29
That night, Richard sat with Jess at the kitchen table and he said, “Your sister’s been through enough.”
“She has to find out sometime,” Jess said, and unconsciously Richard glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of Emily upstairs. “Were you really planning to keep us in the dark forever?”
“You treat this as some life-changing revelation,” Richard said. “It’s not. It doesn’t change anything about you.”
“Yes, it does! This means that I have Jewish aunts! Chaya Zylberfenig and Freyda Helfgott. And Rabbi Helfgott is my uncle! Why didn’t you tell us?”
Heidi poured three mugs of herbal tea.
“You shouldn’t have kept a secret like that,” Jess accused her father.
Richard met her angry gaze. “It wasn’t my secret. Your mother didn’t want you or your sister to have any contact with those people.”
“Those people are our family,” said Jess. “Even if they’re religious mystics and they look different and act different from you and me.”
Then Richard struggled a little with himself. He tried to speak and stopped. Heidi stood behind his chair and kneaded his shoulders with her small hands until he put his hands up onto hers. “When they found out your mother had married a non-Jew, they sat in mourning for seven days. When she chose to marry me, they declared her dead.”
“And Mom took that name—Gillian? And she went by Gold instead of Gould?”
“She wanted a free life,” said Richard. “She wanted to choose her own husband. She wanted a musical career.”
“Yes, but—”
“She associated those people with pain.”
“But you could have told us,” Jess said. “You could have told Emily and me.”
“I did what she asked,” Richard said. “She felt that they were dangerous, and I agreed with her.”
Upstairs, Emily stirred in her twin bed in the guest room. She heard the voices below and opened her eyes in the half-light shining through the open door.
She heard her father’s voice: “Your mother and I …” and … “Yes, these Bialystokers are open and welcoming to everyone outside, but they have another attitude toward those within the fold, and that attitude is repressive to the—”
“Dad.”
“I would not violate your mother’s last wish—”
“Her last wish!” Jess raised her voice. “Her last wish was, ‘Don’t tell my daughters who I really am’?”
“No, you don’t understand. She knew exactly who she was. All she asked was that I conceal who she’d been.”
“But who you were fits inside of who you are. Can’t you see that?” Jess cried out.
Then Heidi said, “You’ll wake the children.”
But the little girls slept on upstairs. Only Emily lay awake, heart pounding in the dark.
Catharsis was for strangers. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel least went to sleep that night chastened, but cleansed, blessed to come home to their own families and lie down in their own beds. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel best left the memorial service uncomforted. The memorial was something they suffered for the sake of others. They themselves felt queasy at Sorel’s “Hallelujah.” A service in October was too soon. A service next October might be too soon.
Barbara slept. Whenever possible, she slept upstairs, escaping her relatives from Philly, her divorced younger sister with her autistic foster child, a sweet ten-year-old named Dominique who whooped more often than she spoke, and wouldn’t sit in chairs. Barbara outslept her dearest friends, the ones who brought My Grandma’s of New England Coffee Cakes and wept in her kitchen, declaring that Mel never hurt anyone, realizing that the world was unfair.
She appreciated Rabbi Zylberfenig’s approach, proactive from his first visit in September, when he had arrived with a roll of blue duct tape. All that morning he had taped sheets over the numerous mirrors in Barbara’s bathrooms. “This is traditional in a Jewish home of mourning,” he had explained.
After the memorial service, even as Barbara was finishing breakfast, the rabbi drove over to study sacred texts with Barbara and whichever relatives and friends showed up.
“Mom,” Annie whispered when she spied Zylberfenig through the kitchen window. “Does he have to come here every day?”
“You know Dad thought the Zylberfenigs were creepy,” Sam reminded her.
Barbara could not deny this.
“He thought Bialystokers were a cult. That’s what he told me,” Annie said. Barbara saw her daughter take a breath and turn pale behind her freckles. “We think that Dad wouldn’t want them in the house.”
Barbara placed her coffee cup gently on the granite kitchen counter. She had been a devoted stay-at-home mother, an involved parent—overinvolved, Mel used to say, when she drove hours every weekend for soccer league, stayed up all night sewing costumes, troubleshooting projects for the science fair. She had been a weeper, crying at every milestone and graduation. Even after the kids had left home, she’d longed for them, rejoicing intensely in their triumphs, hurting and worrying for them when they stumbled. In a real sense she’d lived for them. And now? Grief changed her perspective. Trauma provided sudden distance. Now Barbara looked at Annie and saw a young woman needing a haircut, and probably a new young man as well, someone who might find a way to fly east for his girlfriend’s father’s memorial.
“We were just thinking of what Dad would want,” said Annie.
Oh, really, young lady, Barbara thought. You have a lot of nerve. Did you and your brother get together and figure out what to say? Not very sensitive. Not very thoughtful. Not very bright! But she said none of this. She told Annie mildly, “Your father would want me to do whatever helps.”
Do what you have to do. Whatever works. Whatever helps. People said this, Orion mused, but they didn’t mean it literally. They didn’t mean, for example, go out and get high, or buy a gun and shoot someone. They were thinking more along the lines of go ahead and eat ice cream for dinner, carve a pumpkin, drive to western Mass. for apple picking. None of which appealed.
His anger did not subside. The pain only increased. Losing Jonathan, he had lost a year’s work as well. His friend, mentor, and rival dead, his tools repurposed for millennial cyberwars, Orion left the memorial service in such a fury, he didn’t know where to go or what to do. He took his father to the train station.
“Take it easy,” Lou told him as they hugged good-bye.
“I can’t,” Orion said.
He sped back to Boston, but he didn’t get a ticket. His wheels screeched as he turned off Memorial Drive onto Vassar Street. He hit a pothole that nearly sent his car flying, but he didn’t spin out of control. He pulled over and parked illegally in MIT’s West Annex Lot. Train tracks ran behind the fence. Every night at nine-thirty a train shuffled past.
He paced the lot, waiting. An hour passed. Two hours passed. At last he heard the horns and jingling bells at the railway crossing a block away, and then the steady shuffling engine.
He sprinted through the parking lot to the cyclone fence that ran along the tracks, and pounced, clawing metal, cutting his right hand, as the train barreled past. Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus. The circus had come to town. He watched the long silver train snake past. What did those cars contain? Tents and tigers, ponies, acrobats, sequined costumes, feather plumes. His father had written a circus poem. “The Circus Animals Return after Successful Contract Negotiations.” How did it go? The troupe returns / Those shopworn joys … His mother had taken him to the circus once, and he had learned to juggle. He had gone through a juggling phase as a child. In high school he got pretty good. He used to irritate his mother while she was cooking. He’d juggle a grapefruit and an avocado and a lemon. Sometimes a cantaloupe. Persimmons tended to explode.