Which I thought was very curious. Not that she was crying because it was very cold out, ten or fifteen below maybe, and there were tears in my eyes too, only the tears in my eyes were because of the cold weather, that like icy stinging you get in your eyes when it’s real cold and you almost feel your eyeballs are going to crack, or those sharp, sticky pains that you get in your temples. I’m a little embarrassed to tell this next part, but my attorney, Counselor Christopher Rockers, says that a deposition is a testimony taken down under oath for use in court, although in this case there’s not going to be any trial or anything and I’m making this deposition only because I want what happened to go on the record. Anyway, the point is, the lady was not only crying but crying so hard she had this runny nose too. (I was raised in a cemetery, I know about Nature. I don’t get the giggles if a boy cuts a fart. I don’t go all squeamy when it’s that time of month. I know that bodily functions often have nothing to do with whether a person has or has not got bad manners. I’m like a kid on a farm in that respect.) Anyway, what was so curious was that the tears were pouring out her eyes and running down her cheeks, and the mucus was dripping out her nostrils just exactly as if she was crying indoors in a warm, toasty room and not outside on a cold, blustery ten- or fifteen-degree-below-zero snow day. That’s the sort of tears and mucus they were — soft, room temperature tears and mucus.
My father, Rabbi Jerome Goldkorn, works for Shull and Tober Funeral Directors of Lud, New Jersey, and even if I am only fourteen years old, I’ve been around enough unhappiness, sadness, sorrow, gloom and grief in my time almost to be able to tell the difference between them (and, if you ask me, I think it was all five), and certainly to swear that whatever it was that caused all that weeping didn’t have anything to do with weather.
Though you’d almost think it could have because all she had on was this — I don’t know how to describe it exactly — not a kimono or shroud, more like what those ladies wear in Middle East countries so men can’t look at them, that they wrap around them like a shawl and that covers their heads too — big blue gown like a housewife who’s locked herself outside her own house.
Now this next thing is embarrassing because it’s on me. I don’t have a whole lot of friends. My father thinks it’s because of where we live, and there’s some truth in that because there certainly aren’t a whole bunch of kids around here to play with. Anyway, even if I don’t have a lot of friends, those kids who do get to know me, the kids in my car pool, for example, or some of the people who know me from class, will tell you I’m shy, that I keep to myself and like to mind my own business. I’ll give an example that comes to my mind. Last year I graduated from Junior High and there was some foulup at the printer’s about the school colors — they’re brown and white, not green and red — and our yearbooks all had to go back to the bindery and we didn’t get to see them until after we actually graduated. What happened was, they sent us this announcement that the yearbooks were ready and that we could come to the gym and get them if we brought our receipt along to show that we’d paid. Only I had a bad cold the day we were supposed to pick up the yearbook and didn’t get to the school until three days later. They had to open the gym especially for me (which as you can probably imagine was pretty embarrassing just in itself), and Mrs. Sayles, the lady from the office who opened the gym, went to the table where they’d put all the yearbooks. “It’s too bad you had that cold, Connie,” she said, “or you could have written in your friends’ yearbooks.” Then she said, oh, well, at least mine had been inscribed, that she’d seen to it herself that the kids wrote something in all the kids’ yearbooks who couldn’t pick them up on the regularly scheduled day they were supposed to. Well, after she told me that I never got up the nerve to even open my yearbook. Because she’d made them write something in it, you see. I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. It would have been like reading someone else’s mail.
That’s why I didn’t ask her anything. Like why she was crying, or if she was lost — I’d never seen her before — or cold in just her thin blue wrap, and made out like it was perfectly natural to find someone in the street on the coldest day of the year, crying like a baby with stuff coming out of its face, and even — and I’m really embarrassed about this part because shyness and keeping to yourself and minding your business are one thing and only part of a person’s particular makeup, but this was something else altogether, not just disposition but character — that people around here were free to behave like they want to behave, as if letting someone suffer was democracy in action or something and not asking them if any thing’s wrong is a plus, rather than the cruel minus I knew it was even then. And wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t turned the tables on me, making out as if it was me and not her standing out there in the street in this summery lightweight with the wind tearing at my head, and the temperature banging my blood to a standstill.
I’ve already mentioned how I’m this agony expert. I wasn’t boasting. I wasn’t even trying to suggest that it’s a natural gift. I think it’s just what a person is accustomed to. If I’m able to tell which one is really in mourning and which one is probably only putting on a show, I don’t think I should get extra credit for it. As I say, it’s what a person gets accustomed to. You live and learn. I just happen to have this sort of perfect pitch for heartache. It’s unusual in a person of my years, I admit, but I come by it honestly. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if I thought I was good at different shades of misery and grief, it was because I’d never seen this lady before. She made me feel insensitive. She made me feel like, well, some tone-deaf piker.
But this is a deposition and that last part, while it’s true as far as it goes, isn’t really what I was paying a lot of attention to at the time. I mean I really wasn’t into whether I was feeling insensitive or worrying about losing my perfect pitch for the somberness of the heart or not. Anyway, I hadn’t. Lost it, I mean. I could read hers, the somberness of her heart. And I was scared. Because what I saw there, in her woe, in her wracked heart, was the deepest mourning I’d ever seen. It was for me. She was in mourning for me!
I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
She said, “I am the holy mother, Constance child.”
“What do you want? Why did you come? Why are you here?”
“For the harrowing of Lud’s cemeteries. For the harrowing of Pineoaks and Masada Gardens. To rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews.”
Well, maybe I am afraid of Lud, maybe I am. Maybe I am bothered by having only dead people for neighbors like my father thinks, or hurt because kids won’t play with me, who won’t even visit even though my mom drives the car pools and would not only go out of her way to pick them up in the first place but would bring them home too, even though I try to make my folks think that shyness and a solitary spirit and minding my business are part of my nature and not just these add-ons to my character like those cardboard cutouts in which you dress your paper dolls. (Because I’m not shy really. And don’t keep to myself by choice, or mind my business like some miser in his counting house in love with his ledger. No. Really I’m like some cheerleader and could name things even in Lud that swell my pom-pom heart and fill me with pride. Our monument carvers and landscapers, for example, are the best there are!) But even if I am, even if I am afraid to live here, even if I secretly agree with the kids who make fun of me because of what Lud stands for, I’m no anti-Semite! I’m no anti-Semite, and my first reaction was that the woman in blue was probably Seels’s wife. Seels is a vicious anti-Semite who probably felt exactly the same way the woman did. Only he wouldn’t have thought poor and he wouldn’t have thought righteous, and he wouldn’t have wanted to rescue them.