The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “My marriage was breaking up, and I had to confront that,” Mather is telling them, “along with the other issues I had been harboring—my guilt, my alcoholism—and in that process I found that the Church held less for me. Spiritually, where I found myself was in my network of friends and my support groups. Then, slowly, I found that as one vessel emptied out, another filled—that my supports in terms of people and my therapy process came, for me, to be a church. I think it’s happened this way for a whole generation coming to terms with dependency—”

  “Excuse me,” says the woman with the precise voice.

  “Yes, Sister Elaine.”

  “I think you have to be careful about speaking for a whole generation. I, for one, am not dependent. I am a sinner”—she divides the air swiftly with her hands—“but I am not dependent. I’m sorry, I interrupted you.”

  “No, go on, go on,” Mather urges, leaning forward in his chair. “Please, jump in. I was just getting the ball rolling, but I want to hear from all of you.”

  “No, you aren’t done,” Sister Elaine demurs.

  “No, please.”

  Ed watches Sister Elaine as she gives in unwillingly. She is a thin woman with delicate features and short, wavy hair. Her skirt and short-sleeved top are brown and strangely autumnal. She drapes a cardigan over her shoulders. “I grew up in a functional family,” she begins, “and remained close to my parents and my brother after I left home. I was still a very young girl when I lived in the mother house. I had my training there—the discipline. It was there I had the most important experience of my life. Two years after that—”

  “Tell us about the experience,” Mather says.

  “Oh, no,” Sister Elaine demurs.

  “No, really, please, this is exactly—”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly tell you about it,” Sister Elaine says. “It wouldn’t be of general interest, though it was the most important experience of my life. And, of course, it’s private. Paradoxically, in the mother house, where we lived in such close proximity, sharing rooms, schedules, and meals, we all managed to observe a strict degree of privacy. There would be a room for silence, for example, and when you entered it—left the corridor where everyone was bubbling over—you would find perfect quiet, almost as if you were alone. I taught in the primary schools until one day I was called by the diocese to get my Ph.D. in Scriptures of the First Testament. Now, of course, I’m an assistant professor, subject to all the strains and pressures—the ruthlessness. I specialize in prophets from a form-critical approach, and I serve in the Washington, D.C., Jewish–Christian dialogue, on the Catholic Committee.”

  “Go on,” Mather says.

  “That’s it,” Sister Elaine tells him. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Uh, well, I know you are a feminist, for one thing, and I was wondering about your feelings, as a feminist, living within the hierarchy of the Church.”

  “Well, I am a feminist,” Sister Elaine says, “but I am not a revisionist. I won’t change the liturgy.”

  “That’s what I was wondering—I mean, why you won’t,” Mather says.

  “Because I won’t tear my heart out!” This startles everyone around the table, and one very old man wakes up suddenly and shakes himself.

  “Well,” he says, when he finds the others looking at him, “I believe I am the senior member of the group—”

  “Just a second, Brother Marcus,” Mather interrupts apologetically. “I don’t think Sister Elaine was finished.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” the old man says, and he settles down again into his white beard.

  “Yes, I was finished—absolutely,” Sister Elaine tells Mather sternly.

  “Well, you just tell me when you want me to start,” Brother Marcus says in a deep Southern voice. “Give me a holler, so I can hear, because you are dealing with a very old monk here.”

  “You go right ahead,” Sister Elaine tells him.

  Ed feels a nudge at his side. It’s Mauricio. “You see,” he whispers in his breathy Spanish accent, “first the nun’s tale, and now the nun’s priest’s.” He quirks his eyebrow at Ed.

  “Yeah, right,” Ed says, not really sure what Mauricio is getting at, feeling exhausted, duped, self-deceived. It was his own greed, after all, that drew him here. The check from the Ecumenical Institute. It’s agonizing sitting here like this, forced into this kind of voyeurism.

  Brother Marcus just looks out at all of them, his beard startlingly white, his eyes the intense blue of the very young and the very old. “I believe I am the senior member of the group,” he says again. “I am eighty-four years old. My name is Brother Marcus Goldwater, and I think I’ve been invited because of my life experience, ecumenically speaking. I was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a family of Reformed Jewish background. We went every year to the temple on the High Holy Days, and there was a dinner every year on Passover. Also, we children belonged to a Jewish social club, where we went to dances and singing parties. At the age of eighteen I got a job at the Sears and Roebuck Company and I stayed with the company nine years, where I fell under the influence of my immediate supervisor, who set out to court me into Catholicism.”

  “What do you mean, ‘court you’?” Ed asks, shocked. He has never heard anything like this. He’s stunned to come up against such a figure—the voice, those eyes, that bright white beard.

  “By courting I mean that he never pretended he was doing anything different,” Goldwater explains, more deliberately than ever, “and yet he never forced me farther than I wanted to go. He courted me the way a man courts a young girl. He never made any pretenses, though. He told me that he had converted five and he hoped I would be his sixth. It happened gradually. He used my natural curiosity, like this—‘I’m going to a beautiful concert,’ he said to me. ‘I want to take you along, but you wouldn’t understand it.’ Well, that piqued me, of course. I insisted he take me. The concert was a holy Mass. I sank down on my knees, and I could understand.”

  “You are saying,” Mauricio says dryly, “that this man seduced you into Catholicism.”

  “Oh, yes,” says Goldwater, “he seduced me very deliberately. Yes, indeed. But I think that’s what a conversion is. I surrendered myself up, body and soul. I fell in love with the Church. Yielded away. My supervisor at the Sears and Roebuck Company was not interested in an easy infatuation or a quick conversion. He insisted I take instruction, which I did for several years, and later, when I decided I wanted to take orders, he questioned me severely.” Brother Marcus looks down at his hands, and Ed notices his ring for the first time; it’s large and silver, a Gothic cross that reaches almost to the first knuckle—it’s a little tarnished, so it looks at first like wrought iron. “So I was his sixth,” Marcus says. “But this I remember him telling me, and I have always been grateful for it. He said, ‘Never forget your roots. Never forget you were born a Jew.’ And I have not. Some of you here will surely think I am an apostate, but I am not. I’m just the opposite, because I have preserved my identity. And I have never given up my Jewish name, Marcus Goldwater.”

  “Oh dear, oh my!” gasps old Rabbi Lehrer. He is convulsed with laughter, and no one can believe it. He sounds absolutely pixilated. “I had this one from a congregant of mine in North Carolina,” he wheezes, eyes streaming. “There was a man—a Jewish man—and somehow his name got onto the solicitation list for the Republican Party. The girl calls him up and says, ‘Mr. Goldwasser, may I put you down for a contribution?’ Says the man, ‘My name is Goldwater. Goldwater, not Goldwasser. My father’s name is Goldwater, my grandfather, olev hasholem, his name was Goldwater, too!’

  “But on one subject I must seriously disagree with you, Brother Mark,” the rabbi says, wiping the tears from his eyes. “You are not the senior member of the party, because I am eighty-five. And, God willing, in November I’ll be eighty-six! I was born in a little town that would now be in Romania if it had survived the First War and if what was left had been spared by the Nazis later
on. This is history! One ‘if’ after another. But I had a beautiful, religious childhood, thanks to my parents, of blessed memory. My father had a sawmill and kept us prosperous and well. Always he instilled in us a love of education, and he kept a library in the house, where he himself would read and meditate. He was prominent in the synagogue and in the town. His greatest joy was to give to the poor and provide for them. But it was my dear mother who instilled in me my spiritual sense from the time I was a child, and I remember that once—it is one of my earliest memories—she was standing in the golden light of the window in late afternoon with a book before her. ‘Mama, Mama,’ I asked her, as small children do, ‘why are you standing there with that book?’

  “ ‘Because I am praying,’ she answered me. ‘Praying to the creator who made the world.’ Small as I was, this impressed me deeply, and from that moment I also wanted to dedicate myself to God, the creator of this beautiful world.”

  Ed squirms. He closes his eyes and sees pictures. Embarrassing pictures. The kind that hang in the social hall of his temple in D.C. Fake Chagalls of the old country. A woman standing at the window, a babushka on her head. A pair of klutzy candlesticks. Does Lehrer expect them to believe he grew up in one of those pictures? It makes Ed sick, because he does believe it. He sees Lehrer in all those garish colors, that village with roofs tilted upward and rabbis with upturned eyes and frail Hasidic faces and Lehrer’s mother floating at the window. He sees it all, and it is maddening, the way Lehrer triggers these clichés. Affirming that he, Ed, has roots in bad lithographs and the pictures on mortuary calendars; that he, Ed, originally comes from a Judaica shop, and that his cultural memory is bound in coffee-table books.

  “My parents,” Lehrer continues, as Brother Marcus nods off again, “had dearly hoped I would become a rabbi when they saw my love of learning in the little school my brothers and I attended. In any case, it seemed ordained that I should be a rabbi. Our last name was Lehrer, which means teacher, and my parents had given me the name Menachem, which means comforter. In fact, I was named after my sainted grandfather on the maternal side, who was directly descended from the famous Vilna Gaon, one of the greatest teachers and scholars who ever lived. Well, I grew into something of a talmid chachem myself. What can I say? It was not my intelligence but my love of the subject that spurred me on. I loved God’s word—this was my gift.”

  Ed shifts in his chair. His right foot has fallen asleep. He writes a note to Mauricio: “I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

  “How fortunate that we emigrated to Toronto when we did, in 1915!” Rabbi Lehrer exclaims. “I was only a small boy, but truly my life has been full of blessings. We settled in Canada, and, as before, my father prospered, this time in the retail business. My older brothers soon joined him in the company. Then it was my turn to choose a career. I remember the day clearly. My parents sat down with me, and they said, ‘Menachem, you are old enough to decide on your profession.’

  “ ‘Father, Mother,’ I said, ‘my dearest wish is to become a rabbi and devote my life to learning.’ Well, they smiled, because this was exactly what they had hoped for all through my childhood.”

  Mauricio is signaling to Rich Mather, tapping his watch. He passes a note to Ed in his pale, spiky handwriting. “Stand it, you say? What else do we do in this world but talk about ourselves?”

  “And so it happened that when my dear wife and I moved to Vancouver, where I took on the fledgling congregation—well, there another blessing befell me. By some chance my phone number was only one digit different from that in the immigration office, and, purely by mistake, some officials called me—officials deciding the cases of some of the Jews fleeing Hitler. Well, whenever they asked for my services I was more than happy to oblige them as an interpreter or whatever else was needed, and in this small way I helped several Jewish families seeking asylum. For this—only for this in my life—I can say I am truly proud.”

  “Rabbi,” Mather says, hesitantly, “I sense some of the people in the room are feeling tired after their flights.”

  “Maybe we should end this session,” Ed cuts in.

  “But I’m only up to 1932!” Rabbi Lehrer says, dismayed. “I haven’t even gotten to the war years and my congregations in Winnipeg and North Carolina, or my monograph—”

  “It is getting late,” says Sister Elaine. The others start to gather their things or even stand up. Brother Marcus wakes and looks around him.

  “I suppose I have more to tell, having lived so long,” Lehrer says.

  “You should write your memoirs, Rabbi,” Bob Hemmings tells him.

  “I have two hundred pages,” Lehrer says.

  —

  It is ten o’clock when they walk down the hill to the institute’s sod houses. The sun is setting, and heavy clouds move rapidly across the sky. An instant later the sky blackens, and it begins to pour. Steam hisses up from the black asphalt road. “Christ,” Ed groans. His glasses are steaming up, and water pours down his face.

  “This is one of our storms,” Brother Matthew tells the group, in exactly the tone he used identifying Bob Hemmings as “our Presbyterian.” Sister Elaine is the only one with an umbrella. She insists on giving it to Rabbi Lehrer and Brother Marcus.

  “Coming from where I do—Chattanooga,” Marcus says, “I couldn’t possibly accept a lady’s only umbrella.”

  “Nor could I, nor could I,” the rabbi tells her.

  “But you are the senior members,” Elaine reminds them, and she holds it over their heads.

  Ed stamps into his sod house, shoes squelching, stomach churning. After he has dried off, he waits in the living room until Bob says, “Well, time to turn in. Pleasant dreams!” Then Ed seizes the phone. It’s late in D.C. He doesn’t want to wake his wife, but this is an emergency.

  The phone rings three times on the other end. Sarah picks up. “Hello, what is it now, Rose?” she asks.

  “Sarah, this is Ed.”

  “Oh,” Sarah says, “I thought it was your mother. She’s been calling from L.A. about her lawsuit.”

  “What?”

  “She’s suing Primo Cleaners—remember?”

  “Oh. Listen, Sarah, I don’t want to hear about that.”

  “Why not? She’s your mother,” Sarah says, “and I’m the one stuck here manning the phones. I’m at the end of my rope. She’s met a retired judge at the center and they’re working on the case full time. She’s been calling me every night! Two, three times a night. I would have disconnected the phone if the kids hadn’t been on that canoe trip. I was afraid in an emergency they wouldn’t be able to reach me. Of course, she’s having a wonderful time.”

  “Who?”

  “Rose. She’s getting more mileage out of that bedspread. It was polished cotton, and they laundered it and ruined the finish. Of course, she doesn’t want a new one.”

  “Sarah, I don’t care about that bedspread,” Ed tells her.

  “Neither do I!” she thunders.

  “Don’t you scream at me. I didn’t call to be screamed at.”

  “Fine.”

  “Sarah?”

  “What?”

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you?”

  “I just told you how I was,” she says.

  “Look, Sarah, I’ve had a miserable day. I’ve been through hell.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? I’m in some godforsaken hole in the ground. Literally! It’s a hundred degrees when it isn’t pouring rain, with a bunch of clergymen”—he lowers his voice, eyeing Hemmings’s closed bedroom door—“with no academic qualifications whatsoever, at a conference which is being run like some cross between Stanislavsky and A.A.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “I have been listening to the participants talk about themselves. We’re supposed to talk about ourselves.”

  “What do you do the rest of the time?”

  “Anything. No structure. N
o schedule.”

  “It sounds nice,” Sarah says. “It sounds relaxing. Why don’t you relax and enjoy it?”

  “No, no, you don’t understand, Sarah. You don’t understand what these sessions are like. There’s some kind of senile rabbi here who just—”

  “Is there a lake?” she asks.

  “What? Yeah.”

  “Go for a swim. I rolled up your swim trunks with your underwear.”

  “I don’t want to go swimming,” Ed hisses. “I want to go home and get some—”

  “You think I’m going to fall for that after sending four kids to Camp Ramah?”

  “When I think of the referee reports on my desk. And the unanswered mail—the paper I promised Frankel! My time and energy—”

  “Oh, Ed,” Sarah says, “it’s two more days. One and a half.”

  “I don’t think you’re catching on to what I’m saying. These people are making me physically ill! The bullshit here goes right up to the sky!”

  “What’s that from—Oklahoma!?” She giggles.

  “And my roommate,” he whispers, “is a small-town preacher out of Norman Rockwell. Just now he wished me pleasant dreams!”

  “So what, Ed! What’s wrong with that?”

  “He doesn’t even know me!”

  “It’s a good thing. Ed, I happen to have a meeting at the university tomorrow morning.”

  “Sarah?”

  “What.”

  “I’m just exhausted.”

  “So am I,” she says.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Pleasant dreams,” she tells him.

  Ed finds a glass in the living-room cupboard and fumbles in his toiletries case for his Alka-Seltzer. Glumly, he drinks the fizzing mixture in the bathroom; he eyes himself in the mirror. His thinning hair is windblown, his eyes stare out, wild and confused—the remnant of a younger body. “I’m too old for this,” he mutters, as he eases into bed. His ears ring with other voices. The Spanish Yiddish of Mauricio Brodsky, and Bob Hemmings’s “Sure thing!” clanging in the air, Rich Mather’s even tones, Rabbi Lehrer’s tale of good fortune. Ed pushes his pillows to his ears.