On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  He’d had no idea he had an illness, no idea about precautions, protection. Before the arrest, he’d never heard of the AIDS crisis. He’d thought condoms were a kind of apartment you owned instead of rented. He hadn’t known the English word gay. He hadn’t known the names for what he felt or what he did and so he had remained an outsider. A few weeks after the arrest, he emptied Surie’s purse, jumped bail, and hitchhiked out to California. Without a high school diploma, a driver’s license, or even a Social Security card, he’d been unable to get work. He’d lived behind a dumpster for a couple of months. Then he was found hanging in a tree in a public park one evening, the first night of Chanukah, by a jogger. Surie had to ask what it was, a jogger.

  “For God’s sake,” Yidel had said on the way out of the morgue. “He was a fag. He deserved to die.” But he choked on the word deserved and more tears fell and he turned and wiped his face on his sleeve.

  They couldn’t bury him in the community plot in the Kiryas Joel cemetery. The rabbis wouldn’t permit it. They couldn’t bury him in Israel. The rabbi in San Francisco took pity on them and said that perhaps a vigilante had strung up their son; that he was not, after all, a suicide, and could therefore be buried in the Orthodox graveyard. The rabbi was young and he said the words beside the deep hole in the earth very fast, and, intimidated by their old-fashioned appearance, by Surie’s scarf and Yidel’s earlocks, he did not come to comfort them at their hotel. None of their children came out to California for the funeral, and she wasn’t clear, even all these years later, which of her children knew what had become of their brother. He was never spoken about. His photographs had been removed from the albums by the time they returned home.

  It seemed that suspicions about Lipa had spread beyond Williamsburg, because recently they’d sent their Gitty to London to find an appropriate match, but even there, she’d had difficulties. She was a pristine and perfect child who should have been able to marry a kollel man, one of the best, and instead, at twenty-two, almost on the shelf, she’d had to settle for a boy in business who didn’t want to wear white socks on Shabbos. Who knew what people were saying about their family! And this new embarrassment—everyone would think she was covering up a granddaughter’s illegitimate pregnancy by pretending the babies were hers. She’d be lucky to be able to marry off the youngest three boys at all.

  Lipa had HIV. He’d been ill. He had warts. He hadn’t taken care of himself. It was clear that he had not eaten in many days. He had weighed less than eighty pounds. He was twenty-two years old. The coroner handed her the green-rimmed glasses in a plastic bag and asked if she wanted the ring from his nipple. She took that too.

  The small cuts on his neck, the coroner said, were from his fingernails. In the end, her boy hadn’t wanted to die.

  She wanted to tell the body to hurry on to the next life, that this life had been one full of sorrow and that next time would be better. She wanted to hold on to the body and not let it go. Yidel took her hand and stroked it for a long time. He stood close to her and inhaled the scent of formaldehyde. The room was very, very cold. Her hands turned blue. “Come with me, my love,” he said several times before leading her gently out of the room.

  After their furtive shiva, on the drive to the San Francisco airport, she’d wondered aloud what it must have been like to be Lipa, to have held such an explosive secret tightly for so long. Had he wanted to tell someone? Had he been swamped with fear? Had the secret and the fears that clung to it like fog changed the ways he behaved? Were the green glasses a symptom of the secret or a symptom of his desire to tell?

  Yidel didn’t understand why Lipa couldn’t just pretend. Be like all their other sons, marry a woman, have children, settle down. Forget the stupid secret. Bury it somewhere. He was sure he’d known young men with a similar secret and they’d all married, they’d all had children and done what was expected of them. Why had Lipa needed to be so stubborn, so visible?

  Nobody was asking her, Surie said, but what, after all, was so terrible about loving a man instead of a woman? Did the Torah forbid loving? She did not know, did not want to know, what Lipa had done behind closed doors. But then, she did not know what her friends, women she had known for fifty years, did behind closed doors either. None of them spoke about such things. How she wished the veil of secrecy had remained drawn for Lipa too. Would it have been different if he could have brought home a young man he had met and introduced him to the family, shown him the family photograph albums, invited him to their Chanukah dinner? Would Lipa still be alive if they could have just loved him as he was?

  For the first time in their entire married life, Yidel shouted at her and said she must have been reading the secular newspapers or maybe she’d been listening to the evil radio broadcasts of the secular leftist destroyers, and she said she would never do such a thing, and the taxi driver had turned around and told Yidel in English to shut up, even though it was obvious he had no clue what they had been fighting about. The driver had ranted about how religious people were fakers and perverts and domestic terrorists, and Yidel had blushed bright red, not really following the conversation but shocked by the tone. He’d apologized, first to Surie and then to the driver. He’d asked in a whisper where she’d gotten such an outrageous idea. She’d wanted to say, “From my heart,” but instead had stared out of the window at the water just below the highway, a wide gray expanse of chop.

  Lipa’s lifestyle hadn’t been a perfect secret, Yidel said then. Lipa had told Yidel that he was gay. Yidel had been kind, hoping that his son might one day change his mind, and for that reason, Lipa kept on coming home, even after he moved out and lived somewhere in Manhattan, selling things. Surie had let her friends think he’d gone to some advanced yeshiva in Israel. She remembered Yidel taking Lipa out walking along the hidden stretch of river between Division and Clymer, how they would return, red-eyed, sniffing, blaming the wind and the cold. It seemed they had both decided that Surie wasn’t ready for the details, that she might tell a friend who would tell a friend.

  Surie felt a sour sensation in her throat, as if acid had risen up and burned her esophagus. Why had Lipa gone to his father instead of to her? Tears pricked her eyes. What kind of a mother was she?

  “You should have shared the secret with me. He was my son too! I wouldn’t have told!” she said. “When did I ever tell any of our secrets? Who would I tell?”

  Yidel stared at her. He did not look away. It was as if he could pin her with his eyes. A police SUV approached with its siren blaring. The taxi pulled over and then, as the police car passed, raced into the empty space behind it. But really, who could she have told? Not her classmates, who would have been scandalized and distanced themselves. Not her only sister, who had been diagnosed at the same time as Surie but, unlike her, had not survived the chemo. Not even Dead Onyu, who had a taste for the salacious, who would have wanted details that Surie couldn’t wrap her brain around.

  Though occasionally she thought it might be nice to do something different, to step outside of the community norms the way that Dead Onyu often did—refusing to wear the Shabbos apron, going down to Florida and swimming on the beach, reading books in Hungarian—Surie was afraid to risk it. If she’d allowed Lipa to wear the yarmulke he craved, maroon velvet with an embroidered gold star, her other sons and her grandchildren wouldn’t be accepted at the local schools. Goyishe kop, that’s what the other children would have said about Lipa and his modern yarmulke, a girly yarmulke, with its decorations. Their parents would have said even worse.

  “How could you?” she’d hissed when Lipa had shown up that last Passover before his arrest, wearing the green glasses. “You look ridiculous. Like some kind of … goy. Like one of those men with pink shirts. Take them off and put on your normal ones.” He hadn’t changed his glasses. He had kissed her hand and, without saying goodbye, walked out. And that was the last time she had seen him as her son, a healthy, normal child. It would be easy to say that it was the community whispers, the change on th
e counter, the plastic-covered couch, but Lipa had been stubborn. A few stares, some plastic, they wouldn’t have driven him out of the world. But to lose the love of one’s mother? It was her fault, all of it. California. The cutoff payos. The nipple ring. The tattoo of God’s ineffable name. The awful diseases. The rope in the park at dawn.

  * * *

  Surie stirred in her chair. A wave of coldness ran from the crown of her head down her ribs and all the way to her feet. She was acting just like Lipa, holding on to an explosive secret, one that had the potential to rip her from her community, even kill her. Like Lipa, she wanted to tell someone but was deathly afraid to do so. Lipa had been such an honest child. He was the one they had gone to whenever they wanted to know who’d eaten the last ice cream or broken the glass. And yet for years he’d lied about where he was and what he was doing and with whom. She had never lied to Yidel, but she was lying to him every day. She had wondered what it felt like to be Lipa. Well, now she knew. It hadn’t been deliberate. And yet it was as if she could feel Lipa standing in the room with her. She could smell the shampoo he used, lime and mint. In her ear, the beating of Lipa’s heart.

  * * *

  “Bubbie,” said Miryam Chiena. “Bubbie?” She stood next to Surie’s chair and stroked her wrinkled face. This child was fascinated with bodies. She must never go near a public library. It would be the ruination of her. “It’s Chanukah. Wake up.”

  Surie sat so still, the way the river seemed on a hot day, still on the surface and, underneath, full of broken things and rocks and garbage. Miryam Chiena lifted her spotted hands and let them drop. Surie’s pale blue eyes didn’t flicker. The child leaned forward and pressed two fingers against the carotid artery, as she’d seen Yidel do. Without warning, heat flooded back into Surie’s face and she leaned to one side and was sick on the floor.

  Then there were many voices, loud and angry, but coming as if from under a pillow or from a faraway place. A strange knell that must have been the clock. Three strikes. But hadn’t it been three o’clock hours earlier?

  “It’s too much for her, this big of a party. We should have it at our house.”

  “But she loves when all the grandchildren come here. And her house is the closest to the shil.”

  “Well, then let Tzila Ruchel host it. She is just as close.”

  “She shouldn’t go out walking tonight. Let the men go to the Rebbe’s tish. But the women should stay here with her. Maybe she is coming down with something.”

  “We should say psalms for a recovery.”

  “Is nobody going to help her?”

  Yidel brought warm cloths and put them in front of Surie. He took a bottle of seltzer from the table and poured it on the rug and then scooped up the mess with paper towels. “Bubbie will be all right,” he said to Miryam Chiena, who was crying. “She’s hard like iron.” And then, when the child didn’t stop: “I’ll let you listen to her heart with my stethoscope on Sunday, to prove she is fine.”

  “I want to lie down,” Surie said. Tzila Ruchel maneuvered her through her dozens of grandchildren and her anxious sons and daughters and back into her bedroom. Yidel carried the coats out into the living room and shushed all the little children.

  “She’s tired,” he said. “But perfectly fine. Don’t worry.”

  In the bedroom, he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “You gave them all a scare,” and she laughed softly.

  “About time,” she said. “They’ve been scaring me for years.”

  In her eyes, there was a strange light that he had not seen in a very long time, and for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it meant. He looked at her for a minute. Two. It was something terribly familiar. What was the meaning of that expression? He knew it. He was sure he did. But he couldn’t name it. With a sigh, he kissed her forehead and brought her a turban and looked away when she took off the scarf and nylon wig. He pulled the blankets up and asked if she wanted a cup of tea.

  “Not unless you want to see me perform the same trick again.”

  Yidel had been a volunteer emergency medical technician with the private Jewish ambulance service, Hatzolah, until his hearing got bad. Married men were allowed to do those kinds of things, as long as they used a pager instead of a cell phone.

  He took out his kit and looked in Surie’s eyes with a flashlight, still hoping he would recognize what it was he had noticed earlier. He asked her to open her mouth and say ahh. He checked her reflexes and everything was fine. “I think you are very sick,” he whispered. “I may be forced to perform CPR on you.” They laughed softly together, afraid the children would hear them. He stood up and quietly locked the door. Surie smiled. For the first time in four years, she felt some whisper of her former strength flood her spine. It had been a long time since Yidel had been so playful with her.

  They missed the Chanukah lighting. They lay, instead, under the warm blankets looking out at the snowflakes swirling past the windows and neither said anything. The door to the scuffed old wardrobe was open, and in its mirrored door, Surie could see the snow. And even if she turned all the way over, she could still see the snow reflected in the glass over their wedding photograph.

  “Oh, love,” Yidel said, and he held her hand in silence.

  It was the night of the yahrzeit. What better time? She wanted, more than anything, to talk about Lipa. Her son lay wedged into the crack between the beds, without his payos, his face mauvely smooth, glancing from his mother to his father, somehow smaller, thinner than he’d been even on the steel table. How could she talk to Yidel about the twins when they still couldn’t talk about this thing that had ripped through the fabric of their family?

  “I miss him,” she said.

  “Who?” asked Yidel, knowing.

  “Lipa.”

  Yidel sighed. Parents were not supposed to have favorites. They weren’t. It might not have been written down in the Torah, but favorites were strictly forbidden. But in a corner of Yidel’s heart, there was a shred of some feeling for Lipa that he did not have for his other children, a protective, tender, numinous love that could not be spoken of without destroying it. He understood Surie’s wish to talk, but he couldn’t bear to risk losing this last little ghost of feeling for Lipa.

  “I’ll say kaddish.” They made a minyan at home on the first night of Chanukah so that Yidel would not be confronted by people walking out on Lipa’s kaddish.

  “Yuh. I’ll answer Amen.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Thank God.”

  After an hour or so, they rose and Surie lit the Shabbos candles with her daughters. Yidel sang in his rich bathroom voice and Surie clapped her hands, her cheeks glossy red, and all of the little ones joined in off-key and behind the beat. On the window ledges were dozens of menorahs and each one held a single flame and, just above, the shamash candle that had lit it. Lipa’s yahrzeit candle stood burning by itself.

  Her seventeen-year-old, Mattis, began to sing a wordless tune that had come with their family from Romania. Then he sang Lipa’s favorite tune, a Yom-Tov Ehrlich song, “The Resurrection of the Dead”: “Dos iz Chaim, dos iz Nissim … men iz geven by alle brissim.” Outside, the snow batted against the windows and melted and lights blinked on in the apartment buildings across the park. Behind her, Surie felt a cool breeze and she put her hands over her stomach to show Lipa where to look, because she wanted to share her secret with him.

  “In the time of the Hashmonaim,” Yidel said as he said every year, “there were great dangers that troubled the Jews. Hellenists wanted the Jews to be like the Greeks, to accept their modern way of life and take on their customs. But Yochanan Cohen Gadol forbade the Jews from behaving like the non-Jews. Then the Hellenists were furious at Yochanan and slandered the Temple, saying that it contained a great wealth.”

  Only the wealth of children, she thought. That is all we have, ever. Later, she could not remember all of the details of that Chanukah. Just a few parts remained clear: the face of her husband, Yidel, as he le
aned down to her; the faint earthy scent of Lipa; the small pinpoints of light shining against the black openings that were the windows; the singing of the children as they went down the stairs and out into the road, to walk the frozen streets of Williamsburg.

  And the words she said to herself as they went were the words Jewish women have said with a hand on the mezuzah for thousands of years. “God will protect your going and your return from now until forever.” It was a small and lovely prayer and she had never allowed it to feel stale in her mouth and her heart, and she felt comforted and at ease and stood at the window watching her family, her whole family including Lipa, walking in the darkened street. Though she was not with them, she felt that she was a part of them, and traveled with them in some way, and she was grateful for the blessings in her life.

  When she lay down in her bed she could hear, through the vents, Dead Opa talking quietly with Dead Onyu in their beds. They were speaking in Hungarian, which she could not fully understand. She heard her name and then the name of Lipa, and she knew that her in-laws must think her ill from remembering the Chanukah of four years ago. Morning sickness, she whispered to the vents, though it wasn’t even close to the whole truth. Yidel had left a bar of chocolate and a small flower next to her bed. It wasn’t anything special. One of the tiny red flowers that formed on the tips of the cactus in winter. The chocolate was her favorite kind, though, and he must have hidden it from her sons and daughters because it was their favorite kind too.

  He couldn’t have any clue about the twins. The one thing she couldn’t stand whenever she was pregnant was chocolate.

  SIX

  A week after the wedding, when Surie left the high-risk clinic, there was a conference between the midwives, the doctor, the physician’s assistant, and the dietitian. They somehow all found themselves in the break room at the same time, and the head midwife, Val, said what they’d all been thinking when they saw Surie’s curved shoulders and her pinched face: “She hasn’t told her husband!”