The-Book-of-Faith-11

The heavens are the Lord’s heavens

And the earth He gave to man. But

Whose are the gold and marble houses of prayer?

—Yehuda Amichai

Rabbi Nate stood by the picture window of his office on the second floor of the synagogue, lips drawn into a thin line, eardrums vibrating. The window was the one feature of the building that he was still fond of. Its height and width made the room bright and airy, and its size gave a great vantage point on the street below, should he need inspiration for an upcoming sermon. At the moment, however, the view from his window was anything but inspiring.

He desperately wished he were still on vacation. He wished he were at the meditation retreat in Jerusalem. Or admiring the bougainvilleas and pomegranate shrubs at the Baha’i Temple grounds in Haifa. Or watching the dolphins cavort in the pristine waters of the Red Sea.

The nightmare scenario unfolding across the street had been inconceivable a few months earlier, and even at the time of his departure for Israel he had somehow remained in the dark. Yes, he had known that Rabbi Alter’s Centre for Jewish Spirituality had bought the empty lot opposite Congregation Emunath a year ago. But then the Town of Hampstead had successfully blocked Rabbi Alter’s band of Hasidim from beginning construction. Not that Hampstead was anti-Semitic. Hampstead was overwhelmingly Jewish, but also overwhelmingly disdainful of the ultra-Orthodox. Balking at the idea of bearded men in furry shtreimls and snooded women encumbered by broods of children establishing a toehold in their midst, the sleek and buffed members of the town’s council had successfully mired the Centre for Jewish Spirituality in a thicket of feasibility studies.

But then the tide turned. An anonymous benefactor sought legal advice on behalf of Rabbi Alter’s congregation. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was invoked. Despite opposition at Town Hall, a defunct study which earlier ruled in favour of a new building was revived.

Perhaps if he’d stayed at home he might have done something to avert the catastrophe across the street. But it had all transpired through stealth and subterfuge, double-dealing, sneakiness.

Nate sank his front teeth into his lower lip and tugged at his beard. He was a liberal man. He had nothing against Hasidim. The Baal Shem Tov and Nathan of Bratslav were personal heroes of his. Rabbi Alter was a decent man (he supposed), albeit very hirsute and mystical. Nate hoped that this supposed paragon of piety had converted Margo Darwin and her infant son because she had evinced a sincere desire to join the Jewish people, not because Kabbalah and woven red bracelets were the latest rage in Hollywood.

The lot across the street was crawling with men in yellow hard hats. He could count twelve of them. His head clanged from the noise produced by the derrick pointed in his direction. That’s to say, it wasn’t a derrick, it just looked like one. Actually it was a pile driver. Stan Shifrin had been by to commiserate and had clued Nate in about the correct terminology. All day long, it boomed, it jounced, it reverberated, over and over. The operator in the cage teetering on high must surely be deaf by now. And bored out of his skull. Imagine spending your life suspended in the air, negotiating an enormous steel cylinder battering that row of piles. Knocking them in like nails, an inch at a time until they hit bedrock. Bang, bounce, echo. Bang, bounce, echo.

Nate felt as if he’d hit bedrock himself. He was jangling all over. Stan said the new shul didn’t mean Congregation Emunath’s expansion was doomed. Imagine, the architect was reassuring him, the rabbi!

“He’s given them five million dollars,” Nate whispered. “And he’s loaned us three hundred thousand.”

A vision of the hoarding at the side of the site flashed before his eyes. Mounted on top of a giant easel, a colourized perspective depicted an edifice built of exquisite, golden Jerusalem stone (no question of penny-pinching, no niggling economizing). It had a jutting upstairs balcony that resembled the one the Queen liked to wave from at Buckingham Palace. Two mighty pillars supported it and were flanked by a couple of massive arched colonnades. What an eyesore the whole thing would be when finished. How ostentatious, how tasteless. Were they trying to emulate the Taj Mahal? “No,” Nate groaned, “Not the Taj Mahal. Solomon’s Temple itself.”

Bold black lettering at the bottom of the drawing proclaimed to the world:

The Melly and Bubbles Darwin

Centre for Jewish Spirituality

In smaller, lighter type, there was a quote from the Psalms:

Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving,

Sing praises upon the harp unto our God.

Reisa entered the den and turned on the light.

“I can’t bear to see you eating yourself up like this,” she said. “It’s just a setback, not the end of the world.”

Nate was hunched in fetal position on the couch. He raised himself on one elbow, covering his face with his other hand, surreptitiously wiping away tears.

“Nate, darling,” Reisa said, stricken. “It’s just a building.”

“I know. I know. I keep telling myself, no one’s died. But we seemed so close.… And how can I face the congregation at Rosh Hashanah? What will I say in my sermons?

“But nothing’s changed! The capital campaign is still on.”

“Everything’s changed! Faith is dead. She finally got behind the idea—and now she’s gone. And Helen’s a total dud. And we’ll never be able to get the go-ahead from the town with that monstrosity going up on the other side of the street. They won’t allow two public buildings in such close proximity to each other in a residential area.”

“You’re not thinking straight. They’ve already allowed it, implicitly. By giving the go-ahead to Rabbi Alter. Everybody knows we aren’t going anywhere. Everybody knows we’re planning an expansion.”

She sat down beside him on the couch and began caressing his arm and talking coaxingly, as to a sick child. “It’s so unlike you to give up…. Come, let’s go out on the deck. It’s such a beautiful evening. I’ve brewed some fresh mint from the garden for tea. And we’ve got to discuss who we’re having for Friday night dinner.”

Rhoda said to Erica on the phone, “I wish Hershy and I could wiggle out of this invitation.”

“You can’t,” Erica said.

“If at least Al would come.”

“I know. But he won’t. He keeps pushing everybody away. The Kaufmans are only trying to be kind.”

“But what are we going to talk about for three hours with them?”

“That’s easy. Melly Darwin and Rabbi Alter.”

“Nate, I hope you don’t mind. I’ve invited Marty Riess as well for Friday night.”

“Whatever for?”

“I was short a man. Al Rabinovitch said no.”

“You know you always strike out when you try to be a schadchan.”

“I’m not being a schadchan. I just happen to be short a man.”

Marty had never before been a guest at the Kaufmans’ and wondered, as he pulled up and parked, if there were some deep political reason for the invitation. He couldn’t think of one. His stint as treasurer was up. No one had asked him to stay on for another term, which piqued his vanity, though it actually suited him. Working alongside pushy Helen Stern had echoes of being married to Leona, and he was glad to be out of it.

One of Marty’s last acts as treasurer had been to approve a generous salary hike for the rabbi, which Nate had negotiated with hard-nosed confidence in his professional worth. You could see that he knew how to put a dollar to good use. The Kaufmans owned a lovely home in Hampstead, adjacent Snowdon, a half-hour’s walk from the shul, so they could get there without driving on the Sabbath. Originally a detached duplex, it had been remodelled as a spacious single family house in the French-Canadian style with a mansard roof and a wraparound veranda. Two spectacular rows of floppy-headed yellow dahlias lined the front walk. The white elyssum border beneath them perfumed the dusk air with a subtle fragrance.

Nate accepted the bottle of kosher wine that Marty handed him with a wider smile than usual, and patted him on the back. He ushered him in the direction of a den towards the end of a long corridor, from which came the murmur of voices. Rhoda and Hershy Kaplansky and Erica were grouped together on a comfy couch. Reisa, wearing a frilly apron over a long black skirt, introduced him to a couple he didn’t know, who turned out to be Reisa’s brother and sister-in-law.

Benjy Cohen, the brother, was tall and broad-backed, a handsome, vigorous looking man in his late fifties, who taught engineering at McGill. Essie, his wife, was tiny and fragile, glinting with diamonds in her ears and on her fingers. She had thick, glossy dark hair and was wearing a well-cut pantsuit and spike heels.

“Shall we begin?” Reisa prompted, “Now that we’re all here.”

They trailed after her into the dining room, where she lit the candles on the sideboard. In Reconstructionist style, everyone—men and women alike—sang the blessing with her and then joined in chanting the kiddush with Nate. Moments later, Marty found himself seated between Rhoda and Essie and, beyond a centrepiece of pink and yellow tea roses, directly opposite Erica.

Erica didn’t look well. Though he still thought her an uncommonly pretty woman, he noted lines of strain around those light green eyes with their flecks of grey. In repose, her skin, usually so delicate and creamy, puckered into pleats on either side of her mouth.

She and Benjy Cohen, on her left, were deeply involved in a conversation that had begun before Marty’s arrival, about a vacation that Benjy and Essie had just returned from.

“Maybe it’s my age or something in the water that suddenly made me all gloomy,” Benjy was saying. “Essie and I’ve never been to Eastern Europe. Our parents—Reisa’s and mine—came to Montreal a long time ago, in the Twenties.”

“Where were they from?” Erica asked.

“From some little town in Ukraine.”

“Their parents were Bundists. They hated religion,” Essie said sotto voce to Marty. “You should get Benjy to tell you about how they used to celebrate Yom Kippur. Their father sent them out to buy bread on Kol Nidre night and made them ham and cheese sandwiches for supper.”

“Essie,” Reisa warned. “It’s Shabbos.”

“This apartment in Budapest we were staying in,” Benjy went on, ignoring Essie, “we figured out used to be in the heart of the Budapest ghetto. It was a fantastic flat, by the way—tons of atmosphere and every convenience. But after we toured the Great Synagogue and the Jewish Museum, I put two and two together. This building must have been what they called a ‘Jewish house’ in the war. Maybe someone from this very apartment that I was trying to sleep in had begged Wallenberg for false papers, or been shot into the Danube.”

Marty cast a surreptitious glance at Erica. She was staring at Benjy motionless and had gone pale.

“The next day I went around gawking at people on the street, calculating how old they were. I gave dirty looks to anyone older than me. What had they been up to in the war?”

Benjy gave his handsome head a little rueful shake. “Sorry, everybody. Seeing Erica made me think of it.”

At the head of the table, Nate gestured toward Erica. “What’s it like for you when you visit Budapest?”

Her face flamed. “I—I’ve actually never been back since we left in 1956 …. When I was seven.”

“Never? But it’s your hometown! And it’s such a gorgeous city …. And your novel—”

“That was all just research. And imagination. I boned up on as much as I needed to. I can read Hungarian, you know. I went to school for two years in Budapest. But,” Erica appeared more and more flustered with each word, “I don’t actually consider Budapest my hometown anymore. It has too much of the wrong kind of history.”

“Is it true,” Rhoda broke the strained silence that had fallen over the room, “that Rabbi Alter has converted Margo Darwin?”

“Not just Margo,” Essie said with evident relish, “her baby, too.”

Reisa pushed her chair back forcefully and began gathering up the salad plates. “Nate, would you help me bring in the soup?” She cast an exasperated glance over her shoulder at her sister-in-law as she left the room.

“What exactly happened with Margo Darwin?” Rhoda mouthed.

“Exactly we don’t know,” Benjy said. “But it appears that Glen Darwin enrolled in one of Rabbi Alter’s classes on Kabbalah, and Alter hooked him but good.”

“Glen?” Erica said, astonished. “Have any of you ever met Glen Darwin? He’s a loudmouth. He’s a racist. Faith would have called him a pig! Are you sure? He once made a big point of telling me that he had no use for Judaism.”

“Well, he must’ve seen some kind of light,” Essie said lightly, “or perhaps he was inspired by Madonna. She’s really into that stuff. All the glossies are full of it.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t pry, but what did your Bundist parents think of Reisa marrying a rabbi and teaching Jewish mysticism,” Hershy was asking Benjy in a low voice, while their hosts were out of the room.

“Danken Gott, Nate was a Reconstructionist,” Benjy responded in a stage whisper, making a comic face. “They were good people and tried not to hold it against him.”

“So what did they have to say about Reisa specializing in Jewish studies?” Rhoda asked.

“That wasn’t a problem. They loved Jewish culture. It was, in a manner of speaking, an article of faith with them. The Yiddish language especially. And Reisa only began teaching Jewish mysticism after they were gone.”

“But does she believe in it?” Erica asked.

“You’d have to ask her that yourself. I think she’s found it possible to reconcile the conflict between our upbringing and her intellectual interests through a scholarly pursuit of mysticism. A real mystic would search for the so-called realms beyond through the emotions.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Erica said, “how we try to reinvent ourselves as the antithesis of our parents, and we end up like our ancestors. Or some modern version.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hershy said. “I personally come from a long line of Romanian idiots, and Rhoda will be the first to tell you that I conform to type perfectly.”

“Hershy,” Rhoda warned, her eyes gleeful. “Don’t start.”

Marty coughed. “How’s Al doing?” He was looking at Erica, while fiddling with his napkin. What nice hands he has, she thought, startling herself. They were large, well-shaped, and long fingered. Her father’s hands had looked like that before arthritis disfigured them.

The rabbi returned carrying a tray with soup bowls.

“Yes, how is he? We wanted him here tonight, but he said he wasn’t up to it.”

“He’s very low,” Rhoda said. “I’m just hoping that going back to work will help. He needs some kind of structure. He’s completely lost.”

“In a way we all are,” Nate said. “I still expect Faith to walk through the door at board meetings.”

“What’s in this soup, Reisa? It’s delicious, so refreshing,” Essie trilled after a pained silence.

“Cucumber.”

“How’s your Melly Darwin project going?” Marty asked, trying to restore the flow of conversation.

“My Melly Darwin project is dead in the water.” Erica tried to smile, but couldn’t pull it off.

“What!” Nate’s soup spoon clattered against his plate. “What happened?”

“He hates it. It wasn’t what he was expecting at all. And he’s reneged on a good chunk of money he owes me. My agent wants me to sue, but I can’t afford a lawsuit. Nor do I have the stomach for one.”

“But why does he hate it?” Reisa asked.

“I think he must have expected something grander, more heroic. I’ve tried to tell it very simply. That’s where its power lies.”

Erica became aware that Nate had become very still. His eyes were suddenly swimming behind the tortoiseshell frames of his glasses. Marty, across the table, appeared to be holding his breath.

“These poor people went through so much just to get from one day to the next,” she added in a rush. “And then most of them died anyway. People think this story’s about numbers, mass graves, victims with empty eyes staring from photographs I wanted to tell one person’s story. And that ends up being about….” She trailed off, looking into the middle distance.

Marty said softly, as if thinking out loud, “being left all alone, with nothing to live for but the next unbearable moment.”

Erica nodded, her eyes opening wide with recognition.

“Can’t you make changes to the manuscript?” Reisa asked.

“He’s flatly rejected it.”

“I’m really sorry,” Nate said. “I got you into this.”

“It’s my own doing. I had misgivings from the start. I shouldn’t have entered into it. But it’s a big financial loss, because it’s not only the money he owes me. It’s also what I stood to make if I’d completed it.” She sighed. “This is turning out to be the summer from hell. Faith dead. And now this stupid thing.”

The evening at the Kaufmans’ wound down with a subdued Birkat ha mazon and a half-hearted round of Shabbat songs. As the final notes of Yom Zeh le’Yisrael were plaintively drawn out, Rhoda’s cell phone rang. She ducked out into the hallway, then returned to beckon Erica out of the room. “Simeon’s sick. I’m going over to his place. We won’t be able to take you home.”

“Not to worry. I’ll call a cab.”

Marty, on his way to the washroom, overheard her and offered to give her a lift. She protested that he’d be going out of his way, but he insisted it would be no trouble. She regretted it almost immediately, when she caught a smirk on Reisa’s face as she and Marty said their goodbyes to the group.

In the car, Erica racked her brains for what to say. Suddenly beset by images of Marty on a massage table, she was about to blurt out that she was planning to put her house on the market, when he said, “I’m really disturbed by what you told us about Darwin. I always thought he was basically honest. Stiffing you is disgraceful.”

She was surprised by the vehemence of his tone.

“He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. If you need a lawyer, I have a couple of good people to suggest.”

Erica flushed. “Actually, Ricky has sent a letter.”

Marty’s jaw tightened. He kept his eyes on the road. “Your ex-husband?”

“Actually, we’re only separated, not divorced.”

“Right. Of course.”

Marty didn’t say another word until they arrived at the house. She thanked him for the ride. He nodded and wished her goodnight, reversed back to the road, and then idled while she rummaged in her bag for her keys.

At the same moment, a car door slammed on the other side of the street, and a tall figure emerged from a parked vehicle. As the man crossed the road, the streetlight caught the shine on a head of abundant silver curls and for an instant illuminated the morose features of Rick Aronovitch.

Erica and Rick exchanged a few words that Marty couldn’t catch, even though he’d opened the window of his car. Then Rick followed her into the house.

Marty pulled away, his tires screeching.

“I’ve had one hell of a day,” Rhoda said to Hershy in the car. “I really hope there’s nothing wrong with Sim.”

“You’ve had a hell of a day, and Erica’s having a hell of a summer. That’s quite a lot of hell floating around.”

“Her hell is part of my day.”

“Is that some kind of riddle?”

“Hershy, listen for heaven’s sake! Erica got the results of a routine blood test this morning. A count that shouldn’t be up is way elevated.”

“What does that mean?”

“It could mean some kind of serious problem. But it’s also possible the test was inaccurate. Apparently that sometimes happens. So they’ll repeat it in a couple of weeks. And then she’ll have to wait another couple of weeks for results.”

“She didn’t look so hot tonight.”

“Neither would you if you thought you had metastatic cancer.”

“It’s too bad…. What else about your day?”

“I was reviewing my files this morning, refreshing my memory and in general tidying up. A bunch of reports always comes in over the holidays. So I open one up and it’s from Faith.”

“From Faith!”

“Exactly. She’d written it the day before she died, and it didn’t get processed until now. I nearly passed out when I saw her handwriting, all loopy and curved. You know she had such a unique—”

“Rhode, I’m sorry. I can’t stop the car here.”

But then he did brake and pull over. The car behind swerved wildly, and its driver fired a long and loud honk. Hershy hesitated, trying to decide whether to respond with a blare of his own or to attend to Rhoda. She was folded over, hugging herself into a ball, choking back great gulping sobs. Hershy began to pat her head tentatively. Rhoda shook him off.

“It’s just so unbearable, it gets worse instead of better,” she said, her voice muffled from beneath her arms.

“What was the report about? That kid Sean Callaghan?”

Rhoda sat up, dashing the tears from her face.

“No. It was about a kid called Mikey Delaney she and I don’t see eye to eye about.” Rhoda reached into her bag for a tissue, and blew her nose noisily. “Didn’t see eye to eye about. He’s going into grade four. Nice, nice kid. Not a behaviour problem at all, but he’s got huge learning gaps. Lots of difficulty reading and writing. I’ve always believed he’s attention deficit. Faith and her people at the clinic say no, it’s visual and perceptual impairment. Towards the end of last year, I begged her to come and see him in the classroom. I was convinced if she saw him wiggling around and falling off his chair, she’d change her mind. And so she finally came, and this was her report about it.”

“Did she agree in the end?”

“Are you kidding?” Rhoda smiled a sad, sidelong smile. “No, she stuck to her guns. She says that because of his perceptual difficulties he can’t look at a blackboard and sustain attention and copy from it to a paper. And the reason he falls off chairs and crawls under desks is because he is frustrated. Maybe she’s right. But it’s not what’s in the report that surprises me—it’s the shock of getting it. It was just like she’s still here.”

“I’m scared,” Erica said to Rick. They were sitting across from each other at the knotty pine table in the breakfast nook, blue earthenware mugs of steaming chamomile tea in front of them. The mugs had been a gift for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary from Raichie and Tamara.

We’re having tea in the kitchen together.

Ever since Dr. de Costa called midmorning, Erica had been in turmoil. At the sound of his soft, Spanish-accented voice, her heart had stopped and then begun lurching violently. “I don’t want to alarm you,” he said, but to her ears he sounded alarmed. She knew him to be cautious and meticulous to the point of obsession. Two years ago, in the era of her diagnosis, he wore his anxiety like a badge, never once offering reassurance through a diagnostic process that was drawn out over months. Only after the removal of her thyroid gland did he relax. When, after her surgery, he dropped by her bedside in the recovery room, he was wreathed in smiles. He touched her swathed neck delicately and said, “You’ll see, you’re going to be an old lady one day.”

All day today she had recited his words like a mantra. She was murmuring “old lady one day” when she went through two red lights. The second time it happened, an angry pedestrian gave her the finger. She stopped the car. Closing her eyes, she pulled her shoulders away from her ears and breathed deeply. It would hardly do to maim somebody or kill herself while agonizing about the length of her lifespan. Remember how Faith had worried about Alzheimer’s?

Faith had been just amazing in Erica’s crisis. She took the day off work to accompany her for her first visit with the surgeon. She ran interference for her with the clerk who scheduled the operation. She beamed hope and encouragement. It wasn’t until after the surgery that Rhoda told Erica what a wreck Faith had been that day at the hospital, all strung out with fear for her.

Ricky had, of course, been nowhere. He and she were busy unmaking their marriage, taking it apart brick by brick. And now? Now he was having tea with her in the kitchen, looking preoccupied and husbandly.

“Have you spoken to your father about this?” he was asking.

“No. He’ll push the panic button. It’s the last thing I need.”

“Why do you baby him so much? He’s a doctor. He could give you advice, provide perspective.”

“For God’s sake, he’s ninety-one. His perspective is he doesn’t want to bury a daughter.”

Ricky took a gulp of tea, tapped his fingers on the table. “You’ll be all right, Erica. Not just all right. Look how well you’ve done since your first bout. It’s probably just a blip anyway, some incompetent technician who can’t interpret a printout.”

Since your first bout. Erica’s eyes filled with tears and she pushed herself away from the table and turned her back, so he shouldn’t see. It served her right for telling him. He was the last person she should have told.

He’d been calling her every day since their dinner at Milos. When he phoned that afternoon, in a weak moment she let it out of the bag. He immediately insisted on seeing her at night, not to be put off by talk of her evening at the Kaufmans. No problem. He’d stay late at the office and drop by around ten.

Blotting her eyes in the powder room, Erica was seized by another fit of sobs. Since your first bout. How many bouts would she have to face before the final bout? Couldn’t he think before spouting stupidities? But what had she expected from him? There never was anyone to beat him for tactlessness.

She went back to the kitchen, her shoulders drooping. Cinnamon Cat was ensconced in Ricky’s lap, purring like a little engine as he stroked the top of his head.

Ricky sent her a long searching look. “You’ve been crying.”

Erica shook her head.

“Look, it’s not the end of the world. So they’ll treat you again. One way or another, you’re going to be okay. You’ve got to be, for me and the kids.”

Though it was the tail end of summer, the cardinals were still calling insistently to each other at dawn. Drugged from a sleeping pill she’d taken at three, Erica rolled onto her side, but kept on dreaming.

A curious kind of bird has flown in through the bedroom window. It has a long jagged red scar running down its swan-like, iridescent blue and yellow striped neck. It flaps around the room, causing a great rumpus. Erica manages to shoo it out and it lands on the lawn below. Drawing itself upright with great dignity under the magnolia tree, it fans out its resplendent tail, revealing itself to be not a swan but a peacock. Its scar magically healed, the bird stretches its graceful neck this way and that before carefully picking its way down the street.

As the bird retreats, Ricky enters the picture. She tries to tell him about the magnificent apparition, but he won’t listen. “I just want you to know,” he says harshly, “that I never intended to stay with you forever. It was never my intention.”

“Of course not,” she answers, equally nasty, “you were going to keep me around to raise the girls and then get rid of me after I’d outlived my usefulness.”

The phone rang again and again at nine o’clock. She groaned and picked it up in a daze. Raichie in Toronto, all apologies.

“I thought you’d be up by now, Mom. Don’t you always go to shul on Shabbat?”

“I’ve had a horrible night. I couldn’t sleep. I turned the alarm off after three. I figured I’d skip shul.”

“Is there something wrong you couldn’t sleep?”

“It may be nothing, but my TSH was elevated on the last blood test.”

Raichie was quiet for a minute.

“I was talking to Tammie last night. She didn’t say anything about this.”

“I haven’t told her yet.”

“Mom, the thing Tammie and I were talking about last night—maybe I shouldn’t tell you. Especially if you’re already worried about your bloods.”

“Is there something the matter with you or with Tammie?”

“No, Mom! We’re fine. It’s just that Tammie and I don’t see eye to eye about this. Tammie says you’ve been seeing Dad.”

“Just a little. Yes.”

Again Raichie was silent.

“What’s going on, Rache?”

“It’s just that…. If you and Dad are planning to get back together again,” Raichie gulped and then continued in a rush, “there’s something you need to know.”

“We’re not planning anything, but he’s certainly been very attentive lately. It’s rather refreshing.”

“Did he tell you that Sandra’s thrown him out of the house?”

“What?”

“I figured you didn’t know. And Mom, you should know.”

“Damn right.”

“Tammie said it wasn’t our business. She says I have no boundaries.”

“Fuck boundaries.”

“Mom!”

“When did this happen?”

“Two, three weeks ago. He’s been living at the office.”

“The bloody cheapskate.”

“Mom, don’t swear. It’s not becoming.”

“Why?”

“Why’s it not becoming?”

“Why’d she throw him out?”

“Promise not to swear.”

“Raichie!”

“He’s been, uh … he’s been ‘dating’ on the Internet…. Mom, are you still there?”

“Raichie, it’s not nice of you to pull my leg at a time like this.”

“I’m not pulling your leg! Sandra caught him on some escort site on the Internet. Or she intercepted some emails between him and some … some girls.”

“How do you know?” Erica didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“What’s really bizarre is Sandra calling me and Tammie to tell us that our father’s a total shit. It’s totally inappropriate.”

“She should have called me.”

Rhoda held the phone away from her ear. Her mother had no idea she was shouting.

“Not chicken soup! What can you be thinking?”

“I thought it was supposed to cure everything.”

“Not stomach flu! Poor Simmie. I’ll make him some applesauce, and you can take it over for me.”

Rhoda rolled her eyes, and put the package of raw chicken pieces back in the fridge. “Don’t bother, Ma. I can buy some.”

“Not like mine, you can’t! I know exactly how Simmie likes it: not too much cinnamon, lots of nutmeg. And lemon zest. Don’t deprive me of the pleasure.”

When Rhoda arrived at the house on Belmont, Leah, her hair in curlers beneath a little lace cap, was mopping her forehead. There were two mason jars of applesauce cooling on the kitchen counter, plus a fruit nappy filled to the brim. The house smelled of apples and spices.

Leah pointed at the little bowl. “That’s for you. Eat.”

“You’re acting like some parody of the Jewish mother,” Rhoda said. Smiling her sideways smile, she opened the cutlery drawer, took out a spoon, and plunked herself down opposite Leah.

“Uh-m, I like the nutmeg. I keep meaning to tell you, Joan wants to know when we can play bridge again.”

Leah’s chin began to wobble with indignation.

“I’m done playing with Ellie. Such a hypocrite! She does me a favour by eating my food, but I can tell she despises me. She looks down her nose at me like I’m a fallen woman.”

Rhoda dropped her spoon. It clattered against the bowl.

It had been years since her mother had gone to this place. Years.

She stared into Leah’s grooved face. The faded blue eyes met hers for an instant before skimming away, but the jaw remained set at its most infuriatingly uncompromising. Rows of neatly aligned curlers left naked ridges of pink skull under her lace cap. Suzy Homemaker transformed into a witch.

Rhoda bit back the words that threatened to burst from her lips. Playing drama queen in rollers and a daisy-patterned duster doesn’t work.

She stood up. “I’ve got to go.”

For form’s sake, she brushed her lips against Leah’s sunken cheek before picking up one of the Mason jars. At the front door, she shot a backward glance over her shoulder. The staircase curved away from the foyer in a lavish sweep, halting at a square landing. A banquette covered in blue velvet was tucked into the alcove under the leaded window. As a child, she had often crept there after she’d been put to bed. Burrowing into the fat needlepoint cushions, she’d curl up and listen to the ebb and flow of her parents’ conversation. Even when she couldn’t make out a word, she derived comfort from it. Later, they’d find her there asleep, and her father would carry her back up to bed.

A wave of memories washed over her and she was back again, sixteen years old on a summer night in 1967, the night she tumbled out of her childhood Eden.

For much of that year, Expo 67 made an international tourist destination of the city. The house on Belmont was a hub of visiting friends and relatives. One of the guests was a cousin of her father’s from Boston. Sid was funny and debonair, a urologist who specialized in male infertility and taught at Harvard Medical School. Recently divorced, the grown-ups whispered, shaking their heads. Divorce was rare in their circle.

He stayed at the Queen Elizabeth but came to dinner a couple of times on Belmont. In turn, he took the family out to a restaurant in Old Montreal. He teased Rhoda, a picky eater, into trying the escargots, paid homage to Rhoda’s Bubbie, and drew out Josh—always modest to a fault—about the success of his business.

Leah volunteered to escort him about the exhibition site when the weekend wound down and Josh went back to work. That evening she phoned home at six and told Rhoda she’d be a little late. Rhoda should order a pizza from Pendeli’s for her and Daddy.

When Leah tiptoed into the house at a quarter to midnight, Josh and Rhoda were sitting in the darkened living room. Rhoda jumped to her feet, shaking.

“How could you? I wanted Daddy to call the police.”

“I called.”

Rhoda stared at her mother. Leah’s lips were swollen, her cheeks streaked pink. She plopped into an armchair and crossed her legs, releasing a cloud of lily of the valley fragrance.

“Six hours ago you called. You said you’d be a little late. A little late! What happened to ‘Always phone if you’re delayed’?”

“Rhoda, that’s enough,” Josh said. “Mummy’s home. Go to bed, sweetheart.”

“How could you?” Rhoda flung over her shoulder again, as she stomped out of the room and took the stairs three at a time.

She halted at the window seat, the refuge of her childhood. Caught between fury, curiosity, and a sense of impending doom, she collapsed on the banquette and curled into a ball. Her parents, who never fought, kept their voices low, so she only heard little bursts and snatches of words.

I’ve never lied to you, Burble burble burble.

It’s not him, it’s us. Burble blah burble.

I don’t know if I love you anymore. Pause. I don’t know if I ever loved you.

All this from her mother. Rhoda had squinched her eyes together against the prickling of tears: she had not imagined this. This was like the time she’d been thrown off her bike into traffic. You ached all over, and still there was the premonition of worse to come.

Her father’s bass was too low to distinguish. And then she heard him raise his voice and the tone pierced her heart as much as the anguished words.

Don’t leave me, Leah. Whatever you do, don’t do that to me.

And then a noise she couldn’t decode. She’d never heard a grown up cry before. That her father was responsible for these strangled yips of pain was unbearable. Rhoda covered her ears and ran to her room. Flinging herself on the bed, she didn’t bother to undress. It must have been hours before the door handle turned, and her mother sat down on the bed.

“Are you going to leave us?” Rhoda wept.

“I would never leave you,” Leah said.

Though Erica had told Raichie she wasn’t going to shul, she thought better of it when confronted with the prospect of a morning spent trying to concentrate on the Saturday papers while her mind buzzed around Rick’s betrayals and those of her own body. In the shower, she held her breath as she soaped and palpated her neck. It seemed smooth and free of lumps, but what did she know? She’d never felt anything when she’d had her first bout. Besides it might not be localized in her neck. By now it could be everywhere.

She ought to go to shul and daven. Never mind her health and her fury at being taken in by Ricky (again), wasn’t a Jew’s place in synagogue on Saturday morning?

All the way there, she held an internal discussion with Faith.

– Why’d you have to die? Who can I talk to about this? I didn’t tell Rhoda in the first place, because I knew what she’d say. (“How many more times are you going to get burned by that putz?”) But, Faithie, he truly seemed to have repented. He was so broken up by your death. I know he wasn’t pretending about that. I do know him that much!

– I’m not impressed. So he was shaken up! You know what my mother always used to say: “The self does not change.” What he once did to you, he’s now doing to Sandra. Serves her right.

– I’m such a chump.

– How does it help to call yourself names? You just don’t want to get it that the two of you are well and truly through. As in forever. You’re not going to live happily ever after with him. It’s not in the cards. It hasn’t been since he started cheating on you. Whenever that was.

The Torah service was in full swing by the time Erica arrived. Faith would have thought it inappropriate to turn up this late: yentas would say she was more interested in the kiddush than in the worship.

I’d have been more punctual if you were still here.

On the bimah at the front of the room, Jonathan Vineberg, the Baal Korei, a stocky man with a head of close-cropped grizzled hair, was chanting from the Torah. The rabbi and the Lovely Helen stood on either side of him. Marty, probably the recipient of the last aliyah, was up there as well. All of them were following the Hebrew text closely, ready to pounce and correct the least error.

Erica hesitated at the back of the dim, near-empty room. It was evident that few members of Congregation Emunath shared her opinion that shul was the place to be this morning. It was a bright day, one of the last golden flashes of summer. The large square windows of the sanctuary were open to admit a mild breeze, and dust motes danced in the streaks of light. In precisely two weeks there would be an overflow crowd in this room for Rosh Hashanah, but today it held only a few elderly congregants.

Erica tiptoed to the spot on the aisle beneath one of the open windows where she and Faith always sat. She craned her neck around to get the page number from Maureen Segal in the row behind her, leafed through the Chumash to the right place, and began to read.

It wasn’t long before it crossed her mind that she should have stayed home. In a low, hurried voice, quite dissimilar from his usual booming delivery, Jonathan was intoning the harshest, most awful verses of the Torah, a litany of what would befall the Israelites if they didn’t follow God’s commandments to the letter.

“The Lord will make pestilence cling to you, until He has put an end to you … and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.”

Erica flipped back and forth a few pages, trying to find the context for the passage. She gathered it was part of Moses’s peroration immediately before the entry of the Children of Israel into Canaan. The parsha began pleasantly enough, with a description of a ritual of thanksgiving to the Creator, offering God the first fruits of wheat, barley, figs, pomegranates, and olives upon the arrival of the Hebrews to the land of milk and honey. There followed feel-good sections promising that, upon faithful observance of and conformity to all decrees, a heap of blessings would rain down on them—in the city and in the country, in the womb and the kneading bowl, etc. “The Lord will make you the head, not the tail; you will always be at the top and never at the bottom—if only you obey and faithfully observe the commandments … and do not deviate to the right or to the left … and turn to the worship of other gods.”

If only, Erica thought: but there are hundreds of commandments!

And hundreds of curses—scores anyway—for non-compliance. What a fevered imagination the Great Redactor of Deuteronomy had possessed. Or perhaps he intuited a preview of the cataclysmic future of the Jewish people?

“The Lord will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evildoing in forsaking Me. … The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like the eagle—a ruthless nation, that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy….”

Erica slammed her Chumash shut with a bang. If she’d been in a different frame of mind, she might have pored over the glosses, seeking enlightenment from learned commentators. It occurred to her that she must surely have been in shul on other occasions when Ki Tavo was read, but she had no recollection of it or of any great sense of previous outrage. Today, however, she felt personally rebuffed. In lieu of uplift and consolation, the tradition had delivered a frontal whack.

It made her think of Melly. He had lived through ghettos and crematoria and work camps and death marches that somehow echoed and were evoked by the painfully detailed curses. Was witnessing and enduring suffering on an epic scale in some way extenuating? If you had survived by hanging on with your fingernails, by theft, subterfuge, cunning, and sheer luck, were you to be henceforth exempt from the normal niceties of good behaviour?

And then, unbidden, she had a flash to her mother, not as she tended to think of her now, a wasted wraith racked by terrible pain, but vibrant and beautiful, sending her and Christine off to school, tying up their red sashes, and then placing a warning finger first on her lips, then theirs: Thou shalt not speak of who you are, or of what we say here in our home. On pain of death.

Klara and Tibor too had endured the times when the Lord brought to their door a nation from afar, a nation that swooped down like an eagle, and showed no mercy. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time ever, Erica understood, understood in her bones the terror that would make you leave the faith of the ancestors, leave the legacy that brought upon your head the hatred of the nations. And blend into blessed innocuousness and anonymity.

She stayed for kiddush, though she wasn’t sure why. Kiddush had only been fun with Faith. Faith knew everybody and liked to schmooze at length after services, with Erica tagging along, a bemused sidekick. There was no pleasure in hanging around today, feeling marginal, but she couldn’t face going home either. And if she stayed she could thank Nate for last night’s hospitality in person, instead of by phone.

As usual there was a clump around the Rabbi. Jeff Stern had buttonholed him first and was making emphatic gestures with his hands and leaning in so close that his moustache almost grazed Nate’s cheek. (Space invader, Faith used to say.) Marty stood on the periphery, waiting his turn, and, it seemed to Erica, avoiding her. She went over to say hello, racking her brains for something to say.

“It was very kind of you to drive me home last night. I’m not sure I said thank you.”

“You did.”

“I … I think you may be angry at me.”

“I have no reason or right to be angry with you, Erica.”

“It was a nice evening last night at the Kaufmans.”

“Yes. I was just about to say thank you to Nate. But if you’ll excuse me, I’ll come back a little later.”

Whew, he’s really pissed off. Well, he’s right. He’s got no right to be mad at me. Even if I were getting back together with Rick. I owe him zip.

She caught Nate’s eye and moved in a little closer. Jeff was still expostulating.

“I don’t want to intrude,” Erica said.

“No, no, you’re not intruding. Jeff and I are—”

“Just about finished,” Jeff said and strode off abruptly, chest thrust out combatively.

“What’s his problem?” Erica said.

Nate smiled and diplomatically held his counsel.

“It was lovely last night, Nate. Thank you for asking me.”

“It was our pleasure to have you. You must come again.”

“Did we exhaust Reisa? She isn’t here.”

“She had a headache this morning. She’s prone to headaches, I’m afraid.”

“Nate, I want to ask you about the Torah portion. I had a lot of trouble with it.”

“So did I,” Nate smiled wryly. “I do, every year.”

“I found it really upsetting today.”

“Isn’t it awful?” Nate said disarmingly. “I’m afraid I copped out a bit by focusing my d’var Torah on the beginning sections—the first fruits—”

“And the tithe. The importance of shouldering our commitments and responsibilities to the community.”

“Did you have a problem with that?” Nate spoke a trifle too quickly.

“Not exactly. Only that I was preoccupied with the idea of belonging to an accursed people.”

“I see. Well. Yes. Is everything all right with you, Erica? I mean aside from this nasty business with Melly? Reisa and I thought you didn’t seem quite yourself last night.”

It was Erica’s turn to be taken aback.

“Actually, things aren’t completely all right.”

“Would you like to talk to me about it?”

“I, I might, actually,” Erica stammered. “Should I call your office for an appointment?”

“You could do that,” Nate said. “But you could also—” He looked down at Erica’s feet and then shook his head, disappointed. “I had a thought—but you can’t in shoes like that. I was going to suggest you walk me home. It’s a beautiful day. But you’re wearing those heels.”

Erica dimpled and for an instant the lines of strain lifted from her features. “I always keep a pair of running shoes in the trunk of my car for exercise class.”

“Well, then,” the Rabbi said. “Shall I meet you out front in about fifteen minutes?”

Normally Erica wouldn’t have dreamed of discussing her private life with Nate. But this wasn’t normal. Not that he wasn’t already thoroughly in the know about her family.

As she bent down to tie her shoelaces by the curb, her dying mother’s face—the sallow, translucent skin, the emaciated cheeks—swam before her eyes. She saw Klara swaddled mummy-like in a pink striped flannel blanket and could almost smell the reek of putrefaction that no amount of airing could dispel. In the final stages of her illness, Tibor had rented a hospital bed for her and moved out of their room into the den. Once he could no longer cope with caring for her on his own, a private nurse attended her round the clock,

Drifting in and out of consciousness, Klara still managed to stay mostly lucid. The disease had ravaged her vocal chords and by the end she could only produce a thin squeal. In this mouse’s squeak she ordered Tibor to call up Dr. Winters. She had something urgent to discuss with the analyst who had reassembled her after Erica’s book unmasked her before the world.

Crusty old Dr. Winters actually took it upon himself to pay a house call and, once he was gone, Klara stunned her family by asking to see a rabbi. It fell to Erica to find one. It was before she and Ricky had joined the shul. Faith put forward Nate Kaufman’s name.

A cloud of secrecy shrouded that meeting. Only after Klara’s funeral—at the Loyola Chapel—was the veil slightly lifted. Back home after the burial on the mountain, Tibor sank into his favourite armchair in the den and in broken, halting phrases took Erica and Christine into his confidence. Klara had suffered from terrible nightmares—morphine induced hallucinations he called them—in which she was haunted by those shadowed generations Erica had dreamed up in her novel. And so Dr. Winters suggested that she unburden herself to a rabbi. What she and Nate said to each other remained between them, but it appeared that it had given her a measure of comfort and peace.

Nate’s delicacy and understanding on that occasion were reason enough to trust him now, Erica thought, as she paced in front of the shul waiting for him. She kept her gaze firmly averted from the offending building site emblazoned with Melly’s name across the street. Nate was the last person to emerge from inside, and he blinked several times in the sudden sunlight.

His automatic smile for Erica didn’t reach his eyes, which remained sad and distant behind the tortoiseshell frames. He must have regretted having asked her to accompany him, Erica thought. She felt a jolt of irritation with herself for having placed them both in this embarrassing predicament.

They both started to speak at once.

Erica said, “I don’t want to bother—”

Nate began,” What’s troubling—?”

They both laughed. “Which route are we taking?” Erica asked.

“Let’s get off of Hillpark right away. I can’t wait to turn my back on that monstrosity across the street. We’ll take Finchley as far up as you like, it’s a pretty route…. Now don’t beat around the bush, just tell me what’s wrong.”

She told him about the blood test. He listened gravely, bending his head forward in concentration, occasionally tweaking at his beard. “It will be tough waiting out the results,” he said, and then peppered her with questions. “Do you have confidence in your doctor? Will you have chemo? Will you have to lose your wonderful hair?”

Erica recoiled. “It depends what the results are. I don’t want to go there unless I have to.”

They walked in silence for a few moments. Across the street a frum couple were shepherding a family of tots along. A baby and a toddler shared a double stroller pushed by the wife, a nicely dressed woman wearing a dramatic hat. The father was a bear of a man with a curly beard. Two little girls in frilly dresses hung on to his hands. A boy of about six brought up the rear, dawdling.

“That’s Rabbi Alter,” Nate observed quietly. He nodded curtly in the vague direction of his nemesis.

“Gut Shabbos, gut Shabbos,” the bear shouted back amiably.

“This thing with Rabbi Alter and Melly, is it really getting to you?” Erica asked.

“Yes, I can’t pretend it isn’t. But I really do want to talk about you right now. It was insensitive of me to talk of chemo. Cancer preys on all our insecurities.”

“Thank you for saying that! It’s like I tucked away all this information about cancer, or associations with it—I’ve been collecting them all my life, way before my mother’s illness or anything to do with me. And now all these bits and pieces are coming out to ambush me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for instance, there was this novel I read years ago. It was kind of light and fluffy, maybe a mystery. But there was something in it of substance. The best friend of the main character has had a mastectomy, but she’s fine. She’s a regular character with a life. And then in the middle of the novel she has a recurrence. The book isn’t really about her, it’s about her friend, this is just a sub-plot. And so the main character is very upset and goes to see her family doctor and tells the doctor what’s happening and asks about her friend’s prospects. And so the doctor says, ‘Prepare to say goodbye.’”

“But it isn’t like that today!” Nate said, too quickly. “There’ve been all these advances.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’ve figured out that no matter what statistics they throw at me—eighty per cent survival rate, or ten per cent, it doesn’t really matter. Either I’ve got what they’re looking for this time, or I don’t. You don’t have cancer eighty percent or ten percent. It’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ve got it one hundred per cent.”

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Then Erica spoke up again, “There’s something else. You asked me if anything was wrong. Well, you know that saying about sorrows coming not in single spies but in battalions. The thing is, Ricky and I’ve been kind of working on a reconciliation. At his initiative, not mine. And—I don’t want to get too specific—I’ve realized that I’ve been a great fool. Again.”

Nate stopped in his tracks and looked at her searchingly.

“This might sound strange coming from a rabbi, but haven’t you drunk enough from that particular well?”

Erica gaped at him. A rabbi, her rabbi, advising against salvaging her marriage? She couldn’t believe her ears.

And then to her immense surprise, she burst into rollicking laughter. She felt out of control. Maybe she’d never be able to dam this crazy wave of hysteria. It reminded her of that moment when Hershy had pronounced the words “Ricky Who?”

After a while, Nate, too, began to chuckle. It was some time before they resumed walking.

Nate said, “It’s none of my business of course, but why would you want to go there, Erica, when someone else is so clearly interested in you?”

“You mean … Marty?”

“Uh-huh. I’m just an observer on the sidelines, but I do notice things, you know, and he’s a fine guy. Dependable as a rock and, I would guess—though I’m hardly an expert—that women would find him attractive.”

“Is the fact that someone admires you a reason for you to give that person encouragement?”

“Yes! Why not? Unless for some reason you’ve absolutely and categorically ruled against that person.”

“But shouldn’t you feel a strong attraction?”

“Sometimes you can feel a strong attraction, and it can even lead you astray. No, not astray—that’s the wrong connotation. I don’t know how best to put it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that making rational choices in relationships is easier to do when the hormonal impulses remain in the wings for a while. You’d be surprised how they emerge when the drama’s allowed to play itself out. Anyway that’s what I’ve noticed in many mature romances.”

“But what if someone’s done something … shameful?”

“Shameful?” Nate raised his eyebrow and stopped in the middle of the road again. “Whatever has Marty done to make you say that?”

Then he held up his hand like a policeman stopping traffic. “No, no, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

They walked on some more. By now they had reached Ellerdale, and begun heading east.

“You know, Erica, the longer we live, the more opportunities we have to make mistakes. By the time we reach our age, pretty well everyone’s done something questionable.”

“Even you?” Erica teased.

“Even me, the rabbi. But it’s easier to accept another person’s failures and flaws if we weren’t the party they stuck it to. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in working hard at marriage. The Talmud says, ‘When a man divorces the wife of his youth, even the altar sheds tears.’ As a Reconstructionist, I’m happy to paraphrase that to ‘when a woman divorces the father of her cherished children.’ Still, as an observer, I’d say that sometimes you simply have to wipe the slate clean and start all over.”

Dressed in an ancient pair of jeans, a white cotton hat with a visor shielding his eyes from spattering paint, Paul Ladouceur was perched on a stepladder in his spare bedroom, humming gently to Tom Waits on the radio. He arced the roller on the diagonal, filling in a broad stripe of yellow next to a matching band of green, and grinned. The rainbow mural was taking shape nicely.

Sun come up it was blue and gold. Tom not growling. Tom’s voice rich and mellow. Tom suddenly a balladeer. How perfect was that? And how perfect this song. Paul wanted to shout his happiness from a rooftop, or at the very least his balcony, but even more he wanted to hug it to himself, keep it secret. Let him not tempt fate this time, or invite ridicule, or have someone puncture his hopes.

He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, laid the roller back in the pan, and went in search of a Griffon in the kitchen. And there she was, her picture not in a frame like in the song, but stuck to the fridge by a strawberry shaped magnet. His miracle woman, the embodiment of the Polish saying his mother so often quoted, the gist of which was that there’s no event too awful for something good not to come of it.

Her name was Norma. He liked to tease her that she was just like her name, an exceedingly normal girl. To which she’d respond, “Not girl, Paul, woman.” He didn’t know whether she was sticking up for feminist language, or simply stating that she wasn’t that young. Nearly forty. To her, that was ancient. To him, a girl.

He wandered back into the spare room and picked up the roller again.

Breathtaking that, if not for Faith dying, he’d never have met her.

It was the last evening of the shiva. When he’d come the first night, the place was still too jammed to do more than shake hands with Al and the children and give Erica a big bear hug. He intended another one for Rhoda, but she darted him such a poisonous glance when he approached that he ended up merely stammering stock condolences.

Mess with my friend, you mess with me, the steely eyes said. Erica made her peace with you, but not with my blessing.

He could only assume that she had taken his breakup with Erica in a distinctly vengeful spirit, quite unlike Erica herself.

This second time he had a chance to press the hands of Faith’s parents and brother as well, but after a few stilted sentences—he could tell they had no idea who he was, or how he was connected to Faith—he retreated to a corner couch occupied by a solitary woman.

She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous like poor Maryse, nor did she have the exotic appeal of one striking feature, like Erica’s curls.

He hadn’t yet told Erica about her, but he would soon. It gave him a pang each time he thought of Erica. He wasn’t the praying sort, but the other day at lunchtime, he’d actually stepped into Notre-Dame de Bon Secours Chapel to light a candle for her. The idea of her undergoing treatments, losing her hair…. The thought of losing her altogether hovered on the edge of his new happiness. He had a lot of trouble keeping it at bay. He knew now that he would always cherish Erica as a dear friend. And he blamed himself for his impulsiveness in stepping over the professional divide that normally guided his relations with female colleagues.

It had taken a great effort by both of them to step away from the brief affair that carried them from New Year’s Eve to Valentine’s Day. Over a steak dinner at his place, she let him off the hook by saying it was a misguided idea, work and romance didn’t mix. But she had clearly intuited his change of heart, though he hoped she’d never know the real reason. Her scar, always camouflaged by a thin gold chain, was the culprit—that tidy little seam at the base of her throat. It symbolized mortality for him almost as much as a tub full of poor Maryse’s blood had. He couldn’t risk becoming hostage to that scar more than he already was by token of being Erica’s friend.

And then a few months later, there was Norma, sitting on a couch in Faith and Al’s living room. (Beneath Rhoda’s loyal, glaring radar. He suspected that she understood his craven heart, even if Erica didn’t. She was a witch, that Rhoda.) He asked how she was connected to Faith and Al. She explained she was a multimedia artist who paid the bills as an art therapist. She consulted at various facilities, one of them the Children’s. That’s how she knew Faith.

She was pretty in a natural, wholesome way, with regular features and nut-brown eyes. They were probably the only two Gentiles in the room, which made for a bond of sorts. She seemed impressed by his journalism background. “I love editors,” she said, and then laughed shame-faced, catching herself lest she was being too forward. She seemed to think that being an editor at The Gazette was important and glamorous.

He tried, but not too hard, to disabuse her. The paper had recently been bought by a Western media mogul who was slashing and burning and gutting the product, hell-bent on turning it into homogenized corporate pap. Erica as columnist was viewed as too elitist, too intellectual. Paul’s budget had been cut; he was resorting to more wire copy than he was comfortable with. Forget glamorous; his job had never been less fun.

All the more reason that it was flattering to be admired.

She seemed direct, easygoing. An outdoorsy woman without a complicated past, who liked to kayak and hike. Yet she read his section, and had some lively opinions about Erica’s last column. Apparently she didn’t just love editors, she loved books.

“What’s your schedule?” he asked.

She looked back at him blankly.

“I mean, when can I call you?… Can I call you?”

He called the next day, which was a Friday. They went for dinner. And despite his best resolution for no more impromptu beddings, they made love on her lumpy living room sofa.

They didn’t take precautions.

Which is why he was now giddy with joy, painting his spare room in nursery colours, and crooning softly.

I love you baby and I always will

Ever since I put your picture

In a frame.

Business was brisk at the butcher shop the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah, but Noam had two extra men flying about the store, so he had a moment with Erica. It was the first time they were seeing each other since the funeral, and he beckoned her to a corner by the square cabinet freezer.

“I’m really sorry about Faith.” His face twitched, as he hoisted a bag out of the cooler.

“Oh, Noam, thank you. I can’t think of the holidays without her. I keep on going over what happened, over and over. How could she fall? Why did this happen?”

“There is a plan. That was the plan.”

“Noam, no! What an awful idea. There was no plan. It was an accident. God is sad over this.”

Noam smiled pityingly at her. He hoisted another bag of meat from the cooler, preparing to help her to her car.

“Don’t get me wrong, Erica. You and I, we don’t agree too much about God. You Reconstructionists, what do you mean by God, anyway? I’ve heard people say you daven to To Whom It May Concern. Oh, you like that! You haven’t heard that one?

“The Lubavitcher rebbe taught that we’re here on earth for one purpose,” Noam continued earnestly. “To reproduce. To have children. So after that it makes no difference, really. Now the rebbe, he was married for years and years. But he had no children. But all the things that he did good in the world, all over the world, they’re his children. Faith did on earth what she was supposed to do.”

“You mean, just because she had children? She didn’t even see them grow up properly! She didn’t see them get married. She didn’t have grandchildren. Among other things, that was also what she was supposed to do.”

“That’s very sad. But look at it my way. She has a son to say kaddish for her. In her life she was involved with many good things. She did a lot for your synagogue. Okay, it’s not my synagogue—but still. And she helped a lot of kids with problems at the hospital. She made a difference. That’s her legacy.”

“But—”

“Erica! Hello. I was just thinking about you.”

Erica looked up, startled by the voice behind her. Marty had walked into the butcher shop and was staring at her with open concern.

“I didn’t know you bought meat from Noam,” Erica said, casting about for a straw.

“I don’t usually,” Marty said sotto voce, looking awkward as he tried to ignore the butcher in his apron. “My son and daughter-in-law and little granddaughter are coming in from Boston for the holiday. They’ll be at my place for the second night. I’m not much of a cook, but I got a recipe for chicken soup off the Internet and I thought it would be nice to go kosher for yontiff.”

“Say no more, mister,” Noam stopped pontificating in a flash and became the soul of professional concern. “Do you mind if I get one of the boys to help you to your car, Erica?”

“Why don’t I do that?” Marty picked up the two bags, “and maybe you can start by cutting me up a chicken?”

“Mister, you’re gonna need at least two for a proper soup.”

“Okay, so two.”

The sun was beating down with pleasant warmth as they headed towards the parking lot.

“Like I said, you’ve been on my mind a lot, Erica. I’m terribly sorry to hear that you may be having a recurrence.”

“Whoever told you that!?”

“Nate. He’s worried about you. So am I, it goes without saying.”

“What a yenta!”

“I’ve been called many things in my time—”

“Not you! Nate! If a woman can’t talk in confidence to her rabbi—”

“Erica, please. Could you tell me what your Hebrew name is?”

“Whatever for?”

“I’d like to make a mishebayrach for you. A blessing for your good health.”

Erica gazed at him dumbstruck. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. The long rays of the sun were blinding and she shielded her eyes with one hand. Had she ever taken stock of him properly, this large, middle-aged man with a receding hairline, beaked nose, and pouches like bruises beneath his eyes? Worry was written all over his face and furrowed his high forehead, but what held her in this intent exchange was the simple compassion radiating from those almond-shaped eyes.

After all the snubs she had subjected him to, he had still found it in him to make this crazy, corny, amazing request.

She bit her lip, hard. If she started crying now, she might never stop. Faith dead. Cancer a second time. Prepare to say goodbye.

“I’m touched, Marty.”

“I don’t want to overstep, but as much as I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”

“Even now? I’m a pretty poor risk.”

“Yeah, well,” he said drily. “In a different way, so am I.… So what’s your Hebrew name then?”

“Ruth. Ruth bat Avraham ve Sarah.”

Marty’s cellphone rang just as he arrived at the office. He answered while letting himself in.

“Melly Darwin, here. Is that you, Riess?”

“It is.”

“You’re the agent for that lowrise on l’Acadie and Jarry.”

“I am.”

“We have a project in mind. We’d make an interesting offer for the owner.”

Marty didn’t say a word.

“Are you still there?”

“Yup,” Marty said, thinking hard.

“Nu?”

“There are … conditions to that property.”

“What’s this conditions?”

“I own it.”

“So—and I want to buy! At a decent return to the seller, already I told you.”

“Well, that’s very good. But the thing is, I have a condition for selling it. Or rather for selling it to you. I understand that you owe Erica Molnar some money.”

“What the hell does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

“Pay up. It’s a condition of the sale.”

This time it was Melly who remained silent.

“I’ll … think … about it,” he said. Then, just before the phone cut out, in a low voice he added, “Shmuck.”

Rhoda having decided that Erica needed a new outfit for the High Holidays, on Sunday they went shopping. Erica hated everything she tried on at Boutique Arnelle and declared she was a hag in the chartreuse silk dress that Rhoda said fit her perfectly. At Papaver bleu there was a Chanel-style suit that Erica thought might do, but Rhoda said it looked like a flight attendant’s uniform. Erica then announced that that was all the shopping she could handle—she had a wardrobe full of clothes to make do with. Rhoda insisted that they should try Quelles Sensations on the off chance. There she kept up a steady patter with the owner, while studying the racks with narrowed eyes. She pulled a mid-calf brown skirt, a form fitting leopard print top, and a long tawny cardigan off three different racks and thrust them into Erica’s arms.

“This top is more Faith than me.”

“Humour me. Try them on.”

Erica did so and had to admit that Rhoda was right.

Re-energized by this success, Erica agreed that the afternoon was still young. They headed for Greene Avenue to look at shoes. Rhoda was at the cash at Tony’s, paying for a lovely pair of button-up ankle boots, when the manager touched her elbow from behind.

“What’s happened to your friend—what’s her name?—I haven’t seen her in ages.”

Erica stepped up and put her arm around Rhoda’s waist. For a moment Rhoda, taller, more sturdily built than Erica, buckled against her.

“Faith,” Rhoda whispered. “My friend’s name is Faith Rabinovitch.”

Erica spoke into the silence. “Our friend Faith—died … very suddenly … in July.”

“I just couldn’t say she’d died,” Rhoda said, looking pale on a couch at the back of the Second Cup. “The words just wouldn’t come out.”

“That woman wanted to fall through the floor when I did tell her,” Erica said.

“I had a feeling something like this might happen one day,” Rhoda whispered, “I just didn’t expect it now…. Yesterday my mother, and today this. And tomorrow just happens to be my father’s yahrzeit.”

“What’s wrong with your mother?”

“Nothing’s wrong with her, she just said something really outrageous.” Rhoda took a gulp of coffee, stared at Erica without appearing to see her, and then tried to straighten her spine against the soft cushions. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. And I don’t want you to comment on it. I don’t need you to be philosophical, or deliver an opinion. I just need you to listen.”

Erica placed her mug on the coffee table.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“My father adored my mother. You know that.”

Erica nodded, completely baffled.

“He had this massive crush on her in high school. He could have had any girl he wanted—this was the way I heard it from my aunt Ellie, not from him, he’d never make that kind of a claim. He was the nicest person alive, and he was an all-round athlete and he was bright. He might have gone to university if my grandfather hadn’t died when my dad was in his last year of high school. Ellie was still in elementary school. There were three other kids.

“My grandfather had been a watchmaker and owned a hole-in-the-wall jewellery shop on Ste. Catherine East. My dad learned the basics of dismantling and cleaning watches from him. And so when my grandfather died and my Bubbie took over the shop, my dad had the chutzpah to present himself at Birks. He got a job at their repair bench, but every spare minute he was watching and learning from the goldsmiths working with their gems. He wanted to be a master jeweller. There was a guy called Serafino there who’d apprenticed at Cartier in Paris, who took him under his wing. My Dad was ambitious—but I have a hunch that really he was just dying to create beautiful baubles for my mother.

“He was obsessed with her. And I think she liked him, too, but she wasn’t having any of him. Her passion was for climbing out of poverty. She’d had a bad childhood. My other grandfather had done time, and my Nana was simply a beaten-down woman.”

“Beaten?” Erica ventured.

“Beaten down, not beaten up. He was a petty thief and a gambler and a drinker. There was never any money. And my mother was this beautiful girl. I think her great allure for men, Jewish men anyway, was that though she was Jewish, she didn’t look it at all. Blonde hair, blue eyes, upturned nose. And she must have been a bit of an ice maiden. She dated older guys with better prospects than my dad. She liked him, but she didn’t want to go steady with him.

“He wouldn’t give it up. My Bubbie scolded him up and down about her. Bubbie’d say that Leah Spanier, the daughter of a goniff who’d served time at Bordeaux, had a lot of nerve turning up her shiksa nose at him.”

Here Rhoda gave the weakest of chuckles and drained the last drops of her latte. “But he tuned her out and asked my mother out again. And I guess in a weak moment, she said yes. By this time, under Serafino’s eye, Daddy was crafting the odd ring and brooch of his own. And one found its way into Birks’ side window, in a famous Birks blue box.

“After the movie let out at Loew’s, for once he didn’t hide his light under a bushel, and he steered her by the shop window and pointed out the ring. It was a pretty flashy number, a star sapphire I think, between two diamonds in a wide platinum band.

“And my mother was astute enough to recognize talent. I think she figured that, with a push in the right direction, he just might make it. And she was going to give him that push.

“She was working as a bookkeeper in a large financial-collection company. Mr. Black, the owner, probably had a crush on her. A lot of men did. In any case she told him that her boyfriend worked with a master jeweller who’d trained at Cartier in Paris. Between them, the Cartier guy and her boyfriend could produce one-of-a-kind jewellery at a fraction of the price that it cost at Birks.

“And so one thing led to another. In the romance between them—and in my father’s career. He never did become a master jeweller. At first he peddled Serafino’s creations to the Blacks and to their friends. Literally. He’d call on couples in the evening, showing off his wares in a customized attaché case. It turned out he had a real flair for sales. And like I said, one thing led to another. They got married. Daddy took over his father’s old store, and then he rented space on Bernard, and then eventually he became Gutner’s on Greene. And later, Bijoux Gutner.

“We had a nice life. I had a great childhood. Not just because I had nice things and we lived well, but because I understood how loved and cherished I was. By my father especially, but my Mom, too. Before I was born she’d done my father’s books and he always discussed every step he took with her, but she stopped working when I was born. Which—” Rhoda stopped and looked pensive for a moment, “may have been a mistake.”

She took a deep breath.

“D’you want another coffee?” Erica asked.

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“You’re probably wondering where this is all heading.”

“A little.”

“Where this is going is she got herself royally laid by my father’s cousin Sid over the course of a day and a night during Expo. And she made sure that my father and I would know it. She rubbed our faces in her crotch.”

“Rhoda!”

“Not a word, remember?”

“Sorry.”

Rhoda’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Erica. I shouldn’t have said that.” She bent down to rummage in her purse, found a tissue, and rubbed her eyes.

“How’s my mascara?”

“Smudged.”

Rhoda made a valiant attempt at a lopsided grin, but with her blackened eyes and ravaged features she ended up looking grotesque.

“You don’t have to tell me more,” Erica said.

“Nah, you’re not off the hook. Besides, there isn’t that much more.

“My father was shattered. He aged ten years that summer. His hair began falling out. He lost so much weight, his clothes hung on him like on a scarecrow. When people asked if he was sick, he couldn’t be bothered making up stories. He told my Bubbie that her charming nephew had seduced my mother.”

“‘What can you expect of the daughter of a jailbird?’ my Bubbie said. ‘The little slut.’”

“She said that? How d’you know?”

“Ellie. Ellie was the fly on the wall, the whole time.

“My father stood by my mother through it all. He told my grandmother to cut it out. He said, ‘She made a mistake. Have you never made a mistake?’”

“‘There are mistakes and there are mistakes,’ my Bubbie said. ‘Mistakes like this I haven’t made.’

“That has stayed with me,” Rhoda said. “‘Mistakes like this I haven’t made.’”

“You never told anybody about this?” Erica said, after it appeared that Rhoda was done.

“No.”

“Not even Hershy?”

Rhoda shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

“But what kind of a marriage is that—when you carry around this big secret—?”

“It’s not a secret! All kinds of people know—”

“This big story, the biggest story in your life. And you don’t tell your husband? Don’t you trust him?”

Rhoda shrugged. “I trust him, but I don’t want him to know how much something like that can hurt. Can hurt me. Did hurt me.”

“But don’t you want to share everything with him?”

“There’s way too much emphasis on sharing in marriage. Marriage should just be a pact. Like, I want to have children, I want to have a certain standard of living, I want someone who can make me laugh, and I want someone who’ll stick to his side of the bed.”

“And what about romance? Passion?”

“That is precisely what I distrust. My father loved my mother too much. Right from the get go. It’s a stifling thing to be loved like that. A risky thing. Loving and being loved like that, you could get burned, you could get burned up….”

Rhoda bent down to place a couple of pebbles at her father’s cool, marble headstone. It read:

JOSHUA GUTNER,

Yehoshuah ben Yekutiel,

1920-1992

Beloved Husband,

Incomparable Father,

Devoted Grandfather.

Each year on his yahrzeit, she was in the habit of having a little monologue at this spot, catching him up on the family news. Breaking down.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said now. But instead of launching into her bulletin to the hereafter, instead of pouring her heart out to him about poor Faith as she had planned, she was tongue-tied with shame.

She had not called her mother for two days. She had not picked Leah up and brought her along to the cemetery as she always did. In the hereafter—about the existence of which Rhoda was highly dubious—her father would be sorrowful.

Head bowed, Rhoda stood, her fingers still lightly touching the monument, remembering the night of her father’s death. A massive coronary, completely out of the blue. She and her mother were back at the house on Belmont, back from Emergency at the Jewish General. Both of them stunned by the suddenness of the attack, and by the futility of the measures taken to save him. She helped her mother ease out of her clothes, as she might have done a small child, then slipped the cotton nightgown over her head. From the bathroom she brought her a glass of water and a sleeping pill. Leah grabbed hold of her hand.

“Don’t leave me just yet.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Ma. I’ll be next door.”

“Not yet. Stay with me for a while.”

Rhoda sat down at the edge of the bed.

“Every night—from my wedding night, until last night, your father and I were together. Every night. D’you know what I’m saying, Rhoda?”

“I think so,” Rhoda said. What was that expression kids had these days? Too much information. Please don’t say another word.

“But he never, you know, satisfied me until after Sid. I didn’t even know what it was.”

“So now,” Rhoda said through clenched teeth, “Now will you get together with Sid? There’s nothing to stop you now.”

“You don’t understand the first thing, Rhoda. Not the first thing about me. I didn’t love Sid.”

“You didn’t love Daddy, either. I heard you say it with my own ears that night. You know which night. ‘Maybe I never loved you.’ That’s what you said to Daddy.’”

“I never said that. You’re mistaken. I never said that. I always loved your Daddy. I just loved him a whole lot more after Sid. After Sid, I didn’t just love him for what he could do for me as a provider. I loved him for the way he stood up for me. And for the way he gave me pleasure.”

In the cemetery, Rhoda dashed tears from her eyes. She would call her mother. She would go fetch her. They would return together to pay their respects, as they did every year.