A Town of Empty Rooms (17 page)

Serena stared at the words. She thought, suddenly, that the allegations were about her, that the rabbi had been caught calling her, late at night, but then she realized, of course, that she had been calling him. She sat very straight, hands clasped politely in front of her, and glanced around the table, imagining they all could see through to her pacing at night, her strange, frantic dialing, her need to hear his voice. She had stalked him; that was what they would tell her, and this time there would be no lawyers. But then she understood that no one at this table could see this, and that the allegations had landed on him.

“A Zip file will be sent to all of you,” said Betty, solemnly. “In the coming week. We will address all issues, in full, at the next meeting.”

“Meeting adjourned,” said Tom. “Shalom!” He darted out.

The board members glanced at each other; the meeting had devolved into something unexpected, wholly new. Serena rushed out the door toward Tom, who was scuttling quickly down the dark street. “Tom!” she said. “What is going on?”

A pickup truck rumbled by, a heavy bass drumbeat shuddering through the air. “We will discuss everything at the meeting next week.”

He turned to walk away, and she stepped up to him. “Now, Tom.”

Tom looked at her, and she noticed a new expression in his eyes: fear. “People are bored,” he said. “Or perhaps they are frustrated by other world events, the situation in Israel. . . . Serena. What would compel a person to attack another good person for no logical reason? Perhaps the members of our congregation who dislike our great rabbi, my friend, secretly hate Jews. The blossoming of a Jewish institution.” He gestured toward the enormous buildings across the street, buildings with the size and heft of cruise ships. “Or think. What would the Baptists, or the Methodists, the Catholics, gain if we, the Jewish people, were at war with each other?”

“What are you saying?”

He leaned toward her. “Are we puppets of other people's hatred? Why is brother taking up arms against brother? We have to protect him,” he said, and lifted his fist. “Right?”

They were in the parking lot beside the Temple, standing in the
pools of the orange light from the lampposts. The orange light falling onto their faces made them look not human but alien. The smell of barbecue rolled off someone's yard, and Serena tasted ash in her mouth.

“Yes,” she said.

She got into the car and drove home. It wasn't late, but the road had already emptied, and no one was here; the street was hazy and radiant with the lights from the McDonald's, Bojangles', Hardee's, signs, a lonely nation under the night sky. There were signs from the restaurants and churches set out for the drivers to read:
BOGO Monster Bacon Cheeseburgers Today Only!; Call 986-3728 for Free Pool Installation Estimates; Five minutes after you die you'll know how you should have lived.

The paper announcing the allegations against the rabbi lay on the seat beside her. She touched it, as though somehow the thin physical fact of the paper would bring her closer to him.

Part Two

Chapter Ten

SERENA'S FATHER ALWAYS TRIED TO be home from the emergency room at Northridge General Hospital in time for dinner. He didn't always make it; the car crash, drug overdose, and bullet wound victims who flew through the electric doors of Northridge General tended to pile up late in the day, so her mother set the table at six, and by six thirty, Serena and her mother and sister would start. But a part of Serena would always be waiting for him, as she tried to plan what she would say to him at dinner that night.

Aaron had pleaded with his parents to leave Germany when he was six; they left just before his aunts and uncles were herded on trains and vanished. He had tumbled through his life in America wondering what had happened, why they had chosen that moment to listen, and what was the extent or limit of his own power. He had become a nurse in the emergency room to accommodate the constant thrumming of his own heart. Now, every day he rushed toward stretchers holding patients whose hearts had stopped, whose necks had broken, whose intestines had been stabbed, whose skin glistened with shards of glass; some recovered, many died. He could never get over the arbitrary nature of suffering in any form; it terrified him, and when he got home he wanted to shield his daughters from all of it.

He whisked in while they were in the middle of dinner, each night a little surprised that they were all merely sitting around the dinner table, healthy and alive. Serena and Dawn looked up at him and told him what they had done that day. “Quick,” he said, “what happened to my girls today? What did you win? Serena? Go on. Tell me.”

She did not always know what to say. Her father was a tall, restless man with gray curly hair and clear golden eyes that were set on her, piercingly, for that long moment. She could sense that he was a little
afraid of her, or of her future, and she wanted to tell him the thing that would calm him.

She had about a minute.

“I won my spelling test,” she might offer, ridiculously — it was not something anyone could win.

He blinked. “Excellent!” he said, too brightly. She released a breath.

“Dawn?” he said, and Dawn would present her offering to him. Their father sat, nodding too hard, as though he was not truly interested, or else he was so interested he was about to fall apart.

“Okay,” he said. “Great. Win. Keep going.”

Nothing kept him in his seat. He jumped out of his chair, added salt to his food, got up to pour the extra off, reheated it; his dinner was eaten mostly standing up. He was extremely deliberate about his food, could not get it to the right temperature. There was a kind of athleticism to the way he ate, as if he were engaged in a race that the others were not aware of. Their mother moved about him carefully; she had mastered a kind of wryness around him. Her job was to translate his actions to the rest of them.

“Aaron, sit down,” she said lightly. “The potatoes are better with butter. Don't scrape it off. Aaron, you already have a fork. Aaron, thanks for getting up to look for the salt — can you bring it?”

He tried to listen to their mother, sitting down briefly when she told him to, but he found an excuse to pop up, to roam the kitchen, searching for the ingredient that would render them impervious to suffering. Sometimes he told them about his own day.

“Guess what I did today?” he said. “I held my hand against someone's aorta. Stab wound. I felt his life there under my thumb. I held him alive while the useless doctor dropped the needle he was going to use to stitch him. I felt his pulse jump on my thumb. It was like a grasshopper. If I lifted my thumb, it would be a geyser.”

He smiled.

“You can all do that, too,” he said, and Serena wanted to believe that she could.

AFTER DINNER, HE WOULD SOMETIMES go into the garage to work on his train landscapes. Whoever had finished her homework, or presented a particularly memorable accomplishment that night, would be allowed to help.

Serena's father would go over his plans for his landscape. He wanted to make a landscape that other people would want to see and discuss. He told her about some of the nation's premier miniature landscapes: the Ave Maria Grotto in Alabama, located in an old quarry, a garden of miniature churches all over the world, landscaped, incredibly, into rock. There was Holy Land USA in Connecticut, built by a local attorney, showing a biblical Holy Land. There was a panorama of New York City made for the 1964 World's Fair in which 320 miles of New York were reproduced at a scale of 1 inch to 100 feet.

They stood over his large plywood table, the fields made of TruGreen vinyl mat, the foam inclines, the trees, the houses and stores and fire stations and office buildings, the tiny people, and the endless winding tracks.

“Where should my trains run?” he asked. “Tell me.”

He had written a letter to Harvey Smith, who had been featured in
Model Trains Monthly
and who had won numerous awards for constructing terraced landscapes with Windsor blocks and “reject sand,” unusable from construction sites. “I've used forty tons of reject sand on my landscapes,” Mr. Smith announced in the article about him; that fact itself impressed her father. Her father tracked down bags of reject sand and blocks, and he set up terraces. He wrote to Mr. Smith:
Why terraces? How did you decide that? Do you have many where you live? Do you have houses? What kind? How many trees? Is it a desert or a forest? Which is better?

Harvey wrote back, politely,
Dear Mr. Hirsch, I have terraces that measure twenty-five inches to thirty-six-and-a-half inches. Trees cover approximately 75 percent of this landscape. I have seventeen houses, three train stations, and seven other buildings. My landscape mimics the terrain of northern Italy.

Her father had kept Harvey's letter and taped it up in his garage. He had correspondence from other train aficionados: Barry Jones, who specialized in landscapes with tunnels; Quentin Avery, whose trains moved through “Nebraska in 1889.” They could relate the exact
number of accessories, the degree of angle to their inclines, the numbers of people, cars, road signs, and the bridges that went up and down. They had clear, specific goals.
I plan to create a multilayer train landscape through several Midwestern towns. I plan to re-create the Swiss Alps with silver glitter and snow made of glue.
Serena was annoyed by the letters, the crisp authority of the other model makers, who seemed to have clear and definite goals and no ambivalence about them. The letters intrigued and shamed her father, who lied when he wrote back to them,
I have added my fifty-seventh handmade tree to my landscape,
he wrote to Barry Jones.
I have re-created a Bavarian forest.
He would not send photos.

The garage had the glamour of a castle, that same dank, cool interior, the musty odor of damp concrete. He bought heavy books with photographs illustrating a particular place, spent hours researching, ordering parts, figuring how to make a particular forest look North American, European, Scandinavian.

Only while her father created the train landscapes did they share the rare moments when he slowed down and asked her what she thought. She stood by the table, telling him her ideas for his landscape, and he nodded, tapping his fingers against the table. She was triumphant in that small room, the light hazy, golden from the bright, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She loved him. She was aware of the restlessness she often felt in her family, the understanding that all children gain — that the world has been created without thought of them, and that they are left out of the grand world their parents create — but here, in here, she was in the center of the world. She watched him, whittling a tiny tree, adjusting the TruGreen. She might hold down the turf while the glue was drying, paint a tiny apartment building, place tiny people waiting for a bus.

“Serena. Tell me. What should I make?”

She looked up at him, leaning over his table, hands clasped. What did she know at six, seven, eight? At this train table, instructing him on the placement of the world, she had the solid, immutable sense that he knew she was good. She was aware in some way of the tragedy of the link between parent and child, the fact of their separateness — that he would die before she did, that by creating her, he and her mother guaranteed her a self that would someday be alone. She set her eyes on the
tracks, on the trees, trying to figure out what she could say that would make him happy she was there.

“Sacramento,” she suggested one day. “Where you grew up.” But that was really Berlin, which he refused to build. Los Angeles, where he had ended up. Their mother's hometown, Fresno. Las Vegas. Paris. China.

“Good plan,” he said, sometimes. “What should I put there?”

He was listening then. She picked out trees and buildings; they painted them.

 

 

 

THE PROBLEM WAS THAT HE never was able to finish anything. As the landscape gained shape, streets, and neighborhoods, as it began to resemble a place, her father became anxious. He stood in the garage, looking at his creation, and then he began to pace.

“Serena,” he said once, when he was abandoning a project on a San Francisco gold rush town in the 1800s, which involved multilevel bridges, rows of shanties, fake gold, special tracks, “I don't like it.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I can't get the right dirt. It should be more orange. I don't know how the streams fall. The rocks are not the right shape.”

The moment he became a perfectionist was when they stopped. She looked at the table, trying to see the flaws. He walked around the table and began to pluck pieces of the landscape, the trains, off it. She pressed her hands down on it, to protect it.