“Did you ever get the sense that Rivka was the victim of domestic violence?”
Sara shakes her head. “She rarely spoke about her husband. Except to say that she never loved him.”
“Do you think he knew that?”
“I have no idea.”
I look at my notebook. I should have written down my questions before I got here. Sara doesn’t seem impatient, though. I flip back a couple pages and see my note about the fight Yakov said his mother and father had about Coney Island.
“Have you ever heard about a house in Coney Island, where people sometimes go who are questioning?” I ask.
“Oh course,” says Sara. “Menachem Goldberg’s house. I don’t know that he lives there anymore, but it’s been open for, decades, I think. Since the eighties, anyway.”
“Have you been there?”
Sara nods.
“Do you think you might be willing to give me the address? I think Rivka spent time there, and I’d love to maybe learn a little more about her from the people there. I won’t use names if they don’t want.”
“I suppose that’s fine.” She scrolls through her phone and finds the address, then sends it to me in a text.
“Do you still consider yourself part of the community?” I ask.
Sara smiles. “I don’t think I’ll ever escape it. And so much of my work is with people in the community. It is who I am. I choose to live apart, but I am never really… apart.”
I haven’t been writing down much, but I scribble I don’t think I’ll ever escape it into my notebook. That, I think, is a good quote.
“Now,” says Sara, “let’s talk about what you’re going to write.”
I take the bus back to Park Slope and manage to get a couple pieces of usable information from the clerk at the bodega where I got tea near porn mom’s apartment. Apparently, porn dad came in for energy drinks and gum after jogging.
“He always buy gum,” said the clerk.
The desk, as I predicted, loves this.
“Gum!” says Mike, taking my notes. “For the kids.”
“I guess,” I say. Who cares.
It’s only three, so Mike tells me to stick around until someone can relieve me.
“Make sure you get anyone coming in or out,” he says. “Neighbors.”
“Sure,” I say, but as soon as I hang up, I slip into a sushi restaurant where I can sip green tea and call Cathy.
I tell her that I’ve got a source, a woman with a name, who says Rivka Mendelssohn had been grieving the loss of a daughter, might have been having an affair, and was considering a divorce before she died.
“And the police haven’t questioned the husband?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“We need that,” she says. “Call Larry. I’ll pitch this at the meeting, but I’m not sure they’ll want it.”
I call Larry.
“I can’t confirm for sure,” he says, “but I don’t think they’ve brought him in.”
“They made a big deal about bringing the gardener in, right? If they’d brought the husband in, you think you’d know.”
“Not necessarily,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
When I hang up, I take out my notebook and start scribbling a draft.
The Hasidic woman found dead in a Brooklyn scrap yard Friday was no stranger to tragedy. [cliché?]
Less than a year before she was murdered, Rivka Mendelssohn, 30, lost a child, according to Sara Wyman, a social worker who runs an informal group for “questioning” ultra-Orthodox. Wyman says Mendelssohn told her that her daughter died of an asthma attack last spring when she was less than a year old. [get second source-Miriam?]
“Rivka was devastated,” said Wyman, who grew up in Borough Park and has since left the ultra-Orthodox community. “I believe it led her to question her faith.”
Wyman said that as a teen, Mendelssohn lost her father to suicide, and several members of her extended family struggled with mental illness. [check? death records?]
“The Orthodox do not typically seek medical help for psychological problems,” explained Wyman.
Wyman said Mendelssohn had been coming to her weekly meetings for nearly a year and told her that she was considering a divorce, but was worried about losing access to her four young children.
Wyman said the last time she saw Mendelssohn was two weeks ago.
“Rivka said her son had been chosen to sing in shul,” she said. “She was very proud.”
Wyman said she had “no idea” how Mendelssohn could have met such a gruesome end.
“I just hope the police find who did this-she didn’t deserve to die so young.”
Police have questioned and released the family gardener, but refused to comment on the case, citing an ongoing investigation.
I make the last bit up, figuring I’ll fill in whatever Larry finds, or doesn’t find.
I read over what I’ve written and decide it’s not bad, but it’s definitely what my professors would call a “one-source story,” which isn’t ideal. I need Miriam in here. I need somebody at 1PP. I need Baruch.
Back at the porn mom scene, Bill is sharing a cigarette with a tall woman wearing Pan-Cake makeup and an Entertainment Tonight badge around her neck.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he asks.
“Did I miss anything?”
ET shakes her head. “Neighbors are like Nazis,” she says, blowing smoke out her nostrils. “Biddy’s on patrol, too.” I look past her into the lobby and see that, indeed, biddy is manning the door in her housecoat and snow boots. Maya is across the street, so I cross and ask her if she’s gotten anything.
“Nothing,” she says. “Total bust. I followed one woman around the corner and she started running, literally. Where’d you go?”
I shrug. “Coffee.”
“Smart. If they have me back here tomorrow, I’ll do the same.”
I call Mike and tell him the biddy has the place locked down.
“The Ledger has nothing either. Nobody does,” I say.
“All right,” he says. “You can take off.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I first heard about the house at Coney Island from my dad. It figured briefly in “the story of Mom.” They hatched the plan to run back to Orlando together in Coney Island. It was their hideaway. Where they could meet in private. As a child, I imagined “Coney Island” as a tiny island, like the ones that cartoon characters get marooned on. With a single palm tree in the center. Later, when I saw a picture of the boardwalk and the roller coaster, I pictured them walking hand in hand together down the shoreline. By high school, when I understood a little about sex, and experienced its connection to what I’d always been told was love, I realized that Coney Island was where my parents went to have sex. I might even have been conceived there.
But Coney Island was just one line in the story. A story that was communicated to me in pieces as I was deemed ready. Mom isn’t dead, but she’s not here, at three. She’s not here because she had to go take care of her family in New York, at five. We didn’t go with her because Mommy and Daddy were divorced, like so-and-so’s parents, at seven. Mommy and Daddy were divorced because Mommy grew up a certain way, at nine. Actually, Mommy and Daddy weren’t exactly divorced, because they never got married, at eleven. From there it started getting muddy. They weren’t ever really lies, and I can see now that it was not a story that easily lent itself to a child’s comprehension, but it always felt to me like another big secret was coming-another piece of the picture dangling above my life like a piano. Ready to drop and force me to climb over it. For years I hated my father as much as I hated my mother. And in some ways I still do, but now I also have sympathy for him. And respect for how he handled the situation. Twenty years old with a baby girl and a thoroughly appalled family can’t have been easy, and he made it work for us. He might not be as in touch with his actual emotions or, to some extent, reality, as I wish he was, but he’s a good guy. To the core. And even at twenty-two years old I know that’s rare. One parent who would protect you at all costs is more than a lot of people get. But he doesn’t want to understand who I really am inside. He thinks I’ve turned away from God. Those were his actual words. I called him to say how bad I’d been feeling sophomore year in college. I told him how I was scared all the time but I didn’t exactly know what of. Well, he said with a kind of sadness, You’ve turned away from God. His words infuriated me. I’ve never seen or heard or felt this “God,” but my life is basically a mess made by people twisting themselves into knots, trying to please him. My parents were both looking for God in a bookstore when they met. Oh wow, they must have thought. Someone I can obsess over God with who I also want to fuck! And why did my mother leave? God. All the good I’ve ever seen in this world, all the beauty and joy, comes from people, or from the earth. An evening sky, music. Did God make it all? Maybe. But we don’t look at a Picasso and worship his father, I said to my dad. And he responded, sounding both smug and sad, But see, we have to worship something. Fuck you, I said. And fuck God. And that was the last time we talked about it.