The Beautiful Possible (20 page)

When Rosalie opens her eyes, Maya is standing before her, modeling a black silk cocktail dress that makes her look like a woman. Rosalie shakes her head.

“It’s too revealing.”

“But how do I look?”

“Turn.”

Maya spins around slowly and then faces her mother again.

“You hold his beauty,” says Rosalie.

“Whose?”

“Your father’s.”

Maya rolls her eyes.

“Whatever.”

“You want it?”

“I do, but it’s expensive.”

“What is?”

“The dress, Mom!”

“Yes, of course.” Rosalie stammers. “I have something for you to wear with it, sweetheart.” She reaches into her pocketbook and pulls out a silver bracelet nestled in tissue paper. She hesitates and then places it in Maya’s hand.

“It matches nicely, don’t you think?”

Maya unwraps the paper and slips it on.

Days later, at their family seder, Rosalie stares at Maya’s bracelet. It fits her perfectly, neither too loose or too snug. Walter had noticed her small wrists; a random observation on a misbegotten
Hanukkah night. She gazes at Maya, sandwiched between Charlie and Philip, her voice rising boisterously with every verse of Dayenu, her brothers banging their hands on the table.
She will know and she won’t know,
thinks Rosalie.
Both at the same time.

When Maya stops singing for a moment she realizes that her father isn’t singing, and he barely claps his hands. She looks at Rosalie and notices that she too has dropped out of singing the endless refrains of this melodic thank-you note to God—freedom from slavery, manna in the desert, Shabbat and Torah and the Land of Israel—every gift bearing just one more and then one more. Maya tries to meet her mother’s eyes and invite her back to this moment, but Rosalie gazes out toward the window, lost in a private dream.

Months later Rosalie stands in the back of the paneled sanctuary on a Shabbat morning, looks at the faces in the room, and reflects on the narrowing field of her life. This place is her ashram, her Shantiniketan, the place to consider what she does not think of as God but rather as Desire—the desire that sets all things in motion. She stares at these people with whom she has walked through the chapters of her life, each of them aging in sync with one another and yet—despite the mah-jongg confessions and shared life-cycle events—she barely knows them.

Prayer is impossible for Rosalie, but she sees now that it is impossible for all of them, impossible for anyone. Her daughter and her friends use this room as a showcase for their blooming bodies. If her grown sons were home for a holiday (they rarely
are) they would roll their eyes at the modest gathering and they would think,
such sad lives.
Why do these people come here to listen to Rabbi Sol Kerem preach about God when the world is so vast with possibility?

It’s inexplicable to her, even after all these years. Faith becomes a habit that cannot be explained. A few of the congregants practice it like a musical instrument; they open the black prayer book and shuckle from side to side as someone once taught them. They place themselves in this paneled room once a week, take the same seats. Bev sits to the right of Serena; Missy and Nathan Samuels claim the second row. One Shabbat after another, these people show up at the shul for reasons that cannot be explained in words and if Rosalie would ask,
Why are you here?,
Bev would laugh and say,
I come because I used to bring my father, may he rest in peace
. And Serena would say,
I come to see you, of course, now turn around, I love that dress.
And Missy would strike a pose because she needs to be seen, and the more she is seen the more proof she has that she is alive, truly alive. The great mystery is played out in Temple Briar Wood week after week, year after year. The pulsing heart of theology drums its beat in this paneled room. Missy and Nathan and Serena and Bev—who now sits in the row that was once designated for her father’s wheelchair—are to Rosalie a sampling of souls that express the unquenchable thirst of humanity.

Walter wrote about this in the introduction to one of his books; Rosalie remembers when he told her the story.

On a research trip to Varanasi I approached a man who was bathing in the Ganges, the ashes of the freshly cremated bodies floating
around his legs. He was wearing a Western suit and tie and I was surprised to see him standing in the water with the legs of his pants rolled up. When I asked him why he said,
“
My father bathed in the Ganges and called it holy. So at first I came here for my father, to understand the heart of the man who raised me. And then I came back again and looked at the people who were lifting their tunics and walking into the filthy river and I admired their faces. And then I realized I was one of them. A cesspool became love became dignity became everything that mattered. Love in this dirty holy water. Love on my body. Love on the faces of the people who are doing this with me, who are me, who could be me, and the dead who once loved this world too, who once stood in this water, just like me.
”

By the time she turns fifteen, Maya has colonized all the upstairs bedrooms. When she wants to write in her journal she encamps in Lenny’s old room and burns white musk. When she wants to listen to music and burn sandalwood, she stretches out on the butterfly chair in Charlie and Philip’s room. The entire second floor of the Kerem house smells of the incense Maya buys off the street in Greenwich Village on Sundays. She no longer takes voice lessons with Lucie Morgan but spends every Sunday carousing Manhattan record stores, spending her babysitting earnings on albums by Flora Purim, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. After, she rides the subway simply to look at the people who surround her in the crowded cars and test out her theory of Everyone-Is-Beautiful-on-This-Train.

Maya holds a book in front of her nose, gazes up, and glances from face to face she alights on someone who seems wounded in some harsh way. Then she stares, trying to locate what shines from within. An inkling of longing. Someone turning the page of a book, yearning to find out what happens next. A harried woman who combs the knots from her hair, a student who pinches the pleats of his jeans, a homeless man who wipes crumbs off his beard and then sniffs his palm, looking for the remnants of the roll he ate for breakfast. Every Sunday Maya rides the #1 local from 14th Street up to the Bronx, gazing at the faces of strangers until she finds some degree of beauty underneath what seems so broken, so lost, so unbearably sad. She thinks of the congregants and their brave lives in Briar Wood, dressing up for shul every Shabbat morning and listening to her father reach for a bit of wisdom that could wake them up in some way. They were also a little bit broken and a little bit radiant—often both at the same time. Just like her parents. Just like everyone.

One night after she finishes her homework, Maya joins her father in the study.

“Pull up a chair,” he says. “I miss learning with you.”

“Okay. One for old times, Abba.”

“She’elah,” says Sol. “Why do we count the days of the Omer between Passover and Shavuot?”

Maya answers, “Teshuvah: We measure days to fathom the mysteries of time. We throw ourselves against the truth of numbers to block out the unforgiving light.”

Sol looks at Maya and thinks of the contents of the purple binder, the frolic of words that saved him and his rabbinate.

“Did you come up with that idea yourself or did you read it somewhere?”

Maya smiles. “All mine.”

Sol kisses the top of her head. “You’re so much like him.”

“Who?”

“Walter. The man you met. Always full of surprises. When we were young he and I traveled through the texts—”

Maya thinks of the strange barefoot man who gazed at her, and how she heard words spoken on the other side of a door, words she vaguely remembers but didn’t understand.

She wraps her arms around his neck. “Just like we do,” she says.

Rosalie phones Madeline every week. She sits at the kitchen counter late at night and winds the cord around her arm as she once did when she talked to Walter. Sometimes Madeline asks Rosalie how she copes in the wake of so much loss. Rosalie gives the same answer every time:
If I asked myself such a question I would not survive my life
.
I just keep going.
But she doesn’t tell Madeline how grief ripples through her body and surprises her at least once a day. When she walks past Lenny’s old bedroom she feels a great weight in her belly that she recognizes as the immovable ballast of sorrow. It never dissipates and makes her feel old and heavy, like an ancient hag. When she thinks of Walter—
of course I do, Madeline
—she is overcome by a floating sensation and she needs to shut her eyes, reclaim her balance, and go on. Before she falls
asleep at night Rosalie indulges in recollection, hoping that the thought of Walter will invite him to enter her dreams, but he never appears.

On Maya’s last night in the house before she leaves for college, she pulls a volume of Mishnah from her father’s bookshelf. She often scans the Mishnah at random, but always returns to her favorite seder, Zeraim (“Seeds”). She alights on the description of how the figs grown during the sabbatical year may not be cut with a fig-cutter but with a knife, and how many cubits render a vineyard authentic enough to grow grapes for wine. Know the dimensions of a vineyard and you can grow grapes for the wine that you will one day bless. Know how to cut a fig with the proper knife and you will understand how to tell a story and make it bear fruit. Maya is in love with these laws, with this obscure book she thinks of as an ancient Farmers’ Almanac. If she knew how to sketch, she would create a series of drawings based on these figs and these grapes, breathing new life into their ancient skins.

June 1999

When Sol is just shy of seventy-two Rosalie drives him to the same hospital where she gave birth to her sons in the maternity wing decorated with balloons and flowers, and where Lenny died in a room along the corridor decorated with aquarium-themed wallpaper. Sol has lung cancer, the non-smoker’s kind. Lungs poisoned from simply breathing, and in Sol’s case—so he believes—inhaling the dry ink from the pages of the Talmud he loved.

During Sol’s last weeks Charlie and Philip keep an around-the-clock vigil with Rosalie, and Maya flies home from Los Angeles, where she attends rabbinical school. When Maya arrives in his room, Sol sits up in bed and asks her to play the she’elah-teshuvah game with him.

“Sure, Abba,” she says. “Ask me anything. You go first.”

“She’elah: Where does God live?”

“Teshuvah: Within the seeds.”

“That’s it, Maya? You sound like some kind of enigmatic rabbi. Too much subtlety and you won’t have a following.”

“I’m not sure I want one.”

“Do yourself a favor and stay away,” says Sol. “It’s a terrible profession.”

“Stay away from what?” asks Rosalie.

“The rabbinate. Let her love the Torah in complete freedom.”

“She’s doing what she wants, Sol.” Rosalie smiles at Maya. “And in her own way.”

Maya excuses herself to get some water and bursts into tears. Charlie meets her in the hallway.

“It’s awful to see him like this,” says Charlie.

“It’s not that,” says Maya. “Abba spent his whole life trying to solve a riddle he could never understand.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“He was never meant to be a rabbi.”

“Welcome to the world, Maya.”

“It can be a beautiful life. And it doesn’t have to be so confining.”

“You’d better be right, or you’ll wind up like him.”

Maya wipes her tears. “There’s practically a revolution in rabbinic creativity out there. It’s intoxicating. I’ve signed up for a social action project in Ghana, and I’m translating—”

She notices Charlie’s smirk and lets her voice trail off. Her brother grew up in the same house as she did and he would never understand why she wakes at dawn to translate excerpts from the Ishbitzer’s work—Rosalie’s suggestion—so she can build a bridge between her Jewish meditation practice and the Hasidic rebbe whose understanding of the human heart was once considered so radical.

“I always thought you were the milkman’s daughter,” says Charlie.

“You’re the foreigner, Charlie. You’re too cynical to understand your own parents and you miss out.”

“I’ll suffer my losses,” he says. “You look good, Maya. And despite the circumstances, you seem happy. Mom told me about your wilderness rabbi.” He begins to hum “The Hills are Alive” from
The Sound of Music.

Maya chuckles.

“Do the two of you pray aloud in the open fields of Rockland County?”

“I won’t judge your approach to spirituality if you don’t criticize mine.”

“What approach to spirituality?”

“Exactly, Charlie. That’s the point.”

“I’m sorry, Maya. We had different versions of the same parents. I’m not talking about the generational gap, though that’s part of it. Philip and I missed out on your childhood. You were an adorable baby and you made everything better for them. And that made life better for all of us.”

Maya leans her head on Charlie’s shoulder. “Thanks for saying that. And yes, I inherited the crazy religion gene. My friends used to play school and pretend to be teachers; I would pretend to be a rabbi. I would put on Abba’s tallit, stand on a chair, and recite the Shema to my dolls.”

Charlie laughs.

“Temple Briar Wood was my childhood intoxication. Even the smell of the stairwell was delicious to me.”

“That stairwell! Those bathrooms! Philip and I used to stash our weed inside the sanitary napkin box in the girl’s bathroom.”

“No wonder that thing never worked.”

“We stole the custodian’s key and rigged it, and no one ever bothered to fix it.”

Maya remembers how she and Deena invented stories about the failed sanitary napkin box. It became the place where Missy Samuels stored her breath mints, where the custodian lost his toupee, where the golem of Briar Wood would one day be born.

“That explains everything.” Maya wipes her nose. “Charlie?”

“Mmm?”

“What was going on with them? I used to eavesdrop when Mom talked on the phone to her supposed best friend in London that I never met, and I just couldn’t figure out what secret thing consumed them. I would sometimes imagine that an abandoned suitcase had been dropped in the middle of our house and no one knew what to do with it.”

“Something seemed strange, but I never gave it much thought. I suppose they did the best they could. If anyone can understand that, it would be you, Little Miss Everyone-Is-Beautiful-on-This-Train.”

“Wait! I told you about that?”

Charlie smiles.

“My ancient brother. I used to think you held a secret code I needed to crack.”

“The enigmatic Kerems, the riddle at the center of Temple Briar Wood.”

She’elah: Why did her family seem so fucked-up half the time and so enlightened the other half?

Teshuvah: The human heart is not a mystery to be solved.

Rosalie closes the door and checks on Sol’s IV. The doctor said he wouldn’t linger much longer and Rosalie has avoided being alone with him until now. After a lifetime of negotiating secrets, she doesn’t know what she should reveal, and what should be left unspoken.

“Morris phoned you yesterday.”

“Morris? From the Seminary?”

“He said he was praying for your recovery.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Then he started to reminisce about Professor Heschel and how he wished he had appreciated him because now he quotes his work all the time.”

“Who doesn’t? You can’t be a good American rabbi without quoting Heschel.”

“Then he mentioned Walter, told me that he borrowed his books from the library and—get this—he was actually impressed.”

Sol closes his eyes. Rosalie lies down next to him and rests her hand on his chest.

“There was an attic, Rosalie. Walter brought me up there and something happened. Between us. He and I.”

“What?”

“It was nothing to him—a little kiss from a chavrusa. A gesture of friendship, a moment of affinity. But then I couldn’t
shake it.” He begins to drift off, then mumbles, “I held him all my life.”

Walter was mine, thinks Rosalie. What kind of little kiss?

Sol is short of breath and a nurse lets herself into the room, silently adjusts his IV.

“Are you comfortable, rabbi?”

Sol nods and closes his eyes, waiting for her to leave.

“God is in the morphine drip,” he says.

Rosalie lays her hand on Sol’s cheek and he covers it with his.

“I lived with shame, Rosalie. So much shame. Working a job that asked me to turn myself inside out, reveal my soul, explain my passion—all in the service of the tribe. And the clapping, the cheerleading, trying to make people sing when they didn’t feel like singing.
Feel the love! Feel the love!
What an awful burden. Better to be a spiritual civilian than a spiritual leader.”

“You’re finally catching on,” she says. “A little late, but—”

“Thank you for the binder,” says Sol. “For all those words.”

Rosalie smiles. “Did I tell you that Bev called?”

“I can’t recall a Bev. Hat? Doily?”

“Frizzy hair. Flip-flops.”

“I remember now.”

“She told me to thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Whatever.”

“No, Sol. For something you did many years ago. After Bev got up from sitting shiva for her father, you stopped by her house and offered to drive her to the supermarket. And then you took her to the Cosmos Diner and bought her a plate of scrambled eggs.”

“So?”

“You sat across from her in a booth and she told you stories about her father’s tailor shop, how she would draw pictures on the backs of the yardsticks and eat pastrami sandwiches while his customers came in for a fitting. And you listened to every little story about her father and his customers, all afternoon, until the sun began to set.”

“Not such a big deal.”

“But it was.”

Rosalie shuts her eyes and remembers the night Sol introduced Maya to Walter.
Your husband isn’t blind
, Walter had said.
Our daughter is so lovely.
After she listened to him cry on the phone for a long time, she lay her head on the granite countertop, and let her own tears come. And then Maya called out,
It’s late! We have to light!
and the three of them stood before their clay menorah, this remnant of a family cobbled from grief and desire, and they recited the blessing and stood together silently as the candles burned down.

Sol summons the strength to grab Rosalie’s hand. He winces.

“Did I bless the children?”

Rosalie begins to cry.

“When I blessed them did I seem like an overblown rabbi or did I seem like a normal father? Was I authentic?”

“You blessed them as a father would.”

“Tenderly?”

“Quite.”

Sol closes his eyes, winces, and then opens them again.

“I wish Maya wasn’t going ahead with this.”

“This is what she wants, Sol.”

“It’s a terrible profession for someone with imagination. She
will always feel let down. As soon as the words leave her mouth she will wonder what gave her the nerve to speak about what’s unknowable and parade it as truth.”

“But the Bevs of the world need their rabbis.”

“If she finds herself a Bev maybe it will be okay.”

“The two of you are cut from the same cloth.”

“Yessir, that’s my baby, no sir—”

“Don’t mean maybe,”
whispers Rosalie.

“A three-way cord is not readily broken,”
says Sol. He closes his eyes and winces again. “Has Walter come to see me yet?”

“He’s gone from this world, sweetheart.”

“Come and gone,” whispers Sol.

“Yes,” says Rosalie.

Sol sighs. God flows into his veins and he can breathe again. He feels his own lips soften around Walter’s. They sit in the geniza, Walter in his cotton tunic and Sol in his wedding suit. They are surrounded by the books each of them has ever read—multitudes of volumes in Hebrew and Aramaic and English and Sanskrit and Bengali and German—a repository of infinite words and endless silence. The books jumble together in ragged piles and the words seep from one volume to another, flowing like a river, as Walter allows Sol to kiss him and Sol allows Walter the same. They kiss and taste each other and drown out the laughter and loud footsteps of the students on the floors below. Daylight fades and night comes and still they kiss.

When old rabbis die, new rabbis arrive, take their seats on the bima, move into their offices, occupy their homes. These young
replacements show up with their hopeful wives and their small children, eager to install a new countertop, paint the bookshelves, replace the aluminum siding. The synagogue board offers Rosalie an apartment in town but she declines. Madeline has moved from London to San Miguel de Allende and Rosalie wants to join her in Mexico. The children protest—Charlie is to be married, Philip has a stepdaughter who calls her bubbie, Maya is still in rabbinical school in Los Angeles and wants Rosalie to keep a home base for her in New York—but Rosalie knows their pleas have nothing to do with her.

The children return to the house to help Rosalie sort through the rooms. Their work is an elaborate choreography of nostalgia and efficiency. They fill black garbage bags with the clothes and shoes that one of the Kerems wore at some moment in their lives and never discarded. Charlie overturns the file that held articles about clinical trials that should have saved Lenny, and Philip shreds the tax returns that were filed along with Sol’s synagogue contracts. Rosalie gathers memorabilia to donate to the shul. Maya sorts the books, and boxes up her grandfather’s set of Mishnah and her father’s volumes of commentary for her own growing library. And Philip sweeps up scattered socks, paper clips, coins, and dried-up etrogim. The children take turns tossing stuffed garbage bags from the top stairs and Rosalie watches the bags tumble down to the landing like boulders falling from a hill.

Rosalie saves Sol’s desk for last and opens the overstuffed drawers. In the bottom file she finds a folder of sermons: Sol’s original work, and those she wrote with Walter, preserved in the purple binder. In the same folder, behind some bank statements,
the childrens’ class pictures, the
yahrzeit
calendar for Lenny so they would know what date to light a candle and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish projected fifty years into the future—an envelope, opened and then closed, postmarked from India.