The Beautiful Possible (17 page)

Rosalie labors for seven hours. Sol stands in the corner of the room and davens. When she is fully dilated, Rosalie calls out her mother’s name and asks Sol to explain why he couldn’t be more like her father and why the fuck can’t he quit being a lying rabbi and why did she marry him when she had been far too young to be a wife and too young to be a mother and look at them now, just look at this mess of a tribe. And when Rosalie closes her eyes she thinks of Walter at Eden Ranch calling out the names of the dead and she pictures the animals walking out of the forest and feels their eyes holding her in their creaturely gazes. With every contraction she believes her body will split open but then Gail calmly asks her to bring her breath to the center of this moment and they breathe in sync and this goes on for an eternity during which Rosalie trusts Gail’s knowing instructions—
what choice does she have?
—but secretly longs for death or deliverance from this body that betrays her, cursing its history, spitting on her divided life, and then she finds a brief moment with the animals in the forest, locking eyes and then losing them again, until, miraculously, Gail shouts, “Push! Now!” and Sol repeats “Now!” Gail and Sol look at each other and reach for Rosalie’s armpits. They pull her up to a crouching position and she grinds her feet on the sheet and groans in a voice she does not recognize as her own, and then she hears Gail say, “The baby is crowning,” and Rosalie imagines her baby wearing a garland of flowers, and then Gail’s hands catch the baby’s head and
she gently pulls and Sol cries out, “We have a girl, Rosalie. This one is a girl.”

Rosalie asks Sol if he wants to choose the first name. “Maya,” he says. He explains how the baby connects him to the prayer for rain he recited on Shemini Atzeret. As he stood on the bima in his white robe he glanced at Rosalie’s swollen belly and asked God to provide the water—
mayim
—that would repair their broken souls. As the baby suckles from her breast Sol asks Rosalie to choose a middle name.

“Oh, there are so many,” says Rosalie.

“We have our grandmothers—”

“No grandmothers.”

“What then?”

Rosalie pauses.

“Sonia. I like the name Sonia.”

“Significance?” asks Sol.

“It’s a lovely name; that’s all.” She brushes her baby’s soft cheeks and smiles. “It suits her, don’t you think?”

Walter and Paul have box seats for the San Francisco Orchestra performance of Haydn’s “Nelson Mass,” a gift from one of Walter’s wealthy doctoral students. Before the music begins, Paul peruses the libretto.

“We should write about this outing,” he says. “An evening of music with the scholars of religion. Just look at the words of the Mass. Everything beautiful connects to God in some way. I know several editors who would be happy to publish our reveries in their journals.”

“A night at the symphony as career promotion,” says Walter.

Paul laughs. “It’s not self-promotion. It’s love. All this wonder, everywhere. Let’s create a Music and Awe retreat at the ranch.”

“You’ve been tainted by fatherhood.”

Paul pulls a baby picture from his pocket and passes it to Walter.

“Jacob Rabindranath Richardson.”

“Such an august name for an ordinary baby.”

“My son is anything but ordinary. He’s a cathedral of magnificence, Walter! A work of art! As exalted as the music that embraces our longings in this concert hall we share with thousands of strangers. Holiness is everywhere!”

Walter gazes at Paul. His mentor’s white hair falls past his shoulders, the creases around his eyes are pronounced, his skin has darkened from the sun. The man with the brown felt hat has morphed himself yet again, while Walter still feels like a lost refugee who wanders around a foreign spice market, looking for the single hit of cardamom that will change his life.

During the Qui Tollis movement, Walter thinks of the daughter who isn’t quite his. They named her Maya Sonia Kerem.
Her middle name is the thread that connects us
, Rosalie said to him on the phone.
Our little secret.
The baby belongs to Sol and Rosalie, his gift to them. Given in consolation, conceived with love. He closes his eyes and tries to still his mind by following the line of the chords that resolve and open, invite and sustain and bear so much beauty.

After the performance Paul says, “I listen to this music through my child’s ears. I evaluate everything in my path with a single question: Is this worthy of bequeathing to Jacob Rabindranath?
Nothing else matters to me now. My tolerance for mediocrity is nil. I want everything to be as transcendent as this Mass.”

Walter stares ahead at the empty stage.

“I’m sorry,” says Paul. “You have no idea what I’m talking about and I’ve intruded somehow. I try so hard to be good to you, and often feel as if I’m letting you down. I once promised you everything and look at you now.”

“What do you see?”

“You are so very successful and so very alone.”

“You made good on your promise,” says Walter. “You gave me an American life.”

“I hope it’s been good for you.”

“I have a daughter now,” says Walter. “A newborn, a love child. She belongs to another family.”

Paul takes Walter’s hand and holds it against his wet cheek.

“You’re crying,” says Walter.

The concert hall empties out and the two of them sit in their seats until an usher asks them to leave.

Maya has colic. She screams more than she sleeps; Rosalie weeps from exhaustion, and longs for the brief spells when the baby gets milk-drunk at her breast and falls into a deep nap. She wonders if the incessant crying is a curse. Her boys were such easy babies, but Maya’s face is set in a hard, wizened scowl. But one day, seemingly out of nowhere, Maya quits crying and her features soften. Rosalie gazes at her face with new understanding. The baby does not resemble Walter or Sol; Maya looks just like Rosalie. No one would ask her to explain why she doesn’t look like her father, the
rabbi. She would go to school and she would go to camp and on Shabbat she would listen to her father deliver words from the bima, and no one would ever doubt that she belonged to him.

After Sol bathes Maya at night, he wraps her in a towel, and sings,
Yessir, that’s my baby, no sir I don’t mean maybe, yessir that’s my baby now—oww.

On weekday afternoons Walter rushes home from the university and waits for Rosalie to call and tell him when he can come to New York to see Maya. He can’t concentrate on grading papers; his class lectures are based on old notes, outdated research. He has abandoned his drawing of Sonia and he no longer invites models to the studio for inspiration or for sex. Weeks go by. Then months. Walter stares at babies in their strollers and asks their mothers and nannies,
How many months old? Why does the baby need a pacifier? Where did you buy such a pretty blanket?

When Rosalie finally calls, Walter doesn’t tell her he has been waiting. Years ago when they used to speak late at night, Rosalie’s voice was sultry and the hours unfolded before them like an open field. But now she speaks quickly and her voice is harried.

“Tell me about her,” says Walter.

Rosalie rushes through her words. “What’s there to say? She’s a baby. Delightful, cooing, babbling. A girl who notices everything.”

“You talk so fast and say so little. Slow down. I want to hear this again.”

“Oh, Walter. I’ve got six loads of laundry and Sol is at a meeting. There’s no time.”

“You sound different.”

“I’m a new mother. Of course I sound this way.”

“This is not new for you.”

“But for you it is.” Rosalie closes her eyes and waits. She wants to offer him something, but has no idea what to say.

“When, Rosalie?”

Two years later, Walter is invited to speak at a conference in Boston and he arranges for a stopover in New York. Walter and Rosalie sit side by side in a crowded terminal at JFK. They lightly hold hands while Maya runs in circles, pretending to be an airplane, shrieking with pleasure.

“You can play with her,” says Rosalie. “Go ahead.”

Walter hesitates at first, but then he lopes along, following Maya’s stride, waving his arms, tears streaming down his cheeks. Rosalie glances at his face and winces. She remembers the names he called out at Eden Ranch, and how he filled the night air with words she didn’t understand. She had never known anyone so very alone, and now he seemed more alone then ever.

Just before they part, Walter tells Rosalie that in Sanskrit, the word
maya
means illusion.

“Our daughter is no illusion,” she says.

“I get it now.”

“Get what?”

“Everything.”

“It’s about time—”

“—that I’ve become like the rest of you?” asks Walter. “Well, yes. I’ve arrived.”

“Welcome to the aching world of ordinary mortals. Join our little party. Joy in one corner, heartbreak in another. Now help me trim the crust off their sandwiches and watch where you dribble peanut butter because half the children are allergic to it, and give me the back of your hand to wipe up their snot.”

“Do you disdain me?”

Rosalie bursts into tears and Walter wraps his arms around her. He reaches for Maya, places her awkwardly between their bodies for a moment, kisses the top of her head, and then turns away.

Charlie and Philip live in Manhattan and only return to the house for holidays and an occasional Friday night dinner. To Charlie, Rosalie no longer seems like the same mother who raised them; he can barely remember the clothes she wore when he was Maya’s age. Philip believes Maya is the replacement child for Lenny, and looking at her prompts old sadness. Maya’s presence in the house makes her brothers feel as if the door to their childhood has been closed a second time; first when Lenny died, and now with this new addition.

At shul, Maya is everyone’s child, passed from shoulder to shoulder, lap to lap. During services congregants reach out their hands to touch her. When she jumps on her lap, Missy shouts, “Oh, lucky me!” Bev calls her
my girl, my
maidele
, my Maya.

On a Shabbat morning in the middle of winter, the synagogue is packed with bar mitzvah guests. While the boy gives his speech, Sol peers down from his velvet chair, Rosalie sits in the front row, and Maya loiters in the aisle, smiling at the
congregants. Rosalie turns around to beckon Maya back to her seat, and she sees him in the very back of the sanctuary, wearing a suit, leaning against the doorframe. She looks again. A man in a suit, yes. But Walter? Rosalie rises and walks to the door but when she gets there the man is gone.

She never asks Walter if he passed through town that morning to have a glimpse of his little girl, but Rosalie believes that he did.

A year later Sol and Rosalie arrive in Jerusalem for the wedding of Missy and Nathan’s son. Maya sits between her parents in the back of a taxi that races through traffic.

“Where are we staying?” asks Rosalie.

“The American Colony,” says Sol. “Right near the wedding venue.”

“Find another hotel. Please.”

The driver glances at them in the rearview mirror.

“But we already have a reservation.”

Rosalie stares out the window. She can’t go back to the American Colony with her husband. That hotel belonged to Walter, not Sol. It was impossible to trespass from one life to another, as if she could put on a different skin. And yet she did it again and again, made the interweave of three strands possible and beautiful and wrong all at the same time. Those three words were her braid:
possible wrong beautiful, wrong possible beautiful, beautiful possible—

“Not that hotel,” says Rosalie.

“I thought you’d be pleased. Walter stayed there, as you recall. Anyway, the Samuels arranged everything; we’re their honored guests.”

“Of course we are. Nathan kept you employed so you could one day officiate at his kid’s wedding, pro bono.”

“They mean well, Rosalie; don’t mock them.”

Maya listens to her parents banter. The driver mutters something about the congested streets, takes a detour through Old Katamon and speeds through the narrow alleys, calling it a shortcut.

“Stop the car,” says Rosalie. “Let me off here.”

“Are you carsick?” asks Sol.

“No. I’ll meet you later. The American Colony will do. Whatever. Just let me out.”

“Mommy! I’m coming with you!” calls Maya.

“Rosalie—”

She leans into the window. “It’s okay, Sol. I just need time to walk.” Maya runs after Rosalie and asks where they are going.

“To visit an old friend.”

Rosalie steps through the familiar blue door framed with bougainvillea. The courtyard is empty, and at first Rosalie doesn’t notice Madame Sylvie sitting in a corner, shaded by a tree.

“That old lady scares me,” whispers Maya.

Madame Sylvie approaches and kisses Rosalie on both cheeks.

“Asseyez-vous.”
She turns to Maya and asks if she would like some cake. Maya nods. Her eyes follow the ancient woman as she disappears into the house and returns with a slice of lemon cake.
She takes a bite and tries to make out what Madame Sylvie says to her mother.

“I have thought of you often. I regret that I couldn’t offer you an astonishment back then, nothing beyond a strange braid. You have suffered a great loss,
n’est-ce pas
?” Sylvie taps Rosalie’s chin with her wrinkled hand, coaxing her to meet her eyes. “You lost a child; it is written on your face.”

“Yes. A son. This is Maya, my little girl.”

“This one is a great blessing.”

Rosalie’s body shakes and she begins to sob. Madame Sylvie leads her into a corner.

“Ma chère
,
”
says Madame Sylvie. “A woman with two men has an impossible life. Better to suffer with one.”

“It’s too late.”

“Close your eyes.”

“I didn’t come for an astonishment today.”

“
Ça ne fait rien.
You will take what I have to offer.”

“I don’t want anything now.”

“You walked through this door for a reason. Now shut your eyes. You and your daughter are alone in a dark cavern. You look around for one of your men but the darkness overwhelms you. You call their names but the sound of your own voice echoes off the cavern walls. Birds fly out. Your daughter holds your hand tightly. You keep walking until you find the opening to daylight.”