“It’s not that easy, Papa.”
“You give yourself to a man before you’re married.”
“No, Papa, we never—”
“You give yourself to this profane man who’s not your husband,” he said, “and still you see him when you know who he is and what he believes? Tell me who he is, this man, if not Satan dressed up as a Jew?”
“He’s confused, Papa. And I think he’s lost.”
“He’s a fraud, Mirav. And you should have the sense to see it.” He stood. “You will make your choice,” he said. “The fraud, or your family.” And with that he left the room. A few minutes later everyone was back to typing.
His third and final visit took place on a Friday night after services, just before the Shabbat meal. The Mendelsohn family was sitting down when Grant Arthur’s voice entered the house. “I want to be included,” he cried. “I want to be God’s chosen. I want to break bread with the Mendelsohns. Welcome me into your home, Rabbi. Give me your traditions, I will carry them forward. Give me your riches, I will safeguard them all my days. You Jews!” he cried. “How lucky God has made you! With your wives and your daughters and your fathers and sons! How blessed you are with life!” Rabbi Mendelsohn was calling the police while the others looked out the window at the figure on the lawn. Mirav saw that he had brought the Chagall. “Let me buy the challah! Let me join the minyan! Let me read from the scroll! Let me in! Will you keep me out because of an accident of birth? When so many others have used that same excuse to oppress and murder you? It was an accident of birth! It was not my fault! I love the Jews!” He continued to implore them until the police arrived. He held up the Chagall and said, “I bought this for you, Rabbi Mendelsohn,” and then he leaned it carefully against a tree. “I believe I saw you admiring it.” The cops stepped out and cuffed him. He had violated the protective order he had been served two days earlier.
Mirav Mendelsohn lived with Grant Arthur in the house on the corner during the five months of his probation. She ran the errands and bought the groceries. She furnished the house with the necessary things. On Fridays they went to services, for which he had special dispensation from the judge, at a synagogue in the Valley, and then they came home, blessed each other, and celebrated the Sabbath with a meal, after which they sang traditional songs out of the siddur.
But it was never easy, Mirav told us in the commons room, and it was doomed from the start.
By logic, persuasion, and force of character, he made her question her belief in God. With argument, appeals to common sense, and intellectual bullying, he showed her how brittle her faith was. With evidence drawn from history, he revealed her faith’s foolishness. Let us go atrocity by atrocity, he said to her. A critical mass of God’s absence accumulated. Bit by bit, he reversed almost twenty years of received wisdom.
Without God, she had even less reason to go home. When you wake, you don’t return to dreams and superstitions. You begin your adjustment, not without bitterness, to uncompromising truth, and bitterness turns to contempt.
“I treated them terribly,” Mirav said of her family thirty years later. “And I suppose they didn’t treat me all that well, either. But the way they treated me was customary, it was to be expected. That doesn’t excuse it, but it explains it. There was no earthly way to explain how I treated them.”
Her secularizing, when it came, was swift and brutal. It was only a matter of time before she took her education in skepticism to its logical conclusion, and started wondering why she should persist in wearing the clothes she had been made to wear since time immemorial, why she should cover her hair or attend services or bless the candles or sing the songs. These struck her suddenly as among a thousand empty gestures of increasing absurdity. He had only himself to blame as, one by one, she stopped doing the things that connected her to her past, finding in them no purpose and no reward. That hadn’t been a part of his agenda. She might refuse to dress appropriately or declare that she wouldn’t be joining him at synagogue or plan nothing to eat for the Sabbath meal, and he would say to her, “Why are you doing this to us?”
“What am I doing? I’m doing nothing.”
“But you have obligations.”
“To whom?”
“To me,” he said. “To the others.”
“What others? What others do you see around here?”
“You’re a Jew!” he cried. “You have obligations to the Jews!”
“What makes me a Jew?” she asked.
“You were born a Jew!”
“And now I’ve grown up,” she said. “So tell me, please: what makes me a Jew?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. If he’d come to Judaism as an atheist to seek fellowship among the Jews and found the rituals and customs he needed to order and enrich his desolate young life, she came to atheism to find nothing where once there had been everything, vertigo where there had once been structure, and freedom where there had once been rule. She knew why she was a Jew narrowly defined: she was born of a Jewish mother. But without God, what did Judaism have to do with her life?
If she no longer knew what made her a Jew, she knew even less what made him one. One day, after a year of living together, she looked over and saw him in kippah, prayer shawl, and phylacteries, reading Torah while tightly rocking. A common sight, a practice whose reasons were self-evident, programmatic, and beyond scrutiny, so unquestioned that she had never really seen it before. But now she could only gape in wonder. It was deeply strange: the nonbelieving non-Jew in the middle of a devout Jewish prayer.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice full of contempt.
“Praying,” came the reply.
“But why?”
He ignored her. She couldn’t interrogate his assumptions and motivations as he had so freely interrogated hers. He wouldn’t let her. But she knew he wasn’t Jewish. There was no word for what he was, unless that word was “Jewish-ish.” Everything before he became Jewish-ish—family neglect, loneliness, alienation—was off-limits. It had been discarded. He put on a skullcap and was born. Her father was right, she realized, even if they had arrived at the same conclusion from positions now diametrically opposed. He was a fraud.
“There was something desperately fraudulent about him,” she told us.
“Did Grant Arthur ever talk to you about a people in the Bible called the Amalekites?” asked Wendy.
“Yes.”
“And a people called the Ulms?”
“Yes. After his father died. He returned to New York, and when he came back, he was different. He stopped reading Torah and started spending time at the library. He was looking into his personal history, researching his family tree. He had discovered that he belonged to a people, some kind of lost history or something.”
It was the last straw. The only cousin still willing to speak to her found a way to loan her two hundred dollars. She boarded a bus and never saw him again. She arrived in New York in a pair of blue jeans and one of those honky-tonk shirts Debra Winger wore in Urban Cowboy, with buttons of fake pearl.
“Here’s a question I wanted to ask you this morning,” said Wendy, “when you were explaining all of this to Pete. Why did you return to Judaism?”
“Oh, Lord!” cried Mirav, and her laughter dispelled some of the tension in the room. “That’s such a long, dreary story. How can I sum it up for you without boring you to tears? Let’s see: husband, divorce, mistakes, regrets. Thirty years of spiritual emptiness.” She laughed. “I guess I just realized that he was right after all. Life is best when it’s lived as a Jew.”
“This thing you’re mixed up in,” Stuart began.
“I’m not mixed up in anything,” I said.
“Aren’t you?”
“Is it me you’re worried about? Have you gone to all this trouble just for me? Because I never got the impression that you liked me very much.”
“The truth has to start somewhere.”
“And what is the truth?”
“Haven’t you ju
st heard it?”
“I heard the details of a love affair that I’d been made aware of already. You heard her—he was nineteen. A kid, just some lost kid.”
“Well, he’s not a kid anymore,” said Wendy. “And he’s certainly not lost.”
“Do you even know who you’re talking about?” I asked her. I turned to Stuart. “Do you?”
“He’s the mastermind,” said Wendy.
“The mastermind? He spends his time in libraries, in archives, assembling family trees,” I said. “Some mastermind.”
“He’s been told,” she said to Stuart. “That puts me right with Mercer. I’m done.” And with that, she left the room.
Stuart turned to Mirav. “Would you mind giving me a moment alone with Paul?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. She stepped out. I felt weird being alone with Stuart in the commons room of an Orthodox religious center in Crown Heights.
“It doesn’t bother you, the things you’ve just heard?”
“I keep telling you,” I said. “I’ve heard it already.”
“Everything? As she presented it?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Maybe not exactly as she presented it,” I said. “But there are always two sides to every story.”
“The truth isn’t simply ‘one side of the story,’ ” he said. “The truth isn’t a partisan choice.”
“And you have a monopoly on the truth? You know that you should side with her over the differences between their stories?”
“What are those differences?”
“He left her, for one. She didn’t leave him, he left her. And everything she just told us, that happened before his father died, before he confessed on his deathbed. Arthur was lost when he was in love with Mirav. It was only after they parted that he discovered the truth about himself.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“That’s what he has told me. He doesn’t keep Mirav a secret.”
He looked at me with what I felt keenly to be disappointment. “Believe what you want to believe,” he said. “But the suffering does not belong to them. It belongs to the Jews who experienced it. It belongs to the dead and nameless who have gone unrecorded in history and who the world has long forgotten. They can’t borrow that suffering and make what they want of it. They can’t adopt it and turn it into a farce.”
“I never wanted to disappoint you,” I said.
“Let’s be perfectly clear—this has nothing to do with you. This is much bigger than you. A man broke with reality. He took an old legend from the Bible and made a myth from it, and now he tells the myth like it’s truth. This is how it happens.”
I arrived home that night during the fifth inning. I ordered takeout, poured a drink, and waited for the game to end so that I could rewind the tape and start from the beginning. I called Mercer, not for the first time that day. There was again no answer.
After the game I took the bottle onto the balcony. I had a seat on a canvas chair and looked out on the Brooklyn Promenade. There’s almost nothing better than the Promenade and its walkers, benchwarmers, and late-night lovemakers to further estrange you from a Friday night. I poured a drink and toasted them. I toasted the whole city. “Here’s to your picnics and suntans,” I said. I looked at the Manhattan skyline, that luminous glow just across the river. People were still hard at work. “Here’s to your war rooms and coronaries,” I toasted the people inside that honeycomb of industry. “Here’s to your dress socks and divorce papers.” I had a toast for practically everyone that night. “To you, young couple overlooking the river,” I said, “here’s to your frittatas and sex tapes.” “To you, picture taker with the endless flash,” I said, “here’s to your personal-brand maintenance with every uploaded image.” “To you, beautiful youth, wasting your life behind your me-machine,” I said, “here’s to your echo chamber and reflecting pool.” I toasted them all. I drank and toasted. “To you, Yankees fan with the Jeter shirt,” I said, “here’s to your aftershaves and rape acquittals.” I poured and I drank. “To you, corporate citizen, failing to bag up your Pomeranian’s warm shit,” I said, “and to all your fellow derivatives traders and quant douche bags: here’s to your anonymous faces and unlisted numbers,” I said. “Here’s to your sinking of America, you scumbags. May you end up in cold cells where rats go to die.” “Here’s to you, Mrs. Convoy,” I said, “here’s to your catechisms and your turtlenecks.” “Here’s to you, Abby. Thanks for the notice. Good luck on your new opportunities.” “And here’s to you, Connie. Here’s to your poet, your Ben, and all your future smiling babies of life.” I didn’t toast Uncle Stuart. I tried not to think of him, or of Mirav or Grant Arthur. I was drinking, and toasting, to forget. I continued in this vein until I had only enough toast left for one last drink. “And to you,” I said, “asshole on the balcony, here’s to your curried flatulence and your valid fears of autoerotic asphyxiation. Here’s to your longing, your longing for the company of others, and all your bighearted efforts to secure it. Cheers,” I said. I toasted myself and drank. I must have been saying much of this aloud, as a neighbor of mine, standing on her balcony, was peering over at me. I toasted her. She went inside. I was done with the bottle, I was done toasting and drinking. For a long time thereafter I stared almost steadily at the bright and ostentatious VERIZON sign on top of one of the tallest buildings—the only branded skyscraper in Manhattan, a fucking blight marring the skyline—and I thought, Why couldn’t those cunts have flown into that building? Then I passed out, and when I woke, there was nobody, I mean absolutely nobody, out on the Promenade. I searched and searched, I waited and waited. Surely someone would walk by any minute now. But no one did.
What terrifying hour was this, and why was I made to wake to it? Where were they, the strangers I had just been toasting? Never before had the Promenade emptied out so entirely, so finally, and instead of the familiar, noisy, peopled landmark of one of the biggest cities on earth, where you are promised never to be alone, it seemed now like a colony on the moon floating in an eternal night, with me as its only inhabitant. All of this hit me literally within the first second or two of waking up, and that moment was unbearable. I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. The solution at desperate moments like this was always to find something to do, and I mean anything, as quickly as possible. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose. Maybe Connie had called or texted or emailed, or Mercer, or… but no. No one had called or emailed or texted. I would do practically anything, I thought, to have them back—I mean the strollers and lovers of a few hours earlier, so that I might have another chance to stroll alongside them, to look out in wonder at the skyline, to lick carefully at the edges of my ice cream, and, after a while, to leave the Promenade, off to bed for a good night’s sleep—or to that one vital thing among the city’s offerings that night, that one unmissable thing that makes staying up all night a treasure and not a terror—and then to rise again at a decent hour, to walk the Promenade in the light of a new morning, eating a little pastry for breakfast and having coffee on one of the benches while looking out at the brightened waters. Oh, come back, you people lost to darkness! Come back, you ghosts. The day is hard enough. Don’t leave me alone with the night. Finally I was able to move. I sat up in the chair and listened. There was the hum of the river, and the island across the river, and the last desultory traffic of the night washing by on the expressway below. I can only suggest the effect it had on me, that is, the feeling that my life, and the city’s, and the world’s every carefree, winsome hour, were perfectly without meaning.
Ten
“THERE YOU ARE, MY boy,” Sookhart said as he handed me the book.
I took it, studied it, turned it over in my hands. The worn leather cover was blank from front to back, w
ithout author or title, inconspicuous. I opened it. The ancient spine cracked like a nut. By all appearances, it was as old as Sookhart claimed. It naturally fell open to cantonment 240—or something 240, at any rate: the strange characters squiggled before my eyes incomprehensibly. I ran my finger down the stitching that held the pages together. But as for making sense of the words, there was no way.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“How do I know it’s real?”
“My boy, look at it. It’s the strangest curio I’ve ever encountered in all my career. I don’t recognize a single proper name in it. Safek and Ulmet and Rivam and all the rest. It’s like it burrowed its way up from the center of the earth.”
“Is this Yiddish?”
He nodded.
“And can you confirm that it’s as old as you say it is?”
“It’s one hundred fifty years old if it’s a day,” he said.
“How can I be sure?”
“Do you doubt me?”
He looked offended.
“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
For some reason, out of habit maybe, as I was leaving, I asked him for a bag. He had to unpack his breakfast, a banana and a yogurt, and I carried the book out in a plastic sack from Whole Foods.
“Have I not been honest with you from the beginning?” he asked.
From the moment you inquired, did I not tell you about Mirav? And did I not explain that my involvement with her happened before I learned the truth of my history, of our history? Yes, I fell in love, and yes, I was devoted to Judaism. But it was a mistake, Paul. It was misdirected passion.
Come, Paul, and see what remains to be seen. Take the genetic test, and claim the final piece of your family history. Don’t take their word over ours.
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour Page 28
