The Counterlife (39 page)

Yet, Jewishly, I still thought, what
do
they need all this stuff for? Why do they need these wise men and all these choruses of angels? Isn't the birth of a child wonderful enough,
more
mysterious, for
lacking
all this stuff? Though frankly I've always felt that the place where Christianity gets dangerously, vulgarly obsessed with the miraculous is Easter, the Nativity has always struck me as a close second to the Resurrection in nakedly addressing the most childish need. Holy shepherds and starry skies, blessed angels and a virgin's womb, being materializing on this planet without the heaving and the squirting, the smells and the excretions, without the plundering satisfaction of the orgasmic shudder—what sublime, offensive kitsch, with its fundamental abhorrence of sex.

Certainly the elaboration of the story of the Virgin Birth had never before struck me as quite so childish and spinsterishly unacceptable as it did that evening, fresh from my Sabbath at Agor. When I heard them singing about that Disneyland Bethlehem, in whose dark streets shineth the everlasting light, I thought of Lippman distributing his leaflets in the marketplace there and consoling, with his
Realpolitik,
the defiant Arab enemy: “Don't give up your dream, dream of Jaffa, go ahead; and someday, if you have the power, even if there are a
hundred
pieces of paper, you will take it from me by force.”

When her turn came, Maria's mother ascended to the pulpit lectern and, in that tone of simplicity with which you induce first gullibility and then sleep in children to whom you're telling a bedtime story, charmingly read from St. Luke the fifth lesson, “The Angel Gabriel salutes the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Her own writing disclosed a stronger affinity to a lowly, more corporeal existence: three books—
The Interior of the Georgian Manor House, The Smaller Georgian Country House,
and
Georgians at Home
—as well as numerous articles over the years in
Country Life,
had earned for her a solid reputation among students of Georgian interior design and furnishings, and she was regularly asked to speak to local Georgian societies all over England. A woman who took her work “dead seriously,” according to Maria—“a very reliable source of information”—though on this occasion looking less like someone who spent her London days in the V & A archives and the British Library than like the perfect hostess, a short, pretty woman some fifteen years older than I, with a soft round face that reminded me of a porcelain plate and that very fine hair that turns from a mousy blond to snowy white with very little difference of effect, hair that's been done for thirty years by the same very good, old-fashioned hairdresser. Mrs. Freshfield had the air of someone who never put a foot wrong—which Maria claimed had nearly been so: her big mistake had been her husband, but she'd made that only once, and after her marriage to Maria's father had never again been distracted from Georgian interiors by the inexplicable yearning for an attractive man.

“She was the beauty of the Sixth,” Maria explained to me, “the Queen of Hockey—she carried off all the prizes. He was academically rather stupid, but terribly athletic, and he had enormous glamour. The black Celt. He stood out a mile. Elegant and, even before he arrived at university, quite stuck up about his glamour. Nobody could understand what it was that made him so famous. There were all these other boys wanting to be judges, or cabinet ministers, or soldiers, and this stupid twit was turning on the girls. Mother hadn't been turned on before. After, she never wanted to be again. And she wasn't—from all the evidence, never so much as touched again. She did everything to give us a solid world, a good and solid, traditional English upbringing—that became the entire meaning of her life. He had always behaved beautifully to us; no man could have enjoyed three little girls more. We enjoyed him too. He behaved beautifully to everyone, except her. But if you're convinced that your wife is fundamentally uninterested in what interests you, which is your erotic power, and if the history of your relationship is that you can hardly communicate with her at all, and there's nothing really but resentment between you in the end, and however sterling a character she may have, she doesn't really
come across
—I think that's the expression—and you yourself have lots of vitality and are rather highly sexed, as he was—and like all you boys, he seemed to find it a great torture, you just want it
so much
—then you have no choice, really, do you? First you devote lots of hours to the humiliation of your wife, with her best friends ideally, and then with the obliging neighbors, until having exhausted every possibility for betrayal in the immediate hundred square miles, you vanish, and there's an acrimonious divorce, and after there's never enough money, and your little girls are forever susceptible to dark men with beautiful manners.”

Until her grandmother had taken her place in the pulpit, Phoebe had been mostly intrigued by the tiny trebles in their short pants, some of whom, not halfway through the hour, were looking as though they wouldn't have minded being home in bed. But when Grandmother stepped into the pulpit to read, the child suddenly found everything amusing—tugging at Maria's hand, she began to laugh and get excited, and could be quieted only by climbing onto Mummy's lap, where she was gently rocked into a semi-stupor.

A solo followed, sung by a slender boy of about eleven whose untainted charm reminded me of a doctor with too much bedside manner. After he concluded his part and the entire choir had seraphically joined in, he brazenly focused a coquettish smile upon the choirmaster, who in turn acknowledged how remarkable a boy the beautiful soloist was with a half-suppressed but lingering smile of his own. Still not about to be taken in by all this Christian heartiness, I was relieved to think that I'd caught a little whiff of homoerotic pedophilia. I wondered if in fact my skepticism hadn't already prompted the rector to single me out as someone privately making unseasonal observations. On the other hand, as we were seated in pews reserved for the readers' families, it may have been that he had simply recognized Maria as her mother's daughter and that alone explained the scrutinizing appraisal of the gentleman next to the Freshfield girl who appeared to have come to the carol service determined not to sing.

We stood for the carols and sat for the lessons and remained seated when the choir sang “The Seven Joys of Mary” and “Silent Night.” When the program directed “All kneel” for the blessing, which came after the collection, I remained obstinately upright, fairly sure I was the only one in all the church failing to assume a posture of devout submission. Maria leaned forward just enough so as not to affront the rector—or her mother, should she turn out to have eyes in the back of her skull—and I was thinking that if my grandparents had disembarked at Liverpool instead of continuing on in steerage for New York, if family fate had consigned me to schools here rather than to the municipal education system of Newark, New Jersey, my head would always have been sticking up like this when everyone else's was bowed in prayer. Either that, or I would have tried to keep my origins to myself, and to avoid seeming a little boy inexplicably bent on making himself strange, I too would have kneeled, however well I understood that Jesus was a gift to neither me nor my family.

After the rector's blessing everyone rose for the final carol, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Inclining her head conspiratorially toward me, Maria whispered, “You are a very forbearing anthropologist,” and holding Phoebe so as to keep her from slumping over with fatigue, she proceeded to sing out rousingly, along with everyone else, “Christ, by highest heaven adored / Christ, the everlasting Lord,” while I remembered how shortly after our arrival in England her ex-husband had referred to me on the phone as “the aging Jewish writer.” When I'd asked how she'd responded, she slipped her arms around me and said, “I told him that I liked all three.”

Following the organ finale we took a stairway by the porch of the church down into a spacious, low-ceilinged, whitewashed crypt, where mulled wine and mince pie were being served. It took some time to navigate little Phoebe through all of the people heading down the stairs for refreshment. The child was to spend the night with her grandmother, a treat for both, while I took Maria out to celebrate her birthday. Everyone said how lovely the singing had been and told Mrs. Freshfield how wonderfully she had read. An elderly gentleman whose name I couldn't catch, a friend of the family who had also read one of the lessons, explained to me the purpose of the charity for which the collection had been taken—“Been going on for a hundred years,” he said, “—there are so many poor and lonely people.”

Fortunately there was our new house to give us all something to talk about, and there were Polaroid snapshots to look at, taken by Maria when she had driven over the day before to check on the construction. The house was to be renovated over the next six months while we stayed in a rented mews house in Kensington. Actually it was two connecting, smallish brick houses, on the site of an old boatyard in Chiswick, that we were converting into one large enough for the family and the nanny and for studios for Maria and me.

We talked about how Chiswick wasn't as far out as it seemed and yet with the gate closed on the stone wall to the street it had the seclusion of a remote rural village—the quiet Nathan needed for his work, Maria told everyone. On the rear-street side there was the wall and a paved garden with daffodils and irises and a small apple tree; at the front of the house, beyond a raised terrace where we could sit on warm evenings, there was a wide tow-path and the river. Maria said that it looked as though most of the people who walked along the towpath were either lovers having assignations or women with small children—“one way or another,” she said, “people in a very good mood.” There were people fishing for trout now that the river was cleaned up, and early in the morning, when you opened the shutters on what was to be our bedroom, you could see rowing eights out to practice. In the summer there were small boats going up for holidays on the river and the steamers carrying sightseers from Charing Cross to Kew Gardens. In late autumn the fog came down and in winter barges went by with their cargo covered, and often in the morning there was mist. And there were always gulls—ducks as well, that walked up the terrace steps to be fed, if you fed them, and, occasionally, there were swans. Twice a day at high tide the river rose over the towpath and lapped at the terrace wall. The elderly gentleman said that it sounded as though for Maria it would be like living in Gloucestershire again while only fifteen minutes by the Underground from Leicester Square. She said, no, no, it wasn't the country
or
London, and it wasn't the suburbs either, it was living on the river … on and on, amiably, amicably, aimlessly.

And nobody asked about Israel. Either Maria hadn't mentioned my being there or they weren't interested. And probably just as well: I wasn't sure how much Agor ideology I could manage to get across to Mrs. Freshfield.

To Maria, however, I'd talked all afternoon about my trip. “Your journey,” she'd called it, after hearing about Lippman and reading my letter to Henry, “to the Jewish heart of darkness.” A good description, that, of my eastward progress and I delineated it further in my notes—from the Tel Aviv café and the acid dolefulness of disheartened Shuki, inland to the Jerusalem Wailing Wall and my prickly intermingling there with the pious Jews, and then on to the desert hills, the plunge into the heart, if not of darkness, of demonic Jewish ardor. The militant zealotry of Henry's settlement didn't, to my mind, make their obdurate leader the Kurtz of Judea, however; the book suggested to me by the settlers' fanatical pursuit of God-promised deliverance was a Jewish
Moby-Dick,
with Lippman as the Zionist Ahab. My brother, without realizing, could well have signed onto a ship destined for destruction, and there was nothing to be done about it, certainly not by me. I hadn't mailed the letter and wouldn't—Henry, I was sure, could only see it as more domination, an attempt to drown him in still more of my words. Instead I copied it into my notes, into that ever-enlarging storage plant for my narrative factory, where there is no clear demarcation dividing actual happenings eventually consigned to the imagination from imaginings that are treated as having actually occurred—memory as entwined with fantasy as it is in the brain.

Georgina, younger by a year than Maria, and Sarah, three years older, were not tall and dark-haired like the middle sister and their father but resembled the mother more, slight, shortish women, with straight fair hair that they didn't much bother about and the same soft, round, agreeable faces that had probably been prettiest when they were girls of fifteen living in Gloucestershire. Georgina had a job with a London public relations firm and Sarah had recently become an editor with a company specializing in medical texts, her fourth publishing job in as many years and work having little to do with anything she cared about. Yet Sarah was the sister who was supposed to have been the genius. She had spent her childhood mastering dancing, mastering riding, mastering just about everything as though, if she didn't, terrible tragedy and chaos would ensue. But now she was constantly changing jobs and losing men and, in Maria's words, “fucking up, absolutely, any opportunity that's presented to her, throwing it away in the most monumental way.” Sarah spoke to people with an almost alarming rapidity, when she spoke at all; in conversation she pounced and then abruptly withdrew, making no use whatsoever of the enigmatic smile that was her mother's first line of defense and that even sedate-looking Maria, uneasy upon entering a room full of strangers, would shield herself with until the initial social timidity subsided. Unlike Georgina, whose awful shyness was a kind of trampoline to catapult her overeagerly into every minute and meaningless exchange, Sarah held herself aloof from all courteous pleasantries, leading me to think that when the time came, we two might actually be able to talk.