The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  Staring at the sky, head tipped back, motionless on that terrace, he was no longer seventy, not yet a man at thirteen, but a young boy on a red velvet seat swinging his legs, Mordy and Lenore stilling him, whispering, “Listen.” And he listened to the rabbi instructing the congregation in the ways of atonement, explaining the Torah’s requirement to ask for forgiveness in person, specifying the sin, as soon as the harm had been inflicted. That the Jewish people were born possessing innate kindness, knowing the nature and the power implicit in forgiving, in the act of seeking and providing it. That if the wounded, the offended, the hurt, the victim, the transgressed, refused at first to forgive, one had to continue on, facing the pain he had caused, facing himself, returning to atone again, and again, and again, each time in person, each time speaking original words of genuine, earnest, and candid apology. That path toward atonement, it was intended as a deliberately humbling walk, and one had to keep walking forward humbly, until forgiveness might be granted.

  And he knew he was humbled, and he was prepared to step onto the path, to follow it on and on until he reached its end, where he would atone with every fiber of his being, and hope that Max Stern would find it in his heart to forgive him. Only then, bathed in the virtuousness of the man against whom he had so thoroughly transgressed, would he be cleansed of his misconduct, his malfeasance, the harm he had unwittingly inflicted, freed of this choking shame, this self-loathing consuming him, this impotence pinning him down.

  In those long moments when the past and present collided, he was both the child he once was and the man he was at last becoming, and he understood.

  And it was true. Harry Tabor understood.

  From that perch high above, there was approval for the way his mind was working, the way his being was accepting all he had learned about himself, not feigning ignorance, not shunning it, but facing it, his newfound strength not weakened in the least, not swept away, by the gala celebrating him. Approval, too, for what he had decided to do, for he was and had always been a man of action, and action was what he would take.

  Harry Tabor was experiencing supreme lucidity, attaining the essential perspective, stepping into the holy. His free will was restored to him then, and he lowered his head from the dark night and the stars, and moved across the terrace, seeing nothing except that path he would take, no light yet at the end. Down the steps he went, and it seemed as if the cab was waiting for him, idling there at the entrance, the driver’s face hidden in shadow, and he said, “Palm Springs,” and he was racing through the night, lowering a window, feeling the rushing of the heated air, tossing out his cell phone, a quick puff of rising sand marking its landing in the desert, where it will never be found.

  He did not return home, for home, with its embracing love that he longer deserved, was not on the path. He rode the elevator up to CST, entered offices that were soundless and dark, confused about why he was there, until he sighted the path, and made his way to the hidden safe known only to him, opening it, stashing his passport in his pocket, taking cash from the roll he keeps on hand for families in need. He had never done anything like this. Had never not planned in advance. Had never disappeared for even an hour. Had never caused concern over his whereabouts. But it was not a time for explanations. If he explained, his family would stop him, and he could not allow anything to prevent him from fulfilling his profound duty.

  He quickly wrote a loving letter to Roma, another to the children, and left the two envelopes on his desk to be found. In those letters, he did not mention Israel, or Max Stern, or that he had an address on a slip of paper in his jacket pocket that he hoped would lead him to where he needed to go, scribbled down just a few hours ago, while searching for answers to questions he had never known to contemplate. Nor did he write that there was a force guiding his actions. He told them he loved them. He told them not to worry. Beyond that, there was nothing else to say until he understood how Max Stern was, what the years in prison had done to him, until he asked for Max’s forgiveness in person, specifically, heart laid bare, though decades late.

  He didn’t know if Max was still alive, but if he was, he would find the wrongfully convicted stockbroker turned Modern Orthodox rabbi living in Jerusalem.

  And if the search was not easy, he would never give up, would continue looking for Stern until the finale of Harry’s own days.

  And if there was only a grave, he would find the rules for asking forgiveness of the dead, and go to the grave and do everything he needed to do, and do it again, and again, and again, and then lay stones on the stone, saying, “Forgive me,” saying, “I remember you.”

  It was, for him, a vanishing act of life-saving consequence, both a distillation and concentration of the imperative to make amends to his old friend.

  It would be, for all time, the single most important act of Harry Tabor’s previously enviable life.

  Though he’s not quite sure how he managed to go from CST to LAX, or how he spent the time once he was there, he is now in a seat on an El Al plane that is twelve hours into its fourteen-hour-and-thirty-minute flight to Tel Aviv. He doesn’t know what time zone he is in, only that it is one in the morning at home. Outside his window, the sky is whitening, cloudy wisps gliding alongside, as if outlining the path toward the plane’s destination.

  The first part of his journey, to this airline seat, should have been impossible, but it had been unfettered, aided, knots untangled, these initial steps on the way to atoning facile and smooth, as if his mission was anointed, for it was remarkable how the world embraced a broken man of handsome age, black-tie-clad, with cash in his pocket, his thoughts at last properly aligned. His economy-class ticket had been quickly rendered obsolete when the young stewardess, a golden sabra he could imagine expertly wielding an automatic weapon in the Israeli army, ushered him to the front, into platinum class. He tried to decline the upgrade, but with her strong arms, the sabra pushed and cajoled, and it seemed right to give in, to give her what she wanted, and her hand on his shoulder said he had made her happy. He declined, however, the wine and the cocktails, the small plates of olives and almonds, the dinner. When the sabra said, “All meals are kosher, if that’s your concern,” he thanked her and said he needed nothing, and he didn’t. He was a man on a pilgrimage, traveling far away to make things right, to correct what he had deliberately obliterated more than three decades in the past.

  He has been sitting all these hours like a statue in his seat, jacket on, hands clasped, barely aware of his fellow passengers slumbering around him. But the stale air is warming up, and he feels all the slowed breaths, the slowly beating hearts, the dreams in which they are engaged and encased, and he removes his jacket.

  There, in the inner pocket, are two envelopes, their presence a shock.

  The letter he wrote to Roma, the letter he wrote to Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, letters he thought he left for them on his desk at CST.

  Instead, he has them, and is crushed by his discovery. And frantic, as they must be, too. He turns them over and over and over, hearing Roma’s voice telling him that the workings of the mind are often unfathomable, and perhaps he unconsciously held onto them, and needed to contemplate why.

  And so he contemplates. Perhaps the words he wrote last night in Palm Springs to those he loves were not the right words, were insufficient. Perhaps those envelopes ended up in his pocket because he will not know the right words until he has reached the end of the path and returns home to them as, he prays, an illuminated man.

  He tears the envelopes and the letters within into tiny pieces, until he holds fistfuls of confetti, and watches them flutter into the bag held open by the sabra collecting detritus from her passengers.

  He sets his jacket across his legs and closes his eyes. When all of the world’s emotions roll through him, he finally understands that the past will always exist, and that the world will always defy comprehension, and that he is not, has never been, will never be, traveling all on his own.

  Soon there is an internal rus
h of lapping oceanic waves pulling him under, into the ruffled layers of sleep, and the dream he has in his platinum-class seat on this El Al flight taking him to Israel, it has not been touched from above, belongs wholly and only to him:

  Ben Gurion Airport. A cab to the Savidor Merkaz train station. Climbing aboard the right bus, an hour later stepping out into a city of ancient grandeur, of veneration and conflict for Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. A cosmopolitan medieval city, of walls and gates, and pink and white stone, looking down at the Dead Sea, across the Jordan River to the biblical mountains of Moab in the east, west to a coastal plain and the Mediterranean. It is a temperate seventy-five degrees, but the sun is hanging steep in the sky. Birds nest in the old walls. Hooded crows, jays, swifts, and bulbuls, though he doesn’t know their names. He stands still for a moment, watching a flock of white storks flying overhead. The air is fragrant with the aromas of cooking, scented with spices. He is carried along by the crowds, awash in a myriad of languages, Hebrew, Arabic, English, he recognizes, but there are many more that he doesn’t. Among the pageantry of secular garb and monastic vestments, of black hats and hijabs, and the splashy colors sported by the tourists, his tuxedo merits no second glances.

  This is the Old City. There is the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock. The Jaffa Gate. The Tower of David. He passes synagogues and yeshivas, mosques and madrassas, churches and convents, bazaars and souks, hidden courtyards and gardens, all manner of dwellings. It is an architectural mosaic, continuously inhabited for five thousand years. Beyond, where he is not going, the ancient is replaced by the modern. And beyond the modern, the desert sands range from white to ochre.

  He hears the peals of church bells, the calls of muezzins from the minarets, the chanting of Jewish prayers at the Wailing Wall. He is in Jerusalem, the city on a hill.

  He follows the address on the slip of paper carried these seventy-five hundred miles. He circles and circles around tiny streets and finds himself in a narrow stone lane that opens into a large tiled courtyard. Sunny, but shaded by old trees, olive and fig. The crumbling walls covered by climbing vines. People on wooden benches raising their faces to the sun. He thinks they might be waiting to speak to the man who lives in that restored thousand-year-old house with the door that is painted such a particular blue he imagines stepping through it and reaching the sky.

  He raps quietly, nervously, heart knocking in his chest, and then standing before him on the transom is a man who is Max Stern. And not. As tall as Harry remembers, but dark hair now white and wild, his once clean-shaven face hidden beneath the bushy long beard of a sage, a sublime light in his eyes. The force of him is extraordinary, and Harry understands that whatever Max Stern once was, he has been transformed into a powerful being.

  There is no time to waste, no niceties that would make sense, and so he begins.

  “I am here to seek your forgiveness.”

  Max Stern lifts a hand, the motion mysterious, the intent ambiguous.

  “I, not you, deserved to be punished. You should have thrown me to the wolves. Why didn’t you throw me to the wolves?”

  And he is again that young boy on that red velvet seat in the synagogue, his parents imploring him to listen, and he hears his childhood rabbi say, “The sages taught whoever forgave the faults of others would have his sins pardoned by Hashem.” Here in Jerusalem, facing the man he wronged, he prays it is true.

  Max Stern says nothing, gives nothing away. Even his eventual smile gives nothing away. Finally, he steps aside and says, “It took you far longer than it should have. But I knew one day you would show up at my door. Come in, Harry Tabor, come in.”

  SIXTY

  IT IS A QUARTER to four in the morning.

  In his bed in his house in the hills, Simon is awake and staring at the crack in the ceiling. Elena is asleep; the girls are asleep. His bag for Israel is packed and at the front door.

  Will he find his father?

  Will he at last sleep, on the plane, or in his hotel room in Jerusalem?

  Will he be transformed by this trip?

  Will he find the truth of himself?

  Will he find the hole he possesses filled up?

  Will his wife still love him, though she has said she will not?

  It’s the unforeseen Elena doesn’t want in her life, as if there could be no distinction between the internal and the external, which doesn’t make sense in the context of her Catholicism, practiced all these years, with him unaware.

  She turns beneath the sheet, and his automatic response is to hope, then to pray, Elena is turning toward him, despite all he has considered, all that he knows, all that she has said. But when he looks, he is confronted from a distance by the tight whorl of her black hair pinned at her neck. She’s far away, at the very edge of their large bed, as if even in sleep, she is expressing both her literal and metaphorical position.

  IN PALM SPRINGS, THE Tabor women are also awake.

  They slept, but one by one they emerged from unremembered visions, padded out of their rooms, and gathered outside. Except for the occasional chirrup or hoot or quick high cry of the desert’s night creatures, silence surrounds them as they toss away their night clothes and walk united into the pool. Under the silvery glow of the waxing moon and the plentiful stars, they float naked in water as warm as the air.

  Phoebe is thinking of Lucy and wonders why. She does not remember it was Lucy in her dreams, grown into a young woman with flowing hair, speaking to a crowd in words liquid and fluid, her eyes never once straying from her aunt and cousin in the front row. In the dream, Phoebe had smiled up at Lucy, then leaned over and emptied her shoes of sand. Then she had kissed the small hand of her own daughter, a charming chestnut-haired little girl whom Phoebe had fairy-tale-named Tulip Tabor.

  Camille is thinking of shoots of grass, and seas of flowers, and oceans of sand, and the way chocolate tastes in her mouth. There is a giddiness inside of her, of which she is barely aware, just bubbles of something traveling between heart and head. In her dream, of which she has no recollection, she was wearing a gauzy white gown, cradling a naked infant at her breast, walking alongside Valentine Osin, who was dressed in a white linen suit and clutching a book in each hand, one titled The American Widow, the other, How the H. Naledi Changed My Life.

  It comes to Roma that she woke breathless, unaware she dreamt of a fruit orchard set in a desert, her feet mired in sand, trying and failing to reach the trees laden with fruit, round, and ripe, and alluring. When she sat up in bed, she had looked at the clock and seen it was half past three. She does not know it yet, but that will become her waking hour for the rest of her life.

  Her hair glides on the surface, water beads slip across her skin, and she finally feels quieter, calm even, at one with the atmosphere and the future of her family, the connective chorus that they are, that they will remain.

  She imagines Harry and Simon returning. The whole family around the table by the big pool, set with rose crystal goblets and rose-flowered plates. Harry, himself once again, with that big Harry Tabor smile, and the weight lifted from his shoulders. Simon, happy, rested, no longer restive at all. And she and Phoebe and Camille listening to the adventuresome tales told by husband and father, son and brother, about their separate journeys to Israel, about finding each other, their time there together. About all that transpired when Harry met Max Stern. Asking the easy question first: Is he really a rabbi?

  When the tales of courage and discovery and insight slow to a trickle, she will suggest the whole family plan an immediate tripartite trip: to walk one of those biblical routes Harry had been researching; then to find that farm, once Russian, but Russian no more, where Tatiana and Inessa lived for eleven long years; then to find those former shtetls once located in the circumscribed Pale of Settlement, where most of their people lived their whole lives.

  She wants them all to remember the Kahanoviches and the Jacobys and the Tabornikovs, their determination to survive, that determination giving rise to this Tabo
r clan, which will continue to exist. She can nearly smell the tang of the Black Sea, feel the fecund earth in the palm of her hand. She imagines them all together, reclaiming themselves, reclaiming their origins, demonstrating their profound gratitude for the immense kindness that has been visited upon them.

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIX MONTHS AGO, SIMON lost the sensation of time moving, how it felt when it raced or crawled, and although the days have progressed, for him, time instantly halted, turned inert and stagnant.

  He has spent whole days in his office with his door shut and the Palm Times article on his desk. First read in his business-class seat, drinking his coffee, newly airborne on that Monday in mid-August. He opened the paper he’d taken on his way out of the house and saw the byline of Owen Kaufmann.

  The name had called forth the young man who had cornered his mother at the gala, when the gala was still a party. He couldn’t recall their awkward conversation, but he remembered his discomfort, and when he led his mother away, his impression had been that Owen Kaufmann did not like Harry, and he had wondered how that was possible, because everybody loved Harry.

  He hadn’t known then that Owen Kaufmann had interviewed his father earlier in the week. And he hadn’t known then that Owen Kaufmann had misled Harry, telling him it was a profile about his Man of the Decade honor, rather than an uncharitable exposé masquerading as an op-ed.

  That morning, on the plane, he read Owen Kaufmann’s description of Harry, a charming man, with smarts, and a can-do personality, and Simon wasn’t sure if the inked sarcasm he sensed was real or not. But when the article applauded CST’s valuable contributions to society and the people it served, he’d relaxed.

  Then been gut-punched. Owen Kaufmann had written about Harry’s time at Carruthers Investments, and the insider trading case that had ensnared Max Stern, and questioned whether Harry might have been involved.