by Neil Gordon
“You underestimate us. You underestimate yourself too.”
“Yeah, right.” She laughed briefly. “Allison Rosenthal. A jewel of Orthodox femininity.”
“Esther. Esther Rosenthal.” Drew was speaking very seriously now. “That’s not a name you can run away from. What did your zaideh call you? ‘The girl who saved the Jews,’ right? You’re brilliant, perfectly educated, and soon you’ll be a lawyer. You could be a central, productive, important person for us.”
“Oh God, Drew, Peretz, don’t give me that old garbage. I’m the daughter of a criminal, living like a goy, not virgin. I have nothing to offer you or your damn community.”
But Drew just shook his head, gravely, patiently. “It’s not old, and it’s not garbage. Essie, your father’s no criminal—not in Israel. Not to the Jews. You don’t understand: the story is biblical: your father is Mordecai, Sid Ohlinger is Haman, Clinton’s the king, and you’re Esther. Don’t you see?”
“No. No, I don’t see.” Allison stepped closer now, smelling the stale sweat on her childhood friend’s white shirt, feeling like crying. “All that proves is that politics are ageless and the one constant of history is how horrible people can be to each other.”
Drew was whispering now, urgently, across the small distance between them. “No. You’re not listening. You think this is a story about politics. It’s not even a loyalty.”
Rather than answering, she watched him, and after a long moment, he stepped back and spoke sadly.
“Essie, you need me, all you have to do is pick up the phone. You understand? One call, whenever you want, and I’m there.”
She nodded.
“And one more thing. You tell your father the same thing. Any time he needs me, I’m ready, and so’s Menacham Abramowitz and Ben Gordon and Yankel Shapiro. You with me? Any time, any place, anything. All you gotta do is tell me.”
Allison frowned, nodded again. Then she spoke in a normal voice.
“I’ll tell him. Hey, Drewski? I’ll see you later.”
And before he could stop her, she had darted over and planted a kiss on her old friend, her dear friend’s cheek, and then, steering her bicycle, was out the door.
5.
Prospect Park, at the head of Coney Island Avenue. Alley pedaled hard along the drive, pushing herself, her breath coming fast in the cold air, her body sweating steadily under its tight clothes. At Grand Army Plaza she exited the park, shot out really, through the changing light and full into the stream of traffic around the monument, disregarding the blare of a horn.
How odd it was that across the gulf—the abyss, really—between them, Drew’s loyalty remained intact. He could have done a lot for her, she thought. He could have added so much to the field of possibilities. Thinking that, she became aware of the weight of her father’s documents she carried on her back. Then she shrugged off the thought. Nicky’s death ruined everything.
Four o’clock. An hour or two of daylight left. Before the bridge she found herself somehow unwilling to return to Manhattan, and she detoured west into Brooklyn Heights, and against the traffic down Pierrepont Street. Outside her high school, of its own volition her body paused the bicycle and her eye turned to the low wall next to the art room.
Two girls, tight T-shirts showing their small-breasted, slim-shouldered bodies, sat smoking, talking to the small group of boys gathered around. That was where she would have been, with Martha, her own blond hair shoulder length and parted at the middle, Martha’s black and curly and tied back with a band so it exploded around the nape of her neck. Across the street, in the big sycamore whose lower branches you could reach with a boost from a friend, Pauly would be climbing with Michael Numeroff and Richard Robbins, waiting for her to take him home. She looked to the right, expecting to see other children climbing the tree. But the lower branches were now twelve or fourteen feet high, and no one was climbing the tree.
A car approached, so she pushed off and down the street, then turned left and coasted against traffic on Hicks Street to Grace Court. Midway on the small street was the ornate brownstone mansion in which she had grown up, and here she paused again.
Not for the first time, she wondered why her father had moved here. Perhaps, she thought, when he had decided to withdraw his daughter and son from yeshiva and move the family out of Borough Park, perhaps he’d been too scared to go out of Brooklyn, and settled on this enclave next to Grace Church as a compromise. A class of children from the church school passed behind her, crayons and papers in hand, and settled to copy a street sign, and her eye traveled up the facade of the house to the windows of her third-floor bedroom. They rested briefly there, then dropped as she mounted her bicycle and rode slowly off.
Still, she could not quite bring herself to leave, and paused at the end of the street, watching Manhattan rising in an aura of smog. Funny that she should feel so at home here now, she thought. Moving had been the trauma of her life, the first trauma: eleven years old, an odd-shaped creature with long legs, showing up the first day of school dressed in the ankle-length skirt and starched white shirt of her yeshiva. Only Martha, who had also been subject to a deculturation—although much earlier in life when Ohlinger had pulled himself out of the Bronx and headed, a brilliant young yeshiva bucher , to Harvard Law—had befriended Allison. Then together, they’d taken care of Pauly.
Which was funny, because it had ultimately been Pauly who’d taught her everything she knew about living here. Those two years had made all the difference: his memories of yeshiva disappeared the moment he took his kipah off, the first day in school when he realized no one else was wearing one. Now, watching the river just beyond her childhood house, Allison thought that Pauly had always been more indigenous to the Heights than she.
Later on the divorce came, her sophomore year of high school, the winter—she thought now—after she had made love with Dee on Hancock Beach. Her mother had quietly, with no preparation and no explanation, disappeared from their lives, leaving their father to explain. Two summers later, while they were on the island, her father had quietly sold off the Grace Court house and bought a prewar apartment on Park Avenue. Without ever returning to the house, she had gone off to Yale, Pauly had moved uptown with her father, and started at Dalton. And now the roles were reversed. Now it was Allison, escaped from her family just when her family had fallen apart, who was at home in this new world in New Haven with Martha and a quarter of their graduating class from St. Ann’s, and Pauly, torn apart by the divorce, who had to master a new place alone.
God, he had had a bad time that year. First the divorce, then her departure, then the move, all within a couple of years. Her father had had her bedroom moved intact to the new apartment, and she had come home every weekend, and every weekend night little Pauly would huddle his tight, sullen body next to her, sleeping a tragic child’s sleep in which he tossed and talked and cried out all night long.
And now a terrible ache was in her stomach as, step by step, starting from those nights in this house, the logic of her brother’s death came back to her. She didn’t say it, even to herself, but she knew it. It all started here, in this house: this was where Pauly learned everything about love, and everything about hate, and it would be that hate that would lead him to be killed on the cliffs of Gay Head.
Nobody knew that. It had nothing to do with suicide, Pauly’s death, and it had nothing to do with being gay. Being gay for Pauly meant having fallen in love only once, and that had been with a man. That man had been like him in so many ways: so quick to laugh, so strong and beautiful, so in touch with that strain of yiddishkeit black humor and yet so at home in a world of WASPs. But it wasn’t about being gay, it was about the fact that Johnny Eisenberg could have been his brother.
Or his sister.
No one else knew that. Not her father, not their neighbors, not the newspapers. They saw a traumatized child, sick with homosexuality, and when the day came that he stole his father’s gun and on the red clay cliffs at Gay Head turned its
muzzle into his chest, his beautiful strong chest, they saw an inevitability.
Only once had she had the chance to tell her father the truth, at the unveiling of Pauly’s gravestone, a year after his funeral. Only she and her father had been there, Acacia Cemetery in Queens. Afterward, they’d gone to see her grandparents’ tombs, and stooping to put a pebble on his mother’s gravestone, his father had said, not looking at her but into the green depths of the cemetery, “When did Davey take my gun, Esther?”
She knew he was referring to the night her brother shot himself. “Why, Daddy?”
His voice carried on under the vault of summer sky.
“I was thinking about it this morning. It was in my bedside drawer when I went to sleep. That night. I know because I checked it.”
“So?”
“So, Davey went out before I went to bed. According to the police report, he never came back.”
Watching her father crouching by his mother’s tombstone, she wondered what story, what other story, he was telling himself, and how close it came to the truth. That was when she had a chance to tell him. But what she said was wooden, factual:
“He came back. During the night. I heard him. He came upstairs, then he went out again. I thought he was in the bathroom, but he must have come to take the gun while you were asleep. I thought he was going back out to party. I let him go. I—I could have stopped him, Daddy.”
And now her father was standing, approaching her across the small distance of his mother’s grave, and then she was in his arms and as her tears came she knew he had, once again, believed her.
With a start, she came back to herself. What was happening? All the implacable discipline of the years past, years where she had never once revisited this time in the past, was falling apart, falling apart. Tears in her eyes—the second time she had cried since that day at the cemetery—she mounted, turned, and accelerated, hard, toward the bridge.
6.
Eight P.M., on Jane Street. Allison, drying her hair by the mirror, dressing after her shower.
She had met Martha for a drink, downtown at the Ear Inn, on her return to the city. Martha ordered dinner, Allison, waiting to eat later with Dee, had a couple of beers. Afterward, she’d cycled home, somewhat drunk after not having eaten all day. Encouraged by the mixture of exercise and beer, a great lassitude had gone through her, and she had rested for a long time on her bed before, noticing the time, rising. First she’d unpacked her knapsack, hiding the documents she’d taken from Borough Park in her desk drawer. Then she’d gone to shower.
Standing in front of the mirror in her bedroom, brushing her wet hair, she considered her eyes dispassionately. It was time to go downstairs to the bar, to show herself so that Dee would know to follow her up, but she found her mind resting not on that meeting she had awaited all day but on Drew. Drew, his pale face framed by black hair, his bent nose, his strong body hidden beneath a crumpled white shirt above drab black pants, the fringe of his prayer shawl hanging loose above his pants pockets.
And suddenly she was consumed by a sensation of hatred for her old friend, a heat that swept through her, hatred for his right-wing politics, his disregard for freedom, his righteousness; hatred for the pure unaestheticism of his life, the dreary clothes, the sun-starved skin.
God, the audacity of his sanctimonious nonsense. Bitterly, she thought, not for the first time, of the hypocrisy of the religious, thinking themselves holy for their willingness to sacrifice everything to their belief. But how holy was that? Everyone, Allison knew, thinks they are making some holy sacrifice. Her father was prepared to sacrifice the lives of people and the freedom of countries to protect Israel’s ability to defend itself. Dee was prepared to sacrifice her father to bring legal questions into court. Dee’s father was prepared to sacrifice justice to satisfy the overarching demands of foreign policy. And even Nicky had been prepared to sacrifice her—her very freedom—to stop Greg Eastbrook from being elected. So how different was Drew, thinking he had given so much to the pursuit of sanctity?
And then, as that anger faded, she just as suddenly felt something other, and as it grew she acknowledged that it had always been there, and it had always been guilt. Guilt for her goyish good looks, guilt for the changed name, guilt for the happiness she had had, guilt for the degree to which she had escaped the thorny obligations and questions of these people’s lives.
And as she felt guilt she felt a longing, shocking in its depth, for the pure simplicity of Drew’s beliefs, the conviction that God has 613 rules, no more, no less, and all we—Republicans, Democrats, gun runners, or rabbis—have to do is follow them. How quickly, how easily, she could turn right around from her entire life and go back! Slip clearly into the religious belief, the xenophobia, the racism, Zionism, faith. The zealotry. As if all her life, to this moment, all her cherished beliefs, faded as easily as an ex-smoker gives in to the seductiveness of tobacco and suddenly, from a militant antismoker, becomes again a profound addict.
Longing. That longing flowing through her, alive and hot. She carried it across the room, out the door, and down into the night to find Dee. Carried it downstairs, carried it around the corner, carried it to the bar and to Dee—cradling it, cherishing it, nursing it until she could masquerade it as that other longing—until she could end this terrible day with Dee’s body in hers.
And still, that long, long day had another surprise coming.
Or, to be exact, two.
A large crowd was in the bar, and she had to maneuver for position before she could see that Dee was not in yet.
Nervously, impatiently, she waited while Bobby brought her a beer and a letter, a messenger delivery, which he had received for her during the day. It was from Bob Stein, and idly, expecting more in the endless stream of court-related documents, she opened the envelope and leafed through its contents.
And then the first thing happened. Inside, a letter with a handwritten note on top from Bob:
Alley honey—tried to call you all day. What is this about?
Dear Mr. Stein,
I am writing to advise you that I have in my possession evidence of Allison Rosenthal’s fraudulent rental of her father’s Martha’s Vineyard property known as Ocean View Farmhouse to my client, Stanley Diamond.
I am able to prove that Ms. Rosenthal knowingly rented this property to my client although it was under a federal seizure order, and furthermore that in so doing she committed forgery. It is therefore in Ms. Rosenthal’s best interest to contact my office to discuss the terms under which she may make restitution to my client.
Failing this, I will be bringing my evidence to the Massachusetts State Attorney’s office, which will certainly produce a criminal action, following which Mr. Diamond will be filing for civil damages.
Your sincerely,
Gillian Morreale
Partner
Stockard, Dyson & Struck
That made her, nearly, smile. Stein would be shocked indeed, she thought, to find out what this matter was about, and that it was certainly not going to be resolved in any timely manner.
She put the package down and turned to her beer. What would Stein find out? That in addition to her father’s other problems, now she—not her father, but she—was going to be pursued for wire and mail fraud.
Later, she knew, she would be scared. Later, when she came to think seriously about what had happened to her, she would be even panicked.
For now, however, in the familiarity of the bar’s noises and smells around her, she smiled, not just at the thought of Stein’s surprise, but also at how perfect it could have been.
For it was perfect. What had Drew called her? A modern-day Esther? Drew didn’t know how perfect the analogy was. After all, hadn’t Esther—in the king’s harem—slept with the enemy in order to save her own father? Hadn’t Esther sacrificed her very virginity, and then, from her conjugal bed, ordered her people saved and her enemies destroyed?
The only thing lacking was that Nicky was dead. If Nicky
were alive, she thought, she would have the perfect plan. If Nicky were alive she could, just like her namesake, save the Jews.
And then she shook her head, as if to wake from a dream. Of course, nothing was the same. Nothing. Esther was taken into the harem with no control over the choice, but she, Allison, had loved Dee from her childhood on, adored him. And deep within herself, she admitted that she would love him still, just as much, had she not met Nicky.
But far in her mind a voice was saying to her, so what? Her precious love for Dee, was that worth allowing her father to be convicted a criminal before the world? Her father was innocent, innocent. Everyone knew he had been authorized to sell arms to the Bosnians; everyone knew he was being scapegoated for a foreign policy agenda, and that were he not a Jew, it would not be happening.
And Dee, the instrument of a vicious king, was carrying out this scapegoating, this terrible injustice. So what did it matter what happened to Dee? And what was she prepared to sacrifice, not for some religious myth, or for some political aim, but for her father, a real person, and even more, for the truth?
Then the second thing happened.
With a sigh, she turned to the second letter, a FedEx envelope sent to her care of Stein from California. It had left California, she noted idly, the day before. Something, no doubt, to do with the Diamond prosecution. For a moment she considered leaving it unopened. Then she tore the perforated tab and pulled out the contents: legal documents relating to the filing of a criminal action against her, motion for discovery in Massachusetts court, a filing for interstate warrant.
Slowly, she realized that these were letters from the inside of the Diamond prosecution. Now, at last curious, she turned to the cover letter accompanying the documents, her eye falling on the signature.
Nicholson Jefferson Dymitryck
She read the letter, or better, devoured it in a glance.
Dear Allison Rosenthal,
I would like to advise you that, per the enclosed documents, Stanley Diamond is about to inform the Massachusetts State Court about a number of crimes committed by you, ranging from forgery to embezzlement to interstate wire fraud.
