The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  Georges Zaghlul adds, “I am not American and I am not funded by Israel.”

  But Hasan continues. “You must understand the propaganda of land for peace. This is lip-service by the Israelis. This is a cover-up of Israel’s abuses of human rights, its nuclear arsenal, and its terrorist destruction of lives and property.”

  “Let me explain something,” Ed says. “There is a plurality of opinions in Israel, as in every democratic state, and there is a history in which policy has shifted and changed just as it does in every country. But to say that every move toward moderation is compromised—”

  “In other words, give peace a chance,” Bob sums up for him.

  “No,” Ed says testily, “let me finish my point.”

  “You see,” Hasan announces, “he is not interested in peace. He is interested in public opinion, and the reason for that is financial, because—”

  “Listen, Hasan,” Ed interrupts, “before we single out Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East, let’s remember—”

  Hasan talks over Ed’s words. “Israel is a U.S. colony dedicated to a racist ideology. It is occupying land and holding indigenous peoples in concentration camps and building up weapons arsenals.”

  “Hold it,” Ed says. “Let’s look at this in context. Let’s consider what Israel is reacting to. Israel is surrounded by absolutist, radical, anti-Western theocracies. Look at the Iraqis. Look at the Per—Iranians. All this aside, we have to recognize and applaud the movement in Israel to recognize the plight of the Palestinians.”

  Hasan says, “This is only Israeli propaganda.”

  “Where do you get your information?” Ed asks Hasan.

  “All right, we have to move on,” Bob Kennedy says.

  “Have you researched this issue?” Ed presses on. “Or, let’s hear what organization you belong to—”

  Bob Kennedy is waving his hands at Ed and shaking his head.

  “Let’s hear the name of your organization,” Ed says.

  “All right,” Kennedy says, “we have a lot to cover today.”

  “Just hold on a minute,” Ed snaps, forgetting his professorial manner and his radio manners. “Let’s hear who’s paying you, Hasan.”

  “Georges Zaghlul,” Kennedy interrupts, “what do you think of the issues Hasan raises. Are these legitimate concerns?”

  “The concerns are very real,” Zaghlul begins. As he speaks, Kennedy passes Ed a note: “Do not antagonize callers, please!”

  Ed has a roaring headache by the time the two-hour show is over. He can barely see straight and almost hits a biker driving home. There is no point in going back to school. He gets a dusty bottle of Scotch from the cabinet over the refrigerator and pours himself a drink. They got him comfortable with their bright, intellectual-sounding producer—the one who could read—and then they just threw him out there and he couldn’t hear himself think, let alone formulate his argument. And he had flattered himself that he would have a chance to make a real statement there on national radio, not just about tolerance and coexistence in the Middle East but about the way we examine other cultures, about examining our assumptions and moving beyond stereotypes into a more enlightened, more cosmopolitan view of the world. His temper had flared up again, shot to hell the balance Bordles had so admired in his book. He couldn’t help himself, sitting there with that simplifying, bowdlerizing radio moderator, and those callers, by turns ignorant and vituperative. Of course, Georges Zaghlul had kept his cool; he is a lobbyist, a hired gun. But Ed made a perfect fool of himself. This is why, despite his dreams when he was young, he is an academic and not a diplomat. He has studied and written—“brilliantly,” according to the Near East Review—on diplomatic theory, but he doesn’t have the personality for diplomacy.

  —

  The next day Ed and Sarah stand in the social hall of Congregation Shaarei Tzedek. Ed is wearing a peach satin yarmulke with “Bat Mitzvah of Katie Passachoff” printed on the inside in gold.

  “Ed, I heard you on Talk of the Times yesterday,” slim, snowy-haired Ida Brown tells him. They are all standing in the buffet line. “He was wonderful, wasn’t he, Sidney?”

  Sidney nods and says, “You took out that Arab from Oklahoma City. You really had his number. I said to Ida, ‘I’m glad we had someone on there to defend Israel.’ ”

  “Well, I didn’t go on the show to defend Israel.” Ed is feeling grumpy. “I was trying to talk about terrorism and its impact on the peace process.”

  “It all goes together hand in hand,” Sidney Brown tells him.

  The videographers are walking along the other side of the buffet tables, panning over the food. At the midpoint of the buffet table one of the chefs is carving up the prime rib.

  The Greenbergs wave at them from the other end of the line, and Jeanne Greenberg seems to be calling out, “Loved you on Talk of the Times,” while Art Greenberg gives Ed the thumbs-up sign.

  Ed looks at Sarah. “You see,” she says, “everyone loved it.”

  “Of course they did.” Ed groans. “I gave them the Arab-baiting performance they were looking for.”

  “Relax. You made them happy!”

  “Meanwhile, I’m a laughingstock at the department.”

  “Oh, stop. You’re the man of the hour.”

  Several people come over and congratulate Ed at table 11. A few of them are old-timers in their eighties, and they congratulate Sarah, too, and tell her she must be very proud of her husband’s accomplishments. She thanks them all.

  A drumroll signals the arrival of the bat mitzvah cake, which the caterer rolls in on a white table for everyone to see. It is magnificent—adorned with a marzipan book and a gilt ribbon bookmark. The pages of the open book are inscribed to Katie. There are holders on the table for the birthday candles. Katie Passachoff comes to stand by the cake, to be photographed. She is thin and long-legged in her floral dress, and she wears large round glasses. With the video cameras running, she takes the microphone.

  “Another speech?” Ed asks Sarah.

  “No,” Sarah whispers back, “I think she’s going to do the candle-lighting thing.”

  Sure enough, the keyboardist from Phil’s Harmonic begins playing softly, and Katie reads:

  Friends and family, I have got.

  I love you all an awful lot.

  With joy I ask you each to take

  A candle on my birthday cake.

  Three friends I have,

  So great and jolly,

  Darcy, Brittany, and Molly.

  Ed and Sarah watch as the three friends get up to light candles. “I can’t believe this with the rhymes and the piano,” Ed says. “Have we seen that before?”

  “She’s very poised,” Sarah comments, watching Katie read.

  “You say that at every bat mitzvah,” Ed reminds her. Then, a few minutes later, “How many candles does she get? There are seventeen people up there already.”

  “A lot of them are sharing candles,” Sarah explains.

  A woman Ed doesn’t know leans over from the next table and whispers, “You don’t know me. I’m Katie’s aunt. I just wanted to say I heard you on Public Radio. I only heard the end, but did they say you wrote a book?”

  Just at that moment Katie Passachoff is reading:

  Much loved, and too seldom seen,

  Light a candle, Aunt Irene.

  “I think you’re on,” Ed tells Katie’s aunt.

  “Oh, you’re right. Thanks,” she says.

  When the cake is finally rolled off for cutting, the band starts playing again and Sarah wants to dance. “All right, come on, we have to check out the band for the wedding. Listen, what’s that they’re playing?” Sarah hums a bit. “ ‘More’? I think they’ve hit our decade!”

  They go out onto the dance floor, where a few couples are sham-dancing around the zest-filled Millers, who have had dance lessons and take to the floor whenever they can.

  “Maybe we should take some lessons,” Sarah says, looking over Ed’s
shoulder.

  “Why?” Ed asks. “You know, I can’t believe how many people were listening to me on the radio.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Sarah says.

  “But they’ll never invite me back.”

  “So what? They want you in Iran. Do you think we should hire them?” She gestures with her head toward Phil’s Harmonic.

  “Yeah. They’re good. I liked the guy who did keyboard for Katie’s candle-lighting.”

  Sarah gives him a look.

  “Oh, God, Fran and Stephen are working their way over here,” Ed says. He steels himself for another battery of compliments on his performance.

  “How are you, Sarah? Ed?” Fran asks them. “Isn’t this lovely? Can you believe Katie is twelve years old already? I feel so old! I remember when she was born.”

  “You know,” Stephen Miller says, “as the time passes you don’t remember the years anymore, just the decades.”

  “And now your oldest is getting married?” Fran shakes her frosted head at Sarah. Fran chatters away, and Ed looks around for some means of escape. It’s clear to him that as far as the talk show went—she and Stephen hadn’t even been listening.

  THE FOUR QUESTIONS

  Ed is sitting in his mother-in-law Estelle’s gleaming kitchen. “Is it coming in on time?” Estelle asks him. He is calling to check on Yehudit’s flight from San Francisco.

  “It’s still ringing,” Ed says. He sits on one of the swivel chairs and twists the telephone cord through his fingers. One wall of the kitchen is papered in a yellow-and-brown daisy pattern, the daisies as big as Ed’s hand. The window shade has the same pattern on it. Ed’s in-laws live in a 1954 ranch house with all the original period details. Nearly every year since their wedding, he and Sarah have come out to Long Island for Passover, and the house has stayed the same. The front bathroom is papered, even on the ceiling, in brown with white and yellow flowers, and there is a double shower curtain over the tub, the outer curtain held back with brass chains. The front bedroom, Sarah’s old room, has a blue carpet, organdy curtains, and white furniture, including a kidney-shaped vanity table. There is a creaky trundle bed to wheel out from under Sarah’s bed, and Ed always sleeps there, a step below Sarah.

  In the old days, Sarah and Ed would fly up from Washington with the children, but now the kids come in on their own. Miriam and Ben take the shuttle down from Boston, Avi is driving in from Wesleyan, and Yehudit, the youngest, is flying in from Stanford. She usually can’t come at all, but this year the holiday coincides with her spring break. Ed is going to pick her up at Kennedy tonight. “It’s coming in on time,” Ed tells Estelle.

  “Good,” she says, and she takes away his empty glass. Automatically, instinctively, Estelle puts things away. She folds up the newspaper before Ed gets to the business section. She’ll clear the table while the slower eaters are contemplating seconds. And, when Ed and Sarah come to visit and sleep in the room Sarah and her sister used to share, Ed will come in and find that his things have inexorably been straightened. On the white-and-gold dresser, Ed’s tangle of coins, keys, watch, and comb is untangled. The shirt and socks on the bed have been washed and folded. It’s the kind of service you might expect in a fine hotel. In West Hempstead it makes Ed uneasy. His mother-in-law is in constant motion—sponging, sweeping, snapping open and shut the refrigerator door. Flicking off lights after him as he leaves the room. Now she is checking the oven. “This is a beautiful bird. Sarah,” she calls into the den. “I want you to tell Miriam when she gets here that this turkey is kosher. Is she going to eat it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah says. Her daughter the medical student (Harvard Medical School) has been getting more observant every year. In college she started bringing paper plates and plastic utensils to her grandparents’ house because Estelle and Sol don’t keep kosher. Then she began eating off paper plates even at home in Washington. Although Ed and Sarah have a kosher kitchen, they wash their milk and meat dishes together in the dishwasher.

  “I never would have predicted it,” Estelle says. “She used to eat everything on her plate. Yehudit was always finicky. I could have predicted she would be a vegetarian. But Miriam used to come and have more of everything. She used to love my turkey.”

  “It’s not that, Mommy,” Sarah says.

  “I know. It’s this orthodoxy of hers. I have no idea where she gets it from. From Jonathan, I guess.” Jonathan is Miriam’s fiancé.

  “No,” Ed says, “she started in with it before she even met Jon.”

  “It wasn’t from anyone in this family. Are they still talking about having that Orthodox rabbi marry them?”

  “Well—” Sarah begins.

  “We met with him,” Ed says.

  “What was his name, Lowenthal?”

  “Lewitsky,” Ed says.

  “Black coat and hat?”

  “No, no, he’s a young guy—”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Estelle says.

  “He was very nice, actually,” Sarah says. “The problem is that he won’t perform a ceremony at Congregation S.T.”

  “Why not? It’s not Orthodox enough for him?”

  “Well, it’s a Conservative synagogue. Of course, our rabbi wouldn’t let him use S.T. anyway. Rabbi Landis performs all the ceremonies there. They don’t want the sanctuary to be treated like a hall to be rented out. Miriam is talking about getting married outside.”

  “Outside!” Estelle says. “In June! In Washington, D.C? When I think of your poor mother, Ed, in that heat!” Estelle is eleven years younger than Ed’s mother, and always solicitous about Rose’s health. “What are they thinking of? Where could they possibly get married outside?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed says. “Dumbarton Oaks. The Rose Garden. They’re a couple of silly kids.”

  “This is not a barbecue,” Estelle says.

  “What can we do?” Sarah asks. “If they insist on this rabbi.”

  “And it’s March already,” Estelle says grimly. “Here, Ed”—she takes a pink bakery box from the refrigerator—“you’d better finish these eclairs before she gets here.”

  “I’d better not.” Ed is trying to watch his weight.

  “It’s a long time till dinner,” Estelle warns as she puts the box back.

  “That’s okay. I’ll live off the fat of the land,” says Ed, patting his stomach.

  “I got her sealed matzos, sealed macaroons, vacuum-packed gefilte fish.” Estelle displays the packages on the scalloped wood shelves of her pantry.

  “Don’t worry. Whatever else happens, the boys are going to be ravenous. They’re going to eat,” Sarah assures her mother. They bring the tablecloth out to the dining room. “Remember Avi’s friend Noam?”

  “The gum chewer. He sat at this table and ate four pieces of cake!”

  “And now Noam is an actuary,” says Sarah.

  “And Avi is bringing a girl to dinner.”

  “She’s a lovely girl,” Sarah says.

  “Beautiful,” Estelle agrees with a worried look.

  In the kitchen Ed is thinking he might have an eclair after all. Estelle always has superb pastry in the house. Sol had started out as a baker, and still has a few friends in the business. “Are these from Leonard’s?” Ed asks when Sol comes in.

  “Leonard’s was bought out,” Sol says, easing himself into a chair. “These are from Magic Oven. How is the teaching?”

  “Well, I have a heavy load. Two of my colleagues went on sabbatical this year—”

  “Left you shorthanded.”

  “Yeah,” Ed says. “I’ve been teaching seven hours a week.”

  “That’s all?” Sol is surprised.

  “I mean, on top of my research.”

  “It doesn’t sound that bad.”

  Ed starts to answer. Instead, he goes to the refrigerator and gets out the eclairs.

  “Leonard’s were better,” Sol muses. “He used a better custard.”

  “But these are pretty good. W
hat was that? Was that the kids?” Ed runs out to meet the cab in the driveway, pastry in hand. He pays the driver as his two oldest tumble out of the cab with their luggage—Ben’s backpack and duffel, Miriam’s canvas tote and the suitcase she has inherited, bright pink, patched with silver metallic tape, dating from Ed and Sarah’s honeymoon in Paris.

  “Daddy!” Miriam says. “What are you eating?”

  Ed looks at his eclair. Technically all this sort of thing should be out of the house by now—all bread, cake, pastry, candy, soda, ice cream—anything even sweetened with corn syrup. And, of course, Miriam takes the technicalities seriously. He knows she must have stayed up late last night in her tiny apartment in Cambridge, vacuuming the crevices in the couch, packing away her toaster oven. He finishes off the eclair under her disapproving eyes. He doesn’t need the calories, either, she is thinking. She has become very puritanical, his daughter, and it baffles him. They had raised the children in a liberal, rational, joyous way—raised them to enjoy the Jewish tradition, and Ed can’t understand why Miriam would choose austerity and obscure ritualism. She is only twenty-three—even if she is getting married in June. How can a young girl be attracted to this kind of legalism? It disturbs him. On the other hand, he knows she is right about his weight and blood pressure. He hadn’t really been hungry. He’ll take it easy on dinner.

  Meanwhile, Ben carries in the bags and dumps them in the den. “Hi, Grandma! Hi, Grandpa! Hi, Mom!” He grabs the TV remote and starts flipping channels. No one is worried about Ben becoming too intense. He is a senior at Brandeis, six feet tall with overgrown ash-brown hair. He has no thoughts about the future. No ideas about life after graduation. No plan. He is studying psychology in a distracted sort of way. When he flops down on the couch he looks like a big, amiable golden retriever.

  “Get me the extra chairs from the basement, dear,” Estelle tells him. “We’ve been waiting for you to get here. Then, Sarah, you can get the wineglasses. You can reach up there.” Estelle is in her element. Her charm bracelet jingles as she talks. She directs Ben to go down under the Ping-Pong table without knocking over the boxes stacked there; she points Sarah to the cabinet above the refrigerator. Estelle is smaller than Sarah—five feet two and a quarter—and her features are sharper. She had been a brunette when she was younger, but now her hair is auburn. Her eyes are lighter brown as well, and her skin dotted with sun spots from the winters in Florida. “Oh—” she sighs suddenly as Miriam brings a box of paper plates from the kitchen. “Why do you have to—?”