Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

  “A woman?”

  “Just, a woman at the funeral.” Another thing I have to be careful of, revealing sources. “I didn’t actually get her name.”

  Miriam’s face, if it’s possible, becomes sadder. Her chin sinks closer to her neck and she closes her eyes, almost wincing. “There is so much talking,” she whispers. “That is how the women are. Their children, they are not enough. Their husbands, they are not enough. They are always talking.”

  “What kind of talking?”

  Miriam shakes her head. “Horrible things. Lies. That is what killed her. The lies.”

  I bring my voice down very low. “What were they saying?”

  Miriam puts her finger to her lips. I wait, but she doesn’t continue.

  “Have you spoken to the police?” I ask her.

  “No. I have nothing to say. I do not gossip.”

  “You never know what might help,” I say. “Sometimes little stuff, like the last time you saw her. Or, where she liked to go, that sort of thing.” I’m kind of talking out of my ass here. I’ve never been privy to a murder investigation that wasn’t on Law & Order. I want to ask again if she’s safe, but I stop myself because I wouldn’t know what I’d say if she said no.

  “The service was very crowded,” I say.

  “I’m glad,” she says.

  “Were you there?”

  “No,” she says. “It was … too much.”

  That’s the same thing Mrs. Shoenstein said about why Chaya didn’t go. Too much.

  “Is there anything else about her you could tell me?” I ask, figuring I should at least try to get a quote I can give the desk. “Was she … had she been acting differently at all?”

  Miriam’s eyes wander toward the back gate.

  I repeat my question and Miriam pulls her eyes slowly back to me. But she says nothing.

  “Because, you said you hadn’t seen her since Tuesday? I just wonder if …”

  “I am not certain about the dates.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay. Well, is there anything you could tell me? What did she like to do? Did she …” I’m flailing around for examples of activities, but everything that comes to mind—movies, sports, adventure travel—seems culturally inappropriate. “Did she like to read? Or … cook?”

  Nothing. It’s almost as if she doesn’t hear me.

  I lower my voice. “I heard … I was told she’d lost a baby recently.”

  Miriam shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s indicating that, no, she did not lose a baby, or yes, and it was very sad.

  “Thank you,” she says finally. She begins walking toward the back gate. “Rivka would have liked you.” She opens the gate. Apparently it is time for me to go. “She liked to talk.” And with that, Miriam turns and walks back into the house. I stay in the yard for a moment. Once again, I forgot to ask her last name. Maybe Saul can help with that.

  *

  I get to the Starbucks before Saul and pull out The Oprah Magazine while I wait. When I open it, a piece of paper slips out. It is a handwritten note.

  Chaya,

  I know you are frightened. I was frightened after becoming engaged. I think most of us are frightened. But I cannot answer your questions about whether your marriage will be a happy one. I married because it hadn’t seemed possible to do otherwise. I know now that I always had a choice. Had I chosen not to accept Aron’s proposal, my life would have become more difficult in many ways. I do not know where I would have lived, but now I know that I would have lived.

  What does this life mean to you, Chaya? Why do you pull on your stockings in July? What do you feel when you pray? I wish I had asked myself these questions when I was 18. Hashem can see the truth inside your heart. And I now believe that to defy that truth is to defy Hashem. Your choices may cause pain before they bring joy, but no joy can come from lies. Especially lies you tell yourself.

  Yours always,

  Rivka

  I read the note again. The handwriting is a mix of print and cursive. Flourishes on the y’s and f’s, but otherwise utilitarian. The paper is thin and pink, the kind of paper I wrote notes to my friends on when I was eleven years old. Not notes like this, though. This note is more honest than any note I’ve ever written. And judging by its soft, easy crease, Chaya read it often. My dad used to tell me stories about my mom as if she were a character in a fairy tale. Like most suburban girls growing up in the 1990s, I learned about sex young. I was nine when our Girl Scout troop went to Planned Parenthood to learn about ovaries and sperm. I learned the rest sporadically from Madonna songs and Maury Povich and maybe someone’s mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I had several years for the act itself to morph from mildly horrifying to potentially cool, and several years after that to actually get involved in doing it. Not my mother. My mother, my father said, learned about sex only in whispers. And then one day her best friend, a girl named Naomi, became engaged to a man in his twenties. Naomi was seventeen, and my mother was sixteen; neither had ever traveled farther than the Catskills. Her interaction with men was limited to family. And suddenly, Naomi was to be married. Which meant sex. My mother, my father said, stayed with her the night before her wedding. Naomi was sick with dread. She knew not to expect love, but when she’d met her fiance, she told my mother, he made her stomach turn. Your mother, said my father, vowed she would not find herself in Naomi’s position. She was not ready to run away then, my father said, but she was planning. She knew that the best way to postpone an engagement was to make herself undesirable to a potential groom’s family. That was the word he used, “undesirable.” When he came to this part of the story, I always pictured my mother burping in public, or parading around in dirty clothes. That’s what undesirable meant to me: ugly, unladylike. But that’s not what my mother did. What my mother did was start reading—and asking questions. Word got around, and it bought her some time.

  I fold the note back into the magazine. I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t heard from the city desk, which is good because I’m not sure what I should tell them. There is no way I’m turning the letter over. They’d print it.

  Saul arrives, and when he sits down I hand him the magazine.

  “There’s a note inside. It’s from Rivka.” As he opens it, carefully, I explain. “I met an old woman at the funeral who said her daughter Chaya had been friends with Rivka. So I went and talked to her. She was very pregnant. Her mother knew about the gardener, but Chaya thought maybe Rivka died in a car accident. It seemed weird that the mom knew so much, and Chaya knew so little.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Saul as he opens the note. “Most Hasidim do not watch television or read English newspapers or use the Internet. But there is a lot of talk, especially around something like this. Depending on who they had spoken to, they could have heard completely different stories. Or nothing at all.”

  He stops talking while he reads the note, which he balances open on one wide palm. After a minute or more, he closes the note and slips it back into the magazine. “This was given to you?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We were sitting in the kitchen and she told me that Rivka had been her babysitter and had sort of counseled her before she got married. Then she went into her bedroom or something and came back with this. And then she told me to leave.”

  “A magazine like this is contraband in an ultra-Orthodox home.”

  “Really?” I could see Cosmo being banned, but Oprah?

  “Hasidim are taught to fear influences outside their community. They consider most of American culture to be corrupting and much effort is expended to avoid and demonize it. You don’t see it, but there are highly subversive ideas in this magazine. Even Oprah herself. Unmarried. Childless. Hasidic girls are taught that having children and bringing them up in a Jewish home is the most important work there is. They are called and blessed by God for this work.”

  “Right, but …”

  “There is no ‘but.’ Not for many people. For many people, this is enough.”

&nb
sp; I’ve offended him. “I’m sorry.”

  Saul shakes his head. “Thank you for this note. This note is very revealing. Have you spoken with your editors at the newspaper about it?”

  “No,” I say. “They’d probably print it.” I chuckle, trying to lighten the moment. Saul doesn’t smile. “Seriously. It’s yours now.”

  “Thank you,” says Saul.

  “I spoke to Miriam again. And the little boy. Yakov.”

  “Rivka’s boy?”

  “He was coming home from the service. He said his father told him his mother had been sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t really know what he meant. He said he didn’t think she was sick.”

  Saul considers this. He looks out the window. There is a 1-800-Flowers shop across the street and a narrow pizzeria and a nail salon. I can almost see Saul thinking. The crow’s-feet at his eyes twitch. He is squeezing his jaw.

  “Also, the old woman at the funeral, Mrs. Shoenstein? She said Rivka had lost a baby recently. Did you know about that?”

  “I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “That, I don’t know.”

  My phone rings. It’s the desk.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say, and take my notebook outside.

  “It’s Rebekah.”

  “Hold for Lars.”

  Lars comes on.

  “Whatchu got?” he asks.

  “The funeral was packed.”

  “How many people?”

  “Hundreds?”

  “What else?”

  “Lots of crying. She was in this plain wooden box and they passed the box back toward the car. The women—it was like, you know at a concert when people crowd surf? They passed the coffin back like that.”

  “What about quotes? Were people talking about the gardener?”

  “Um … one woman said she heard the gardener did it.”

  “Great, what did she say?”

  I flip open my notebook and realize I’d never actually written down what Mrs. Shoenstein said, but I remember it clearly. Does that mean I’m getting better at this job? Or just getting used to bending the rules?

  “She said … ‘It’s so horrible. She trusted a stranger and look what happened.’”

  “Perfect. What else?”

  “I mean, she didn’t actually know anything.”

  “What’s the name.”

  “Shoenstein. Mrs. Shoenstein.” I did write that down.

  “First name?”

  Shit. I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t thinking about calling in to the desk during our conversation, I was thinking, how can I be as friendly and gracious as possible so she’ll give me her daughter’s address. “She wouldn’t give it.”

  “Okay, fine, Mrs. Shoenstein. Was she a neighbor? Relative?”

  “She said her daughter had gone to …” I can’t remember what she’d said. It was something Yiddish. “Her daughter was friends with Rivka.”

  “Great. What else?”

  “I talked to a woman, a social worker; she said Rivka might have been thinking about a divorce.”

  “Do you have a quote?”

  “Not exactly …”

  “Name?”

  “Her name was Sara Wyman.”

  “Age?”

  Again, I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t thinking about the newspaper. I was thinking about what she could tell me. “She wouldn’t give it.”

  “What else?”

  “She said, ‘Rivka was a passionate, intelligent woman who cared deeply for her children and her friends.’ She also said she ran an organization for new mothers. Boro Park Mommies.”

  “That all?”

  Here we go. “Actually, I talked to a detective, but he didn’t want his name used.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said she was pregnant.”

  “Great. We can definitely use that.”

  “He also … um, from the funeral home, he said that her body was really, um, beat up. Head wounds.”

  “Okay. Who’s this from?”

  “You can say a police official with information about the case.”

  “Anyone else from the funeral? You said there were hundreds of people there.”

  “I talked to one woman who said Rivka Mendelssohn used to babysit her and was sort of a confidante.”

  “Do you have a quote?”

  I’m reaching. “She said, ‘Rivka liked to walk and listen to music.’ She said when she heard she’d died, she thought maybe she’d been hit by a car on one of her walks.”

  “That’s the quote: She liked to walk and listen to music?”

  “Yeah.” It is, without a doubt, a lame quote. A big part of this job is hearing the quote. People say a lot of shit, and most of what they say is either unprintable or unimportant, or both. At the Trib, because the articles are short, they like explanatory quotes—quotes that narrate what happened—instead of supplementary quotes, which add color or context to the action. So, if I was covering, say, an old lady whose geriatric scooter was hit by a garbage truck traveling in the bicycle lane (as I did in September in the West Village), the desk would love me to get someone to say: “She was scooting along toward the Y like she always does after lunch, when this garbage truck came barreling through the light. I don’t even think he saw her.” If I were working at the Times, they would write the information in the first sentence using their own language, then use “I don’t think he even saw her” as the quote. In college, most of my professors said that narrative quotes were lazy, that it was the writer’s job to succinctly tell the reader what happened. That quotes should be “gems.” But as with much of what I learned in college journalism classes, this does not apply at the Trib.

  “That’s it?” asks Lars.

  “She also said Rivka was questioning.”

  “Questioning? What does that mean?”

  “Like, questioning … her faith?”

  “Is that a quote?”

  “No, she didn’t exactly explain, but …”

  “What’s the woman’s name?”

  “She wouldn’t give it. You can say a friend.”

  “Too many unnamed quotes. I can’t use them.”

  “Sorry … she also said Rivka Mendelssohn had lost a baby recently, but I couldn’t confirm that with the family.”

  “She lost a baby and she was pregnant?”

  “According to the people I talked to.”

  “All right,” he says. “The desk wants to run something on the gardener being questioned. Did anybody else say anything about the gardener?”

  “No.”

  “Marisa got some great stuff from his neighbors. Apparently he’s a drinker. And he has a couple arrests for fighting, one for exposing himself.”

  “Do they really think he might have done it?” It doesn’t make sense to me that a drunk who doesn’t speak English could pull off getting Rivka Mendelssohn alone long enough to tie her up, kill her, and get her dead body into a scrap pile on her family’s private property.

  “How should I know?” says Lars. “Do you have anything else? How the family is taking the news, maybe?”

  “Um …” I’m trying to think back. “You can say the family is very shaken up. I talked to her son for a minute on his way home; he was crying. He said the father had told him his mother was sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I’m not positive. Around nine or ten.”

  “That doesn’t help me. Did you get a name?”

  I’m not going to give them Yakov’s name.

  “No.”

  Lars sighs. “Anything else?”

  “I guess that’s it. Is Cathy around?”

  “Greg!” he shouts. “When does Cathy come in?” Pause. “Tomorrow.”

  Before I can even say thanks, he hangs up.

  I look through the glass window at Saul, and suddenly I feel very tired. All
I want to do is go to sleep. I can still smell the inside of that room where Rivka’s body was. I wonder if I’ll still smell it at home. Tomorrow. Forever. Saul is on his phone. I wish I had kept the letter instead of giving it to him.

  I go back into Starbucks and sit down across from him.

  “The paper is running a story about the gardener tomorrow,” I say. “Apparently, he has a record.”

  Saul does not respond.

  “When Yakov told me his father had said Rivka was sick before she died, he got really upset. Oh, and he said they had a big fight about Coney Island….”

  “Coney Island?”

  “Yakov said his mother had taken him to Coney Island to ride the roller coaster. She told him to keep it a secret. And there was a big fight about it at home. I didn’t tell the desk, because …” I’m not sure why I didn’t, actually. Somehow, it seemed like that might be, I don’t know, evidence? I feel like I’m serving two masters here. What goes to Saul and what goes to the Trib?

  “They had a fight about the roller coaster? Or Coney Island?”

  “I don’t know. He said …” And then it hits me: Coney Island is where the safe house my mom and Saul used to go to was. Could it still be there? “Saul,” I say slowly. “How did you know Rivka Mendelssohn?”

  Saul looks at his hands.

  “Saul,” I ask again, my voice louder this time. “How did you know her?”

  “Calm down,” whispers Saul. “Rivka Mendelssohn knew my son.”

  “Your son?” What had my dad said about Saul’s son? That they were estranged after his divorce.

  Saul nods. “He was an instructor at Yakov’s yeshiva.”

  “Oh,” I say. “What does he teach?”

  “He taught math,” says Saul. “But he was let go. Rivka Mendelssohn was one of the only parents who took his side.”

  “His side?”

  “She asked the rebbe to let him stay.”

  “Did he?”

  Saul shakes his head.

  “What happened?”

  Saul draws and exhales a sharp breath. He seems impatient. I don’t think he’s going to tell me any more. “That is not really important. What is important is that she helped someone I love at a time he needed help. And I want to help her.”