“But,” he had argued, “she is the daughter of Abraham Ha-Levi, Reb Yerachmiel’s granddaughter.”
“For all that, she is a rich American girl.”
The words weighed on him somewhat, but he would have to leave that in God’s hands. He was only the messenger. And truthfully, it was not the girl who worried him. Women were naturally pure souls, on so much higher a spiritual plane to begin with than men. That was why they needed fewer commandments to mold their character. They didn’t need to pray three times a day, or wear tefillin. Men were made of coarser matter that needed constant prodding, constant reminders that they were the possessor of a holy soul formed in the image of God.
No. What worried him was Isaac.
What kind of man asks nothing of the physical appearance of a future bride? Who asked only if she was pious and Godfearing? Could it be that such a young man could have reached such a high spiritual level that he was beyond such petty thoughts of outer beauty? It was awesome. And yet, a small doubt crept into Reb Avigdor’s heart. Awesome and completely against man’s nature. He had often had misgivings about this most brilliant of his students. A mind that was a gift from heaven. Such retention and clarity! Truly, a gift from God to this generation, to make up for the scholars wiped out in the Holocaust by the most bestial of men. But his heart? Where was his heart? Other students came to him confessing their desires for love, for intimacy, for wealth and power. But Isaac confessed only one thing, asked for guidance for only one thing: I have wasted time today instead of studying Torah. How might I spend more time studying Torah, increase my concentration, my insight and understanding? He was a pure flame of consciousness that seemed to live on the oxygen of scholarship. Almost incorporeal, so little did he allow his bodily desires. He took no vacations, no side trips to sightsee or bathe in the sea, as did the other students. But he was a constant presence, a fixture in the study hall.
His parents, seventh-generation Jerusalemites, were thrilled about the match, which had everything such parents dreamed of:
yichus
—the right family, and material wealth that would take the burden of years of support off their shoulders. They had three daughters and thus three sons-in-law they needed to support with down payments for apartments and food money.
Also, they had begun to worry about Isaac’s seeming lack of interest in a
shidduch
, a match. Once he had even broached the subject of being on such a high spiritual level he could not marry at all, making them both ill with worry. If he did not marry there would be no grandchildren, and no generous father-in-law.
So Reb Avigdor had kept his misgivings to himself, accepting the role of messenger from his friend and teacher, Reb Magnes. As it was written: Forty days before conception, a
bas kol
goes out from heaven that decrees, “This man is destined to marry this woman.” It was not for him to decide.
The week before Isaac Meyer Harshen’s arrival was spent in a frenzy of shopping. Batsheva and her mother took the limousine to Rodeo Drive and bought clothes, hats, and shoes. The storekeepers recognized the Ha-Levis and did not waste their time. They brought out only the most modest clothes: dresses with high necks and at least elbow-length sleeves; no pants, or, heaven forbid, jumpsuits. The clothes were all of the most exquisite materials—pure silks, wonderful cashmeres, satin moirés, angoras. They knew Mrs Ha-Levi’s style, like Queen Elizabeth’s, ran to frumpy belted dresses with matching hats that tended to emphasize her plumpness. But the fashionable pencil-thin saleswomen had learned to flatter her nevertheless in whatever choice she made.
If the elder Ha-Levi was the queen, they took solace that Batsheva was Lady Di. What an exquisite body! Even in stores that catered to movie starlets, producers’ mistresses, and models, she glittered like some rare tropical bird. She had an unerring eye for color and style. She always chose jewel colors—ruby reds, emerald greens, lapis. She was like a piece of polished crystal that sparkled, from her shining black hair to her white, even teeth, to the sheen of her lovely, healthy skin. Often they had tried to find a color to match her eyes, but it was impossible. There was no such color.
The elegant saleswomen gave her a grudging admiration, too, for the way she handled the producers, casting agents, and directors who inevitably came up to her with propositions, decent and indecent. Grudging, because they thought she was foolish not to follow through, as they would have in a moment.
Yet there was something very fine about the girl, they thought, something very genuine. This was rare in Tinsel Town, where everything was a fake. It began with the movie lots that created fake floods and earthquakes and filtered down into the most intimate conversation between man and wife. Feigned friendship and sycophantic praise hid boredom, contempt, and real malice. Hypocrisy and falseness were the name of the game, and this girl was so real. Her modesty was real, her beauty was real, her sensitivity and kindness were real, for often she would buy something she didn’t really want to compensate a saleswoman for a long, unsuccessful session of try-ons.
Batsheva looked long and hard into the mirror, but always discarded the dresses. They were not right. The dress he must see her in for the first time must be perfect, perfect. It must say all she wanted but dared not, there in front of his rebbe and her parents. It must speak of her youth and innocence and beauty and hint of her terrible longing for him. It must fill her with power to choose him if she wished. The choice must be fully in her hands. He must be rendered almost helpless. She must be able to make him love her, if she wished. In the month that had passed since her conversation with her father in the garden, she had begun to get used to the idea of a husband. It was just a lover really. It was a man you would be wholly connected to, whose body, mind, heart, and soul would intertwine with your own in a beautiful, irrevocable intimacy.
“Try one more,” the saleswoman suggested wearily.
Batsheva undressed slowly. She would have freedom as a married woman from her parents, her teachers. She would read whatever she pleased, draw, travel, dress. Like an adult, she would make her own choices. The life of a religious Jewish girl was so narrow and circumscribed by a million prohibitions—not the Law, but social conventions all meant to keep her in line. One could not go alone on the bus, or travel without a chaperon, except up and back to school, and even then she was escorted to the plane by her parents and picked up by the family with whom she boarded. Even on Simchat Torah, when the synagogue was filled with joyous dancing, one could not join a circle of other girls and dance with abandon, but only sit behind the curtain and watch the men dance and enjoy themselves. It was vicarious pleasure. What you read was scrutinized carefully. Would Shakespeare impinge on your purity, fill your head with lewdness and nonsense? Never mind D. H. Lawrence.
And she loved Lawrence. No one could understand that he was such a prude, such a moralist. Married all those years to his fat Frieda. Lawrence believed in passion, in having every fiber of one’s being caught up in passion. He believed in honest passion devoid of social conventions and thought it was a purely good thing that connected men and women, that it was a holy connection.
Batsheva trusted him and believed that was the truth. When a man and woman married, nothing they did together had any shame or immodesty. It was all in the name of God. There was fruitfulness and joy in it, and it followed the Creator’s own plan for continuing the human race. It was a commandment, a
mitzvah
. In fact, she knew that a husband was obligated to fulfill his wife’s sexual needs, or she had valid grounds for divorce.
And she had remembered learning that one was held accountable in the World to Come for not having enjoyed all the permissible pleasures of this world.
She looked at herself undressed in the mirror. What value did her soft shoulders, her firm breasts with their deep cleavage, have unseen? What value her long slim thighs, her shapely calves and tapering ankles? Like a flower on the summit of a mountain never climbed by man, did its beauty even exist at all unseen? It could have no value, no meaning, until it was given over to the appreciative hands and lips of a lover.
She looked at the dress the saleswoman had brought in. It was silver, a soft silver-blue silk that fell in a graceful straight line until her thighs, then dropped in small pleats. As she walked out of the dressing room, the saleswomen stopped talking and stared. A modest little dress, who would have believed it? It had long sleeves, a high neck, revealing nothing. Yet it revealed everything about the girl beneath, hinting at her fragile young slenderness, her deep-breasted womanliness, her fertile willing hips. And when you were all through digesting that information, its color directed you toward the unbelievable eyes, eyes full of promise, of maidenly shyness and hidden passion.
Batsheva saw in the eyes of the men and women in the store who stared at her the confirmation she had been seeking. Yes, she said, I’ll take it.
Mrs Ha-Levi stood watching her daughter and caught her breath. She could not believe this was really her child. She was like the expensive paintings and fine silver and crystal that filled what she couldn’t help thinking of as her husband’s house. As she viewed those objects like a visitor in a museum, so she viewed Batsheva as being his child. She saw nothing of herself in so exquisite a creature.
Even when she had thought Abraham Ha-Levi just a bricklayer, she had still thought him too good for her. For he had always been a fine, distinguished figure of a man while she had never been more than a shy, rather plain butcher’s daughter with blood on her hands from helping in the store.
As a young girl, she had often cried into her pillow imagining a future married to a man such as her father, tied to a butcher shop or a grocery, growing gray and fat behind a counter serving demanding housewives. She could never see any beauty in her face or body that should single her out for a different fate. And yet, strangers had often told her father she was beautiful. Her hair had been black, though now it was salted with gray, and her middle-aged body had once been softly rounded and inviting.
And when her husband had revealed his lineage to her, it had cast a permanent state of anxiety over her life. She almost felt it would be just and fitting for him to leave her for the kind of woman he should have married in the first place: the fine daughter of a prominent rabbinical family with wealth, scholarship, beauty, accomplishments, and manners. She had nothing.
Always quiet and shy, passionately in love with her husband, she had faded into a shadow since the wealth and the revelation of the Ha-Levi dynasty. She redoubled her efficiency as a housekeeper and manager, subconsciously hoping to prove her usefulness and be kept on a little longer.
Thus, when her husband had announced his plans for Batsheva without discussing it with her, she did not resent it, nor did she feel she had a right to interfere. She was merely a spectator, part of the household help, and she was grateful to be that. The only time she had ever felt like a true wife was when she gave birth. She could not bear to think of the babies lost to her. It was God’s will and she accepted it. She thought only of Batsheva, her perfect child, full of life and beauty, created in partnership with God and her husband. She remembered the last pregnancy, so full of hope…But then late in the fifth month the fetus had suddenly died. It had been a boy and having him removed from her body had destroyed all possibility of bearing other children.
Abraham had never blamed her, but she felt in her heart it was her fault. If only her body had been more perfect, her soul more deserving…And now only Batsheva was left, her only insurance for her husband’s love. As Batsheva’s mother, she had accomplished something. But the girl was so far from her. She could read complicated books and take wonderful pictures and play the piano! She dared to talk to Abraham Ha-Levi as an equal, discussing the Talmud and Mishnah with him, actually arguing with him! Disagreeing with him! It made her so proud, even frightened.
She did not want to think of this marriage in Jerusalem. She would lose the girl altogether now, even the little bit that remained, the physical closeness, the small talk.
What kind of man would satisfy this spoiled, beautiful, intelligent child, she wondered. She would have her own way in everything, like her father. Neither teachers, nor parents, nor rabbis had been able to do more than guide her reluctant steps down the right roads, and she had kicked and screamed and protested all the way. But she was just a child, a headstrong child. Had she grown up enough to understand what marriage meant? One traded one’s father’s rule for one’s husband’s rule. There was no in-between period when you were totally free, the way American girls were during college. Marriage was the beginning of the most serious business in a woman’s life. There was her greatest joy in building a home and family that would be pleasing in the eyes of the Creator. Yet it was full of pain, too—childbirth and molding yourself to your husband’s will. A part of you had to die to be reborn as a wife. You had to carve away those parts of yourself that did not fit in with your husband so as to form two parts of a perfect whole. Had anyone suggested to Mrs Ha-Levi that the man could also do some carving, she would have gnawed her lip in surprise and consternation, considering such a thing for the first time, and probably discarding it as unholy and highly improbable.
She closed her eyes and prayed that God would, by some miracle, allow the man her husband had chosen to be the right man for Batsheva.
Holding her breath, Batsheva pulled back the delicate French lace curtains of her room and watched the silver Rolls-Royce drive through the black-and-silver gates of the Ha-Levis’ long palm-lined driveway. The butler hurried to open the front door as the chauffeur bowed slightly, opening the passenger door. She saw one man get out and her heart fell inside her like a stone. He is so old! So short! But then she remembered there would be two men and let out a long sigh of relief.
She watched amused as the older man lifted his head in wonder at the white mansion’s tall Doric columns. He has a nice fatherly face, she decided. Next her father got out. Her stomach was tingling, almost sick with anticipation. She bit her lower lip so hard it began to bleed. There, one foot out…
“Shevi darling…”
Oh no, Ima! Of all the terrible timing. She let the curtain fall and hurried to sit down by her bed, taking up a magazine in her shaking hand. Her mother smiled at her and beckoned to the window and then they both laughed and hugged each other, their arms intertwined, their faces full of childish excitement.
She could not see what he was, just what he was not. Not short, thank Hashem, not fat. Dark (like Vronsky!). His clothes fit well, though he looked like a typical Hassid.
She hugged her mother. “When will I speak to him?”
“He has had a terribly long flight. We must let him rest so that he will be fresh and ready for you, difficult child!”
She threw herself petulantly on the bed. “I want to see him now! I won’t live until dinner. I shall die of curiosity!” But she saw that there was nothing to be done.
The afternoon passed like an eternity. At four she took a long, luxurious bath full of expensive bubbled perfume and sweet oils and thought of the Book of Esther: “And they anointed themselves with sweet oil for six months…” Imagine! At five she patted herself dry and put on new silk undergarments, and finally, she pulled the silver silk over her head and let her hair fall free. No, she would not pin it up! He must see her like this, with only a silver ribbon to hold it back from her face. She pulled silver stockings over the long, smooth stretch of her calf and thigh and slipped into shoes that looked almost like lacy silver filigree. The mirror shone back at her. Never had she looked more ravishing, more innocent, or more desirable. At least, that was what she told herself. But she was not a man! How could she know, really, finally, how she would look to him?
It took all her courage to descend the long staircase with slow dignity while her trembling hand clutched the banister and her heart pounded foolishly. There at the bottom stood her parents and two strange men. The short fatherly one and a tall dark one. As she reached the first landing, the tall one suddenly looked up, and their eyes met for the first time.
She stopped and held her breath, lowering her eyes in confusion. His dark eyes, glimpsed for a fraction of a second, gave her a blank canvas on which to paint with all the colors of her imagination. Eyes full of hidden passion, she told herself. Adoring eyes, smitten eyes, so sharp and clear that they seemed to cut through her, reaching in after her hidden thoughts so that she felt almost physically violated. To her great mortification, she felt a hot blush spread from her forehead to her cheeks.
There were introductions, and some laughter, and much awkwardness on all sides, and all the while her heart felt heavy with hidden secrets. She almost did not dare to look at him, so afraid was she of his scrutiny. Yet during dinner, seated across from him, she waited for his attention to be drawn to his rebbe or her father in answering the difficult questions of Talmudical interpretation they posed for him, and then, with his eyes busy elsewhere, she studied him, finishing the blank canvas she had begun earlier, filling in all details to her satisfaction.