Davita's Harp

by Chaim Potok

  My mother remained at the farmhouse with Aunt Sarah all through December and into the second week of January. Mr. Dinn brought her back in his car. She had regained most of her lost weight and looked rested and well. Much of the light was back in her eyes.

  “Your Aunt Sarah is a magician,” she said to me one night after supper. “Wasn’t it clever of your father to have such a sister? I love her.”

  We settled back into our lives. As the winter wore on Mr. Dinn was in the apartment more and more frequently. One day my mother brought home a set of glass dishes and some new pots and pans and silverware. A sale, she said. How lucky! That evening Mr. Dinn and David joined us for a fish dinner in the apartment—my mother shy, a little flustered, worried about the fish; Mr. Dinn shedding a little of his austere and courtly manner and looking gracious, solicitous, relaxed. David and I kept glancing at each other and not knowing what to say.

  One Friday evening my mother lit Shabbos candles without saying the blessing and covered her eyes and stood there in the flickering light and wept. The candles burned evenly in their tall twin silver candelabra—a gift from Mr. Dinn, who had brought them to her the day after she told him she wished to light Shabbos candles. I will never forget the images of that night—the candles, the weeping, my mother holding me, and our meal together afterward. The next morning we walked together to the synagogue and she sat next to me near the curtained wall. I noticed that she did not pray but sat with her head slightly inclined toward the wall, listening. People kept glancing at her but she seemed not to notice. I showed her the tear in the curtain and how she could see through it to the other side, and she laughed softly but would not use it.

  In the weeks that followed, David and I saw each other often in the synagogue and in school—and not once did we talk about my mother and his father. There seemed something fragile and wondrous about it all, and I think we felt that we might spoil it if we put it into idle words.

  Nor did we speak to each other about what our parents separately told us one day that spring. We communicated with looks and glances and with the language of our bodies: a wave of a hand, a turn of a shoulder, a raising of the eyebrows, a light skip, a wide smile. Words of congratulations washed over us in the synagogue. Ruthie chirped and bubbled; her parents beamed. Nothing but darkness was coming out of Europe: Germany had invaded Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and France. But at least here in our little Brooklyn neighborhood there would be a moment of light.

  Painters came and redid our apartment. One of them took a look at my father’s books and muttered angrily under his breath. “You have to know who your enemy is,” my mother said quietly. He looked at her, grunted, and went back to his work. Rugs were brought from Mr. Dinn’s apartment and placed on the bare floors of our living room and my mother’s bedroom. All of Mr. Dinn’s dishes and silverware were moved in, along with a new kitchen set and a large new bed that was divided down the middle and was like two beds with one headboard and footboard. New linoleum was put down in the hallway, new fixtures were hung from the ceilings. My father’s books were moved to new shelves in the hallway and living room. Additional shelves were built in the bedroom and living room for Mr. Dinn’s large library: volumes and journals of law, folios of Talmud, holiday prayerbooks, a many-volumed set of Bible commentaries. There were no books of stories in Mr. Dinn’s library.

  Paintings appeared on the walls, mezuzahs on the doorposts. The four of us worked together. My mother was like a young girl, Mr. Dinn like a courting youth. The picture of the horses on the beach was moved to a wall in my room. There it hung, over my bed, and sometimes at night I would wake and imagine I could hear the hooves of the horses on the sand. Mr. Dinn did not think he wanted the harp to remain on our front door and helped me hang it on the back of the door to my room. I felt in a trance. I was inside a dream in a story written by Jakob Daw and knew I would soon wake. But the story went on spinning itself out, though I didn’t really understand it all, and one day in June my mother, shy and blushing and dressed in white, married Mr. Dinn in the midst of a large crowd of celebrants. David and I stood by, glancing at each other and not knowing what to say. Aunt Sarah was there too, in a white dress and a white hat—not her nurse’s uniform. After the ceremony I held her for a long time and cried.

  My mother and new father went away for a few days and then returned. I searched my mother’s face and saw in it a new light. Happiness seemed to dance in her eyes like tiny specks of sunlight on the surface of a sea.

  David moved into the room once occupied by Aunt Sarah and Jakob Daw. I helped him put his clothes and books away. He had many books, and his bookcases had been placed along the wall across from the window that looked out on the cellarway.

  In my room the harp sang each time I opened and closed the door. I thought often of the two birds nesting in the harp and wondered if Uncle Jakob was still writing stories.

  Seven

  July was cruel with heat and news of the war. Summer rumors of polio seeped into our lives, evoking dread. David spent most of his days studying Talmud with a small special class formed by the yeshiva. I read a great deal and went to the day camp in Prospect Park. My mother had taken a part-time position with the agency in which she had worked before; she was still helping immigrants and war refugees. My new father worked in a large law office somewhere in lower Manhattan near Wall Street.

  The days went slowly by. There was little rain and from time to time I watered the flowers planted in the backyard by Mr. Helfman. Evenings I often spent beneath the canopy of the sycamore, reading. Nights were sultry with damp heat. The heat rose from the streets in shimmering waves. On my way back from the day camp I could see the trees and fireplugs wriggling.

  My new father said to us during zemiros one Friday night in the middle of July, “Could I interest anyone here in a few weeks at Sea Gate? I think I should get my family out of this heat.”

  He used those words often. My family. He seemed to like the sound of it and said it with pride.

  “I don’t know, Ezra,” my mother said hesitantly. “Sea Gate has too many memories.”

  “You can’t run away from your memories, Channah,” my new father said. “Say good-bye to them if you have to, but don’t run away from them.”

  “I’ll have to tell Rav Hammerstein we’re going away,” David said uncertainly.

  “He’ll forgive you,” my new father said. “He won’t begrudge you a few weeks in the sun. My family needs it.”

  “What will happen to Mr. Helfman’s flowers?” I asked.

  My new father smiled indulgently. “We’ll pray for rain,” he said.

  “Will we live on the beach?” I asked.

  “I’ll see what’s available. You’re all interested, yes? Good. Then it’s settled. Let’s continue with zemiros.”

  He found a house on the beach. Early one Sunday morning we loaded up the car and climbed in and he drove us through silent tree-lined streets and past elegant houses. My mother sat very still in the front seat, gazing out the window. She wore a pale yellow cotton summer dress and she looked lovely, her eyes calm, her long hair moving in the warm wind that blew into the open windows of the car. I sat with David on the backseat. I was still not used to all this newness: a car, a father, a brother.

  Familiar scents entered the car: ocean water, briny air, the gas works. And suddenly there was the silver sheen of the sea, and the security gate, and the embowered streets, and the tide of memories like an inundation.

  And so that August we lived in a cottage in Sea Gate a few blocks from the cottage my parents used to rent years before. Everything seemed the same. The dunes were the same: dwarf hills beyond the screened-in porch sloping gently to the beach and the sea. And the ocean was the same, though a little choppier near this cottage, noisier. A stone jetty extended deep into the water to the right of the cottage, and waves crashed against it, loudly, endlessly.

  One day I wandered along the beach to the cottage where I had once lived. There was another f
amily in it now. I stood on the beach and gazed at the screened-in porch. The cottage lay stark white in the hot sun and was the same as it had been before. I looked across the beach and imagined my parents swimming together and Jakob Daw in baggy pants and wrinkled shirt standing on the sand and gazing up at the wheeling birds. Give us a hug, my love, an ocean of a hug. I walked down to the tidal pool where I had once built castles along the rim of the sea. Waves rolled and foamed and broke upon the shore. The surf moved back and forth monotonously across the smooth wet sand. I whispered good-bye to the cottage and the castles and did not return again to that part of the beach.

  The beachside cottage we lived in that August was a large redbrick structure with bedrooms along both its sides separated by a spacious living room and a large, open kitchen. Exposed beams spanned the length of the living room, and the white cathedral ceiling ended in a bank of floor-to-ceiling oceanfront windows through which the sun shone all morning long. There were drapes on those windows to protect us from the sun and the gaze of passersby, but we almost never used them during the day. Somehow in my imagination the morning sun was diminished that summer, changed. I told myself that each dawn was dimmed by what the sun had witnessed on its journey across bleeding Europe. The sun would gather strength as it climbed into our sky. But mornings seemed pale as the weakened sun glided into my room and woke me slowly to the day.

  I would lie in my bed in the early sunlight and listen to David. We were separated by a thin wall and I could hear clearly his breathing, his movements as he turned in his bed, his footsteps, his soft chanting of the prayers. He was not yet a bar mitzvah, would not be required to observe all the Commandments until he turned thirteen next June. There were certain things he could not do until then: lead a service in the synagogue, chant the Torah portion for the congregation, lead the Grace After Meals. Yet he was as meticulous as his father in the performance of those commandments that he could observe.

  He told me that August that he wanted to be a rosh yeshiva one day—the head of an academy of Torah learning. He said it during a long moment of openness between us: a night when we sat together on the porch, gazing out at a starry sky and the distant lights of the curving shoreline. He said it softly and wonderingly, his voice shy and hesitant, as if he doubted what right he had to attempt so lofty a calling. He seemed very self-conscious that summer. He was growing; his voice was changing, deepening. I saw the beginning of hair on his legs and under his armpits and soft down on his cheeks. I made it a point never to look too long at the nipples on his chest or the bulge in his bathing suit as we sat together or lay on the sand after a swim.

  Every morning after breakfast he studied Talmud. He sat at the table on the front porch with the folio open before him and chanted softly in the intonation that accompanies the flow of a talmudic argument: a kind of music of the mind that I found enchanting. I would sit on the steps or walk back and forth on the hot sands of the dunes, listening. His deepening voice was taking on a nasal quality. I found myself humming along with his singsong melody. One morning I asked him if he would teach me a passage of Talmud, and he looked a little surprised, then said sure, why not. We studied together for a while and then went swimming. In the afternoon we studied together again. My mother came out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway, listening, her face expressionless. She brushed a hand over her dark hair and went back inside.

  We studied together from time to time in the days that followed. I found it very difficult to keep up with him. He seemed impatient with my inability to understand ideas that he grasped immediately. Also, I had the feeling he was a little uncomfortable about teaching a girl. Often he studied with his father. Mostly he studied alone. He was already many pages beyond the quota of summer study assigned him by his Talmud teacher.

  “Can a girl become a rosh yeshiva?” I asked him one day.

  The question startled him. “I don’t think so. No, she can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are no girls in the high yeshivas.”

  He looked so uncomfortable that I did not pursue it and went on to talk of something else.

  He seemed to grow easily embarrassed in my presence. I had the feeling he had been so long without a woman in his family that the presence of me and my mother was now often overwhelming to him. Once, in the apartment before we left for the beach, I walked out of my room in my underwear and ran into him in the hallway near the bathroom. He looked shocked, his pale face flamed, he averted his eyes. My mother gave me a brief lecture that night about proper garb outside one’s room now that there were men in the house.

  I read a lot that summer. The world of the novel began slowly to open itself to my imagination. I haunted the local public library, spent hours searching its shelves. I found I was too bored by the books in the children’s division and too young for the books in the adult division. I talked to my mother. She gave me her library card.

  “Who is this book for?” the librarian, an elderly lady with spectacles and gray hair, asked me one day.

  “My mother told me to take it out on her card.”

  She knew me well and looked at me for a long moment. “I am not supposed to give it to you,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  She held the book open beneath the rubber stamp affixed to the end of her pencil. “This is a very serious work.” Still I said nothing.

  “I always suggest to people that they owe it to such a work to invest in it between seventy-five and a hundred pages before they decide whether or not to go on reading it.”

  She stamped the book and handed it to me. I thanked her.

  I brought it to the cottage and sat on the porch, and after a hundred pages was gone deep inside it and heard only distantly David’s talmudic music, the wind and the waves, the news of the war on the kitchen radio, my new father calling out, “Hello! It’s me!” as he came home from his day’s work in Manhattan. He came out onto the porch, his hat tipped back on his head, his tie loose, and his shirt collar open. He patted David lightly on the shoulder, patted me on the head, looked at us for a moment, and said, “I thought school was over. Why are we in a beach house if all you do is read? Why doesn’t your mother chase you out, for God’s sake?” He smiled broadly and went inside.

  He seemed a happy and relaxed man. Much of the stiffness had left him since his marriage to my mother. He was proud of his family, solicitous and soft-spoken, with a courtliness of manner that resembled somewhat the old-world habits of Jakob Daw: a slight bow when he met someone new; a way of listening seriously to all sides of a conversation; a moment of thought before responding to a question; a vague note of irony that at times crept into his words; a restraint even when all around him were loudly laughing. But when it came to ritual practice, his strictness with the Commandments brought an exactness to my life that was quite new. He insisted on the careful observance of the law: Shabbos began each Friday night at sundown and not a moment later; kosher meat was to be bought from a specific butcher and no other; the Havdoloh service at the end of the Shabbos could take place only from this moment on and no earlier; this or that act was permissible on Shabbos and festivals, and this or that was not. Sometimes he sat relaxed in an easy chair, one of his legs draped over an arm, and I saw in his sprawled form a ghostly reminder of my father. He read The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a Yiddish newspaper. He read law journals, the New Republic, and a magazine having to do with government service. His newspapers and magazines were arranged in neat piles on a table in the living room near the bookcase that contained his law library. He was orderly and self-disciplined. He rose, prayed, ate, left for work—each act at a fixed time every weekday morning. On Friday afternoons he came home with flowers an hour before the start of Shabbos. Often on Sunday mornings he went shopping with my mother in a neighborhood grocery store run by an observant Jew. He did not read the Sunday comics or stories or novels, but was never disdainful toward those who did. He treated my mother with tenderness and respect. I li
ked him, my new father, Ezra Dinn, and was not sorry my mother had married again.

  I had asked my mother, shortly before she remarried, what her new name would be.

  “Dinn,” she said.

  “And my name?”

  “Ilana Davita Dinn.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the way it will be, Ilana.”

  “Not Chandal?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to lose Papa’s name.”

  “Your new father will adopt you and you will have his name.” “What does adopt mean?”

  She explained it to me. To take as one’s own child. Papers and courts and signatures and—a new name. I found I could not reconcile myself to no longer carrying my father’s name. I told myself I would do something about that one day.

  In the library at Sea Gate I asked the librarian one day if she knew the meaning of the word Chandal. She knew my name had been Chandal and was now Dinn. She searched for it in the dictionary on her desk and could not find it.

  “Perhaps it hasn’t any meaning,” she said. “Sometimes words and names refer to sounds and not to things or ideas.”

  I went to the shelves, found two more books by the author of the book I had read and returned, and brought them to the librarian. She stamped them and said, “I found your word. Chandal. I went to our largest dictionary. Not precisely that word, but the one closest to it.”

  She pointed to the huge dictionary she had brought over to her desk. I followed her finger and read, “chandala: an Indian of low caste: OUTCAST; UNTOUCHABLE; esp.: the son of a Sudra by a Brahman woman.”

  “I don’t understand what that means,” I said.

  She explained it to me.

  “But Chandal can’t mean that,” I said.