken about for his brilliance but always praised for his behavior. He is dutiful and meek. On Sunday morning the boy sits at the dining-room table, bent over the great black-bound volumes of Talmud, from which he learns each day. Briskly Jeremy flicks on the light over the table. “Don’t read in the dark, Nachum.” Through the open double doors to the library, Jeremy can see Rachel and Isaiah helping the Rav to his desk. They are easing him slowly into his leather chair, one on each side.
Everything in the house is old. The china is old, so are the candlesticks. They are not from this lifetime, but from another place and another world, the house in Germany in the 1930s. The place is so oppressive, Jeremy can hardly bear it. He avoids coming up to the house as much as possible. And yet Jeremy loves antiques; he collects early printed books—only small volumes, of course—very small ones in fine leather bindings. He doesn’t collect extensively. But when a good piece comes up for auction, or when he sees one in the catalogs, if the book is learned and not too expensive, he will buy it. He loves the touch of soft leather and smooth paper. He loves antique furniture, especially small traveling cases, fitted boxes, inlaid lap desks, travel libraries with miniature volumes, travel apothecaries. He cannot afford to indulge his appetite for these, of course. He reveres certain manuscripts in the great libraries; he is moved by certain paintings, portraits of small dark beauties looking over their gilt windowsills into the vast museum rooms, nervous, like train passengers arriving at unfamiliar stations. All these are wonderful to him, but he cannot bear the old furniture and the books in his father’s house—watermarked as they are, rescued from the library of the house in Germany. There is a stench about all the old things in the house. They reek. They are like freshly killed birds with the flesh still on them. They have no delicacy, no formal and anonymous beauty; they smell only of death.
Jeremy stands and watches his father at his work, frail and intent, reading letters, sorting them into piles. Slitting open envelopes with his silver letter opener. Isaiah comes out to the dining room. He looks a great deal like Jeremy. He has the same sharp features. But the pointed nose and sharp chin look different on Isaiah, not shrewd, but delicate.
“Are you going back today?” Isaiah asks Jeremy.
“I’m getting ready.”
“If you want to stay …” Isaiah trails off. “No, I’m going today. I’m stopping for coffee at Cecil Birnbaum’s and then I’m going home.”
“I only asked because he said he wants to see you before you go.”
“Why?” Jeremy asks.
“He wants to talk to you.”
Jeremy looks past Isaiah to where their father sits working in the library. “He’s tired,” he says.
“You think so?” Isaiah demurs. He is extremely cautious. He is conscious of his public position. In the eyes of the community he is his father’s heir.
“He looks worse,” Jeremy says. “He’s taking the new medication?”
Isaiah doesn’t answer, but Rachel has come up beside them. “He takes it every three hours,” she says. “But the problem is that his condition changes. Then sometimes the medication is too much and it makes him shake, or sometimes it’s too little, and his muscles freeze, and then he can’t move.” Her voice is perfectly quiet, but authoritative in tone. It is she who gives the Rav his medication and watches the clock constantly through the day. At night there is a male nurse to care for him. The Rav has Parkinson’s disease. No one outside the family knows this.
Jeremy stands with his brother and sister-in-law and he feels their unhappiness, their unspoken reproach. After all, he helps neither with the correspondence nor with the medication.
He turns abruptly and strides into the library. “Father,” he says, “did you want to talk to me?”
The Rav looks up from his mail. His eyes are black and sparkling in a face and frame diminished by age and illness. His features are small but deep cut so that his face seems cast in shadow. His hair is thin, but even now mostly black. He sits up straight in his chair. He holds his letter opener firmly. He is not too weak to hold it, but his hands shake. It’s not that he has too little energy, but that he has too much. His fingers tremble with life. “Close the door, Jeremy,” he says.
Jeremy closes the door and then returns to stand in front of the desk.
“Thank you,” the Rav says. He looks at Jeremy carefully, but he does not ask him to sit down. “I have a question for you,” he says. “Where the
baal koreh
shifts the emphasis of the word at the end of the sentence. What is the word for it? The English term?”
Jeremy’s heart beats faster—not from fear, but pride, the desire to pull the word out somehow. He did know the word once, he is sure of it. He knows exactly what his father is talking about; he could come up with examples. The reader of the Torah is finishing a sentence and he pronounces the last word differently, shifts the stress on the vowel. Jeremy searches his memory. He does know the word. Not just as a child, but later, all the way through college, Jeremy pursued the rigorous Jewish curriculum devised by his father. Jeremy and Isaiah had exactly the same education. They studied the same texts, sat together at the same table. The Rav himself examined them. The term is on the tip of Jeremy’s tongue. It is a Masoretic rule, recorded in the fifth century.
“Your brother did not know it either,” the Rav says calmly, and he goes back to his letters. For a moment Jeremy watches him, sitting there, absorbed in his correspondence. His father is not interested in waiting for an answer. When he asks a question he wants results immediately. If he gets them later he is not interested.
Jeremy stands there for a moment.
“He wants me to do less,” the Rav says suddenly.
“Who?” Jeremy is taken aback.
“Your brother wants me to do less.”
“Is that what he told you?” Jeremy asks.
“No, we have not spoken about it,” the Rav says.
“Then how do you know?” asks Jeremy.
“I know. I see. I hear. I don’t need him to tell me.” The Rav’s tone is denigrating. “He is not an artful person. He is not a subtle person.”
It is strange for Jeremy to hear his father talk like this. To hear him speak so openly. There is something in the Rav that he rarely shows, a steeliness, a shrewdness, and a kind of calculation, something political, something self-aware. It’s startling, because the Rav is so
learned. He is steeped in ancient language, and seems far removed from the world. He seems completely disengaged. And, of course, he is insistent, he absolutely insists, not only for himself, but for Isaiah, his successor, for everyone who follows him, on a religion of strict observance. Slowly and firmly with the passing years, the Rav has guided his community into a life of increasing restrictions. He has moved in his exegesis of Jewish law toward an interpretation ever more bounded and punctilious. What he truly values, it seems to Jeremy, is not deep thought about the sacred, but obedience. Gradually, irrevocably, the Rav is drawing his people after him, in study, in word and deed, into a realm of obscurantism, a life encumbered and weighed down by tradition and endless layers of legalism and strict observance. So it is strange to feel at times the secret disdain that the Rav carries within him, even for his own followers, even for Isaiah, his own son, the good son, after all. To hear him say in that dismissive voice, he is not an artful person, he is not a subtle person. The Rav can show that to Jeremy because he thinks Jeremy is full of scorn already. Cynical and detached enough to enjoy his father’s sense of irony. He has flattered Jeremy and rebuked him at the same time.
“What will you do?” Jeremy asks his father.
The Rav does not answer. His silence excuses Jeremy from the room.
Closing the door behind him, Jeremy sees Isaiah in the dining room helping Nachum through the day’s Talmud passage. The two of them sit together in their white shirtsleeves bent over the open volume on the table, the folio pages with their ganglia of texts. In the kitchen Rachel is already preparing dinner. Methodically she is putting up a large brisket for the evening. There will be lunch and afternoon prayers; there will be dinner. There will be evening prayers. There will be blessings for washing hands, blessings for breaking bread, blessings after all the meals. There will be prayers before bed. The house is filled with blessings. All time and all activities are regulated by them. It was different when Jeremy’s mother was alive. The blessings, the prayers, were hardly noticeable then. They were like the ticking of clocks. Inaudible, except in the dead of night.
Jeremy doesn’t like to come to Kaaterskill in part because he feels his mother’s absence there. When his mother was alive she ran the
house. She insisted on having things done properly. The windows washed, the baseboards dusted. She kept his father’s work at bay, never allowing books in the dining or living rooms. Now the Rav’s reading, his notes, dictionaries, and volumes of Talmud, seem to creep through the house like tendrils of ivy. Jeremy’s mother, Sarah, was a pious and imperious woman, his father’s match in the standards she set, although, of course, her interests were different from his, focused on the kitchen and the table, the lighting of candles and polishing of candlesticks, flower arranging, needlework, knitting, painting—she painted well and knitted exquisitely. She was meticulous about her home. She set a gorgeous table on the holidays with crystal and silver, and she had a set of Limoges china, used only two nights a year for Pesach. When she baked, she baked with passionate intensity, destroying any batch that fell below her expectations. When she entertained she exhausted herself. She made herself ill. When she shopped for clothes or furniture, she looked in the stores uptown and then bought on the Lower East Side. She bought there and yet she never bought cheap things. Everything had to be solid. The furniture was solid wood, the silver sterling. The candlesticks she bought at the time of Isaiah’s engagement were not hollow like the pretty ones she saw in Tiffany, but solid silver down to the base.
But her real passion was for Jeremy and for his education. Isaiah was never interested in literature or in art, but Jeremy had been different, and she fostered that difference, nursed it tenderly, insisting that his father hire a French teacher at the fledgling Kirshner yeshiva, a history instructor, even an English teacher with a doctorate, a former professor at Brooklyn College. She changed the faculty and the entire curriculum of the school for Jeremy, because, as she put it, she wanted him to have opportunities. Of course, she wanted him to be a rabbi. It was her deepest wish that he succeed his father, and yet succeed to the position with an extraordinary range of skills. Not merely ordination, but with degrees from secular universities as well. Always, she was his champion and advocate, constantly spurring Jeremy on, constantly pushing the Rav to recognize his accomplishments. And yet, even then, his father was turning away.