by Erich Segal
After this hairs breadth rescue, it was Timothy she slapped for provoking her daughters.
“Nice boys never hit girls,” she chided, a lesson Tim might have better assimilated had he not on several Saturday evenings overheard his uncle roughing up his aunt.
Tim was as anxious to leave the house as they were to be rid of him. By the time he was eight, Cassie had given him a key threaded on a braid of yarn. Worn around his neck, this talisman gave him the freedom to roam abroad and vent his innate aggression in appropriately masculine activities like stickball and street-fighting.
He was not faint of heart. In fact, he was the only boy who dared to challenge muscular Ed McGee, the undisputed leader of the grade-school pack.
In the course of their brief but explosive battle in the playground, Tim caused extensive damage to Ed’s eye and lip, although McGee had managed to unleash a mighty left which nearly broke Tim’s jaw before the Sisters pulled the pugilists apart. The nuns’ intervention, of course, made them fast friends thereafter.
Though an officer of the law, his uncle nonetheless took pride in Tim’s fighting spirit. But Aunt Cassie was livid. She not only lost four days’ work in Macy’s lingerie department, but had to make endless ice packs for her nephew’s jaw.
In the Delaney family album, Tim had seen his mother, Margaret, and could discern a pale reflection of her in Aunt Cassie’s face.
“Why can’t I go and visit her?” he pleaded. “I mean, just say hello or something?”
“She wouldn’t even recognize you,” Tuck asserted. “She’s living in another world.”
“But I’m not sick—I’d know her.”
“Please, Tim,” his uncle insisted. “We’re doing you a kindness.”
Inevitably the day came when Tim learned what everyone else in his world had been whispering for years.
During one of their Saturday night bouts, he heard his aunt shouting at her husband, “I’ve had just about all I can take of the little bastard!”
“Cassie, watch your language,” Tuck upbraided her. “One of the girls might hear.”
“So what? It’s true, isn’t it? He’s my slut of a sister’s goddamn bastard and some day I’m going to tell him myself.”
Tim was devastated. In one blow he had lost a father and acquired a stigma. Trying to control his rage and fear, he confronted Tuck the next day and demanded to know who his real father was.
“Your Mom was very strange about it, lad.” Tuck’s face had turned crimson and he refused to meet Tim’s eye. “She never mentioned anyone—except this holy angel business,” he said, “I’m really sorry.”
After that, Cassie continued to find fault with whatever Tim said or did and Tuck simply avoided him whenever possible. Tim began to feel as if he were being chastised for his mother’s sins. How else could he describe his life with the Delaneys, except as perpetual punishment.
He would try to come home as late as possible. Yet when darkness fell, his friends would all disperse for dinner and he was left with no one to talk to.
The playground was dimly illuminated by a soft kaleidoscopic haze from the stained-glass windows of the church. Careful to avoid detection by the likes of Ed McGee, he would go inside. At first it was merely to warm himself. Gradually he found himself drawn to the statue of the Virgin and, feeling abandoned and lonely, he would kneel in prayer, as he had been taught.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena—Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women … Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now.…”
But even Tim himself could not fully understand what he was seeking. He was not old enough to comprehend that having been born in a web of questions, he was asking the Virgin Mother to deliver him from ignorance.
Why was I born? Who are my parents? Why doesn’t anybody love me?
Late one evening, as he wearily looked up, he thought—for a single fleeting instant—that he saw the statue smile as if it were saying, “One thing must be clear in this confused life of yours. I love you.”
When he went home, Cassie slapped him hard for being late for supper.
Deborah
Deborah’s earliest memory of Danny was the glint of the sharp knife moving toward his tiny penis.
Though there were people crowded all around her eight-day-old brother, she could see everything clearly from the arms of her mother, who was standing in a corner of the room, alternately staring and wincing.
Danny lay on a pillow on the lap of his godfather, Uncle Saul—actually a distant cousin, but his father’s closest male relative—whose strong but gentle hands were holding Danny’s legs apart.
Then the mohel, a tall, gaunt man in white apron and prayer shawl, placed a clamp around her brother’s penis and a bell-shaped metal shield that covered the tip down to the foreskin. At the same moment his right hand raised what looked like a stiletto.
There was a silent gasp as the males present all dropped their hands instinctively to cover their own genitals.
After rapidly reciting a prayer, the mohel pierced the baby’s foreskin and in a single motion, swiftly sliced the tissue all around the rim of the shield. Little Danny wailed.
An instant later, the ritual surgeon held up the foreskin for everyone to see, then dropped it into a silver bowl.
Rav Luria intoned the prayer in a mighty voice, “Blessed art Thou, O ruler of the world, Who has commanded us to make our sons enter into the covenant of Abraham our father.”
There was a sigh of relief, followed by a cheer.
A wailing Danny was returned to his beaming father.
Rav Luria then called out to everyone to eat, drink, sing, and dance.
Since the Code of Law demands it, the men and women were separated by a partition, but even from her mother’s side, Deborah could hear her father’s voice above all the others.
When she was old enough to speak full sentences, one of the first things Deborah asked her mother was whether there had been a similar celebration when she was born.
“No, darling,” Rachel answered gently. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you just as much.”
“But why not?” Deborah persisted.
“I don’t know,” her mother answered. “That’s the way the Father of the Universe ordained it.”
As time passed, Deborah Luria learned what else the Father of the Universe had ordained for Jewish women.
In the men’s morning prayers, there were benedictions to the Lord for every conceivable gift:
Blessed art Thou Who hast enabled the rooster to distinguish between day and night.
Blessed art Thou Who hast not made me a heathen.
Blessed art Thou Who hast not made me a female.
While the men were giving thanks for their masculinity, the girls had to be content with:
Blessed art Thou Who hast made me according to Thy Will.
Deborah was enrolled in a traditional “Beis Yakov” school, whose sole purpose was to prepare Jewish girls to be Jewish wives. There, they read the Code of Law—or at least a specially abridged version compiled for women in the nineteenth century.
Their teacher, Mrs. Brenner, constantly reminded the girls that they were privileged to help their husbands fulfill God’s injunction to Adam to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”
Is that all we are, Deborah thought to herself, baby machines? She did not dare ask it aloud, but rather waited impatiently for Mrs. Brenner to provide an explanation. The best her teacher could offer was that since women were created from one of man’s ribs, they are therefore only part of what men are.
Pious though she was, Deborah could not accept this folklore as fact. And yet, she did not dare give voice to her skepticism.
By chance, years later when he was in high school, Danny showed her a passage from the Talmud which she had never been allowed to read during her own education.
It explained why, during intercourse, a man must face down and a woman upward: a man looks at the ear
th, the place whence he came, a woman at the place where she was created—the man’s rib.
The more Deborah learned, the more she became resentful. Not only because she was regarded as inferior, but because the sophistry of the teachers tried to convince the girls that this was not really the case—even while explaining that a woman who gives birth to a boy must wait forty days before she becomes “pure” again, whereas one who gives birth to a girl must wait eighty days.
And why, when a tenth man was lacking to make a quorum needed for prayers, could no Jewish woman be counted as a substitute, although the tenth place could be filled by a six-year-old boy!
When in synagogue, she dared to peek over the curtain fringing the balcony where she sat with her mother and the rest of the women. She would look at the parade of old men and teenage boys called up to read the Torah and ask, “Mama, how come nobody up here ever gets a chance to read?”
And the pious Rachel could only answer, “Ask your father.”
She did. At lunch that Sabbath. And the Rav replied indulgently.
“My darling, the Talmud tells us that a woman should not read a Torah portion out of respect for the congregation.”
“But what does that mean?” Deborah persisted, genuinely confused.
Her father answered, “Ask your mother.”
The only person she could rely on for straight answers was her brother, Danny.
“They told us that if women stood in front of the male worshipers it would confound their minds.”
“I don’t get it, Danny. Could you give me a for instance?”
“Well,” her brother responded uneasily, “y’know. Like Eve when she gave Adam … you know …”
“Yes,” Deborah was becoming impatient. “That I do know. She made him eat the apple. So what?”
“Well, that sort of gave Adam ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Hey, Deb,” Danny apologized, “they haven’t told us that yet.” To which he added, “But when they do, I promise I’ll tell you.”
Ever since she could remember, Deborah Luria had wanted the privileges bestowed upon her brother at his circumcision; but as she grew up she was obliged to face the painful fact that she could never serve God to the fullest … because she had not been born a man.
Bantam Books by Erich Segal
ACTS OF FAITH
THE CLASS
DOCTORS
LOVE STORY
MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD
OLIVER’S STORY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erich Segal began his writing career with the phenomenally successful Love Story. He has written six other novels, including The Class, which was an international bestseller and won literary prizes in France and Italy. Doctors reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. His latest book is Prizes. Erich Segal has also written widely on Greek and Latin literature—subjects he has taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Oxford. He is married and has two daughters.
