Wedding day, funeral day.
“Gone,” she said. She did not turn from the window. She had the sensation of mingled futility and fulfillment one feels in dreams. There was no point in asking the question, and yet it was the only thing she was able to say. “Gone where?”
“Nobody know, missus. Nobody see him since last night.”
“Last night.”
“This morning.”
Last night she had presided at a forshpiel for the daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe. A brilliant match. A bride of talent and accomplishment, beautiful, with a fiery streak that Mendel’s sisters lacked but which his mother knew her son admired in her. Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shpilman had known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall “the world.” Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light.
That was how she had planned, at least, to put it to Mendel, should he ever seek her counsel on the matter of his betrothal to the daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe.
“Your husband pretty angry,” said the girl, Betty, a Filipina, like all the girls.
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything, missus. That how I know he’s angry. Sending out lot of people looking every place. Calling the mayor.”
Mrs. Shpilman turned from the window, the phrase They were obliged to call off the wedding metastasizing in her abdomen. Betty was gathering up wads of tissue paper from the Turkey carpet.
“What ladies?” Mrs. Shpilman said. “Who are they? Are they Verbovers?”
“One maybe. Other not. Only say they hoping to talk to you.”
“Where are they?”
“Downstairs in your office. One lady all in black clothes, veil on her face. Look like maybe her husband just die.”
Mrs. Shpilman can’t remember anymore when the first hopeless men and terminal cases started to come around looking for Mendel. Possibly they came in secret at first, to the back door, encouraged by reports from one or the other of the housemaids. There was a maid whose womb had been made barren by a botched operation in Cebu when she was a girl. Mendel took one of those dolls he made his sisters from felt and a clothespin, pinned a crayoned blessing between its wooden legs, and slipped it into her pocket. Ten months after that, Remedios gave birth to a son. There was Dov-Ber Gursky, their driver, secretly ten thousand dollars in the wrong with a Russian finger-breaker. Mendel handed Gursky a five-dollar bill, unbidden, and said he hoped it might help. Two days later, a lawyer in St. Louis wrote to inform Gursky that he had just inherited half a million from an uncle he never knew. By the time of Mendel’s bar mitzvah, the sick and dying, the bereft, the parents of damned children, they were getting to be a real pain in the neck. Coming around at any hour of the day or night. Wailing and begging. Mrs. Shpilman had taken steps to protect Mendel, setting hours and conditions. But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.
“I can’t see them now,” Mrs. Shpilman said, sitting down on her narrow bed, with its white candlewick bedspread and the pillows she had embroidered before Mendel was born. “These ladies of yours.” Sometimes when they could not get to Mendel, the women would come to her, to the rebbetzin, and she would bless them as well as she could, with the little wherewithal she brought to the task. “I have to finish dressing. The wedding is in one hour, Betty. One hour! They’ll find him.”
She had been waiting for him to betray her for years, ever since she had first understood that he was what he was. Such a frightening word to a mother, with its implication of fragile bones, vulnerability to predators, nothing to protect the bird but its feathers. And flight. Of course flight. She had understood this about him long before he understood it himself. Breathed it in from the soft nape of his infant neck. Read it like a hidden text in the fuzzy knobs of his knees in short pants. A touch of girlishness in the way he lowered his eyes when others praised him. And then, as he got older, she could not fail to note, though he tried to conceal it, the way he grew uncomfortable, tongue-tied, seeming to bank his fire when a Rudashevsky or certain of his male cousins came into the room.
All through the making of the match, the betrothal, the planning for the wedding, she had been studying Mendele for signs of apprehension or unwillingness. But he remained true to his duty and her plans. Sarcastic at times, yes, even irreverent, mocking her for her steadfast belief that the Holy Name, blessed be He, spends His time like an old housewife making matches among the souls of the not-yet-born. Once he had snatched up a scrap of white tulle her daughters had left in the parlor, covered his head with it, and offered in a voice that was an uncanny imitation of his betrothed’s an inventory of the physical shortcomings of Mendel Shpilman. Everyone laughed, but in her heart was a little bird flutter of dread. Apart from that moment, he appeared to remain as he had been, unstinting in his devotion to the 613 commandments, to the study of Torah and Talmud, to his parents, to the faithful for whom he was their star. Surely, even now, Mendel would be found.
She rolled up her stockings, put on her dress, straightened her slip. She put on the wig that she’d had made especially for the wedding at a cost of three thousand dollars. It was a masterpiece, ash blond with hints of red and gold, done up in braids like her own hair when she was a young woman. It was not until she had settled that shining snood of money onto her cropped pate that she began to panic.
On a deal table sat a black telephone with no dial. If she picked it up, an identical phone would ring in her husband’s office. In ten years of living in this house, she had used it only three times, once in pain and twice in anger. Over the phone hung a framed photograph of her grandfather, the eighth rebbe, her grandmother, and her mother at the age of five or six, posed under a pasteboard willow, along the banks of a painted stream. Black clothes, the dreamy cloud of her grandfather’s beard, over all the radiant ash of time that settled on the dead in old photos. Missing from the group was her mother’s brother, whose name was a kind of curse so potent it must never be spoken. His apostasy, though notorious, remained unknown to her. All she understood was that it had begun with a hidden book called The Mysterious Island, discovered in a drawer, and culminated with a report of her uncle having been spotted on a street in Warsaw, beardless and wearing a straw boater more scandalous than any French novel.
She placed her hand on the receiver of the phone with no dial. Panic in her organs, panic in her teeth.
“I wouldn’t answer if I could,” her husband said from right behind her. “If you have to break the Sabbath, at least don’t waste the sin.”
Though he was not then so lunar as he became in later years, the sight of her husband standing in her bedroom was a cause for wonder, the advent of a second moon in the sky. He took a look around at the needlepoint chairs, the green valance, the white-satin blank of her bed, her bottles and jars. She saw him struggle to keep a mocking smile on his lips. But the expression he managed was something at once avid and repelled. It reminded her of the smile with which her husband had once received an embassy from some far-off court in Ethiopia or Yemen, a sloe-eyed rabbi in a gaudy kaftan. That impossible black rabbi with his outlandish Torah, the realm of women: They were divine whims, convolutions of God’s thought, that it was almost a heresy to imagine or try to understand.
The longer he stood there, the less amused and the more lost he seemed to become. Finally, s
he was moved to pity. He did not belong here. It was a measure of the spreading stain of wrongness on this day that he had traveled so far on his embassy to this land of tasseled cushions and rosewater.
“Sit,” she said. “Please.”
Grateful, slow, he endangered a chair. “He will be found,” he said, his voice soft and threatening.
She didn’t like the look of him. Knowing that otherwise he might strike people as gross, he was ordinarily a man of tidy habits. But his hose were crooked now, his shirt misbuttoned. His cheeks were mottled with fatigue, and his whiskers strayed like he had been yanking at them.
“Excuse me, darling,” she said. She opened the door to her dressing room and went inside. She despised the dark colors favored by Verbover women of her generation. The room into which she retreated was hung with indigo, deep purple, heliotrope. At a small vanity chair with a fringed skirt, she sat down. She reached out with a stockinged toe and closed the door, leaving a one-inch gap. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s better this way.”
“He will be found,” her husband repeated, more matter-of-fact now, trying to reassure her and not himself.
“He’d better be,” she said. “So I can kill him.”
“Calm yourself.”
“I say that very calmly. Is he drunk? Was there drinking?”
“He was fasting. He was fine. Such a teaching he made us last night on Parshat Chayei Sarah. It was electric. A stopped heart would have begun beating again. But when he finished, there were tears on his face. He said he needed air. No one has seen him since.”
“I’ll kill him,” she said.
There was no reply from the bedroom, only the rasp of breath, steady, implacable. She regretted the threat. It was rhetoric on her lips, but in his mind, that library in a bonepit, it took on a dangerous color of agency.
“Do you know, by any chance, where he is?” her husband said after a pause, and there was danger in the lightness of his tone.
“How would I know that?”
“He talks to you. He comes to see you here.”
“Never.”
“I know he does.”
“How could you know that? Unless you have turned the maids into spies.”
His silence confirmed the scope of her household’s corruption. She felt a glorious seizure of resolve never to leave her dressing room again.
“I didn’t come here to find an argument or to reproach you. On the contrary, I hoped that I might borrow a cup of your usual calm prudence. Now that I am here, I feel compelled, against my judgment as a rabbi and as a man, but with the full support of my understanding as a father, to reproach you.”
“For what?”
“His aberration. The freakish streak. The twist in his soul. That is your fault. A son like that is the fruit of his mother’s tree.”
“Go to the window,” she told him. “Look through the drape. See those poor suitors and fools and broken yids come to receive a blessing that you, you would never, in your power, in your learning, would never be able to bestow, honestly. Not that such an inability has ever hampered you, in the past, from offering it.”
“I can bless in other ways.”
“Look at them!”
“You look at them. Come out of that closet and look.”
“I’ve seen them,” she said through her teeth. “And they all have a twist in the soul.”
“But they hide it. Out of modesty and humility and the fear of God, they clothe it. God commands us to cover our heads in His presence. Not to stand bareheaded.”
She heard the scrape and creak of his chair leg and the shuffle of his feet in their slippers. She heard the wrecked joint of his left hip crack and snap. He grunted in pain.
“That is all I ask of Mendel,” he continued. “What a man may think, what he feels, these have no interest, no relevance to me, or to God. It doesn’t matter to the wind whether a flag is red or it’s blue.”
“Or pink.”
There was another silence. This one carried a lighter charge somehow, as if he was coming to a conclusion or remembering how it might have felt at one time to find amusement in her little joke.
“I will find him,” he said. “I will sit him down and tell him what I know. Explain to him that as long as he obeys God and His commandments and gives righteously, there is a place for him here. That I will not turn my back to him first. That the choice lies with him to abandon us.”
“Can a man be a Tzaddik Ha-Dor but live hidden from himself and everyone around him?”
“A Tzaddik Ha-Dor is always hidden. That’s a mark of his nature. Maybe I should explain that to him. Tell him that these—feelings—he experiences and struggles against are, in a way, the proof of his fitness to rule.”
“Maybe he isn’t running away from marriage to this girl,” she said. “Maybe that isn’t what frightens him. What he can’t live with.” The sentence she had never spoken to her husband took up its usual station at the tip of her tongue. She had been composing and refining and abandoning elements of it in her mind for the past forty years, like the stanzas of a poem written by a prisoner denied the use of paper and pen. “Maybe there is another kind of self-deception he can’t reconcile himself to living with.”
“He has no choice,” her husband said. “Even if he has fallen into unbelief. Even if in staying here, he risks hypocrisy or cant. A man with his talents, his gifts, cannot be allowed to move and work and hazard his fortune out there in that unclean world. He would be a danger to everyone. In particular to himself.”
“That wasn’t the self-deception I meant. I meant the kind that—that Verbovers all engage in.”
Silence then, ominous, neither heavy nor light, the vast silence of a dirigible before the static spark.
“I’m not aware,” he said, “of any others that confront him.”
She let her sentence drop; she had been running in the air for too long by then to look down for more than a second.
“So he must be held here, then,” she said. “With or without his consent.”
“Believe me, my dear. And do not mistake me. The alternative would be something far worse.”
She reeled a moment, then rushed from her dressing room to see what was in his eyes when he threatened the life of his own son, as she construed it, for the sin of being what God had pleased to make him. But, silent as a dirigible, he had sailed. Instead, she found only Betty, back to renew the visitors’ appeal. Betty was a good servant, but she had the Filipino knack for taking intense pleasure in scandal. She had a hard time concealing her delight in the news she brought.
“One lady, missus, say she bringing a message from Mendel,” Betty said. “Say, sorry, he’s not coming home. No wedding today!”
“He’s coming home,” Mrs. Shpilman said, fighting the wish to slap Betty’s face. “Mendel would never…” She stopped herself before she could say the words: Mendel would never leave without saying goodbye.
The woman bearing a message from her son was not a Verbover. She was a modern Jewess, dressed modestly out of respect for the neighborhood in a long patterned skirt and a stylish dark cloak. Ten or fifteen years older than Mrs. Shpilman. A dark-eyed, dark-haired woman who at one time must have been very beautiful. She jumped up from the wing chair by the window when Mrs. Shpilman came in, and gave her name as Brukh. Her friend was a plump thing, pious by the look of her, perhaps Satmar, in a long black dress with black stockings and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down over an inferior shaydl. Her stockings bagged, and the rhinestone buckle on her hatband, poor thing, was coming unglued. The veil bunched at the upper left in a way that struck Mrs. Shpilman as piteous. Looking at this bereft creature, she forgot for a moment the awful news that had brought the two women to her house. A blessing welled up inside of her with a force so urgent she could barely contain it. She wanted to take the shabby woman in her arms and kiss her in a way that lasted, that burned sadness away. She wondered if that was how it felt to be Mendel all the time.
“What is this no
nsense?” she said. “Sit down.”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Shpilman,” said the Brukh woman, resuming her seat, perched on the edge as if to show that she did not plan to stay.
“Have you seen Mendel?”
“Yes.”
“And where is he?”
“He’s staying with a friend. He won’t be there for long.”
“He’s coming back.”
“No. No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Shpilman. But you will be able to reach Mendel through this person. Whenever you need to. Wherever he goes.”
“What person, tell me? Who is this friend?”
“If I tell you, you have to promise to keep the information to yourself. Otherwise, Mendel says”—she glanced at her friend as if hoping for some moral support to get past the next seven words—“you will never hear from him again.”
“But my dear, I never want to hear from him again,” Mrs. Shpilman said. “So there’s really no point in telling me where he is, is there?”
“I suppose not.”
“Only that if you don’t tell me where he is, and no nonsense, I will have you sent over to Rudashevsky’s Garage and let them get the information out of you the way they like to do it.”
“Oh, now, I’m not afraid of you,” said the Brukh woman with an astonishing hint of a smile in her voice.
“No? And why is that?”
“Because Mendel told me not to be.”
She could feel the reassurance, catch the echo of it in the Brukh woman’s voice and manner. An air of teasing, of the playfulness that Mendel imposed on all of his dealings with his mother, and with his dread father, too. Mrs. Shpilman had always thought of it as a devil inside of him, but now she saw that it might be simply a means of survival, protection. Feathers for the little bird.