All Other Nights (5 page)

T
HE SECOND HALF OF THE PASSOVER SEDER IS EITHER TEDIOUS
or triumphal, depending on how much one has eaten compared with how much one has drunk. Most years, people drag themselves back to the table tired, sluggish, and ready for the whole evening to be done with. But that night in New Orleans was different. Food wasn’t yet scarce, but it had become harder to come by; liquor, on the other hand, had been laid up for years. Even at the genteel table of Harry Hyams, the drink had not quite been balanced by the food, and so the tone that night, after everyone made their way back to the table, was triumphal: most of the guests were more drunk than full, and it showed. The guests sang the grace after meals loudly, with great spirit, the older ones even singing aloud the parts usually chanted to oneself. Afterward, before Harry rose to read the next passage, some of the older guests began laughing about Elijah the prophet, messenger of the Messiah, for whom one opens the door at the end of the evening—joking that perhaps Elijah might arrive this year in the form of a swarm of mosquitoes full of Yankee blood.

Jacob sat at the table in terror, forcing himself to laugh. His head and hands felt light, weightless. In their weightlessness Jacob imagined that his burdens had been lifted, the people around the dining-room table rendered into mere illusions. The room shimmered before him like a lighted box floating in a void. Jacob flipped through the prayer book in his hands, folding the pages back and forth until he reached the page with the questions he had recited earlier in the evening, and for an instant he imagined that it was true: that this night really was different from all other nights, that somehow this dining room had detached itself from the world where the past led to the future and where actions had consequences, that the person he was tonight was an exception, entirely unrelated to the person he had been or the person he would be. He saw the raised glass in Harry’s hand, and waited for Harry to bring it to his lips.

Harry pronounced the blessing over his glass of wine, and Jacob stared at him, unable to look away as Harry drank it. When Harry put the glass down, he made a face and leaned back on his cushioned chair, turning to the side where the Negro was waiting.

“Badly decanted, Jim,” he called. “Bring another bottle, will you? There’s something peculiar about this one.”

The Negro muttered something and then wandered off, returning with another bottle that he began to serve around the table. Jacob watched Harry, ridiculously—hadn’t the officers told him that the results wouldn’t be immediate? He began to feel as though he himself had been poisoned, but Harry showed no signs. Instead, Harry rose to his feet, holding his half-empty glass before him. He was slightly drunk. Steadying himself on the table’s edge with one hand and raising the glass with the other, he began to read aloud—in English, this time—the cry of vengeance from the very end of the Passover meal. He drawled out the words slowly, pronouncing them with a firm and terrifying passion:

“Pour out Thy wrath on the nations that do not know Thee, and upon the nations that do not call upon Thy name. For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his habitation. Pour out Thine indignation upon them, and let the wrath of Thine anger overtake them. Pursue them with anger, and destroy them from beneath the heavens of the Lord.”

At all of the Passovers in his short life, Jacob had heard those biblical words recited dutifully, by happy men with full stomachs who rushed through this passage so as to finally reach the evening’s long-awaited end. But in Harry Hyams’s voice, Jacob suddenly heard an unexpected tone of actual, frightening rage. Harry looked up from his book and around at the company, and smiled a cruel smile. For an instant, Jacob felt that he was the one who had been devoured.

“I would like to dedicate this fourth cup of wine to the Union,” Harry said, in a loud and angry drawl. “May it go the way of all tyrants. May our dear Judah Benjamin lead us as we pursue the Union hosts with anger, and may we destroy them from beneath the heavens of the Lord.”

The company broke into applause. Judah Benjamin applauded too, modestly at first. But the applause began to escalate, becoming louder and wilder, until the room roared. Everyone raised their glasses, banging them with their spoons.

Harry’s face changed, reddening with passion. “Death to the Union!” he bellowed, his voice louder than Jacob could ever imagine it. Soon everyone took up the chant. It was the drinking, Jacob was sure—or so he believed, until Harry Hyams cried, “Death to Lincoln!”

Judah Benjamin smiled, the same perpetual smile he had worn the entire evening, and in that moment Jacob recognized the sentiment it masked: an awareness of limitations. In the shadow of that smile, in the shimmering gaslight, Jacob saw, with sudden and terrifying clarity, his uncle’s powerlessness and also his own—the vast distance between rage and resolve, the crippling need for the approval of others, the fear of freedom that placed even the smallest dreams beyond one’s reach. He knew then, without the slightest doubt, that Harry Hyams would never have done it.

Harry’s hand was shaking now, quivering in the lighted box of that detached dining room, as his other hand clutched the top of his chair. The rest of the company echoed Harry’s cry, man to woman to man, cheering for the angel of death. Jacob banged his glass with them, and in the wave of passion that circled the table, he convinced himself that he had had no choice, that there had been no questions left to ask. When Harry turned to face him, Jacob tried not to flinch, and succeeded.

“My dear boy, Jacob,” he said, with the hardened edge still on his drawl as the company’s chants died down, “please open the door for Elijah the prophet, may he arrive speedily and in our time.”

Jacob forced a smile, stood, bowed to the ladies at the table, and walked toward the door. But when his hand touched the doorknob, he heard a horrid sound, a rattled, muffled gasp. He turned around in his tracks and saw Harry still standing at the table’s head, looking straight at him. And at that moment, Harry Hyams poured out his wrath onto the dining-room table.

Jacob had never imagined that it would be so supremely terrible to witness. The commanders must have given him something other than ordinary lye. Harry’s eyes rolled back in his head as he vomited black bile onto the silver trays in front of him. He vomited, and vomited, and vomited: his entire life poured out of his mouth before the heavens of the Lord. As the women at the table began to scream, Jacob opened the door, panicked, for the prophet Elijah. But as he rushed back to Harry’s side with the other guests, Jacob was the only one who saw the crippled slave—who, it seemed, was no cripple—run out through the open door and into the moonlit southern night.

“W
HY DIDN’T YOU KILL HIM, TOO?”

It wasn’t what Jacob had been hoping to hear. When he left New Orleans—after staying with his aunt and her weeping friends for seven excruciating days, eating tasteless unleavened bread and listening to Elizabeth’s animal wail as the cavalrymen reported back to the house again and again on their failure to track down the runaway slave—the journey back was even worse than the journey down. At some point during the long voyage, first in a smuggler’s boat and then on a navy gunship, Jacob finally stopped thinking. Harry Hyams no longer existed. Jacob’s mind had also erased the faces of everyone else at that seder table. Even New Orleans itself no longer existed. It was an act of sheer will to erase it all, and not an entirely successful one. When he crawled back to the camp and appeared before the three officers at headquarters, what he expected—the only reason he had done what he now wanted to forget—was glory. And at first, the officers did seem pleased. But as Jacob described what had happened that night, their eyes went wide at the mention of one name.

“You had the poison. Why didn’t you kill Benjamin?”

The question shocked Jacob, not least because the idea had occurred to him at the time, and he had dismissed it because he was sure that these very people would not approve. He choked, and tried to cover it with a cough. At last he composed himself enough to mumble a reply.

“Those were not my orders, sir,” he said. He glanced past the officers, avoiding their eyes. The long, narrow table where the officers sat was scattered with papers, inkwells, pen nibs, and pipe-holders, and anchored on either end by brass spittoons. Outside the windows behind their heads, rain was pouring down in torrents, drenching Jacob’s fellow soldiers in their leaking tents. He listened to the rush of rain pounding against the windows and remembered the blind sounds of waves slapping the sides of the smuggler’s boat as he crouched inside the barrel, trying to will himself unconscious, paralyzed by what he had done.

“But you might have had the ingenuity to seize the opportunity at hand,” the colonel said.

Jacob felt himself beginning to sweat, though the air in the room was cool. “And murder Benjamin, sir?” he asked. Were they serious? Had his murdering of Harry Hyams somehow been insufficiently patriotic? “But they—they consider him a head of state there, sir,” he stammered, searching for an excuse. “Even if we know it’s all nonsense, wouldn’t that have violated some sort of—some sort of rule of war?”

The general laughed. “Judas Iscariot Benjamin is hardly a head of state.”

The other two snorted. “He isn’t even a figurehead of an imaginary state.”

“No one can possibly imagine that that traitor is a head of state.”

Dimly aware that he was about to do something foolish, Jacob reached into his breast pocket and removed the Confederate notes that he had collected in honor of his deaf-and-dumbness. Without a word, he peeled off a two-dollar Rebel bill and placed it on the table. The three officers peered down to examine the ragged paper, until all three of them could see the tiny etched lithograph of Judah Benjamin’s face, its eerie smile mocking them all. As Jacob watched their faces change from smug to intrigued, he was surprised to feel a twinge of pride. It was the first time a Hebrew face had appeared on currency since the days of ancient Judea. The officers saw him trying to suppress his smile, and frowned.

“So he’s a king to you,” the general huffed.

“To them, sir,” Jacob said quickly.

“But not to you? Then I fail to understand why you did not take action.”

Because I am not a murderer
, Jacob caught himself thinking, until he remembered that it was no longer true. But surely what he had done was an exception, the moment of pouring the poison into the glass unrelated to the moments before and since. “Sir, I concentrated on fulfilling my mission,” he finally said, and came up with an appropriate lie. “If I had divided the poison between two targets, the dose might not have been potent enough to—to achieve the initial goal.”

The officers turned to one another and nodded. Jacob breathed, thinking again, as he had thought over and over during those awful seven days, of how he owed his life to Harry Hyams’s runaway slave.

“Well, what’s done is done,” the colonel said. “We are pleased with what you’ve accomplished, Rappaport.” The other two officers grinned.

“Thank you, sir,” Jacob mumbled. Was this what he had been waiting for, the justification for the entire mission in his mind? The reason he had poisoned Harry Hyams? For this tiny, worthless phrase,
we are pleased
?

“So pleased, in fact, that we have another opportunity for you,” the major said.

Now Jacob listened, standing straighter. A promotion this time. Maybe even a citation or a medal; surely he deserved one.

“You have shown yourself to be quite capable, Rappaport,” the general declared.

“We doubted your trustworthiness at first,” the major said, with a wave of a hand. “But you have succeeded in putting most of our doubts to rest.”

“You are impressively reliable,” added the colonel.

“Remarkably dedicated.”

“Eminently competent.”

“Devoted to the cause.”

“There are very few young men who have proven themselves to be as unconditionally devoted as you.”

“And of those, it must be said, few are as well-connected as you are.”

“Or as…cosmopolitan.”

“With relations and business partners in so many relevant places.”

“Your social liaisons are of a very useful variety, Rappaport.”

“You are in a position to render an incomparable service.”

“And sophisticated enough to play the role.”

“Calculating.”

“Clever.”

“Convincing.”

“Trusted by the enemy.”

“It would be a disgrace not to make the utmost use of your abilities.”

“Treasonous, even.”

“We know we may depend on you for anything the cause may require.”

“Absolutely anything.”

“With no exceptions.”

“Rappaport, are you familiar with the Levy family of New Babylon, Virginia?”

Jacob swallowed. This cannot, he thought, cannot be happening again. “I—I’m not certain, sir,” he said.

But he was certain. And the three officers seemed to know it. They glared at him, contempt seeping into their proud faces. “Philip Levy was your father’s business associate for more than ten years,” the major said, as if he were telling Jacob something he didn’t know. “He is the founder of the P.M.L. Shipping Company in Virginia, which was an affiliate of Rappaport Mercantile Import–Export until the war forced the connection to dissolve.”

Jacob was perspiring so much by now that he was sure they could see it, dark patches of sweat blossoming under his arms and across his chest. He had no idea what to say. “I had little to do with my father’s affairs, sir,” he tried.

The colonel glared at him. “Except that you spent the two years before you enlisted working in your father’s business, and you received Mr. Levy personally every time he came to New York,” he said.

Now Jacob was frightened. This was more detail than he had ever mentioned to Mendoza, or to anyone else he could remember. They had done research this time. Whom had they asked? Were there other rats besides Mendoza? He looked at the eyes of the officers before him and felt himself cornered, trapped. Treason, one of them had mentioned. Had he meant it?

The general blew smoke. “We would like to inquire as to whether you have ever met any of Mr. Levy’s offspring,” he recited, as if reading from a script.

Jacob’s uniform stuck to his skin. “No, sir, I never met anyone in the family other than Mr. Levy,” he replied.

He was relieved that this, at least, was true. His memories of Philip Levy were all of meetings with him in his father’s offices, Philip always dressed in a stylish suit and top hat, writing down figures as he laughed at how young Jacob was. Jacob had liked him. But he had never come to their home, as far as Jacob remembered, and he had always made his business trips alone. As Jacob racked his mind now, he vaguely remembered Philip once mentioning children his age—as part of his incessant jokes about Jacob’s youth, to be sure—but he couldn’t remember what he had said. He swallowed and tried to remember even less about him than he already did, terrified to hear what might be coming next.

“Levy is apparently one of those men who produce nothing but daughters,” the general said. There was something vaguely rude about this remark, Jacob thought, as though it were some sort of comment on Philip Levy’s manhood. It disturbed him, though he could not put his finger on why. “Four of them, actually. Our main concern is with the second one. Eugenia.”

Jacob held his breath. A woman?

“Miss Levy, it seems, is an even stauncher Rebel than her parents or sisters. She appears to be at the helm of a spy ring, though it’s possible that her sisters are involved as well.” He paused. “We managed to hold the city for about a month last year, and during that time we detected suspicious activity in the household. We detained Miss Levy then, but unfortunately we lacked sufficient evidence, and various circumstances forced us to release her after only a few hours. We’ve managed to move the lines closer to the city this spring, and we hope to take the city again by autumn. In the meantime, there still appears to be a chain of informants in place, and on the other side of the lines, the young lady’s guard has likely been lowered. And that is where we hope to rely on you.” The general lit his pipe.

“Sir, I won’t assassinate a woman,” Jacob blurted out.

His words astonished him. If he were capable of refusing to murder a woman, he understood an instant later, shouldn’t he have been capable of refusing to murder an uncle? A man? An ostensible head of state? Why one line in the sand, rather than another? Once he had become a murderer, did it make any sense to feel that he was somehow a
better
murderer than other murderers? It did, he believed. He had no choice but to believe it.

The three officers looked at Jacob, then at each other. Suddenly, all three of them laughed. Jacob smiled, confused. At last the major stopped laughing.

“What kind of savages do you think we are?” he asked, with an odd gleam in his eye.

Jacob didn’t reply; the truth was that he didn’t know. His own failure to answer alarmed him. The general saw his fear, and leaned an elbow on the table. He smiled. This time the smile was a kind one, or so it seemed. “No one is asking you to assassinate a woman,” he said, with a warm gentleness in his voice.

Jacob breathed with relief. The three officers heard his breathing, and then all three of them smiled at him. For an instant he thought that they actually understood how he felt.

“Don’t worry, Rappaport,” the general said. He stood, and leaned over the table until he had clasped Jacob by the shoulder, a gentle, fatherly touch. “We don’t want you to murder her.” Then he added, still smiling, “We want you to marry her.”