The Beautiful Possible (15 page)

Rosalie smiles.

“We hadn’t eaten and she went out to look for crackers,” he says. “She was barely dressed. An inconsequential moment.”

“She was murdered.”

“Everyone at the Seminary knew that part of the story. Shot. Along with my father. His flute fell to the floor with their bodies.”

“Walter.”

“The bullet—”

Rosalie rests her head on his chest.

“She took the bullet for me, Rosalie. My father was a target, and I was his son. But Sonia had a chance of survival.”

“How can you blame yourself?”

Walter begins to sob. “I hid under the bed. They were shot in the next room and I made myself disappear.”

Rosalie runs her fingers through his hair, pulls him close.

“You had no choice.”

“Sonia took the fall so I could live.”

“It was so hopeless, Walter. You all would have been killed anyway. Then, or eventually. You don’t know.”

“At Shantiniketan I would lie under the date palm trees and imagine that I was in the afterlife and Sonia was on her way to Palestine. I would close my eyes and allow time to disappear, a night and a day and another night until someone came outside to offer me food and tea.”

Paul and Giselle walk by, holding hands. Walter stops talking and waits for them to pass.

“I deserved none of it. I was not meant to be saved.”

“You deserved me,” says Rosalie.

Walter laughs. “That’s rather pitiful. I stole you from my first American friend. First I stole Sonia’s life, then I stole yours.”

“You did not, Walter. This—
everything
—has been my choice. You said so yourself.”

“Sonia was so much better than we will ever be.”

“She was young, Walter. She was in the process of becoming.”

“And what have we become?”

Rosalie turns away, wraps her arms around herself, and begins to cry. “Why is this so sacred to me?” she asks.

“I don’t know, darling. Ask my friend who lectures in the circle of stones. He will tell you all about karma. Paul and I have words for everything, just like you and Sol. Is this beautiful or is this an ugly betrayal? Roll the dice and let me know what you come up with, rebbetzin.”

Rosalie pictures the congregants looking up at her when she gave her speech, hanging on every word that crossed her lips. They were hungry for the syllables that stumbled out of her mouth, as if she were a mother bird parceling out worms: Feed us. Teach us. Awaken our sleepy lives. And that’s what she and Walter did, with their purple binder overflowing with attempts at wisdom, a line here, a story there. Mazel tov, rabbi. You delivered the goods. Our love, your words. Our stained bodies, your sacred mission.

“Shameless and wrong and confounding and beautiful,” says Rosalie. “Everything at the same time.”

“We never should have met,” says Walter. He reaches for her and she shrugs him off.

“Sometimes I wonder if Sol and I would still be married if we didn’t have you. But what about you, Walter? You can crisscross the globe, gaze upon Brahmins immersing in the ghats, then return to your hillside idyll graced with young women and flanked by peacocks. Your life is so big! So why us? Why me?”

“My heart is not aligned to reason, Rosalie. And neither is yours.”

Just before dawn Paul and Giselle’s voices ring outside the tent. Through a crack in the siding, Rosalie spies a bright red splotch and rising smoke. She turns to Walter and shakes his shoulders but he doesn’t wake up.

“Evacuate!” shouts Paul.

Rosalie shakes Walter harder. “Wake up!”

Paul storms into the tent and screams into Walter’s face. “Wake the fuck up! There’s a fire on the other side of the hill!”

Rosalie shakes him again and Paul screams louder. “Get your head out of the spice sack, Walter! We’re evacuating! Get on the truck with the others!”

Rosalie pulls Walter to stand, hands him a shirt and pants, and leads him outside. The corner of the canyon glows orange and the radius of the light spreads down the surrounding hills like lava. The guests pile into the truck and Rosalie runs toward it. Walter grabs her arm.

“There’s no immediate danger.”

“It’s dry as bone here. The chaparral will go up in flames in minutes.”

“This is nothing, darling. We have the place to ourselves—”

“Is this some kind of death wish? You can escape only once.”

“I know what danger smells like,” he says. “This is a trifle.”

“You’re crazy.”

Walter cups her face in his hands.

“Trust me,” he says.

Rosalie spies the truck heading down the mountain, chases after it for a minute, and then gives up.

The sky is dark; they have no kerosene and no flashlights. Walter leads Rosalie to the circle of stones and they sit on a single rock. She wraps her arms tightly around herself.

It’s three hours later in New York, she thinks. Wednesday. Lenny has a trumpet lesson and Sol doesn’t know where he keeps his music. Philip won’t do his homework if she’s not in the house. The jar of peanut butter is almost empty, not enough for Charlie’s sandwiches, and where are her children while she stands on this mountain in the middle of Gehenna? Rosalie stares at Walter in the dark and for a moment he appears to be a complete stranger.

“Who are you?”

She clenches her hands into fists and pounds his chest.

“I am the biggest fool for carrying on with you, ever,” she cries. “I have a family. I have children. Boys who need me. Who always need me.”

Walter looks stern, professorial. “This is nothing to be afraid of,” he says in a guarded voice. She once loved his accent and now she wants to break it apart, shatter his inflections until he talks like she does. Like Sol does.

“Look,” he says, suddenly. “Over there.”

A family of deer, scattered foxes and rabbits step out of the woods one by one and stand on the path, transfixed by the light in the distance. Squirrels and a single quail appear. Another deer. A lone turkey. The animals pause where they stand, all of them. Rosalie stands. Walter stands.

Rosalie looks into the eyes of the deer emerging from the woods. A family of quail flow onto the road. The rabbits stand frozen; one hops close to Walter’s feet. Rosalie gazes at the animals and pictures her children in their beds and Sol at his lectern and her father surrounded by his books and her mother in the kitchen. The animals stare, waiting for her to make the first move. She reaches for Walter and touches his face. He begins to cry and then speaks softly, “Sonia, Josef—” He recites a litany of names and words in German that she doesn’t understand.

Rosalie watches the animals who stand frozen in the clearing. She listens to the inflection of Walter’s voice as if she is listening to a strange symphonic poem. This is, she thinks, the last time. Walter continues to speak in German and then begins to sob. She takes his face in her hands and they kiss in the smoke that swirls around them.

The fire stops on the other side of the canyon.

July 1973

Sol and Rosalie are lost on a dark road in the Berkshires. Rain batters the car windows and Sol leans his head past the steering wheel, hoping the angle will lend him visibility.

“It won’t help,” says Rosalie. “We can’t see through this torrent.”

“I’ll pull over,” says Sol. “We can wait it out.”

“Keep driving.”

“Ten minutes won’t make a difference.”

Rosalie shouts, “Have you grown deaf in both ears? We were expected two hours ago.”

Sol continues to drive and Rosalie reads the directions to Lenny’s summer camp.

“The roads aren’t marked. We were supposed to turn right at a gas station.”

“I don’t see a gas station,” says Sol.

“Keep going.” She stares straight ahead, her eyes following the hurried blink of the wipers that are useless in the storm.

“I need your help,” he says suddenly. “I can’t remember the names of the first-timers who came to shul last week. There was a woman named Natalie, I recall. She stood next to our Bev, the lady with frizzy hair and flip-flops. Was Natalie the redhead or the one who wore a doily on her head? And she brought along a friend: a Sue, a Beth, maybe a Linda. What’s with these names that all seem the same to me?”

“Lenny is lying in a camp infirmary with a fever and you want to talk about some lady named Natalie or Linda or Beth or Sue? Who the hell cares?”

“It’s a camp infirmary, Rosalie. And Lenny is fine. He wanted to come home anyway.”

Rosalie sighs. Lenny is twelve, away at camp for the first time. His brothers had outgrown Camp Herzl, staffed with muscular Israeli counselors who supervised endless games of Gaga, built campfires by the lake, and danced in the baseball field every Friday night, greeting Shabbat like the ancient mystics of Safad. Lenny had begged Rosalie to let him try it out. She questioned his stamina for being away from home, but sewed labels and packed a trunk anyway. At the end of the first week he sent home a postcard:
I hate it here. Too many rules, too many sports. Pick me up.

When Rosalie called the camp director, she was told that Lenny was beginning to make friends and she should give it another week before speaking to him directly. The director called a few days later and calmly stated that Lenny was running a fever that spiked from 101 to 104.

“Your son is very sick,” he said. “How soon can you get him?”

“Turn here,” says Rosalie. “This is the road.”

Sol asks her again about Natalie, and then says he remembers—
all of a sudden! a miracle!
—that Beth is the one who walks with a cane.

We are trapped, thinks Rosalie. In this car, in this synagogue, in this box of a life. If only. If only she and Sol could start all over with new lives. She would be the rabbi. A rabbi without a pulpit. She would be the kind of rabbi who could receive the questions:
What language does God speak in my ear when I kneel over a bathtub to scour it clean? What story does God tell when I unload sacks of groceries from the station wagon and my life feels so narrow?
Rosalie would be good at answering these; she would have no need to conjure up metaphors that could serve as guideposts for what she knew in her heart. And if she were the rabbi, Sol would be no rabbi at all. He would wake up, daven, put away his tefillin and drive to the hardware store, where he could talk about kitchen faucets with earned authority.
Brushed nickel coordinates with any backsplash
would be his holy motto, his proclamation of faith. And with another kind of life she would not have had to leave Walter behind at Eden Ranch. She would be a rabbi and she would be married to Sol and married, quite differently, to Walter. There would be no need to ever say goodbye.

The camp director is waiting in the parking lot. He hands Sol a clipboard, asks him to sign release papers for his son.

“If he were my kid, I’d go directly to a hospital.”

“Why didn’t you—” shouts Sol.

“Never mind,” says Rosalie. A counselor brings Lenny to the car; he shivers beneath a gray camp blanket.

“Thank God you came,” Lenny says. “I can’t get warm.”

Sol helps Lenny into the backseat and Rosalie sits beside him, offering her lap as a pillow.

They drive in silence and Rosalie lays her hand on Lenny’s forehead.

“Is he asleep?” asks Sol.

“Yes. A bit cooler now too. Let’s get him home.”

Sol peers into the rearview mirror. Rosalie’s eyes are closed.

“Are you awake, Rosalie?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been wondering about Walter,” says Sol.

“Uh-huh.”

“I think of him often. Did I ever thank you for saving me with that material? The purple binder.”

Rosalie looks out the window. The rain has stopped completely.

“You don’t need to thank me.”

“But I didn’t thank Walter.”

“No need to, Sol. He knows.”

Sol peers into the rearview again and bites his lip. “I think about him more than I let on,” he says.

Don’t encroach on my story, thinks Rosalie. The place in the Venn diagram where Walter touches you is not the place where he touches me. She imagines Walter’s hand between her legs, then blocks the memory. Don’t go there, she thinks. Not now, with Lenny, with
this
. Sol can have his little fantasy of the storybook man who showed up at the Seminary so many years ago
with his sil batta, but you, Rosalie Kerem, are played out. No more illusions. No more Walter.

She holds Lenny tighter.

Lenny’s pediatrician orders a biopsy and arranges for him to be admitted to the hospital. A new doctor invites them into his office and rambles through phrases that are as coded and incomprehensible as Pig Latin.
Cells are out of control
.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma. No longer treatable. The troops will be home in a month, maybe two. Keep him comfortable. Normalize. The best we can do will have to be enough. I’m only saying this because you are a religious family but God has designs on him.

“I’m the rabbi here!” Sol shouts. “You’re a fucking MD. Don’t bring God into this!”

Rosalie places her hands over her eyes and begins to heave.

Sol mutters something under his breath in Hebrew. He reaches for Rosalie and she pulls away.

“Rosalie. God is challenging us—”

“Don’t touch me and don’t say a word to me,” she shouts. “Not about God and not about what you think and not about anything I don’t want to hear. Don’t ever talk to me again, Sol. Never. Again. Ever.”

The next day Sol breaks into a tirade about how Camp Herzl made his son sick and he phones an attorney. Rosalie stays in the hospital with Lenny and returns home for a few hours at a time. When she decides it’s time to break the news, she dials Charlie, hollers for Philip to pick up the phone in another room and for
Sol to pick up the phone in the study, linking them around the impossible words that Sol mutters to all of them.

After his initial horror Charlie says he’s not surprised.

“Based on what information?” asks Rosalie.

“We had that clubhouse out back when Lenny was about five, remember? Gosh, I loved that place. I lorded over my brothers, we pummeled Philip, we mocked Lenny for being such a mama’s boy.”

“It was the Wild West back there.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” says Charlie. “And you never will. But one Shabbat afternoon Philip shared a cigarette butt he found in the house.”

Rosalie sighs. She would occasionally smoke when she spoke to Walter or Madeline late at night, and she sometimes forgot to empty the ashtrays.

“It was Philip’s first toke and Lenny asked to try it also and I told him he could die if he smokes tobacco and he turned to me and said, ‘I will die before both of you, Charlie.’ I told him to stop being an idiot and he just walked away and we never talked about it again.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” says Rosalie, wishing it were so. “Lenny has always been a dreamy boy. That’s all.”

Rosalie is an agent of efficiency and detail. She clutches a datebook whose pages are black with doctors’ names and a maze of schedules. When she’s not at the hospital, she scours medical journals and loads a file cabinet with articles about treatments and medication trials. Sol asks the congregants to pray for Lenny,
and Rosalie asks Nathan Samuels to send a note to the congregation, asking that they be left alone. No unsolicited advice. No alternative therapies. It is too late.

Rosalie moves into Lenny’s hospital room and sleeps on a chair beside his bed. Sol delivers corned beef sandwiches that no one bothers to eat. Charlie takes a leave of absence from college and moves back home. He and Philip embark on a mission to teach Lenny all the things he will miss in his abbreviated life. Every afternoon they coax Rosalie to leave Lenny’s room for an hour and demand that the nurses keep the door shut. Philip steals a steering wheel from his driver’s ed class and shows Lenny how to drive. Charlie unpacks a collection of
Penthouse
magazines and talks to Lenny about sex, and then hands him a cheeseburger. “You’ve got to taste some
trayf
,” shouts Charlie. “Transgression is delicious.”

“No appetite. What else do you have for me?”

Charlie reaches into his knapsack.

“Everyone is reading this up at school.” He reads aloud from Abbie Hoffman’s
Steal This Book
:
“Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free.”

“Sounds exhausting,” says Lenny.

Charlie tells Lenny that most of what Sol taught them about Judaism is a myth. “We were never in Egypt,” he says.

“I don’t believe you,” says Lenny.

“There is no proof,” says Charlie.

“This is proof enough,” says Lenny. “My suffering is Egypt. It’s a metaphor, like Mom always says.”

“Even the metaphors are lies,” says Charlie.

“But they told us—”

“You really believe everything they taught you?”

“Abba is a rabbi and Mom knows so much,” says Lenny.

“That doesn’t mean they always speak the truth.”

“And does your Abbie Hoffman do any better?”

Later that night Lenny tells Rosalie she fell asleep in her bedside chair and called out a man’s name.

“Whose name, sweetheart?”

“Walter. You called out the name Walter and you were crying.”

“I’m sorry, Lenny. You don’t need to be burdened with my problems.” She forces a smile.

“Who is Walter?”

“A friend,” says Rosalie. “Your father and I had a good friend.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing to say. It’s over now.”

“He’s dead?”

“No. Just out of touch.”

“That’s sad. You could use more friends in your life. Those congregants are so fake.”

“They leave messages on our answering machine every day. Those fake congregants care about you, sweetheart.”

“It makes them feel better to pretend to care,” says Lenny. “Part of the unwritten contract in our shul. How many of them ever talked to me? Serena once asked me if I got good grades in
school. Missy and Nathan used to pinch my cheeks. These people saw me every Shabbat for my whole life—
they watched me grow up!
—and all along I was just their scenery.”

“So are we,” says Rosalie, her voice drifting.

“Charlie is teaching me about sex,” says Lenny. “And about
trayf
—at least he’s trying to. And about Abbie Hoffman. Charlie is joining the revolution, Mom. He’s keeping a running list for me that he calls ‘Lies and Illusions that Abba Delivers from the Bima.’”

“It must be a long list.”

“It’s Charlie’s list, not mine,” says Lenny.

“And what’s on your list, sunshine?”

“I used to wish you were the rabbi. The words Abba spoke would have sounded so much better coming from you. When he was good he reminded me of you.”

Two days later Lenny develops an infection and slips into a coma. Rosalie rests her head close to his, warming his cheeks with her breath. Sol stands by the window and davens, and Charlie and Philip sit cross-legged on the floor, squinting away tears. The sun sets that evening and the sun rises the next day and the Kerems stay in Lenny’s room just like this, no longer hoping, no longer waiting.

Years later, when Rosalie reflects on Lenny’s last months, she realizes that the fog of memory has obliterated the sharp edges, smoothed the jagged stones into a forgiving blur. She cringes when she recalls the Hallmark words that served as ciphers—
comfort, hope, memory
,
eternity—
words they dispensed like the
aspirin that proved to be futile in lowering Lenny’s fever, words they reached for as children grasp soap bubbles at a summer picnic, words that evaporated in the air. The empty words floated through Rosalie’s brain those last months, days that held beauty because Lenny was still here and days that held sadness because Lenny was gone.

She’elah: Who comforts the clergy who mourn?

Sol’s teshuvah: The Holy One whose comfort eludes me.

Rosalie’s teshuvah: Abbie Hoffman. Rabindranath Tagore. Frank Sinatra. Missy Samuels. Steal this book. Return my son. No more questions.

The congregants deliver shiva food—whitefish platters with a dozen varieties of bagels—and reach their arms into eager hugs and cry onto each other’s shirts. The men arrive for the evening service and stand in the den with Rosalie, Sol, Charlie, and Philip. The boys stand on either side of their father and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, their square shoulders holding him upright; Rosalie mouths the words from a distance. After the week of shiva the platters are replaced with casseroles dropped at the front door and Rosalie can tell who baked the lasagna by how tightly the foil is pulled across the top of the pan. Every comforting gesture feels insincere yet necessary; every dish dropped at their doorstep curses their home.

Rosalie hates Missy and Nathan and Bev and Serena and Delia and Marv and all the others who surround her with gestures of comfort, but when she sees them at the post office or the mall she tugs on their coats to draw them close. Words are wrong.
Silence is worse. Sol spends his days curled up in a ball, first on the floor of his synagogue office, then at home, on the living room carpet. “There is no medication for grief,” says Sol’s doctor. “When he is ready the rabbi will pull himself out.” Charlie returns to college and Philip is the only child left at home. He keeps stashes of weed in his back pocket and Rosalie does not notice that his eyes are always red and he never does schoolwork, never cracks a book. When Sol, Philip, and Rosalie pass each other in the kitchen no one touches. Many nights Rosalie sleeps in Lenny’s bed, wrapped in the sleeping bag that held his sweat when he first got sick at Camp Herzl.