All Who Go Do Not Return (41 page)

Tziri stopped coming, and Freidy followed suit soon after. It was April 2009; Tziri had turned fourteen the previous September, and Freidy turned thirteen in January. I didn’t want to fight my own children, but their change was so sudden and so inexplicable that I felt socked in the gut just when I needed clarity of mind. I knew that it could not be the children alone. A parent for fourteen years, I was accustomed to my children’s pendulous moods, but this—complete and determined withdrawal from one day to the next—was something else. It had all the hallmarks of bearded, sidecurled puppeteers.

And so I brought the matter into court, and the judge, blessedly, ordered them back.

My two eldest daughters were delivered to my door the next day by Shragi. They brought along their own books to read, no longer trusting the amusements I might offer. The moment they entered, they set themselves down on the edge of my charcoal gray sofa and kept their eyes in their books or stared at the walls.

“How about a game of Cranium?”

Tziri turned a page in her novel. Freidy crossed and recrossed her legs.

“Hey, you want to make mac and cheese? Freidy, you
love
mac and cheese.”

For two hours straight, they refused to eat, speak, play, or even meet my gaze. Every few moments, I would catch Freidy glancing at me, but whenever I looked at her, she averted her eyes quickly. She sat slouched in a corner of the sofa. I got the sense that she wanted for us to speak but was being held back by some invisible force. Tziri, suffering no such doubt, sat stiffly the entire time, her back like a rod, her arm never touching the side rest, poised to leave. Only occasionally would she look up from her book toward Freidy, and in their glances I could see some pact remembered, their resolve reinforced.

I blamed the family court judge most of all. Spiteful ex-spouses and religious minds can be expected to have lapses of reason, but the judge had no such excuse. With a single careless thought, under the guise of “temporary,” he had declared me a “visitor” rather than a father, and the children’s attitudes had changed immediately, as if the courts had confirmed Gitty’s accusations. Now it was my job to convince them otherwise.

“Try to speak to them,” my therapist advised. “Ask them if they have any concerns they want to talk about.” I pulled over a chair and placed it opposite the coffee table, and looked at my silent daughters and cleared my throat.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

My words reverberated against the apartment walls, while my daughters pretended that no one had spoken.

“You know this can’t go on forever, right?”

I crossed my arms and stared at them. I told a joke or two, hoping to elicit a laugh. I stood on my head. I pulled out a pack of cards and performed a couple of old magic tricks, which they had loved watching when they were younger. But they refused to be entertained. And so I sat with them in silence, until we heard the honk of Shragi’s horn.

The three younger ones were now visiting separately from the older girls, although they, too, appeared lost, warming to me during one moment and declaring their unwillingness to visit during the next. Whenever I went to pick them up, only Akiva and Hershy would come out to the car, and I’d make them go back and get Chaya Suri, who would emerge wiping her tears. At my apartment, Hershy got into a new habit. To every remark that I made, his response was, “When can we go home?”

Their visits left me emotionally drained. Later, I would berate myself for taking it to heart as I did and for not thinking more clearly; there were things I could’ve done, perhaps. But at the time, I felt destroyed. My children loved me, I was sure of it. Yet they were living in a world that could not tolerate difference, and I was beginning to realize that I was powerless to fight it.

“I shouldn’t have let those little shits control my emotions,” I would tell a friend later, in anger; but at the time, that’s exactly what I’d done. After they would leave, I would sit in my empty apartment stewing with anger. I cried so much those days, it felt as if my tear ducts would clog, but I wept still, unceasingly, in anger and in despair and in yearning for my children to return, but all I got in response was the rustling of leaves outside my window and another exorbitant bill from my attorney.

Tziri and Freidy’s visits, especially, took an emotional toll that I knew would break me if I let it continue. Shragi called me several times to tell me that the girls were causing Gitty untold grief about their forced visits. They cried. They threw tantrums. They picked fights with the little ones. I believed him and wondered whether it was wise to keep forcing their visits.

During their next visit, while they sat in silence, as always, I turned to them earnestly: “Do you really not want to come anymore?”

For the first time in months, they spoke. “Yes,” they said in unison.

I asked and they answered. I told them how much it hurt for me to hear it, but they showed no reaction. For every question that went unanswered, every remark unacknowledged, the brick in my throat grew larger and lodged itself deeper. I could not let my children see me cry, and yet I wanted only to scream.

Instead, I said I was sorry. I said that I would fix it—say the word, and I’m on it. If only they would speak, and tell me what it was they wanted me to do.

Tziri ignored me as before, but Freidy looked up. For a moment, it seemed as if she might say something. Then she rolled her eyes.

In that eye-roll lay the answer, I realized. How conceited of me to think that I could impose a monumental change and then ask
them
how to fix it. My daughters were rebuking me in the only way children know how. This was not about faith or values or lifestyle choices. Children, I would realize, do not have philosophical problems but only emotional ones. What mattered was not what I believed, or the particulars of how I lived, but that, by my own choices, I had placed myself in the camp of those they were taught to shun, and so I had shamed them, shamed our family, shamed all of us. What they wanted was a father who did not represent the wickedness they were taught to abhor, but I could only be the father I was, and that, clearly, was not good enough.

I told them then that I loved them, that I couldn’t help it, and that I could not imagine life without them. And that regardless of what happened, I would always be there for them.

Tziri’s face remained a mask of contempt. Freidy, who was often quick to tear up, swallowed hard, but when I looked at her, hoping that my eyes would carry my plea, she was busy fingering a spot on her tights, a tiny clump of thread on her knee where a rip had been mended, as if suddenly overcome by the intricacies of navy-blue thread.

“And if you really don’t want to come, I won’t force you.” Moments after the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I thought that by sympathizing with them, by easing up on my demands for their affections, they would feel freer to grant them, but, a split second later, I realized it was unlikely to happen.

We sat in silence for a while longer, until we heard Shragi honking the horn of his minivan. The girls headed to the door in a hurry, but I was ahead of them.

“Family hug?” I asked.

This was the ritual of only months earlier, when the six of us would wrap our arms around one another giddily. This time, the girls held themselves stiffly, while I wrapped my arms around them anyway, and held them close. I could feel their eagerness to get out from my embrace, to be done. All I wanted was never to let go.

I could not know then that this was the last I would see of Tziri and Freidy for a long time. I could not know then that my many phone calls and letters would go unanswered, my messages unreturned. That for years, I would not know whether they even received my messages, or whether they were intercepted and discarded by those tasked with keeping their minds pure.

I could not know then that four years later, I would hear of Tziri’s engagement to a boy she had met for only a few minutes, just as Gitty and I had met twenty years earlier, that I would wait in vain for a phone call or a letter inviting me to her wedding, or that on the night of her wedding, in February 2013, I would sit at my desk in my Brooklyn apartment snacking on a bag of chili corn chips and browsing the Internet, chatting on Facebook, as I did on so many other ordinary nights, trying desperately not to think of the wedding taking place one hour away and the years of my children’s lives I had missed.

I could not know all this then, but as I watched my daughters leave that evening, watched through the blinds as they got into Shragi’s minivan and swung the door closed, I knew that something had ended.

The next week, Shragi called to say that the girls refused to come.

I had said I wouldn’t force them. They were holding me to my word.

In December 2008, nearly nine years after I had been hired, my employer called from his office in Tel Aviv.

“I’m sorry, Shulem. But we are going to have to let you go.”

I wasn’t surprised. The company had begun outsourcing its programming needs to India. I thought I would quickly find employment elsewhere, but the country was in a full-blown recession, and jobs were becoming scarcer by the day. New York City was crawling with unemployed programmers, many of them with master’s degrees in computer science from prestigious universities. Unlike nine years earlier, when computer programmers were practically hired off the street and when I had relied on the Orthodox community’s support network to find my job, I was now trying to find a tech position in New York without even a high school diploma to show on my résumé. I could barely get interviews, and when I did, employers quickly determined that I was not qualified.

I drew money from my unemployment insurance and sent it all to Gitty and the kids, while I tried to scrape by on my meager savings. Gitty and I were trying to sell our home in Monsey, but with the downturn of the housing market, it couldn’t be appraised for more than three-quarters of what we owed on the mortgage, which was soon foreclosed. My car cost more than I could afford, and I owed my landlord several months in back rent. I had no money left to pay for my college classes and decided to discontinue school until things stabilized. I needed to focus my energy on finding a new job. I had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees, my reserve funds were quickly depleting, and I was sinking into unmanageable debt.

I had been many things in adulthood—a husband, an entrepreneur, a computer programmer, a blogger—but for fourteen years, fatherhood defined me most. Now, I no longer knew who I was. After months of harrowing court appearances, I felt drained.

I came to a low place, depressed and suicidal and angry at the world and myself. Most of all, at myself. I could not understand how it had all happened. I could not understand how I had lost my children before the fight had even begun. I blamed myself for not having foreseen it, for not being better prepared, for lack of cunning and craftiness to match the qualities so deftly used by the other side.

In June 2009, I spent a week at the Frawley Psychiatric Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital, after my therapist determined that my suicide ideation was more than just a passing notion. I had fallen into a despair from which I could not see myself out. Perhaps I hadn’t even known until then how much my children meant to me, but now I could not imagine life without them. For more than a decade, their voices had been the first thing I heard when I woke each morning, the rhythm of my days guided by their needs, even when we were not physically together. The realization that I had lost my role as a father, not by the courts but because my children’s minds had been turned against me, sent me tumbling into an emotional sinkhole. I yearned for some way to shut down my mind and was gripped with the increasing conviction that death was the only way to do so.

When I was released from the hospital, my stack of antidepressants in hand, I felt lighter. Grief, I learned, blessedly diminishes over time, and soon the pain would lessen; it was something to work toward and to look forward to. I also forgave myself for some of my failures. I knew that the choices I had made had seemed the best at the time and that if my judgment had failed me at certain points, I could not remain angry with myself forever.

But my resolve had weakened. My fight was gone.

We can beat him down emotionally and financially
, Shragi had said.

He had succeeded.

We met at a local park, three miles down from New Square. A group of Hasidic kids twirled on a merry-go-round nearby, while Shragi and I sat across from each other at a picnic table.

Shragi shook his head. He wanted to clear up a misconception. “We would never keep children from a father.” He was so very surprised, he said, that I’d thought otherwise. “That would be incredibly cruel.”

I asked what he had in mind for an agreement.

“What we would like,” he said, with a salesman’s flourish, “is for you to see the children twice a year.”

I stared at him in disbelief, while he offered some vague explanation for why this was really best for the children. I thought I had been prepared to take whatever I got, but I could not accept this.

“You are aware that they don’t want to see you, yes?”

When I said nothing, he thought for a bit, and then offered four times a year.

I asked for six.

“Fine,” he said. He offered his hand but then pulled it back. “But only the three little ones.”

I bit my tongue, and nodded.

“And only until they’re thirteen,” he said. “Later, it’s difficult. Especially for the boys, after bar mitzvah. You understand, of course.”

I didn’t understand. It didn’t matter.