A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  I devised a new and desperate strategy: if I demonstrate to them that I am the worst lunkhead of all, disruptive and incapable of further learning, certainly they’ll ask me to leave, as they did Ze’ev, a wild boy who peed into Reb Sender’s hat, but my daydreaming and rude remarks only brought my teacher’s attentions more virulently down upon my small person. There was no fooling Reb Sender. He was up to date on the most modern of pedagogical methods, and when he screamed at me or cuffed my ears, I learned my lessons fast.

  Every day I tried a new scheme, and every day it failed; and in the end, I succeeded only in convincing everyone how appropriate school was for me, until finally there was nothing to do but fold my hands and sit at the table like the other boys and read aloud from the books when I was asked to. The dark swirls of the curly alef-bais were no longer the evocative Rorschachs they had once been. No, somehow, they’d become the very sounds they symbolized, and no matter how hard I concentrated, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t unremember what they meant.

  I’d been tricked, I realized. I’d been tricked and there was no way back to the happy, illiterate savagery I’d known before.

  FORBIDDEN BOOKS WERE only the beginning. I began to smoke a pipe as well, and I knew no greater pleasure than hiding in my father’s cherry orchards, lying on a bench in one of his gazebos, smoking bowl after bowl while reading the illicit books Avrum supplied me, versions of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Shakespeare, expanded and improved upon (, as their title pages attested) by our Yiddish writers, as well as several Hebrew novels written by these same wicked men. I took precautions, of course, hiding my contraband beneath a loose plank in the gazebo’s flooring and concealing whatever book I was reading inside a folio of the Talmud, so if anybody chanced upon me, all he would see would be a young scholar absorbed in his learning, teasing out the arguments of Rava and Abaye over whose donkey should go first in a procession of scholars.

  On the day Sore Dvore discovered me, I was reading a novel by Mapu. Even more entranced than usual, hidden inside a fine cloud of tobacco smoke, I didn’t hear her calling me until she was only a foot or two away. Though I’d taken my usual precaution of concealing the forbidden novel inside a larger volume of Talmud, I’d lain on the bench with my head towards the house, so that all she to do was look over my shoulder for the charade to be exposed.

  She had no choice but to report everything to our mother, of course, who had no choice but to report everything to my father, of course, who had no choice but to prepare for me whatever punishment I had forced him to conceive. After all, nothing less than my place in the World to Come was at stake!

  Spewing forth a litany of curses (cf. Deuteronomy 28:15–68), Father dragged me to the rebbe, and I was made to sit between them as they hurled verse after verse of psalms over my head. (Though he’d married into an Hasidic family, Father was not himself a Hasid. He treated the rebbe of Szibotya with respect, but without reverence, and this was pleasing to the rebbe. The most learned men in our community, the two literally spoke each other’s language and could converse in it for hours.)

  Save me from this lion’s mouth (Psalms 22:22), my father pleaded. My heart is melancholy (13:3). Have truthful people vanished? (12:2)

  I’m perfectly innocent. I quoted a verse (18:24), attempting to give testimony at my own trial.

  He has raised his voice? (46:7). The rebbe looked at me critically.

  my father whispered. Desist! (37:8).

  It was decided the best thing Father could do was to marry me off — certainly at age twelve, I was old enough — and in this way saddle me, like a goring ox, with a wife and, may God smile upon us, with children, and quickly, too (my father emphasized), before I’d permanently deranged my mind with vile literature written by godless men who wanted only to destroy our people’s name, and also (the rebbe emphasized) before rumors of my conduct circulated widely enough to destroy all chances of a suitable match with a good, pious girl, under the obligation to care for whom, he was certain, I would return to my former self.

  Father shook his head. The boy is sick (1 Kings 14:5).

  the rebbe counseled him. Pick up your son (2 Kings 4:36).

  After burning the books and the pamphlets they’d found in my possession, the two negotiated my marriage contract with a family from a distant town.

  • • •

  IT PAINED ME that my marriage would be so different from my parents’, whose courtship, by all accounts, had been a storybook affair.

  Everyone knew that Father had been a sickly youth, so sickly, in fact, that no one had expected him to live. He was a sight to see: bruised patches colored the gaunt planes of his face; his chest sunk in so cadaverously his ribs could be counted with precision through his clothing, though he wore a jacket, a vest, a shirt, and a talis katan. When he coughed, spumes of bloody phlegm were torn from his lungs, which he spat into his handkerchief like dull red-green oysters. He carried a dozen fresh handkerchiefs with him each day, and each day these were ruined.

  Forbidden by his doctors to attend school, he’d developed an invalid’s propensity for study and dedicated the long hours in bed to the Talmud. Eventually his enormous learning entitled him, as was customary at that time and in that society, to the most covetable of rewards: a bride of his choice.

  And by seventeen, despite his ill health, he’d conceived a burning desire to marry.

  None of the local girls would have him, of course, and he was too aware of his deficiencies to force himself upon an unsuspecting girl through an arranged match. Partly to protect his pride and partly out of a fear of girls natural to an innocent young man, he was scrupulously forthright when it came to his courting, and naturally enough, the long line of maidens that paraded through my grandparents’ parlor took one look at this scrofulous hairball of a boy, coughed up, it seemed, by an ailing cat, and remembered more pressing engagements elsewhere.

  Many, I’m told, ran from the room without a word.

  Father endeavored to remain philosophical — God must have His reasons for visiting this plague of horrified girls upon him — but the rejection took its toll, and his parents despaired. Grandmother Sammelsohn cried, wringing her hands and pulling at her marriage wig. This bride-hunting was too much for her baby’s delicate constitution. The family physician and the family rabbi concurred. “The strain on his heart might prove mortal,” Dr. Kirschbaum announced. “Though a man is commanded to marry,” Rabbi Weissmann affirmed, “one may not sacrifice his life to carry out the commandments.”

  At one time adamant about his son’s need to carry on the family name, eventually even Grandfather Sammelsohn agreed. The boy would never be healthy enough to find a wife, and no girl in her right mind would have him.

  No one, however, bothered to ask Father his opinion, which he bothered to reveal to no one. Even then, he was an expert at effacing his true self. A lifelong invalid, he knew how to build a wall out of his symptoms and to hide himself behind it. Of course, he would never act against his parents’ wishes, but the truth is, he never stopped praying for a bride.

  IT HAD BEEN arranged for him to meet one last girl, and Grandfather Sammelsohn had been unable to send a letter in time to prevent her family from coming. They’d already begun the arduous trek from her town to his. (As Father was too ill to travel, the girls and their families came to him.) Grandmother Sammelsohn felt that canceling the tête-à-tête after the pains Mother’s family had taken in getting there would be unseemly. “They’ll come and go quickly enough,” she said. “What difference does it make? One look at Nosn and they’ll be out the door.”

  They waited one day, two days, three days for the girl to arrive, accompanied by her father and, no doubt, an uncle or two. They’d play out the charade one last time, their hearts no longer in it. Though they urged him to return to his bed, Father insisted upon waiting for their guests in his chair in the parlor, slouching with his legs pulled up high before him, his knees like doorknobs inside his best pants, a folio of the Talmud spread ac
ross his lap, his hair long and lanky, the odor of sickness hovering, like a rain cloud, almost visibly above his head.

  The clock ticked loudly in the otherwise silent room. At last, they heard the rumbling of a coach approaching, then stopping at their door. Concentrating on his blatt of Gemara, Father listened to the clicking and clacking of passengers as they disembarked and the trill of his mother’s voice as she welcomed their visitors into the hall. Father slouched farther into his black leather chair. One foot on its cushion, he crossed his legs, and his knobby knees were now higher than his head. (He was so thin his angular bones scraping against his clothing wore out the fabric in half the time it normally took.)

  “Alter Nosn!” his mother calls in to him.

  Pretending to be engrossed in his studies, Father pretends not to hear her. She enters the room with the small party of guests in her wake: my father’s uncle, the girl’s father, the girl’s uncle, and the girl herself.

  “Oh, look, he’s studying,” Grandmother Sammelsohn says, as though explaining a diorama in a museum. “Lost in thought. That’s our Alter Nosn, I’m afraid.”

  Father stutters out a chain of syllables and looks up from his book, blinking at them, as though into new light. Unlocking his long body from the chair, he stands, waiting for what he knows is coming next: ill-concealed disgust, quickly minted excuses, a hasty retreat from the room. Everyone avoids looking at one another until the girl’s father, seizing the moment and putting the best face on it, offers Alter Nosn his hand.

  Careful not to smile, lest he reveal the rickety picket fences of his teeth, Father places his hand, a cold dead fish, into the older man’s hand. (Years later, we would laugh at how Grandfather Horowitz reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and wiped his palm.) Everyone waits for the inevitable: the inevitable desperate looks between father and daughter, the inevitable noticing of the clock, the inevitable remarking on the lateness of the hour, the inevitable remembering of the pressing appointment, their inevitable and immediate departure.

  Grandfather Sammelsohn clears his throat and is about to speak, when my mother says, “I fear it may seem rude” — occasioning knowing looks from every side — “but the long trip by coach has left us parched.” They lean in: this is something they’ve never heard before. “And I do so worry over my father’s health” — ah, here it comes, here it comes now, bring their coats, their hats — “and I’m wondering if we might trouble you for a place to sit and a glass of tea?”

  That was my mother. She possessed a flair for the dramatic reversal. From the few photographs of her from that time, one can see that she keeps the great sweep of her caramel-colored hair in a high, muscular pompadour. Her cheeks radiate an ecstasy of blushing. Her white teeth flash each time she throws back her head to laugh. Her torso and rib cage are robustly articulated; her bosoms, straining against her bodice, are like two scoops of ice cream on a spoiled child’s plate. Each of her arms is larger in diameter than my father’s neck. Through the shimmer of her skirt, you can see the magnificent strength of her haunches, as strapping as a young colt’s. And yet, at sixteen, despite her monstrously good health, there’s nothing masculine about her at all. She’s soft, spherical, thoroughly estrogenic, her hips muscularly wide as though engineered specifically for the vigorous work of childbearing.

  And now it is my Grandmother Sammelsohn’s turn to search for a polite excuse. With a mother’s concern, she regards her future daughter-in-law, this Brünnhilde stepped off the stage of some Wagnerian nightmare, with unadulterated horror, certain that if her stick-figure son pursues a marriage to this Amazon, he will survive neither the rigors of his wedding night nor the travails of the marriage bed.

  What to do?

  Grandmother Sammelsohn coughs and fidgets. She fingers the watch she wears on a gold chain around her neck with her stubby fingers. She makes suggestive nods towards her brother, my great-uncle Chaim-Mottle, who, to her dismay, seems as enchanted as his nephew by this radiant, gracious horse of a girl, now serving tea and passing around the mandelbrot her mother baked for them.

  Grandfather Horowitz, his plump hands on the head of his cane, his curly black beard bristling with pride, sits at my mother’s side like a barker at a carnival showing off the strong man: Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen! Behold this marvelous creation, this strapping lioness that I have produced … yes! … from my very own loins!

  Had my father been a normal man and not a pious scholar, he would have been unable to take his eyes off my mother. As it was, she was so beautiful, he forbade himself to glance at her even once. Instead, crumpled up like a damp handkerchief in his chair, one long leg looped around the other, his chest sunken deeper than usual by his slouching posture, his pallor as moldy as cheese, he attempted, when the tubercular coughing to which he was subject permitted it, to make learned conversation with the men, quoting this or that Gemara, this or that Mishnah, this or that word of this or that sage, demonstrating his value as a potential husband to this vibrant girl, surprising himself, no less than the others, by the seductive brilliance of his remarks.

  Indeed, Father was so smitten that at one point, when his and Mother’s eyes accidentally met across the parlor table, he blushed so deeply his face took on the mottled color of a bruise. Embarrassed, he looked down at the crumbs in his lap and then raised his tearful, bloodshot eyes to take in the new family portrait before him.

  Unable to suppress a grin, he revealed to the others all the grey luster of his translucent teeth.

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE for Grandmother Sammelsohn to protest. How could she when her son had been refused by girls with squints and incipient mustaches and small disfiguring humps? As formal promises were exchanged over the dregs of Russian tea, she excused herself politely, went into her kitchen, and vomited. Her kerchief balled up in her fist, she beat her breast, wailing quietly enough that no one in the adjoining rooms might hear her.

  She wasn’t alone in her concerns. No one in the entire town expected Father to survive until the wedding. The strain on his heart would prove too great, they said. He was so skinny, you could almost see it (his heart, I mean) pounding like a fox against the bars of his rib cage whenever Mother walked into a room. The excitement was taking its toll. He could hardly sleep. He exhausted himself each night staring at the ceiling in anticipation of the dawn. In the morning, a day nearer to claiming his beloved, he was too excited to eat. He sat at the table and allowed Grandmother Sammelsohn to serve him, though he couldn’t touch a bite.

  How long could he burn like a Havdalah candle with all his wicks in flame?

  “She’ll be a widow longer than a bride,” the townspeople whispered. “If she doesn’t smother him with affection, she might just smother him,” they didn’t even bother to whisper. “Alter Nosn, eat, rest, consider your health!” my grandmother Sammelsohn pleaded with him, but all in vain.

  Lovesick and simply sick, Father abandoned himself to the wedding preparations, studying through the long night, his body bent like a question mark over his Gemara, memorizing every word our Sages had uttered on the subject of spousal duty, so depleting himself in the process that eventually he could barely speak. His voice sounded like a piece of crumbled rice paper, all crackles and pops and sibilant hisses, and to everyone’s surprise, when the morning of the wedding arrived, he was alive to see it, although how well was the question: his vision had begun to fail.

  WHAT NO ONE understood, of course, was what my mother saw in him, and yet she seemed as smitten as he, and as eager to have the wedding contract signed. What no one knew, indeed what no one could have possibly known, is that for many weeks before they met, Father had appeared to Mother each night in a series of dreams. In one, he offered her an iridescent fish; in another, a basket of ripe fruit; in a third, a tin box filled with cookies shaped like the letters of the alef-bais. These, he hurled high into the air and, as they fell, they flashed out cryptic sentences in rapidly changing constellations. Upon awakening, Mother scribbled down what she c
ould remember of them in a diary she kept near her bed. Realizing, too late, that in rushing to document this dream on a Saturday morning, she had unintentionally violated the Sabbath, she threw down the pen, and when she peered at the words again later, they made no sense to her at all:

  Using Almoli’s famous dreambook, she took all sorts of arcane stabs at what this emaciated apparition might mean, never for a moment thinking his nightly appearances might contain the slightest bit of prophecy. Still, there is no dream without its interpretation, and in her prayers she begged her great-great-great-grandfather, the Seer of Lublin, to intervene on her behalf, to petition the archangel Gabriel to unlock the secret meaning of these visitations. The seer proved unable to move Heaven in this regard, however. Appearing to her one night in a luminous white robe, he counseled patience: “Wait, my daughter,” he said. “The best is yet to be.”

  And so when she strode so purposefully into the Sammelsohn parlor, following her uncle and her father, and saw the wretched invalid sitting there like a waterlogged scarecrow, she couldn’t help giving out a happy gasp of recognition. Here was the boy with the fish, the boy with the fruit, the boy with the cookies and the dozen and one other things he’d presented to her each night. The excitement she felt in having at last solved a puzzle and the dizzying sense of transformation it foretold stayed with her throughout their short engagement and did much to compensate her for the repulsion she felt at the sight of my father’s physical person.

  “Obviously God has intended me to marry him,” she told her worried parents.

  THE WEDDING DAY was sparkling, immaculate, the sunlight seeming to illuminate everything from within. The pink cherry blossoms trembled in the wind. The windows of the buildings along the main road, scrubbed clean for the occasion, dazzled the eyes of the only people up at sunrise to see them: the milkmen and the garbage collectors and my father who watched these men making their rounds from his room at a local inn.