SOOKHART CALLED WITH NEWS. “I’ve found a copy,” he said.
“Of the Cantaveticles?”
“I’m as surprised as you. Astonished, in fact. Never in a million years… well, what follows from this is… the implications are rather far reaching, aren’t they?”
“How’d you find it?”
“The seller contacted a colleague of mine who was making inquiries on my behalf.”
“Who’s the seller?”
“He wishes to remain anonymous. That is frequently the case with transactions of this nature,” he said. “I’m sure you can understand.”
“But it’s real?”
“It’s real, and it’s complete. My understanding is that it is of Hungarian origin and dates roughly to the middle of the eighteenth century.”
“Written in Aramaic?”
“Curiously,” he said, “it appears to be written in Yiddish.”
That surprised me.
“Can you read Yiddish?”
“My dear boy,” he said, “no one can read Yiddish. But don’t let that worry you. We’ll find you a Yiddishist, and you can have it translated to your heart’s content. So long as you share what it says with the rest of us.”
He went quiet.
“Well?” he said. “Shall I proceed with the purchase?”
“Today was a tough day,” he wrote.
The man who takes care of us around here came to see me. He keeps the grounds, does the repair work. He knows how to strip mold from the walls and put in new lighting, but he can also recite Kierkegaard and the Psalms. He’s been here seven happy years. But lately he’s been having dreams. In them, he sees his wife again. She tells him things about God. She tells him what heaven is like. The dreams are vivid. He wakes up and can’t shake them. He feels her in the room with him. He asks me my opinion of the dead. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. The dead are dead. He nods. He’s a thoughtful man, I can see he’s struggling. He knows some cultures believe that the dead are alive and well. They hover, they hold sway over the living. He wants to know if I agree that it would be better that way, better to be separated from the dead only by a thin membrane that the dead can pierce when necessary. What’s called miracles. I tell him what it says in the Cantaveticles. There are no miracles, only men. But I can’t help him shake the dreams.
He will leave, I think. It has happened this way before. We are our own worst enemy. We abandon doubt. We become believers. Even now our numbers are dwindling.
Please consider my proposal to pay us a visit.
That same afternoon I saw a new patient, an old man with poor gums. He introduced himself as Eddie—an odd name, I thought, for an octogenarian. But, hey, if you’re Eddie at ten, you’re still Eddie at eighty. Eddie let me know the minute I sat down that he had been seeing the same dentist for over thirty-seven years. A Dr. Rappaport. I knew Dr. Rappaport. He had a good reputation. He also had—and this was the reason we all knew Dr. Rappaport—an unusual hygienist, whose habit it was to enter the room and ask her patients to hold certain instruments while she worked. “Hold this,” she’d say, handing the patient an instrument while in the middle of a cleaning, and “Hold this,” which the patient did dutifully, if not wholly comprehendingly, one instrument after the other—only to discover later, upon closer inspection, that she had only one arm. She was a one-armed hygienist. She was a very good hygienist, from everything I heard, even compared to hygienists with both arms. You can be a one-armed golfer and a one-armed drummer—why not a one-armed hygienist? The variety of determination in the world never ceases to amaze me. Anyway, about three weeks before my new patient was scheduled to see Dr. Rappaport, Dr. Rappaport’s office called to inform him that Dr. Rappaport had died. My new patient was going to have to find a new dentist. But after thirty-seven years, Eddie—who, at eighty-one, and weighing in at about a hundred pounds, was no spring chicken himself—didn’t want to find a new dentist. He was happy with Dr. Rappaport. Dr. Rappaport had taken fine care of his teeth for nearly half his life. It was inconceivable to him that Dr. Rappaport could die. That tall, youthful man with the lab coat and tan, how could he die? “He must have been a full twenty years younger than me,” said Eddie, who, I recognized, was one of those patients who found in his biannual checkup an opportunity to unburden some of his loneliness. He was a talker, and although I was busy that afternoon, that poor old dad was going to be dead in six months, and so I rested the hand that held the explorer and let him talk. I looked over at Abby, to nonverbally share in the conclusion that we had a talker on our hands—only to find her gone again, replaced by that diminutive temp I disliked. Where was Abby? She was there that morning. She never came to me, not even when all she needed was an afternoon off. She went to Connie instead. To Abby I was more like some creepy janitor, with his leer and mop bucket, than I was the man in charge. I didn’t care for the way the temp looked at me when I looked at her thinking I was looking at Abby; it was, I thought, the natural expression of her face at rest, but it made me feel vaguely accused all the same. Why is she not wearing a paper mask? I wondered. Does she not care if flecks of dental scum invade her membranes and nostrils? Abby would never not wear a mask, I thought. I peered back down at Eddie, whose face—though not at rest, as he was still going on and on about Dr. Rappaport—appeared melancholy, beautiful, and lost. His eyes were much wider than eyes typically are at that age, swimming in a pure whiteness. It was one more indignity of old age, he was saying, like chemo, or incontinence, to have your dentist die on you. Whose dentist just ups and dies? Old people’s. But not even old people expect it. Among the most basic guarantees that life goes on, that life is ever going on, is the promise that after the passage of six months’ time, your dentist will be alive and ready to receive you. When my patient learned that Dr. Rappaport had had a sudden heart attack, despite his relative youth and vigor, and was no longer receiving anyone, he realized that he, too, was bound to die. He’d always known it in an offhand way, but if it could happen to Dr. Rappaport, death was coming for Eddie, too. It was one of an accumulation of things that sent him spiraling into depression. He stopped taking care of himself, stopped going to the doctor, stopped doing any of the exercises necessary to keep his rheumatoid arthritis in check, and stopped flossing at night. Only at the urging of a physician friend did he get on an antidepressant and resume making an effort. But by then, his health had deteriorated. His rheumatoid arthritis was much worse, and as a result, it was virtually impossible for him to pull the floss out, wrap it around his fingers, and manipulate it between his teeth and gums. He couldn’t even use a floss pick. He’d flossed every day for nearly fifty years before Dr. Rappaport’s death, and now he had lost the necessary dexterity. A casual glance at his hands and anyone could see why. Each of his fingers veered at the knuckle like the end of a hockey stick. I didn’t know how it was possible to do anything at all with hands like that, even so little as turning a doorknob or opening a jar. Eventually, I thought, those fingers are going to meld into one, as teeth sometimes do in the mouths of the super old, and his two finger chunks, one on his right hand and one on his left, will be useless for anything but sitting in his lap pointing at each other. I should bring Connie in here, I thought, and show her Eddie’s hands and ask her if she still sees the point of lotioning every ten minutes. Lotion an inch thick, to this favor you must come. And Mrs. Convoy, too, I should bring Mrs. Convoy in here and demand to know why I shouldn’t immediately go outside and smoke a cigarette and continue smoking throughout the afternoon, since we all arrive at the same conclusion. After the hands, I’ll show them Eddie’s teeth and tell them his absurd predicament: half a century of flossing, only to be knocked on his ass by news of a dead dentist.
When I finally got inside his mouth and had a look around, I confirmed Mrs. Convoy’s notes: bone loss, gum pockets measuring sevens and eights. I never put odds on teeth with gum pockets of sevens and eights. But I vowed then and there to do everything I could to help him resume his fifty years of flossing. I removed the explorer and smiled down on him, placing my hand on his child’s shoulder. “Eddie?” I said. “Eddie, just what are we going to do with you, I wonder.”
Connie was at the front desk doing some filing.
“Where’s Connie?” I asked her.
“I’m right here,” she said.
“Ah! My brain’s going. I mean Abby, where’s Abby? She was here this morning.”
Connie suddenly got real busy.
“Connie?”
“Huh?”
“Where’s Abby?”
“She quit,” she said.
“She what?”
“She quit,” she said. “Abby quit.”
“What the hell for?”
She wasn’t looking at me.
“Connie, stop filing and look at me. Look at me! Stop!” She stopped filing. “What do you mean she quit? What did she quit for?”
“She took a new job,” she said. “She’s pursuing new opportunities.”
“New opportunities?” I said. “Abby?”
“Yeah, Abby,” she said. “Is that so outrageous?”
“What new opportunities?” I said. “Did she give notice? Most people give notice. It would be unlike Abby not to give notice,” I said.
“She didn’t give notice,” she said. “Unless you count lunch. Which she had off anyway.”
“Is this a joke?”
“She quit, Paul. She’d had enough.”
“She’d had enough? Hold on,” I said. “Having enough is totally different from pursuing new opportunities.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” she said.
It was time for Abby to get serious about being an actress, Connie explained, and to do that, she needed a job with greater flexibility. This was not the first time I’d heard rumors that Abby was some kind of aspiring actress. I should have let it suffice. People quit all the time and on the flimsiest of pretexts, and intelligent people have learned not to poke at those pretexts too closely, for fear of what might come flying out. But I couldn’t shut up about it. I couldn’t comprehend Abby not giving notice. It was common courtesy to give notice. Abby was taciturn but not discourteous. I pressed Connie and pressed her until finally she admitted that among Abby’s stated reasons for quitting was that I could be a bit much to work for. No news flash there. Also, said Connie, Abby had looked at what I was posting on Twitter, and not liking what she’d found there, not liking my so-called online persona, decided to quit right away rather than give notice.
“But that’s not me! Doesn’t she know that’s not me?”
“Apparently not.”
“Didn’t you tell her?”
“I told her.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“She either didn’t believe me, or she didn’t care.”
“But Abby’s not even Jewish,” I said.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“If somebody should be quitting, it’s you,” I said, “not Abby. Abby’s a Presbyterian, or a Methodist, or something.”
“A Presbyterian or a Methodist?” she said. “You didn’t even know she was an actress until five minutes ago.”
“How long has she been an actress?”
“And you don’t have to be Jewish to dislike anti-Semitic remarks. That’s a pretty universal sentiment in America these days.”
“But if anything,” I said, “if you read my tweets all at once, they’re really more anti-Muslim. Or anti-Christian. Antireligion in general, if you read them all at once.”
“When you’re hiring for her replacement,” she said, “you can post that in the ad.”
“Does Abby even know anything about the history of Judaism? Is she aware of what real anti-Semitism even looks like?”
“Real anti-Semitism?”
She looked at me like I’d lost it.
“What?” I said.
“Do you know what this bizarre little identity theft of yours has taught me?”
I sighed, then gestured for her to give it to me.
“The only people qualified to judge what ‘real’ anti-Semitism is and what it’s not are Jews. Which excludes you.”
I went back and sat across from Darla, the diminutive temp, who apparently had no objections to working for an anti-Semite. How badly Abby and I must have misjudged each other, I thought, and after so long being day after day only a few feet apart for hours at a stretch. It was inconceivable that she could be gone, and without so much as a goodbye. That afternoon, she must have just drifted out, or slipped out purposefully, and I thought nothing of her sudden absence, even welcoming it as that break in the continuity so commonly referred to as lunch. I had no idea that it would be the last chance I’d have to take her aside and apologize for being such a moody bastard. I was sorry for being so moody. I was sorry for being terse, cold, stern, dismissive, withholding, and unremittingly indifferent to every aspect of her being. No wonder she never came to me, no wonder she was gone.
Abby gone!
I worried about losing Mrs. Convoy next. I could not lose Mrs. Convoy and keep O’Rourke Dental running smoothly. In so many ways, Betsy Convoy was O’Rourke Dental.
When I found her, she had already begun the day’s sterilizing. “Betsy,” I said, “I’d like to talk to you about why Abby quit.”
She set everything down, reached out, and took me by the hand. I could feel the expert little bones inside her fingers.
“Have I ever told you what a fine dentist you are?” she asked.
During Betsy’s first year at O’Rourke Dental, when her superhuman skills still had the power to awe, I wanted nothing more than some sign of her opinion of me. I hoped that she considered herself to be working alongside a worthy partner. She was the best hygienist I’d ever known. Over time, I took her excellence for granted, and she simply became Betsy Convoy, devout R.C. and double-wide ballbreaker. But here she was, years later, giving me what I had once longed for.
“Thank you, Betsy,” I said.
“My husband, may he rest in peace, was also a good dentist. But he was not of your caliber. I’ve worked with a number of good dentists over the years. None of them has been of your caliber.”
“I’m honored to hear you say that.”
She smiled at me.
She released my hand and resumed sterilizing.
“But about Abby quitting,” I said.
“She’s pursuing new opportunities,” she said. “She’s always wanted to be an actress.”
“But that’s not the only reason she quit,” I said.
I told her what was being said in my name on Twitter. I removed my me-machine and read her my most recent posts.
“Aren’t you curious about all that?” I asked her.
“Why should I be?”
“Because those posts are in my name.”
“Did you write them?”
“No, but shouldn’t you wonder if I did?”
“What for?”
“What for? Betsy, many of these comments can be construed as anti-Semitic. Which would seem to imply that I’m an anti-Semite.”
“Are you an anti-Semite?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But the Internet sort of implies I am. Isn’t it important to you, to know if I am or not?”
“But you just said you weren’t.”
“But I had to come to you and tell you that. Once you heard why Abby quit, shouldn’t you have come to me? Shouldn’t you have voiced some concern? We’re talking about one of the ugliest prejudices in the history of mankind.”
“But I know you. You aren’t that way.”
“But shouldn’t you question just a little the possibility that maybe you don’t know me?”
“I don’t understand what your point is, Paul. Are you an anti-Semite, or aren’t you?”
“The point is you’re not curious! You’re not showing any concern! What if I am an anti-Semite?”
“But you’ve said that you’re not.”
“I’m going to finish the sterilizing now,” she said. “If you wish to tell me that you’re an anti-Semite, I’ll be right here.”
“Prove I’m not!” I cried. “Have a look online and prove it!”
She left the room. That was all she and I said on the subject.
My last patient of the day was a marketing executive with three cavities in need of filling. I conveyed that information to him and then was called away momentarily. When I returned, the marketing executive said, “I don’t think I’m going to have them filled.”
His X-rays were still on-screen. He could see his cavities as well as anyone. I looked again at his chart. He was well insured. There was no financial reason not to have his cavities filled. And I took it on faith that oral upkeep was at least of some concern to him. Otherwise, he would not have made the appointment.
“Okay,” I said. “But I do strongly recommend having those cavities filled at some point. They’re just going to get worse over time.”
He nodded.
I said, “Is it the pain you’re worried about?”
He looked puzzled. “It’s not painful to have a cavity filled, is it?”
“No,” I said, “that’s why I ask. It’s not painful at all. We numb you.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “No, it’s not the pain.”
“So just out of curiosity,” I said, “if it’s not the pain, why not have them filled? They’re just going to get worse over time, and then you really will be in pain.”
“Because I feel fine right now,” he said. “I don’t feel like I have any cavities.”
“But you do have cavities,” I said. “I just showed you where your cavities are. Look, they’re right here.”
I started to show him a second time.
“You don’t have to show me again,” he said. “I saw them the first time. I believe you.”
“So if you believe me, and you see there’s a problem, why not get it fixed? You have three cavities.”
“Because I don’t feel like I have them.”
“You don’t feel like you have them?”
“I don’t feel like I have them,” he said.
I was growing a little frustrated.
“Okay,” I said, “but indulge me for a moment. Look here, at the screen. Do you see the areas in shadow? One, two, three. Three cavities.”
“According to your X-rays,” he said. “And that’s fine. But I’m just telling you how I feel.”
“How you feel?”
“Right now I just don’t feel like I have any cavities. I feel fine.”
“But cavities aren’t something you always feel. That’s why we take the X-rays. To show you what you can’t feel.”
“That might be your way,” he said, “and that’s fine, but it’s not my way.”
“Not your way?” I said. “They’re X-rays. They’re everyone’s way. They’re science’s way.”
“And that’s fine,” he said. “But my way is how I feel, and right now I feel fine.”
“Then why did you come in? If you feel so fine and you don’t care what the X-rays say, why come in?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re supposed to. Every six months, you’re supposed to see the dentist.”
Connie was standing in the doorway.
“Will you excuse me?” I asked the marketing executive.
I went straight over, never happier to see her. “That guy in there,” I whispered, “won’t take my advice and get his cavities filled, because he says he doesn’t feel like he has any. He says he feels fine, so why should he have them filled? I’m showing him his cavities on-screen, and he tells me that’s just my ‘way.’ X-rays are my ‘way,’ he says. Science is my ‘way.’ His way is to feel around with his tongue and everything feels fine so just ignore the X-rays and the expert opinion. And when I ask him why he came in if he feels so fine, he tells me it’s because he’s supposed to! Every six months, you’re supposed to see your dentist! Is this really how people think? Is this really how they get along? Is it that easy?”
“My uncle Stuart’s here to see you,” she said.
I was quiet. “Again?”
The waiting room was empty with the exception of Stuart and an Asian woman sitting next to him, sunglasses perched on her head. They stood, the sunglasses came down, and Stuart introduced her. Her name was Wendy Chu, and she worked for Pete Mercer.
“You know Pete Mercer?” I said to Stuart.
“Not me personally,” he said. “I only know Wendy.”
Wendy was so petite and youthful looking behind the sunglasses that she might have been struggling for straight As in the seventh grade. She handed me a business card. Reading it, I was reminded of what Mercer had said in passing about having hired a private detective. The card read “Chu Investigations.” I looked back at her. We’ve come a long way, baby, from fedoras and frosted-glass doors.
“And how do you know Wendy?” I asked Stuart.
Wendy answered for him. “Funny things happen when two people go looking for the same woman.”
“What woman?”
“Paul,” said Stuart, “we’re here to ask you a favor. Would you accompany us into Brooklyn when you’re finished for the night?”
“What for?”
“There’s someone Mercer would like you to meet,” said Wendy.
“Where is Mercer?” I asked.
“He’s no longer involved,” she said.
“Involved in what?”
She looked at me blankly behind her sunglasses.
“I still have a patient,” I said.
“We can wait,” she said, sitting down.
“What’s going on?” I asked Stuart.
“As a personal favor,” he said, “come with us to Brooklyn.”
I returned to my marketing executive, who was sitting in the chair, patiently waiting. I sat down chairside and gave him a long look before throwing up my hands. “What are you still doing here?”
He was perplexed. “You told me to wait,” he said.
“But why listen to me?”
“Because you’re my dentist.”
“So you’ll wait when I tell you to wait, but when I tell you to have your cavities filled, you refuse?”
“I told you, I don’t feel like I have cavities.”
“But you do!” I cried. “You do have cavities!”
“According to the X-rays.”
“Yes, precisely! According to the X-rays!”
“But not according to how I feel,” he said.
We took Wendy’s car into Brooklyn, to the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights. Hebrew dominated the storefronts and awnings. Identically dressed women walked the streets pushing prams (not strollers but those upright pram things with big metal wheels), men in black hats, black suits, and black beards stepped into and out of minivans while talking on cell phones, and innumerable children of all ages defied the austerity of their sidelocks and somber dress to play as children will on the stoops and street corners. The sun was setting and the streets were orderly. With the exception of the tinted windows passing by shuddering with bass, we might have been back in the seventeenth century.
On the way over, I learned that I would be meeting with Mirav Mendelsohn, the woman with whom Grant Arthur had once been in love. I didn’t understand why. I told Stuart that I already knew all about her. Mirav had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Los Angeles before she fell in love with Arthur. When her family found out she was seeing a Gentile, they expelled her from the community. They eventually sat shiva for her as though she were dead. Over time, Arthur made one discovery, and then another, and another and another about his ancestry, and about who he really was. He felt duty-bound to leave Mirav and the life they had made together in Los Angeles, to devote himself to the arduous task of re-establishing a community of diasporic Ulms.
“Sounds pretty,” said Wendy. “But maybe not the whole story.”
Stuart told me that Mirav abandoned Judaism, married a materials magnate, and was divorced after raising two children. Responding to an ever-growing urge, she changed her name back to Mendelsohn in 2007 and reentered the Orthodox community. She was now living at a Hasidic center and teaching traditional Jewish practices to female proselytes.
We arrived at a kind of campus or housing network, with synagogue, school, and dormitory, where those individuals committed to a new life as Orthodox Jews received instruction. Mirav was teaching a night class. The women concluded class by singing. We stood outside, waiting and listening. I will never forget that one unbroken song of shifting melody and tempo changes and the novices’ imperfect command of both, while one voice remained steady: a strong, joyous voice, a guiding and correcting voice, a voice glorying her Maker while leading those unsteady faltering voices, derailing and dying and devolving into laughter, to the ringing harmony of a pure instant or two. It was Mirav’s.
Once class was over, Wendy made introductions, and Mirav led us to a commons room. It smelled of old books and burnt coffee. The walls were adorned with a variety of Jewish folk art: playful illustrations of menorahs and dreidels, Hebrew letters trotting colorfully across Torah scrolls. There were bent figures at the Western Wall, roughly sketched; prayer shawls aswirl on magical gusts of wind; exultant feasts; dancing families. My favorite was an enormous paper cutout of Noah’s ark, laden with every animal, and a dragon, too, floating in what looked like a calm Caribbean Sea.
Mirav wore a silk head scarf patterned with paisley and a long black skirt. I found her to be open and forthright, speaking to us with earnest intent until she cast off that earnestness with an easy laugh. She gave me the impression of being a joyful person, not unaware of the shit and the misery and yet still joyful. I was always startled to encounter such people. I liked them instantly and all out of proportion to our acquaintanceship.
“Can I get anyone coffee?” she asked as we sat down.
We all declined.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with us,” Stuart said. “I know you’ve done this already for Mr. Mercer, but would you mind doing it one more time, for my sake and for Paul’s?”
“Sure,” she said. “That should be easy enough.”
And with that she took us back to 1979.
Her uncle owned a small grocery in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood not far from her parents’ house. She would walk there in the afternoons to get things for her mother. On her way home one day, Grant Arthur came up to her and offered to carry her bags. He was dressed in bell-bottom jeans and the kind of shirt that only John Travolta wore. He asked her if she was Jewish. She said she was. He asked what that life was like, where she went to church, and if she minded not celebrating Christmas. She told him that her father was the rabbi at Shalom B’nai Israel and that Christmas was something she had cared about only as a little girl. He wanted to know if the Jews really ate so differently from Christians. What exactly did Jews eat?
“At first,” Mirav told me, Uncle Stuart, and Wendy Chu in the commons room, “I thought he might be mocking me. But he wasn’t. That boy, he was so guileless. So eager. He was really just so innocent.”
The next time she went to her uncle’s grocery, he came up to her the minute she left the store. She suspected that he was watching her, but she never knew how or from where. He told her that he had found a rabbi, Rabbi Youklus of Anshe Emes, who had agreed to oversee his conversion to Judaism. Rabbi Youklus was going to teach him everything there was to know. He had already learned about Shabbat, which happened every Saturday. That was a big difference between Judaism and Christianity, he said. Christians always worshipped on Sunday and never had a big meal the night before, unless it was a dinner party or a fund-raiser. Rabbi Youklus had promised to invite him over for Shabbat. Did she know by heart the blessings made when the candles were lit? And all the other blessings and songs? He said he liked, as he put it, “all those rituals and prayers and things” Jewish people were always doing. He couldn’t wait to sit inside the rabbi’s house and see how it was all done. She liked listening to him. He animated her everyday world, and it made her feel special for the first time. She was seventeen.
“It never occurred to me to ask which came first,” she said, speaking directly to me, “his interest in Judaism or his interest in me. I’m not sure it matters, even now—if I ‘inspired’ him, or however you want to put it. Deranged him!” She laughed with a lot of spontaneous heart. She turned to Stuart. “Isn’t that what we do when we fall in love, derange each other?” He smiled at her as I had never seen him smile, as if he, too, knew what it meant to be deranged by love. “But no, I never thought that Judaism was just a convenience for him—‘a way in.’ Or the other way around: that I was a convenience for whatever he was ultimately seeking. I think he saw me and he liked me, but I also think that he was in that neighborhood, that specific neighborhood, for a reason. He wanted to be a Jew.”
“I already know all this,” I said. “He told me himself.”
Mirav looked from me to Stuart. “Should I continue?”
“Please,” he said.
On one such trip from the grocery to her house, they took a detour so that they could continue talking. He said he didn’t know how anybody could be Jewish because of everything you had to know. You had to know the Bible. You had to know the Talmud. You had to know the laws—so many laws. You had to know the history. You had to know how to say the blessings and the prayers. And if you really wanted to do things right, you had to know Hebrew. He had thought Hebrew was just an old language the Bible had been written in, but the rabbi told him that Hebrew was the language of Israel, the language of the Jews. And then there was Yiddish. He asked Mirav if she knew Yiddish. He asked her what the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew was.
“They’re just two different languages,” she said.
“Do you see what I mean? You have to know two different languages and study the Old Testament and know all the holidays and how they started and why they’re important—that’s a lot.”
“You don’t have to know Yiddish,” she said.
“That’s okay, I’m going to learn it.” He pointed to a bungalow on the corner. “I live there,” he said.
It sat up on a little slope of lawn. Azaleas bloomed below the front windows. Flagstones rose from gate to door flanked by rows of tulips. It was a grown-up’s house.
“With your parents?” she asked.
“No.”
“With anyone?”
“No,” he said. “Just me.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Nineteen,” he said.
It would take her three months to gain the courage to walk there on her own and ring the bell. By then there would be a mezuzah by the door. In the meantime, there were more walks from the grocery, more detours, longer detours, questioning looks from her mother when she finally made it home. She knew not to utter a word. This was not the kind of boy they had in mind for her. Her father was only going to approve of someone born south of West Hollywood or north of Wilshire or on a kibbutz in Kinneret. She confided in her cousins, whose lies and complicity helped her keep him a secret for longer than anyone would have imagined.
“We were a close-knit community,” she said. “You could say closed off, or even closed minded. And look where I am now!” she said, and she laughed at herself. “Right back in it!” She laughed again. “But it was different then. You have to remember the times. A generation of shtetl Jews was still alive. They didn’t mingle with too many John Travoltas. They had that ‘once-a-goy-always-a-goy’ mentality that we no longer have, even here in Crown Heights. They didn’t know what to make of converts.”
He began to call things by their proper names: not “church” but “temple,” not “Old Testament” but “Torah.” He changed out of his street clothes and bought a plain black suit. He stopped shaving. He wore a kippah, and later the tallit katan. After she graduated from high school, she worked for her uncle in the office of the grocery store, while he spent his days reading Torah and the commentary. He proved to be a quick study. One day he greeted her in Hebrew. He had changed rabbis—he was now studying with Rabbi Repulski of Temple Elohim, who was a better fit and who talked to him about Israel. He was fascinated with the country, wanted to visit, wanted to live there. He couldn’t comprehend how it had willed itself into being in such short order. But that’s what happens, he supposed, when you lose six million people in a holocaust.
“It’s like how you drive down the highway,” he said, “and you see this enormous thing tied down to a big rig, with the sign on back, you know, that says OVERSIZE LOAD, and it’s hard to believe, but as you get closer, you realize, that’s a house they have on that truck, an actual house, and they’re driving it down the highway! That’s Israel—the house they drove down the highway.”
“I haven’t seen one of those,” she said. She had never once, even in Los Angeles, been on a highway.
A few days later, after more study, he said to her, “But, Mirav, the Holocaust wasn’t the reason for the state of Israel. Israel got started a lot earlier than that. And not even as a religious movement. It was secular Jews, intellectuals, who saw the importance of it. They knew haskalah was a death sentence. Do you know about haskalah? It was guys like Moses Hess who started Israel—Hess and Pinsker and Herzl.”
She had heard of Herzl, but not the others. She had spent seventeen years under the tutelage of Osher Mendelsohn, but in a matter of a few short months, Grant Arthur knew more history than she did.
“The fact of the matter is,” she said to us thirty years later in the commons room, “the man was brilliant. I honestly think he was fluent in Hebrew in six months. I was simply amazed by that, and I remember saying so, and I remember his reply. He said, ‘If Ben-Yehuda can invent it in a year, I can learn it in six months.’ He had been to exactly one Shabbat dinner in that time.”
She couldn’t invite him over. She couldn’t introduce him to her parents. No matter how long he studied Torah or how well he mastered Hebrew, he would never be a Jew. The liberals, the congregations with mixed seating, they could convert him. But in the eyes of Osher Mendelsohn, the rabbi of Shalom B’nai Israel, a man of tradition, with a long memory of Europe’s madness, and born into that generation when the chasm between Jew and non-Jew had never been greater, Grant Arthur would never be a Jew, because he hadn’t been born a Jew.
One day Grant Arthur said to her, “I’m going to become a rabbi.”
By then she had entered the house. She had seen his bedroom (from the doorway only) and the mattress that lay on the floor. There was a white sheet thrown over it. That sheet was the only sheet, that mattress the only bed. He had a lawn chair in one room and a beanbag in the other, some mismatched dinnerware. The cabinets were bare, the closets were empty. She could manage to adjust only slowly to the evidence before her eyes that this was how a person her age might live. Without linens, without china, without furniture, without siblings, without a dozen cousins always in the kitchen. The curious maturity of his owning a home coupled with his complete ignorance of how to properly make one could bring tears to her eyes in an offhand moment. So it was left to her to smuggle in what little touches the house would acquire: lace curtains, a menorah for the mantel, a coverlet, a serving bowl, a pair of matching wineglasses. For her trouble he cried and kissed her. He had never been loved, he said, and she expected some addition or qualification, but that was it: he had never been loved. She cried and kissed him. Whenever she left him in that house, that set of rooms, in that hermitage of books, she took with her the rhythm of his breathing. It was the closest she had ever come physically to someone else; it felt as if he were breathing from within her.
It was the house with nothing inside until one day she walked in to find a painting on the wall mounted in an ornate frame. It was a Marc Chagall. There was a cow and a fiddle, goats’ heads, a dark blue sky, the moon and its halo, a knockabout set of curving, teetering, upsloping houses, a fallen chair, a curled-up woman on a cloud. She knew nothing about painters or their schools or styles, but she knew Marc Chagall. She knew him from her father. She also knew that Marc Chagalls lived on the walls of museums.
“What’s it doing here?” she asked.
“Do you like it?”
“Is it real?”
“Of course it’s real.”
“Where did you get it? What did it cost?”
“My grandmother bought it,” he said. “Well, my grandmother’s dead. But I used the money she left me. Do you think your father will like it?”
He had, said Mirav, trying to express the shock of walking in and seeing an original Chagall, about fifty dollars in furnishings scattered around that house and then a priceless work of art on the wall. She knew he was unusual; she hadn’t known he came from such crazy wealth. His father was a lawyer in Manhattan, and his mother was a socialite. He hadn’t spoken to either of them in over a year.
“He was very heavy into the history by then,” she said. “The shtetls, the Pale. Cossacks and Tartars. He was deeply affected by them in a way I found hard to understand. They filled him with revulsion, and with pity—and with something… I think the word might be romance. Not for Jewish persecution, I don’t mean to suggest he romanticized that. But he had a strange affinity for that time. I think the Chagall was his way of owning part of it.”
And of impressing her father. By then he had spoken to Rabbi Blomberg of Yad Avraham about going to seminary after his conversion. He was keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and following the 613 mitzvot maintained by traditional practicing Jews. He thought that his conversion and his course of study, his sympathies and his Chagall, would prove his devotion to the man he wanted for a father-in-law. He may not have been born a Jew, but even among the Orthodox, according to the law, a convert was an equal in the eyes of God.
“But it doesn’t matter what the law says,” Mirav told him, “or what’s right in the eyes of God. He’s not going to approve.”
They were sitting at the far corner of a dining room table that had been recently delivered, made of cherrywood and large enough to hold sixteen, upon which he had promptly rested not only the menorah but the dream of a thousand Sabbath dinners, with his bride beside him, and all his court.
“So to God, and the state of Israel, I qualify as a Jew, but to Rabbi Mendelsohn, father of Mirav, I was born a Gentile and a Gentile I will die? It doesn’t make any sense, Mirav. Does the man have no respect for Halakhah?”
“Halakhah! But you aren’t listening, Grant. It has nothing to do with the law. You want to marry his daughter. His daughter. My father will want that man to be born a Jew. And if you want the law to weigh in, I guarantee you he will quote the mitzvah that forbids intermarriage with a Gentile.”
“I’m no longer a Gentile,” he said.
“Until you go before the Beth Din,” she said, “you’re a Gentile.”
It had been almost a year, and while he was not yet a Jew, he had the beard of one greatly devout, covered his head everywhere he went, and had had himself circumcised. He spoke as if he had been one all his life, a life whose sole purpose was its devotion to Judaism.
“So it doesn’t matter,” he said to her calmly, “that I do this of my own free will, that I do it eagerly, that I do it lovingly, that I love nothing on earth as I do the Jews, that I am happier nowhere more than in shul, and that I came to Judaism because of its wisdom and beauty and swear to live by those things until my last day? And it doesn’t matter,” he continued, “that I want to bring more children into the world, more Jews, grandchildren for your father, who I will raise according to the custom and law of the Jews? I elect all of this, but you’re telling me in your father’s eyes it would be better for you to marry some Jew-by-the-numbers, so long as he was born a Jew?”
“Do you know the men he stands in front of during service?” she asked him. “Some of them just barely made it out of Europe before the Nazis marched in. One of them survived the camps. These are people who remember their villages being attacked just because they were Jews. My father came here from Kiev—”
“I know he came here from Kiev.”
“He saw things happen to his family—to his father, to his uncles. He was just a boy. You know the history, Grant, but they’ve lived it.”
“That shouldn’t disqualify me.”
“In the eyes of my father and the men of his congregation, it does.”
“And in your eyes?”
“In my eyes, no,” she said. “We’ll go to Israel. We’ll raise a family.”
“But lose the one you have?”
“What does it matter if we have our own?”
“No invitation to your house,” he said. “No Shabbat. No Seders. No holidays with your aunts and uncles. No place for me at Shalom B’nai Israel.”
“I know him,” she said. “He won’t allow it.”
“What’s it all been for, then,” he asked, “if we don’t have that?”
She wasn’t at all sure what he meant, and it confused her. Was he worried about her losing her family, or about it being lost, somehow, to him? But how could he lose something he never had? Aside from two complicit cousins, he’d never met any of them.
Then one afternoon Rabbi Mendelsohn appeared outside the house on the corner, rang the bell, and asked to see his daughter.
Despite the time they had had to prepare for the confrontation, neither of them was ready. Her father asked Mirav to introduce him to the young man who’d answered the door. Then he asked the young man if his parents were at home.
“My parents live in New York, sir,” he said.
“You live here alone?”
He nodded.
“Would you be kind enough to invite me in?”
“Of course.”
Osher Mendelsohn stood in the foyer and complimented the boy on the house. He gave no indication of what he thought of its spare interior or of the Chagall that hung conspicuously from the living room wall. They watched silently as he peered into the room with the fireplace, at the beanbag and the books on the floor.
“Do you mind if we sit down?” asked the rabbi.
“Only the two of us, sir? Or Mirav as well?”
“Would you care to join us, young lady?”
“If you want me to, Papa.”
“Yes,” he said. “I think you should.”
They had a seat at the new dining room table while Grant Arthur raced off to the kitchen. He wanted to offer the rabbi a variety of things to drink. If he knew anything as intimately as Mirav knew the traditional women’s prayer at candle lighting, it was how to host a party. That was his inheritance, the legacy given him by his parents. But there was only a little milk in the fridge. So he left the house through the back door and ran down to the grocery that belonged to the rabbi’s wife’s brother, where he bought three kinds of juice, two kinds of soda, and tea and coffee. But on his run home he found that the back gate had fallen shut, locking him out, and he had to enter through the front door, to the surprise of Mirav and her father, who were sitting in silence, waiting for him to return from the kitchen. He excused himself once more, unpacked the groceries, and returned to the doorway to ask what they would have to drink. Mirav wanted nothing, and her father asked only for a glass of water.
“I understand,” the rabbi began, after Grant Arthur had settled down at the head of the table he had purchased for his family, the rabbi to the right of him, Mirav to his left, “that you know Rabbi Youklus of Anshe Emes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rabbi Youklus tells me that you want to be a Jew.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“A very bright young man, says Rabbi Youklus. Maybe even a genius. He was very impressed by you.”
“I have devoted myself day and night to the study of Judaism, sir. I plan to continue to do so. I hope to live up to the Jewish scholars I admire the most. Rabbi Akiva, Spinoza.”
“A noble thing.”
“I’ve learned some Hebrew, and I study Torah at least six hours a day. And my favorite poet is Heinrich Heine. He wasn’t a good Jew, but he wrote lovely verses.”
“I also understand,” said the rabbi, “that you have legally changed your name, is that correct? I believe Rabbi Blomberg of Yad Avraham told me that.”
“I’m in the process of doing so right now, Rabbi Mendelsohn.”
“And who are you studying with now?”
“Rabbi Rotblatt, sir. Of Temple Israel.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right. Rabbi Rotblatt, who tells me that you wish to go to seminary after your conversion is complete.”
“Yes, sir, I do. I hope to be a rabbi,” he said, “like yourself.”
“A noble thing,” repeated the rabbi. He took a sip of his water and placed the glass back on the table. “This is a very nice table,” he said, pausing a moment to admire it.
“Thank you, sir.”
“And the painting on your wall, that is a fine reproduction.”
“Oh, that isn’t a reproduction, sir.”
The rabbi lingered on it before withdrawing his eyes.
“Do you wish to marry my daughter?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“I wonder,” he said, “if you would mind me asking you a question or two about your studies—not to interrogate you, I hope you understand. We are in your house, and I have no wish to be rude to you in your own home. I only want to know a little of what you know, considering that you would like to join my family.”
“You may ask me anything,” he said.
“Do you know what a Seder is?”
“The Seder is the major ritual of Pesah, or Passover, when we commemorate the Exodus from Egypt and mark the start of the covenant between God and the Jewish people.”
“Have you been to a Seder?”
“I should also add that the word ‘Seder’ means ‘order,’ and this order, or ritual, is to be found in the Haggadah, or ‘telling.’ I have only been to one Seder, sir, at the invitation of Rabbi Greenberg, and it was a transformative experience.”
“Rabbi Greenberg?”
“Of Temple Sinai, in Long Beach.”
“Rabbi Greenberg I don’t know,” said the rabbi.
“He was kind enough to invite me to my first Seder,” he said. “I wish I could convey to you even a portion of what it meant to me.”
“And may I ask you about the holiday of Shavuot, and what, if anything, it means to you?”
“Shavuot marks the end of the Counting of Omer, which begins at the end of Passover and lasts for seven weeks. It commemorates the Revelation at Sinai, when God bestowed the miracle of the Torah upon the Jewish people and marked them forever as His Chosen Ones. I participated in an overnight study session during Shavuot this year. It was meant to demonstrate our love and embrace of Torah, and was one of the most moving experiences of my life.”
“Was that also with Rabbi Greenberg?”
“No, sir,” he said. “That was with Rabbi Maddox.”
“You have come to know quite a few rabbis,” said the rabbi.
“Yes, sir, I have.”
Rabbi Mendelsohn sat back in his chair. “I wonder if I can ask you just one more question.”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
“Do you believe in God?”
Never would it have occurred to Mirav to ask him that. He had transformed himself into a Jew. What for, if not God?
“No, sir, I do not,” he said.
“You don’t?” she said.
“You are an atheist,” said the rabbi, “is that correct?”
“Is that what Rabbi Youklus told you?”
“Youklus,” he said, “Blomberg, Rotblatt, Maddox, Repulski. None of them could recommend you to a Beth Din because you do not believe in God. If you did, you would be a Jew by now, and on your way to seminary.”
He was quiet. Through the long silence they stared at each other.
“How can you believe in God, sir,” he asked the rabbi, “knowing the history of your people as you do?”
“The history of my people is their struggle to keep God’s covenant,” said the rabbi. “Without Him, we are nothing.”
“God is what got you into this mess.”
“God is my every breath,” the older man said, losing the poise he had maintained throughout the conversation until, as Mirav put it thirty years later, Grant Arthur presumed to inform him that he was in a mess of some kind, and on account of God. He failed to collect himself. “You have no business in a synagogue,” the rabbi said, rising from the table, “and you make a mockery of the Torah.”
“I’m not the only nonbelieving Jew,” he said.
“You are no Jew at all,” said her father, “and never will be.”
Rabbi Mendelsohn turned and told his daughter that if she was not home within the hour, she would not be welcome in his house again.
“It was my first experience with someone who denied the existence of God,” she continued in the commons room, thirty years later, “and he had done so in the presence of my father. That was much more shocking—more violent—than if he’d reared back and punched the man. And I felt as you might expect me to feel if my father had come over to call me a slut and a whore—but worse. Much dirtier. Strange, isn’t it? I was deeply ashamed and scandalized and yet in love and hurt in some way, betrayed, and so I was very confused.”
“Did you go home that night?” asked Stuart.
“I did,” she said. “I looked at him differently when he admitted that he didn’t believe. There was an immediate estrangement. I’ve been married and divorced—I know from estrangement!” she said, laughing. “But with marriage, it takes time. With Grant it was instant. In my world, God was a fact of life, plain and simple. How could you be a good person and not believe in God?”
But the next day on lunch break, she found herself against all better judgment following her confusion back to its source. He answered the door in skullcap and beard—a Jew like any other but stripped now of some essential core, so that he looked costumed, a parody. She saw the clownish impiety her father must have seen when he stood where she was standing just the day before. Why was he wearing those clothes?
“Please come inside,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Please,” he said. “Last night was the worst night of my life.”
“Why are you dressed like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a Jew.”
“Mirav, please,” and he opened the door wide.
She felt like Jezebel entering the house of Satan, bound to be torn to pieces by dogs until only her hands and feet remained.
“I want to know why,” she said. “Why you pretend.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing, pretending?”
“Devotion.”
“Devotion?” she said. “To what?”
“To you,” he said. “To your father. To the Jews.”
“But the Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to God.”
“The Jews are the Jews because they are devoted to the Jews,” he said.
“I think you’re confused,” she said.
“Mirav, do you have any idea how much more is required of me to be a Jew, how much more is demanded of me than of your father? How much more I must sacrifice—”
Instinct took over, and she pushed him. He fell back but steadied himself.
“He has Kiev,” he said, “and the birthright, and the upbringing.”
“And you have a Marc Chagall on your wall! You can have everything you want!”
“Not everything,” he said.
The first incident took place a few nights later, when he stood on the Mendelsohns’ front lawn and called out to the rabbi. “Rabbi Mendelsohn,” he said, “Rabbi Mendelsohn. Do I not follow the commandments as God demands? Do I not tithe? Do I not fast? Do I not celebrate the Revelation at Sinai? Have I not had myself circumcised for you? Learned Hebrew for you? Changed my name? Let my hair grow? Whether He is or is not, do I not make a good and righteous person in the eyes of God? Look out your window and tell me what you see. What of me is not a Jew?”
The rabbi called the police.
“Why do you deny me?” he continued. “What have I done? Do you love Judaism and want to protect it? You should be a Christian! Stand out here, Rabbi Mendelsohn, with me, with the Christian, and look in at the Jews. At the candles that light up the faces of your loved ones. At the verses that bind you together. At the fellowship that makes you Jews. Then you would love Judaism!”
Siren lights flickered down the street. He didn’t run. The police gave him a stern warning and told him not to return.
“Why do you study the Torah?” she asked. “Isn’t it just a waste of your time?”
“Do you think that without God, the Torah is without beauty? Do you think it’s without wisdom?”
“But God is everywhere in the Torah.”
“The goodness of the Jews is everywhere,” he said. “Their temptations, their folly, their humanity. Their intelligence, their compassion. Their struggle. Their charity. You don’t need God for those things.”
“But God is what inspires them.”
“The greatness of the Jews is what inspires them,” he said. “God only inspires fear.”
The next time he stood on the lawn, he asked Rabbi Mendelsohn to please forgive him for any rudeness. “But where is He now?” he asked, and his voice came clearly through the open windows. “Let Him strike me dead if my actions displease Him. If I am not a Jew, let Him strike me dead.” He paused. “Now why has He not struck me dead? Does it mean that I am a Jew? Or is He simply not there? Or is He standing by yet again while the Jews suffer another insult at the hands of a Gentile? How many insults do you endure before you turn your back on Him, Rabbi Mendelsohn? William of Norwich wasn’t enough? The Inquisition—that wasn’t enough? The pogroms, the gas chambers? Let Him strike me dead, Rabbi, if I do not hate the anti-Semite as much as you. Let Him strike me dead if I do not love you like a brother. Can’t you see why I love you, Rabbi? Or are you blind to it because you were born to it?”
This time he was gone when the police arrived. They told the rabbi they would go to the man’s house and have a talk with him. But if the rabbi really wanted to keep him away, they suggested he find a lawyer and seek a protective order.
“All your life you’ve been told to believe,” he said to her. “Your father’s a rabbi, a pious man. You go to services. You are given little lessons. You’re taught to fear Him, to love Him, to respect Him, to obey Him. It doesn’t surprise me that you look at me like a stranger, like you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You come five minutes, ten minutes at most.”
“But I do come.”
“You won’t kiss me.”
“I can’t kiss you because I don’t understand you,” she said.
“It’s simple,” he said. “God is a relic you don’t need.”
“You say that. What does it mean?”
“Why do you need God when you have Judaism? Why mar something so beautiful?”
“There would be no Judaism without Him!”
“Do you know the true meaning of the blowing of the shofar?” he asked her.
She hated his arcane questions.
“Of course,” she said. “It announces the start of holidays, and… it awakens the soul—”
“No,” he said. “You are in Los Angeles in the twentieth century. Blowing the shofar in Los Angeles in the twentieth century has the same meaning as blowing the shofar in Gezer and Dibon in the First Temple period. That’s the true meaning of the shofar: to connect the Jews of Los Angeles to the Jews of Gezer whenever it is blown. It is about the people, not God.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not correct.”
“Why did you keep going back to him?” Stuart asked her in the commons room.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I was compelled to, I was drawn to him. I was still in love. He’d lied to me, or misled me, if you want to be kind, and I wanted answers. I was a little scared of him, but I liked listening to him, listening to him thrilled me. And now that he was free to be honest, he had a lot more to say. I was young; I was naïve. I was shocked by most of the things he said, and I was made to think. Was it necessary that the person I loved believe? Why? Because I believed? Did I believe? What did I believe? Or was it enough that he be a Jew? Was he a Jew? He was different, I’ll tell you that. And determined. And he wanted me. I was seduced. I was very sheltered, and I discovered I liked people who acted freely. Why did I go back to him?” she said. “Because he knew how to make me.”
She still worked in the office of her uncle’s grocery. One day her father entered the office, and the two cousins who worked alongside her stood up from their desks in silence and left the room. Then her uncle stood and left, too. Her father sat down on a chair halfway across the room. He looked at her a long time. When he spoke, it was only loud enough to convey the words across the distance.
“You hear from his own mouth that he doesn’t believe, and still you see him?” He paused, and the room was silent. “He comes to our house, he disrupts our peace, he makes a spectacle of us, he menaces us like we live in the ghetto a hundred years ago, and still you choose to disgrace yourself and your family?”
“You give yourself to a man before you’re married.”
“No, Papa, we never—”
“You give yourself to this profane man who’s not your husband,” he said, “and still you see him when you know who he is and what he believes? Tell me who he is, this man, if not Satan dressed up as a Jew?”
“He’s confused, Papa. And I think he’s lost.”
“He’s a fraud, Mirav. And you should have the sense to see it.” He stood. “You will make your choice,” he said. “The fraud, or your family.” And with that he left the room. A few minutes later everyone was back to typing.
His third and final visit took place on a Friday night after services, just before the Shabbat meal. The Mendelsohn family was sitting down when Grant Arthur’s voice entered the house. “I want to be included,” he cried. “I want to be God’s chosen. I want to break bread with the Mendelsohns. Welcome me into your home, Rabbi. Give me your traditions, I will carry them forward. Give me your riches, I will safeguard them all my days. You Jews!” he cried. “How lucky God has made you! With your wives and your daughters and your fathers and sons! How blessed you are with life!” Rabbi Mendelsohn was calling the police while the others looked out the window at the figure on the lawn. Mirav saw that he had brought the Chagall. “Let me buy the challah! Let me join the minyan! Let me read from the scroll! Let me in! Will you keep me out because of an accident of birth? When so many others have used that same excuse to oppress and murder you? It was an accident of birth! It was not my fault! I love the Jews!” He continued to implore them until the police arrived. He held up the Chagall and said, “I bought this for you, Rabbi Mendelsohn,” and then he leaned it carefully against a tree. “I believe I saw you admiring it.” The cops stepped out and cuffed him. He had violated the protective order he had been served two days earlier.
Mirav Mendelsohn lived with Grant Arthur in the house on the corner during the five months of his probation. She ran the errands and bought the groceries. She furnished the house with the necessary things. On Fridays they went to services, for which he had special dispensation from the judge, at a synagogue in the Valley, and then they came home, blessed each other, and celebrated the Sabbath with a meal, after which they sang traditional songs out of the siddur.
But it was never easy, Mirav told us in the commons room, and it was doomed from the start.
By logic, persuasion, and force of character, he made her question her belief in God. With argument, appeals to common sense, and intellectual bullying, he showed her how brittle her faith was. With evidence drawn from history, he revealed her faith’s foolishness. Let us go atrocity by atrocity, he said to her. A critical mass of God’s absence accumulated. Bit by bit, he reversed almost twenty years of received wisdom.
Without God, she had even less reason to go home. When you wake, you don’t return to dreams and superstitions. You begin your adjustment, not without bitterness, to uncompromising truth, and bitterness turns to contempt.
“I treated them terribly,” Mirav said of her family thirty years later. “And I suppose they didn’t treat me all that well, either. But the way they treated me was customary, it was to be expected. That doesn’t excuse it, but it explains it. There was no earthly way to explain how I treated them.”
Her secularizing, when it came, was swift and brutal. It was only a matter of time before she took her education in skepticism to its logical conclusion, and started wondering why she should persist in wearing the clothes she had been made to wear since time immemorial, why she should cover her hair or attend services or bless the candles or sing the songs. These struck her suddenly as among a thousand empty gestures of increasing absurdity. He had only himself to blame as, one by one, she stopped doing the things that connected her to her past, finding in them no purpose and no reward. That hadn’t been a part of his agenda. She might refuse to dress appropriately or declare that she wouldn’t be joining him at synagogue or plan nothing to eat for the Sabbath meal, and he would say to her, “Why are you doing this to us?”
“What am I doing? I’m doing nothing.”
“But you have obligations.”
“To whom?”
“To me,” he said. “To the others.”
“What others? What others do you see around here?”
“You’re a Jew!” he cried. “You have obligations to the Jews!”
“What makes me a Jew?” she asked.
“You were born a Jew!”
“And now I’ve grown up,” she said. “So tell me, please: what makes me a Jew?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. If he’d come to Judaism as an atheist to seek fellowship among the Jews and found the rituals and customs he needed to order and enrich his desolate young life, she came to atheism to find nothing where once there had been everything, vertigo where there had once been structure, and freedom where there had once been rule. She knew why she was a Jew narrowly defined: she was born of a Jewish mother. But without God, what did Judaism have to do with her life?
If she no longer knew what made her a Jew, she knew even less what made him one. One day, after a year of living together, she looked over and saw him in kippah, prayer shawl, and phylacteries, reading Torah while tightly rocking. A common sight, a practice whose reasons were self-evident, programmatic, and beyond scrutiny, so unquestioned that she had never really seen it before. But now she could only gape in wonder. It was deeply strange: the nonbelieving non-Jew in the middle of a devout Jewish prayer.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice full of contempt.
“Praying,” came the reply.
“But why?”
He ignored her. She couldn’t interrogate his assumptions and motivations as he had so freely interrogated hers. He wouldn’t let her. But she knew he wasn’t Jewish. There was no word for what he was, unless that word was “Jewish-ish.” Everything before he became Jewish-ish—family neglect, loneliness, alienation—was off-limits. It had been discarded. He put on a skullcap and was born. Her father was right, she realized, even if they had arrived at the same conclusion from positions now diametrically opposed. He was a fraud.
“There was something desperately fraudulent about him,” she told us.
“Did Grant Arthur ever talk to you about a people in the Bible called the Amalekites?” asked Wendy.
“Yes.”
“And a people called the Ulms?”
“Yes. After his father died. He returned to New York, and when he came back, he was different. He stopped reading Torah and started spending time at the library. He was looking into his personal history, researching his family tree. He had discovered that he belonged to a people, some kind of lost history or something.”
It was the last straw. The only cousin still willing to speak to her found a way to loan her two hundred dollars. She boarded a bus and never saw him again. She arrived in New York in a pair of blue jeans and one of those honky-tonk shirts Debra Winger wore in Urban Cowboy, with buttons of fake pearl.
“Here’s a question I wanted to ask you this morning,” said Wendy, “when you were explaining all of this to Pete. Why did you return to Judaism?”
“Oh, Lord!” cried Mirav, and her laughter dispelled some of the tension in the room. “That’s such a long, dreary story. How can I sum it up for you without boring you to tears? Let’s see: husband, divorce, mistakes, regrets. Thirty years of spiritual emptiness.” She laughed. “I guess I just realized that he was right after all. Life is best when it’s lived as a Jew.”
“This thing you’re mixed up in,” Stuart began.
“I’m not mixed up in anything,” I said.
“Aren’t you?”
“Is it me you’re worried about? Have you gone to all this trouble just for me? Because I never got the impression that you liked me very much.”
“The truth has to start somewhere.”
“And what is the truth?”
“Haven’t you just heard it?”
“I heard the details of a love affair that I’d been made aware of already. You heard her—he was nineteen. A kid, just some lost kid.”
“Well, he’s not a kid anymore,” said Wendy. “And he’s certainly not lost.”
“Do you even know who you’re talking about?” I asked her. I turned to Stuart. “Do you?”
“He’s the mastermind,” said Wendy.
“The mastermind? He spends his time in libraries, in archives, assembling family trees,” I said. “Some mastermind.”
“He’s been told,” she said to Stuart. “That puts me right with Mercer. I’m done.” And with that, she left the room.
Stuart turned to Mirav. “Would you mind giving me a moment alone with Paul?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. She stepped out. I felt weird being alone with Stuart in the commons room of an Orthodox religious center in Crown Heights.
“It doesn’t bother you, the things you’ve just heard?”
“I keep telling you,” I said. “I’ve heard it already.”
“Everything? As she presented it?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Maybe not exactly as she presented it,” I said. “But there are always two sides to every story.”
“The truth isn’t simply ‘one side of the story,’ ” he said. “The truth isn’t a partisan choice.”
“And you have a monopoly on the truth? You know that you should side with her over the differences between their stories?”
“What are those differences?”
“He left her, for one. She didn’t leave him, he left her. And everything she just told us, that happened before his father died, before he confessed on his deathbed. Arthur was lost when he was in love with Mirav. It was only after they parted that he discovered the truth about himself.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“That’s what he has told me. He doesn’t keep Mirav a secret.”
He looked at me with what I felt keenly to be disappointment. “Believe what you want to believe,” he said. “But the suffering does not belong to them. It belongs to the Jews who experienced it. It belongs to the dead and nameless who have gone unrecorded in history and who the world has long forgotten. They can’t borrow that suffering and make what they want of it. They can’t adopt it and turn it into a farce.”
“I never wanted to disappoint you,” I said.
“Let’s be perfectly clear—this has nothing to do with you. This is much bigger than you. A man broke with reality. He took an old legend from the Bible and made a myth from it, and now he tells the myth like it’s truth. This is how it happens.”
I arrived home that night during the fifth inning. I ordered takeout, poured a drink, and waited for the game to end so that I could rewind the tape and start from the beginning. I called Mercer, not for the first time that day. There was again no answer.
After the game I took the bottle onto the balcony. I had a seat on a canvas chair and looked out on the Brooklyn Promenade. There’s almost nothing better than the Promenade and its walkers, benchwarmers, and late-night lovemakers to further estrange you from a Friday night. I poured a drink and toasted them. I toasted the whole city. “Here’s to your picnics and suntans,” I said. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, that luminous glow just across the river. People were still hard at work. “Here’s to your war rooms and coronaries,” I toasted the people inside that honeycomb of industry. “Here’s to your dress socks and divorce papers.” I had a toast for practically everyone that night. “To you, young couple overlooking the river,” I said, “here’s to your frittatas and sex tapes.” “To you, picture taker with the endless flash,” I said, “here’s to your personal-brand maintenance with every uploaded image.” “To you, beautiful youth, wasting your life behind your me-machine,” I said, “here’s to your echo chamber and reflecting pool.” I toasted them all. I drank and toasted. “To you, Yankees fan with the Jeter shirt,” I said, “here’s to your aftershaves and rape acquittals.” I poured and I drank. “To you, corporate citizen, failing to bag up your Pomeranian’s warm shit,” I said, “and to all your fellow derivatives traders and quant douche bags: here’s to your anonymous faces and unlisted numbers,” I said. “Here’s to your sinking of America, you scumbags. May you end up in cold cells where rats go to die.” “Here’s to you, Mrs. Convoy,” I said, “here’s to your catechisms and your turtlenecks.” “Here’s to you, Abby. Thanks for the notice. Good luck on your new opportunities.” “And here’s to you, Connie. Here’s to your poet, your Ben, and all your future smiling babies of life.” I didn’t toast Uncle Stuart. I tried not to think of him, or of Mirav or Grant Arthur. I was drinking, and toasting, to forget. I continued in this vein until I had only enough toast left for one last drink. “And to you,” I said, “asshole on the balcony, here’s to your curried flatulence and your valid fears of autoerotic asphyxiation. Here’s to your longing, your longing for the company of others, and all your bighearted efforts to secure it. Cheers,” I said. I toasted myself and drank. I must have been saying much of this aloud, as a neighbor of mine, standing on her balcony, was peering over at me. I toasted her. She went inside. I was done with the bottle, I was done toasting and drinking. For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings—the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline—and I thought, Why couldn’t those cunts have flown into that building? Then I passed out, and when I woke, there was nobody, I mean absolutely nobody, out on the Promenade. I searched and searched, I waited and waited. Surely someone would walk by any minute now. But no one did.
What terrifying hour was this, and why was I made to wake to it? Where were they, the strangers I had just been toasting? Never before had the Promenade emptied out so entirely, so finally, and instead of the familiar, noisy, peopled landmark of one of the biggest cities on earth, where you are promised never to be alone, it seemed now like a colony on the moon floating in an eternal night, with me as its only inhabitant. All of this hit me literally within the first second or two of waking up, and that moment was unbearable. I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. The solution at desperate moments like this was always to find something to do, and I mean anything, as quickly as possible. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose. Maybe Connie had called or texted or emailed, or Mercer, or… but no. No one had called or emailed or texted. I would do practically anything, I thought, to have them back—I mean the strollers and lovers of a few hours earlier, so that I might have another chance to stroll alongside them, to look out in wonder at the skyline, to lick carefully at the edges of my ice cream, and, after a while, to leave the Promenade, off to bed for a good night’s sleep—or to that one vital thing among the city’s offerings that night, that one unmissable thing that makes staying up all night a treasure and not a terror—and then to rise again at a decent hour, to walk the Promenade in the light of a new morning, eating a little pastry for breakfast and having coffee on one of the benches while looking out at the brightened waters. Oh, come back, you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts. The day is hard enough. Don’t leave me alone with the night. Finally I was able to move. I sat up in the chair and listened. There was the hum of the river, and the island across the river, and the last desultory traffic of the night washing by on the expressway below. I can only suggest the effect it had on me, that is, the feeling that my life, and the city’s, and the world’s every carefree, winsome hour, were perfectly without meaning.