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 planning 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?