The Saturday Wife (47 page)

He didn’t move.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Do you love me, Delilah?”

She stared at him. “How much have you been drinking?”

“Just answer me. For once in your life, tell me the truth.”

She studied her nails. “I had your son, didn’t I? I became a rebbitzin, didn’t I?”

“Answer me!”

Oh, gee whiz, what now? “Chaim, I love you. Now, can we
please
just go back to the party? The entire ship is waiting for us.”

“You don’t, do you? I think I always really knew that, deep down. You think I’m ridiculous. I bore you.”

Her mouth dropped open. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I saw you out there on the dance floor, with Dr. Rolland.”

Uh-oh. She tossed her head. “Dr. Rolland? So?”

“So? So a woman who loves her husband wouldn’t dance with another man that way.”

“Oh, grow up! I was just having a little fun!”

“I know all about it, Delilah.”

“It?” For some reason, she started to get nervous.

“Yitzie Polinsky.”

Her jaw dropped. Oh, boy. “There’s nothing to know.”

“Josh told me all about it before we were married.”

“What? That sanctimonious piece of—!”

Chaim smiled sadly. “I was also angry at him. I didn’t want to know.” He looked into her eyes. His face was somber. “I don’t care about that, Delilah. You didn’t know me then. You were single. I want to know about Benjamin.”

Her face went white. “Benjamin?”

“Why didn’t he come to pay a shiva call? You knew him so well. He took the train with you every morning—”

“Oh, I get it. It’s the old Schreiberman subway business! You’re mad so you are bringing up ancient history. Is that it?”

“I went to see her, Delilah.”

“Schreiberman? In the mentally challenged ward?”

“She told me some things that don’t sound so crazy. That make everything fit together.”

She inhaled, wondering what part to play. Outraged and Insulted? Hurt? Amused? (Harder to pull off but infinitely more fun as a part, she thought.) She decided on Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty.

“You know, the Torah says if a person makes accusations, they have to back them up with facts.”

“Oh, it would be easy to back up. All I have to do is find out if you really worked late that night. All I have to do is call your boss when we get back.”

There went Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty. “You wouldn’t embarrass me by doing that!”

He looked at her shocked face. “Are you sure?”

She took a deep breath. “Look, Chaim, I can see you’re upset. And you probably have every right to be. I agree with you that we need to have a long talk. But please, the Shammanovs are waiting. It’s going to be humiliating for them if we don’t show up soon. Please, please, can we just talk about all this later? After all,
they
haven’t done anything to deserve being embarrassed in public.”

“They’ve embarrassed themselves with this ridiculous, tasteless display of excess.”

“Chaim, promise me you won’t hurt their feelings? They’re my friends!”

He thought about it. He got up and handed her the baby. He straightened his tie and tapped the top of his head with his cupped palm, checking that his skullcap hadn’t slid off. He tucked in his shirt and buttoned his jacket and then, without turning around to look at her, walked out of the cabin.

Realizing the au pair had probably been let go for the night, Delilah groaningly put the baby down in his carriage, praying he wouldn’t wake up and ruin her evening. Then she wheeled him into the banquet hall.

“There khe is!” Viktor boomed when Chaim walked in. “Rabbi, please, please, come up khere!” Viktor waved enthusiastically. “I vant to tell you, every one of you, I luff this man. Khe is a true friend. Khe take my son, my Anatoly, teaches him. Khe brings me khonor, pride, brings me back my grandfather’s kheritage.” He pounded his chest. “I am Jew. I am proud! Thank you, Rabbi!” He gave Chaim a bear hug.

“You’re welcome,” Chaim gasped.

“And my Joie, where is my Joie? And Delilah? Where is Delilah?” He motioned urgently for them to join him onstage. “I have announcement. In honor of son’s Bar Mitzva, I build for Svallo Lake new synagogue. Not like tepee, like palace! I build new house for rabbi—beautiful house, with swimming pool. Until is ready, I give you extra house on Uspekhov for synagogue! Khere, I khave surprise.”

The lights dimmed, and a huge screen was lowered.
“Khere it is!”

The crowd gasped as the screen projected the image of a magnificent synagogue about three times the size of their present one. There were landscaped grounds and a sculpture garden. The screen flashed pictures of the new social hall, which looked like the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. He pounded his chest. “No donations! No fund-raising. I do this myself, for Grandfather!” Wild applause rang out. Confetti fell from the ceiling and the boom of a fireworks display lit up the windows with magenta and orange.

Delilah looked at the plans for her new house as they flashed on the huge screen, thrilled. Again and again, the drawings of the new synagogue, the banquet hall, the landscaped grounds flashed on, almost hypnotically. There was a moment of mass hysteria, as the drunk, exhausted crowd applauded and applauded and applauded until their fingers felt numb. Chaim looked around. Arthur Malin, his rage at Sabbath desecration forgotten, clapped along with the rest. Then Viktor took the microphone in hand once more.

“And vun more thing: I khave Superbowl tickets for all men. You come as guest of Viktor Shammanov. New England Patriots vill vin!”

A shout arose from the luxurious deck as it plowed into the calm waters of the night, a cry of surprise and awe the likes of which had not been heard on a cruise ship since the
Titanic.

THIRTY

B
ack home in Swallow Lake, Chaim and Delilah settled the baby and unpacked their suitcases. They felt hung over, exhausted, and emotionally drained. Both were eager to avoid conflict. Ever since the Bar Mitzva banquet, they had been polite and distant, like bus passengers thrown together on a crowded Greyhound going from New York to California, wishing only to travel along pleasantly without additional stress.

Chaim had no time to deal with his personal life, because members of the synagogue had been calling him nonstop ever since Viktor’s dramatic announcement, wanting to hear him gush about what a saint Viktor Shammanov was.

“I mean, it’s just wonderful, don’t you think?” rich accountants and lawyers and businessmen would blather through the phone lines, the same way those who had been to the Bar Mitzva had done in person on the plane all the way home from Hawaii.

“Well, it certainly is a generous offer that we should consider” had been his usual cautious answer.

This infuriated his listeners.

“Consider? What’s to consider? A billionaire falls into our laps and wants to redo our shul, saving us millions; what’s there to think about?”

“Well, first of all, do we really need a new synagogue?”

This incensed them even more. “We’ve been saying for years that the social hall is tiny. And the kitchen—no decent caterer would set foot inside it! Why should we look a gift horse in the mouth?”

Ask the Trojans, Chaim thought. But all he said was, “Well, I’m sure that the board will make the right decision. It’s not up to me. I’m only the rabbi, after all.”

“But Rabbi, with all due respect, I just don’t understand! You and the rebbitzin should be thrilled! After all, you are the ones who brought the Shammanovs into the community! You introduced them and made them feel at home! None of this would have happened if not for you! Besides, hasn’t he also promised to build you a new house?”

Something in those words, meant as praise, struck Chaim like a blow. He took a deep breath. “Perhaps we shouldn’t accept such a generous gift. There are so many worthy causes that need support: terror victims in Israel, handicapped children, the poor, the aged. Just because there are resources to buy something doesn’t mean one should buy it. Perhaps we should redirect Mr. Shammanov’s generosity elsewhere.”

At this point, the questioner usually gave up, exasperated, casting baleful and uncomprehending looks at the telephone or the rabbi, as the case might be, followed by an explanation of some unexpected and urgent reason to end the conversation.

Chaim locked himself in his study, writing furiously. He must write the sermon of his life, he exhorted himself. He must bring some sanity back to this community, before it drowned in its own Olympic-sized ego. Patiently, he sieved through the sources.

Was a man permitted to live excessively if he could afford it? Judaism, he found, was not in favor of asceticism. The Rambam had said, “No one should, by vows and oaths, forbid to himself the use of things otherwise permitted.” In the Talmud it was written, “In the future world, a man will have to give an accounting for every good thing his eyes saw, but of which he did not eat.”

There would always be poverty in the world. There would always be the suffering caused by disease and the malice of humans toward one another. The Torah commanded people to set aside ten percent of their wealth for charity, but the other ninety percent, a person was free to enjoy in any permissible way he saw fit.

Yes, all this was true. But who decided what was a fit way to enjoy God’s blessings? Was it not the society in which one lived? One’s neighbors? Should not the synagogue set the standard for moderation and being happy with what one has? For as it is written in Ethics of the Fathers: “Who is wealthy? He who rejoices in his lot in life.”

Why shouldn’t this community which had everything, including a perfectly adequate synagogue, simply rejoice in what it already had? Would Viktor Shammanov’s gift really make anyone happier? Or would it feed into the community’s ever-burgeoning demands upon itself, making each congregant mourn all those things they imagined they lacked, instead of praising God for the abundance that was already theirs?

The first rule of fund-raising is to know how to say no to a donor who wishes to donate something you don’t want: the million-dollar statue of the late Herbert Cohen, to be placed at the entrance to the town’s meeting hall; the Hospital for Stray Raccoons; the soccer stadium for ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem.

This is very difficult, because for the fund-raiser it means deliberately reducing your bottom line. But sometimes less really is more. This too, he thought, was a time to say: No, thank you very much. We have what we need. We should not be concentrating on walls and floors. We should be concentrating on how to fill the shells that are our homes and places of worship with the richness of meaning, values, and generosity toward our wives and children and neighbors and friends and employees that is expressed in the expenditure of time, and words, and caring personal acts, not the purchase of more things. Enough with the remote-controlled toilets, the three-hundred-dollar rubber beach sandals for three-year-olds, the infinity pools, the midget trees, the au pairs day and night, the ten-thousand-dollar koi fish, the army of servants you treat like slaves. Enough! Learn to find pleasure in your relationships with your family and your God. Learn to cherish what you have, not to pile on more junk you’ll need to unload: things that will clog your basements and attics and brains and arteries, like plaque choking off the flow of lifeblood to the heart; things that will block and obscure what really matters in life!

He wrote furiously, nonstop, his armpits wet, his forehead glistening, his hands shaking.

Yes, Chaim thought, his chronic stomach pains leaving him for the first time since he got the invitation to the Shammanovs’ Bar Mitzva. This is the speech he would make. Let them fire him! Let Delilah leave him! As he had once read on the door of a toilet stall in a vegetarian restaurant:
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
This is what he would say to them all. For once in his life, he would be a real rabbi, a mentor.