The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  She reaches out and touches her sister’s shoulder, smiles a true and loving sisterly smile at Camille. “Maybe we should stay here past tomorrow, like Mom said. Hang out just us in the pool, spend time together like we never get to do anymore. Really talk.”

  “Maybe,” Camille says, nodding her head in a way that might qualify as an answer in Camille’s world, but doesn’t qualify as one in Phoebe’s.

  “Just so you know, Phoebe, I’m wearing a gorgeous white satin suit tonight. There’s no way you’re not going to think it’s fabulous.”

  Camille instantly wants to slap her own face because she sounds ridiculously defensive, because fabulous is not a word in her regular vocabulary, because Phoebe is not going to think the white satin suit is fabulous, because she wishes she had what Phoebe has, a future that is solid and real.

  “I’ve no doubt,” Phoebe says.

  And in her sister’s intonation, Camille can’t find any of Phoebe’s usual sarcasm when it comes to Camille and fashion. But she’s hurt Phoebe, she sees that, and she should throw her sister a bone.

  “Hey,” she says, “do you remember those dogs we used to have?”

  “Yeah. Our hot dog dogs.”

  Camille nods. “Do you remember their names?”

  Phoebe wrinkles her forehead. “Royalty.”

  “Royalty?”

  “No, I mean they were named after royalty. Yes. King David and Queen Esther. Why?”

  “I saw a dog on the drive and thought of them. Whatever happened to them?”

  Phoebe stares at Camille, though it’s clear she’s looking into the past, then shakes her head, and Camille watches her sister’s chestnut curls flying, finding sharp old envy inside, over those curls, over that seductive color of hair.

  “I don’t know,” Phoebe says. “But I remember we loved those dogs so much.”

  Then their mother is waving them over and they kneel at her chair and she puts her hands on their heads. “I love seeing my daughters together. Will you watch Lucy? Simon and Elena went to unpack and I need to check messages. I’ll bring out a fresh pitcher of Arnold Palmers when I’m done.”

  Lucy, grinning and waving her arms, yells, “Pleasepleasepleaseplease. Bewithme, bewithme, bewithme.”

  God, how Phoebe wishes she had her own Lucy.

  “We’re right here,” Camille says, stepping into the water, holding out her arms to her niece.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I FORGOT NAPTIME COULD have another meaning,” Elena says.

  They are at the far end of the house, in the guest room down its own separate hallway, distant from his sisters’ perennial bedrooms, distant from his childhood bedroom into which his father disappeared with Isabel for her story and nap, distant from the big pool in the courtyard where Lucy is splashing under Roma’s watchful eye, where Phoebe and Camille are probably drifting on rafts. Here in this secluded airy room that he has wrongly resented, that he has not recognized as the private domain that it is, he and Elena are completely alone.

  The view through the large windows makes him think of the inception of the world, flat desert, cacti, two rabbits running across the shrubby sand, and when Elena says, “Any interest?” he turns and finds her stretched across the inviting king bed, the agapanthus violet of the duvet and pillows arresting against her tanned skin, beckoning him with a seductive hand.

  As always, her hair is a thick coil pinned at her nape, but she’s wearing only her silver bikini, the fabric imprinted to resemble the scales of a snake. She reaches up, unties the knot at the back, lets the strings fall.

  “Yes? No?” she asks.

  He can’t recall the last time they made love in the middle of the day, can’t recall the last time she initiated anything more than a kiss, other than that quick grasping of him early this morning at home, and he says, “Yes. Definitely, yes,” his reaction to her as ardent as the first time he saw her at a friend’s party, seated on a low stone wall, her hair loose and moonlit, her long legs brown and bare, her summer dress exceedingly short, her sexy, slightly accented voice telling a ribald story to the keen men circling like birds of prey. When her wineglass was empty, he’d swooped in with a fresh one and a smile. What were the first words he spoke to the woman who would become his wife? He was sure he’d never forget them, but they become irrelevant when her breasts are in the palms of his hands.

  AT FIRST, THEY WERE trying too hard, and then the real thing kicked in, their bodies acclimating to genuine physical desire, rediscovering something close to the carnality that existed before the children came along. Now, sweaty and depleted, with Elena’s skin flush against his, Simon thinks it was nearly wild, and he wants to ask what brought on this unpredicted pleasure, but something is carving away at the air, returning them to their own spheres, separating them once again into dissimilar components, though moments ago they were fully united. Truly, he doesn’t know whether the divide between them is in his mind or real. And if it’s real, how he might cross it. And then he says what he has not said in a very long time: “I think it’s time for a story.”

  Elena shifts in his arms, glances up at his face, and he smiles; he’s chosen well. She seems ready to speak, then refrains, something she’s been doing for too long, and it bothers him, but he’s gentle when he says, “What are you thinking?”

  Looking down at the totality of his wife’s beauty, he realizes he spends part of each sleepless night watching her without really seeing her, merely aware of her outline, of the fact of her, this woman he is bound to, with whom he has two young children, who seems less interested in their love day by day. He wonders when that happened, and why this moment, against the positive evidence that should refute his apprehension, he is again contemplating the lessening of her love.

  “I was thinking that five short years ago, I was the travel writer, but you were always the storyteller, illuminating emotions people hide from themselves and from others. Even at our wedding, you told a story that had everyone tearing up. In the past few years, other than humorous recitations about your day, your stories have dried up and disappeared, and I was considering what’s different about today, to bring a story on.”

  “I haven’t a clue,” he says, unsure if he’s speaking the truth, knowing he’s not when a sudden pressure builds behind his sternum. He waits for her to probe, the way she has always done, or rather did. In their past, she would have asked questions, unraveled his I haven’t a clue, but this afternoon, in their postcoital embrace, she doesn’t, and he reluctantly lets it go. But there is again that sense of loss he experienced when she didn’t ask if he feels he’s missing out by not having religion as part of their lives.

  When did they, their relationship, life, or some combination, become so complicated? Or has it always been, and it’s taken additional maturity and fatherhood to recognize it?

  And the idea comes to him that maybe it isn’t complicated at all, maybe it’s merely a matter of finding the right stories to tell, the right stories to live.

  He feels the heat where their skin is in contact, and though only the vaguest idea is forming, he begins.

  “Once upon a time, a couple took a trip to a place of mountains and valleys and many churches. One day, during a visit to a very old church, the man took the woman’s hand and hurried them past the other sightseers, through the sacred dimness, until they were beyond the weighty doors, back in the world where people walked the sunshiny streets, peered into shop windows, strolled into galleries. At the top of the church steps, the woman asked, ‘Why are we leaving?’ and the man said, ‘It’s time we had an afternoon drink.’

  “What do you think they drink in Colombia?”

  “Is that what the man says to the woman?” Elena asks.

  “No, that’s what I’m asking you.”

  “Aguardiente, definitely, and Cuba libres, probably.”

  “What are they?”

  “The nickname for aguardiente is ‘firewater,’ sugarcane spirit flavored with aniseed. And Cuba libres are made w
ith rum.”

  “Okay. So the man led the woman to a table at a charming outdoor café, their hands soldered together. When the woman sat, the sun mysteriously shadowed her face, her exposed shoulders, turned her into a Giacometti sculpture, rare and elongated, a distance contained in her core, a coolness shimmering across the warmth of her skin, and the woman said, ‘We’re to drink Cuba libres.’

  “In no time, the young waiter was upon them, so tall he made the man feel as if God was staring down upon him. The man said, ‘Hola, por favor, dos cuba libres,’ and the waiter, named Victor, smiled and said, ‘Inmediatamente.’”

  “Why is the waiter named Victor?”

  “I don’t know, that’s what jumped into my head.”

  “Okay. Continue.”

  “When Victor the waiter was gone, the woman lifted her face to the sun, and the man was enthralled by the pulse beating at the base of her long slim neck, his heart hammered by love.

  “The silvery drinks arrived—”

  “Not silvery,” Elena says. “They’re made of light or dark rum and cola.”

  “The golden-brown drinks arrived, ice cubes tinkling, and the man held up his glass and toasted the woman, and having her attention made him realize he had missed the force of her stare, her heart displaying itself to him.”

  He feels Elena press harder against him, watches as she drapes an arm across his chest.

  “The woman sipped and then she said, ‘That old basilica reminded me of my family’s neighborhood church, much larger of course, but the same cruciform shape identifiable only by birds with their aerial view. It made me think of my years in pews, in catechism classes, dreaming of a God who was handsome. Did you hear me whispering the church parts into the cool air?’

  “And the man said, ‘No, I didn’t hear that at all,’ and the woman said, ‘This is how it goes …’” And Simon pauses.

  Elena looks up at him again and quietly says, “High altar, transept, nave, vestry, chancel, apse, font.”

  Simon nods. “And after the woman chanted the parts of the church, the man said to her, ‘When I looked at the church’s stained glass windows, I was reminded of sitting in synagogue when I was young, happy to have something to look at, wishing for something to read beyond the prayer book, wondering what my older sisters meant when they whispered with glee, ‘Atone, little brother, atone!’

  “For a while, the couple sat companionably, drinking their drinks, absorbed in their separate thoughts. The woman was thinking that when the visceral pleasures of life revealed themselves to her, she had intended to marry a man just like Jesus, never imagined that the man who would make her laugh and tremble would be a Jew. The churchgoers sitting on the wooden benches reverentially beholding their Christ on the cross made her wistful for those afternoons when she used to shiver figuring out her tame girlhood sins, waiting to confess, playing with the tiny crucifix that once dangled around her neck on a thin chain. She thought of that crucifix and chain tucked away in her jewelry box beside a Chinese bowl the man gave her as a gift.

  “And the man was thinking about his enforced Hebrew school years, being taught the Hebrew alphabet and enduring lessons about Judaic history he likely forgot while still in the classroom. He remembered the Abba-Zaba bars he bought at the temple store before every class, long and flat and slightly squishy when firmly pressed. He would stretch out the white taffy until it finally splintered, surreptitiously placing a wad in his cheek, letting it slowly dissolve until he tasted the peanut butter inside. How that candy made those tortured hours spouting ‘Aleph, Beit, Gimel, Dalet, Hey, Vav’ slightly more palatable, and responsible for the numerous cavities he incurred when he was a boy.”

  Simon pauses, wondering what comes next, and when Elena looks up at him, he holds up his hand, closes his eyes, and thinks until it comes to him, it all comes to him in a blinding deposit of knowledge, and when he opens his mouth, the pressure in his sternum dissolves.

  “Sitting at that outdoor café, the man wanted to tell the woman a story, needed to tell her a story, a very Jewish story that he thought of as a coming-to-Jesus story, that would be, in some undefined way, his coming-to tale. And he decided to tell her about the ancestor after whom he was named. He said to her, ‘Unlike me, past generations of my family prayed fervently. In my father’s family, there was a great-uncle born and raised in the Pale of Settlement, who studied long and hard to become a cantor, and then was in search of a position. The young cantor had been profoundly deaf since birth, but when the rabbi heard him sing, the rabbi thought, God is wise and caring, for although He made the cantor this way, He provided by giving him a magnificent voice, and a personal story that would draw large worshipping crowds, guaranteeing both the young man’s livelihood and an increase in the shul’s congregation, and it didn’t hurt at all that the deaf cantor’s name contained an inherent irony, for although he could not hear, his name meant one who has heard.

  “The rabbi hired the young cantor, who began his career singing through all the Shabbats and holidays. Many years passed, and in the cantor’s sixtieth year, at the onset of Rosh Hashanah, when the Days of Awe began and the Book of Life was opened, he raised his celestial voice to the heavens and continued singing the prayers until the sun was setting on the tenth day. With Yom Kippur drawing to a close, the cantor stood in front of the open ark, singing his heart out, and when his prayerful words reached a godly place, the cantor, without warning, fell silent. It was said that the silence was startling, vicious, reminded people of the decimations they had experienced in the past, continued to experience at the hands of those who wanted their kind turned forever to dust. And then, the cantor toppled over, and the congregation inhaled, a hundred sets of lungs pulling in consecrated air as he crumpled onto the bema, its red carpet shabby and worn. The rabbi leaped to the cantor’s side, dropped to the ground, pressed a hand to the neck of his ersatz son, his longtime friend and colleague, and felt no pulse. With eyes overflowing, he turned to the congregation and shook his head, and all those bated breaths released in a hard whoosh—” And Simon hears Elena sharply inhale.

  “Had God determined that the cantor should expire just at that moment? During the days and nights of Awe evoking his people’s fate with the deep melodies only he could carry, had the cantor missed the fact that his own name was not inscribed in the Book of Life for the coming year? Perhaps. Or perhaps an aneurysm exploded in the deaf cantor’s brain and ended his life just as the Book of Life snapped shut. Who knows whether the cantor died in such a poignant way, or whether the carpeting on the bema was actually red. The only thing truly known was that the cantor had lived a worthy life, had been part of an ancient line, had carried the ancient forward in his heart and in his head and in all his sung prayers, had brought sustaining faith to his people and himself.”

  “Simon?”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you saying?”

  He’s not sure what he’s saying, but this morning in bed, and on the drive as the miles sped by, there was a spiraling thought that there is something missing in him, in his life, which can’t be rectified by the methods he’s chosen to date. How strange if all his various fitness regimens, and his running the last six months, as if preparing for marathons, as if aiming to become one of those punishing distance runners, were for naught, because what’s missing has nothing to do with the physical realm at all.

  And the thought spirals faster and faster and faster, then blows apart, leaving behind something pure, something infinitely ageless.

  And it hits him, his chaotic nights, they aren’t about insomnia at all, but about something much deeper, about how he is living his life without any awareness of what lies beneath, without any awareness of his historical past, without any unifying theme rooted in the ageless to ground his present actions.

  He is astonished to find his Jewishness bubbling up, seeking release, when he has never much adhered to his religion.

  And it is precipitous, and overwhelming, this powerful sudden
wish to be perfectly aligned with his own people, for his daughters to know the cantor’s tale, to know all the other mystical tales, for them to live their forward-looking lives bathed in a magical past that is hard as nails.

  He wants for them what he once fought against, including the years spent in Hebrew school. He imagines each daughter playing Queen Esther in a temple Purim Day parade. In his own past, a handmade float carried the queen, a pretty teenage girl named Laurel. He can’t remember whether Mordechai the Savior or Haman the Jew-Hater sat next to her, but he remembers Laurel wearing a diaphanous blue gown with a gold crown on her head, and the float circling and circling the temple parking lot, snagging against parking-space bumpers. He remembers his father holding his hand, telling him that Simon’s grandfather was named after Mordechai the Savior, and that Harry’s name, Hiram, meant high-born and lofty, the name of the king of Tyre who supplied building materials and workers to build King David’s palace, and to Solomon, to build the temple of YHWH, and that Simon was named after the rarest of rare men, an ancestor who was a deaf cantor, the single time his father explained where Simon’s name had come from.