One Hundred and Forty-Two Bricks
Nattie and I waited, waited, waited for Mother and the Savoy to turn up at Piedmont Park. We’d taken Frooshka for a Sunday afternoon romp.
Nattie was hopscotching on an imaginary grid when finally—twenty minutes late, natch—the car pulled up, Mother’s ciggie dangling out the window, waving us over.
Except it wasn’t Mother behind the wheel. It was Sara.
Nattie screamed. Okay, I did, too.
Sara slammed the car in park and came out to squish us both to her like we all shared the same skin. Froo jumped up and put her paws on Sara’s shoulders, slow-dance-style.
“I’ve missed you weirdos,” she said, driving us back to the guesthouse with the help of Mr. Hank’s road atlas.
It turned out Sara, in her beatnik all-black, had taken the Greyhound from Penn Station—twenty hours chugging south. She was here for fall break and for the Ten Days of Repentance that started with Rosh Hashanah and ended with Yom Kippur. Holy days I hadn’t planned on observing. That was the other reason Sara was here. She’d been summoned by Mother following the rabbi-and-rebel dinner to “remind Ruth who she is”—Mother’s words, according to Sara.
That night, after a roast beef dinner in which Fontaine questioned Sara’s political and sartorial choices, Sara shoehorned herself into my bed. It wasn’t the first time we’d shared a twin bed, but the first time in, oh, twelve years. Nattie asked Sara to sing a lullaby Dad used to croon when we were little—and then, the second Nattie fell asleep, Sara and I whispered about her Jerome and my Davis.
It felt so good to talk—to not think and rethink and rehearse, but to talk in the dark. To not have to hide the Jewish part of myself from the pastel posse, or the T&E part from Mother. To talk about how I loved feeling popular, even tangentially, and how I ached to earn a crown like Mother and Fontaine. “I want it, even though I don’t know why,” I said, and that felt good, too—to admit how much I didn’t know.
“What do you have to do to get it?” Sara shifted to her elbow. “The crown.” I could see the vaguest outline of her hair, calmer, saner than mine.
“For the school dances, it’s pretty much popularity. But for the debutante—” I caught myself. “Pre-debutante balls, which are the Magnolia and the White Rose, I have to attend Tea and Etiquette meetings, be recommended by an established member—a grandmother, for instance—and beat out some hundred girls in Atlanta.”
“Eh, you can best ninety-nine other girls.”
“You don’t approve.”
“I’m not Mother—I don’t approve or disapprove. If you want it, go get it.” What Sara wanted for herself, she then told me, was to actually finish James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which she called “an experiment in incomprehensibility,” and to bop Jerome like a bunny on a near-daily basis.
For sixteen years, Sara and I had shared the same air, the same air-shaft view from our bedroom window, the same family jokes, list of words, and favorite books, and I drifted off to sleep now so very happy to have her elbowing me in the ribs.
The next morning, Mother, Nattie, and I were on our second bowl of cornflakes when Sara surfaced.
“Is that your temple outfit?” I asked her.
Sara pirouetted—black headband, black leotard, black capris, black ballet flats. She looked like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face without the beret.
Frooshka leaped her floofy black self into Sara’s lap like she was part of the ensemble.
“Black is my color—the color of bohemia,” Sara said, as if she’d read it in Mademoiselle, which I guarantee she had not.
A smile formed on Mother’s lips.
“Black is for funerals,” Fontaine said. She had knocked and walked in without missing a beat. She unclasped her pearls and held them out to Sara. “You know what would look great—these. ‘No pearls, no power.’ That’s what I say.”
Fontaine, bless her, had been only too happy to call Covenant’s school nurse earlier to report I was feeling queasy. I was surely queasy about anyone finding out why I wouldn’t be in school. Fontaine promised to make the same call for Yom Kippur.
Mother poured Sara coffee—black, of course.
Sara sidled up to Fontaine. “Thanks, but I’m not a fan of adornment.”
“There’s nothing that can’t be made better with a little adornment,” Fontaine said.
“We better adorn ourselves and change,” Nattie said to me. I was still in my pj’s, and Nattie was in her bathing suit; she’d slept in it.
“Ruthie?” Fontaine offered the pearls to me.
I’d coveted Fontaine’s pearls—and her motto—every day I’d been here. I nodded, and she made a production of lifting my hair and nestling the strand around my neck.
Fontaine stood back and assessed. “They’re daytime pearls, cultured. But they’re lovely—even with pajamas.”
We were seventeen minutes late to services. The usually deserted parking lot was packed, and we pulled into one of the last open spots.
“I love this place more than New York,” Nattie said out of the blue. It was like one of those analogy tests: Nattie was to temple as I was to Davis—completely, extremely smitten.
“New York will always be special—you can love both,” Mother said.
Nattie paused for a second. “Dad would let me bobby-pin his yarmulke on.”
“That’s right, honey.”
“His hair was sort of sproingy,” Nattie said.
Sara shouldered between Nattie and me, locking arms. “Super sproingy.” We were back to being a trio—the girls.
As we approached the lipstick-red doors, I wondered if Sara would hate it here—the red, the gold, the plaster flowers on the ceiling, the stained glass that turned ankles lilac. Would she think it was too much, too gussied up, compared to our sleek and modernist temple in New York?
Mother stopped short. “I can’t believe it, on this day of all days.”
Sara dropped our arms. “Holy shit.”
“Sara!” Nattie said. But then we all saw.
On the brick wall above the lipstick doors was a scrawl of black paint—JEWS ARE NEGRO LOVERS—with one giant swastika for emphasis.
Mother dug out her notebook and jotted down the exact wording. “This is what happens. The rabbi speaks up for what is right, and people get scared.”
“Those bastards,” Sara said.
“We don’t see this all the time.” My voice cracked. “Don’t think we see this all the time.”
Nattie kept staring. “Who would do this?”
“I can’t believe you have to live here among this”—Sara looked around at the loveliness of the building, the loveliness of the long, graceful lawn that swelled from the street, the loveliness of the pale-blue sky, light as chiffon—“evil.”
Somehow, Mother had her arms around us all. “Let’s go in,” she said.
“It ruined one hundred and forty-two bricks,” Nattie whispered. She’d been counting—not staring, but counting. Cataloging what was lost.
There was room in the back row, where Mr. Silvermintz and his peacock-hatted wife were in residence. We squeezed past them on the aisle and entered the row in our usual order: Mother first, then Sara, then Nattie, then me. But instead of Dad next to me, I had Mr. Silvermintz.
He leaned over. “Ruth, meet Mrs. Silvermintz.” She smiled one of those could-be-sincere smiles and went back to thumbing the prayer book.
Every man in the place had on a white yarmulke—rows and rows of white satin circles perched on the heads of men who were not our father. I scanned the pews, looking for Max, but I couldn’t find his head among all the others.
The choir, in shiny gold robes, sang out. And Nattie sang out, too.
In the special High Holiday prayer book, I flipped through pages of Hebrew words that looked, that sounded, familiar. I fingered Fontaine’s pearls, turning them around one by one on the knotted string.
After nearly an hour of all of us standing, sitting, standing, praying, standing, singing, the rabbi took a step back from the podium and cleared his throat. We were in for the sermon. From our way-back row, I could see only the top half of the rabbi. Instead of his usual rumpled suit, he wore a white robe with gold trim. He looked vaguely royal.
“These are sacred days,” he began, “but even amid the sacred, we are compelled to acknowledge evil in our backyard.”
Mother leaned over to Sara. “Hand me my pocketbook.”
“You’re taking notes?” I whisper-asked.
“Habit,” she said, pen poised in her lap.
The rabbi’s voice rose. “Shortly after the discovery of the words on our walls, a neighbor, a Christian, came over with a large white bedsheet.”
The congregation seemed to suck in its breath.
“He wasn’t a Klansman, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the rabbi said. “He just wanted to hang a sheet over the words to cover them up, but I turned him down. If we cover up the hate, we are only brave in theory. The KKK makes no secret of its hatred of many races and religions. Is there comfort in not being the only target?”
“No,” Sara said, not even pretending to be quiet.
“No,” the rabbi echoed. “We’re sometimes fooled into thinking hatred doesn’t happen here because the magnolias are in bloom. But hatred cannot be hidden.”
Mother scribbled discreetly.
The rabbi’s voice gathered in volume and righteousness. “Isaiah chapter six, verse eight tells us: ‘I heard the voice of my Lord, saying, Whom shall I send? Who will go for us? I said, Here I am. Send me.’ ”
He sat down in one of the thronelike chairs on the side of the bima, and I knew what was coming—the sound of the shofar, the twisted ram’s horn blown on the High Holidays. A regular man, in a regular suit, picked up the horn.
I held Nattie’s hand, and she squeezed back. Some years, blowing the shofar had been Dad’s job, which was an odd thing for a man with little musical talent. It didn’t take regular talent to blow the shofar, Dad had said—it just took someone showing you how. And his father, who’d been dead long before we came along, had shown him how.
The man who definitely wasn’t Dad blew three short piercing cries, like an alarm, like a battle cry, followed by a long, anguished wail.
My heartbeat turned up in my stomach.
Sara reached into Mother’s pocketbook for a hankie. I thought she’d dab at her upper lip, where she had a frown of sweat, but she wiped her eyes.
I stood up, scooting past Mr. Silvermintz, past where Dad should have been sitting—completely ignoring the pink booklet’s advice about putting my posterior in the face of others—and left.
I opened the lipstick door to the shock of daylight and nearly tripped over a bucket and rags on the lawn.
Max rounded the corner, balancing a ladder on his shoulder. He was dressed up, for a change, in a tie and jacket, a yarmulke askew in his overgrown hair.
“Hey, what are you doing out here?” He checked his watch. “Services aren’t over for an hour.”
“What are you doing out here?”
He clanked the ladder against the brick and started to climb. “I’m cleaning this up.”
Right then, in my tea-worthy dress, I climbed behind him, like climbing to the rotunda but without the panic. I needed to touch the paint, the ugliness, for myself. I ran my fingers over the letter L, following the heavy brushstrokes, and landed on a black bubble, still wet. I pressed in, dimpling the paint.
“You’ll ruin that dress,” Max said.
I’d worn it to the last T&E, where it got a big “Terrif!” from T-Ann. “I don’t care,” I said.
“Then grab a rag and help me get it off.”
I took a rag from the bucket on the grass and soaked it with turpentine, which smelled of pine trees and licorice, but with even more vim.
I climbed back up, leaning left while Max leaned right. We worked until services ended, until we’d rubbed off the “Jews Are” (me) and the “Negro” and the swastika (Max). Only “Lovers” was left, and when Max said he’d take care of it, I believed in him.