The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  When Rosalie called the camp director, she was told that Lenny was beginning to make friends and she should give it another week before speaking to him directly. The director called a few days later and calmly stated that Lenny was running a fever that spiked from 101 to 104.

  “Your son is very sick,” he said. “How soon can you get him?”

  “Turn here,” says Rosalie. “This is the road.”

  Sol asks her again about Natalie, and then says he remembers—all of a sudden! a miracle!—that Beth is the one who walks with a cane.

  We are trapped, thinks Rosalie. In this car, in this synagogue, in this box of a life. If only. If only she and Sol could start all over with new lives. She would be the rabbi. A rabbi without a pulpit. She would be the kind of rabbi who could receive the questions: What language does God speak in my ear when I kneel over a bathtub to scour it clean? What story does God tell when I unload sacks of groceries from the station wagon and my life feels so narrow? Rosalie would be good at answering these; she would have no need to conjure up metaphors that could serve as guideposts for what she knew in her heart. And if she were the rabbi, Sol would be no rabbi at all. He would wake up, daven, put away his tefillin and drive to the hardware store, where he could talk about kitchen faucets with earned authority. Brushed nickel coordinates with any backsplash would be his holy motto, his proclamation of faith. And with another kind of life she would not have had to leave Walter behind at Eden Ranch. She would be a rabbi and she would be married to Sol and married, quite differently, to Walter. There would be no need to ever say goodbye.

  The camp director is waiting in the parking lot. He hands Sol a clipboard, asks him to sign release papers for his son.

  “If he were my kid, I’d go directly to a hospital.”

  “Why didn’t you—” shouts Sol.

  “Never mind,” says Rosalie. A counselor brings Lenny to the car; he shivers beneath a gray camp blanket.

  “Thank God you came,” Lenny says. “I can’t get warm.”

  Sol helps Lenny into the backseat and Rosalie sits beside him, offering her lap as a pillow.

  They drive in silence and Rosalie lays her hand on Lenny’s forehead.

  “Is he asleep?” asks Sol.

  “Yes. A bit cooler now too. Let’s get him home.”

  Sol peers into the rearview mirror. Rosalie’s eyes are closed.

  “Are you awake, Rosalie?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve been wondering about Walter,” says Sol.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I think of him often. Did I ever thank you for saving me with that material? The purple binder.”

  Rosalie looks out the window. The rain has stopped completely.

  “You don’t need to thank me.”

  “But I didn’t thank Walter.”

  “No need to, Sol. He knows.”

  Sol peers into the rearview again and bites his lip. “I think about him more than I let on,” he says.

  Don’t encroach on my story, thinks Rosalie. The place in the Venn diagram where Walter touches you is not the place where he touches me. She imagines Walter’s hand between her legs, then blocks the memory. Don’t go there, she thinks. Not now, with Lenny, with this. Sol can have his little fantasy of the storybook man who showed up at the Seminary so many years ago with his sil batta, but you, Rosalie Kerem, are played out. No more illusions. No more Walter.

  She holds Lenny tighter.

  Lenny’s pediatrician orders a biopsy and arranges for him to be admitted to the hospital. A new doctor invites them into his office and rambles through phrases that are as coded and incomprehensible as Pig Latin. Cells are out of control. Hodgkin’s lymphoma. No longer treatable. The troops will be home in a month, maybe two. Keep him comfortable. Normalize. The best we can do will have to be enough. I’m only saying this because you are a religious family but God has designs on him.

  “I’m the rabbi here!” Sol shouts. “You’re a fucking MD. Don’t bring God into this!”

  Rosalie places her hands over her eyes and begins to heave.

  Sol mutters something under his breath in Hebrew. He reaches for Rosalie and she pulls away.

  “Rosalie. God is challenging us—”

  “Don’t touch me and don’t say a word to me,” she shouts. “Not about God and not about what you think and not about anything I don’t want to hear. Don’t ever talk to me again, Sol. Never. Again. Ever.”

  The next day Sol breaks into a tirade about how Camp Herzl made his son sick and he phones an attorney. Rosalie stays in the hospital with Lenny and returns home for a few hours at a time. When she decides it’s time to break the news, she dials Charlie, hollers for Philip to pick up the phone in another room and for Sol to pick up the phone in the study, linking them around the impossible words that Sol mutters to all of them.

  After his initial horror Charlie says he’s not surprised.

  “Based on what information?” asks Rosalie.

  “We had that clubhouse out back when Lenny was about five, remember? Gosh, I loved that place. I lorded over my brothers, we pummeled Philip, we mocked Lenny for being such a mama’s boy.”

  “It was the Wild West back there.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” says Charlie. “And you never will. But one Shabbat afternoon Philip shared a cigarette butt he found in the house.”

  Rosalie sighs. She would occasionally smoke when she spoke to Walter or Madeline late at night, and she sometimes forgot to empty the ashtrays.

  “It was Philip’s first toke and Lenny asked to try it also and I told him he could die if he smokes tobacco and he turned to me and said, ‘I will die before both of you, Charlie.’ I told him to stop being an idiot and he just walked away and we never talked about it again.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” says Rosalie, wishing it were so. “Lenny has always been a dreamy boy. That’s all.”

  Rosalie is an agent of efficiency and detail. She clutches a datebook whose pages are black with doctors’ names and a maze of schedules. When she’s not at the hospital, she scours medical journals and loads a file cabinet with articles about treatments and medication trials. Sol asks the congregants to pray for Lenny, and Rosalie asks Nathan Samuels to send a note to the congregation, asking that they be left alone. No unsolicited advice. No alternative therapies. It is too late.

  Rosalie moves into Lenny’s hospital room and sleeps on a chair beside his bed. Sol delivers corned beef sandwiches that no one bothers to eat. Charlie takes a leave of absence from college and moves back home. He and Philip embark on a mission to teach Lenny all the things he will miss in his abbreviated life. Every afternoon they coax Rosalie to leave Lenny’s room for an hour and demand that the nurses keep the door shut. Philip steals a steering wheel from his driver’s ed class and shows Lenny how to drive. Charlie unpacks a collection of Penthouse magazines and talks to Lenny about sex, and then hands him a cheeseburger. “You’ve got to taste some trayf,” shouts Charlie. “Transgression is delicious.”

  “No appetite. What else do you have for me?”

  Charlie reaches into his knapsack.

  “Everyone is reading this up at school.” He reads aloud from Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book: “Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free.”

  “Sounds exhausting,” says Lenny.

  Charlie tells Lenny that most of what Sol taught them about Judaism is a myth. “We were never in Egypt,” he says.

  “I don’t believe you,” says Lenny.

  “There is no proof,” says Charlie.

  “This is proof enough,” says Lenny. “My suffering is Egypt. It’s a metaphor, like Mom always says.”

  “Even the metaphors are lies,” says Charlie.

  “But they told us—”

  “You really be
lieve everything they taught you?”

  “Abba is a rabbi and Mom knows so much,” says Lenny.

  “That doesn’t mean they always speak the truth.”

  “And does your Abbie Hoffman do any better?”

  Later that night Lenny tells Rosalie she fell asleep in her bedside chair and called out a man’s name.

  “Whose name, sweetheart?”

  “Walter. You called out the name Walter and you were crying.”

  “I’m sorry, Lenny. You don’t need to be burdened with my problems.” She forces a smile.

  “Who is Walter?”

  “A friend,” says Rosalie. “Your father and I had a good friend.”

  “And?”

  “There’s nothing to say. It’s over now.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “No. Just out of touch.”

  “That’s sad. You could use more friends in your life. Those congregants are so fake.”

  “They leave messages on our answering machine every day. Those fake congregants care about you, sweetheart.”

  “It makes them feel better to pretend to care,” says Lenny. “Part of the unwritten contract in our shul. How many of them ever talked to me? Serena once asked me if I got good grades in school. Missy and Nathan used to pinch my cheeks. These people saw me every Shabbat for my whole life—they watched me grow up!—and all along I was just their scenery.”

  “So are we,” says Rosalie, her voice drifting.

  “Charlie is teaching me about sex,” says Lenny. “And about trayf—at least he’s trying to. And about Abbie Hoffman. Charlie is joining the revolution, Mom. He’s keeping a running list for me that he calls ‘Lies and Illusions that Abba Delivers from the Bima.’”

  “It must be a long list.”

  “It’s Charlie’s list, not mine,” says Lenny.

  “And what’s on your list, sunshine?”

  “I used to wish you were the rabbi. The words Abba spoke would have sounded so much better coming from you. When he was good he reminded me of you.”

  Two days later Lenny develops an infection and slips into a coma. Rosalie rests her head close to his, warming his cheeks with her breath. Sol stands by the window and davens, and Charlie and Philip sit cross-legged on the floor, squinting away tears. The sun sets that evening and the sun rises the next day and the Kerems stay in Lenny’s room just like this, no longer hoping, no longer waiting.

  Years later, when Rosalie reflects on Lenny’s last months, she realizes that the fog of memory has obliterated the sharp edges, smoothed the jagged stones into a forgiving blur. She cringes when she recalls the Hallmark words that served as ciphers—comfort, hope, memory, eternity—words they dispensed like the aspirin that proved to be futile in lowering Lenny’s fever, words they reached for as children grasp soap bubbles at a summer picnic, words that evaporated in the air. The empty words floated through Rosalie’s brain those last months, days that held beauty because Lenny was still here and days that held sadness because Lenny was gone.

  She’elah: Who comforts the clergy who mourn?

  Sol’s teshuvah: The Holy One whose comfort eludes me.

  Rosalie’s teshuvah: Abbie Hoffman. Rabindranath Tagore. Frank Sinatra. Missy Samuels. Steal this book. Return my son. No more questions.

  The congregants deliver shiva food—whitefish platters with a dozen varieties of bagels—and reach their arms into eager hugs and cry onto each other’s shirts. The men arrive for the evening service and stand in the den with Rosalie, Sol, Charlie, and Philip. The boys stand on either side of their father and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, their square shoulders holding him upright; Rosalie mouths the words from a distance. After the week of shiva the platters are replaced with casseroles dropped at the front door and Rosalie can tell who baked the lasagna by how tightly the foil is pulled across the top of the pan. Every comforting gesture feels insincere yet necessary; every dish dropped at their doorstep curses their home.

  Rosalie hates Missy and Nathan and Bev and Serena and Delia and Marv and all the others who surround her with gestures of comfort, but when she sees them at the post office or the mall she tugs on their coats to draw them close. Words are wrong. Silence is worse. Sol spends his days curled up in a ball, first on the floor of his synagogue office, then at home, on the living room carpet. “There is no medication for grief,” says Sol’s doctor. “When he is ready the rabbi will pull himself out.” Charlie returns to college and Philip is the only child left at home. He keeps stashes of weed in his back pocket and Rosalie does not notice that his eyes are always red and he never does schoolwork, never cracks a book. When Sol, Philip, and Rosalie pass each other in the kitchen no one touches. Many nights Rosalie sleeps in Lenny’s bed, wrapped in the sleeping bag that held his sweat when he first got sick at Camp Herzl.

  She’elah: How?

  Teshuvah:

  She’elah: Why?

  Teshuvah:

  Teshuvah:

  Teshuvah.

  Months pass. In the house of the rabbi the meaningful mourning rituals are as useless as weak tea. Sol’s daily recitations of the Mourner’s Kaddish do not connect him to Lenny and his prayers are empty and rote. The women of Briar Wood surround Rosalie with affection but the words they speak linger on her skin like cheap perfume and she wants to rub them off with a scouring pad. No atheist is ever found in a foxhole; no believer is ever found in a child’s empty bedroom. The sunlight streams into the house during the long afternoons and mocks their brave, sad lives. Termites parade into the kitchen; the exterminator overcharges for treatment. Sol cries to the exterminator, to the gardener, to the handyman, to the floor waxer. Every service man who walks into their house utters the same syllables: Rabbi, I heard. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, as if Jeff, who makes a living by carrying a can of pesticide on his back, had stolen Lenny from the Kerems. I’m sorry, as if Glen the gardener had swept Lenny into a sewer with autumn leaves and gum wrappers. I’m sorry, they all say, bearing words that slash like razors.

  You shouldn’t have named your son after the West Side Story composer, rabbi. I remember that sermon you gave, how music inspired your child’s name. That was a huge error in judgment, thinking you could attach your son’s life to art.

  You didn’t pray enough; better you should be Orthodox and you would be a real rabbi.

  Your wife is so aloof. Something is not right in your lives. Rabbi, I’m only telling you this because I care.

  Your son was never yours. God lent him to you and then broke the terms of the lease.

  Rosalie cannot breathe in the house, cannot breathe in the shul. She cannot bring herself to go anywhere except to the mall where she meanders into stores, and caresses expensive dresses that she has no intention of buying. At the same time every night, Madeline phones Rosalie from London and listens to her cry into the phone. After a few weeks of these sessions, Madeline interrupts Rosalie’s sobs.

  “Have you told him, Rosalie?”

  “No, and I don’t intend to. Don’t you think my distraction cost me my child? What if I was missing cues about Lenny while I was running off to California? Even Charlie knew something wasn’t right with Lenny’s health. How did I miss it?”

  “Children are aware of things that adults can’t pick up,” says Madeline. “You could not have known. And anyway, your visits to Walter allowed Sol to keep his job.”

  “Those visits allowed me to step backwards into a hornet’s nest of youthful desire. I had no business—”

  “Jerusalem. Madame Sylvie. You were so hungry with longing and you weren’t wrong to follow it.”

  “Easy for you to say, Madeline. Easy for you to hold your friend’s hand while she walks through fire. Safe from a distance.”

  “Don’t judge my life,” says Madeline. “I love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Rosalie.

  Nathan Samuels has granted Sol bereavement leave. After he recites Kaddish at morning services, Sol is free to go home. No sermons to prepare, nothing for him to do. A
student rabbi fills in for the holidays. On Kol Nidre night, Sol waits at the door with Philip and Charlie, and turns to Rosalie.

  “I presume you won’t be joining us.”

  “As usual,” she says.

  “This time I won’t even try.”

  After they leave, Rosalie stands on the porch and waits for the first notes of the prayer to pull her away from her house, her body, her life. Walter is far away now, a figment from another time. She wraps her arms around herself and when she hears the first words of Kol Nidre she goes back inside the house, sits down at the dining room table, and wets the white holiday tablecloth with her tears.

  PART THREE

  All the poems of our lives are not yet made.

  —MURIEL RUKEYSER

  THERE IS A BOAT

  January 1974

  Walter takes a hit of cardamom mixed with ginger and mace, places his palms flat on the floor, and springs his body into a headstand. Fluid as paint, he thinks. Still in the game. He lands on his feet and considers the drawing he wants to finish before the new semester begins. Walter is sketching Sonia as he remembers her, but he has no photograph to work from and his memory is vague. He has found the shape of her cheeks, her eyes, her cascading hair—certainly not a true representation, but he captured something.

  When he returned home from Eden Ranch that last time Sonia began appearing in his dreams and she has become a frequent guest. She doesn’t speak, just stands before him in the slip and sweater she was wearing when she was shot, and stares at him with cool indifference. At first Walter wasn’t taunted by her appearance but the regularity of the dream seemed to him like a request, and he picked up a piece of charcoal and began. His studio has become a tangle of sketchbooks and ungraded papers; the books he and Rosalie tore through for their project are stacked in a corner, exactly where they left them.

  The door has shut, he thinks. Eden Ranch was the ending, sealed by the fire. May life be sweet for the rebbetzin and her rabbi. May they grow old together in the place where their words bloom, where their Torah flowers and bears fruit. May they teach others. May they prosper without me.