Ten

I DON’T KNOW IF I was hurt or shocked or simply numbed by Mama’s letter. After months of near silence on the matter, except for inviting the rabbi for dinner and the last visits of my elder siblings, it came down to a letter. I suppose I was really surprised, and also a bit disappointed, that they had to resort to such passive-aggressive methods. I would’ve preferred to talk it all out. I am partly to blame too; I was always too afraid to bring it up; I didn’t want them to be angry or disappointed in me. I didn’t want to hurt my parents and put them to shame, as David kept referring to it. I couldn’t have or shouldn’t have expected that they would support me, let alone rejoice or want to have any part in my day…my glorious day.

It was one of the two happiest days in my life, and even this little bomb on the kitchen table did not spoil it. It was the catalyst I needed to be less passive-aggressive myself and to grow up and take responsibility for my life. My girlfriends from school who were leaning more towards the hippies, at least by way of drinking wine, smoking pot and singing folk songs, seemed caught in a pre-adult rebellious kind of mode. There were some who were angrier and more aggressive, and their weapons were the pen, the electric typewriter, and perhaps a protest march.

The less intellectual group was more nonchalant and in your face about things my parents’ generation would never speak of in public, and probably not in private among themselves! There were some turning to a kind of spiritual experience, but it was often linked to drug experimentation, an infiltrating Eastern style of meditation, and yoga which came with its own philosophies of reincarnation, karma, and Chinese acupuncture. I flirted myself with the writings of Alan Watts, a former Anglican minister who became a Zen Buddhist, mixed in with Hinduism. Grist for the Mill and the poems of Allen Ginsberg were even interesting except for the likes of my sister Ruthie who still read Archie comics and travel magazines. Her interests were not yet piqued to high fashion or sports, which mine never were either. Ruthie and I usually acted out our quarrels or disagreements, which often helped to demote them. But Mama’s letter was different.

Naturally I shared the letter with Ezra, who wasn’t surprised with it and tried to point out the more positive things I could be grateful for. I wasn’t rejected, disowned, or declared dead in their hearts and in their lives. I had to accept that they were who they were, and that they were good and proud parents who tried their very best to raise their children. There was more good in them than even they could understand. He advised me to sleep on it, pray on it (an expression I’d never heard him use before) and decide what to do tomorrow. We would meet at Blessed Sacrament for the 8:00 Mass…my Second Holy Communion…and have breakfast afterwards.

When I took stock of my situation, I decided I could not return to Barnard for my final year, at least not as a full-time student. It would be unfair to ask them to pay for my college any more than they did. I would get a job and my own apartment and take an evening course or two. If I had written all that down it would have looked good on paper, but so overwhelming to begin.

As it turned out, Greta came to my rescue. There was an opening at the New York Public Library for an assistant librarian. The hours were good; the beginning salary was not much, but I really had no resume; and I knew that I would love the atmosphere of working in a library. Greta also had a spare room which served as a guest room when needed, and a study for herself when not needed. She welcomed me to move in for a few months, till I got settled and could find a place on my own, and afford it. She also welcomed the company. The best part was that I would be close to St. Vincent’s. It would be my parish. Greta and I became daily communicants, the single most powerful grace of my life.

I had cleared out my room over a few days with lots of help from Ezra, Michael, Constance, Stephen, and a few of their friends, one with a small truck which proved to be a godsend. I was able to arrange for a late afternoon class and one evening course which met twice a week. I could handle that. I also got the job, but then, I had Greta’s recommendation.

I was at home on West 79th Street when Mama, Papa, and Ruthie returned from the Jersey Shore. I gave them my new address and would be letting them know my phone number once my own phone was installed. Till then, they could reach me at Greta’s number. We hugged sadly and said goodbye for now, and I promised I would be over for dinner one night during the week. I did that for a few months. The frequency got less and less as the weather changed and winter was upon us again. It left an empty place in my heart and at times a great heaviness, but I was also terribly happy that first year, that first winter and Christmas. Greta and I got along so well, our common factors being that we were both converts and loved the Church, and that we were both librarians at the same library. It made it quite convenient to go to early Mass and have a quick breakfast somewhere near St. Vincent’s, usually the Starlight Café. It was there that I had my first bacon and eggs. I had often smelled bacon in coffee shops like the Starlight, but never ate any pork, ever. It was quite delicious, a little saltier than I expected, and much too greasy. I liked it, but I don’t think I ate pork again for many years! Some things never change.

Living and working on the East Side was nice, although it made my trips to Tea on Thames less frequent, but I had established a nice friendship with Gwendolyn outside of the tea shop, and she would come to our place often for supper and was always a good one to run off with to a movie. I was seeing less of Ezra too, but we always met at Tea on Thames after my Wednesday night class. He was finishing up his last year at Columbia and had to decide what to do from there. He had visited the Passionist Retreat House a couple times more, as well as a Benedictine Monastery near Elmira, New York. He liked it very much. He said they had him up at four o’clock in the morning milking cows. He said it was all very romantic to him, till one bitterly cold morning he got slapped smack in the face by a cow’s wet tail. He wasn’t sure if he had a monastic vocation after that, he’d jokingly say. But I knew beneath the joking, he was thinking of a vocation. It was brewing in him, as Greta once put it.

I wasn’t sure at first what I thought about that and/or how I felt about it. Intellectually I knew it was a wonderful thing, and it made complete sense to me, knowing Ezra as I did. He would make a wonderful monk or priest. He was on fire with the writings of the mystics and saints, and talked about them like he knew them firsthand. Most of them were just new acquaintances to me: St. Paul of the Cross; John of the Cross; the Curé of Ars; Frances de Sales. It took a little longer for me to feel good about him having a vocation, and I had to look at my own relationship with him, which seemed to be the personal factor affecting my take on it all. Greta was very quiet and philosophical about things. Gwendolyn was more down to earth and upfront. “Maybe you’re falling in love with him, and the two of you should get married and have a dozen little Catholic Goldmans,” she once said, adding her typical humor to what she was saying.

What amazed me more was that both of them, Greta and Gwendolyn, saw something going on there before I could see it. I also think people are apt to project their own hopes and dreams onto someone else’s life and thus misinterpret what’s really going on. I knew I loved Ezra, but I was not in love with him. At least I didn’t think I was. What did I know at twenty-one years old?

Ezra and I never dated, but we went out a lot together, usually to a school or church thing, or maybe I should say, always to school or church things, not counting Tea on Thames or some new restaurant in the neighborhood. I wasn’t all too comfortable with the vocation thing. It was all very new and strange to me. I only knew a few priests and had never met a monk or a nun, at least not a cloistered nun.

Ezra was going to the Passionists in West Springfield, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving weekend, and invited me to go with him and to stay at a monastery of cloistered Dominican nuns, also in West Springfield, if they had a free guest room. I was excited about that and was all set to go when I was told I would be expected to work on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving; I was low on the librarian totem pole. Greta had off, but was going out of town for Thanksgiving weekend to be with old friends of her and her husband. They were retired missionaries living in Braintree, Massachusetts.

I was invited home for Thanksgiving and decided I should go, although David refused to come if I did. Maybe he would at least stop in for dessert. Ruthie was probably the most enthused about my coming to Thanksgiving dinner as I think she missed me the most. So I went and had a lovely time. Even Sally was there, and while she would not speak directly to me, she wasn’t inhibited in speaking about everything else to the family. She was actually anticipating a relocation to Chicago and seemed to talk about nothing else.

Mama was happy we were both home—her three girls, such a blessing to have three, she would say every time we were together. I couldn’t help but recall the Thanksgiving the year before with Ezra and his Aunt Sarah. Mama never once asked about him. I think she still blamed him for taking me away from Judaism. She could never really get it in her head that I was thinking about that before I even knew Ezra.

Papa looked tired to me, and he seemed to have lost weight, but he was his gentle self, and did ask me about Ezra. I didn’t say anything about his thinking about being a priest, not that they should care, but I figured they wouldn’t understand. Papa also asked how my job was going and seemed genuinely interested. He wanted to know if I was the one to put the huge wreaths around the stone lions in front of the grand entrance on Fifth Avenue? Ruthie asked about Greta and our apartment and whether we had a dog or cat, which I didn’t understand why, except that she was hoping for one for Chanukah.

It was a pleasant enough evening, but I missed Ezra terribly, especially when it was all over, and we would have met at Tea on Thames to hash it all over again. Tea on Thames was closed for Thanksgiving, and Gwendolyn was having dinner out with a girlfriend over from England for the week.

I went back to the apartment, and was rather content, as I recall, to be alone, happy actually. I had the whole apartment and the whole weekend to myself. I would go to Mass in the morning and go to work and then come home and cuddle up with a book. I was fascinated by that time with the life of Edith Stein, and wondered whether there might be a Carmel near Manhattan that maybe I could visit someday…and run off for a retreat, like Ezra did.

That was Thanksgiving 1966. That Christmas I was given a lovely leather-bound blank book, a gift from Greta, who told me I should begin to keep a journal of important moments and changes because it all would move along very quickly. It was my first Christmas as a Christian and my first Holy Communion at a Midnight Mass. St. Vincent’s couldn’t have been more beautiful. It had been a wonderful year when New Year’s came and one thought back on all that had happened since the new year, a year ago. The country seemed to be in so much unrest; the Middle East too, as Papa followed closely the developments in Israel. My favorite professor at Barnard was all agog over Truman Capote’s latest book, In Cold Blood, and said it would change the style of novel writing. Ruthie was still crazy over the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and now wanted to look like Twiggy, a model I never aspired to emulate.

A year later, Thanksgiving 1967, was memorable because it was my first time not having Thanksgiving with my family. Greta and I were cooking the turkey on our own as a kind of special gift and farewell to Ezra. I was still at Greta’s. I never made enough money that I could afford to both pay for school and rent my own apartment. I was able to pay part of Greta’s rent and share in the groceries and other little things, and we were good companions for each other. I had received several raises at the Library and was becoming more and more confident in my work, which I loved.

I had also discovered two monasteries in Brooklyn. A small Carmel had been there for over seventy-five years, and there was a Dominican Monastery in Brooklyn Heights. I had also visited the Mother of God Monastery in West Springfield, Massachusetts. I discovered that there were three Dominican monasteries in north Jersey, one in the south Bronx, and one near Mt. Savior, and the Benedictine monastery near Elmira, New York. I never visited there, nor had I been to the Dominican Monastery in the Bronx. There was also a monastery in Connecticut which I had hoped to visit in ’68. I was surrounded by them!

There were Carmelite, Dominican, and Franciscan monasteries of nuns all over the country which I had never had any idea of before. I thought cloisters were either a museum, like in Yonkers, or something you’d only find in Europe. We all loved Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music; she had won the Academy Award last year for Best Actress, but who knew that monasteries like that still existed, let alone in America! I liked visiting them, not because I was thinking of being a nun—Lord have mercy on me—but because I loved the peace and quiet and listening to the nuns chant. I was a daughter of the Psalms, of course; they are our Jewish songs and poetry, and it was glorious to hear them chanted in ancient Gregorian tones. I envied those who lived near such monasteries and could be a part of their prayer life every day, but East 79th Street was not quite a cloister, although I could find some nooks and crannies in the stacks at the library or down in the archives.

Now Ezra. He graduated from Columbia and immediately began teaching high school to keep himself out of the draft. Vietnam was still tearing us apart politically, and there were all kinds of other scandals and politics which I couldn’t get interested in. During the year, however, Ezra applied to enter the Passionist Novitiate, and he was accepted. He was to enter the first Sunday of Advent. So Thanksgiving was really our formal “Last Supper.” We invited Aunt Sarah, of course, and his roommates, Michael and Stephen, who were beginning a Catholic Religious Articles and Book Store in the Village. There were lots of Catholic Action Groups forming and rumors of dramatic changes coming. There were lots of changes taking place, not just in the Church, but in our culture and society in general.

The menu didn’t change that year, however. It was a good old-fashioned American Thanksgiving Day Dinner with all the trimmings. Gwendolyn brought three homemade pies: mincemeat, apple, and pumpkin (which she always called squash). We teased her that the mincemeat was probably penguin meat, but she didn’t find that as funny as we did. Greta actually did the bird and made her own stuffing recipe which I think was originally “Lutheran stuff,” we teased, and it was the first time I had had chicken livers and pork sausage in the stuffing. I did the butternut squash and mashed potatoes, which were both kosher.

We had little gifts for Ezra because he couldn’t take much with him anyway. I gave him a beautiful black Mont Blanc fountain pen from Cartier’s which set me back a week’s wages, but I knew he would use it. Greta gave him a lovely blank book journal, which I thought was a wonderful complement to my pen. And Gwendolyn gave him a little glass penguin for his desk, if he had a desk, to remind him of us. Aunt Sarah gave him a framed picture of herself standing in front of her apartment building, so he wouldn’t forget her or New York.

Aunt Sarah was a remarkable woman. She didn’t understand at all why he was running off to join a group of men called Passionists. “Can’t you find your passion right here in New York?” She was half teasing and half serious. She had had great hopes that he would be a lawyer, and blamed the whole Catholic thing on spoiling that, but she didn’t rub it in. She accepted and let things be.

I don’t think my own family ever got to her level of acceptance. Our relationship became cooler with the passage of years. Papa always hugged me tight and still called me Raf, and still delighted to go out for walks with me, my arm linked in his, strolling down the Avenue. David, Sally, and less so, Mama, never really accepted that I became a Catholic, and I think they secretly hoped it was just a phase I was passing through, and that I would meet a nice Jewish man, get married, and forget this Christian silliness. Little Ruthie, who was quickly growing up, missed having her big sister around and couldn’t understand it all, but took it all in stride. She was too busy with her own plans, I think, to get hung up over mine. We would go off to Tea on Thames once in a while, and Gwendolyn always put on a show for her, pretending she was being visited by a member of the royal family. The little girl in Ruthie loved it all!

So Ezra went off to be a Passionist. And a new year began with a wonderful blizzard and change in the air. I decided that holiday to make a retreat between Christmas and New Year’s, as I was able to get those days off now from work; Greta would be away herself, and Gwendolyn was busy at the tea shop. So it was Christmas of ’68 and the New Year ’69 that I went to the Dominican Monastery of Mary, Queen of Hope, in Brooklyn Heights. I had wanted to go to the Carmel in Brooklyn, as I really liked Edith Stein, and had read several times now, the Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. It was the autobiography of St. Teresa of Jesus, that is, St. Teresa of Avila, that converted Edith Stein who was much more Jewish and much more intelligent than I. I had not yet read Teresa of Avila’s autobiography and asked Santa for a copy for Christmas. Santa gave me a hardbound edition from her own collection…good old “Greta-Claus.” However, the Carmel didn’t have any guest rooms available. I called the Dominican nuns, and by luck, someone had cancelled their reservation that very morning, and a very nice room with a view towards the Manhattan sky line was open.

I had only been there a couple times, and that was only to pray in the public chapel. It was a very prayerful chapel, like that of the Carmelites, with a beautiful high altar of marble. Unlike the Carmelite chapel, which was L-shaped with the nuns on the side, separated by a curtain and grate, the Dominican chapel was a single nave with a wrought iron grille behind the high altar separating the sanctuary and the public chapel from the nuns’ choir, which was their chapel. Over the tabernacle was a wooden carved crucifix, and about a half-foot above that was an inlaid ledge on which was placed a beautiful sunburst monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. The nuns had Perpetual Adoration all night and all day, which was the first time I really experienced that awesomeness of having the Lord always seen and adored in the chapel. The public chapel doors were locked after Vespers, but guests, like myself, had complete access to the chapel twenty-four hours a day. On both the nuns’ side of the grille and the extern side, beneath the monstrance were six large sanctuary lamps always burning…twelve in all.

The chapel was decorated for Christmas with plenty of red poinsettias and white and red carnations and roses. The side altars were lovely too, Our Lady of the Rosary on the left, and St. Joseph on the right. Inside the nuns’ choir, there were statues of Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Dominic. My friend, St. Vincent Ferrer, wasn’t there! But they did have a Sr. Mary Vincent, who was the guest mistress and what they called an extern sister. She lived on the outside, above the sacristy actually, along with two other extern sisters: Sr. Grace Mary, which thrilled me to no end—her name, I mean—and Sr. Hyacinth Marie who was the eldest of the three and spent hours—literally hours—praying her Rosary in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

The guest quarters were off to one side, with a separate entrance to the chapel, a little kitchenette, and six guest rooms. They were small, but cozy, with a single bed, a small wooden desk at the window, a small dresser with three drawers only, and to my greatest delight, a rocking chair with a floor lamp. Each guest room was named for a Dominican saint. I was in Bl. Jordan’s room. I had no idea who he was, but he had a nice taste in rockers. This one didn’t even squeak. Off from the small kitchen was a larger room with a large round dining table. It had a plain green linen table cover on it with a huge poinsettia in the middle, which blocked the view of the person across from you. There was also a serving table, and a tape recorder which would play tapes of conferences given to the nuns at various times. We didn’t speak while we had our meal, but listened to these taped conferences. The main meal was served at noon, and a light meal for the evening. Breakfast was on our own. There were no radios or televisions, of course, and with the windows closed tightly, it was very quiet in the guest wing.

There were three sisters from one of the Dominican motherhouses on retreat and two other young women like myself. We were not confined in quarters during the day and could go out for a walk. We could not go into the nuns’ part of their back yard, which was behind a high stone wall, but we had our own little enclosed garden with a shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in the far corner. It also had a bank of poinsettias, artificial ones, but quite pretty, and a rack of votive candles which burned all year round. One was asked to keep silence in the guest garden too, but one could also go outside to the street and walk around Brooklyn Heights, which I discovered was much prettier than I ever imagined.

I think it was on my third day that I ventured out and decided to walk to the Promenade, which flanked the Hudson and East Rivers and gave one a spectacular view of lower Manhattan. It was there that I ran into one of the other young women in the guest quarters. Her name was Joanne Meyers. She was from Boston, Massachusetts, and was what she called “discerning her vocation.” She had been with the Daughters of St. Paul for a brief time, and felt drawn to a more contemplative life, although, as she put it, “I love books.” She had visited the Roxbury Carmel and decided they didn’t read much, and that’s when her spiritual director told her about the Dominicans.

She had been to several, as I had. Greta was sent to a Librarians and Archivists Convention in Niagara Falls, and she invited me to go with her. We took the train and arrived in Buffalo eight hours later. While Greta was at the hotel, I stayed at the Dominican Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary. It was so beautiful. Over the altar they have a magnificent mural of Our Lady giving the Rosary to St. Dominic, and on both sides, twenty Dominican saints and blesseds. They are a large community, according to Sister Mary Rita of Jesus Thorn-crowned, they were forty-two nuns. I hoped to be able to go back and make a retreat there someday. It was more grand to me than Niagara Falls, which Greta and I visited and took the Maid of the Mist boat ride. It was most exciting!

Joanne had never been there, but said that she liked Brooklyn Heights the best because it was small and close to the City, which afforded them excellent lecturers and retreat masters, and they also loved books. I wasn’t exactly sure how she knew that, but I took her on her word. This was her last visit before being admitted inside as an aspirant, which she hoped would begin soon into the new year. She was a sweet and lively person, I thought. Her eyes kind of sparkled when she talked about “the life,” meaning the contemplative life. I ventured forth and asked her what she was reading, since she loved books so much. And she said “The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton. It was the perfect follow-up to The Seven Storey Mountain.”

“Oh yeah, Thomas Merton, Merton…” I knew I had heard of him, just recently too. She pointed out to me that he had died by an electric shock when he touched a live wire in an electric fan. That was just this month, on December 10th. He had been taking a shower before an evening conference he was giving. Joanne said his autobiography was a gem and that it should be read in every refectory. I had heard of that book; I think it was even Greta who had brought up his name a couple times. I knew I would enjoy reading him just listening to Joanne when she spoke of him.