Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  “I’m Pearl Edelman,” Pearl said. “Masha’s mother.”

  “Of course,” said Helga, almost to herself.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Edelman,” said Ross, putting out his hand, which fell back to his side, untouched. “Ross and Helga Coe. We simply adore your daughter.”

  Pearl regarded the pair of them. “Good to meet you,” she said, then began to fold Masha’s things, as if to leave them to their privacy. The Coes left with cheery haste.

  Neither Pearl nor Masha spoke of the Coes, once they were alone. I crept along the edge of Masha’s breakfast tray, wondering. Some horror had been acknowledged by Helga’s blush, some vile thing released. I didn’t know what it was yet, but it terrified me.

  After a week at home, Masha woke to find that the pain had receded from her chest like a noxious tide. She propped up her head on her fist and cast a hostile glance around the room: her sisters’ tidy beds, the bare desk, each pencil in place, a row of dolls they had once shared crammed on the shelf above the radiator.

  The plastic bag of Masha’s clothes lay crumpled on the floor beside her. Masha reached out for it, leaning over in bed to peer at her things: a pair of jeans, a dress, shorts, a couple of tank tops. Shelley’s favorite orange platform shoes had somehow been added to the pile. Masha took out each item and spread it on her bed. Hungrily, she dressed herself in the tight jeans, a tank top, the shoes. Masha thought of her shining friend, wobbling along in these heels, her coltlike legs skinny and strong, shock of blond fluff pinned down with girlish pink clasps. Masha was brushing her hair for the first time in days when Estie walked in.

  “Oh, what are you—what are you wearing, Mashie!”

  “I’m alone in my room,” said Masha. “I get to wear what I want.”

  Estie walked over to Masha’s bed and sat down at the end of it, pulling the covers over her bony knees. “They talk about you all the time, you know,” she said.

  “I bet,” said Masha.

  “Yehudis feels bad.”

  “Why?” asked Masha.

  “Because of Eli,” said Estie. “Oh! Can I have one?” she was holding up a bag of purple hard candy she’d found under the blanket.

  “Sure,” said Masha. “What about Eli?”

  “That he’s taking out Yehudis,” said Estie, sucking on the sweet. “But Mommy says if it’s beshert, it’s beshert, and she shouldn’t worry so much. I think they’re gonna get married.”

  Masha just sat for a long time. She was amazed by how much she could cry. No sobbing; just silent, unstemmed tears that dripped down her face. Yehudis rushed in and wept too, when she realized that Estie had told her. She sat beside her sister, held her hand.

  “It’s okay,” said Masha. “You should marry him. I couldn’t have made him happy. I don’t think I’m that kind of person. I don’t know why.”

  “Of course you are,” said Yehudis. “When you meet the right person it’ll all work out.”

  Masha shook her head. “I wish I could get out of here,” she whispered. She had no money. She didn’t know anyone outside. It was finished with the Coes; Nevsky had disappeared.

  She began walking around the house in her skimpy clothes. Mordecai wouldn’t even look at her. The younger children stared; Suri and the twins avoided her, embarrassed. Miriam told her she could at least have the consideration to dress modestly while in her parents’ house. “Why must you insult us?” she asked. Masha didn’t answer; she couldn’t, really. Her mind was a blank. She could not do more than what she was doing: haunt the house, her mind clogged, her legs and arms moving mechanically. She knew one thing: if she put on her old clothes, if she covered up again, then it would be a sign that she was ready to die. She ate in her room, lay in bed all day. Pearl looked in on her daughter every fifteen minutes or so. She insisted the door be kept open at all times.

  I despaired of my plan. The ruin of Leslie Senzatimore had brought me no joy, as it turned out. And here was Masha, on suicide watch. My meager powers were not enough to rectify the situation. I began to hope someone would swat me and put an end to my misery when Pearl’s sister, Rivkah, came to visit from Baltimore.

  Rivkah was plump, bustling. She wore a bobbed brown wig. Glasses. She ate the modest late-morning snack Pearl served up with gusto, and spoiled the youngest children with books and sweets. Then she lifted a large blue folder from her satchel.

  “I know you have a million things to do before sundown, and I promise I’ll help you,” she said, beaming at her sister. “But I can’t wait anymore, I have to show you this.”

  “What is it?” asked Pearl.

  “The family tree!”

  “You finished it?”

  “Can you believe it? Ten years it took me! Don’t worry about spilling coffee on it, this is just a copy,” she said, spreading out the laminated page for inspection. “Now, look. The pink squares are direct relations. The blues are indirect. You know we originally came from Poland. Well, boy do I have a surprise for you!” The page was a maze of lines connecting pink and blue rectangles. Each rectangle contained a name, a place and date of birth, and death. The print was tiny.

  “Look how far back that goes,” murmured Pearl, tracing her finger from her own name, with its impressive eleven offspring written below it, up and up, to people born in the seventeenth century. “Sixteen ninety-two!”

  “Yes. There are still a few names outstanding. We already knew about Grandpa Max coming here through Portugal, but look. Look at this. In Poland. See? He’s not a direct relative, but he is a relative.” A shiny red fingernail was pointing at a name. Curious, I hovered over it. I read: b. 1732. d. 1780. Gimpel Cerf. It couldn’t be. Cousin Gimpel? I landed on the name, only to be shooed away by Rivkah.

  “He was a maggid. A wandering holy man. A tzaddik. He was the disciple of the Rav Dov Ber, who was of course a disciple of the Ba’al Shem Tov!”

  “No …,” Pearl whispered. I landed on the table with a thud. Was I related to these people? Tears came to my eyes and I looked up to heaven. This would really be too much.

  “We have a true tzaddik in our family,” Rivkah continued. “And not just any tzaddik—one of the originals! Now try marrying off your girls, they’ll go like hot cakes!”

  “Rivkah!” Pearl laughed. “That’s a little shtetl for me.”

  “Say what you like, you know it’s a nightmare getting them all married, and everybody loves a tzaddik in the family,” said Rivkah.

  “I have to admit, you’re right,” said Pearl, checking her watch. “Oh, I need to get to the store, it’s so late!” They fled, leaving the baby in the care of Trina, the housekeeper. The family tree was left exposed on the coffee table. I flew over to Gimpel Cerf’s name and landed on it. As my filament-thin legs trod across the characters, I had a strange sensation: images were being drawn up into my brain, as if through the pads on my feet. I could see Mezritch. The men in their high fur hats, their black caftans, the women, hair covered, aprons soiled, walking through the streets, their children hanging off their arms. I smelled the woodsmoke pouring from the chimney pots, heard the sound of the droshky cabs clopping along the streets, and the loud, vehement people calling to one another in Yiddish. I saw Cousin Gimpel, that dear friend, his wandering iris floating aimlessly, his other fixed before him as he walked to prayer. He looked older than I remembered, and so intent. Gone was his bumbling manner, his foolish smile. This was a wise man, a man who knew the holy names, the Book of Creation. He had hid his power from all of us. Why? I wondered. Out of modesty? An unwillingness to face what he really was? I would never know. Filled with curiosity, I took off and buzzed over to where my own name might be. After a long search I found it. Jacob Cerf. Married to Hodel Mendel. Issue: Ethiop. Ethiop married Hannah and they begat Jacob, Sarah, Abraham, and Scheindl. I hovered over the name of my son, afraid to land, and yet wanting so much to see his face. In the end, of course, I alighted.

  I found myself in a tailor’s shop. Pigeonhole cubbies filled with every color of thre
ad and ribbon lined the walls. A large glass window framed a well-heeled populace bustling outside. The women wore the waists of their dresses very high now, just below the breasts. They didn’t wear wigs, but charming little knots of hair at the base of their necks. How I wished I could try my luck with those beauties. Now my gaze shifted. I saw a young man seated in a fine black suit, a yarmulke on his head, his pale face bent over his work. My son had my light eyes and a quick, foxlike expression, the dark brows and swarthy skin of Mme Mendel. He was sewing a gentleman’s waistcoat with great intensity. The silk was pale green as new leaves. Ethiop’s work was fine, precise. I stayed with him for several hours. He only looked up from his task when a customer walked into the shop. The man was tall, wearing a pair of tight-fitting vanilla-colored woolen britches and a short navy jacket. To my surprise, he referred to Ethiop as “citizen.” Had the Jews become citizens of France? I wondered, incredulous. My son deftly took the man’s measurements, made notes of his desires for a new jacket, and nodded without a hint of servile groveling when the man left. I was impressed.

  At noon a large dark girl in a matron’s bonnet swished in. She had a covered basket dangling over her arm. Ethiop peeked under the cloth with a smile, anticipating his lunch. This was clearly his wife. She was pregnant. With my grandchild! I could have wept. After that, greedy for more of my lineage, I walked the generations, each name streaming its secrets fluidly through my sensitive feet, flooding my eyes. We were a prosperous, fecund family. By 1900, my heirs had moved out of the cramped Jewish quarter, into a newly built neighborhood, with paved wide boulevards and freshly planted trees. They lived bourgeois Parisian lives. Ethiop’s tailoring business was passed down from father to son all the way to a boy named Max, who eschewed tailoring to become a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne in 1935. Max’s last name was Levi, but he was my direct descendant. I saw him very clearly as I traversed the letters of his name: dark-haired, honey-eyed, with a narrow jaw and a somewhat pointy chin, he looked like the Jewish intellectual he was.

  42

  PARIS, SEPTEMBER, 1941

  Max chopped the onion fine. Behind him, oil smoked in a pan. He swiveled around, turned down the gas, slid the onions off the chopping board with a frayed wooden spoon, watched them sizzle and brown. He was making his wife, Suzielle, her favorite dish, even though he had just discovered she was having an affair with a mutual friend of theirs. The compulsion to please her in this way was odd, and he wondered at it.

  Max had a lot of time to cook these days. One year earlier, shortly after the German invasion, he had been fired from his professorship at the university in a general culling of Jews from the teaching professions. Now, with the occupation, as a Jew he was banned from:

  public swimming pools

  restaurants

  cafés

  theaters

  cinemas

  concerts

  music halls

  markets

  museums

  libraries

  public exhibitions

  historical monuments

  sporting events, and

  parks.

  He could only shop between five in the afternoon and seven at night, when all the good food, rationed already, had been bought up. He had been lucky to find the carp. His parents and sister were already in Cuba. Max had elected to stay in Paris, in part out of loyalty to his wife, in part because he didn’t believe he would be harmed by the French police. They were rounding up the refugees, not the old, established families. His mother was nearly hysterical when he put his parents and sister on a train to Lisbon, their port of embarcation. She wanted her only son with her, and she distrusted Suzielle. Mme Levi had taken the liberty of obtaining a coveted French exit visa for Max, as well as Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. She begged him to get to Lisbon as fast as he could, as the visas would expire in three months. Max did not yet have an entry visa to Cuba, or the United States, or Mexico, but his mother had applied for all of them on his behalf. Instinctively, he had put off discussing his mother’s escape plans with his wife.

  Suzielle smoked as she ate, as she always did, her fine, plucked eyebrows arched over a pair of upturned green eyes. A sharply drawn mouth, thin nose, hennaed hair made her look a bit like a circus performer, though she was a clerk in a bookstore. That’s how he’d met her—over a copy of Baudelaire. Max didn’t touch his food as he watched his wife dispatch hers efficiently, her garnet-colored nails flashing as she bent over the plate to snatch another bite of fish, chewing rapidly.

  “Your carp is wonderful, as always,” she pronounced emphatically.

  “À la juive,” he said.

  “The best recipe in the world,” she said, finishing the last bite. She took a long, final drag of her Gauloise, stamped it out in the remains of the sauce, and stretched, smoke streaming from her nose.

  “I worked so long today,” she said.

  “It must be difficult, being employed,” he said.

  “Oof,” she exclaimed, rising with her plate and sweeping up his. “You didn’t eat,” she noticed, walking leisurely to the sink, overturning a plastic tub, and humming as she turned on the tap.

  “What a picture,” Max said, looking at her.

  “What? I always do the dishes when you cook!”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are a marvel.”

  “Why are you so sarcastic today? Did something happen?”

  “Nothing special. A couple of French policemen came by.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They confiscated my bicycle.”

  “Why?”

  “Jews aren’t allowed to have bicycles anymore, apparently. They were quite embarrassed. German orders, you know how it is. Also—radios.” Suzielle swiveled around to where the radio normally stood.

  “But that was my radio!”

  “I know! The injustice of it. I told them. They did say that in mixed marriages the confiscation of property becomes very tricky.” Suzielle dried her hands hastily on a tea towel and grabbed her coat from the hook.

  “Where are you going?” asked Max.

  “To the police! You aren’t some Pole who just got off the train! You are a Frenchman! Your family goes back to the eighteenth century, in Paris! They can’t just steal your belongings.”

  “But that’s the thing—they can, Suzielle. That’s what I realized—only today, because I’m an idiot. They can. I’ve been a fool all this time, staying here, thinking I was safe because I am a French citizen with Balzac in my head, better than the poor Eastern refugees gushing into Paris, with their beards and their caftans. But as it turns out, for them I am only a Jew, whatever my education and attire.”

  “For the Germans …”

  “It was a French policeman who took my bicycle. It’ll be a French policeman who knocks on my door when it’s time to put me on a train.”

  Suzielle stood, solemn, her dance-hall legs turned outward, arms dangling at her sides. “You blame me,” she said.

  “Not for this, no. Why would I?”

  “Then for what?” she asked.

  “My dear Suzielle. I prefer not to.”

  Still, she went to the police.

  When she returned, embarrassed yet triumphant, with her radio but no bicycle, Max had departed. He left no note, but the dishes were washed.

  CONEY ISLAND, 1943

  Max lay on the double bed staring up at the lumbering ceiling fan, sweat trickling from his temples. His cotton shirt clung to him. Hot as Paris could be, it was nothing compared to August in New York. This was pure swamp heat; paved nature, asserting her rights. The crazy rattle of a roller-coaster drifted through the wall, accompanied by dispassionate screams. He tried not to think of the real screaming going on across the Atlantic.

  Max had been lucky to find this place. A couple he’d met while stalled for a month in Lisbon waiting for a boat to New York had given him the lead. His new landlady, Lydia Schwartz, had a weakness for refugees. She rented him her largest seafr
ont room for a nominal sum.

  Every morning, after his breakfast of black coffee and a slice of rye bread, Max took a stroll along the Coney Island boardwalk. The morning pleasure seekers stood in line for the Ferris wheel, roller coaster, ice-cream cones with unsmiling, even dour patience, as if waiting to buy sardines. As the sun climbed there were flocks of them. These people took their frivolity very seriously, Max noticed. Only when they were terrified on one of the rides did they bare their teeth in a smile, their mouths open and shrieking in high-pitched, automated bursts. It was all so far from what he had come from in Europe, he found it impossible to comprehend. The Coney Island images he saw every day simply lay in his brain undigested, like a wad of chewing gum stuck in a kid’s intestine: Salamandar Boy eating a sandwich in his tank, little flipper hands gripping the bread as the bearded lady chatted to him, smoking; floating bouquets of balloons struggling against their tethers in the breeze; fluffy domes of light blue and pink and yellow spun sugar, the tender colors trembling against the crumbling gray woodwork of the amusement park, with its long traditions of ritual excess. People descending pell-mell in chutes, whipped around in teacups, yelping in the House of Horrors. A painted face high as a hill, its open mouth a gateway to hours of fun in Luna Park. At night, winking lights, swirling pinwheels of light, comets of light. Faces hungry for pleasure, eyes straining to see what’s next, what’s new. Carnival without end. All this while nobody knew where all those people in Paris were being taken in the trains. To the East. And none of them ever came back. The trains in France had never run so punctually as when there were Jews in them. Maybe there was a full boxcar pulling out of Drancy at this instant. How was it possible, as a ten-foot-high custard cone cast a shadow on Max’s bronzed face, as a thousand half-naked people were swarming into the Atlantic for their morning dip, as the dark-skinned man squirting mustard on his hot dog smiled without malice and asked if he wanted onions?