Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

  “Hi, Bill.”

  If he remembers me, he doesn’t say so. “I’m in Manhattan. I’ll be there in about an hour. Don’t do anything without me. Is the Ledger there?”

  “Yup. And TMZ.”

  “Fuck. I’m on my way.”

  I stick my phone in my pocket and walk across the street, into the group of reporters in front of the building. I recognize the Ledger reporter, a girl about my age whose name I always forget. We smile and walk toward each other.

  “Did you just get here?” she asks. Like me, she’s so bundled, she has to move her entire upper body if she wants to turn her head. Half her face is covered with a scarf, so I can’t see her lips move.

  I nod.

  “I was on this yesterday, too. It’s fucking horrible out here. I think I’m getting a cold.”

  “I was in Chinatown Friday. Then Gowanus, by the canal.”

  She shivers. “There was a body, right?”

  “Yeah, a woman. You guys had Pete Calloway on it.”

  “Figures. He probably ferreted it out before the desk even.”

  “Did you run anything?”

  “I think it went in the blotter. You guys got the gardener angle before us.”

  “Ah.”

  “Well, porn mom’s a fucking hoot. Everybody got a shot of her going in yesterday, but nobody’s seen her since.”

  “Did you do a door-knock?”

  “No, but if you do, I’ll come with.”

  “I have to wait for photo,” I say.

  “Mine’s here,” she says, motioning toward one of the two men on fold-out camping chairs.

  “Have you talked to anybody, like, in the neighborhood?”

  “I stopped a couple people leaving for work, but everybody’s just pissed that we’re here. One lady actually pushed the TMZ kid. He loved it.”

  “I’m gonna go get some tea. I’ll find you before I go in. Do you want anything?”

  “I’m good. Thanks.” She pulls two tiny beanbag-sized handwarmers from her coat pockets. “Got these.” Smart girl.

  I head up Eighth Avenue into the wind. I get tea at a bodega and look through the Ledger. Porn mom and dad are on the front page. The Ledger ran with a courtroom sketch of dad at his arraignment and a twenty-year-old glamour shot of mom, plus a fuzzy still from her Melrose appearance. I scoot into the corner by the beer and dial Sara Wyman.

  “This is Sara,” she answers.

  “Sara, hi, my name is Rebekah Roberts. I’m a reporter for the Tribune.”

  “Hello, Rebekah,” she says. “I’m pleased to hear from you.”

  I’m not used to hearing that.

  “Oh? Great. Well, like I said, I’m interested in learning a little about Rivka Mendelssohn. We’d like …”

  “Are you in Brooklyn?” she asks, interupting me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m in Park Slope right now.”

  “Wonderful. I’m downtown. Are you free?”

  “I’m actually on another story assignment,” I say, hoping she’s flexible. “How about twelve thirty?”

  She tells me to meet her at a Starbucks on Atlantic near the R train stop. I put my phone in my pocket and almost smile.

  I linger by the door of the bodega, scrolling through news on my phone. I should be interviewing the guy behind the counter. I should at least ask if he recognizes either porn mom or dad. But I just don’t care. Instead I think about Sara Wyman, and what I should ask her. The information I gave Lars yesterday, that Sara had said Rivka Mendessohn was considering a divorce, didn’t make the gardener story, but if I can get more details, it might be enough for a short feature, especially if Larry can add confirmation that the police haven’t yet questioned her husband. I need to ask how many people knew she was unhappy in her marriage, and if Sara thinks that could have had something to do with her death.

  Eventually, Bill calls.

  “Where are you?” he asks.

  “I’m a couple blocks up.”

  “The Ledger’s going to do a door-knock,” he says. “We can’t miss it.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Back at the building, the Ledger chick is standing with Bill and the seated photogs. Bill is a douche. She wouldn’t have done the door-knock without me.

  “Mara said there’s a biddy downstairs …” says Bill.

  “Maya,” says the Ledger reporter. Right, Maya.

  “Okay,” says Bill, not looking at her. “The desk wants a studio of the big happy family.” A studio is where we take a picture of a picture. We use studios a lot for dead people—school portraits, church bulletin, weddings. “And nobody has her full-face yet, right?” The Ledger photographer shakes his head. He’s short and wide. I think his name is Mac, or Bo. Something with one syllable.

  “If she opens the door, we might not have much time,” I say, turning to Maya. “I’m thinking the first question is whether she’s gonna take him back.”

  “Definitely. Then ask if she’s seen the photos.”

  I nod. “Does anybody know where the kids are? I haven’t heard anything about Child Protective Services being involved, but it seems like that’s a possibility.”

  “Our overnight said they heard there’s a grandparent.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So if she’s taking him back, if she’s seen the photos, where the kids are.”

  Maya nods and jumps up the front step to peek into the lobby. “No sign of biddy. Let’s do this.”

  The four of us enter through the heavy metal and glass front doors into the white-painted lobby. The floor is a mosaic of little octagonal black and white tiles. A giant nonworking fireplace and mantel stands stark and empty, a reminder of a time when some sort of butler stood stoking the flames, ready to greet residents with warmth and cheer and a whole bunch of pampering shit that doesn’t exist anymore, at least in Brooklyn. We won’t all fit in the elevator, so we start to climb the stairs, and as we do, the front door opens and TMZ, The Insider, and Fox come shuffling in, video cameras perched on their shoulders, microphones in their fists.

  “Fabulous,” I say to Maya.

  She rolls her eyes. “Let’s just get up there first.”

  We pick up the pace and make it to the landing with Mac huffing behind us. It’s a narrow hallway, maybe four feet wide and long, six apartments per floor. Maya and I stand in front of the door. 3E. Bill is practically on top of me, the long lens of his Canon scratching my neck. I knock. Nothing. The TV people have piled into the elevator and I can hear them laughing as they rise slowly toward us. I knock again. Nothing. “Ms. Dryden? Ms. Dryden my name is Rebekah and I’m from the New York Tribune. I know you don’t want us here and I don’t blame you, but if you could just give us a minute of your time, a couple of questions, we’ll leave you alone.”

  “Look,” Maya says quietly, pointing to the glass peephole. “I think I just saw her move.”

  “Ms. Dryden,” I say, my voice a little louder. “We’d really like to hear your side of the story. People are saying some pretty awful things and we’d really like to give you a chance to …” TMZ and the rest come galloping out of the elevator, pushing up behind us.

  “Did you get her?” says the girl from The Insider. She’s dressed for a stand-up: lipstick and foundation, no hat. I try to ignore her and knock again, more softly. “Ms. Dryden, could you just tell us if Frank is planning to come home?”

  I hear a lock turn—everyone does—and like dogs sensing a squirrel, we all point our noses and notebooks and camera lenses toward 3E. But the door stays closed. And behind it, a woman’s voice.

  “Please,” she says softly. “Can’t you please just leave me alone?”

  “What’s she saying!” yells the kid from TMZ.

  “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” shouts Bill, but he doesn’t move from his pose, so he not only practically shatters my eardrum, but spits in my hair, too.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Dryden,” I say again, putting my hand on the door. I look at Maya and she nods. Keep going. “Are you pl
anning to take Frank back?”

  “Please, can’t you just go?”

  “I’m really sorry, but none of our bosses will let us leave until we talk to you. It won’t be long, we just want to know if Frank is coming home. If you could just open the door for a minute …”

  “Missy!” shouts TMZ. “Have you seen the photos? Ask her if she’s gonna do another soft core.”

  Bill whips around to yell at TMZ, but he moves so fast, he forgets to lower his lens and smacks the chick from The Insider right in the face.

  “Oooooh!” yells TMZ, sounding like a middle school boy witnessing a playground dis. “You okay, Chrissy?”

  Chrissy is not okay. Chrissy is bleeding. She’s got her pretty leather glove pressed to her mouth. Bill’s kneeling, tending to his lens, which appears intact. He looks up at TMZ and hisses, “If you fucked up my lens, I’m gonna fucking kill you, motherfucker.”

  TMZ puts his hands up, like in surrender. “Tell your fucking reporter to tell porn mom if she don’t come out, we’re gonna be on her and her kids and her fucking whatever all day every day until she jumps out the window.”

  “Hey!” I say. I look at Chrissy and I look at 3E and I’m not sure which to attend to. Chrissy’s lip is split. She’s done for the day—you can see it in the tired, blank sheen that’s fallen over her eyes. I’m done, too.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sara Wyman arrives at the Starbucks a few minutes late. She has the rumpled, distracted look of a librarian, with ruby red–rimmed eyeglasses and half-gray hair cut in a shapeless bob.

  “I saw the article about the gardener,” she says after we sit down. Up close, her face is much softer than it seemed at the funeral. She’s probably forty-five, and has very few wrinkles. “Not much real information there.”

  Touché.

  “Yeah,” I say, pulling out my notebook and pen. I’m going to get this right. “I’m hoping to round that out. Fill it in, rather. I spoke with a young woman she used to babysit. And her sister-in-law.”

  “Miriam,” says Sara. “You mentioned that.”

  “You said you knew her, too?”

  Sara nods. “First,” she says, “I need to set some ground rules. I will tell you what I know, but my words do not appear in the newspaper unless I approve the language.”

  Letting sources approve their quotes is frowned upon. But I’m not really in a position to be picky. At least I can use her name.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “Rivka began coming to my gatherings about a year ago. I host a weekly group at an apartment near the United Nations. We have an open door policy. People hear of us through friends. Those who come are unhappy in their Orthodox identity somehow. They come to have a supportive, positive place to think and question. To sort things out with the help of others.”

  “Do you know why Rivka started coming?”

  “She had just lost a child,” says Sara.

  “Yes,” I say. “Someone else mentioned that. A miscarriage?”

  “No. The baby was nearly eight months old. A little girl named Shoshanna. She was devastated. Rivka said it was asthma. The little girl had a breathing attack. She was devastated, and I think it changed her.”

  “How did she change, do you think?”

  Sara sighs. “I didn’t know her before, but she was angry. And she talked about feeling that she had just woken up to the anger. At the group meetings, she kept things close to her chest, but when we met separately she was less circumspect. You said you’d met Miriam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rivka spoke often of Miriam. You know she’d been away for many years.”

  “Away?”

  “Yes. Miriam had problems. Mental health issues, we call them now. Rivka said that starting around age eleven she just couldn’t act like everyone else. She wouldn’t always wash herself, things like that. Seemingly purposeless defiance. And she had rages. Rivka said she gave herself a concussion banging her head against the kitchen wall when she was barely thirteen. Rivka and Miriam had been friends since they were very young, and Rivka went to live with the family after her mother died and her father was unable to care for her.”

  “Miriam said Rivka’s mother had worked for their family,” I say.

  “Yes, I believe that was the background. She died of cancer and the Mendelssohns took Rivka in. Her brothers went upstate, to the grandparents, I think. Rivka remembered Miriam being punished a lot. Locked in a bedroom. Made to miss meals. The parents didn’t know what to do. And she got worse as she got older. She was expelled from school.”

  “What happened?”

  “Rivka said that Miriam pulled her hair out. It’s a nervous habit, of course, and now we know it’s somewhat common for young women with certain kinds of mental disorders. The other girls made fun of her. One day the class was in the kitchen, and Miriam … well, something happened with a kettle. Rivka said Miriam poured the boiling water on one of the girls. Right down the back of her neck. The girl was in the hospital for weeks and her family made a big stink. You can’t blame them, of course. I believe that was when Miriam was sent away—the first time, at least. To some sort of hospital.”

  “But Rivka stayed?”

  Sara nods. “She said she felt terribly guilty about the way the family reacted to Miriam’s … departure. She told me that they didn’t speak of her at all in the years she was gone. It was as if she hadn’t ever been there.”

  “Rivka didn’t want to go back with her father?”

  Sara shakes her head. “Rivka’s father was not much of a presence in her life, even before her mother died. She told me that now she could see he had mental problems, too. He spent his time at work—I believe he was a clerk of some kind—or shul, or his bedroom. He jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge when Rivka was sixteen.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It was considered a great blessing in the family when Aron proposed to Rivka.”

  “Really?”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “He’s much older….”

  “Almost twenty years, I think. But that isn’t terribly unusual. He was away in Israel most of her childhood.”

  “I’ve met him a couple times. Honestly, he kind of scared me.”

  “You met him, I assume, just after the violent death of his wife.”

  I nod.

  “Aron is a generous man, from what I can tell. He helped find a match for Miriam, which was not an easy task, despite their wealth.”

  “And Miriam never had children.”

  “As if things weren’t bad enough for Miriam, yes, Rivka told me she was infertile.”

  I flip back through my notebook to find the word Chaya used. “I talked to a girl who said Miriam was … akarah?”

  “Akarah, yes. That means barren. Who said that?”

  “Um, just a woman who knew her. A young woman. She was very pregnant.”

  Sara shakes her head. “Miriam does not need more scrutiny from the community. I’m sure her infertility is a great sorrow for her. She and Aron were two of eleven in their family.”

  “Jesus.”

  Sara laughs. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. She has dimples in both cheeks. “They were fruitful and they multiplied. Heshy, Miriam’s husband, I believe has health issues as well. Couples without children do not fit into Hasidic society easily. They are suspicious. Something must be wrong, people think. And of course something is wrong. But something is always wrong, isn’t it?

  “I think that when she came to me, Rivka had been very unhappy for a very long time. She told me she’d never felt right about the way the family—and everyone else—treated Miriam. From what Rivka said, Miriam was a wonderful, sensitive friend to her, especially throughout the tragedies of her childhood. But what could she do?” Sara pauses. “Rivka started reading. Secretly, of course. She spent time in bookstores, in Manhattan, away from the community.” The Strand, I think. Like my mom. “She started reading religious philosophy, but quickly began reading about
mental illness. She believed Miriam was very definitely bipolar, with borderline traits as well.”

  “But she was never diagnosed? Or medicated?”

  “That’s unclear. A few months ago Rivka mentioned she was considering a trip upstate to the hospital where Miriam had stayed. I think she suspected it wasn’t actually a hospital.”

  “What would it be?”

  “Some sort of home for inconvenient family members, perhaps. Run by a rebbe. Where she was kept but not really treated.”

  “Do things like that exist?”

  “Oh yes,” says Sara. “It’s informal, of course. Money is donated from the community.”

  “Are they locked in?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been to one. It can’t be much worse than some of the state-run homes for the disabled. You’ve read about those, right?”

  I have. Tales of violence and neglect; lots of hand-wringing, not much corrective action.

  “Rivka was angry when she learned that what made Miriam act the way she did was something that was so out of her control. ‘Miriam wasn’t bad,’ she told me. It had been a revelation to her. She said it took several years, but that she finally convinced Aron to bring Miriam home to Borough Park. She’d felt pain about her friend as long as she could remember. The way the community dealt with Miriam’s illness—and Rivka’s father’s, probably—terrified Rivka. I remember her saying that it interfered with her love of Hashem. You’re Jewish?”

  I nod.

  “Then you know. Jews, we are all sons and daughters of Hashem, God. He is accessible to us through how we live our lives. Where I grew up, where Rivka Mendelssohn grew up, everything is about Hashem. From our hairstyles to our clothing to when we rise and where we go and what we eat and when we eat and what we do and do not have in our homes. It is very difficult to live this life without an abiding devotion to Hashem. And to the community itself. To the idea of living apart. To creating more Jews here and living our values.”

  “What are the values, exactly?”

  “What I described. Exalting Hashem, modesty, family, prayer, tradition.”

  “And Rivka Mendelssohn rejected those values?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. But she was beginning to reject how she felt she was forced to express them. And then she fell in love.”