Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  I smiled weakly.

  “Why did you track me down?” he asked. His voice was still youthful.

  “I’m not here to cause trouble for you. I have questions.” The steady infusion of adrenaline over the past few days had made me reckless.

  “Your mom should be the one to answer them.”

  “My mother has Alzheimer’s,” I said in a “so there” tone that made me sound like a child. A part of me still blamed him for everything that had gone wrong with our family.

  His expression barely changed. Then he took a sip of his coffee. “How bad?”

  “She wanders back and forth between the past and the present, but she definitely prefers the past.” The air carried an autumn chill, and I wrapped my sweater around me.

  He looked right into my eyes with an intimacy that came from sharing a common understanding of a loved one. We both knew that my mother had always wandered.

  I pulled out the copy I’d made of the photo and handed it to him. “I want to know why she keeps this picture in the bottom of her suitcase, under….” I almost said “dirty underwear,” but I could never hate her enough to offer up this tidbit about her declining personal hygiene to anyone.

  The man with the beard beckoned him, and I wondered if he’d walk away and never come back. “Be just a minute, Kip.”

  “Why did you have this photo?” I demanded.

  He lowered his voice. “I can’t get into your mother’s business with you.”

  “Do you mean that she grew up in the mansion? All these years of her damn secrets, and all I had to do was check the Journal Sentinel archive? Isn’t that a kick?” I could taste the bitterness in my mouth.

  “She never told you that her family lived in the mansion?”

  “She never told me about the mansion. She never used to talk about my uncle or anyone else in her family, but now she can’t stop calling my brother Norman.”

  He winced at the mention of Norman’s name. “She never got over losing him.”

  Finally I was getting somewhere.

  He rattled the change in his pockets. “I want to help you.”

  “Then please talk to me.” I was practically begging.

  “Go to her again. She’ll tell you what she can.” His lips tightened into a thin line.

  “Her brain is a piece of soggy French toast.”

  He stroked his chin, and I waited as patiently as I could while men in green polo shirts and jeans unloaded a truckful of pumpkins.

  “What do you want to know, Barbara?”

  “For starters, I want to know who you are.”

  He looked at me carefully, as if he were considering opening up to me.

  I hated that he knew my family history. I felt like smashing one of his pumpkins. “See, here’s the thing. If you hadn’t messed up her head, she would have been normal, and I could have gone to Mrs. Kessler’s funeral. But the two of you wrecked all that.”

  “Go easy on your mother,” he pleaded. “She’s been through hell.”

  I stepped closer to him. “Do you think I’m not painfully aware of that? Who do you think took care of her after you took off?”

  “I better get back to work.” He turned toward the pumpkins.

  I grabbed his sleeve. “Can you just tell me how the Schines came to own the mansion?”

  Kip walked over to us. “Everything okay here?”

  “Fine, I’m just seeing the lady to her car.” The Shabbos goy took my elbow.

  “How do you think your mother met the Schines?”

  The pressure on my elbow felt oddly reassuring. “I’ve heard the whole appendicitis story.”

  “It wasn’t appendicitis.”

  “Oh, please. She told that story a million times.”

  “She was….” He paused. “Very sick.”

  “What do you mean, very sick?”

  “Depressed.”

  I stopped walking. “How depressed?”

  “Enough to be hospitalized.”

  We stood side by side for a few seconds, staring at my car.

  “That’s when the Schines found her.”

  “Why was she so depressed?” I asked hoarsely.

  “She lost Norman and then her dad.”

  “So the Schines took care of her, and in return she gave them her mansion.” The truth came out of my mouth, bypassing my brain.

  A vein pulsed in his neck. “Barbara,” he said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Be gentle.” Again his voice was pleading. What had my mother meant to him? Not once in all these years had I considered his feelings. He’d merely existed as the person who had ruined our lives. He was done talking. I could see it in his lips, tight and locked. I opened the car door, my head whirling. He was protecting her, and like Neil, he was now shielding her from me. Everyone was forgetting that I’d been the one damaged by her affair, the one the rebbetzin had cast from the shul, from the mansion, from my home. And I was the one who’d lost my best friend.

  THE SECOND WASHING

  It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play.

  Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place.

  – Ian McEwan, Atonement

  10

  June 1974 – May 1975

  Rabbi Levenstein picked me up at the San Diego airport wearing a long black coat and matching hat, his cheeks pasty white against his dark beard. He was only a couple of inches taller than me, and he had hazel eyes that changed color depending on the light. Rabbi Schine’s eyes were dark brown, nearly black, and full of fire.

  “Barbara.” His voice was deep but almost apologetic, while Rabbi Schine’s was high pitched but assertive.

  “Hello, Rabbi Levenstein.”

  He strained to heave my two suitcases from the baggage carousel, and by the time we reached his Pontiac, his temples glistened with sweat. I’d never been to the West Coast, and I felt like I was stepping into a colorized postcard. Had I not been so homesick, it would have been thrilling. The cloudless sky was reflected in the bright blue harbor, where sailboats clanked against long white docks. Unlike Milwaukee’s maples and elms, with their enormous trunks firmly planted in the earth, lanky palm trees swayed around us, their big leaves shimmying in the breeze.

  Rabbi Levenstein slammed the car door shut and pointed to the sky. “Until today, it’s been dark and cloudy. June gloom, the natives call it.”

  I wondered what native would engage in conversation with a man dressed like this. His car smelled like the men’s section of the Schines’ sanctuary, the kind of body odor that burrows deep into polyester. I wanted him to turn the car around so I could catch a flight back to Milwaukee and return to my shul, smelly men’s section and all. I concentrated on the water stretching out into the horizon, trying not to worry whether my mother had gotten out of bed today.

  The Levensteins had placed a large decorative menorah on a strip of grass in front of their townhouse, which looked exactly like every other home in the complex. A picture of the Rebbe hung on the wall in the foyer, and a few remaining moving boxes, along with toy trucks and building blocks, littered a beige carpet that smelled new.

  A woman, thin and tall like the rebbetzin, sat on a worn couch with her arm around a little boy with strands of hair hanging down each side of his face like drapery cords. She smiled, revealing an overbite that my father would have wanted to fix.

  “I’m Sari, and this is Benny,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. The rebbetzin must have been a young wife like Sari when she met my mother so many years ago, and soon Tzippy would become the wife of a young rabbi, cast out to some strange city to build an Orthodox community. In a few weeks, Tzippy would be home for her last summer before she got married, and I’d be here taking care of her cousin’s child. A riptide of longing threatened to drown me.

  Sari moved her hand from her belly, not yet swollen, and motioned to a loveseat stacked with children’s books
, but I sat down on the floor next to the little boy. “So you’re Benny?” I stuck my hand into my bag and pulled out two Matchbox cars I’d wrapped in bright blue paper. Benny was small for a four-year-old, and his skin looked as if he rarely played outside. On his cheek he had a light brown birthmark shaped like the state of Illinois that disappeared into a deep dimple when he smiled.

  He looked at Sari, and she shook her head yes. He opened the gift deliberately, his eyes widening when he saw the cars. “Thank you,” he said without looking up.

  “Aunt Rivkah was right, you’re good with four-year-olds.” I flinched at the mention of the rebbetzin. Sari’s thick Brooklyn accent sounded just like hers, although Sari’s voice was softer.

  I nodded, confirming myself as the expert. My gift with children was the one thing I never doubted, thanks to Mrs. Kessler.

  Sari’s skin took on a grayish tint, and she belched into her fist and bolted toward the bathroom. Benny and I raced his new cars. I pretended to cry when mine lost, knowing this would tickle him.

  When Sari recovered, she walked me down to my room in the basement, and I made up my bed, a pullout couch with a thin mattress and a blanket that smelled like mothballs. I waited until the house was quiet before I phoned home.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said after he accepted my collect call. “I’m here.”

  “I’ve been waiting for this very call. How was the plane ride?”

  “Good. Fine, I guess.”

  “California! What an adventure!” he said, trying to sound upbeat.

  “I suppose. Can I talk to Mom?”

  He sighed. “She turned in early.”

  I pictured her sitting in bed smoking, her eyes bloodshot and barely open. I started to feel panicky; she’d been my responsibility for months, and I needed to hear her voice.

  “Can’t you wake her, Dad?”

  “Tell me about San Diego,” he said.

  “It’s sunny. There are palm trees, and the water and sky are abnormally blue. Come on, Dad. I’m worried.”

  “Barbara, this is why you need to spend some time away. You’re too young to worry so much.”

  “I don’t want to spend time away, Dad.” I wanted to sob until I’d exhausted myself.

  “I don’t want you to either.” He sounded defeated.

  “Then let me come home. I want to be with you and Mom. I’ll help more. I won’t have school, so I can help write the rebbetzin’s talks to the newcomers like Mom did. I can cook too. I’m a better baker than Mom. And I could make the Shabbos meals, and Mom would only have to come downstairs and eat. And if I had extra time, I could spend it with Tzippy.”

  “It’s okay, Bunny. It’s okay. You’ll be back before you know it.”

  It was no use. The rebbetzin had sold him on her plan. Even if I hitchhiked home, she’d just send me back to San Diego, or she’d pawn me off on another family, in Anchorage or Hagatna. After I said goodbye, I bawled my eyes out. When I finished, I was harder inside.

  The next morning, I helped Sari unpack her boxes. She sat on the couch and told me where to put her things, clearly self-conscious about having to pay someone to play with her child and find places for her books and candlesticks. She spat often into a coffee cup, and when she got up to get sick, I rinsed out the cup in the sink.

  I would take care of Sari and her saliva because it was my job. If we’d met during a different time, we might have become friends, but the last thing I wanted was to tether myself to another rebbetzin. I’d always assumed that if the rebbetzin found out about the Shabbos goy, we’d leave the shul as a family, but the rebbetzin had taken my place in nursing my mother, and I was living with strangers. The Rebbe’s familiar eyes following me when I passed his photo, the ritual washing cup hanging from the kitchen faucet, and the hushed Yiddish falling from Rabbi Levenstein’s lips when he spoke to his parents in Brooklyn served as painful reminders that the Levensteins’ condo was only a pale imitation of the Schines’ mansion, my real home.

  Sari looked exhausted, so I took Benny for a walk around the housing development. “Children need to be run,” Mrs. Kessler used to tell me.

  I picked up a eucalyptus leaf and offered him a sniff.

  He made a face. “Smells like medicine.”

  I took a whiff and made his same face, and we both laughed.

  I spotted a digger on the horizon. “I see something you’re really going to like,” I said as he slipped his little hand in mine.

  He looked up at me. “What?”

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  He was a fast walker for his size, and soon we were standing in front of a yellow truck with a claw appendage. Benny’s eyes widened when the claw reached down and scooped up dirt.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “I think it’s making room for new homes,” I said. The houses in my Milwaukee neighborhood were all old and made of sturdy materials like brick. I thought I could blow one of these new condos down with a huff and a puff.

  For almost an hour, we watched the digger while the construction workers stole glances at his forelocks and my long skirt. When he finally got restless, we walked on a good half mile up a steep hill, and Benny pointed his finger toward what lay on the opposite side.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I looked up at yellow steel forming an enormous V against the brilliant sky. “A crane, Benny.”

  “No, that!” He pointed toward a line of blue far off in the distance.

  I put my hand to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun. “Do you mean the ocean?”

  “Yes! We saw it from the airplane.”

  Again he pointed toward the miles and miles of water new to both of us. Something opened up inside me, just a crack. For the first time since my mother got sick, I could see out of the well I’d jumped in to save her.

  “Benny, have you been to the beach yet?”

  He shook his head no.

  The Levensteins had been living in San Diego for six months and Benny had never seen the ocean? I would find a way to get us to the beach. The water would bring me more of that sunlight, I was certain of it, even as I felt a flash of guilt over leaving my mother alone in the well.

  For the next few nights, while I browned hamburger meat for farfel and bathed Benny, I plotted how to convince Rabbi Levenstein to loan me his car. Because Sari was so nauseous, he and Benny dined alone, and then I ate and cleaned up the kitchen while he told his little boy a children’s version of the weekly Torah portion.

  One night, instead of retreating to the basement after supper, I waited for him in the kitchen, busying myself with cleaning the burners. “Rabbi Levenstein,” I called before he disappeared into his study.

  “Yes, Barbara?”

  I’d figured out his schedule. He visited the hospital on Mondays and the college campuses on Tuesdays, but mostly he locked himself in his study to pore over the Torah.

  “One day when you’re studying here at the house, can I borrow your car and take Benny to the beach?” I asked.

  He stroked his beard as if he were contemplating a Talmudic matter.

  “Or the zoo, or Balboa Park.”

  “Let me think about it, Barbara.” He gnawed the tip of his forefinger. The old Barbara would have said something to make him feel more comfortable because she empathized with his shyness. Exiled Barbara stared at his finger until he grew self-conscious and put his hands in his pockets. I’d established my dominance, like an alpha dog in a new pound.

  “Thank you, Rabbi Levenstein,” I said as if he’d already given me the key.

  The next morning I was halfway up the basement stairs when I overheard Sari and Rabbi Levenstein talking. I sat on a step and eavesdropped.

  “The Rebbe called to ask if I needed more prayer books.” Rabbi Levenstein’s voice vibrated with tension.

  “What did you tell him?” Sari spoke with more energy than I’d heard from her voice before.

  He sighed. “You don’t need prayer books if you can’t find ten men
to make a minyan for a Shabbos service.”

  “Invite those men you met at the university, the ones with the long hair and the crosses. They’ll stay for lunch.”

  I’d heard my parents talk about the beatniks and Werner Erhard dropouts, lapsed Jews who found their way to the Schines’ table. These recruits were young and often sad-looking, and therefore, according to my father, ready to receive Rabbi Schine’s teachings. They were nothing like the well-dressed young mothers who showed up at the rebbetzin’s teas.

  “When you’re feeling better, Baruch Hashem,” Rabbi Levenstein said bleakly.

  “You are a learned man, Shimon,” Sari reassured him. “You will find a way to touch these souls.”

  “By next summer, we’ll be on our own.” He sounded tense. “No more stipend.”

  Sari was stacking dishes in the sink, but I could still make out her words. “You’ll touch people, and they’ll want to help us build a shul, and it will all work out.”

  I walked up the steps and interrupted their conversation. “I’ll cook Shabbos lunch for you.”

  Rabbi Levenstein and Sari looked at each other.

  “Thank you, Barbara, for the light of your Jewish neshama.” Sari smiled at me with relief.

  My Jewish soul was actually feeling rather shaded. I felt a little sorry for the Levensteins, but I wasn’t interested in helping Sari as my mother had helped the rebbetzin. Exiled Barbara wanted to guilt the rabbi into giving me the key to his car so that Benny and I could go to the beach already.

  The next Friday, I engaged in an odd little act of rebellion against the rebbetzin while I cooked her Shabbos menu. I used a milchig fork designated solely for dairy foods while poking the beef for the cholent. Aside from one Yom Kippur when I’d forgotten I was fasting and ate a cherry Lifesaver after the Kol Nidre service, I’d never so much as broken a minor rule.

  I prepared way too much food; the rabbi couldn’t find ten men for his minyan. How was he ever going to fill a shul if he couldn’t even fill his living room? Benny followed me around the kitchen while we listened to the anemic chanting of the rabbi and the two men he’d met during his rounds at the hospital.