Christmas for Joshua - A Novel (10 page)

The idea was tempting, but at that moment the group around Debra squealed in delight at something she said, and I caught a glimpse of my daughter in her white gown. “He won’t go against his father and their rabbi,” I said. “He’s not the type.”

“
I can try.”

“
The cards have been dealt. I have to play with what’s in my hand.”

“
It’s not a card game.”

“
You’re right. It’s not a card game. It’s my daughter’s one-and-only wedding, and I’ll do anything to avoid spoiling it. Tell Rabbi Mintzberg that I agree to comply with his conditions.”

Aaron bowed his head. “This is so wrong.”

“
Tell him I’ll turn myself into mere wall decoration, but on one condition: Debra mustn’t know about this.”

“
How could she not know?”

“
You’ll stand in for me—down the aisle, under the chuppah, the whole thing. And you’ll recite the blessing I was supposed to recite as her father.”

“
Are you crazy?” He was mortified, shaken more than I had ever seen him during our long friendship, during years in the operating room, when deadly crisis often struck. “I can’t!”

“
Promise me!”

His face twisted as if he was about to weep.

“
Dr. Aaron Brutsky!” I grasped the lapels of his tuxedo and shook him. “Get a grip on yourself!”

“
You’re asking too much. I’m not her father. You are!”

“
Only one thing matters tonight. Debra’s happiness. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“
For the rest of her life, tonight’s memories will stay with her. It has to be perfect! She mustn’t notice a thing!”

“
But how would she not notice that you’re missing?
How?
”

“
Lie to her. Tell her I’m sick with a stomach bug, that I have the runs and asked you to stand in for me. And make the others swear to do the same.” I pushed him back toward the ketubah room. “
Go!
”

Mordechai’s friends formed a crescent of dancing and singing to welcome him out of the ketubah room. He emerged pale and red-eyed. His father and Aaron held his arms, leading him, neither of them smiling. But the groom’s friends were unperturbed, their voices strong, the floor shaking under their feet as they danced before him, advancing toward Debra.

I met the glassy gaze of Rabbi Mintzberg and turned away from him. At the opposite side, I found a chair and got on it to watch over the crowd’s heads.

The dancing men surrounded the bride’s throne. Debra laughed with joy, clapping with the rhythm of their singing.

Mordechai approached her. She looked up at him. He said something. She nodded and smiled. He lowered the veil back over her face.

I exhaled in relief. She only had eyes for him. And the veil not only hid her face from us, but also hid the world from her. She wouldn’t notice my absence for a long while.

The dancing men circled Mordechai, his father, and Aaron as the three of them proceeded down the red carpet to the chuppah. The men sang and danced with complete abandonment, as if in ecstasy. The pounding of their black shoes, the loudness of their soaring voices, the tightness of their interwoven arms electrified the hall with elation that was physical, embracing, penetrating, until even I, despite my shock and pain, could not resist it. I was taken in, my heart filled with joy for my daughter and her groom, who were blessed with such devoted friends. By the time Mordechai, his father, and Aaron reached the chuppah, I had been clapping so hard that my palms burned.

The music changed from joyous to melancholy. Rebecca and Mordechai’s mother, holding candles, walked Debra along the lacey partition that corralled the women on the right side of the hall. The procession reached the chuppah, where Debra and the two mothers began to circle Mordechai, who rocked back and forth, eyes shut devoutly as he murmured more verses. The sad song repeated itself, the Hebrew words too garbled for me to comprehend, while my veiled daughter was led blindly around her groom seven times.

By now the chuppah was surrounded with tiers of spectators, leaving me with only the audio part of my daughter’s marriage ceremony. Rabbi Mintzberg’s voice sounded from the loudspeakers as he made the initial blessing. Mordechai recited his lines, slipped the ring on, and stomped on a glass cup, winning applause as if for an act of great courage. Then a series of dignitaries, starting with Aaron and Cantor Bentov, were honored with the recital of more blessings.

The couple left the chuppah, and the men’s singing reignited. They formed several lines, their arms on each other shoulders, facing Debra and Mordechai, and danced before them while moving backwards across the hall, back to the foyer, and down to the ketubah room, where the newlyweds would spend a little time alone with food and drink and, I assume, smooching to make up for a lost week. Soon they would reemerge, and the real party would begin, the men forming tight circles, dancing on the left side of the partition, and the women doing the same on the right.

But I belonged in neither side.

I stepped down from the chair and found myself surrounded by men wearing beards and black yarmulkes or hats, none of them familiar. I could no longer stomach the prospect of watching strangers rejoice at my expense while I was shunned. I felt lightheaded and feeble. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the crowded hall and I was going to suffocate, me alone among the hundreds of celebrating strangers.

A moment later, I was across the foyer, pushing through the two sets of double doors, stumbling down the marble steps. My fingers unbuttoned the tuxedo and pulled it open to the icy breeze. I inhaled deeply, and again, teetering on the verge of collapse.

The sidewalk was still busy with pedestrians. Behind me, the tall, bright windows of Pillars of Joy muted the sounds of music and singing. A yellow cab swerved out of traffic and screeched to a halt by the curb.

As I was getting in, I heard a yell. “Rusty?”

I turned.

Rebecca stood among the white columns under the lit-up menorah, her arms stretched sideways in a gesture that said, “Where are you going?”

Aaron emerged from behind her and spoke urgently, pointing at me, rubbing his stomach.

I blew a kiss and slammed the door. “Take me to the Muse Hotel. Midtown Manhattan.”

The cabby hit the gas.

A moment later, my Blackberry rang. I ignored it.

As we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, Bing Crosby sang “Silver Bells” on the radio. When he reached “
Children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile
,” I pressed my forehead to the frosted window and, for the first time since my mother had died, burst out crying.

Part Three

Monday, December 21

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

Rebecca returned to the Muse long after midnight. I was in bed, covered up, facing away from the door, feigning sleep. She didn’t turn on the lights, but came around the bed to check on me. I felt her hand rest lightly on my forehead, then her lips, barely touching.

I opened my eyes, but she had already turned away, which was just as well. Tonight my wife deserved to be happy, and I didn’t trust myself to speak with her casually as if nothing had happened to me at Pillars of Joy but an upset stomach.

She took a long time in the bathroom, humming a klezmer tune. I felt her slip into bed behind me, inching closer, her warm breath on my neck. Her arm threaded between the blanket and my stomach, caressing it gently. Aaron must have lied well about the reason for my departure.

Shortly after sunrise, I tiptoed out of our room. Rebecca hadn’t woken up yet, but I knew my Blackberry would ring as soon as she did, so I turned it off.

In the elevator, I quietly chanted
Adon Olam
, my favorite morning prayer: “
Master of the Universe, who ruled before any creature was created. He is one, and there’s no second, no one comparable or akin to Him. In His hand I deposit my soul, when asleep and when awake. God protects me, I fear none.
”

The revolving lobby doors propelled me onto Forty-sixth Street. I walked east across town, huddled in my coat and wool cap. Manhattan was waking up, and delivery trucks grunted as they vied for curb space while plodding vehicles with spinning brushes threw off chunks of blackened ice and refuse. The noise and frost didn’t bother me. The mental pain had numbed all my senses.

Was this how my patients felt, waking up to find their cracked ribcages stapled back together with stainless steel rings? No. My patients had pain, but they always reported feeling better after the operation, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from their chests when the blocked arteries were replaced with clear ones, allowing oxygen to nourish starved heart muscles. My pain was different. It was a deep, all consuming, the-world-is-coming-to-an-end kind of pain.

I descended the escalators into Grand Central Station and boarded the first Hudson-Line train going north. Sitting by the window on the left, I watched the river flow by, as wide and as blue as it had been during my childhood. We passed under the Tappan Zee Bridge and stopped at the Tarrytown station. I was the only passenger to disembark. The opposite platform was filled with Monday morning commuters waiting for the next train into Manhattan.

Outside the station, a taxi dropped off a passenger, and I got in. The driver, a bearded man wearing a turban, drove slowly up the steep road and turned right on Main Street, joining slow traffic headed south. I paid him and walked the rest of the way.

It had been many years since I last visited my hometown, and most of the ma-and-pa stores were gone, replaced by familiar chains—Kinko’s, Great Clips, Subway Sandwich, Allstate Insurance, Pizza Hut—a generic set of signs that made me stop and look around. I was momentarily disoriented. Had I taken the wrong train and reached a different town?

The sight of our church reassured me that I was at the right place. It had not changed much in my long absence. I stood for a moment, gazing at the squat building with the fake bell tower on top, which seemed like a glued-on afterthought. But the interior, I knew, was genuine and homey, filled with warmth every Sunday morning, voices rising in hymns, familiar faces and kind smiles, the hearth glowing with burning wood. In my memories, it had been a cozy and comforting place for a boy growing up at the outer fringe of poverty.

I followed the cracked-concrete path around the chapel. The cemetery in the back was muddy, patches of snow crusted with brownish ice.

Mom was still there, lying under a block of granite. “It’ll stay clean, better than concrete,” she had told me as part of an impromptu set of interment instructions a year before her death, which had seemed odd considering she wasn’t even fifty, younger than my current age. “There will be enough money in my savings account,” she had added, ignoring my protests that she was too young to plan a gravesite. “And put both names on it. Your father would appreciate a proper grave.”

I pulled off my gloves and touched the line:
MaryAnn and Joachim Dinwall

Would my father appreciate this grave, which no one ever visited? I didn’t know. He had shipped off when Mom was pregnant and died when I was three months old, buried at sea, sort of, his Swift Boat blown to pieces on an estuary of the Mekong River. According to his mates, my baby photo was in his pocket when the rocket hit his boat.

I put a pebble on the stone as was the Jewish custom. “You were right, Mom,” I said. “In the end, it didn’t work out so well.”

Back then, her response to the news of my engagement to Rebecca had been a long pause followed by one of her off-the-cuff metaphors: “A cat with a cat, a dog with a dog, a duck with a duck. Only a turkey tries to mate with a swan in hopes of flying south for the winter.”

Mom’s heavily mixed metaphor had not originated in anti-Semitism. She cleaned Jewish homes in Scarsdale as willingly as she labored in the white-shoe mansions of the Protestant bankers in Irvington. But she wasn’t deaf to her employers’ kitchen table conversations, to their prejudices, bigotries, and clannish attitudes.

“
We’re not birds,” I had responded. “I’m in love with Rebecca, and she’s in love with me. Isn’t love more important than how or whom we worship?”

Mom’s response was practical, as always. “I’ll ask Jesus Christ to watch over you and bless your marriage, even though you don’t attend His church.”

When I later returned to my dorm at Columbia and opened the suitcase of laundered, folded clothing, I found her dog-eared book of hymns lying on top. The dedication, in her block letters, said only:
In case you ever need it. Love, Mom.

My fingers lost sensation on the cold granite. I pulled the gloves back on. “I’m hurting as hell,” I said. “And angry.”

I imagined her hand on my cheek, her palm clammy after a day’s work.

“What am I going to do?”

There was no answer.

I blew my frosted nose into a tissue and stuffed it in my pocket. Why did I come here? To seek answers from a tombstone? To find a sympathetic ear under six feet of granite and soil? To pour my heart out and feel better? If so, it hadn’t worked. There was no noticeable relief in the hollow wound that had been throbbing inside my chest since I had mounted the chair at the Pillars of Joy and watched my daughter’s marriage ceremony proceed without me. If anything, I felt even worse now, having realized that my dead mother was the only person with whom I could unreservedly share my hurt.