The Beautiful Possible (18 page)

“That’s it? After all this time?”

“What do you expect?”

“I was hoping for guidance, for comfort.”

“Then why did you come to me?”

After the wedding, Rosalie walks alone to the Western Wall and tucks a note between the stones: Ani Ma’amin. I believe. With all my strength I believe that the man I saw in the back of the sanctuary was Walter and he will always find his way to Maya. And one day she will understand.

Rosalie sits cross-legged in front of the Religion shelves at the new bookstore in town. She scans the books that bear Walter’s name and reads sentences at random. She skips from page to page and book to book, listening for the cadence of his words, hoping to find him in the prose. But his books don’t bear a trace of his voice, his touch. The purple binder was their secret project, separate from the books that define his career. She wishes his words would help her understand the shul she has grown to love, but she can’t find the connection between Walter’s temple of religious scholarship and her Temple Briar Wood. Walter held every religion in his brain and what does Rosalie hold? A paneled room filled with Jews who bring themselves inside every seventh day (a selected few, barely) and three times a year (a selected many, barely) whose yearnings and voices have become her entire geography. Walter’s flights take him to New Delhi and Istanbul and Oxford and Paris for conferences and book parties, with stopovers in New York so he can appear like a ghost at the back of the sanctuary, behold the sight of his daughter, and then disappear. He lives with his peacocks in a studio where no one cooks a meal or shuckles in prayer or pours her little-girl body into his arms.
Rosalie’s trajectory is limited to the cubits of a prescribed life that seems very small and quite vast. She sits on the floor of the bookstore and ponders this until closing time. She drives home, kisses her sleeping daughter, and slips into bed alongside her husband.

Every night after her bath, Maya runs into Sol’s study and climbs onto his lap. He takes his tallit out of its bag and wraps it around both of them. Sol opens a volume of Talmud to a random page and points out the words to Maya. He lays his hand over hers and leads her fingers around the black letters, the two of them exploring where black ink meets white paper. Rosalie watches them from the corner of the room. Maya concentrates on the words and twirls her hair in ringlets just as Rosalie did when she learned with her father.

She’elah: How is the world passed down?

Teshuvah: Only the days can answer this question.

December 1985

Time bites all of them. Years back, if Rosalie skipped Shabbat services for a few weeks, she would have missed the sight of a woman in the first blush of pregnancy, a baby taking its first steps at the edges of the sanctuary. Now she notices other passages of time—reading glasses, receding hairlines, the swell of congregants who rise to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish for a parent, a sibling, a spouse. When she stands in the back and notices the slight insults of age that form on their skins—tiny brown spots on Missy’s hands, the gradual sprawl of Serena’s hips, the bulges that puff beneath Nathan’s eyes—Rosalie realizes that time is biting her too. Her periods have eclipsed, her ankles have widened, the skin on her knuckles has thinned. Her own mother died two years ago, and Sol’s mother soon after. She never arranged another rendezvous with Walter because Maya was getting older and she did not want to invite the inevitable query.

She sends Walter a postcard:

At Maya’s birthday parties, Rosalie invites her to make a wish before blowing out the candles. Every year, Maya closes her eyes and tries to envision something she wants, but she can only imagine things that defy ownership. I wish for white flowers. I wish for an arched doorway. I wish for a footpath that crosses a river. She once wished she could meet Lenny, but she realized that was impossible and cancelled the wish.

After one of her parties, Sol asked Maya what she wished for. She didn’t think he would understand the flower, the doorway, and the footpath, so she said,
to hear a great symphony.
The next week Maya sat sandwiched between Sol and Rosalie at a New York Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s Ninth, which felt unbearably long and made her restless. When Sol asked if she liked the music, Maya said,
I’d like it better if the music were made of words.
Sol smiled and turned to Rosalie.
She is ready to study Talmud. Our little girl is just like me.

When Maya is eleven she overhears her mother talking on the phone late at night. “Maya will know everything. We will figure this out.” When Rosalie hangs up, Maya asks why she was talking about her and why she looks so sad.

“That was an old friend, buttercup. Someone far away,” says Rosalie.

“Madeline from London?”

“Yes, honeybunch. You guessed it.”

Maya knows her mother is not telling the truth. She can hear it in her voice. When she talks to Madeline, her mother seems to be unloading secrets. When she talked to this friend, her mother sounded sultry; her voice seemed to caress the words as if she didn’t want to let them go. This friend was not Madeline.

She often spies on her parents at night, sneaking up on them in every room except their bedroom. She watches her mother join her father in his study, wrap her arms around his neck and plant a kiss on his good ear. She watches them dance to Frank crooning “Fly Me to the Moon,” Leonard smoking “Dance Me to the End of Love,” Dionne singing “I Say a Little Prayer.” After, they sit side by side on the sofa and study the liner notes to their favorite albums, reading the lyrics to each song as if they are studying a sacred text together. One day she saw her mother pick up an unopened letter with a postmark from India and her father snatched it out of her hands.
The letter is for me, Rosalie. This one is mine.

Rosalie tells Sol she wants to offer a class on Hasidic thought, spin out the teachings from the Ishbitzer she learned from her father. She has three students: Missy, Serena, and Bev, and she sets out a plate of homemade cookies, along with a source sheet. While Rosalie is teaching her class, Sol sits in his study and retrieves a letter he received from Walter a few months back. He holds the thin paper to his nose, sniffing the chalky aroma of onionskin and dried ink. The letter is tinged with words of affection:
How we are woven together, I have not forgotten the geniza, I love you both always.
He reads it again and again, permitting himself to feel a
semblance of joy at their rekindled friendship. Now it is possible, he thinks. He picks up the phone and dials Walter’s number.

“Thank you,” says Sol.

“For what?”

“For your letter from Varanasi. For the sermons. For letting me cry on the phone for hours and hours after Lenny died.”

Walter laughs. “That’s a long list!”

“Dayenu
!
”
says Sol. “Any one of those would have been more than enough.” His voice breaks.

“How is your messy brew these days?”

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m racketeering; other times I feel as if I’m doing holy work. I marvel at the rabbis who are good at this—their sincerity is completely aligned with their intent and they become masters of spiritual leadership. But I’m not one of them; I’m the other kind.”

“Then why bother?”

“What else would I do now? It’s a soft job. I’m supporting my family, my commute is a few steps across a parking lot, and my president leaves me alone. I have time to study now and I’m finally dipping into the Zohar!”

“You? Mysticism?”

“Yes!” Sol reaches for a book, opens it to a flagged page. “Listen to this.
This mystery is that the flowing, gushing river never ceases; therefore, a human should never cease his river and source in this world, so that he grasp it in the world that is coming.
”

“You’re practically quoting Tagore! From
Gitanjali
. Listen:
All things rush on, they don’t stop, they don’t look behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on
.”

“Remarkable,” says Sol, beaming. He rises from his desk chair and spins in a circle. Their minds are in sync again, he thinks, just like when they were young.

“You seem much better now,” says Walter.

“I owe it to my daughter,” says Sol. “Maya brings us such joy. When she learns Talmud with me I feel utterly complete. For a preteen, she discerns startling patterns in the text.”

Walter doesn’t respond.

“Are you still there?”

“Of course,” says Walter. “I’m always here for you.”

“When will I see you again?”

“I don’t know.”

“So find a way to know. Make time for your old chavrusa.”

“Look. I have a two-day conference in New Haven next week, and plan to spend a night at a colleague’s place in Manhattan. I was hoping to see—”

“Perfect! Next week is Hanukkah. I’ll take you to the symphony. My treat!”

“We don’t have to go out—”

“Of course we don’t. It’s better that way.”

“Next Tuesday night, then. West End Avenue at 71st. I’ll call you with the exact address.”

“Rosalie teaches on Tuesday night.”

“I know—”

Their wires have gotten crossed, thinks Walter, and he blames this on the Ishbitzer. He had spoken to Rosalie only an hour ago, told her how he had arranged to give a paper at Yale as an excuse to pass through New York for a single night.
But I can’t
cancel my class,
she had said
. I need to teach my students about Hanukkah. I prepared such a great source shet on the hidden light. Oh, I’m sorry. I wish I could see you.
And now Walter would have Sol, who would be eager to resume their Zohar-Tagore riff, and share some jazzy theological be-bop.

If back at the Seminary, someone had played a reel of their future lives, would he have believed that Sol would carry the whole messy braid of them in his arms? Walter sometimes thinks of Sol as Sisyphus, lugging a heavy sack up a steep, rocky incline. He has bouts of relief—
the Zohar! Maya!
—but inevitably the load overtakes him. Walter wants to see Sol, but he had earmarked this single night in town for Rosalie. He hadn’t seen her in so long and he wanted to ask if Maya laughed like she did, or if the swell of his daughter’s cheekbones resembled his own.

Maya is learning to sing. She lip-syncs to Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, belts show tunes in the shower, and occasionally joins her father on the bima, leading the congregation in a folksy rendition of Adon Olam. Every Tuesday afternoon she has a voice lesson with Lucie Morgan, who specializes in training the vocal chords of young singers. Maya doesn’t care about the hour she spends running through arpeggios with the legendary Miss Morgan, but she relishes the forty-seven-minute train ride from the leafy platform of the Briar Wood station to Grand Central, where she delights in the smells of diesel, pretzel salt, and the cologne of the men who take the train to work. Her own father’s commute is a brief meander across a parking lot, and he never wears cologne.

On the fourth night of Hanukkah, a Tuesday, Sol offers to drive Maya to her lesson. “My old chavrusa is passing through town,” he says. “And he’s staying only a block away from Miss Morgan’s studio. So close!”

“I can take the train, Abba.”

“I’d like you to meet him, even for a second. We’ll light candles when we get home.”

She pouts.

“Please, sweetheart. I ask you for so little. And I often get bored in the car without company.”

Maya never thinks of her father as bored. For as long as she can remember, he has carried a volume of Talmud in his arms, opening it to a random page and running a finger across the trail of letters. Sometimes she catches him looking forlorn. When she was small she would climb onto his lap and nestle herself under his chin until he would wrap his arms around her and soften.

At times, her father seems to be weighed down by sorrow. Even though the sad story of her dead brother lingers in their house—old family photos and sports trophies line the shelves—her mother seems too busy and distracted to let loss pull her down. But Sol swims in a moody haze that sometimes surfaces as deep misery, other times as a frisson of worry. And yet, when he stands on the bima and gazes at her and Rosalie, he seems tethered to happiness, at least for a moment. The rabbi needs his girls, Maya thinks. We save him from himself.

“Okay, Abba. I’ll go. For you.”

As they cruise down the Hutchinson Parkway Sol turns to her.

“Do I look old to you, sweetheart? My friend hasn’t seen me in so long. Tell me, how do I look? Younger than Nathan? How about Marv?” He smoothes his hair, glances at himself in the rearview mirror.

“Younger than your congregants, for sure. But older than Mom.”

“Everyone looks older than your mother.”

Maya laughs. “Sometimes I think even I look older than Mom!”

“That’s because you have an old soul, sweetheart.”

When they pull up to Lucie Morgan’s building, Sol hands Maya a slip of paper with an address. “Meet me after your lesson and I’ll introduce you.”

She steps out of the car and then turns back and smiles. “You look good, Abba. Young. Like a rabbinical student.”

He winks.

After forty-five minutes of deep breathing and an exhausting arpeggio practice that makes Maya wish she had cancelled her lesson, she walks down the block and waits for the doorman to buzz her up to the apartment where she is to meet her father.

“No answer,” says the doorman, “but you may as well go up.”

Maya hesitates outside the apartment and listens to the voices on the other side of the door.

“I missed you terribly. Who we once were. More than I can ever explain—”

“I remember everything, Sol.”

“My God! Look at you!”

Maya knocks gently. Sol opens the door, and a barefoot man wearing a brocade Indian tunic and tailored pants stands before her. Maya notices his high cheekbones, then glances down at his feet. So familiar, she thinks. Famous? Ballet famous? The choreographer from the PBS special she watched? She stares at his bare feet. He can’t possibly be a dancer because his feet are not worn and calloused, but smooth. Is this her father’s study partner? Someone he knew in rabbinical school?
Him
?

“You must be Maya. I’m Walter. We met when you were small—”

“My father talks about you all the time.”

“Actually, we haven’t met,” stammers Walter. “Not exactly.”

“And not approximately either.” She turns to Sol. “We should go, Abba. Mom’s class will be over soon and we have to light—”

Sol turns to Walter. “Hanukkah.”

“I’m aware of it,” says Walter.

Sol excuses himself to go to the bathroom, and Walter and Maya are alone. Walter stares intently at her face, as if she is a statue in a museum. His hands are clasped behind his back and a faint smile softens his mouth. Maya gazes straight ahead and holds herself perfectly still. He is just like a strange congregant, she thinks, only he is wearing a costume and resembles that choreographer from the PBS special.

Walter angles his face close to the ends of her hair and inhales, as if trying to pick up the scent of her shampoo. Uh-uh. Too close, too weird, too costumey, she thinks, flinching.

She hears the sound of the toilet flush and sighs. Sol emerges and clears his throat.

Thank God,
she thinks. Both she and Walter turn to face Sol. “We should go, Abba,” she says. “It’s late.”

Silence.

Sol is staring at her and at Walter. He squints, takes a step back, and then squints again. His eyes are fixed on Walter’s face and hers. He bites his lip, then audibly exhales and sighs.

“Earth to Abba,” says Maya.

Sol wipes his eyes and Maya can’t tell if he is wiping away tears or sweat.

“Abba!”

“Yes—”

“We need to go—”

Silence.

Now
, she mouths.

Silence.

Maya rolls her eyes. “I’ll be waiting outside.” She turns to Walter and waves. “Nice to meet you.”

“Wait, Maya!” calls Sol.

She lets herself out and then lingers for a moment, picking up fragments of the muffled conversation on the other side of the door.

“Go home and light your candles. Maya is waiting for you.”

“My daughter—”

“Of course, Sol. Yours and—”

“Rosalie’s and—”

“Yes. Now take her home and make your holiday.”

The door opens and Sol walks out, his face streaming with tears.