by Rhoda Lerman
“See? He’s feeling it. He’s feeling it a little.” His father whispered to someone else.
Who in Hell was his father talking to about him?
The matzoh ball turned to farina and spread, warm and sweet, to his toes, to the top of his head, filled him. But as soon as he felt it, it was gone and he was back to a tight compact mealymouthed matzoh ball. Then he thought about Lillywhite and her legs. Instantly he saw something vague flash on his screen. His screen was back? A screw turned in his heart. The clearer the screen, the deeper the pain. Pain equals screen? Who needs it? And what’s this? Lillywhite? Again? What does she want from him? Lillywhite in a chocolate brown Porsche parked in the twilight on the outside edge of a hairpin curve in Loveland Canyon and an eighteen-wheeler coming down the mountain on top of her. What’s this? A new trick? Just when he was getting a handle on Shabbas, in comes the mishugge universe? He didn’t want it. Leave him out of this.
“Okay, okay, it’s like pulling teeth,” his father said to someone else. A chill went through Yussel. Who? Angels? The Heavenly Court? The Angel of Destruction? “Yussele, you see anything? Now’s the time to pay attention. The computer’s working. It’s coming up now with the variables …”
“I’m pretty busy now, Totte.” He wanted to sing Kaddish. He wanted to be left alone. Looking at Lillywhite was like reading Talmud in the toilet.
His father spoke as if he were announcing a horse race. “Almost there, Yussele. A woman’s out of cigarettes. Your shamas has a visitor, forgets to turn off the sound. Tonight a parking spot, certain winds, a driver named Stuart delivering NASA parts decides to take a little tour on his way to California, see the Rockies. On the rock face of the canyon there are certain configurations. And now a little free will here, there, and suddenly, Yussele, possibility turns to probability, and then becomes necessity. The girl pulls off the highway and parks her car. So you pay attention. You’re being shown a direction.”
“She needs insurance? Collision? Liability?”
“Trust me, Yussele.”
“Don’t get me involved with your computer chazerei.”
“Rabbi!” Grisha’s face was in his, sarcastic, miserable. “Your congregation is waiting for Kaddish, Rabbi.”
“That’s your cue, Yussele. Give it all you’ve got. You hear?”
Yussel gave it all he had. He turned his back to the others, lifted his head to HaShem, sang. And as he sang he heard the voice of an angel piercing the universe. He looked around. It was the Jackalope singing, as the Flower Child had said he would. The Jackalope’s voice soared. His words were clear—silver pellets piercing the veils of the universe—his face shining with a fire. This dumb cluck was an angel. If he was, Yussel could be. He joined the Jackalope, soared with him, floated on his back in the clouds. Big, total, potent, like the universe itself, Yussel soared and sang his glory into Grisha’s face, Grisha coughed, backed away. Yussel forgot Grisha, forgot his father, saw the orange truck full of NASA parts, Stuart the driver looking around at the Rockies, Lillywhite in her little brown car on the edge of the pass, and he started to hurt. Up his arms, down his legs, in his chest, a vise. It was the kind of pain his father must have had all the time. He sang his pain. “Yisgadal, viyiskadash … exalted and sanctified be His great Name….” He sang his pain. He remembered the woman in the creamy cashmere with cancer. He sang for her too. He sang for them all, goddamn them.
16
WHEN STEVIE LILLYWHITE WAS NINETEEN, A SOPHOMORE AT RADCLIFFE, she had a terrible fight with her father and told him she’d never speak to him again. She had been studying medical anthropology, discovered the chemicals her father sold to Third World nations were pesticides that could cause abortions. She flew to New York, took a limo to his warehouse in Hoboken, stalked past a phalanx of Puerto Ricans on forklifts, and in front of all his employees, called him a murderer. Her voice echoed in the big warehouse. “Murderer!”
Her father pulled her into his office. “What are you, crazy?”
“You’re president of the temple. You’re a religious man. You brought me up to be religious. How can you do this?”
The bookkeeper, Kate, a single Irish woman, shooed two pale girl typists out, snapped down the shades in the cubicle.
“Do what?”
“Murder babies.”
Her father and Kate looked at each other, relieved. “My daughter walks in here and calls me a murderer to my face?”
Kate said to them both, “Now, don’t get excited. Stevie, keep your voice down. Don’t upset your father.”
“You’re murdering babies, Daddy. You’re supposed to be a good Jew.”
Kate raised her eyes to the ceiling, shook her head. Her father’s face swelled, turned red. “Listen, Little Miss Lily White. My customers are happy because my pesticides are increasing their food supply. And if they’re decreasing the population, they don’t mind that either. That’s the way the world works, kid.”
“You brought me up to be Jewish, to obey the commandments. You want me to marry a Jewish guy and have Jewish kids.” Stevie started to cry. Kate brought Kleenex. Stevie shoved Kate’s hand away. “I don’t understand you. I don’t know what to do, Daddy. I don’t know what to believe in.”
“You can start by believing in some respect, in who puts food on the table and leather coats on your back. One color for every day in the week,” he screamed at Kate. He screamed at Stevie, “That you can believe in. Start there. No. Start with respect.”
Kate screamed, grabbed Stevie’s arm, pulled at her. “He’s getting very upset. You want him to have a stroke? Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“What business is this of yours?”
Then Kate put her arms around Stevie’s father. Her father was shaking, threw Kate off so hard she landed in his swivel chair.
“Daddy! How can you do this?”
“You’re breaking my bones, Stevie.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Daddy.”
Stevie’s father wept. “Just get out, Stevie. Just go back to your fancy school with your fancy ideas real people can’t afford. Go!”
“Daddy …”
“Go!”
“I—I—I’ll quit being Jewish. I’ll quit being your daughter.”
“That’s what you want? You got it. I disown you. You’re dead.”
“I disown you! You’re dead!” Stevie tore at her knapsack, threw credit cards at her father. “I don’t need you. I don’t need your filthy money or your hypocritical Judaism.”
Kate tried to quiet Stevie. “Your father’s very upset.”
“Yeah, and what’s your story, Kate?”
Kate flushed.
“Big shot! Big independent big shot!” He swept the credit cards toward himself, found a pair a scissors, cut the cards into pieces. “Saks, Ann Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf.” He spoke the names with the same voice he listed God’s curses against Pharaoh at Passover. Frogs, locusts, plagues, death of firstborn. The pieces dropped onto his desk. “You wanna see suffering, Miss Lily White? I’ll show you suffering.”
“Should I cancel the accounts? Should I write letters?” There was something hopeful and savage in the way Kate asked.
“What’s between you and your little Irish friend here, Daddy?”
Kate stood between her and her father. “You better leave. You better go away. You’re killing your father. You better leave him alone.”
Stevie yelled over Kate’s shoulder to her father. Her father had his hands over his face. His hands were trembling. “I’m not speaking to you. Ever again. I want nothing to do with you.” And went back to college, had her Daddy’s lawyers change her name to Lillywhite. One week after she told him she’d never speak to him again, after he told her she was breaking his heart, her father had a stroke on the floor of the warehouse, went into a coma, and never came out of it. Ten days later, Stevie had to give permission to pull the plug. Her mother was drunk. Two cousins took over the business. Kate disappeared.
By the time
she was a senior, Stevie Lillywhite had learned that nothing was so simple, that she could never forgive herself for what she’d done to her father, what she’d done to herself. In her junior year she’d discovered real sex with Tom, an architectural student at Harvard. Tom looked a little like Warren Beatty. They were engaged. Lillywhite lay next to him in the attic room she rented, thought about sex, watched a streetlight sketch oak leaves and grapevines with the wind on her ceiling, thought maybe she should marry a dentist, live a normal life, give all the money to Save the Whales. There was already a lot of money. Lillywhite tried to think about Tom. There was nothing to think about. She wanted her father. She didn’t want to marry anyone. She graduated with honors, sent back Tom’s ring, called Gabriella, her mother’s personal shopper at Neiman-Marcus, ordered lots of khaki stuff, climbed Annapurna, called her mother’s housekeeper every month or so, hung around Katmandu, played jazz piano in a restaurant, tried to forget about her father’s grave, studied architecture, numbers, music, geometry in London, measured cathedrals and Egyptian temples, read, drifted, sought, avoided Israel, avoided Jewish men, knew all along she was looking for an answer to the big question: Did I kill my father? Men fell in love with her. They didn’t have any answers for her.
She felt special, even chosen, but she didn’t know what for or what difference it made until she visited a Tibetan refugee camp in India, heard the cry of a newborn, and decided to be a midwife. She went into the camps when she was twenty-six. She biked to hill stations, hitched rides in beer trucks to other camps, climbed mountain paths, tried to make up for her father’s sin by bringing into the world as many babies as he’d sent out. A Tibetan monk in the camps taught her how to think fire and burn leaves at a distance. It took hours and wasn’t worth the trouble. Then he told her she’d never bring enough babies into the world to make up for the dead ones, that she should go home and make her own babies. The child she had would have her father’s soul and that soul should work out its own karma. But Stevie wouldn’t forgive herself. She had hepatitis. She walked to a village where there was a telephone, called her lawyers, was three or four times richer than she’d been when she first came to the camps, bought half a mountain in Colorado, and called her mother who’d moved from Montclair to Houston. Her mother had been living on Valium and scotch the way Lillywhite had been living on the cries of newborns. Her mother mumbled something, dropped the phone. Lillywhite listened to the phone bouncing, swinging against the night table in descending chords until a man picked it up and said, “Hello, hello …” Lillywhite hung up, headed home. She wanted to stop in New York, visit her father’s grave, make peace, but it was too late. By that time she’d lost her courage or knew too much about herself. Or both.
She was thirty-three when the cab drove her up the long driveway to her mother’s house. She gave her mother chains of pearls from Hyderabad. Her mother tossed the pearls in the swimming pool. Her mother was fifty-six. Her mother tried to get Lillywhite to drink with her. When Lillywhite refused, she came after her with a kitchen knife. Lillywhite called Tom, grabbed a lot of her father’s clothes, and left for Colorado, where, eventually, on the night Yussel was leading his first Shabbas service below the mountain, Lillywhite ran out of cigarettes, turned off her Music Minus One tapes, tossed on her father’s golf jacket with his name on the back, punched Willie Nelson into the tape deck, headed her chocolate brown Porsche down her mountain, pulled up on the outside rim of a hairpin curve on Loveland Pass, cut her engine, killed Willie Nelson in the middle of “All of Me,” rolled down the window, threw her head back on the neck rest, and watched the clouds.
Buzzards circled in a column of hot air. The strip of sky was solid turquoise, hard as the face of the rock walls. The peevish cry of a hawk scraped along the sky, a truck shifted gears to make a grade somewhere in the mountains above the canyon. She sang to the clouds, imagined she changed their shapes, could see her father’s face, could hear his voice. She saw his face in dreams. She’d be on a train going one way. The train would enter a tunnel. Another train, going the other way, would pass. In the yellow windows of the cars she’d see travelers’ faces. One of the faces would be her father’s. She’d run to the conductor, tell him the train was going in the wrong direction, but he wouldn’t turn the train around. He’d offer to let her drive, but she would be too afraid. Then she would wake up, adrenaline racing into her bloodstream, and know her life was going in the wrong direction. The dream lasted for hours during the day, made her drive too fast.
Tom had a wife and a kid in Santa Fe, lived on a trust fund, inspected chimneys three or four days a week, owned a part share of an airplane, built things from atom bomb parts he found in the junk pile at Los Alamos. Tom said he’d been waiting for her to call. She said she’d been waiting to call. He said he knew that. Tom didn’t have a weapon in the world. Lillywhite had them all. Tom and Lillywhite didn’t have to say much more. He still looked like Warren Beatty, still had a sexy crooked grin, still rolled along when he walked, still had a smooth slim body, still was good and grateful in bed. Lillywhite was relieved to have him around again. She wished she could feel more.
Tom designed a sprawling house of twelve-inch rough timbers, glass, nose cones, missile parts for her on the mountain, set up the sound system so she could make all the noise she wanted to, built a skylight so she could sleep under the stars in her own bed, and used orange plastic strips, which were meant to detonate hydrogen bombs, for the light pulls. It didn’t matter much to either Tom or Lillywhite that he’d married. He’d fly up, land his plane on the main road, stay two or three days, wait for her to ask him to stay longer, ask him to leave his wife. She never asked. Then he’d fly home. Sometimes he called. Sometimes he punished her by not calling. He begged her to make a decision. She said until she figured out if she killed her father, until she could forgive herself, she couldn’t go on with her life.
The last rays of the sun shot up over the canyon walls, smeared cosmic graffiti on the rock face. Lillywhite knew if she could open her heart a fraction more, she’d be able to read the bloody letters pulsing on the rocks, get the message. A gust of sand blew across the highway. She shivered, rolled up the collar of her father’s jacket, found a pack of cigarettes in the pocket, lit up. The turquoise turned to wine, poured down over the rock walls, filled the letters. Mica chips in the rock face clustered into stars, pairs of elk eyes blinked at the top of the cliff. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes. And then, on some perverse vector, the wind came up the mountain from the desert floor, lifted itself to Loveland Pass, found her car, found her heart, like an arrow, like a direction. And Lillywhite heard, on that perverse shift of wind, instead of her father’s voice, Yussel Fetner’s voice singing Kaddish, which was close enough.
She knew it was the Rabbi. Up, down, deep, high, breaking now and then with pain, sweet, joyous, sexy. As if he were making love to God. Lillywhite heard babies and lovers and fathers all at once. And death. She knew how dangerous it was for her head to listen to someone singing Kaddish. She’d been tricked and trapped before and she wanted no part of it. So she turned on the engine, ripped the Porsche onto the highway, wiped the face of the night with rooster tails of dust and sand and rock, didn’t see the eighteen-wheeler loaded with NASA parts tearing around the curve, wanted to kill the Rabbi because he reminded her she was still afraid that she’d killed her father, that she didn’t know how to make peace with him.
She didn’t hear anything behind her until she pulled off into the parking lot of the Riverside and the eighteen-wheeler screamed past her, brakes sparking, trying to slow. Stuart, the driver, gave her the finger. She never knew he’d been behind her. She threw her hand over her mouth. A minute more, the bloody letters on the rock face would have spelled her name. She shot pool, drank beer the rest of the night with the boys, wondered if she should go climb in the back of a truck, take a walk down by the river with one of the boys, didn’t have the heart for it.
Late Friday night, after kiddush, Yussel pile
d dirty dishes in the dishwasher. His father vamped around the kitchen, flapped a dish towel like a stripper. “How about these, Yussele? Am I the Maharajah of Pajama or not?” One of his doors was now louvered. The other door was still solid wood. He wore tie-silk pajamas with tiny green crowns on a shimmering gold background and a tie-silk bathrobe with tiny gold crowns on a shimmering green background. The cuffs and the collars were piped in gold. His slippers were green silk, a large gold crown on the fronts. “Yom diddle yom diddle ai diddle dai dai.” His father grabbed him, pulled him into the dance. “First thing tomorrow, I’m going to get you four kibbutzniks, so you’ll have a permanent minyan. It’s going to work, Yussel. It’s going to work. You keep this up, I’m going to Heaven. Yom diddle yom diddle ai diddle dai dai. I’m going to sit at the throne, enter the gates, breathe the perfume of paradise. And my son, my beautiful caring loving saint of a son will put me there.”
“What worked?” The Jackalope had worked and Yussel couldn’t find him. First thing after everyone walked out and said it was a wonderful Shabbas, they’d been transported, Yussel looked for the Jackalope and he was nowhere. All his things were gone.
“What worked? What worked? Listen to him. Is this humility? You changed a decree of the Almighty, that’s all. You changed a decree. Your blood has come alive, Yussele, and it’s good blood and it can change a decree of Heaven. You have the blood of a zaddik, my darling.” His father pulled Yussel out of the kitchen, out into the bar, down the length of the Arizona, polkaed with him in front of the altar. “Also because I did a favor for a friend, he’s going to give me his place on line.”
