Only Begotten Daughter (7 page)

He came upon a parthenogenetic birth.

An episode of water-walking.

The Mount of Skulls.

He found an attempt on the infant’s life:
And Herod sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.

Murray closed his King James. This paradoxical personality whose life was synonymous with his mission, this passive-aggressive prophet who’d gotten himself tortured to death before his thirty-third birthday, this Jew who, despite his subsequent rematerialization, never saw his poor bewildered parents again—was Julie really this man’s half sister?

No, no, Georgina and the New Testament aside, the whole notion was preposterous.

And, indeed, for many months afterward, nothing remotely supernatural happened in southeastern New Jersey.

Like most members of his species, Spinoza the cat was boastful of his hunting prowess—aren’t you proud of me, isn’t it great being on top of a food chain?—but whereas inland cats stalked mice and squirrels, Spinoza specialized in the bounty of the sea. “What’s
that?
” demanded Julie, age four, as Spinoza dashed into the cottage one frigid February afternoon, a half-dead something in his jaws.

“A crab,” Murray explained. Spinoza carried the carcass to the fireplace as if intending to roast it and dropped it upside down on the hearth. “It’s dead.”

“But I
like
the crab.”

Pinning the crab’s corpse under his paw, Spinoza chewed on a leg. “Get away!” Murray shouted, and the cat, spooked, shaped himself into an oblong of fur and scurried off, leaving the inverted corpse to warm by the fire.

Fist crammed with crayons, Julie ran to the hearth. “I don’t
want
it to be dead.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

She poked the crab’s belly with her yellow crayon.

“Leave it the hell alone,” ordered Murray.

Now she applied the green. “Poor Mr. Crab.” Now the red.

“Leave it alone!”

A crab leg twitched like a thistle in the wind. Giggling, Julie tickled the creature with her purple crayon. Soon all eight legs were in motion, rowing back and forth.

“That’s
wrong,
Julie! Stop it!”

But the crab had regained the earth. It stuck out a great claw and levered itself upright. Instinctively, Murray turned. Spinoza was cranking himself down like a catapult’s arm, making ready to pounce. Murray scooped up the cat and held him wriggling and hissing against his sweater.

With uncanny speed the crab scuttled forward and, as Julie opened the door, jumped onto the front porch, Spinoza howling all the while, enraged by this sudden reversal of the natural order.

“Julie, I’m mad at you! I’m really
mad.
”

The parade—crab, little girl, man with cat—marched down the jetty. After ascending the highest rock, the crab pushed off with all eight legs and dove into the bay.

“Don’t ever do that again!” Murray yelled. Spinoza wrested free and, running to the water, began pacing the shore and meowing maniacally. “You hear me?”
And Herod sent forth and slew all the children …
What a hateful face Julie wore, all pleased and beaming, cocksure, catproud. “Not
ever
!”

She approached, and he hit her.

They recoiled simultaneously. He’d never done such a thing before, smacking her cheek like that. Her skin reddened, the blotch growing like spilled tomato juice.

Silence. Then: a high, jagged scream. “You hit me! You hit me!”

“No more of this—this
stuff,
Julie. No more water-walking, no more firefly alphabets, none of it. They’re just waiting for you to do things like this, they’re just
waiting.
”

“Why’d you hit me?” Her tears ran in all directions, detoured by her nose.

“They’ll take you away.”

“Who will?”

“
They
will.”

“Take me away?” Julie rubbed her cheek as if nursing a toothache.
“Take me away?”

He moved forward, offering whatever of himself she might choose to smack. She pounded on his chest, and the transition to hugging happened quickly, like a change of figures in a waltz.

“Things have to stay dead?” she asked, her voice muffled by his sweater.

“Uh-huh.”

“Other children have mommies.”

The thumpings of her heart massaged him. “
I’m
your mommy.”

“
God
is my mommy.”

“That’s a very strange thing to say, Julie.”

“She
is.
” Julie’s turquoise eyes glistened with tears.

“Did Aunt Georgina tell you that?”

“No.”

“Georgina told you, right?”

“No.”

“How do you know God’s your mommy?”

“I
know
it.”

Murray held his daughter at arm’s length. “Does God … er, visit you?”

“She doesn’t even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn’t talk. It’s not fair.”

God didn’t talk. The best news he’d heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. “Look, Julie, it’s good she doesn’t talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It’s good she doesn’t whisper. Understand?”

“I guess.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Where’d the crab go? Is he looking for his friends?”

A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. “Yes. Right. His friends. It’s
good
God doesn’t whisper.”

“I got it, Pop.”

Exhaustion—and what else moved through him as they stood silently together on the jetty? A justifiable self-pity, he decided. Other fathers worried about getting their girls off drugs. Out of jail. Into Princeton. But Murray Jacob Katz alone had to keep his daughter from ending up on that infamous hill where all those who could fix dead crabs were eventually sent.

I
N THE BEGINNING YOUR
mother created the heavens and the earth. “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place,” your mother had said.

Deeper, still deeper, you spiral toward the bay floor, baptizing yourself in the great gathered sea called the Atlantic, heading for your underwater cave and its secret petting zoo. Bubbles tickle your cheeks. Currents comb your hair. Joyously you take a big bite of oxygen from Absecon Inlet—the one miracle you’ve managed to talk Pop into letting you keep.

“What if I fall in the bay with a rock tied to me?” you asked him. “Can I breathe the water?”

Your father frowned so fiercely his eyebrows met. “Well, I suppose you’d have to. However, Julie, it’s
very
unlikely you’d ever fall in the bay with a rock tied to you.”

“If I can breathe water instead of drowning, can I sometimes do it for
fun?
Oh, please, Pop, I need to see what’s down there.”

For an entire minute he said nothing. Then: “Would it be like holding your breath?”

“Sure. Just like holding my breath.”

“Well …”

So you won. You could give yourself gills. As for your other powers, bringing crabs to life and such, Pop remained unbending: you must never use them. The rule is a part of you, slapcarved on your cheek just as the Jewish God had etched the Law on stone.

“There’s a deaf class in our school. Fourteen deaf kids.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“I won’t fix them.”

“Good.”

“I won’t even
think
about fixing them. Not Ronnie Trimble either, who’s always in this wheelchair.”

You touch bottom. Cool sand gushes between your toes. A gloomy eel, thick and rubbery like a live sausage, bumps your stomach, nipping at the Care Bear bathing suit Pop got you for your birthday.

You loved turning ten, except your mother didn’t send anything, not even a lousy card. Phoebe gave you a sweater with cats prowling all over it. Aunt Georgina showed up with a bunch of neat stuff from the Smile Shop: a squirting carnation, sunglasses with windshield wipers on the lenses, a hat outfitted with a can holder and a plastic straw so you could drink a Coke while riding your bike.

Twisting your body like a seal, you swim into the cave. You hate being chunky—your shape resembles a zucchini and you want to be a carrot. Phoebe is a carrot.

Your petting zoo creeps and wriggles over, eager for strokes and tickles. Casually you tune in their soft thoughts. The flounder is hungry. The starfish wants to have babies. The lobster is frightened in some strange lobstery way.

—Hi, Julie, broadcasts Amanda the sponge.

—We shouldn’t talk, you reply.

—Why?

—It’s like doing a miracle.

—Talking with a sponge isn’t exactly stopping the sun, Amanda notes.

—We shouldn’t talk.

You glide away, deeper and deeper into the chocolate-frosting darkness.

A year ago, you and Pop sat together on the couch, flipping through a book of famous paintings. In your favorite, “The Birth of Venus,” a woman with long hair the color of Tastykake Pumpkin Pie filling stood on a giant scallop shell. You decided this was how your mother would arrive. Here on the bottom of Absecon Inlet, a giant scallop shell would open and God would climb out, swimming to the surface and asking people, “Do you know where my little girl lives? Julie Katz?” “Oh, yes, she’s waiting for you. Go to the lighthouse on Brigantine Point.” Every night before you fall asleep, the same scene passes behind your eyelids: God appearing at the cottage doorway in a white dress, soaked, dripping, her hair tied back with ribbons of seaweed. “Julie?” “Mom?” “Julie!” “Mom!” Then your mother and father get married, and you all live together in your lighthouse above the petting zoo.

Whiteness flashes on the cave floor. You reach down, poke it with your fingertips. Something hard, buried. You brush the sand away. The more you uncover, you hope, the more there will be to uncover, until at last the scallop’s shell is revealed, and it will open, and out will come …

But no. Not a door to heaven but a naked white face, the kind people bring out at Halloween. An eyeless stare, a lipless grin. You keep digging. It’s all here, every spooky bone. You shiver. Maybe this is a sailor from one of those wrecks Pop is always talking about, somebody who went down with the
William Rose
or the
Lucy II.
You squeeze his hand—so rough and hard, like coral. You squeeze tighter. Tighter …

Things have to stay dead. They’re waiting for you to do miracles. If you do miracles, they’ll take you away.

Returning is always tricky. You can’t swim straight up. If the lifeguard spots a little kid out that deep, he’ll go nuts. Instead you cruise along the floor, watching till you see the swimmers’ legs dangling down like the roots of water lilies.

Rising, you break the surface and feel the bright, pounding air on your face. Tourists swarm along the Boardwalk, hopping from casino to casino. At the bottom of the bay, the sun is like somebody else’s mother watching over you—quiet, gentle, never strict—but up here it’s hot and fierce, the way some people think of God. What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card? Why has God stuck you in this place, this filthy old Atlantic City where the grownups spend all their time playing games? It isn’t fair. Phoebe has a mother. Everybody does.

You squint at the dazzling sun and wonder whether, at that moment, God is peering over the edge of heaven and noticing how terrifically her kid can swim.

Before they could graduate fourth grade, Julie and her classmates all had to write essays entitled “My Best Friend.” The problem, of course, was how to talk about Phoebe without landing them both in trouble. “The thing I most enjoy about having Phoebe Sparks for a best friend,” Julie began, “is that she’s a lot of fun to be with.”

Thanks to Phoebe, Julie was growing up skilled at throwing rocks through the windows of Atlantic City’s vacant hotels and sneaking into the swimming pools of its inhabited ones. Within a single month, Phoebe had taught Julie how to smoke cigarettes, spray graffiti on boxcars, fly alphabet kites that spelled out dirty words, and stand on a railroad bridge and launch an arc of pee into the air just like a boy.

“My best friend and I like to sell Girl Scout cookies together,” Julie continued her essay.

The props that figured in so much of their mischief came from Smitty’s Smile Shop. It was a rare evening when Aunt Georgina, who knew how a mother should behave, did not bring home a joy buzzer, fart spray, or something equally fine. “Half orphans like us, we’re always spoiled,” Phoebe noted as Julie beheld her treasures, which Phoebe kept in a saddlebag slung over the wooden stallion they’d stolen from the wrecked merry-go-round on Steel Pier.

“What do you mean, spoiled?”

“We get what we want. That’s because our parents know they should’ve married somebody.”

“You ever think your father will show up, Phoebe? You know, come walking through the front door one night in time for dinner?”

“I think it all the time. He’s a marine biologist, Mom says. Very smart and brilliant.” Phoebe dredged up a string of firecrackers. “It’s weird, I never saw his picture or anything, but I can still imagine him standing here in his marine uniform, looking through his microscope.”

“Know what I think?” Julie fished out the rubber turd they liked to stick in slot-machine payoff boxes.
The machine’s pooping!
they would scream, which always drew a crowd. “I think
your
mother and
my
father should get married.”

Phoebe freed a firecracker from the pack and stuck it in her mouth like a Marlboro. “Can’t ever happen.”

“Why not?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

“I’m older than you.”

“You wouldn’t get it,” said Phoebe, puffing on her firecracker.

“Hopscotch and jump rope are a few of the many games my best friend Phoebe and I play together,” Julie wrote.

Two days before her tenth birthday, Phoebe decided to throw herself “an early party, just you and me, Katz,” at the abandoned Deauville Hotel, whose crumbling remains adjoined the slick new casino called Dante’s.

The sunken door on St. James Avenue was only slightly ajar, but skinny Phoebe had no trouble slipping around it. Once inside, she gave the door a hard kick, making a gap so wide both Julie and her A & P grocery bag fit through easily.