The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “It’s awful to see him like this,” says Charlie.

  “It’s not that,” says Maya. “Abba spent his whole life trying to solve a riddle he could never understand.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “He was never meant to be a rabbi.”

  “Welcome to the world, Maya.”

  “It can be a beautiful life. And it doesn’t have to be so confining.”

  “You’d better be right, or you’ll wind up like him.”

  Maya wipes her tears. “There’s practically a revolution in rabbinic creativity out there. It’s intoxicating. I’ve signed up for a social action project in Ghana, and I’m translating—”

  She notices Charlie’s smirk and lets her voice trail off. Her brother grew up in the same house as she did and he would never understand why she wakes at dawn to translate excerpts from the Ishbitzer’s work—Rosalie’s suggestion—so she can build a bridge between her Jewish meditation practice and the Hasidic rebbe whose understanding of the human heart was once considered so radical.

  “I always thought you were the milkman’s daughter,” says Charlie.

  “You’re the foreigner, Charlie. You’re too cynical to understand your own parents and you miss out.”

  “I’ll suffer my losses,” he says. “You look good, Maya. And despite the circumstances, you seem happy. Mom told me about your wilderness rabbi.” He begins to hum “The Hills are Alive” from The Sound of Music.

  Maya chuckles.

  “Do the two of you pray aloud in the open fields of Rockland County?”

  “I won’t judge your approach to spirituality if you don’t criticize mine.”

  “What approach to spirituality?”

  “Exactly, Charlie. That’s the point.”

  “I’m sorry, Maya. We had different versions of the same parents. I’m not talking about the generational gap, though that’s part of it. Philip and I missed out on your childhood. You were an adorable baby and you made everything better for them. And that made life better for all of us.”

  Maya leans her head on Charlie’s shoulder. “Thanks for saying that. And yes, I inherited the crazy religion gene. My friends used to play school and pretend to be teachers; I would pretend to be a rabbi. I would put on Abba’s tallit, stand on a chair, and recite the Shema to my dolls.”

  Charlie laughs.

  “Temple Briar Wood was my childhood intoxication. Even the smell of the stairwell was delicious to me.”

  “That stairwell! Those bathrooms! Philip and I used to stash our weed inside the sanitary napkin box in the girl’s bathroom.”

  “No wonder that thing never worked.”

  “We stole the custodian’s key and rigged it, and no one ever bothered to fix it.”

  Maya remembers how she and Deena invented stories about the failed sanitary napkin box. It became the place where Missy Samuels stored her breath mints, where the custodian lost his toupee, where the golem of Briar Wood would one day be born.

  “That explains everything.” Maya wipes her nose. “Charlie?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What was going on with them? I used to eavesdrop when Mom talked on the phone to her supposed best friend in London that I never met, and I just couldn’t figure out what secret thing consumed them. I would sometimes imagine that an abandoned suitcase had been dropped in the middle of our house and no one knew what to do with it.”

  “Something seemed strange, but I never gave it much thought. I suppose they did the best they could. If anyone can understand that, it would be you, Little Miss Everyone-Is-Beautiful-on-This-Train.”

  “Wait! I told you about that?”

  Charlie smiles.

  “My ancient brother. I used to think you held a secret code I needed to crack.”

  “The enigmatic Kerems, the riddle at the center of Temple Briar Wood.”

  She’elah: Why did her family seem so fucked-up half the time and so enlightened the other half?

  Teshuvah: The human heart is not a mystery to be solved.

  Rosalie closes the door and checks on Sol’s IV. The doctor said he wouldn’t linger much longer and Rosalie has avoided being alone with him until now. After a lifetime of negotiating secrets, she doesn’t know what she should reveal, and what should be left unspoken.

  “Morris phoned you yesterday.”

  “Morris? From the Seminary?”

  “He said he was praying for your recovery.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “Then he started to reminisce about Professor Heschel and how he wished he had appreciated him because now he quotes his work all the time.”

  “Who doesn’t? You can’t be a good American rabbi without quoting Heschel.”

  “Then he mentioned Walter, told me that he borrowed his books from the library and—get this—he was actually impressed.”

  Sol closes his eyes. Rosalie lies down next to him and rests her hand on his chest.

  “There was an attic, Rosalie. Walter brought me up there and something happened. Between us. He and I.”

  “What?”

  “It was nothing to him—a little kiss from a chavrusa. A gesture of friendship, a moment of affinity. But then I couldn’t shake it.” He begins to drift off, then mumbles, “I held him all my life.”

  Walter was mine, thinks Rosalie. What kind of little kiss?

  Sol is short of breath and a nurse lets herself into the room, silently adjusts his IV.

  “Are you comfortable, rabbi?”

  Sol nods and closes his eyes, waiting for her to leave.

  “God is in the morphine drip,” he says.

  Rosalie lays her hand on Sol’s cheek and he covers it with his.

  “I lived with shame, Rosalie. So much shame. Working a job that asked me to turn myself inside out, reveal my soul, explain my passion—all in the service of the tribe. And the clapping, the cheerleading, trying to make people sing when they didn’t feel like singing. Feel the love! Feel the love! What an awful burden. Better to be a spiritual civilian than a spiritual leader.”

  “You’re finally catching on,” she says. “A little late, but—”

  “Thank you for the binder,” says Sol. “For all those words.”

  Rosalie smiles. “Did I tell you that Bev called?”

  “I can’t recall a Bev. Hat? Doily?”

  “Frizzy hair. Flip-flops.”

  “I remember now.”

  “She told me to thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Whatever.”

  “No, Sol. For something you did many years ago. After Bev got up from sitting shiva for her father, you stopped by her house and offered to drive her to the supermarket. And then you took her to the Cosmos Diner and bought her a plate of scrambled eggs.”

  “So?”

  “You sat across from her in a booth and she told you stories about her father’s tailor shop, how she would draw pictures on the backs of the yardsticks and eat pastrami sandwiches while his customers came in for a fitting. And you listened to every little story about her father and his customers, all afternoon, until the sun began to set.”

  “Not such a big deal.”

  “But it was.”

  Rosalie shuts her eyes and remembers the night Sol introduced Maya to Walter. Your husband isn’t blind, Walter had said. Our daughter is so lovely. After she listened to him cry on the phone for a long time, she lay her head on the granite countertop, and let her own tears come. And then Maya called out, It’s late! We have to light! and the three of them stood before their clay menorah, this remnant of a family cobbled from grief and desire, and they recited the blessing and stood together silently as the candles burned down.

  Sol summons the strength to grab Rosalie’s hand. He winces.

  “Did I bless the children?”

  Rosalie begins to cry.

  “When I blessed them did I seem like an overblown rabbi or did I seem like a normal father? Was I authentic?”

  “You bles
sed them as a father would.”

  “Tenderly?”

  “Quite.”

  Sol closes his eyes, winces, and then opens them again.

  “I wish Maya wasn’t going ahead with this.”

  “This is what she wants, Sol.”

  “It’s a terrible profession for someone with imagination. She will always feel let down. As soon as the words leave her mouth she will wonder what gave her the nerve to speak about what’s unknowable and parade it as truth.”

  “But the Bevs of the world need their rabbis.”

  “If she finds herself a Bev maybe it will be okay.”

  “The two of you are cut from the same cloth.”

  “Yessir, that’s my baby, no sir—”

  “Don’t mean maybe,” whispers Rosalie.

  “A three-way cord is not readily broken,” says Sol. He closes his eyes and winces again. “Has Walter come to see me yet?”

  “He’s gone from this world, sweetheart.”

  “Come and gone,” whispers Sol.

  “Yes,” says Rosalie.

  Sol sighs. God flows into his veins and he can breathe again. He feels his own lips soften around Walter’s. They sit in the geniza, Walter in his cotton tunic and Sol in his wedding suit. They are surrounded by the books each of them has ever read—multitudes of volumes in Hebrew and Aramaic and English and Sanskrit and Bengali and German—a repository of infinite words and endless silence. The books jumble together in ragged piles and the words seep from one volume to another, flowing like a river, as Walter allows Sol to kiss him and Sol allows Walter the same. They kiss and taste each other and drown out the laughter and loud footsteps of the students on the floors below. Daylight fades and night comes and still they kiss.

  When old rabbis die, new rabbis arrive, take their seats on the bima, move into their offices, occupy their homes. These young replacements show up with their hopeful wives and their small children, eager to install a new countertop, paint the bookshelves, replace the aluminum siding. The synagogue board offers Rosalie an apartment in town but she declines. Madeline has moved from London to San Miguel de Allende and Rosalie wants to join her in Mexico. The children protest—Charlie is to be married, Philip has a stepdaughter who calls her bubbie, Maya is still in rabbinical school in Los Angeles and wants Rosalie to keep a home base for her in New York—but Rosalie knows their pleas have nothing to do with her.

  The children return to the house to help Rosalie sort through the rooms. Their work is an elaborate choreography of nostalgia and efficiency. They fill black garbage bags with the clothes and shoes that one of the Kerems wore at some moment in their lives and never discarded. Charlie overturns the file that held articles about clinical trials that should have saved Lenny, and Philip shreds the tax returns that were filed along with Sol’s synagogue contracts. Rosalie gathers memorabilia to donate to the shul. Maya sorts the books, and boxes up her grandfather’s set of Mishnah and her father’s volumes of commentary for her own growing library. And Philip sweeps up scattered socks, paper clips, coins, and dried-up etrogim. The children take turns tossing stuffed garbage bags from the top stairs and Rosalie watches the bags tumble down to the landing like boulders falling from a hill.

  Rosalie saves Sol’s desk for last and opens the overstuffed drawers. In the bottom file she finds a folder of sermons: Sol’s original work, and those she wrote with Walter, preserved in the purple binder. In the same folder, behind some bank statements, the childrens’ class pictures, the yahrzeit calendar for Lenny so they would know what date to light a candle and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish projected fifty years into the future—an envelope, opened and then closed, postmarked from India.

  October 27, 1985

  Dear Sol,

  I write you from Varanasi, where I am doing research on cremation. I feel very far from home, yet somehow close to you and Rosalie. I often think about how the three of us are woven together in a way that feels sacred to me. I believe we created something that we may not comprehend in this lifetime.

  I am no longer the chavrusa you once desired, and I have not forgotten how I disappointed you in the geniza—but how we lived tells a story that is bigger than what the two of us could have told by ourselves.

  Herzlich,

  Walter

  P.S. I love you both, always.

  CASA ROSALIE

  June 2002

  Rosalie stands on her balcony and peers down at the street. A parade of white-haired expatriates gambol down the cobbled walkways, the choicest mangoes weighing down their straw market bags. By day San Miguel de Allende is a tourist paradise of cafés and English speakers who roam the art galleries and tour the gardens where the wealthiest gringos live. But at night, Rosalie lies awake and listens to gunshots in the surrounding hills, the howling of a coyote that prowls for leftovers in the alley behind a cantina. She falls asleep to the sound of rats outside her casa, rats larger than the raccoons that once rummaged through her yard in Briar Wood.

  When Rosalie first moved here she felt homesick and questioned her choice to live so far away. She didn’t unpack for a year, and spent long hours sorting through boxes of memorabilia. On the days following 9/11 she practically lived at the Internet café, checking names and scanning photographs, scouring for anyone who may have passed through Temple Briar Wood. And then one day she just stopped looking. Let others check the lists. Let others send the condolences, sign the cards, give the donations. She could not look back when she needed to look forward; San Miguel de Allende was her new home.

  Just as she began to settle in, Rosalie went to a clinic for a routine test and was diagnosed with stage-three pancreatic cancer. Harvey Berger, expatriate internist and leader of the San Miguel Torah study group, told her what to expect, and that in time, she would have trouble sleeping, not because of discomfort but because she would be preoccupied with remembering the details of her life.

  Rosalie is still strong and coltish; she scurries up the hills without losing her breath. She has let her hair go gray and wears flowing embroidered dresses that she purchased in the tourist boutiques when she first arrived. Harvey calls her his young rabbanit. “Do not tell anyone your age,” he says. “Your illness will be our little secret.” The two of them smoke weed together and conspire to create a little Jerusalem in San Miguel, radiating out from the Torah study group they lead every Saturday morning in the lobby of the El Norte Hotel. “Without us the little study group would be reading selections from Kahlil Gibran and performing alef-bet yoga,” says Harvey. “We are their living Torah.”

  Harvey leads an abbreviated prayer and meditation service, and Rosalie presents one-minute sermons she calls frissons of Torah. Her fellow expats ask her questions that they never broached to a real rabbi: If I’m cremated, will my children sit shiva for me? Is there an afterlife? Do Jews believe in angels? Does the soul survive? Instead of answering their questions, Rosalie offers brief Hasidic stories, and then asks if anyone wants to join her on the San Miguel House and Garden Tour, or meet up after her yoga class, or sit with her in the jardín at sunset.

  When she passes the mercado in town and wakes up to the smell of burning cornhusks and chile rellenos, she tries to imagine Walter’s Bombay. The city where he woke up to the smell of spices connects Rosalie to the town where she will use spices to stay awake. His holy city of spices; her hilly town of scented candles and cornhusks smoldering in the street vendors’ tiny grills. His land between two worlds; her country between one life and the next. To Maya she writes: I’m so sorry, my sweet girl. I moved far away from you but I knew I could not leave this world without starting over, this time for myself. One day you will understand. And you, Maya, will be the child of mine who understands everything.

  Over tea one afternoon, Madeline asks Rosalie why she won’t return to the states for treatment. “I sit under the skylight in my bathroom,” says Rosalie, “and I am surrounded by blue tiles. Even the inside of my toilet bowl is a work of art. During the day the light pours in and the
re is no place I would rather be. And that’s only my bathroom. I am in the perfect spot to conclude my life. I don’t need to create an ugly chapter.”

  “You will have to bring your children down,” says Madeline.

  “I will,” says Rosalie. “Soon enough.”

  “You plan to tell Maya, don’t you?”

  Rosalie plays with her sugar packet, folds it into tiny squares.

  “Maybe she senses it.”

  “Be honest,” says Madeline.

  “Not everything has to be spelled out. Maya understands subtlety. I’m sure she can figure this out on her own. She’s a rabbi, for God’s sake.”

  Madeline laughs. “You realize your contradiction.”

  “I sometimes think Sol knew more than he let on,” says Rosalie.

  “Everyone has their blind spots,” says Madeline.

  “Maybe Maya will do better. She’s the real deal now. A newly minted, honest-to-God unemployed rabbi who lives in Morningside Heights.”

  “Men? Women?”

  “Off and on with a wilderness rabbi named Jase. He leads retreats in the mountains.” Rosalie laughs.

  “Why the derision? Didn’t you spend time at Eden Ranch?”

  Rosalie tries to remember what happened there but she can’t place all the details. She can picture Paul walking with a very pregnant Giselle, and she can recall the litany of names that Walter called out during the fire. His sobs and her fear. Had she told Madeline everything? Even that? At least she kept some of the details to herself: the way the sound of Walter’s voice made her body soften, the perfume of cardamom on his palms, the swirl of desire that flowed and flows still—

  “I suppose Maya will be just fine,” says Rosalie.

  “Were we any less confused? Madame Sylvie and her little astonishments! We bought it all, didn’t we?”

  “Sometimes I wonder if I was up for the challenge of my own life.”

  “You pulled it off with style, pussycat. You carried this crazy bundle in your arms as if you were born for the task.”

  “Did you ever worry about me, Madeline? All those conversations, our long nights on the phone. Why didn’t you wake me from my convoluted dream?”