And Aaron was such a promising scholar, such a handsome bridegroom-to-be: dark, broad-shouldered, with a physique that made the other yeshiva boys seem puny and unhealthy in comparison. Such a fine boy, such a loving son, she thought, her eyes misting. Everyone knew how good he was! The diligent hours he spent in the study hall conquering the thousand-page books of Talmud, the hours he spent on the Sabbath visiting the sick in local hospitals, making sure they heard kiddush and had a proper Sabbath meal.
But oddly enough, it was not his good qualities, but his failures that gave her the most pleasure. His arrogance, his unforgiving intolerance for backsliding or sloppy religious observance. His proud confidence in himself, in his knowledge, in his position in life, which gave him an unpleasant streak of haughtiness and bad temper. For in these things, he was really just like his father. Just like Josh, she repeated to herself in a way that had now become familiar.
She ran her hand through her hair. It was never uncovered now. Even in the house. Only sometimes, at night, when Josh and Aaron slept, did she allow the walls their eyes. She touched the long, thick curls sadly. She was graying by the day it seemed—those horrid stiff gray hairs. Dry and ugly, they seemed to sprout up like weeds from her aching brain, manifestations of her aging soul.
Could life ever again be a gay summer evening on Thirteenth Avenue, with your pretty new summer dress swishing and your gleaming bright hair spilling gaily down your shoulders? Her eyes moved restlessly. There were her husband’s religious books—tomes and tomes filled with knowledge. Be kind. Be good. Obey. And there was the oil painting of a flower she had bought as a young girl, its captured bloom going a bit plastic in the bad light. The closed, well-dusted piano. The black synagogue hat and veil she had left on the dining room table since last Shabbas. Everything so calm and familiar and reassuring. There were no dangers here. No threats of any kind.
Then why couldn’t she sleep?
She looked out the window. A light snow had begun to fall, and in the morning the whole world would be strange and beautiful, all the trees sculpted in sparkling sugar coating, the garbage cans and fire hydrants beautiful new creations. Even the sky would be new, white, clean, and somber, turning the falling light into long, purple shadows. All the familiar darkness of the city would bleach white. She would see it in the morning. But for now, it was so terribly dark, the light of the moon and stars blotted out by the pregnant dark clouds.
She was so tired. So very tired. But she knew better than to try to go back to sleep. From long experience she was intimately aware of the nuances of her life and had grown wise in the ways of survival. To go back to bed now would be to stare at the dark ceiling, the shadows of the chest of drawers, the dark eyeless socket of the window. It would mean battering away furiously at the night terrors, trying to keep their heavy bodies from sitting heavily on her face and chest like little mythic animals with sneering grins. She would lie there tense, willing the night away, tossing in exhaustion, afraid to close her eyes, afraid of that sinking feeling as she edged into the horror that awaited her the moment she succumbed.
All these years. She had been all right for most of them. She had slept, her belly swelling blessedly with her baby girls, her arms tired from the baking of challah, the making of hamantaschen, the Shabbos meals, the festive meals… For years she had allowed herself the luxury of some modicum of peace. But now, Aaron’s search for a bride… something was happening to her again. She didn’t know what.
She started to cry, pressing her hands over her mouth to keep the sound from waking her family. I’m sorry, so sorry, she thought. My whole life, never any end, never any relief.
It doesn’t matter how much love I get, how much respect and honor. The whole surface of my life, so perfect. But the real life underneath, never any real happiness, never any real, untainted joy. Never, never. He is always there, always just about to rip my clothes. His kiss still poisons me, a rotten fruit I’ve bitten into whose taste never leaves me, no matter how much good food I swallow, no matter how much fine wine I swirl and swirl over my tongue.
I can’t get him out of my life.
She sat alone in the dark room, her glasses misted from tears. She was so alone. She thought of her husband deep in peaceful sleep, a few footsteps away. At the end of the universe.
Not like the days when she was a young bride and he reached for her, her absence changing the very air so that he had to wake and search for her; like the days he had to find her and put his arm around her and lead her back to bed…
He was older now. He snored. He did not wake easily. He did not even know she was not there beside him. Her life was separate from his. It had happened gradually. Too much he didn’t know. Too much, she didn’t dare tell him. And now, so long after, did not wish to tell him.
How I begrudge his snoring, heavy-lidded sleep-filled nights! His righteous, thoughtless, peaceful, heavy sleep.
She could not forgive him for not knowing intuitively. Magically. Why doesn’t he know? If he was a better man, a bigger man, he would rescue me from myself, my sleepless nights, she thought unreasonably. She was cruel in her senseless antagonism. She hated her creation, the marriage she had built and designed after her own will. A marriage with so many dark corners, so many attics and basements where you had to be careful never to go.
An old rabbi, founder of the yeshiva, had died, and out of respect Josh had flown with the casket to Jerusalem to be at the burial on the Mount of Olives. It was bitter cold and pouring rain when they buried him, he told her later. Why didn’t you wait? she’d asked him. For another day, for better weather? That is the law, he’d answered. The dead must be buried. To leave them even a day is an abomination. If I die and it is pouring rain, don’t bury me, she’d suddenly begged. Wait for the sun to come out. And he had answered patiently that it was the law to bury the dead the same day.
And she had thought: He would not say yes to a dying wish. He would bury me in the cold night, in the freezing rain, because a dead body is an abomination to G-d and must be buried. Even on a cold night. Even in the icy rain.
He was not a cruel man, not unfeeling. But he was principled. He did what he learned was right, though it might tear his insides. But somehow, though she tried to see him in a kinder light, a softening pinkish glow of goodness, she found his righteousness appalling. Perhaps, she thought, because I am weak and emotional I cannot really appreciate his strength. Perhaps it is simply Eve’s old wish to involve Adam in her desire for the forbidden. To get him to side with her against the Law, the Word.
And what was the Law when it came to adultery? To rape? To illegitimate children? She would never ask. She did not want to know. It was safer not to know.
Tomorrow she would get up and wash her face and start fielding the calls from the matchmakers. She would have to start visiting the young girls and their parents. Nothing could happen until the mother of the boy got involved and gave the green light.
How she hated the idea of it! The prospective mother-in-law lumbering up the steps to the scrupulously scrubbed house of strangers, making some poor sweet young girl tremble in her room at the coming inspection! She didn’t want that role! She sided too much with the girl! Besides, who was she to judge? What right did she have to decide? And yet it was her duty. Her son was counting on her. It was the way their world worked. Aaron would never have a bride if she did not lumber up those steps and terrify that young girl.
And she could not tell them, tell anyone, that beneath that heavy flesh, that graying hair, was also a young girl, trembling too. She went back to bed and reached for her husband’s inert hand. She put it under her cheek. And then she slept.
Chapter twenty-four
The pattern was always the same: The matchmaker’s phone call. The pious sales pitch: “Such a fine family!” “Such a lovely, pretty, friendly girl!” “So smart!” “Whoever knows her, loves her!” “Such a distinguished father!” And more rarely: “Such a well-to-do
mishpachah!
Such a generous dowry.”
Tamar had been through this five times before. The matchmaker did not always have the same taste in beauty she did. Nor the same view of what friendly meant. To the matchmaker, “lovely” meant a good, healthy appetite, a fine, ruddy complexion; “friendly” meant that her eyes were open and she didn’t immediately turn white when the prospective mother-in-law said hello.
This time it was a little girl, barely seventeen, named Fruma Devorah. Josh had already made discreet inquiries about the family and found nothing amiss. Fruma Devorah’s father, Rabbi Engel, had already visited Aaron at his yeshiva and questioned him on the finer points of Talmudical intricacies. The prospective father-in-law and the prospective son-in-law had waxed enthusiastic over each other.
“Too bad you can’t marry the father,” Tamar finally said.
“
Ima
, really!” Aaron had protested touchily. “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough. I mean, my whole future is at stake. I would like it to be finished already. I want to get back to learning.”
“So what is the next step, Aaron?”
“Why, you know… You have to go see the girl. Nothing can happen until you see the girl.”
“But why can’t
you
go see the girl? I mean, why do I have to decide? Since when is the future mother-in-law allowed to choose?”
“
Ima
, I can’t understand you,” Aaron said with that foreboding, humorless stiffness that she knew so well. He was offended, shocked at her lack of
frumkeit
. At her questioning the strict social conventions that had wound its relentless tentacles around Orchard Park and Williamsburg, B’nai Brak and Jerusalem, over the past twenty years, tightening up what the new generation viewed as the shocking slackness of their parents’ world. Educated by old European rabbis, the young men and women of Orchard Park yearned to return to the unbending, almost wrenching purity of their self-sacrificing European grandparents and great-grandparents.
“In my day, your father came to me,” Tamar protested. “Only then did I meet his parents. Afterward, when we’d already decided.”
“But this is not the way it’s done now,
Ima
. At least not among real B’nai Torah,” he said stiffly.
She bit her lip, chastised and resentful. How she had come to resent that term, used whenever one group wanted to brag how many miles nearer the intersection of G-d and His divine will they were than another group! She was reminded sorrowfully once again of how much the community of her childhood had changed.
Though outwardly the grid of streets and avenues, the little
one-and two-family homes of Orchard Park had remained the same, socially the community had undergone a drastic transformation. Gone were the relatively easygoing Orthodox American families that once dominated the streets, replaced by the devout Hasidim, mostly imports from Hungary and Russia and Poland. The influx of the Hasidim, especially the devout Hungarians, had changed the community’s standards with amazing swiftness.
Ruach Chaim Yeshiva was gone, its standards no longer living up to those of the newcomers. Indeed, the rumors that the boys had sometimes crossed the street to talk to girls had invoked such wrath that the Hasidim had not only closed it down, but actually demolished the building and plowed under the earth with a team of oxen! (Where had they gotten oxen? she still wondered. New Jersey?) It was the only way, they insisted, to remove the impurity from the neighborhood.
Sometimes she wondered if people had really become
frumer
—sincerely more religiously observant—or simply more
farchnyokt
, outlandishly obsessed with making up new strictures that helped them showily display their superior piety, similar to the way people had once bought cars with bigger and bigger tail fins. Would the Jews of Orchard Park ever decide that less was more, the way people had concerning their cars? She somehow doubted it.
It seemed that you proved your status by denying yourself. The foods that were kosher enough for your parents and grandparents (and everybody else’s parents and grandparents) were no longer kosher enough for you—or anyone you’d allow your children to play with. So now, even canned peaches in sugar syrup needed rabbinical supervision, a stamp of approval. Even salt, even sugar! Not to mention the hysterical lengths people went to about meat—which really did need strict supervision to see it was ritually slaughtered so no pain was felt by the animal and salted and soaked to remove the blood. Butchers who wanted to make a
living had to know the right rabbis, pray in the correct synagogues, and probably pay off the right kashruth supervisor. It was getting so ridiculous that no one would be allowed to eat anything at all very soon!
She bit her lip, surprised at the heretical train of her thoughts, feeling disloyal. After all, wasn’t Josh one of those people? Every week there was something else he warned her to avoid buying, saying, or doing because it was no longer acceptable to “B’nai Torah.” But wasn’t it just snobbery? A way to exclude those who didn’t think and behave exactly as you thought they were supposed to?
“
Ima!
” Aaron implored with a touch of despair.
“All right, all right. I’ll go see her.”
Friday night. She lit the candles and left Sara and Malka to fend for themselves as their father and brother went to shul. It was a cold night. She pulled her coat around her, barely able to button it. I have to lose some weight, she told herself, appalled at her own girth.
She’d mourned her lost figure after each pregnancy and vowed to regain it. But like some unstoppable gushing of molten lava flowing up from the center of the earth, her body had continued to add the unsightly layers, hoarding the stores it was sure it might need when the impending famine arrived. Except there had been no famine. And the storerooms were seriously overstocked. Ridiculously overstocked, she mourned, hurrying, glancing at herself in anger and despair in the windows of stores already closed for the Sabbath. I look like one of the matrons, she thought. One of those women who used to make faces at me and Jenny and Hadassah when we skipped down the streets or ran to hide from the boys.