“Very.”
“I must study this morning. I can meet you this afternoon at three o’clock.”
“Terrific,” I said. “In the elephant room. Right under the tusks of the lead elephant. I’ll be there with my two small children, a baby and a little girl.”
“Under the elephant,” he said, and hung up the phone.
When I hung up I looked up at my mother. She was standing over me, smiling complacently.
“What?” I said.
“A ridiculous idea,” she said.
“What was?”
“Calling him. Ridiculous, you told me.”
“Okay. Not ridiculous. A good idea. A very good idea. So, do you want to come into the city with me?”
“No. I have to go to the office for a few hours. Myron has a petition for certiorari due this afternoon and I can’t trust the temp to get it right. You only have one chance you know. If it’s late, it’s late. The Supreme Court doesn’t take excuses.”
“I know, Ma. I filed a few of those while I was the federal public defender.”
“Of course you did,” she said, clearly mourning my lost days as a professional.
“Maybe Daddy will want to come along.”
“Sure he will. He loves the museum.”
WHEN we got to the Upper West Side we parked the car and unloaded the kids. My father insisted on putting Isaac on his own chest in the Baby Bjorn. I was sorry I hadn’t brought my camera along to catch the two of them waddling down the street with Ruby skipping along next to them, her little hand buried in her Grandpa’s furry paw.
It was one of those perfect New York City autumn days. The air was cool and crisp and the sun shone brightly. The city looked new and polished and smelled like apples and the streets were so clean, the asphalt seemed to sparkle. Even the homeless people looked a little more cheerful than usual. I gave Ruby a couple of dollars to distribute among them on our way down the block. My usual rule is that I give money only to women, and then only if they don’t seem visibly intoxicated, but today I let Ruby hand out the bills to whomever she pleased. I wasn’t sure I should be letting her play Lady Bountiful this way, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt for her to understand that since she was lucky enough to have money, she had an obligation to share some of it with those who weren’t as fortunate.
We walked into the beautiful old Museum of Natural History and made our way to the huge hall where the herd of elephants stands, massive and imposing, in the center of the room. I sat down on a bench under the looming tusks of the lead elephant. Ruby came up and, leaning against me, stared up into the behemoth’s face.
“These elephants are all dead, right?” she asked.
“Yup,” I said.
“Somebody killed them,” she stated.
“That’s true.”
“Even the baby?”
“Even the baby.”
“Why?”
“Well, Rubes, a long time ago, people didn’t know that it was bad to kill animals. When these elephants were shot, people didn’t really understand that if you kill lots of animals, there won’t be any left.”
“They’ll be stink.”
“What?”
“Stink. Like the dinosaurs.”
“Right, exactly, extinct. People didn’t understand about extinction and endangered species back when these elephants were killed.”
“But now we know that’s bad, right?”
“Right.”
“And nobody kills elephants anymore. Cuz it’s bad.”
I wasn’t about to get into a discussion of wild animal poaching and the insatiable Asian market for things like elephant tusk and rhino horn, particularly since one of my last clients was a Chinese bear-bile smuggler. So I just said, “Right.”
Ruby scampered off to play with her grandpa, and I looked up. Across the room I saw a young man dressed in the garb of a Hasidic Jew. He wore a Fedora, a dark suit, and his tzitzit hung outside his trousers. His long sidelocks were tucked behind his ears and a patchy, light brown beard covered his chin. His cheeks were reddened with acne and pitted with scars. For all that, he wasn’t unattractive. He had big blue eyes with long lashes and a straight nose. His full lips looked almost bruised under the mantle of his moustache.
I lifted my hand in a sort of half wave and he walked over to me.
“Ari Hirsch?” I asked.
“Yes. And you are Mrs. . . . uh, Mrs. . . .”
“Applebaum.”
“Yes, of course. Mrs. Applebaum. A friend of Fraydle’s.” He stood awkwardly, a few feet from me.
“Would you like to sit down?” I motioned to the bench on which I sat. He perched at the far end, carefully maintaining a respectable distance from me.
“Did Josh Bernstein tell you why I asked you to meet me?”
“Why don’t you tell me yourself,” he said, his voice soft.
How was I going to do this? One of the reasons I was here was my suspicion that Ari and his family might know something about Fraydle’s whereabouts. But what if he didn’t? Fraydle’s family was adamant about keeping her disappearance a secret from the Hirsches. How could I ask him if he knew where she was without giving away their secret? How could I ask him whether she knew about his sexual orientation without making him aware that his secret was out? I could do neither.
I’ve always believed that it’s secrecy that causes the most difficulties. If you are honest and open about your problems, then nobody can hurt you by disclosing them. I didn’t believe that either the Finkelsteins or Ari were doing themselves any favors by being so reticent. Now, maybe that decision wasn’t mine to make, but I decided to act as if it were. For the purposes of this conversation, at least.
“Ari, I don’t know how much Josh told you, but Fraydle has disappeared. Her parents don’t want your family to know; they’re afraid your parents will call off the match. But she’s been gone for almost a week now, and I am very worried.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Gone as in she’s not at home and nobody knows where she is.”
“Could she have been kidnapped? What do the police say?”
“For the time being, Rabbi Finkelstein is conducting the search on his own.”
“No police?”
“No.”
“So she has just run away? Nobody has . . . has hurt her?”
“Nobody knows where she is, Ari. That’s why I asked you here to talk to me. I wonder if you might know if she has run away and if so, why.”
He shook his head vigorously. “I know nothing. I have met her only a few times. I don’t really know her at all.”
I took a breath. “Ari, there’s no easy way for me to ask this. Did you tell Fraydle that you might be a homosexual?”
The blood drained from his face. He looked at me for a moment, stricken.
“Ari? Did you tell her?”
He reached his hand to a sidecurl and tugged at it nervously.
“Ari?”
“How do you know? What did she tell you about me?” he whispered.
I said nothing. I felt guilty about letting him think that Fraydle was the source of my suspicions, but I’d promised Libby and Josh that I would keep their confidence.
Ari shook his head, as if to clear his ears of my words.
“I’m not . . . not . . . I’m not what you said,” he murmured.
“Ari, I’m not judging you, and I’m not going to tell anybody what I found out. All I need to know is whether you told Fraydle anything.”
He remained silent for another moment, winding his hair around his finger. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Fraydle knew everything there is to know. I told her about my doubts about . . . about myself. We talked about it and we decided that with her help, and God’s, I could overcome this.”
That was a surprise. I guess I’d been expecting to hear that he’d told Fraydle, and her shock and her fear of marrying a man who would rather be with another man had made her run away from home. I hadn’t expect
ed to hear that the two of them had discussed the issue openly and nonetheless reached an agreement to marry.
“She agreed to go forward with the wedding?”
“Not at first. She was upset at first. But she didn’t reject me right away. She told me she needed some time to think.”
“Then what happened?”
“I went back to New York. She called me on the telephone, a few days later. She told me that she had thought about it and that we should marry.”
“Ari, did she tell her parents?”
He shook his head. “No. We agreed to keep the secret between us.”
“Are you sure she kept this agreement?”
“Yes. She promised not to tell her parents. I don’t think she would have broken her promise.”
“Did she tell you anything about herself, of her own doubts about marriage?”
Ari didn’t take his eyes off the long thin fingers knotted in his lap. He shook his head.
It surprised me that despite the fact that her fiancé had been so honest with her, Fraydle had failed to confide in him about Yossi. However, the truth was that none of this helped me at all. If Fraydle and Ari had worked this out between them, there was no reason for her to run away. A chill ran across the back of my neck. Since the first days of Fraydle’s disappearance, I’d done my best to think of her as a runaway. But I’d always known that the odds were good, and getting better with each day, that she hadn’t run anywhere. It was all too possible that someone had taken her, had done something to her. Maybe that someone was sitting next to me under the elephant tusks. Or maybe that someone was in Borough Park or back in Los Angeles. I had to get on a plane to Los Angeles as soon as possible. I needed to see the Finkelsteins and convince them to go to the police. And if the rabbi refused, I would make the report myself.
The young man interrupted my thoughts. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Don’t worry, Ari. I’m not going to tell anyone about you. I’m just trying to find Fraydle.”
“You must call me as soon as you know anything.”
“I will. Of course I will. Thank you for talking to me.”
“No, thank you. Thank you for telling me. You said you are a friend of Fraydle’s?” He looked at me, obviously not understanding what I, a non-Hasidic woman in a pair of overalls, could have to do with his wife-to-be.
“She was my baby-sitter.” It was, I knew, a ridiculously thin connection. Not a friend. Not a member of my family. Just a girl who watched my baby one morning. So that I could take a nap.
“Ah, yes. Well, goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye, Ari.”
I rushed off to where my father was standing with the kids, looking at a diorama of the African veldt.
“Look, Mama,” Ruby said, “A Thompson’s gazelle.”
I looked at the sign next to the exhibit box. Lo and behold, it was, in fact, a Thompson’s gazelle.
“How do you know what a Thompson’s gazelle looks like?” I asked.
“The Kratt Brothers told me!” she replied. Thank goodness for public television.
I hustled the three of them through the rest of the museum as fast as I could, zipping by the dinosaurs and the giant blue whale. I wanted to get back to New Jersey and call the airline. The fates were conspiring against me, however, and we ended up stuck on the West Side Highway, creeping slowly north toward the George Washington Bridge. It took almost ninety minutes to get home. Luckily, Isaac fell asleep in the back of the car, after he’d screamed for an hour at the top of his lungs.
When he finally crashed into slumber, my father looked at me and said, “For a minute there I thought he’d shatter the windshield.”
Eighteen
BY the time we pulled into my parents’ driveway, it was dark. As my father and I unloaded the kids from the car, I noticed a big black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house. The car stuck out like a sore thumb in a neighborhood where my parents’ Chrysler was the only American car that wasn’t a sports utility vehicle.
I lumbered up the porch stairs with a sleeping Isaac draped over my shoulder and Ruby wrapped around my leg. A group of Hasidic men stood waiting outside the front door. All wore hats, but only a few were bearded. They did not look particularly friendly.
“Hello? Can I help you?” I asked. My father, who had been coming up the steps behind me, said, at the same time, “Who are all these people?”
A large man with a big belly stepped forward. He pointed a finger at me. “You are Juliet Applebaum,” he said, rather than asked.
“Well, you’re ahead of me, sir. You know who I am, but I don’t know who you are,” I said, trying not to show how nervous I was. I did a quick head count. There were six men standing on the porch. I decided to pretend this was a social call.
“Why don’t we go inside so I can get the baby out of the cold.” I walked by the man who’d spoken to me and unlocked the front door. My father followed me, reaching out for Ruby’s hand.
“What’s going on?” he whispered as he walked past me into the house.
“I have no idea,” I answered, in a loud, clear voice.
I held the door open and the men filed in, one by one. I walked into the living room area and sat down on the couch, still holding the baby on my lap.
“Daddy,” I said, “why don’t you go set Ruby up with a video, upstairs.”
He nodded and led her away. Meanwhile, the men had followed me across the floor and stood in a little huddle in the center of the living room. I looked them over. There were two older men, the big one who’d spoken to me and another of about the same size, but with a long, grizzled beard. The four other men were much younger. Two looked to be about my age, and two seemed no more than boys. One of the younger men, with short blond hair, a trimmed beard, and broad shoulders, looked vaguely familiar. Where had I seen him before?
“Please sit down,” I said.
They all looked at the leader of the pack, who shook his head angrily. “We are not staying in this house. We came only to warn you, Juliet Applebaum. Stay away from the Hirsch family. You are not welcome.”
Ah. The uncles.
“You must be Esther Hirsch’s brother. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. Here’s the thing about having been a public defender: After a while, scary guys just don’t scare you anymore. My clients had almost all been scary guys. They were gangbangers with elaborate tattoos, jittery bank robbers with thousand-dollar-a-day smack habits, car-jackers with arsenals of Glock 9mm semi-automatics. As their lawyer, and often the only person who really cared about what happened to them, I almost always became their confidante, confessor, and even their friend. I’d learned to look behind the crime and see the man. And the person standing in front of me, for all that he looked intimidating and even dangerous, was just a man. An old Jewish man. Like my father, but with a fur hat.
“Who I am is not important!” my rude visitor bellowed. My father came running downstairs at the sound of the shout.
“Daddy, please go up and stay with Ruby,” I said.
“But—” he began.
“Daddy! I need you to stay with her. I don’t want her to be scared.” Though clearly reluctant, he headed back up the stairs.
I turned to the spokesman, who was pointing a finger in my face. “Stop shouting,” I said. “You’ll wake the baby.”
The blond man, the one who looked familiar, stepped forward. “We are here to ask you to refrain from prying into the affairs of Ari Hirsch. That is all.” He spoke with a faint accent.
“Ask nothing!” the leader shouted. “We are telling you! Mind your own business, you churva!”
At that moment, the front door opened and my mother walked in the door.
“Churva?” she said. “Did I hear someone say the word churva in my house? What’s going on here?” She looked at me, and at the group of men still standing in the middle of the living room. “Josef?” she said. “Josef Petrovsky, what are you doing here? What is your mother going to say whe
n I tell her your friend called my daughter a whore?”
Nineteen
MY mother’s scolding seemed momentarily to take the wind out of the sails of my second-cousin-twice-removed and his cabal of hostile Hasidim. Then the leader raised his fist. “This is a warning,” he bellowed.
The older man with the grizzled beard, who had been silent up until then, put a restraining hand on his cohort’s arm. He turned to me and, in a voice made somehow more ominous by its softness, said, “We are a close family.” I didn’t answer. “We protect each other.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “But what does that have to do with me?”
He smiled thinly. “You should know this about us, that is all.”
“Listen, you,” my mother squawked. “What do you think you are, the Jewish Gambini family? I want you out of my house. All of you. Out now, or I’m calling the police.”
The quiet man ignored her and looked at me. I stood my ground.
“I think you should leave,” I said.
“Out, out!” My mother grabbed the young man closest to her by the arm and began pushing him in the direction of the door. He shook her off with a rough jerk and she stared at him, her mouth open.
“Please leave,” I repeated.
“Yes,” the soft-voiced man said. “And you, of course, will no longer make my nephew a subject of your conversation.” I said nothing. “Good. That is settled. Thank you for your time.” He nodded once and walked to the front door. He waited for a moment for one of the young men to open it for him, and then walked out the door, followed by the others. My cousin was the last to leave. He walked over to my mother but she pushed him away. “Out of my house, Josef Petrovsky. You are no longer welcome here!” He slunk out the door.
“Humph!” my mother said.
“Yeah, no kidding. Hey, Ma?”
“Yes, darling?”
“What the hell was that about?”
“You’re asking me? You’re the one out raking muck. You tell me what happened.”
“First of all,” I said, “muckraking is investigative journalism. I’m not raking muck. Second of all, what was cousin Josef Petrovsky doing in our house? And why was he with Ari Hirsch’s uncles?”
The Big Nap Page 14
