by Bari Wood
She took the ring off before she went to bed that night. It was too big and her grandmother would have loved it. Her grandmother had been Russian and nothing was ever too much for her. Rachel remembered having breakfast with her one morning in the enormous kitchen of the old apartment on West Seventy-second Street. Everybody else was out of the house. The old lady ate groats for breakfast with butter and she would talk about anything during the meals. Smallpox and the pogroms were two of her favorite subjects, and at breakfast she could be devastating. Rachel ate fast but not fast enough and as she cracked her boiled eggs, the bubbe opened her paper and cried “Oy . . . oy, vay iz mir. . . . Look at this.”
She shoved the paper right in front of Rachel’s face and there, on page one, was a news photo of a trolley accident in Chicago that the wire services picked up and printed across the country, and here it was on Seventy-second Street in front of her eggcup. The trolley had hit a gas truck and the truck exploded. Rachel couldn’t stop reading. Flame engulfed the trolley, the driver’s head was burning, the conductor was dead, and only the passengers in the back lived long enough to try to get out. And that’s how the cameraman caught them, mashed together at the exit door where the sheet of flame got them. They looked like sticks, all black stalks and angles, except for their heads which were charred ovals. The heads were all touching—as if they were telling secrets at the end. Rachel pushed the paper away and took her egg to the garbage can. Her grandmother took the paper back and looked steadily at the picture over her bowl of groats. She read slowly, moving her lips. Finally she looked up and smiled at her granddaughter.
“There was a Gordon on the trolley,” she said. “Andrew Gordon. Sam Gordon or Nat Gordon might be Jewish, might be. Andrew Gordon, never.” She folded the paper, satisfied. “There were no Jews on that trolley,” she said.
Chapter 4
The Rosses’ house stood alone and forlorn already, the windows were dirty, the grass needed cutting. Golda and Rachel looked out through Golda’s kitchen window for a first glimpse of Sutter Lane’s only black family.
“Bet he wears white silk suits and sells numbers,” Golda said.
“He’s a doctor,” Rachel said.
“Who moonlights as a pimp. Imagine being a pimp in Laurel.” Golda poured coffee. “If he’s smart he’ll sell the men . . .” she looked up at Rachel, “for instance Allan. Plenty of broads around who would pay good money for Allan.”
“Stop it, Golda.”
“He’s waiting to set the date, Rachel . . .”
“Adam’s only been dead . . .”
“One year, six months, three days, seven hours. How long you gonna wait? Even the Talmud says eleven months is long enough.”
A moving van pulled into Sutter Lane behind a black Cadillac. Golda was going full steam and didn’t notice.
“Okay, you’re almost young and still pretty, but how long will that last? Jacob can’t live forever and what happens when he dies? You could be forty by then, Rachel . . .” She’d be forty in a few years anyway. “Forty, and broke, with a kid that someone’s gonna have to spend thirty thousand dollars to send to college, or twenty thousand to marry off. You’ll really be a bowl of shit then, Rachel . . .” Rachel expected Golda’s eyes to look cold and bitchy, the way Rachel’s mother did whenever she talked about men or money, but Golda’s eyes were soft, full of concern.
“They’re here,” Rachel said. Golda ran to the window and stood next to Rachel as the van and car pulled into the Rosses’ driveway. A tall black man got out of the car and looked up at the house, then a woman got out. They stood still, then he took her hand, and all at once Rachel started to cry. “Rache, Rache,” Golda said, “I’m sorry. But everything I said was true. He’s a lovely guy, Rache. I envy you.” Golda looked out at the couple and suddenly she remembered the black cop . . . Adam’s friend . . . in the dark room, reaching for Rachel. Who knows what they’d said to each other in that room before Golda opened the door. Who knows what Rachel felt then and what she remembers. He was black, true, and a shitheel cop who probably only made twenty or thirty thousand a year. But he was the sweetest-looking man Golda had ever seen and there were, after all, some things that couldn’t be measured in money.
Dr. Garner answered the door. Golda smiled, all teeth.
“We’re not the welcome wagon,” Golda said, “but we got a whole bottle of brandy and I bet a drink sounds pretty good about now.”
He smiled and opened the door all the way. He was wearing wash slacks and a frayed dress shirt with the collar cut off, but he was the kind of man who looked neat no matter what.
He led them down the hall to the kitchen calling “Willa . . . Willa, company . . .”
The kitchen was already unpacked, empty boxes waited next to the back door, and Rachel thought the place looked and smelled cleaner than it ever had when Temma Ross lived there. She put the coffeepot on the stove as Willa Garner came into the kitchen. She had on a loose housedress-smock, bright cotton, still crisp after all the unpacking. She was much taller than Rachel, about Golda’s height, and a little overweight, with a handsome round face and big firm arms, and she moved slowly and confidently, making Rachel feel jerky and nervous.
They had coffee, cake, and brandy and they talked easily. The Garners came from the city. They had two sons, one seventeen, one fourteen, both living with Tom Garner’s mother on East Ninetieth Street until the school term ended. He’d bought a good practice in Lake Grove, and there was a good hospital nearby. He was an orthopedist. “ ‘Orthopods,’ we call ourselves,” he said, smiling. He walked around the back of Rachel’s chair and she smelled his sweat, sweet and sharp, and she thought of Hawkins again. The doorbell rang and for one crazy second she imagined that when Willa Garner opened the back door, she’d see him at last. But it was Reverend Ryder (she didn’t know his first name), pastor of the First Congregational Church. He was carrying a big, flat cake box and smiling.
“Cookies,” he said. “My wife baked them.” He was blushing and, standing right there in the middle of the kitchen, he raised the lid of the box and peered inside.
“Pistachio,” he said. “Peanut. Chocolate. They’re delicious, which I can vouch for personally since I ate half the top layer on my way over here.” He thrust the box at Willa, then sat down at the kitchen table next to Rachel.
“My, that coffee looks good.” Tom Garner poured some out and held up the brandy.
“Better than cream,” Garner said, and Ryder nodded.
“I’ve seen you in the bookstore,” Ryder said to Rachel. Rachel nodded and he held out his hand to her. “Ed Ryder,” he said. His skin was pink and his eyebrows and lashes pale blond. He leaned back, drank, ate the cookies, and talked to the Garners, but managed to include the other women. He told them where the church was, then brought out two wrinkled pamphlets.
“They’re about the church,” he said shyly. “Not the religion . . . the architecture. Our little church is well thought of . . . architecturally, that is . . .”
It got dark and Rachel knew she should leave. Levy had had Leah all day. It wasn’t fair for him not to have a hot dinner waiting. But she was comfortable here even though they were all strangers trying to get to know each other. She liked Willa, and Ryder’s shyness was appealing, and she could have put her head down while they were talking about the church, the deacons, and what Tom would have to do to join. . . . She could have laid her cheek against the pine-topped kitchen table and slept more peacefully than she had in months.
But she stood up, her eyes heavy and burning.
“I have to make dinner,” she said. Then impulsively she leaned down and kissed Willa on the cheek. “Call me tomorrow. Or come over. I live at number seventy, two blocks down toward town. . . .”
Willa Garner knew how to age cheese, pickle beef, and weather-strip windows. She could lay a slate floor and use a stone chisel. She knew things from anothe
r time. That adding a pinch of salt to wash water kept clothes from freezing on the line. That storing brown sugar in a tight jar with a slice of bread kept it moist. She knew how to garden and she taught Rachel. Golda wasn’t interested, but with Willa’s help Rachel planted zucchini, lettuce, broccoli, and ten tomato plants. She watered and watched the garden and, in June, when the first shoots of lettuce showed through the soil, she was so excited she ran the two blocks to Allan’s house and brought him back.
“What did you think would happen?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I honestly don’t know.”
But Levy acted as if no one had ever grown anything from a seed before. He got down on his knees in the dirt and clucked over the shoots, and when he asked which was which Rachel realized that she’d doubted the whole process so thoroughly she hadn’t bothered to label the rows.
She wouldn’t set a wedding date and, except for gardening, she drifted. She took Leah to Golda’s or Willa’s pool and she lay on her back out in the water listening to Leah laugh. Willa’s sons, Tom Jr. and Eric, came home in June and they drifted, too. The white children didn’t shun them, but they didn’t seek them out, and Rachel sensed in both of them, especially in Tom Jr., a pride that kept them from making the first move. So they lay by the pool, too. They swam, barbecued, read, played some gin. Tom Jr. wore a big Afro, thin at the ends, so his hair seemed to float around his head. Leah stood on her toes to reach for his hair and when he’d pick her up and let her touch it, she’d bury her small fat hands in it and get a look of perfect peace on her face. He let her crawl all over him. She pulled his hair, bent back his toes and fingers, punched him, and loved sleeping on top of him. When he lay on the grass on his stomach, she sprawled across the small of his back. When he lay on his back, she curled up on his chest like a cat.
In August Rachel and Willa took some extra vegetables to Reverend Ryder. At first Rachel felt shy about going inside. All her friends were Jews or atheists or had gotten married in a garden or on the side of a hill and she’d never been in a church before. She’d seen pictures of churches with beaked and taloned gargoyles clinging to fluted columns that rose into the stone ceilings, and when she went inside the plain frame Congregational church she thought she’d see the Virgin, draped in chiseled stone, melting eyes raised to heaven in torment, and a stone or stained-glass Jesus crucified, with blood running into his eyes from the thorns gouging his forehead and into his groin from the wound in his side. She expected Roman grand guignol with griffins and demons, writhing serpents, and saints in agony trapped against the walls, embedded in stone, staring out of perpetual gloom.
But the sanctuary, if that was what they called it, was high-ceilinged, light, and plain. The walls were white plaster, the windows were mullioned clear glass with sunlight coming through in bars, stripes, and rectangles. She expected to smell old books and incense. Instead she smelled beeswax and bayberry from the thin green candles in pewter sticks at the front of the church. They were the only decoration, except for a simple, elegant, maple pulpit and a milk-glass bowl of autumn flowers. She stood at the head of the aisle for a moment, then followed Willa, who seemed at home here, down to the platform-altar and up two steps and through a door to the reverend’s office.
Reverend Ryder gave them tea and he and Willa talked about the Harvest Bazaar, whatever that was, while Rachel looked around the room. The shelves were full of books by Calvin, Zwingli, Jonathan Edwards, and someone called Laud. There was a photograph on Ryder’s desk of a blond woman holding a boy and a girl on her lap. And another photograph of a fishing boat called the Lady Helena out of Montauk. In the case behind his desk she found books by Dorothy Sayers on religion, a complete set of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and a set of Chesterton and John D. MacDonald. The reverend had more mysteries than religious books. He saw her looking at them and said, “They have more ideas for sermons than all the tracts put together. For instance . . .” He took down Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. “In this one a man is murdered at his club and his body sits upright in his chair for two days before anyone notices. Two days. Of course, you can see the implications . . . the young woman who gets murdered on a street in Queens while thirty or forty or a hundred people refuse to notice. Or the poor old man who gets ill on the subway and falls off his seat while people snap open books and papers, terrified of noticing. But to do good you have to notice—” He stopped and laughed.
“You just heard the gist of last May’s prize sermon,” he said as he put the book back.
That afternoon she found a copy of Bellona Club in the shop and read it and for the next few weeks she read all the Wimsey books: The Nine Tailors, Murder Must Advertise, Whose Body? They were funny, sometimes good, sometimes silly. The deeper moral lessons of most escaped her, except that the code of honor of upper class England won out in the end.
In September she and Willa decided to pickle the extra tomatoes and Rachel went up to the attic to look for her father’s recipe. She found her old textbooks and her lecture notes. She pushed them back and closed the box because the lectures were Adam’s and the books were full of his margin notes. In another box she found her father’s recipes, all of her Jane Austen novels, and her old Shabbes school book.
She took it out, blew dust off the cover, and laid it flat on the floor in the light from the dormer window. Then she opened it and there in the centerfold, was the picture the clay had reminded her of. She saw a crooked, cobbled street and crooked, ugly houses with blank leaded windows that reflected nothing—she saw the old man in his rabbi’s hat. There was the twisting alley, and a shadow of something was coming up it. Something so huge its shadow blacked out the wall. The shadow was in the shape of a man, but too big to be a man.
Rachel read the first few paragraphs.
It wasn’t a man, but a monster shaped like a man. It was called a golem and it was made of clay. Clay.
That was the connection, Rachel thought. A child’s horror story that must’ve given her nightmares, and that came back to her when Ableson said clay. That simple.
She went back to the beginning and read the whole story . . .
An angel visited the great Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague late one night. The angel carried a glowing sword and wore a golden robe. He appeared against a backdrop of the ocean with waves rolling in on a lonely beach. As he came closer to the rabbi, the ocean disappeared. The rabbi saw his own bedroom wall behind the angel and he knew that he wasn’t dreaming. The angel came up to the rabbi’s bed and leaned close to him.
“On the first night of Passover, the Gentiles are going to attack the ghetto,” the angel told the rabbi. “Only you can save the Jews of Prague.”
“And how am I going to do that?” the rabbi asked gently.
The angel smiled and the whole room was filled with light. “You are going to build a golem.”
The rabbi resurrected ancient cabalistic formulas from the clues the angel gave him that night. Leaves appeared on the trees, grass turned green, and Passover was coming. The rabbi took two men—a Levite and a Kohen—to the banks of the river, away from the city. There they dug the river clay and molded it into the shape of a man. When they were done, the rabbi incised the sacred word on the forehead of the thing, and the three men followed the formulas the rabbi had unearthed. The figure glowed red, the glow faded, and then, slowly, painfully, a huge gray form rose up out of the mud and stood mute before them in the moonlight.
Rachel’s skin prickled as she read.
Three men had gone to the river, four came back.
They led the golem to the great Altneushul. They took it up the stairs to the shul attic and the other two men left the rabbi alone with the golem.
The rabbi studied his creation. It was huge, superhumanly strong, and mute. It shambled when it moved and seemed to have no mind of its own or capacity for feeling. He decided that the golem was more frightening th
an the Gentiles. He left it in the attic and spent the next days praying that he would never have to lead it down the narrow stairs.
But on the first night of Passover the Gentiles worked themselves into a frenzy and massed at the ghetto gate. They carried clubs, torches, swords. They killed the gatekeeper, battered down the heavy wood gates, and stormed into the ghetto. They found the Jews in their houses celebrating the first Seder, and they dragged them out into the streets. They beat them and beheaded some and set some on fire.
There was a picture of a wrecked house. It showed the broken door and through it the ruined Seder table. Chairs were overturned, wine glasses broken. The Seder plate lay in pieces on the floor and candles burned in the empty room. Rachel turned the page and kept reading.
The great rabbi saw the massacre, ran back to the shul, and led the golem down the stairs and across the empty sanctuary in the flickering torchlight that came through the window. The rampaging Gentiles had reached the synagogue. They were piling wood around the foundation to set it on fire when the rabbi opened the front doors and led the creature out. The rabbi released his hold on it and said to it, “Save us.” The golem stood without moving for a moment, its head raised. A hush came over the crowd in front of the synagogue as they saw the being that was shaped like a man, but too big to be one. The torches burned and everything was quiet while the golem and the Gentiles confronted each other. Then the golem took a step toward them. The ground shook when his foot came down and a terrified murmur started in the crowd. The golem took another step, then another. The murmur in the crowd turned to screams and they broke and ran, trampling the people in the back who didn’t move fast enough. In full panic the mob raced back through the narrow ghetto streets. Most made it over the wall, but the monster caught a few on the ghetto side and killed them by smashing in their heads or breaking their necks. The people on the other side of the wall listened to the shrieks of their companions and trembled, but they stood where they were, thinking they were safe. The golem reached the wall, stopped, and stared out over the top of the crowd. The Gentiles felt secure enough with the wall between them to raise their torches, shake their swords, and yell at the creature. It didn’t move; its huge head was a black mass against the gray night sky. The people got bolder, and a wave of them moved closer to the wall; but as soon as they did that, the golem raised its enormous fists, locked them, and brought them down on the top of the wall. With one blow it demolished the stone barricade that had enclosed the Jews of Prague, and, with defiant fury, it charged the city itself.
