On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

  * * *

  “Where is the girl that came in earlier?” Val asked later, her big hands flapping. “I can’t find her.”

  “She’s gone. I spoke with her and she didn’t agree to have an internal examination yet, and anyway, she needs an adult present, so I made another appointment for her and sent her home. I know where she lives. If she skips the appointment, I will bring her with me on the bus.”

  “I’m disappointed that you didn’t ask me, but I’m also impressed,” Val said. “No one else could get a word out of her. She’d been sitting there for an hour when I sent you in. Who’s the father?”

  Surie hesitated. The reputation of Chassidic Jews would sink lower if she revealed how the pregnancy had happened. “It is a miracle that she came in at all.”

  “Did you talk to her about the possibility of an abortion?”

  Was that part of Val’s job? Surie would never discuss such a thing with anyone. It was forbidden even to kill wasps on a holiday, flies on Shabbos, spiders. Even in her worst, most desperate moments, early in the pregnancy, she hadn’t considered that word she didn’t even like to think.

  “Killing an unborn child is murder.”

  “But how will she bring the child to term? What is she? Twelve? Thirteen? Surely that will be worse for her?”

  “She’s already in the second trimester. There’s nothing to talk about, so stop. Her parents will send her away to be a ‘mother’s helper’ somewhere and the baby will be adopted, and it will be hard, very hard, on the girl. Or if her mother is young enough and fat enough, the family will say she is the mother of the baby. The girl will be able to stay in the community and she will eventually get married and have more children. It’s not a perfect solution. But I don’t think there is a perfect solution.”

  “But was it her father? Or a brother? An uncle? You shouldn’t have let her leave the clinic until we made sure she was going home to a safe environment.”

  Surie shook her head. “It was a therapist. In the school.”

  “Oh my God!” Val cried. “I have to call ACS.” Then, seeing Surie’s blank expression, she said, “The Administration for Children’s Services. They have to arrest this maniac before he hurts anyone else.” She lifted the phone, but Surie put a hand on hers.

  “Wait,” she said. “Let me speak to the family. I’ll call the community police too. He’ll be watched.”

  And after speaking with the girl’s mother, then what? Would she dare go to the home of the therapist, to make sure that he really wouldn’t hurt any other children?

  His innocent wife would let Surie in and offer her Passover cookies with a look of puzzlement. What’s wrong? she would ask. Can it wait? And Surie would say no, it couldn’t wait, and she’d take a bite of the biscuit, which would taste of dry potato starch, and she would have to gag it down before telling the therapist’s wife and the woman would probably not believe her and would already be calling the police when the molester arrived home from baking his matzos, right as Surie would fly at him, screaming and crying. She’d scratch his face. She’d throw the yarmulke off his head and tear handfuls of his beard out in both of her fists. At first, she’d be yelling about the little girl, but in the end …

  My son, she’d cry, my son, my son, my Lipa.

  * * *

  The clinic closed for the day and Val and Surie walked out onto the wet sidewalk, the awning dripping cold water down their necks.

  “I told that girl I am pregnant,” Surie said.

  “She doesn’t need to hear about your life, she needs help,” Val said. “Listen, if the girl’s parents know what happened and they are still sending her to the therapist, they are hurting her and will be liable in court. I need to know how seriously your community will take this—can the Chassidic authorities lock him up? What’s the plan? How old is he, anyway?” She looked at Surie, frowning, but Surie looked away.

  In his sixties. He’d been seeing Lipa when he was in his fifties, but now the therapist was totally gray. Most of his kids were married off. She regularly saw him walking down Lee holding one of his grandsons’ hands. The filthy beast. Maybe Lipa would still be alive if she hadn’t relied on him to fix her son. If she’d just listened to her son the way a mother should.

  “I’m upset too, Val. To my knowledge, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened in the community. You have no idea of the tumult it’s going to make. I’m going to bring this girl’s story to the rabbis and tell them the name of the therapist, but I’m scared. It’s risky for everyone involved, and the last person I want to hurt is that little girl.” The rain trickled down her spine, so cold. “Please don’t tell anyone until I’ve had a chance to tell her mother and the rabbis.” Though she wouldn’t go to the therapist’s house and tear out his beard, she was going to write a letter and leave it in his mailbox and she was going to ask what, exactly, he had said and done to the girl. And to Lipa. She remembered the way he had sneered, passing them, after Lipa had come home from his arrest. The hypocrite!

  “I can’t wait,” Val said. “I am a mandated reporter and this is a matter for the police. The girl is so young. How would you like it if you sent your own child to this man and she came back pregnant?”

  Surie’s son, hanging from the tree, the rope tangled around the branch, the sun just rising over the mountains, the jogger running on the hard dirt path.

  “Pregnancy,” Surie said, “is not the worst thing.” She had to hold her elbows tightly to keep from walking away.

  * * *

  It was getting toward evening and the bridge was empty of pedestrians. A strong wind was blowing, and the water in the East River was rough, and the tugboats rolled in the swell. The sky was dark gray and it was bitterly cold. The wind tore through her coat, which had been warm enough in the morning. She leaned over the railing and looked down at the black water. Could parents ever get it right? If she failed her children, she’d always thought she could send them to counseling or therapy or one of those special schools. But you couldn’t rely on other people to fix your mistakes. It was better not to fail in the beginning. By the time she got home, it was well after dark on Friday evening, too late to light the Shabbos candles, and when she came in, Yidel burst into tears.

  “I didn’t know what happened to you!” he said. “I thought you were, chas v’shalom…” After checking that no children were nearby, he put his arm around her and drew her close. “I couldn’t bear it…”

  “I was safe the whole time,” she said into the cave of his warm, familiar neck.

  “Shabbos HaGadol, Surie! What were you thinking?”

  “Yidel,” she said, taking a small handful of his beard and giving it a shake, “while I was at the hospital, something very terrible happened.”

  He’d been the head of a volunteer ambulance organization for years. What could be so terrible that he hadn’t already seen it? Until the moment she opened her mouth, she thought she’d tell him about the girl. But how could she have been a witness to such a thing? As a volunteer food distributor?

  In whispers, she told him about holding the hand of a dying woman. Lipa, leaning against the wall, frowned. One of the unlit candles fell out of the candelabra and rolled under the breakfront. Lipa’s outline faded. The last part of him to disappear was his left eye, which watched Surie for a while and then blinked and was gone.

  * * *

  Saturday night, Surie sat up late composing a letter to the girls’ school that employed the therapist and a second one to the rabbinical court. She provided all of the details she’d heard from the girl, but she did not write the girl’s name. Neither did she sign her own. She wasn’t afraid of anyone recognizing her handwriting, since none of her family members served on the beis din. She put on her coat and walked up Division to drop off the letters. The school was closed, but the rabbinical court was swamped by Jews with last-minute questions about Passover. In the hallway, she sat on a bench and watched as her letter was plucked out of the mailbox by one of the gloomy male
secretaries and taken into the inner sanctum. Men and women and children continued to flow in and out of the poorly lit waiting room. After an hour, a different secretary came out of the room, carrying a wastebasket. On a torn piece of paper, her handwriting.

  She left the building, angry, and called the Community Watch from a phone box in the street. Holding her sleeve over the receiver and doing her best to imitate a Bobover accent, she reported the therapist to the Chassidic police.

  * * *

  Later that night, Val called Surie at home.

  “I’ve already spoken to the Community Watch and the rabbis,” Surie said. “And I’m going to see her parents tomorrow morning. Please wait on making your report until the community has a chance to respond.” If only she’d had some warning before the cyclone that became Lipa’s last months. “The mother deserves that kindness.”

  “Thank you.” Val sighed with relief. “Listen, I’m really glad you are helping out here. It’s awkward, you know. I don’t really understand how things work in your world. And I know I can be a bit gruff at times. Truthfully, there’d be nothing to report if that girl hadn’t stayed and spoken to you,” she said. “In fact, today was the smoothest clinic of any in recent memory.”

  There was a long silence. Surie closed her eyes and waited.

  “Would you consider doing this regularly? As many days as you can come in? I’m fairly sure I can get you about fifteen dollars an hour.”

  She’d been certain Val was about to tell her she’d called the ACS and that Surie was in trouble for failing to report the crime in a timely fashion. “Not next week,” Surie said. “It’s the holiday.”

  “You can’t come in for a whole week? What about your appointment with the doctor on Friday?”

  With fifteen dollars an hour, Surie could buy the twins some fresh outfits and a crib they could share. Maybe she could even put some money toward a helper for the girl, for after the birth. She wouldn’t have to ask Yidel for anything.

  But that Sunday, she was too busy with the last-minute preparations for the Seder to go talk with the girl’s parents.

  * * *

  Surie, dressed in her holiday clothes, anxious and sweating, took a taxi to the hospital first thing on Monday morning, the eve of Passover, wondering what had happened over the weekend. Val had filed the report on Sunday afternoon, the moment she thought Surie had spoken with the girl’s parents. Sunday evening, Surie had lingered near the windows, but she hadn’t heard a commotion on the street. Yidel had not come home from the evening prayers buzzing with gossip.

  Though it was scandalous to leave Williamsburg on erev Pesach, she felt a responsibility toward the girl. Yidel would not be able to find his freshly laundered holiday clothes; the boys would be fruitlessly searching for the cases of wine, wanting to open the bottles before candlelighting; Tzila Ruchel would ask a rabbi if Surie wasn’t to be fully trusted with the grandchildren, since she had gone to Manhattan for no good reason on the eve of a festival. Like a goyta. But Surie wanted to ask Val if other children had come in from the community with a similar problem. If what the girl said was true, there must have been others.

  Val’s eyes grew wide when Surie walked into the clinic.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t come!” She smiled. “Isn’t it Passover tonight?”

  Surie had finished cooking a week earlier. She’d set the tables for the Seder the day before, and after sunset followed Yidel and her sons around the house with beeswax candles and wooden spoons and feathers, searching for crumbs.

  Around ten that morning, Val called her into an examination room to assist with a secular couple, people whose first language was English.

  “Why?” Surie asked. She didn’t know anything about science, about anatomy. Her only useful skill in this hospital was Yiddish.

  Val said she didn’t just need a translator. Really, she needed an additional physician’s assistant, but the budget didn’t stretch that far. The clinic needed many extra pairs of hands. If Surie was going to be here anyway, could she maybe learn to assist with some of the easier jobs? And more important, Val said, the patients seemed to relax more when Surie—awkward, old-fashioned, otherworldly Surie—was in the room. Val also wanted Surie to be around other pregnant mothers, happy mothers whose delight and acceptance might rub off on Surie herself, transform the pregnancy into the kind of joyous event that the others had been. But Val couldn’t say that to Surie, so she said instead, “I don’t really understand why, but the women like you so much.”

  “It’s because I’m a mother,” Surie said. “They trust me. That’s why that girl spoke to me when she wouldn’t speak to anyone else.” The headband twisting between the girl’s hands, such small, pale hands. “Nothing against you, but that orange hair doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.” Val almost shouted with surprise, and then they both laughed.

  Just before lunch, she told Val, “I have to leave now, but in the future, I could come every day. If you want.”

  “Two conditions,” said Val, holding up her fingers. “You have to tell your husband about the twins and what you are really doing at the hospital. No secrets. And I need you to keep on talking with the mother of that girl. They are all going to need a lot of support. Are you up for that?”

  Surie nodded. Despite the lack of obvious response to her letters and telephone call, she still felt sure she could help the girl get the care she needed while somehow shielding her from the kind of idle gossiping that had killed Lipa. “Thank you for waiting to make the report. It’s really helpful to the family.”

  Val was glad she’d waited and followed Surie’s lead. She didn’t want to set off a cascade of unpredictable consequences. “I’m grateful,” Val said, “that you were willing to speak to her parents. What did they say when you told them?”

  Surie glanced at her watch, though there was no bus scheduled for that day. “Oh my goodness!” she said. “The bus will be here any second! I have to run. Happy holiday!”

  * * *

  On Thursday morning, the first of the intermediate days of the eight-day holiday, Surie found the girl’s address and walked up Division for fifteen minutes, to the far end of Havemeyer, where there were a series of Section 8 apartment buildings that were full of wailing music. Bizarre garments flapped out of the windows and smoke that smelled strangely like skunk filled the hallways. The girl’s father was the janitor of one of these places. After asking a woman for directions, she found him, jacketless in the basement, sitting with his feet up on a pipe coming from the side of an old boiler. “Cup of tea?” he offered, and then poured some hot water from a tap he’d welded into the side of the tank. “It’s Pesach’dik.” He was nothing like Yidel or any of her sons. No one she knew would offer another man’s wife a drink. “Is something the matter?” His face was almost obscured by steam. Being in this dark, enclosed space with a man she didn’t know felt wrong. There were definite laws against it. She backed out toward the door and told him she was looking for his wife. He pulled a walkie-talkie out of the rafters and pressed a button. “Says to go on up,” the man said. The entire time, he had not looked at her. He spoke quickly and wiped his dirty hands on his trousers, clearing his throat. Surie had never visited this family. They were far from her social circle, the kind of outcast family she might, because of Lipa, because of the twins, have to consider as matches for her granddaughters.

  Upstairs, the girl’s mother looked at her through the peephole for a few seconds before opening the door. “A gitn moed, Rebbetzin!” she said. “I’m so surprised!”

  Surie didn’t quite know how to open the conversation. She couldn’t compliment the apartment, which had a yellow-gray ring around the walls a few inches above the baseboard, like an unwashed bathtub. She couldn’t compliment the woman, who was wearing a speckled housecoat, a turban, and flattened felt slippers. There were no babies in the house to tickle, no food on the table, no curtains, no tchotchkes of any kind.

  “I saw your daughter,” she said. />
  The other woman smiled. “Which one?” she asked. “I have seven.”

  Surie said the name of the girl and the woman’s smile faded. “What now?” she asked, sitting quickly on the corduroy-covered daybed. “What next?” She put a hand over her eyes. “Where did you see her? Was it a boy?” she whispered. “We sent her to see someone, but she won’t stop. She tells me she’s going to a friend’s house to play, but she lies to me. She lies! I’m sure, honored Rebbetzin, that your refined girls never lie to you! She has to follow the rules, but she don’t follow the rules, and she’s a whore, I tell you. I catch my daughter on the phone past midnight, and women come to me, telling me such stories about her. The principal of the school … ach.”

  “She’s twelve,” Surie said. The little girl with her headband, her soft, fine hair falling in front of her face.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Not yet. Her birthday is in two months.”

  The girl’s mother nodded. “Sometimes I get the dates confused. I’m not that great with numbers.”

  “At twelve or thirteen, a girl’s mother is responsible for where she is, what she’s doing, who she is with, what happens to her.” Surie paused. “I was at the hospital…”

  The woman began to breathe very hard and she clutched at her throat. A thin whistling sound filled the room, like the scream of a boiling kettle. She fumbled for an asthma inhaler and took two quick shots.

  “You sent her. Am I right?”

  The woman’s eyes darted left and right and she blinked rapidly. “Maybe?”

  “Don’t try to pretend you don’t know that your daughter is pregnant. Just tell me if you stopped her going to see the therapist. Did you tell the school there was a problem?”