All Who Go Do Not Return (12 page)

“Are you helping Gitty around the house?” my mother asked me several times. From the day we were first married, my mother had made it her business to offer tips for domestic bliss. “Marriage is not a give-and-take,” she said to me the morning after our wedding. “It’s a give-and-give.” But Gitty would balk at my offers to help. “You can take out the garbage, maybe?” Even that seemed an acquiescence, a halfhearted nod toward my willingness to make myself useful.

“How is she feeling?” my mother would ask, and I would say, “I’m not sure.” “Maybe you should ask her,” my mother would say. I would ask in the silence between the half grapefruit and the split-pea soup at dinnertime, before we’d stumble yet again on possible baby names and occasional bits of gossip that Gitty gathered from the ladies’ waiting room at Refuah, “And how are you feeling?” Gitty, with her near-permanent blush, would smile awkwardly, unaccustomed to so intimate a question. “I’m feeling fine,” she would say, and when I would ask if she experienced morning sickness or headaches or fatigue—things my mother told me to ask—she would giggle demurely. “I don’t have any of those.”

“She says she’s fine,” I would tell my mother. “Are you sure?” my mother would ask. As if the varieties of ailments associated with pregnancy were so many and varied that Gitty’s claims were simply a medical impossibility. “I feel normal,” Gitty would insist when I’d ask her again, after which she’d suggest that she was fine to cook, fine to clean, fine to do laundry, and maybe my mother would, if it pleased her, stop minding our business.

Two days before Yom Kippur, I went to the village shopping center, outside of which stood a large open-air tent, with stacks of plastic crates filled with live chickens. Women and children stood around, many of them swinging the chickens over their heads in the traditional
kapparos
ritual. The ritual was meant to transfer the sins of the individual to the frightened bird, which would then be slaughtered and the sins of its owner atoned for. The chicken would end up boiled on some yeshiva student’s plate sometime during the holidays.

The preferred time for
kapparos
was on the day before Yom Kippur at the crack of dawn, when, according to the kabbalists, a “thread of kindness” stretched across the cosmos and the heavens were in good spirits. So instead of performing the ritual on the spot, I paid for a chicken and had the vendor place it in a small cardboard box. I felt its weight shift into one corner of the box as I carried it. When I got home, I laid the box on the floor of my sukkah, opened the lid, and placed a slice of bread and a bowl of water inside.

My friend Yakov Yosef Freund was to give me a wake-up call at 4:30 the next morning, early enough to dress quickly, have a dunk in the mikveh, rush through the penitence prayers, and be primed for the thread of kindness that would hover over our village ahead of the rising sun. Yakov Yosef and I would take our chickens, swing them over our heads in the prescribed ritual, and then rush to the garbage-strewn alley behind the shopping center to join the line of people waiting for the ritual slaughterer to run his knife over the chicken’s throat at the back door to the butcher shop. By our calculations, that would leave us just enough time to head back to the rebbe’s house and join the throngs squeezed into the dank basement to watch the rebbe swing his chicken over his head, weeping and chanting,
“Sons of man, sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.”

Gitty and I went to bed at two in the morning. A short while later, I heard her calling my name. I thought it was a dream, until I heard her say, “Shulem, my water broke.”

I shot up in an instant. The bedside clock read 4:00 AM. Gitty lay on her side with her eyes closed, and agony poured over her face. The only sound in the room was her slow and labored breathing. I sat on my bed and stared at her, unsure what to do next.

“Call the doctor,” Gitty said, as soon as the contraction passed, efficient as ever. I called the number she pointed to in her little address book.

Mount Sinai was an hour away, and from the looks of it, it seemed as if Gitty would give birth momentarily. “Should we call an ambulance?” I asked the doctor. Gitty, wearily, rolled her eyes.

“It’s a first baby,” the doctor said. “It’s not going to pop out.”

Gitty stood up to get dressed while I had visions of the baby being born in the backseat of the taxi as the driver, apathetic, cruised down the Palisades Parkway.

“Call the rebbe,” Gitty said.

It was shortly after four now, and I wondered if anyone would pick up, but the elderly gabbai, Reb Shia, answered as usual: “Yes?”

“I’m calling to inform about a birth. We’re leaving for the hospital shortly.”

“Name?” he asked.

“Shulem Deen.”

“Not
your
name.
Her
name.”

“Er—” My mind drew a blank. What was her name?

“What’s
her
name?” the gabbai asked again impatiently.

“Er—Gittel. Gittel the daughter of Chaim.”

“The
mother’s
name!”

The mother’s name? Wasn’t Gitty the mother? But of course—
Gitty’s
mother. “Gittel the daughter of Chava Leah.” It all had to be conveyed just so if the rebbe’s prayers were to be effective.

“I’ll let the rebbe know,” Reb Shia said. “Good tidings.”

“Call the cab,” Gitty said, as she struggled to adjust her wig at the vanity mirror.

While Gitty waited at the door, a small suitcase at her side, I grabbed some cash from an envelope in a drawer in our bedroom. As the car sped along the Palisades Parkway toward the George Washington Bridge, I held my small Psalms book, the same one the rebbe had used six years earlier during his visit to our Williamsburg yeshiva. Beside me, in a small plastic bag, lay
Reziel the Angel
and
The Sweetness of Elimelech
, sacred texts I was to place under Gitty’s pillow, talismans for easy labor. Gitty sat in the back holding her own Book of Psalms, her maiden name embossed in gold Hebrew lettering on the white leather cover.

Psalms Chapter 20 is a wonderful aid for easing childbirth
, I had read in a book of esoteric customs. Nine verses for the nine months of pregnancy. Seventy words for the seventy pangs of labor. The 310 letters for the 310 heavenly worlds of the righteous. It was tried and true, the book said. Very effective.

The taxi driver glanced at my Book of Psalms several times but said nothing. I looked back at Gitty periodically with what I hoped were appropriate expressions of concern. She would nod and mouth,
I’m OK
, alternating between her own recitations of Psalms and managing her breathing exercises.

When I finished reciting Psalm 20 nine times, I recited it nine more times, and then nine more, until I had done nine times nine. We were barely past the mid-Parkway gas station and convenience shop.

Finally, we arrived at the Klingenstein Pavilion of Mount Sinai Hospital, and Gitty was shown to a room. I looked at her as she lay on the hospital bed, her face bathed in sweat, her turban askew and showing the edges of her close-cropped hair. She twisted from her back to a fetal position and back again as she tried to find a comfortable position. For the very first time, I wanted to reach out and hold her. I wanted to say something, if not quite that I loved her, then something very near to it. But I could not touch her or offer any words of affection. The law forbade it. And so, after bringing her several cups of ice chips from the visitors’ lounge, I sat in a chair in the corner and turned back to Psalm 20, for another round of nine times nine.

“I think it’s best if you stepped out,” Gitty said a few minutes later, facing away from me. I would have to go soon, anyway—it was forbidden for me to remain present during the birth—so I left the room and paced the hallway, Book of Psalms in hand. A man emerged from the room next door, his face glowing, as if ready to burst into a grin. He looked at me for a moment and then looked away. I felt self-conscious in my Hasidic garb, alienating the strangers who might otherwise engage me in conversation, other men who had little to do but stand around and wait, grinning at strangers after their babies were delivered.

The doctor came out of the room and walked past me as if I weren’t there.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Fine,” he called from several paces away, without turning, as if I were some strange creature, my presence reluctantly tolerated, a tag-along with no purpose.

The father from the room next door came out again, and then went back into the room. “There’s another one next door,” I heard him say. “Is there screaming?” a woman’s voice asked. I couldn’t hear his response, and imagined him whispering:
It’s one of those Hasidics.

A nurse walked past me and entered the room. The doctor came a few minutes later. For a long time, I could hear the nurse counting to ten and shouting, “Push, push!” Then she would scold, “Not
now!
I told you
not
to push!” Occasionally, I heard soft moaning from Gitty, and wished I could be in the room with her, to hold her hand and wipe the sweat from her brow. After an excruciating thirty minutes, the nurse’s yelling stopped and I heard the cry of an infant. I felt my throat tighten. The nurse said, “girl,” then, “7:22,” then, “six pounds, five ounces.” I laid my forehead against the wall outside the door and let my tears flow.

Twenty minutes later, the doctor left the room and walked past me. When he neared the nurses’ station, he paused, then turned back, as if trying to recall where he’d seen me. “Oh,” he said finally. “It’s a girl.”

I was ravenously hungry when I left Gitty at around two in the afternoon. I remembered the words of the Talmud:
He who
feasts
on the Ninth, it is as if he
fasted
both the Ninth and the Tenth.
Yom Kippur itself, the tenth day of Tishrei, is for fasting and prayer, but before and after were times for rejoicing. Sins were going to be erased. Offenses written off. The balance sheet balanced once again, and all would be good in the great heavenly accounting.
If your sins are like scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow; if they are red as crimson, they shall be made like wool.

I was all for feasting, except I had no idea where to get kosher food at the hospital. All I’d eaten that day was a small slice of honey cake in the morning, grabbed from a loaf on the kitchen counter just before Gitty and I had left for the hospital. A nurse told me that there was a kosher vending machine in the hospital cafeteria, but I found it with a large handwritten note saying, “Out of Service.” The empty shelves inside the display windows—“Tuna Sandwich,” “Strawberry Yogurt,” “Cheese Blintz”—mocked me and my growling intestines.

The specter of Yom Kippur loomed large, and I was anxious not to have a two-day fast. I was also anxious to get back to New Square. The first of the penitence prayers was to be held at four. I wanted to tell the rebbe about my newborn child and to receive his blessings and his good wishes. I wanted to be back among family and friends, away from the alienating glances of Manhattanites. The last bus to New Square would be leaving at three, from midtown, several miles away. I had one hour, plenty of time to get there, I thought.

Just as I was about to hail a cab, I checked my wallet: I had no money.

I’d miscalculated. I’d brought cash for the taxi in the morning but had failed to take along enough to get home. I had a ticket for the Monsey Trails bus, courtesy of my father-in-law, but it would do me no good if I couldn’t get to midtown within the hour. I owned no credit cards and carried no checkbook. I stood at the curb in front of the hospital, gripped with panic.

It was then that I noticed:
a Yid!
He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car parked several yards away. He appeared to be a Litvak, with his thick, short
payess
tucked behind his ears, white shirt with no
tallis katan
over it. Not a Hasid, but still, an Orthodox Jew. He was reading from what appeared to be a religious text, and he looked up as I approached.

I explained my situation. Could he possibly loan me a few dollars? I asked. I would send him payment as soon as I got home.

The man looked at me for a moment, expressionless. I had expected him to offer warm congratulations and best wishes for a meaningful Yom Kippur. I was certain that he’d help me out—it was inconceivable that a religious Jew would do otherwise.

Instead, he stuck his hand in his pants pocket and fished around for something.

“Take the bus,” he said, and placed four quarters into my hand.

I looked at the coins in my hand, speechless. The man turned back to his book. What kind of Yid was this?

I thought of the words of the old rebbe, admonishing his Hasidim never to ride New York City’s public transit system.
Be killed rather than transgress
, the old rebbe had said, declaring it a cardinal sin.

“Please,” I said to the man in the car. “I can’t.” My tongue stuck in my mouth as I struggled to find the words, and then watched as the man reached with his index finger to the window button. He kept his eyes glued to his book as the window rolled up, as if my presence was just another noisy distraction in the bustling city.

“One glance where you shouldn’t,” the old rebbe had said, “and you lose an entire year of Torah study.”

Protect your eyes.
In the ritual bath. At the supermarket. On the streets.
He who gazes at the small finger of a woman, it is as though he has gazed at her place of immodesty.
How could I possibly ride the city bus, with so much immodesty on a hot summer day?