What’s my line? Not to be.
As for this matchmaker, on second look she’s even older but well made up enough, rouged, blushbeaten, mascaramassacred, and lipsmacked haphazardly so that her smile ends just below the hang of her ears, their earrings. A woman of lived years some with love others with less, lately though things not too bad, you know, holding up, nothing bothering save the same old varicosity, not much to complain about, ultimately, not with this recent fame of hers, if maybe she overdoes it a little you can’t hold it against her what with her health and life — her secondcareer celebrity; her premature renown on the renewed West Side of Manhattan, that narrow stretch of upperpark Broadway bordered by liverspotted delis set to reopen, savorystores just under new management, only waiting for their certifications to come through, soon invigorated synagogues about to embark themselves on energetic membership drives and dynamic accounts of outreach initiative; neighborhood, also, of monumental apartments to be rented again above Riverside Drive, columned Classic Sixes furnished with a piano in every fireplace set in walls of more books than could be bound by any tongue; hers a reputation as a shadchaness, a shidducher such as you wouldn’t believe, with references glowing like a superficial venereal disease, a great yenta preceding her, though the impression’s to be honest a bissel mitigated as she goes to pick at any nostril, fivefingered without embarrassment, flicks her snot to the floor while with her other hand extracts six photographs from a shoe under her sock, damp, and slightly mal-odorous, then holds them out of sight atop her swollen knee, a bruised if not chipped patella she don’t whine, thumbs the faces away, as if hoping to rub off the undesirable, you never know, whatever kills a deaclass="underline" a lazy eye, a limp, a limp hand, she shakes while she limps, a pimpled forehead or cheek lipped with such kiss of death, a chin doubling triple, even flaws invisible, the unexamined, too: money troubles, pending audits, alcoholic uncles, the suspicion of incest, ongoing arson investigations, mild schizophrenia though thought recessive on the mother’s side, these days who can tell, who wants to. Her, prior to her present occupation she’d done the life of the wife herself, having been married for golden years and a night deep enough into the fiftyfirst that she’d rather forget to a developer magnate, an obese slumlord in later years an amateur Luna Park memorabilist and professional stripmaller, who’d owned seven of them statewide long and tall across the suckedin gut of the umpteenth borough, Joysey, who’d died abed with his mistress who she was also his secretary half his age, half her size — if this space hadn’t been so sanctuaried, the Holy of Holiest ground if untenanted as yet, pardon our appearances this inpreparation, she’d hock on its floor, a guttural of phlegm for the undedicated pews. Forgive her the maybe exaggerated gesticulations, forget the tics and bats of eyes a whole teeming winking blinking nation of them she’s just getting used to, trying them out — accessories much like the necklace, stranded fingerthick with pearls like black caviar, the earrings, heavy as her tush and amber as if preservative of an ancient seed, and the glasses, mosquitolidded shockwhiteframing plastic, to match her newfangled Affiliation.
I’ve always loved Them, she says with that tendency to spit.
She glances at Ben, so bashful.
After what happened, I got depressed, I got lonely, couldn’t sleep, that and the business with Bob (that’s the husband), after he died, I moved into a more manageable place…I began studying up on Them, bought a few books, took a class. It all seemed so exotic, They seemed so — happy, you know…and so — she makes with her hands a silent ta-da — this present occupation, the dedication of her retiring years to perpetuating that happiness in an assumed incarnation, a usurped personality; she to her friends a whole new person, always tending to the Other Half, door-to-door making matches, by appointment only matching makers, with machers — and all of it money always aside maybe to compensate, as if to overatone, but for what, spite your curiosity, bite tongue.
And I’d love to be able to help you, she says then settles back in her pew, you especially.
Young and in love, is there anything more…nu, maybe not love just yet, but these days, you can understand. It takes time and wooing effort.
She quiets, lifts the glasses around her neck to her face, glasses without glass, so just those insectual frames she squints through — into the sanctuary, in its incompleteness less sacralizing than unsettling, a making awkward; her less awed by the filigree gilded overhead, by the imposing bulkhead of the, how do they call it…bima, that’s it with its pulpits plaqued and the ark’s vault installed deep between, behind the door of which the scrolls of the Law are said to be stored, rolled around their tablets, then crowned with a mappa, the wing of a wimple, than it’s her unwillingness to begin with their bargaining, to initialize an offer, though she knows she’s expected to, and yet further that she’s also expected to stall, to postpone and grossly mislead; that’s why, she has to suspect, they’re meeting here, privacy aside: how can you profane the House of God with such a risky business?
Aren’t we paying you by the hour? Der asks, and she sighs and with fingers plumped with smoker’s bruise though veined in delicate bone lays the virginal photo on the seat of her pew, facing down, pretends to refresh herself with the information obtainable on the reverse, then flips and keeping her thumb over the face turns with two breasts so imposing they’re cleaved into one to the lip of the pew behind her to hand the photo over.
Who’s she? Der asks.
The One, says the matchmaker.
Why her?
For you, only the finest…she retracts her thumb slowly, leaving a print swirled in shvitz over the blondish blue of the prospect.
Her name?
Now she goes by Frumie, wiping her hands of it on her skirts.
But listen: she’s bright, and beautiful, like you wouldn’t believe — altogether a fabulous young woman, an excellent match…you couldn’t do better even if I’d had a daughter — even if He’d be marrying me.
Which is an option — I look better in my photos than what you see in person.
I was asking her name, and Der tattoos the pew with a hand gloved in pigskin.
Did I mention beautiful and bright…a great catch, if you’ll excuse me — she happens to be the daughter of your monger, Fischelson the Fish King; I don’t need to tell you he’s offering generous.
A pity we’re not offering him.
Though I’d like to hear from the future groom, at least see Him…and she turns to face Ben seated alongside Der; it’s praiseworthy, how committed she is to even the inconvenience of her pose; her straining across a shoulder, she’s rubbernecking to ask, what are you looking for, Mister Israelien, who and why? what qualities are important? tell me about your mother…
Down the center aisle, a team of workers barrow in the Menorah, set it up on the pulpit right, are fored over a little to the left, that’s right and leave it lie with one of them remaining, who takes from a pocket of his parka a rag and tin and begins in with the polish. Casks of oil are being rolled step-by-step, for its illumination. The woman snorts all the waged patience in the world, begs a sigh out of herself it sounds bad like a cancer of convenience, frowns, then flips again through the stack arthritic or only stiffly. Fine, she’s saying, not Fein, no, flips, forward, back, and nextward, and this while bending and otherwise creasing her shots in a system so private as to be inscrutable maybe even to herself, then cuts, shuffles, finally deals; peeling the first from the top of the stack, then slapping it down over her shoulder, not bothering to turn around. Hymn, so how about Hanna? she asks, your mother’s name…a match already made, if not in heaven then at least in Joysey, she’s upstate, firstrate, no kidding — Hanna now Geffen-Weinstein née Heather Vinelli.