A Town of Empty Rooms (41 page)

There were twelve of them total, including the six who had come to run the service. They all sat together in the first two rows. It was eight o'clock.

The pulpit was empty. It was as though all of this — the meetings, the emails, the debates — had all been meant to keep this moment at bay, and no one had wanted to see this, the simple wooden podium, the sight of the microphone stretching up into air.

No one moved.

There was a rustling; Betty stood up. She walked silently to the bima. She lit a match and touched it to the tops of the two slender white candles. The flames took and flickered; they stretched upward like white taffy. They burned, a clear white shuddering in the dim sanctuary.

The six went through the service, each of them with their tasks. Serena tried to sense how the congregants who had come were viewing the enterprise, if they thought this was a serviceable Shabbat or not. But there was no protest, there was merely a quiet as they went through the prayers, the sense they were all part of some machinery, the pure engine that was the Shabbat service. It was designed, she thought, to keep them moving. She was aware of the sharp physical presence of the
other members, all of them packed together, the heat of their bodies; Betty's sage-scented hair conditioner and the wintergreen Tums that Tom held in his mouth and the glimmering of Henriette's silvery hose and the way that Florence mispronounced “ha-olam” as “o'halam,” and the way that Tiffany held herself especially straight when reading the Hebrew and the way that Marty coughed wetly before he started a prayer. She did not want to be fooled by their similarity to her, in muttering through these prayers, and she wondered why she was murmuring the prayers at all; it was the way any family fooled you, father, mother, sister, husband, child, that they were like you simply because they lived with you, because you woke up with them and ate food off the same plates and kissed them goodbye, and because you had all pledged, somehow, by virtue of blood or choice, that you would care for each other, that you owned each other in some damp and precious way. It was the same trick. But she stood by Betty and Henriette and Tiffany and Norman and Marty and Tom and the rest, all of them left here, in this dim room, to their lives, and she was glad for their presence.

It was 8:25 PM, time for the sermon. Betty went to the podium. “Tonight, instead of a sermon, we're all going to share something now,” she said. “ Something we want to offer to the rest of us. It's open. Something important to you.” Betty paused. “Or whatever you want to say.”

Lillian was first. She came up and gripped the sides of the lectern tightly. Then she put on her glasses and peered over the top rims. “Thank you for having me,” she said. “I know the last story I shared was a sad one.” She looked down for a moment. “Now I would like to share a different sort of story. About my mother,” she said. “My greatest influence. Little Rosie from Hester Street. Endured terrible poverty growing up. Her mother had made hats for the czar and died when she was ten. She had the biggest heart. Would invite anyone, Jew or Gentile, in for Shabbat. Made mitzvah balls as big as bowling balls, light as air.” Laughter. “I kid you not. I wish she were here today.” Lillian's face blanched for a moment. “But the story I want to tell you is about when she let me skip Rosh Hashanah dinner. I was part of the chorus at my high school. We had a performance that night. We were living in New Hampshire at the time, and the nearest temple was two hours away.
We had to go to services the whole day and have a big dinner after, and I asked her if we could skip dinner so I could perform my solo. She said, ‘Ask the rabbi.' He was not the friendliest man, so I said no. I said, ‘Mom, this is my gift. Please. How will they do this without me?' It pained her, I know, but she said yes. We drove back at probably eighty miles an hour. I rushed in. My mother put her best shawl on my shoulders. It was going to get wet. ‘Do a great job,' she said. I got up there, sang, and it was one of the best Rosh Hashanahs of my life. Thanks to my mom.”

The members were not sure what to do; they all clapped.

Lillian returned to her seat, and Betty walked up to the podium. “My story has to do with my brother,” she said. “Many of you don't even know I have a brother. I did. He was three years older than me. He got polio when I was fourteen. He was a beautiful artist. Watercolors. He loved Sargent. My mother would get him dot-to-dot painting sets, and he would make them look like the real thing. You could have put them in a museum. He kept painting when he was sick, until he couldn't. After my brother died, my parents stopped going to Temple. They just stopped. We celebrated nothing. Not Chanukah, not Christmas, nothing. This was in the South in the 1950s. For three years, I wasn't Jewish, Christian, anything. Then one day, my father found another painting my brother had done. My mother was cleaning out his closet. It took her three years to get to this job. His room had been shut all that time. She found this.” She held up a watercolor picture. “We all thought he had painted a picture of our town.” Betty paused; her voice was quiet. “It was the last view we had of his world. Dated two months before he died.”

She held up the photo of the painting. It was a perfectly ordinary watercolor. A sunset cast a gold light over the entire town.

“Thank you,” said Betty. “I will pass this around for all of you to look at.”

Norman was next; he came up to the podium and looked out with great solemnity and delight. “I am glad to welcome all of you to these services,” he said. “I would like to remind you of the other battles that have been fought. In 1972, the Finance Committee fought the Beautification Committee when they wanted funds to commission the new
covers for the Torahs. I was, I will admit, on the side of the Finance Committee, because a pressing need was the care and repair of the basement after a hurricane, and the fear of killer mold, but the Torah beautifiers won, and we put off the basement repair for another year. And here are the Torah covers, still in service. Then in 1979, the Membership Committee had a question about admitting non-Jewish spouses who had not converted. Should we only admit the Jewish spouse to the Temple? Needless to say, this caused quite a ruckus. I took the side against the Membership Committee and with an open heart wanted to admit all members and spouses,
as long as
they vowed to support and fund their children's Jewish education. I'm happy to report that we agreed to admit the non-Jewish spouses, and that we welcome all supporters of the Jewish faith to our doors.” His face was a little ashen; he clung to the podium. “I have been here thirty-seven years,” said Norman. “I just want to say that battles are fought and then they are done.”

He had just heard from the doctor. He would have six months of chemo. He looked out at the members, and he wanted them to know what he had done.

They each went up to the podium. Seymour Carmel ascended the stairs slowly, carrying a large box. He brought out a plastic tray and tilted it toward them; it was filled with compartments, each containing a single, suspended coin. “I would like to show you all my collection of Israeli coins. I collected these with my father. He was a hero in World War Two. He was one of the liberators in Buchenwald. He was gone two years when I was a boy. I watched the newsreels in the Brooklyn movie theaters and tried to see him in them, but I never did. Then he went to Israel and got their first coin and brought it to me. It was the first time I met him. I was eight years old. ‘Here you go, bucko,' he said. ‘Freedom. If the U.S. of A. tries to kick us out, this is where we will always be able to go.' Two months later, he left my mother. He moved from Brooklyn to Morristown, New Jersey, with a waitress he met when he was having lunch at a diner, and he divorced my mother, and that was that. My mother pretended he was dead. She said the Kaddish for him each Friday night. She went to work teaching kindergarten, and woe to those students, let me tell you.” Seymour
stopped for a moment and closed his eyes. Then he opened them, his hand on the box of coins. “It was hard to pretend he was dead when he sent money, which he did. Each month. He sent me coins. Sometimes, once a month, he met me in a baseball field and threw some balls with me and gave me these coins. He was not dead. He was alive. He lived somewhere else. I looked forward to those days he would come see me. I waited for them. I didn't really care about the coins. He died when I was in college, and then I started collecting more of these coins. Did you know that I have the most complete collection of Israeli coins in the United States?” His voice cracked slightly. Seymour walked slowly around the congregants, holding out the plastic box. The coins were suspended in plastic boxes, floating in the small squares of air.

Tiffany unfolded a portable plastic dance floor and set it on the bima. “I want to share what got me through my childhood,” she said. She tapped a beat on the floor; a clacking sound rang through the synagogue. “I was the champion tap dancer of Elizabeth, New Jersey,” she said. She rubbed her leg. “A little rusty now. But when I was good, I was really good. I was in the background of
Cabaret.
The movie. You can see me in one of the frames. I tap-danced because I wanted to do something loud. My house was quiet. It was always quiet. My mother didn't want to get out of her room. I was always in the kitchen, practicing. I could copy ‘Singing in the Rain' at age eight.” She stood, beaming at the group, tapping a refrain from “Singing in the Rain” onto the plastic square; the sound of the heels rattled through the high ceiling of the synagogue. When she finished, she bowed deeply.

Serena wanted the others to go on and on. She leaned forward, clutching her arms, the inside of her throat hot; she thought she could see inside them, briefly. She wanted to see inside everyone in the world. What they were telling her was so slight, a small sliver of their lives, but she sat, rapt, listening to all of it.

She remembered how it felt to sit beside her father in the garage and look at the trains. She remembered the way the sunlight fell, pale, unearthly, through a crack in the roof, gilding the faded green Astroturf on the train table. She remembered sitting beside him while he stared at the trains. He sat regarding the table, the particular arrangement
he had set up there that day. She was going to help him. She waited for him to ask her what she thought, for she always had ideas. The table gleamed with its tracks and towns, but really she was trying to absorb every element of him — the way he leaned toward the table, thinking, the grayish grizzle on his cheek, the way he tapped his fingers together, the way he picked up a bridge and put it down. She sat, primly, beside him, but what was inside her was wild; she did not know what to do with her love for him. That was the final allegation, the first one, truly, in everyone's lives: the fact that you sat beside your father and loved him so deeply and wildly you felt your arms, your body, become light, and you wanted to pass into him, under his skin, or you wanted him to become you — but he sat there, looking at his trains, and you knew he would die someday and leave you here, on this earth, without him. And here you were, saddled with this feeling. You held a love so deep it shamed you. You knew this: A parent put you on earth to someday leave you, that you and your father, your mother and sister and husband and children, inhabited the same island of time so briefly on earth. You knew this, and you sat there, wanting to be superior to this fact, to stop time, to keep the two of you together, in this quiet room, but your father seemed to know nothing of this, casually moving a few Styrofoam rocks, or worse, did not seem to care, and even had the gall to ask, seriously, “Do you think all the rocks look fake?” You wanted to tell him the right thing. Yes, the rocks looked fake. The entire train setup looked fake. That 's why you liked to look at the miniature houses and trees and the tiny, almost imperceptible people, the misperception that you were superior to it all, merely because you were bigger and alive, breathing. He did not know that you were already trying to figure out how to keep him from dying, to break into his body, his thoughts, like a thief, to do everything — to fix his sadness that happened before you were born that you were supposed to be the solution to, somehow. You were supposed to be the solution with your office and your title and all the money you were supposed to make. But you were not. You just watched him pick up the rocks and move them around as you sat beside him in that musty garage, and you tried to match your breath with his.

You sat beside your father, separate, unable to save him, and you
sat beside Dan and Zeb and Rachel, and you sat beside your mother and Dawn and the rabbi and Forrest and Betty and Norman, and it was this, the fact that a person sat beside you, that you did not know all of his thoughts, that they were not all ones that you wanted to know, that they could be ones that you hated, that made it impossible to talk to Forrest, that it made it impossible for the rabbi to know how to speak. It was the great curse on all of us, the fact that we did not know each other's thoughts. It was the way everyone knew nothing about anyone else.

But it also enabled love. It was this, the fact that another person lived in a different space and time than you — that no one was you — that created this purpose; it made it possible to love someone else. You were not your father. You were not him, and you were not your mother or sister or husband or child or anyone else, and that was the great loneliness that divided everyone, but it was also the great purpose, for the drive to be close to him, to know him, to possess him but briefly would be the engine that drove you to him and to everyone you loved. It was the invisible route you each traveled, day by day, and it was what made you sit beside your father while he stared at his train table, what made you stand outside of the school, waiting for your children to run out so you could gather them in your arms, what made you lean toward your husband's lips in the middle of the night, to kiss him and to hear him whisper something he wanted only to share with you. There were so many small, mysterious ways to try to break through yourself, to try to know and love another. It was perhaps why everyone gathered at this Temple, or a church, or any place that tried to be holy — perhaps they were all simply praying to know another person, to take a step from the empty room that contained their own roaring, to step out of their own room for the rare privilege of meeting someone else.