Hush (34 page)

“No,” I said.

“Who is she?”

“Just a girl. Used to be a neighbor.”

“
Yushive
family?

“Yes.”

“Who is she married to?”

“She’s not married.”

“What kind of boy is she looking for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and took the picture and tucked it under the shirts in my drawer. “I don’t really know.”

I went to the kitchen and took out two glass cups. Yankel took out the orange juice and we sat by the table. I opened my lesson-planning notebook and began reviewing the next morning’s lesson. Yankel sipped at his orange juice.

“Hey,” he said casually. “You heard about this Weinstein story? It’s all over the place today. My learning partner even had a reporter try to ask him questions in the street near the Talmud Torah, where he lives.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Crazy story. And I heard this Berger family is the one that is accusing them. I don’t know how they are not terrified. You know them? ”

“No, they’re not
Yushive
.…”

“This Weinstein is supposed to be one of the best fifth-grade teachers. He’s been there for almost twenty years, and yesterday morning the police suddenly showed up at the
cheder
and arrested him. Supposedly the Berger boy, today already twenty, suddenly woke up to complain that he had done inappropriate things some ten years ago in fifth grade.” He grimaced. “Of course the secular media is having a heyday with it.… Could you imagine his family’s embarrassment? Taking away a respectable
Rebbe
in handcuffs?”

He rolled his eyes.

“I remember in
yeshiva
there was a boy who also called the police on one of our
mashgichim.
This real bum, a depressed boy, was always looking for attention, making problems, and never learning. After the head of the
yeshiva
threatened to throw him out, he suddenly filed charges. Not that he could prove anything…crazy boy. The head of the
yeshiva
always told us a person’s mind who is not in Torah can only be in
shtism.
” He gulped down the rest of his orange juice. “I guess there will always be these people who don’t know what to do with their lives.…”

Something snapped in me, deep inside. I stood up. I could not speak, could not feel, only watched my hand grab the glass cup near me, felt my arm swing back hard, and saw the cup as it flew over the table, over my husband’s head, and smashed against the whitewashed wall near the small mirror by the entrance. And a million little pieces of glass shattered on the floor.

I sat back down at the table, picked up the red pen by the notebook, and continued writing my lesson plans. There was silence; a deep, long silence. I never looked up, never saw his stunned face, his bewildered expression. I just focused on finishing my lesson.

“Wh-wha…What happened?” I could hear the fear in his voice.

I said nothing.

“I…did…did I say something wrong?”

I said nothing.

“Gittel, why…why did you do that?”

My hand began to tremble. I said nothing. Nothing. Could not say a word that night at all. Yankel spoke to me, said things, asked questions. I did not hear, only clenched my hands trying to stop the shaking, the swaying of my body over the notebook.
Don’t cry, Devory
,
don’t cry.
I was so afraid.
It is good up there near Hashem, isn’t it?
I couldn’t breathe.
Don’t be angry that you are dead
.
I can’t be crazy anymore.

“Gittel, look at me.…”

Devory?

“Gittel, what happened?”

Can you hear me?

“Go to bed. You look…terrible.”

Devory, don’t cry.
…

CHAPTER FIFTY

So many broken dreams, a million little pieces shattered. But who had time for the fear, for little girls who would not die, when the
Rebbe
of
Yushive
was coming to America? It was Yankel who told me the news. He arrived home the next morning, after prayers, and when he saw me joking with my mother on the phone he smiled with relief, and then excitedly told me the news. The three greatest rabbis of today’s generation were arriving on the shores of New York: the
Yushive Rebbe
,
Rav
Schapiro of the
litvish
, and the
Kotlaneh
Gaon, a famed scholar.

My father, sipping the small glass of whiskey my mother allowed him before she hid the bottle, joyfully confirmed the news that evening.

“Yosef Yitzchak had told me about it last week, but you know him, so I decided not to say anything until I was sure. They will be here for exactly twenty-four hours. They’re also going to L.A. and London to strengthen the Jewish nation during these difficult times. Not that times for Jews were ever very easy.…”

The
Yushive Rebbe
would stay in the Golds’ house, a simple family, and one whom the
Rebbe
’s father had already once stayed by when he came to visit New York two decades before. The
Rebbe
had refused the offer of the Cohen family, the richest
Yushive
family, who had used no small amount of influence for the unforgettable honor that would be remembered for three generations of
shidduchim
. What was good enough for the
Rebbe
’s father, the
Rebbe
said, was good enough for him, and the Gold family moved out of their house to make room for the
Rebbe
and his entourage.

On Sixteenth Avenue, near Simcha Hall where the rabbis would speak as one, hundreds of young men prepared the street, repainting the traffic poles, washing store windows, stringing yards of little white lights along the lampposts, and hanging signs on every block welcoming the rabbis to their humble abode in Brooklyn. Police set up barricades along the entire avenue blocking traffic and mounted a huge screen with an audio system right outside Simcha Hall so the women could also see the rabbis and be inspired by their words of wisdom.

Every
Chassidic
and
litvish
school in Borough Park and Flatbush closed on that fateful day one week later. I walked with Bubba Yuskovitz down Sixteenth Avenue in the early afternoon, holding her arm in mine, and watched the thousands of Jews,
payos
flying or tucked behind their ears, in their long black coats, shorter dark jackets, long beards, short beards, growing beards.

Bubba Yuskovitz cried. She stood on the corner within the barricades reserved for women and cried tears of joy. “Hitler lost his war,” she said, smiling through her tears. “The ghetto is still alive, the Jewish nation is still strong, the true people of Israel still live.… This is how it looked in the ghetto in Poland. I was such a little girl, but I remember. This is how it looked when the
Rebbe
came, the
Yushive Rebbe
’s father. We would stand and watch how he walked by, so frail yet so powerful, so old, yet afraid of nothing—an angel of fire, a prophet of truth. This is victory; let the Germans see this! For every Yid they killed, there are now two. Look at how we’ve grown, look!”

Hundreds of women gathered outside the building, where we watched the rabbis speak, first
Rav
Schapiro, then the
Rebbe
of
Yushive
, then the
Kotlaneh
Gaon. They spoke of holiness, of purity, of the evils of the world and how we must keep ourselves above and away from it all. They spoke about the Nazis and how we had triumphed over them but how sometimes the biggest source of destruction could come from within; the malignant effects of college, of magazines, of movies, of immodest dress, and most of all, the insidious evil of the Internet—the new darkness that must be destroyed at all costs. The Jews must not change, they commanded. They must set themselves apart from the world in every way. The Torah was what had kept the Jews a holy nation since the beginning of time, and it was the Torah that must be preserved, studied, lived by every day, every moment of our lives.

My mother held a small tape recorder in her hand. “It’s not every day that one sees and hears the
Rebbes
themselves speaking…,” she said. “This is something I’ll share with the grandchildren.”

After the speeches, the men danced—a sea of black swaying, swelling, swirling, dancing around and around, back and forth, tens of circles, ripples as each man held the arm of the other, and we women quietly hummed and tapped our feet along.

When Yankel came home late that night, after waiting in line for a blessing, he was ecstatic. “The
Rebbe
gave me a
bracha,
” he said. “He blessed us that we will have a child. He said, ‘It will come, it will come.’ ”

Yankel had waited for over two hours for a blessing from the
Rebbe
. He had only managed to get in because Laibel the helper, who stood by the door where the
Rebbe
sat, letting people by, knew Yankel through his oldest brother, who had once tutored his younger cousin before his
Bar Mitzvah
for free.

Yankel was happy for a week. He laughed more, cut the salads into even pieces, and waited in anticipation for the good news. But instead I got my period. I called my mother in panic. My mother rebuked me sharply for my hysterics but promised that if I was not expecting in one month she would make an appointment at an excellent fertility doctor, one that her friend Chaya had used after she had given birth to five children and then suffered secondary infertility.

Yankel was devastated. He said it must be his fault. There must be a
stiyah
—an obstruction in heaven—that was preventing us from having children. He told me it said in the Talmud that if a person ever as much as hurt another Jew, the Jew’s pain could affect Hashem’s decisions concerning that person. And then he remembered how, when he was fourteen, he had once made fun of a boy after he had lost a game of ball, and when he was eight, how he had refused to play with a neighbor, and when he was twelve and thirteen, how he had spoken back to his mother, and when he was fifteen, he had refused to study with a weaker boy in his class.…

“I remember how he cried when I told him no. I felt bad, but I never apologized. I must go ask him for forgiveness.”

I agreed wholeheartedly. Together we made a list of potential victims obstructing heavenly benevolence and vowed to beg forgiveness one by one if I was not pregnant within the month.

With our lists folded and hidden in the closet, Yankel was reassured. I was not. I felt depressed and anxious and did not go to my mother for dinner that night. When Yankel returned alone from my parents’ house, he wanted to know why I was so unhappy. “It’s hard, but you can’t mope like that. You didn’t go to work today, you didn’t even call to tell them.… Don’t worry! If the
Rebbe
said it will come, it will! We must have faith. If not this month, then the next.…”

But the next evening, when my husband came home from learning, I was back in bed. I felt tired and jittery. Yankel sat across from me near a bag of unfolded laundry, and when I ignored his entreaties he went to the kitchen, where he washed the dishes. He then returned to the room and pulled the undergarments out of the laundry bag. “I’ll fold them,” he said, and laid my underwear out on the bed, fumbling with it this way and that, first rolling it, then folding it. Then he found my sports bra. Pulling it out of the pile, he let it dangle by the strap from his finger, gawking at it wide-eyed, observing it as one does a strange new species, his mouth hanging slightly open in a most un-
Chassidish
manner. Angrily, I jumped out of bed. I grabbed a towel nearest to me and chased Yankel out of the room and around the kitchen table as I ran after him in circles threatening to call
Reb
Erlich on the spot. From across the table, he quickly threw the bra at me, offering his boxers in exchange. “You could fold my boxers! You could fold my boxers, see if I care!” I told him I had little interest in his big boxers; he could fold them by himself. And holding my bra close to my heart, I went back to bed.

At 7:30 p.m., Yankel went to evening prayer, and I sullenly packed shampoo, tights, and a towel and went off to the
mikvah
once more. I met Dinah there, in the waiting room. We blushed, smiled at each other, and exchanged small talk. Dinah was my former classmate in
Yushive
high school, the only one who went to college, wore skirts that barely covered her knees, and married some bum she had fallen in love with who knows where. My mother told me, “Love, shmove, such marriages end in nowhere.” I observed Dinah closely, her sparkling eyes, her excited giggle, her annoying smile as if she had a secret she was not going to share, and tried my hardest to glimpse the nowhere that was nowhere in sight. Finally, I decided to ignore her, and said my Psalms while waiting for my turn. Later, sitting in the bath trying to pray, I thought a lot about Dinah, who dared look so happy but was probably secretly miserable inside, and I fell asleep right there in the warm water between one prayer and another.