The Beautiful Possible (10 page)

When her breath grows shallow in the final weeks of pregnancy, Rosalie makes a decision. She will banish Walter from her thoughts, along with the narrow-waisted dresses that she will never wear again. He was a young woman’s fantasy, a dreamscape from another phase of her life. She is no longer too young to be a mother. She is too old to pine for the upper geniza and the lower geniza, for every touch and every word and every rub of powdered spice. She cannot live an impossibility. She prepares the house for Passover, purging it of chametz, those leftover crumbs that must be swept away from every kitchen crevice and every coat pocket. As she tapes shelf paper to the cabinet shelves, she reviews the litany of everything she and Walter did. With the mere thought of every kiss, every game, every word he spoke, Rosalie pulls off the ache of her longing. With every rip of tape, she unpeels Walter’s skin from hers. She summons the sound of his voice and then she lets it echo into the distance. She imagines Walter getting
smaller and smaller until he is a bit of chametz she sweeps to the back of the cabinet.

As Stu Katz promised, the epidural works like magic; childbirth is not quite painless, but somehow empty of high drama. Rosalie senses the contractions as they surge through her body and she receives them with indifference. Stu announces the birth of their baby boy and hands Rosalie her swaddled infant, along with a pill that prevents her breasts from leaking milk. Eight days later she wears a brand new dress to the baby’s bris. Charlie is named for Chaim, Sol’s father; the middle name Samuel is for Shmuel, Rosalie’s father. The baby clings to Rosalie and is slow to walk, but once he takes his first steps Charlie runs around the shul with abandon and in time leads the other children in jaunts around the building. Charlie teaches them where to hide from their parents and shows them the cot where the custodian sleeps, his toupee loose on the pillow. At night, Rosalie reads him stories of K’tonton who was as big as a thumb and fell into the folds of his father’s tallit. She calls Charlie
my happiness, my honeydew, my boychik sunshine
.

Two years later Rosalie gives birth to another son. She has the same epidural nurse, the same Stu Katz, the same sensation of surge, the same pill to dry up her milk, and another new dress for the bris. Sol wants to name this son Pinchas in memory of the Radish who singled out Sol as his protégé before he died.
No Pinky in this family
, says Rosalie, and they name him Philip. As soon as he can walk Philip becomes Charlie’s next in command.
At shul he sticks out his tongue at the congregants and at home he plasters wet peas into his hair. Philip pulls at the ends of Sol’s mustache, and at night he can only fall asleep if Rosalie lies beside him.

Once a week Sol and Rosalie hire a babysitter and go to concerts in Manhattan. Sol reveres Leonard Bernstein, and he listens to recordings of the Mahler symphonies with rapture. He explains to Rosalie how a single large gesture—the sweep of Bernstein’s hands at the perfect moment, his own arms raised to offer a blessing at the end of services—can blaze a hole through the sky and change the direction of a life. Nathan Samuels gives his rabbi and rebbetzin orchestra seats to
West Side Story
. After the final standing ovation Rosalie tells Sol she is pregnant again.

“If we are blessed with another boy,” says Sol, “let’s name him Leonard. Aryeh. A lion. In honor of our great conductor.”

“It’s bad luck to name for the living,” says Rosalie, but Sol says that the superstition only applies to a member of one’s immediate family.

In 1961 Stu Katz has grown sideburns, and his office teems with women wearing batik muumuus and iridescent lipsticks. This time the surge that roars beneath the blanketing silence of the epidural fills Rosalie with curiosity and she wonders what she is missing, what is this pain that other women bear in childbirth, while she watches television and waits for Stu to tell her to push. When she holds her third son in her arms Rosalie tells Stu she might like to try breastfeeding—
what do you think?
—and he says,
why bother when your other babies grew so strong on formula, and you, rebbetzin—
such a role model!
—should leave that to the hippies.

Sol speaks from the pulpit of how their three boys mark the ideal American Jewish family: one child for each parent and a third child to represent one who was lost in the Holocaust. He rests the baby on his shoulder while delivering his sermons. Rosalie watches Lenny’s face staring out from his paternal perch, and she sees herself in him, eyes scoping the room, mouth shaped into a half smile. After she reads to him at night, Rosalie rests her fingers on the curls that drape his forehead, letting them linger as he drifts toward sleep.

Day after day the three boys pull at the hem of Rosalie’s skirts. She feels as if her life is tossing her around on its wild sea and she will land on a shore far away from the cove made of turmeric rocks that she once thought of as her true home.

She says to herself, no one ever tells you that the incessant demands of small children will colonize your brain and make you forget the woman you once believed yourself to be.

She says to herself, no one tells you that you will fall in love with the journey, no matter how unexpected it seems.

She says to herself, no one calls to you and says
, I am waiting, darling. I will wait. However long it takes.

And how would she answer?
My children wait for me too. They need me to trim the edges of their cheese sandwiches, pour them apple juice, cut their nails, and hem their pants before Shabbat so they won’t shame their father whose eyes shine with love.

One year follows another. Charlie’s snowsuit is passed down to Philip and the same snowsuit is passed down to Lenny and they call it the Three Brothers’ Snowsuit. Each year is held aloft with the poles of holidays that intercept the flow of time. The warp is the calendar; the weave is made of the boys who grow taller and the husband whom Rosalie has learned to desire. Some nights after the boys are asleep Sol goes into his study, puts a Frank Sinatra record on the turntable, and waits for her. Rosalie tiptoes in, stands behind his chair, and kisses the back of his neck. Sol rises, wraps his hands around her waist, and they dance far into the night.

One summer morning Rosalie wakes up to the faint scent of turmeric on her fingers. She sniffs her palms but the source of the smell eludes her. No, she thinks, I haven’t forgotten him at all. Walter lives here on my hands; Sol lies beside me in our marriage bed. Milk and meat. Two classifications of food, each distinct. Separate dishes, different utensils. Rosalie uses cornflower-blue dishtowels for dairy, red-checked towels for meat. And then there is the waiting time. Some people count six hours between eating milk and meat, some three, Sol says, according to the custom of their tribe.

Walter is named assistant professor of religion at UC Berkeley. He rents a single-room house in the hills that he calls his studio. A pair of black-framed windows face the Bay; the morning fog obliterates the view but at night the Bay Bridge lights up like a string of pearls. Walter’s life radiates from this single large room
cornered by a kitchen barely wider than his arms and a bathroom the size of a small closet. In his Introduction to Religion class, some students ask if he is a Jew, if he survived the Holocaust, and Walter says, “Yes and yes, end of conversation. Now turn to your source sheets and look up the Sanskrit definition of
samskara
. For this week’s essay, select a family story from Genesis, reflect on the text’s unconscious imprints, and then write about the hidden traces—
samskara
—in your own lives.”

Walter teaches one class, then five more; at night he sits on the floor of his studio and grades papers. He places an ad in the local weekly for an artist’s model and in time he has three young women in rotation, each of whom becomes an eager lover. After he sketches the contours of each one’s body, he rubs spices onto her skin as he once did with Rosalie but none of his lovers summon her and no one can take him back to the past. In the parade of women who have passed through his life, Sonia feels to him like a distant relic that has changed shape through erosion, while Rosalie is perched at the edge of every thought.

One afternoon Walter tears a sheet of paper from his sketchbook and writes.

Dear Rosalie, I long for—

Dear Rosalie, I long for the upper geniza where we first kissed—

Dear Rosalie, I hope you are well and that Sol treats you as—

Nothing works. He rips out another page and another, and then writes a few words that spill onto the page like tears. He phones a rabbinical organization and asks for the address of Rabbi and Mrs. Kerem,
old friends of mine
, he says.

On Kol Nidre night the boys gleam in their holiday outfits: navy blue suits for Charlie and Philip, pale blue Fauntleroy for Lenny who stands sandwiched between his brothers. Picture-perfect. Rosalie tousles the hair of her three sons and tells them to pray for her.

“How about just this once?” asks Sol. “Everyone notices the rebbetzin stays home for Kol Nidre. Missy Samuels asked me if you’re pregnant again.”

“Tell her I’m on the pill. Tell her I keep the little blue box in our medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin. Tell her to ask Stu Katz about my reproductive life. He knows everything, just like a pulpit rabbi should.”

“For God’s sake, Rosalie. It’s Kol Nidre.
This matters
.”

“And it matters to me. Very much. I can hear every word from the porch.”

“Once, when we had the tent, yes. Now it’s not so easy.”

“How would you know what I hear or how I pray? This is enough for me. It’s perfect.”

“I can’t build this shul without you,” says Sol.

“And your shul includes this porch. I’m the outer edge of your boundary.”

“Clearly.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing,” says Sol. “I just wish—”

“Wish what? That I would be a different kind of rebbetzin? More earnest, more devout?” She lays her hands on Sol’s shoulders and kisses his cheek. “Look at me. I’m yours. And while you lead your flock in Kol Nidre I will be here. In our sacred little home. Ours.”

Alone in the house, Rosalie challenges herself to find a glimpse of holiness, something she can think about before she begins her twenty-five-hour fast. She sits at her husband’s desk and sorts through his file of readings. A source sheet with obscure Talmudic references makes her feel sad; a newspaper clipping with popular Jewish jokes makes her feel even worse. If he only quoted a Hasidic master like the Ishbitzer, maybe Sol would be a different rabbi, a different man. Yet she is not disappointed. Her husband has learned to satisfy her and while she misses the daring she enjoyed with Walter, Rosalie has grown to love the way Sol removes his tallit kattan before they have sex, how he is slow and passionate, how he sometimes bursts into tears and thanks her for being his companion on this journey.

Underneath a pile of bills, Rosalie finds Walter’s handwriting. Unmistakable. The winged
W
that takes up the entire page.

Over the years Rosalie has imagined Walter in all his homes. First in Chicago, a city Rosalie has never seen. At times she imagined him holding onto a railing during the famous winds, crouching close to the sidewalk to keep himself tethered to the earth. Then Berkeley. When she watched the students protesting the war on the news she tried to picture Walter holding up a placard but her imagination failed her.

She tried to forget him, worked to banish him from every thought. When she shampooed the boys’ hair and sang,
Gonna wash that man right out of my hair
, her children laughed but for Rosalie the song was all about Walter. She tried to forget him when she pulled out spice jars and sniffed coriander and cumin, simply to remember the feel of the spices on her skin, and then she would challenge herself to let go of her longing.

But then she would wake up with a start in the middle of the night and realize she had lost him. She had forgotten to think of him when Charlie had the flu and the chimney needed repair, when Philip refused to go to school in second grade, when the car was in the shop and Sol was away at a conference—one ordinary encumbered day after another—but then when Rosalie felt calm again, there he was, waiting, asking for nothing.

And now. His cursive
W
rests in her hands. She copies his address on a scrap of paper and tucks it into her pocket. As the opening strains of Kol Nidre drift into the house, Rosalie runs to the porch. The first notes of the prayer run down her spine. Another year of life, unbound, new, open to possibility. With Walter’s address in her pocket she is connected to all that she loves: the boys and Sol, the shul that has become an extension
of their home, and on the other side of the country, Walter, found.

She stands alone on the porch and listens to the chant wafting from the shul, the words encircling her body like a gown. As Kol Nidre is repeated in its third and loudest iteration, Rosalie laughs. What she feels is not happiness, but something pulling at the edge of her skin that wakes her up. Nothing is enough. One life is not enough. The prayer that invites her to open her heart to God is her own call to Walter.

November 1967

After teaching his Monday night class on Maimonides, Sol shuts off the synagogue’s master switch and lingers in his office. With his desk lamp as the only source of light in the building, he feels as if he is illuminating a path in a dark wood. The rabbinate was supposed to be like this, at least most of the time. Years back the Radish had counseled Sol to expect some challenges but assured him that he would grow to love his work.
Torah sells itself
, his teacher had said.
As long as you express its meaning, your suburban Jews will lap up its words like the sweetest milk.
But that hasn’t happened. No one praises his sermons; no one asks him for advice. After he conducts a funeral, Sol gently touches the mourners’ shoulders, hands out business cards, and says,
Call me anytime
, but no one does. He blames this on Briar Wood. The Jews who moved here came for the top-rated schools, reasonable taxes, forty-seven-minute commute to Grand Central,
and the gleaming Cosmos Diner with plastic menus as tall as Talmud volumes.

No one comes to a town like Briar Wood for the rabbi.

At first Sol thought he was reaching the students in his weekly Ask the Rabbi Anything class with four pre–bar mitzvah boys. The group was free-spirited; Mike, James, Mitch, and Ron loved to debate the Thirteen Principles of Faith and whether or not cheese rennet was kosher. Sol taught them the she’elah-teshuvah game, and was impressed with the boys’ associative leaps. But after a handful of classes, the foursome stopped showing up. When Sol stumbled upon them getting high behind the parking lot, they averted their gaze.

“Why?” shouted Sol.

James looked up. “Our parents bribed us to come to your class. And it worked, rabbi. We raised enough money to buy a stash.”

“That’s educational,” said Sol.

“You were building community,” said James. “That’s what you get paid for, right?”

When he called the boys’ homes to report them, Mitch’s mother said, “I’m sure you’d prefer they hang out behind the shul than near the train tracks. And if you care to listen to my real troubles, I can tell you about the restraining order I placed on Mitch’s father, but because he always shows up for morning services, you wouldn’t believe me. If you see us in shul on Shabbat—all dressed up and mouthing the prayers—you assume our lives are picture-perfect. If you want to know what’s going on with
us—any of us—just show up at the church AA meeting. Or come to the Cosmos Diner one night. You can overhear the lurid accounts of our lives, and when you find the details unbearable, turn on the jukebox to block out our voices. We are spilling our guts all over this town, rabbi. And you’re missing all the interesting parts.”

Sol never phoned a congregant again. He had no right to intrude on their private miseries and even if he did, what would he offer? A she’elah and teshuvah? A ruling about cheese rennet? A psalm? A slice of cake?

Pastoral disappointment tells one kind of story, but communal hope dictates another. After the Six-Day War the synagogue swells with members. Hebrew classes become popular, and congregants crowd into the social hall to perfect their Yemenite, Cherkessia, and Debka steps at Israeli folk dance parties. Sol remembers the oversized map of Jerusalem that was tacked on the wall of his boyhood Hebrew school classroom. He would imagine his body lying across the hand-drawn diagram of the Old City, his head resting on the Damascus Gate and his feet on the Zion Gate. Now he visualizes his hands touching the stones and monuments, the heels of Rosalie’s shoes clacking like castanets as she approaches the Western Wall.

The synagogue grants Sol a one-month sabbatical to Jerusalem. Rosalie packs up the boys’ belongings in a single shared suitcase and packs two bags for herself: one for her clothing, and one for her hats and shoes. Charlie, Philip, and Lenny are quickly
absorbed into the hive of children who play in the streets of the German Colony; they are invited to other boys’ homes for lunch and dinner, leaving Sol and Rosalie alone in their subletted flat. Every evening they sit together on the balcony, gaze out beyond the minarets and honey-colored rooftops, and hold hands in silence. Come morning, Sol strolls over to the yeshiva where he fills himself with new interpretations, new ways of looking at the Bible.
The light is different here
, he says to Rosalie.
The Bible comes to life with new music.

Rosalie finds her way to the women’s side of the Western Wall, wraps her head in a scarf, pulls up a folding chair, and leans her forehead on the cool stones. She has not written to Walter, but she carries his address folded inside her wallet, and often touches the scrap of paper like a talisman.
Write to him, already
, she thinks.
Just four words: I wish you well
. The sound of her sobs bounces off the stones.
I can’t and I won’t but I need to and enough with the craziness, rebbetzin, you have three beautiful sons and no business—
She imagines her longings seeping into the Wall, where they will be absorbed and carried elsewhere, freeing her from this impossible desire.

She returns the next day, hoping that another session of resting her head on the stones will offer some form of transcendent relief, but she only feels sodden and achy from sitting on a folding chair. She watches young women sway in prayer, and wonders how they are so good at piety, while she is such a bullshit artist with her headscarf, her scrap of paper, her confusion.

You don’t have to believe
, her father once said to her,
but you should live with some measure of faith
. Rosalie hands an elderly woman some shekels in exchange for a small book of psalms. She runs back to the Wall, rips out the last page, and around the margins of the 150th psalm she writes W
ALTER
& R
OSALIE
. She folds the page into a tiny square, stands precariously on a chair, and pushes it through a crevice, higher than anyone could possibly reach.

“You’ll hurt yourself standing like that,” says a nearby woman with a British accent. “Those chairs are flimsy.”

“Done,” snaps Rosalie. “All tucked in.”

A leggy woman with cropped hair and cat-eye glasses offers Rosalie her hand, helps her down. “No one reads these notes, pussycat. They fall to the ground, eventually. Picked up by beggars or swept into a sewer. Believe me, your words won’t find their way into a geniza and God isn’t reading them either. Are you religious?”

“I’m not religious but I’m not
not
religious,” says Rosalie. “I’m a rebbetzin.”

“Oh dear. An intrinsic contradiction. Proximity to the rabbi does not make anyone religious; it often inspires the desire to rebel.”

“You’ve found me out.”

“I share your fate, sweet pea! Madeline Rosenblum. Reform rebbetzin, visiting from London. The usual trappings of a rabbi’s wife, plus I’m a hobby publisher. My little enterprise is as ambitious as knitting sweaters, but it makes the congregants proud. As you can see, I’ve got a big religion problem. You?”

“Not enough of one. My whole life is a riddle.”

Madeline and Rosalie saunter arm and arm through the Old City, their strides perfectly in sync. Madeline confesses her struggles with infertility despite her excellent sex life, her flirtations with women, and the irony of spending her life as the rebbetzin of a London synagogue, when she would rather be working in a bank, where the terms of the transactions are obvious and clean.

“I like talking to you,” says Madeline. “I hope we stay in touch.”

Rosalie smiles. The women of Briar Wood flatter her and offer generous morsels of gossip, but they will always be congregants, not friends. Rosalie tugs on Madeline’s arm and blurts, “His name is Walter and I have his address. I can’t contact him and I can’t not contact him and I can’t—”

“Oh dear,” says Madeline. “It sounds like you have a situation.”

“You could call it that.”

“You’re on the pill, I hope.”

“Now I am, yes. Thank God for the little blue box. Three boys are enough for the rabbi and his wife, don’t you think?”

“I only wish I had such an overload,” says Madeline.

“I’m sorry,” says Rosalie.

“Every life has its parameters.”

“I’m not good at understanding that.”

“That’s obvious,” says Madeline. “This must be terrible for you. Fenced in by impossible love.”

“Not very freeing, is it?”

Madeline leads Rosalie by the waist. “Let’s give you some relief, pussycat. This is Jerusalem! You can either be burdened
by ancient history or become transformed by something visionary. So tell me, rebbetzin, what do you wish to hold in your cup?”

“I’m sure you know the answer already.”

“Have you been introduced to Madame Sylvie?”

“Who?”

“The French kabbalist in Old Katamon. Her courtyard is just down the street from where I’m staying. Everyone goes to see her—the new Jerusalem ritual, as popular these days as slipping a note into the Western Wall.”

“I don’t need a fortune teller.”

“You just need to tuck notes between deaf stones.”

Rosalie smiles. “At least I met you.”

Madeline takes Rosalie’s arm and leads her through a maze of streets. They approach a blue door framed with bougainvillea and enter a crowded courtyard ringed with chairs. Madeline kisses a white-haired woman on both cheeks, and whispers to Rosalie, “All these people have come to receive one of Madame’s astonishments—a powerful visualization or a dollop of bullshit, depending on your attitude.”

“Who are they?”

“American rabbis, mostly. Sprinkle in a few housewives, backpackers, academics, an occasional shrink.”

Madame Sylvie announces that she will open the dam that has been closed within each of their bodies. No one volunteers to receive the first astonishment. Madame Sylvie looks around the circle and rests her eyes on Madeline. “Close your eyes,
ma chère.
A small bird rests in your hand. Pick it up and hold it close
to your heart. Allow the bird to sniff and nibble at your skin, then nuzzle instead. Watch this procedure with bemusement; do not be afraid. Now allow the bird to separate your heart from its connective tissue. This is painless and quick. The bird carries your old heart in its beak and flies off. Your chest is now open. A new heart rests within, waiting to receive goodness and mercy. You are free. Now open your eyes.”

Madame Sylvie parcels out little astonishments like a short-order cook. Imaginary birds fly off with hearts made of stone. A camel walks off into the desert sands carrying a mute throat in its load, leaving a blocked opera singer free to sing. Doors open and close and open again, garden gates fall off their hinges, tumors melt, the lame can walk. Two men in the circle burst into tears. One woman storms off, furious at what she calls shameful manipulation.

Madame Sylvie scans the circle of faces. “Our session is over,” she says.

Rosalie raises her hand. “You forgot about me.”

“Not yet,
ma chère
. For you I need more time. Please come back later in the week. What you need will be clearer to me then.”

The next afternoon Sol’s class ends early and he strolls the streets of Old Katamon, looking for a place to buy a volume of commentary. Studying with other rabbis in Jerusalem reminds him of what he’s missed since he left the Seminary; once again he yearns to crawl between the Hebrew letters and immerse himself in the conversations that stretched over centuries, a she’elah in one era, answered by a teshuvah in another. With the right
chavrusa, the words will close the gates of this world and reveal an infinite vineyard.
It is a torment to love religion as much as you do
, Walter once said to him.
The distance between your life and the one you crave will only make you suffer
.

Sol steps past an open blue door and hears the sounds of laughter. He lingers at the entrance to a courtyard rimmed with chairs, then takes a seat. Madame Sylvie smiles and instructs him to close his eyes.

“You are standing close to a mighty sea that rages with words. You want to jump in and swim, grasp the letters as if they are fish that will carry you out and return you safely. But the words are illusions that vanish in the water and dart away. The words you love are carried out to the sea. Now open your eyes.”

When Sol looks up, Walter stands before him, beaming. In a button-down shirt, linen pants, and sunglasses, Sol barely recognizes him.

“My God! Is that really you? You look so different!” Sol reaches for Walter’s hands.

“I never thought I’d see you in a place like this,” says Walter. “You’ve morphed into a higher version of yourself.”

“I am the same man you knew at the Seminary, only now I am a pitiful suburban rabbi.”

“You could have written.”

“It felt impossible—”

“Do you really think you’re so pitiful?”

“Only half the time,” says Sol. “The rest of the time I think I’m close to God. Both views seem like a dance of mirrors and I end up totally confused.”

Walter laughs. “That sounds about right. Gurus, rabbis, imams, priests. The same messy brew of imposed grace.”

“Imposed, yes. I’m not sure about the grace.”

“You’re not alone, Sol. I do research on this. A person who gets paid to make meaning for others wonders if he lives in a house of cards. It starts off quite innocently. First he is flattered when people ask him burning questions about God. Then he falls in love with the sound of his own answers, the phrases that float in his mouth like elegant water lilies. He gets hooked on the adulation of his flock, yet begins to wonder why he answered their questions with such certainty. After all, he eats cereal from a chipped bowl just like they do; he ponders ultimate truth just like they do. Who gave him the right to be so confident? An education? A teacher? A brilliant insight? But then it’s too late. The flock won’t let him be less than a clergyman, and he has no choice but to reach for more beautiful phrases, more meaning, more words to frame the essential mystery. He becomes stuck between the seduction of his words and the futility of his work.”

Sol nods.

“He can deal with this conflict by finding a way to live with doubt, or he can deny everything and cloak himself with arrogance. This is the subject of my new book.”