by Julia Dahl
“And there’s something else,” said Schlomo. “Sammy has accused a man of sexual abuse.”
“What do you mean, accused?” I asked.
“My brother attends shul with Eli,” he said. “He told me that Eli was very upset about it.”
I waited for more. “And?”
Schlomo shrugged. “And?”
“What’s being done? Who is this person?”
“Eli told my brother that it was someone at Sammy’s yeshiva. He went to the rebbe and the rebbe told him that the man denied it, and that one little boy’s story was not enough to take the matter further.”
Isaac and I looked at each other. We both knew that sexual abuse was not discussed in the community. Men were accused quietly. Occasionally, someone left a job at a yeshiva. The secular authorities—the police—were never involved, at least not for long. A moser was the lowest of the low.
“When did this happen?”
“My brother was not specific,” said Schlomo.
“Is Sammy still attending the yeshiva?”
“I do not know.”
We were all silent for what seemed like a very long time. I took a bottle of wine upstairs with me and as I lay in bed I decided that I had to try to help Sammy. You were safe with your father and his family; I would not have made your life better by entering it after so many years. But Sammy needed me. And I was not going to run away from him.
Isaac drove with me to Eli’s house. I had not been to Roseville since Rivka died there twenty years earlier. I couldn’t fathom why my family would live in the place that had killed my sister. Isaac said the rebbe had encouraged people to leave Brooklyn in the years following the riots in Crown Heights, and my brother was not one to disobey the rebbe.
I don’t know how I expected Eli to react to my surprise visit. I suppose I thought my presence, after so many years, might soften him—or at least shake him into recognizing how terrible what had happened to Sammy was, and how important it was to show him that he would be protected in the future. But that is not how he reacted.
“This is not a good time for a visit, Aviva,” said Eli when he answered the door.
“I am not here for chitchat,” I said, pushing past him. Penina was sitting on the sofa bed, her hair beneath an ugly velvet snood, feeding the disabled son something from a jar. He sat in a wheelchair, his head propped up by a kind of collar connected to the back of the chair. Half of what should have gone in his stomach was smeared on his bib.
“I want to know what you are doing to keep Sammy safe. Have you reported this man to the police?”
Eli sighed. In the ten years since I had seen my brother he had aged tremendously. Both he and Penina had gained weight. Their skin was yellow and their eyes were gray and their home stank of grease and spoiled milk and urine.
“Aviva, I do not know what you have heard.…”
“I have heard Sammy was molested! Is that true?”
“That is what he says.”
“What he says? Are you saying you don’t believe him?” I had gotten myself worked up on the drive; I anticipated his condescension and I practiced the way I would respond. I would make him see how he had failed. I would make him see that Sammy needed me.
“I am not saying that,” said Eli.
“How could you let this happen! How could you not do anything!”
The boy in the wheelchair grunted. His sidecurls were flat, one halfway in his mouth, caked with food.
“Aviva, please,” said Eli, walking toward the boy. “Not so loud. David…”
“Where is he?” I said, ignoring my brother’s plea. “I want to speak with him.”
“Sammy is at yeshiva…”
“You sent him back there?” I screamed.
Before Eli could answer David swung his arm forward, knocking the spoon and jar from Penina’s hands, sending them flying into the wall. He began screaming, high-pitched shrieks in short bursts. Penina stood up and went to the kitchen without a word. She returned with a towel and a new spoon. She wiped the spilled food from the wall and the carpet, and then sat back down on the sofa. Her face was slack. David kept screaming. The noise was terrifying. A boy his size behaving like an infant, like an animal.
“I know you do not care about our community anymore, Aviva,” said Eli, raising his voice above his son’s cries. “But I spoke with the rebbe and he does not permit taking an accusation to police if you have not witnessed the crime with your own eyes.”
“The rebbe? Who gives a shit what the rebbe says! Sammy is your brother. Can’t you think for yourself, Eli? Can’t you feel! Sammy needs you!”
Eli was unmoved. “He will attend a different yeshiva next year. A big fuss will make shidduch difficult for Sammy and the girls. And we just can’t be sure.”
And that was the end of it, as far as Eli was concerned. How can you argue with someone so brainwashed that he is more concerned about a fuss than the rape of his brother? You cannot. But I was no longer twenty years old and frightened. Eli could not shame me into running off and leaving him to do what was “best” for my family. On the drive home I told Isaac I wanted to move upstate.
“I can’t live in Roseville,” I said. “But I have to be closer. I have to be there for Sammy.”
Isaac told me he had heard about a house like the one in Coney Island—a house for wayward Jews—in New Paltz.
“I’ll go with you if you go,” said Isaac. “I’m done with Brooklyn.”
A month later, Isaac and I moved into the farkakte house in New Paltz. The yellow paint was chipping and the porch sagged and the bedrooms had been partitioned off like a bunkhouse, with patchwork carpet and sloping floors. The house belonged to a man from Marine Park who’d bought it in foreclosure and turned it into a temporary residence for Jews coming from Brooklyn or Israel. He’d separated the three bedrooms upstairs into a maze of six little rooms each with space for a single bed or a bunk bed and a pile of clothes in a basket in the corner. When Isaac and I moved in there were two families living there, each with three children. We had to walk through one another’s bedrooms to get to the upstairs bathroom. Outside, there was space for a little garden, and you could walk to the main street. I bought a Nissan from a graduating senior at SUNY New Paltz and put paper fliers advertising housekeeping on bulletin boards around the campus. Soon, I had as many clients as I could handle.
I wrote to Sammy with my new address and he wrote back. When I called, he picked up the phone. He asked if he could come visit me and I didn’t bother telling him to ask Eli. The next Sunday morning I picked him up a quarter mile from his house, behind a ladies’ clothing store, and we went to Stewart’s for ice cream cones. We sat on the bench outside and watched the people come and go, filling up their cars with gas, buying groceries and lottery tickets. I didn’t ask him about yeshiva, and he didn’t mention it. Sundays became our day. That summer we had picnics in Harriman State Park and when it got cold we went to the Galleria mall in Poughkeepsie and saw movies at the theater. Sometimes Isaac came with us, and sometimes Sammy helped us with projects at the yellow house. Within a year, the families had left and it was just me and Isaac, plus the occasional Borough Park refugee needing a place to stay for a few days or weeks. We tore up the ugly carpet and got on our hands and knees to sand the floors beneath. We dug a garden, and by the third year we were growing tomatoes and herbs and green beans and squash. Sammy loved it. Manual labor was not encouraged in Roseville; extra time is spent studying. Isaac had begun working odd jobs for a contractor in New Paltz, and he taught me and Sammy how to use an electric drill and a level. For my birthday one year, Sammy surprised me with a window box for flowers. He said the work made him feel strong. He asked me and Isaac if we thought someday he could make a living using his hands.
“There are people moving to Roseville all the time,” he told us. “Maybe I could help build houses like Isaac?”
“You can do whatever you want,” I told him. “You have so much life ahead of you.”
One week, a girl was with Sammy when I got to our meeting spot.
“Can Pessie come, too?” he asked me.
“Why not?” I said. And off we went, with Pessie in the backseat. Immediately I could see why Sammy liked Pessie so much. She had as much energy as he did, and a wild, fantastic imagination. She reminded me a little bit of Gitty when she was a girl, although she wasn’t as mischievous. Pessie could make up a story that took an hour to tell. She could stand in an empty yard and find as much to do as if she were in the middle of Times Square. She was a tiny thing, with frizzy brown hair and an underbite. She wore the frum uniform—blue button-up blouse, long black skirt, ballet flats—which made her look ten even as she turned into a teenager. She was very different from me at her age—I had been more restless, always looking for a button to push, a dark place to explore—but when I looked at Pessie I remembered how little I knew about the world as a child. And when she came to me and asked about the blood in her underwear I knew they still weren’t teaching girls about their bodies. We went to the drugstore for pads and the bookstore to look at Our Bodies, Ourselves. Pessie couldn’t take a book like that home, but I bought it for her, and she read it when she came to visit.
Sammy was more alive with Pessie beside him. They talked over each other, excited and overflowing with stories and details about this neighbor who smelled bad and that cousin whose wife had stopped shaving her head. One afternoon, as we sat around my kitchen table drinking Cokes and eating Doritos Cool Ranch chips—Sammy’s favorite—Pessie said that her older sister had just gotten engaged to a boy from Borough Park.
“She is scared,” Pessie said.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Eighteen.”
“Does she love him?”
Pessie shrugged. “No. But my mommy says that eighteen is too young for love. She says you get married first and then Hashem brings you love.”
“I fell in love when I was eighteen,” I said. “With a goy.”
For a moment, Pessie and Sammy, who were probably sixteen at the time, were speechless. They looked at me, and then each other, and then Isaac, trying to decide if I was teasing them.
“No, you didn’t,” said Sammy, his lips furry with yellow powder.
“I did,” I said. “His name was Brian.”
“Was he Chassidish?” asked Pessie.
I shook my head. “He was studying to be a Christian minister.”
They looked so shocked, I laughed.
“Does Eli know?” asked Sammy.
“He only knows I left with a man for a little while. He doesn’t know what happened while I was gone.”
“What happened?” said Pessie, leaning in, ready for gossip.
“Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes!” screamed Pessie. Sammy and Isaac exchanged a look. Perhaps I should have read something into it, but I didn’t. I was ready to tell them. I was thinking that knowing something about my life that no one else in the family knew might make Sammy feel closer to me. I told them about the bookstore in Manhattan and the pool at the YMCA and the trips to Coney Island and the bus to Florida. I told them about living in the college dorm and about your grandfather’s job at Disney World. Pessie asked lots of questions, but Sammy was quiet. I keep looking at him, trying to figure out what he was thinking, but his face gave nothing away.
“What was your wedding like?” asked Pessie.
“We did not get married,” I said.
“Sammy said you were married, though.”
“That was later. In Israel. Brian and I were engaged, but things changed.” I looked at Sammy. I needed to see his face as I said this. “I had a baby.”
Pessie gasped. “A baby!” Sammy looked up, finally. Curious.
“A little girl,” I said. “I named her Rebekah, after our sister Rivka.”
“Did she die?” asked Sammy.
“No,” I said.
“Then why did you come home?”
“I came home because Mommy died and you were born,” I said. It was not a good excuse, but it was better than the truth—and it was partly true. I skipped the part where I snuck out in the middle of the night, and I skipped Gitty entirely.
“I was very young. I did not know how to be a mother.”
Sammy and Pessie were both silent for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell what the slightly scrunched expression on Sammy’s face meant. Pessie spoke first.
“Do you miss her?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every single day.”
“Where is she?” asked Sammy.
“She is in Florida, with her father.” As I said it, though, I realized I wasn’t certain. All those years talking to you, Rebekah, I did not allow myself to imagine that something might have happened to you. Or to Brian. I suddenly felt unsteady. What if I was talking to a ghost?
I must have looked as woozy as I felt because Pessie put her hand on mine.
“Don’t worry, Aviva,” she said. “We promise not to tell. Right, Sammy?”
Sammy nodded. After we dropped them off in Roseville that evening, Isaac and I went out to dinner at a tavern near campus.
“I wish you hadn’t asked them to keep a secret,” said Isaac.
“What do you mean?”
“This man,” he said, and the way he looked at me told me that he was talking about the person who had molested Sammy. “The way he talks about him … one minute he is almost … tender. And then he becomes angry and embarrassed. He said that when he thinks about the man he sometimes gets…” Isaac did not finish, but I understood.
“He said that?” I whispered.
Isaac nodded. “Not in exactly those words, but yes.”
“Did he say what happened?”
“He said it started with washing. Washing their hands together in the yeshiva kitchen. He said the man taught him to bake challah. I believe he may have been the school cook, not a teacher, although Sammy won’t tell me his name. He said soon after they would wash their whole bodies. The man washed Sammy, and then had Sammy wash him. And then … then he told Sammy to touch him. Kiss him…” Isaac took a deep breath. He wasn’t giving me all the details, but I didn’t push. It was enough.
“And he told Sammy to keep it a secret,” I said, feeling feverish with dread, abandoning my meal.
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes. I should have known better.
“I have read about men like this,” Isaac continued. “They find the boys with difficult family lives. They do things that are too shameful to say out loud. Sammy knows what the man did was wrong, but I think he is almost as afraid of people knowing as anything else. And now that he is becoming a man, he is mixed up. He asked me if I thought he was gay if it feels nice when he thinks about kissing a man instead of a woman.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I didn’t know. I said that if he is gay, there is nothing wrong with that. I told him that just because a man made him … do sexual things, it doesn’t mean he is gay. But if he is gay, it may be one of the reasons this man chose him. Men like that—they can tell who is different.”
The next time I saw Sammy he didn’t mention my secret or his, and when he turned eighteen, he told us that he and Pessie were engaged.
“Are you happy?” I asked him.
Like me, Sammy was not a good liar. “Pessie will make a good wife,” he said, but his voice did not sound like his own.
Two months later, Sammy broke off the engagement and Eli sent him to a camp that was supposed to fix gay boys. Three weeks in, he shaved off his sidecurls and came to live with me and Isaac in the yellow house.
A month after that, he met Ryan Hall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
REBEKAH
According to my GPS, it’ll take about an hour to get from Roseville to 444 County Route 81, the address for Ryan Hall. The Google map says the location is between a small airfield and something called Winters’ Feed. I get on the Thruway and head north toward the Catskill mountains. Signs indi
cate ski areas and campgrounds, farm stands, firewood, and county fairs. I pass apple orchards and creeks running under the highway, and start seeing license plates from Quebec.
I take the exit for Catskill and follow Route 145 to Route 81, but my reception is spotty and I overshoot the address and end up back on 145, somehow. The roads are badly marked, and there are huge spaces between the houses. I’ve been spoiled reporting in the city the last year. It’s hard to get really lost in New York—there’s always somebody around to ask directions, and 178 Broadway is right next to 180, which is right next to 182. At first I was always forgetting to ask whether it was East or West Fourth Street, or if it’s Third Street not Third Avenue, but in most cases—except when you’re on Staten Island, where I haven’t been since my car died—you can hop on the subway and get back to someplace you know easily. In Florida, and up here, county routes become different county routes without signage. Landmarks—a gas station, a house with a purple barn—are how you tell where you are, but if you’ve never been to where you’re going, landmarks are meaningless.
I double back and ride the brakes (much to the chagrin of the Chevy behind me) for about a mile until I spot a crooked mailbox set inside an old milk jug with three stickers—444—affixed to the side. I can’t see a house from the road. The trees are bare, but thick, and the dirt driveway is dotted with rusted NO TRESPASSING! signs posted on both sides. A low fence strung with barbed wire enforces the dictate. After a few hundred yards, a clearing appears, and in it are a two-story house that looks at least a hundred years old and three mobile homes—one half-destroyed by fire. A dark-coated pit bull-rottweiler-lab mix comes racing toward my car, barking a manic fit two feet from the driver’s side door. My first guess is that no one is on the property. The only vehicle is a gray minivan, its back window taped over with plastic and weeds growing up past the floorboards. The blue paint on the house’s siding is chipped and faded to nearly white, and there is a scar across the façade where an overhang was once affixed. A gutter that should probably be somewhere along the roof is leaning against a tree. There are shutters on two of the four front windows, and an assortment of chairs—including a wheelchair—on the front porch. The dog feels like it is barking inside my head, the noise pushing on the dull ring from that stupid gunshot. I am about to back up when a girl about my age flings open the front door of one of the intact trailers and screams, “Junior!”
