54

Regret

Today, C. came to me proposing that if he wasn’t willing to go entirely against his principles, he might be willing to bend them a little bit.

“Alright,” he said, “I’ll give in. As soon as I graduate, we’ll be husband and wife, for all the world to see. In the meantime, we can get a marriage license. We’ll go to a court or a rabbi later. For now, you’ll support yourself, as you have been doing. We’ll live separately. And we won’t have any children.”

I understood what he meant. I didn’t invite him into my room, I didn’t throw him out, and I didn’t scream or curse. I just stood there for a while silently, and then I said, “It’s too late.”

“Too late? What do you mean, too late? Too late at night? Or too late in life?”

“Too late in life,” I answered. “I’m in love with someone else.”

He looked at me with confusion and angst, and then asked again, as though he didn’t believe what he’d heard, “You love someone else?”

“Yes.”

“So—you love someone else. And does he love you back?”

“I think so.”

“Does he want to marry you?”

“Oh, I don’t care what he wants!”

“Would you have a free love affair with him?”

“Yes,” I answered in a hushed voice, like I was admitting to a sin.

“But not with me?”

“No.”

“Why would you have one with him, but not with me?”

“Because I’m in love with him.”

“How long have you loved him? Tell me! How long?”

“You don’t measure love in how long. Only how much.”

“Do you love him so much?”

“Very!”

He was quiet for some time and then he asked, glowering, what made me love “him” so much. I responded to his question truthfully.

“It’s hard to answer that question.”

“Did you tell him that you love him?”

“Such a thing need not be said.”

He interrogated me further. “Honestly,” I told him, it was thanks to him, to C., that I was able to love this man so much. He opened my eyes to life. C. showed me how not to be so calculating and controlled when it comes to love. C. was the first one to teach me that you only live once, and that you should take all that you can from life, because you’re living today and tomorrow you may die. In short, I gave him a long explanation using his own explications. My voice was full of obedience to this inevitable truth. I told him that I had decided to give in to life itself, which is stronger than I am.

“Do you mean to say that I awakened you to life, just so you could give yours to someone else?” he asked incredulously, like a man who was buried alive, looking up at me desperately as I walked by. “Why did I do it?”

I told him that yes, I was giving it to someone else. I’ll never forget all he’s done for me. I’ll be forever grateful.

Humiliated, he and his principles walked away.

There’s nothing worse in the world than regret. It’s like a sickness without a cure.

C. is full of regrets that he had not made me his one once and for all.

“There was a time,” he told me today, “that you wanted, with all your heart, to have me as yours forever. Didn’t you want to go with me from the intellectuals’ home to city hall to take out a marriage license?”

“Yes, I did,” I agreed, to make matters worse.

“And there were moments when you would have given yourself to me without a license too. Why didn’t I take the opportunity when I had it?”

“Really, why didn’t you?”

“Are you saying that just to upset me? Or do you mean it?”

“Why shouldn’t I mean it?”

“I was an ass.”

“Yes.”

Unhappy with my response, he retorted, “Anyway, if I offered today to marry you, you would agree to it.”

“It’s too late!”

“It’s never too late!” he cried. After all, he’s the one who woke me from my lethargic sleep! He doesn’t want to hear about the other man. Where was that he before, that yold, while C. was working so hard to prepare me for living? No, he’s not going to walk away from me with his hat in his hand like he did yesterday. He’ll demand what he deserves!

I laughed at him and showed him the door.

“What was your fiancé yelling about today?” asked my landlady. “Did you quarrel about something?”

“Yes, we quarreled.”

“What does he want?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants.”

“Maybe he’s having second thoughts?”

“Let him regret it if he wants.”

“That’s right! Why should you care? So what if he finds another bride? There are plenty of holodriges who’d be happy to take him, who don’t have anything else. Don’t fool yourself. Why should you wait until he graduates? That’ll only give you misery. You should find yourself a plain man, not someone who’s so full of himself. Find yourself a man who’d follow you anywhere, who’d give you everything he had. Do you think that’s a small thing? You should look for a horse doctor or a butcher. He might bring you thousands. He’d lay his grandmother’s inheritance at your feet. Why do you need to crawl, with a healthy head on your shoulders, into a sickbed of a marriage? Just because he’s studying to be a doctor, does that give him a right to make you sick? Let him be the one to suffer.”

My landlady spoke to me like this for a long time. The past few weeks, C. had lost all of his good graces with her. Who knows if it’s because he didn’t taste or eat her food, or because he didn’t follow her advice and try to get married as soon as possible and get off the market, or because he didn’t bring the books he’d promised for her children, or because he gave them candy and ruined their books with it, or maybe for all of those things together. Whatever it was, now she thought as badly of him as she used to think well, and warned me away from him.

I said yes to everything she said, and she wished me luck.

Today, on a Sunday morning, I came in to see my landlady and asked her, now that I’ve split with my fiancé once and for all, if he calls on me would she please tell him that I’m not at home?

“It’s good that you told me,” she responded with righteous anger. “When he sees me I’ll be as loyal as your left eye. You’ve done very well. It’s one way or the other. There’s no use in drawing things out. We don’t need him coming in here waiting for you and burning up our gas. He used to sneak in here like a man who’d been married to you ten years. What did he want from you? What a fool! Listen, as sure as my name is Mrs. Kotik, I’ll drop him, right before your very eyes.” With tears in her eyes, she added, “How dare he come to see you! He should wash your feet and drink the water. And I am such a cow for ever being so enamored with him.”

An older sister of Mrs. Kotik’s who had come to visit from Brownsville smiled at me good-naturedly as I went into my room and looked me over with approval. Her sister must have told her already what a rare, dear, kosher child I was.

“Nishkoshe,” she added, “you’ll land on your feet. A girl like you, with God’s help, will never be lost. Don’t worry. Nishkoshe. There’s a good God in heaven who watches over young people and makes shidukhim from among them. As they say, ‘The long and short of it is that right man will come along.’”

I thought that would be the long and short of what she had to say, and that I’d be able to go. But she kept on talking, and out of politeness I kept on listening.

“I have a boarder, a wonderful young man. In the old days, they would have kept a young man like that on kest for a whole year and showered him with gold and wood. But we’re in America, so he has to make a living for himself. What does he do, you ask? What doesn’t he do? He does everything you can imagine. He tutors, he sings to accompany cantors, he can engrave names onto tin badges—by hand, no less! He can transcribe letters in English, in Christian German, in Polish and in Hebrew. And Yiddish too, but that goes without saying. He says that there was never a need for him to learn to write in Yiddish, he just knew it from the start.”

“What’s the point of telling us all his good qualities?” Mrs. Kotik interrupted. “Bring him here and let us see for ourselves!”

“Of course, you’re right. I’ll bring him here. What was your former fiancé? He must have been a socialist, right?”

“Yes, so what? He thought the whole world should be his,” complained Mrs. Kotik.

“Was that his profession? Talking to socialists?”

“Sure, he talked to them!”

“Speaking about socialism! That’s hardly a profession for a Jew. What kind of a life could he build from that? I tell you, if she’d come to me for advice—there are so many backward thinkers among those socialists! It’s important to, as they say in English, ‘Be careful.’ There aren’t very many of them who deserve ‘respect.’ They talk a fine talk, but they believe the opposite of what they say. If you talk to my boarder about them, he’ll tell you what they really are. They wouldn’t let him into any union he tried to join. They demanded that he give them money first! Socialists asking for money, imagine that. What would the capitalists say? That’s America for you.”

When I finally returned to my room I could still hear the sisters talking about me. Not so much about me as about the wonderful boarder that the older sister promised the younger sister she’d bring for me.

Gorky says, “Everything comes to an end. That’s one of the best things about life.” I’ve been thinking about this for a while. For those whose life is a joy, the passing of things hardly brings pleasure. But for me, whose life is gray, workaday, pale, and bleak, knowing that there will be an end is a consolation.

I gaze up at the full moon in the starry night sky and the faith that I’ll be happy someday settles inside of me. It’s like a ladder of hope that my spirit climbs up to knock on my shuttered heart.

I believe and I doubt. I hope and I wait. I imagine things that I’m almost sure will never happen in my lifetime. But I can’t take away from myself the possibility of imagining and thinking about them, even though they’re far removed from reality.

With a strange, almost religious sadness, I think of A. My lips mouth his name like a prayer and it makes me feel so painfully good and weak. I love him for the suffering that my love for him causes me. It brings me to a holy feeling. It elevates my soul. It disinfects the impure thoughts that C. caused me while he was mounting his campaign for me.

C.’s battle to convince me to live had the opposite effect on me. He didn’t arouse sinful desires in me, as he wanted to, but instead he strengthened my desire to have a soulful, beautiful, eternal devotion to one person.