Chapter 52

Roiling over Bernie’s and Leah’s engagement, I turned for distraction to my classes, especially advanced physiology lab. We were studying platelets, small clear discs without a nucleus that helped to repair connective tissue. I felt as if I too lacked a centre, and wanted desperately to be reattached to my family. That’s when I thought of my aunt’s uncanny ability to sympathize with Mama’s need to find a balance between her brother and her husband. Maybe Tante Yetta could teach me how to simmer instead of boil, the same way she knew when to do what in the kitchen.

“I’m no scholar,” my aunt said when I confessed reluctance to give Leah and Bernie my blessing. “So I never understood God’s refusal to forgive until the third or fourth generation. I say the sooner you let bygones be gone, the sooner you sleep better.”

“But they have each other, Tante Yetta. I lost another brother and my best friend.”

“I’m not saying it shouldn’t hurt. Only that it will hurt less if you don’t hold it against them.”

“Do you think when I’m older I’ll find a new best friend, like you and Mama did?”

My aunt kissed my forehead. “Don’t give up on Leah yet, but you’ll make new friends in college. God willing, they’ll become as special to you as your mother and I are to each other.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure about going to college. Look how much it’s cost me already.”

“Your uncle ...”

“I don’t mean the money, Tante Yetta.”

“I know mamele. You miss your friends. More than that, you miss your parents.”

I nodded, unable to speak. When the unspent tears receded, I asked my aunt what to do.

“I’m old enough to know time helps, wise enough to know that’s not a good answer for a young, impatient person. You need to talk to someone who understands your generation.” She sent me home with a bag full of babka and a mind as full as an oven before sundown on Shabbas.

Forgiveness was a tall order for a kid. Most adults failed at it. My father hadn’t been able to forgive Shmuel nor would he and Gershon ever forgive each other. I supposed I’d eventually absolve Ruchel for speaking the truth, but unless I cut Leah and Bernie out of my life, every encounter with them would reopen that wound. Could there be forgiveness without healing?

Maybe it was myself I needed to forgive. I still felt guilty for not keeping Shmuel home. I didn’t stand behind Mama as much as she stood behind me. And now I doubted my own choices. I was putting Mama in the middle and depriving Papa of the one thing he wanted, a rabbi in the family. Was I acting selfish? Or was I meant for bigger things? If I forsook a chance to heal the whole world, and instead repaired my little family, would God forgive me?

When I got back to the apartment, I washed a plate for Yetta’s cookies and cleared a space on the table. Buried under Ruchel’s term paper about suffragists was Reader’s Digest, a new magazine she liked because every issue featured a tribute to a woman. This one was about a farmer’s wife. Looking for something more useful, I turned to an article on how to get ahead in life. “Common sense and a grasp of the facts are society’s great equalizers,” it said. I crammed two babkas in my mouth. Reader’s Digest must be written for native-born Americans, I concluded. Immigrants and their children depended on good sense and it wasn’t enough to make us equals. Then I wondered about “a grasp of the facts.” That could mean education, but would college separate me from my family and friends? I closed the magazine and shoved it back under the mess.

In an effort to calm myself, I cleaned up the kitchen. I carried Ruchel’s school things to her bedroom, washed and stacked the dishes, then tackled the clothes and papers strewn around the front room. That’s when I came across a month-old copy of the Jewish Daily Forward that Tante Yetta had used to wrap a crystal candy dish she’d given us. Two years ago I’d written Bintel Briefs for advice. The editor had been wrong about my father relenting, but right to urge that I use caution in matters of the heart. Perhaps it was worth writing him again. His columns blended my aunt’s old-world wisdom with an understanding of an immigrant’s life in America today. If nothing else, I was more likely to get suitable advice from him than from Reader’s Digest.

Wise Editor:

My best friend is marrying the man I turned down, my father is angry that I want to go to college instead, and my mother is caught between my father and me. I’m in a tumult about what to do. This seems a uniquely American dilemma. In the shtetl, there were no choices. I’m not asking for help to solve the problem, but to figure out what the problem is. My biology teacher says a scientist’s most important job is asking the right question. What should my question be?

Sincerely,

Muddled Maiden

***

I used part of the spending money I got from Onkel Gershon to buy the paper each day until I got my answer. Fortunately, I didn’t have long to wait:

Dear Muddled Maiden:

In the desert, Moses asked, “What will make God happy?” In the shtetl, our parents asked “What will make the community happy?” Here in America, people ask, “What will make me happy?” It is the hardest question to answer because there are no books or elders to offer advice. The land of opportunity is a country where you decide for yourself.

The Editor

***

Another letter arrived soon after, this one in the mail, saying I’d not only been admitted to Hunter College but accepted into the honours program. Ruchel was there when the mail came, but I swore her to secrecy until I told our mothers and her father on Sunday. Leah and Bernie invited me over midweek, the first time we’d spoken since I heard of their engagement, so I told them next. Leah jumped up and down like we did when we got excited as children and Bernie recited a blessing. They were happier for me than I was for them, but I hoped that by the time of their wedding, my congratulations would be sincere. The only person I didn’t tell, the one I most wished I could, was my father. Mama would kvell to him, but my heart ached that I couldn’t tell Papa myself.

Ruchel wanted to celebrate with another party, but all I could think of was how badly the last one ended. My headstrong cousin refused to be dissuaded. “You earned this. If you won’t have it here, I’ll rent Walhalla Hall and invite the whole neighbourhood to show and tell.”

“Horsefeathers. You wouldn’t.” I threw a dirty dish rag at her. She threatened to dump flour and sugar on the floor until I cried uncle and agreed to the party, provided she cleaned up the house for real.

It was also Ruchel’s idea to serve store-bought food, but I wanted to cook the meal myself. Only this time, rather than studying recipes in the Jewish newspaper, I went to the library to look up classic American dishes. I’d prepare them kosher, but we’d eat meatloaf instead of brisket, and spaghetti with tomato sauce, not noodle kugel. The cat’s meow would be apple pie for dessert.

We scheduled the dinner for Sunday so I’d have the whole day to experiment. Despite my reassurances, Tante Yetta couldn’t stop herself from coming over to help. She said Mama hoped to arrive early too. I shooed my aunt out of the kitchen and ordered her to help Ruchel straighten up. Yetta decided the windows should be washed. To everyone’s surprise, especially Ruchel’s, my cousin enjoyed this chore. The days were growing longer as winter came to end, and cleaning the panes let in the light, an apt metaphor for what today’s women were trying to accomplish.

As I took a perfect meatloaf out of the oven and slipped in the pie, Onkel Gershon and the building’s superintendent came huffing up the stairs, carrying a desk, which they plunked down under the window in the front room. The oak wood gleamed golden in the rays of the setting sun.

“You’ll need a place to study besides the kitchen table,” my uncle said, tipping the super. Yetta warned “Hanten avek!” and shook a finger at Ruchel, who swore to keep her hands off and her papers too. The desk was brand new, not a hand-me-down from the Mendels’ apartment. I now owned a second orchid. I ran my hands over the cascading grain and smelled the beeswax polish. The drawers slid smoothly and the top one had a heart-shaped lock with a tiny gold key.

“To hide the notes about your secret discovery,” my uncle teased.

I turned the key while glancing at the darkening sky, hoping to see my mother hurrying down our street. Instead I saw fathers coming home from sweat shops, met by wives and children tumbling out the doors of their crowded apartments. Whole families strolled past, buoyed by the promise of spring. I retreated to the kitchen to give the tomato sauce one last stir.

Zipporah and Jonah arrived next, with the baby, who’d begun crawling. In five minutes, he was chewing the toe of one of Ruchel’s silk stockings, which he’d found under the couch. “I can’t miss a thing when I clean either,” Zipporah said. “Whatever Yitzak finds goes in his mouth.”

“And it’s getting impossible to take it away and distract him,” Jonah added with pride.

Onkel Gershon bent down to pat the baby’s head. “My grandson is a persistent investigator. You can hire him as a research assistant when you open your own lab, Dev. I’ll put up the seed money.”

The streetlights came on. It was Yetta’s turn to peek out the window. She looked back at me with a small shrug and put her hand on my arm. I let her help me bring the food to the table. When we sat down, Onkel Gershon gave Jonah the honour of saying the blessings. I thought I’d have to explain what the dishes were but Tante Yetta pointed and called out their names: chopped beef, pasta with marinara sauce. I asked how she knew what everything was.

“When your uncle and I first came here,” she said, “our building had immigrants from all over. As I figured out how to shop and cook in America, I showed them. Even after we moved to a better place, I went back there. In return, the women taught me the dishes they grew up with. I learned more from them than they learned from me.”

My big uncle put a small piece of meatloaf in his mouth, chewed slowly, then followed it with a big forkful. “So how come you never cooked this delicious dish for me?” he asked Yetta.

“You want? I’ll cook!” She smiled. “A wife’s job is to make her husband happy.”

That’s when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I threw down my napkin and ran to open the door. My mother came in, alone. I looked behind her but she shook her head. “It’s just me,” she said, “and I’m going to stay for the whole meal.”

I heaped her plate with spaghetti and a thick slice of meat. Half a loaf was better than none, I thought, and there was still a whole pie to go. It too had emerged perfect from the oven.

***

That night, too wound up to sleep, I sat at my new desk, opening and closing drawers. Issues of Reader’s Digest were stacked in a neat pile on the table next to the couch. Despite misgivings, I picked up the latest issue. The tribute article was about Sara Josephine Baker, the public health doctor who’d invented a sanitary way to package the silver nitrate put on newborns’ eyelids. As a result, infant blindness from gonorrhoea had been virtually wiped out. Could I do for grownups’ hearts what she’d done for babies’ eyes? Hearts were more complicated. Blood vessels clogged; muscles stopped pumping. Hearts went on the fritz when people fell in love and weren’t loved back, when a parent lost a child, or a child ached for the love of a disapproving parent. Discover how to cure any one of those and I’d earn a nod from God and a Nobel prize for medicine. More important, I might discover how to make myself happy. The land of opportunity didn’t mean you got everything you wanted, but most immigrants agreed it was better than what they had before.

I read the rest of the magazine, prepared to accept its advice and leave Bintel Briefs to greenhorns. I had my aunt’s common sense, my uncle’s grasp of facts, and my mother’s resolve. It was a recipe for success. My doubts began to disappear, like vapour from a heated test tube.

Disappear, I realized, was that rare word that offered two positives: appear and reappear. Of course, the appearance of a verb didn’t mean the action would happen. Shmuel was not going to reappear on the shore. I’d have to set sail myself. Not only was I the first Levinson born in this country, I was the first to run toward, rather than escape from, a way of life. America was the most valuable orchid ever and it was mine. All I had to do was reach for it.