It was too much—like finding a passport to a place she only knew from dreams. And then, of course, it was nothing. She was still the same woman she’d been before the mail came: hectic, blushing, fumbling for polite conversation while her inner voice produced only spiteful ironies; waiting and watching (checking the mail, the answering machine, every face on the street), alert for the flash that would charge her perfectly satisfactory life with astonishment, with revelation.
She thought of the poster from her childhood Sunday School classroom: an insipid Jesus surrounded by rosy children and fleecy lambs. That was Christianity and it could not contain her. Then had come the cataclysmic coincidence of Rebecca Mizner’s bas mitzvah and their seventh-grade study of Anne Frank. Rebecca Mizner, that little plump-kneed girl who wailed about her impetigo, while her mother sprayed Lysol on anything Liane touched while visiting … Rebecca, at the sacred center of a great rite of passage, while Liane, who lived in a holy rapture, had to mark her own coming of age by learning to insert a Tampax? It would not do. She’d sat fuming amid the congregation of Temple Beth-El while Rebecca stared at the floor and mumbled her portion. “Ch,” Liane had tried, in the back of her throat, “challah; l’chaim.” Oh, Rebecca, stand aside! Rebecca’s older brother, Gabe, was just back from Israel, his massed curls bouncing on his shoulders, his face full of curiosity. His eyes met Liane’s; he smiled. The premonition of physical love dawned over her, and in its glow all the strands intertwined: she would live with high moral intensity, make a metaphysical pilgrimage into a foreign realm, suffer for a great cause instead of her usual suffering for no good reason at all. No other story had been fierce enough, bloody enough, ripe enough with symbol and ritual, for the always yearning, newly throbbing creature she had been—she must have the story of the Jews for her own.
Thus had the Old Testament got filed under the mattress with The Story of O. And then, like all evidence of secret longing, forgotten: distilled and diluted to suffuse her thoughts all these years. Religion seemed to her now a kind of nostalgia, a picturesque ruin that proved that once—long ago—people used to be certain about something. And the Jews—she bore them (us, rather, she reminded herself) a grudge; they were so cozy together, declaring themselves apart while insisting on being included, seeing swastikas at the bottom of every teacup, going on about the Jewish tradition of charity, the Jewish tradition of study, as if such things were unheard of beyond the pale. (Dangerously close to the truth, this, which made it doubly infuriating.) At the word, the thought—Jewish—a breath of envy, excitement, and disdain passed over her, too light to be noticed before it was gone.
“Derek,” she called, to her husband the descendant of Myles Standish. (How they laughed at his mother’s pride in this—had ever a family suffered a sheep as black as Myles Standish? And even if Myles Standish had been, instead of a Brutal Warrior–cum–Religious Nut, a Great Benevolent Thinker such as, say, Maimonides—could one inherit some distant ancestor’s honor, like a sauceboat, or some strain of disease? Silly idea!) Silly to feel, as Liane definitely did, that fortune had whispered an endearment in her ear.
“Derek, guess what? I’m a Jew!”
He came out with his face half covered in shaving lather. “Very nice,” he said, squinting at the chart. “It looks like you are about … hmm, one sixty-fourth Jewish. I congratulate you.”
“No,” she said, “look here—it’s all in the women. On my mother’s side.”
He smiled. When he was uncertain about something he treated it with polite condescension until it went away. Wasps, she thought, are discomfitted by perplexity. Jews live for it.
“The Jews,” she said, “would consider me a Jew.”
“Well, felicitations.” He retreated rather nervously.
“You mean Mazel tov!” she said, sticking out her tongue.
She refolded the chart. She had to get Cecily to the baby-sitter, and dress—and what did one wear, to an evening wedding, a Jewish wedding, a wedding in the city? It must be nice to have a religion, a culture, a class … something that was woven into you, that couldn’t change. As it was she never knew what to put on. Her dresses looked hopelessly Waspy, all silk and flowers, utterly wrong. Shmattes, they were—the Jews would only laugh: what could it be, this fairy simplicity, but a pose? They (we, she said to herself, we) would be confident, certain, quick. They would wear … but what?
If she were really a Jew, of course, she’d have known. She’d have been dressed long since, and be out solving world problems by now. “I’m a person of the book,” she said unconvincingly. Blood has nothing to do with it, what matters is what comes down to you hand to hand. She held up dress after dress in the mirror, feeling the anxiety of the chameleon: if she didn’t assume precisely the colors of the background, would the others have her for lunch?
But when she was dressed (a linen sheath, dove gray, and pearls from Derek’s mother—she’d go as a young birch and leave the questions of human parentage aside), and swept Cecily up for a last kiss, she held her daughter’s gaze for a second, sending a spark across to blaze up there: Look what I’ve passed to you, my girl. Anything is possible, she thought, anything. It’s there in plain sight, you have only to turn your head a little, and voilà! She’d buy The Gifts of the Jews, she’d absorb it like … like … a communion wafer. No, it was hopeless, her feet touched back to earth and she hurried off click, click, click on her heels.
* * *
Walking down Bayside Avenue toward the Silverbergs’ she felt almost distinguished. Her hips were disguised under the sheath; she looked very nearly thin. And Derek strode beside her, lean and sharp-faced like a fox or a British spy. In his navy suit jacket he seemed well-nigh Anglican. Ascetic, devoted to scholarship above everything—that was what she’d seen when she fell in love with him, without thinking he might devote himself to scholarship above her.
“Oh!” he said suddenly, “this must be…,” and dived into a morass of cantaloupe chiffon, warmly seizing a plump little satin-trussed blond girl before Liane could reach him.
“She looked like a bride…,” he said, as the giggling maidens readjusted themselves.
“Of course she looked like a bride! It’s a Saturday in June, every third woman you see is a bride! This isn’t even the right block! Does she look like Naomi?” Naomi, the daughter of Derek’s old friend Len, had been a dark-eyed child who seemed to be gazing straight past you, back into history, and had grown now into an earnest, thoughtful woman whose clear eyes were turned directly toward the future. She was writing her dissertation on water rights in Gaza, and spared no opportunity to remind her mother the lawyer that very few things were simple enough to be decided in court. The girl Derek had hugged was erupting vesuvially from her bodice and wore an amethyst crucifix around her neck and a diamond stud in her tongue.
“Well—” he hung his head, winsomely sheepish. He hadn’t known June was a month of weddings; in fact he didn’t definitely know it was June. He trusted Liane to guide him in the daily matters. When they traveled she just said “Turn here,” and forgot even to tell him where they were going.
To Israel, dear! They turned up the Silverberg driveway promptly at six and found themselves alone with the caterers. The year’s first breath of heat hit Liane like a drug, making everything vivid and strange. The white tents hovered over the lawn, the bouquets of red and pink roses also held spikes of buds like rubbery green chicken hearts, and the striped poles of the chuppah, leaning against a tree trunk, looked like a horse’s cast-off jousting garment.
“Didn’t they say six?” she asked, but of course Derek wouldn’t know, and now Len’s wife, Barbara, came out and cried, “Guests!” as if they were a couple of rats just up from the sewer, then regained her composure, which was usually absolute (she brooked no uncertainty, the better to assert herself in court), came and kissed them, summoned a twinkling young waiter to pour lemonade, and disappeared back inside, calling a bright warning: “Lenny, guests!” She was wearing black organdy; a mo
ther of the bride dress circa 1963—perhaps her own mother had worn it and handed it down. So, Liane thought, two gaffes in the first five minutes—her sheath that had seemed so perfect felt gauche now that Barbara of the courtroom suits had come as a frump, and apparently one was not supposed to arrive at a Jewish wedding on time.
There were too many nuances; you couldn’t get it right. Len and Derek had been thrown together when barred from the same fraternities in college years before, Len being too Jewish and Derek too strange. They’d stood up at each other’s weddings, but Derek’s first two didn’t take, so by the time he and Liane had their three-minute ceremony Len had just sent a card—she hardly knew him. And she was so much younger, had missed the time of fraternities and everything else that defined that generation’s lives.
And in the presence of religion she was always wrong. At church with her mother she’d see stonemasons genuflect with perfect simplicity while she was so clumsy the act seemed nearly satirical. The poignancy of it—the kneeling before a painted God on a gilded cross in a church whose spire pointed straight out into the infinite dark—pained her until she had to laugh, to keep from crying. And that was in her own faith! In a synagogue she felt paralyzed, certain that at the next blink she’d be unmasked as an impostor.
Jewish at last, she became more awkward. Her head was full of words like yeshiva and tsuris that she was afraid to pronounce lest their syllables band together against her … words that ought to have been hers. She wanted to tell everyone, but how did you make such an announcement, and what could it possibly mean? Only that she was barging in to loot a great tradition for her own ends. She had no legacy of suffering, striving in a hostile world. And what were her accomplishments? Cecily, of course, and she had nice garden and did well at her job—fund-raising for a college already heavily endowed. Did she direct the benefactors to go buy wells for desperate villages instead? No, she was naturally ambitious and tried to bring in more money every year. She did not deserve to be Jewish. She was an ordinary woman making her way through a mundane life—it was utterly unbearable.
“I thought we were late,” said a quiet, insinuating woman’s voice in Liane’s ear—Derek’s first wife, Marsha (née Waldman, recently Takemoto), was behind her. Marsha was hardly a close friend, but in the circumstances Liane was glad to see her.
“We were the first ones to get here, and I don’t think we’ll be forgiven,” she said.
Marsha laughed. “Punctuality, Derek’s great belief,” she said. “He can’t help it, you know, it’s his upbringing.”
A Wasp upbringing, all good posture and mortification of the flesh. Their language! “Care for a dip?”—meaning “Let’s throw ourselves into the sea!” Or “Nippy out!”—pronounced with relish as if the phrase itself linked them with millions of equally hearty Wasps everywhere, all of them in unison stepping out on their mats, taking a deep breath, and proclaiming, “Nippy out!” She had imagined she’d save Derek from all that, but in fact it had only grown stronger, and recently she’d caught him diving into a freezing lake just so he could say how “invigorating” it was. These Wasps, they turn proudly away from their senses, from anything that can’t be described in a jovial phrase. Liane felt a sweet kinship with Marsha, who had suffered the same things.
“Fishman’s coming, Len says,” Marsha said.
Fishman! Lenny often spoke of Fishman, but neither Derek nor Liane had ever met him, so the natural comedy of his name had taken hold and Liane pictured him as an ungainly, waddling person with a turned-down mouth and wide-set, staring eyes, like the fish-footmen in Alice in Wonderland. Though, in fact, he was the legendary Fishman and his name was always spoken in a hush. The thought of meeting him finally seemed wonderfully exciting, all the more so because Liane wasn’t sure why. What was he legendary for? A particular warmth or intensity, maybe: a way of looking at you that showed he was honestly interested, or a gift for speaking out his own thoughts and feelings in all their curious depth … Liane turned around to look for him, but saw no one unusual. Still, she was left with the restless sense that if she really studied every face in this crowd, she’d find something special in one of them—something she’d waited all her life to see.
It was a quarter of seven, and the service (did they—we—call it a service?) was beginning. Marsha, like Barbara, was in black, obviously obeying some secret Jewish dress code, but just as Liane was feeling entirely in the wrong, a woman with gray sausage curls and a dress covered with vivid pink and blue hydrangeas brushed by.
“Is that a rabbi?” Marsha asked, as the woman ascended the altar (did we call it an altar?). Marsha was so short she had to go up on tiptoe to talk into Liane’s ear. “My God,” she said, as if they were slaughtering a lamb up there.
“Mine, too, it turns out!” Liane chirped—but the ceremony had begun, the first Adonai was already resounding, and Marsha went on, ruefully, to herself, “or not, in fact, my God at all.”
“What do you mean?” asked Liane, knowing she ought to keep quiet but remembering how everyone had talked through Rebecca Mizner’s bas mitzvah, while her mother told her with reverence (as her father set an example of silent Congregational decorum) that for the Jews talk was a part of the sacred life.
“I grew up among Unitarians!” Marsha said. “I hardly knew what Judaism was! I suppose that’s why I married Derek; he seemed so familiar. But then Barbara’s not exactly Yentl. I mean, she belongs to the ACLU, not the temple! All that wailing and schlepping the Talmud around—”
“Torah,” Liane bristled. “The Talmud is sixty-three volumes.”
“Whatever,” Marsha said. Unitarian indeed! All these years Marsha had done nothing but carp about being Jewish—her allergies, her tormenting mother, her frizzy hair and susceptibility to wine—these and almost every other one of her characteristics were danced out with glee disguised as vexation, for the sake of taunting Liane. Marsha even moaned about her own tendency to complain! (Though she used the word nudzh, to point out that she, Marsha, had access to a vigorous and naturally comical language that Liane wasn’t allowed to get near.) How like Marsha, to join the Unitarians suddenly just when Liane had crept into the pale!
“I mean,” Marsha said, nodding toward Barbara, “to go Jewish suddenly, when your children are all grown … It seems, well, grasping, don’t you think?” Her dry whisper sounded of a little girl’s confidence and a snake’s oscillation, both. Had she been in touch with the Mormons? And why do the Mormons keep tabs on everyone this way? Up went the chuppah, the flower girls scattered their petals. Naomi, who had gone not only Jewish but girlish for the occasion, maneuvered her hooped skirt between the poles and turned her biblical eyes adoringly toward her beloved, one Trevor Tarrington, whose parents, a pair of thin, wan physicians, stood behind him looking entirely desiccated as if the life force had leached out of them and they were likely, at any moment, to disintegrate. And Adonai, Adonai …
“That is not a rabbi,” said Marsha. It was true that in the woman’s brightly lipsticked mouth the Hebrew took on great deliberate vowels as if for a study of Midwestern pronunciation.
Still, the seven blessings, photocopied in Hebrew and English, fell over her like a tallis—nearly weightless but signifying everything: the centuries of holding the crystal of life up, turning every facet to the light, seeking, studying, understanding. Hearing them, her eyes full of those tears peculiar to weddings—tears wept at the sight of people trying to cram the immensity of hope into the very modest vessel of possibility—Liane thought, Yes, I know what to value, I belong with the Jews. Her mother always touched the Mizner’s mezuzah in a demonstration of the reverence she felt Liane had lacked, so that Liane (who was given at the time to hiding behind the back hedge, pricking herself with barberry thorns as if pain was the clearest channel toward pleasure), contemplating her own inadequacy against such a great tradition, would go inside and plunk with heavy heart on the creaking plastic cover of the velvet sofa, to hear Mrs. Mizner continue her running count of Rebec
ca’s calories.
But—Liane’s mother had known, all while she was taking Communion and rhapsodizing about “the Jews,” that she was one! What, why? It was only a few weeks ago that she’d told Liane her grandmother was Jewish, as if it were a fact of no interest at all.
“Really?” Liane had asked, mildly. Her mother tended to concoct: there was the uncle who leapt from the White House balcony during a state dinner, the second cousin who was ‘quite certainly’ Tennessee Williams’s inspiration when he created Blanche Dubois. These unnamed paragons stood as proof that despair and insanity need not be insuperable barriers; an idea as important, in Liane’s family, as the proud bond with Myles Standish was in Derek’s. When Liane was about to approach some Brahmin for a donation she’d think—After all, my people have been to dinner at the White House—and it straightened her spine.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I didn’t like to upset Daddy.”
“How would it have upset Daddy?”
“How would it upset Klaus?” her mother asked, laughing. “His people came from Hamburg, you know.”
“In, like, the 1800s.”
“Still, you can’t be too careful,” she’d said lightly, while Liane tried to imagine what it was she couldn’t be too careful about. Careful not to go around rudely making Germans feel guilty by being Jewish? Not to let your husband know you, in case he might decide to murder you? Not to let even your own daughter see who you were? No, this must be only a new delusion of grandeur: “My people have been tormented through history and triumphant.” Right, Mom.
Darling? Page 11
