Jephte's Daughter (29 page)

Her hair was longer than she remembered, a shaggy tangle of curls pulled severely back. The face was wan and older—definitely, visibly older. Kinder too, perhaps. A face that had learned sympathy through personal tragedy. Dear face, Batsheva thought. And when she finished explaining Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
as a journey to the darkness of one’s soul, an exploration of self, Batsheva felt the sting of hot tears well up in her eyes as she remembered the good, full days of her youth, curled up with Elizabeth, poring over the books she loved.

There was no way she could go up there to her, she thought. Why, nothing had changed. The detectives could be there right now in the lecture hall, waiting for her to make just such a move. It made no sense to come out of hiding now, no sense at all. But her feet, no longer under her control, went down the long aisle. Just to get a closer look, she told herself. She will not recognize me. I will turn away long before. But she knew the familiar face had pierced through her shell of loneliness and she could not go back inside again.

When the lecture was over, she waited patiently outside the building. A light drizzle had begun to fall and she put up her umbrella. A moment later she saw Elizabeth emerge, her head bent against the rain. She walked up to her rapidly.

“Excuse me. I was in your lecture now and I wanted to ask you a question if I might.”

Elizabeth didn’t look up. “Ask away, but you’ll have to hurry along with me. I’m going to the dining room for some coffee. Come along then.” Now where have I heard that voice before? Elizabeth thought vaguely. She shrugged, defeated. “Now, what was it you wanted to ask me?” She hurried along, thinking only of the sheltering warmth ahead of her.

“I wanted to ask you about Anna Karenina. Why, why did she do it?”

“But the lecture was about Conr—” Elizabeth stopped suddenly and looked up, drawing the girl over to a streetlamp. The women looked into each other’s eyes. Elizabeth reached up, touching the familiar face, wanting to feel it solid beneath her hand, afraid it might vanish. She hugged the girl’s delicate, slim back and was reassured by the fragile presence of real bones. “Batsheva?” she questioned, feeling the presence of the thin line between reality and fantasy, between sanity and insanity.

Batsheva took Elizabeth’s cold hands in her own warm ones and kissed them. “My dear friend.”

Wrapped up in bed in warm flannel nightgowns and holding hot cocoa, they talked deep into the night. Elizabeth would ask and Batsheva would answer, her voice sometimes tearful, sometimes earnest. And sometimes their voices would tangle, a question and answer interrupting each other with urgency as they reversed roles and Batsheva asked. And as the night wore on, their voices grew louder and less serious, joining in shouts of girlish laughter like teenagers at a pajama party. With Elizabeth beside her, so many things began to seem funny. Isaac’s demanding discipline and self-control from the baby while he stuffed himself with ice cream. Getting drunk with fat, redheaded Nigel and his hairy knuckles. Isaac’s thing getting stuck in the hole in the sheet, his demanding signs of her lost viginity when he couldn’t keep an erection long enough to deflower her. This Isaac seemed less a monster and more a poor buffoon, or, as Elizabeth put it, a real space cadet.

That comforted Batsheva somehow, reducing her ordeal to more human, forgettable dimensions. And the laughter was very good, very healing to them both.

They woke late the next morning, curiously full of energy when Akiva climbed into bed with them, his face full of cookie crumbs stolen from the cupboard. He put a tentative hand on Elizabeth’s soft, ample breast and, liking its softness, squeezed with both hands.

“Men. They’re all the same.” She giggled, tickling him. “And you, my fine young man, so carefully brought up in the Holy City.” She wagged a mock-angry finger at him. “And how are you set up for money?” Elizabeth asked, turning her attention to Batsheva.

“I’ve got enough for a year or two. But I need to…I want to work. I just don’t know what I can do.”

“You could go back to school for a while then? Oh, just as you always wanted to! Remember your dream? We could go to Paris during the spring break, and ski in Italy during the winter break. I have such a fun group of friends, really interesting people.”

“What happened to Graham?”

Her face clouded; then a glimmer of a smile broke through. “Off with the old, on with the new,” she said, with forced gaiety.

“I’m sorry, Liz.” Batsheva lowered her eyes, regretting the pain in her friend’s voice. “You loved him so.”

“Years ago you would have said: ‘I’m desperately sorry, dearest, you loved him passionately.’ A definite improvement, there. No doubt from the complete lack of my tutoring for a few years.”

“No, actually, it was Isaac’s Yiddish lessons that did it,” she said with a straight face. And then they both started to giggle again, thinking of Isaac and Graham, suicide notes and trips to the south of France, until their stomachs ached and the laughter became hysterical. Elizabeth left, taught class, and returned late in the afternoon. She brought a package with her.

“What’s in it?” Batsheva asked her, tentatively tearing off the wrapping paper.

“What you asked for. A job.”

Batsheva held the Leica, stroking it as she would a beloved human thing. “But I gave it to you.”

“My dear, I already have a little Kodak to match my talents. Take this back and make some money.”

“Doing what?”

“What!” Elizabeth exclaimed, exasperated. “Why, taking pictures of course. Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, confirmations, baby pictures, passport photos—for starters. And then some really artistic things for magazines. You could even set up a darkroom in the potting shed out back…”

“I don’t know. Do you think I could, for money?”

“Why not? You could set up a small studio in your living room with a few different backgrounds and put up notices on the bulletin boards at the university. Students are always doing foolish things like getting married and having babies and getting passports.”

“I think,” Batsheva said suddenly, startled by a sudden vision, “I think that my life is finally going to start.”

His name was Robin Pernell. He had dark-blond hair that slanted across his forehead and a way of tossing his head to get it out of his eyes that made him squint with laughter and look charmingly boyish, Batsheva thought, trying to capture the look on film. He wore scruffy-looking jeans and an old sweater with a long red-and-white knit scarf around his neck. He was a young graduate student in economics, about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, she estimated. He had been one of the first of her clients to respond to a handwritten notice on the university’s bulletin board.

Getting just the look she wanted had turned out to be difficult, and she had had to keep asking him to come back, feeling rather embarrassed and assuring him that it wouldn’t cost him extra—a point that by his clothes she felt would be important to him. He hadn’t seemed to mind, though, which struck her as very kind at first, and then later, as rather odd. He just kept coming back, listening dutifully to her instructions, as she fumbled with the lights and the umbrellas to set the shot up perfectly. All the while, he sat there quietly, watching her with keen interest and an ironic smile.

When she finally handed him the last print—a really excellent portrait they both agreed—she sighed with relief. But the next night he turned up again. “I’m running out of excuses,” he said, flicking his hair out of his eyes and letting the little laugh lines around his mouth deepen. “Won’t you please go out with me tomorrow night?” She was was shyly pleased, surprised, and a little uncomfortable.

She had not gone out alone with a man since Nigel. But he had stood at the door, a little pathetically, she thought, waiting for her answer. So she said yes because his face pleased her, and his manner seemed gentle and controllable. He showed up early and she hardly recognized him in a new tuxedo, forcing her to excuse herself while she hurried upstairs to change out of her skirt and sweater and into evening clothes. He took her to a private staircase at the Royal Opera House that led to box seats.

An old gentlemen dressed in a fine tuxedo leaned out of the next box and smiled at them. “Robin! Haven’t seen you in ages. How’s the earl?”

“Fine, Sir Richard,” Robin answered, and the man nodded at Batsheva with approval.

She felt the blush rising from the modest high neck of the pretty gray-velvet dress she had purchased with so much pleasure so recently. The other women wore low-cut satins with sparkling jewels brilliant on their white skin. She felt prissy and old-fashioned. She would buy such a dress. Tomorrow, she vowed.

“‘Sir Richard’? ‘Earl’?” she questioned, but he laughed and tossed his head, his very handsome boyish head, until her attention was called away by the magnificent rise of the heavy red-velvet curtains that pulled back into unbelievably lush folds to reveal the fairyland of Swan Lake.

The dancers, in love with their own bodies, lifted by the entrancing music, told a story of pain and love, betrayal and renewal. Batsheva watched Odette move with the graceful flow of a swan’s effortless glide across water, an almost bodiless spirit molding herself to the music, following the dancer’s agony and happiness, and her final ecstasy. She was delighted with the good box seat and the wonderful view. The gilt that adorned the theater, the magnificent old chandeliers that illuminated the huge hall, enfolded her in a splendid richness and excitement that made her almost feel like crying with pleasure. She glanced at Robin gratefully. The most expensive tickets around, no doubt. And a rented tux. Poor boy, to spend all his money to impress her, money he certainly could have used to buy himself a new winter coat.

She looked at him secretly in a sidelong glance. He made her think of Gerald in
Women in Love
. He, too, “had a glisten like sunshine, a gleaming beauty, a maleness like a young, good-humored, smiling wolf.” She hid her smile in the back of her hand. He caught the smile and the gesture and gently took her hand away and kissed it. “What is so amusing? This is supposed to be the tragic part: Siegfried vows eternal love to Odile, mistaking her for Odette, and now Odette is stuck forever as a big white bird. But I’d never do that to you. Betray you.” His eyes were serious and tender.

The kiss sent chills up her arm. No man had ever done that before, she thought, missing the wonderful irony of such a thought. Isaac must have done that to her. Once. But curiously, though he had battered her body, he had not touched her dreams. He had never been her lover, and thus whatever he had done could not prove or disprove those girlish dreams of love and romance that lay cocoonlike deep inside her, waiting for the right conditions to emerge. And so she faced each new man with more hope than fear. It was all new, without precedent. She wondered if she liked it.

She pulled her hand away gently and turned her hot face back to the stage. The lovers leapt and turned in perfect time to the music, becoming the visual embodiment of the soaring notes. Every gesture, every curve of every finger, spoke of years of discipline and training.

How wonderful to have such an art, such a talent. To be trained for it. To know who and what you are and to always be able to push yourself up a little further, to be a little better, year by year. I am so useless, she thought. I don’t know how to do anything, except take pictures. Maybe.

The next day she went out and tried on some evening dresses with no back and very little front. She looked at herself in the dressing room, thinking of Robin, the slow, boyish smile breaking over his face, his wolflike pleasure. It gave her a delicious shiver of panic. She looked at herself doubtfully, surveying the long smooth stretch of skin that went from her throat to the soft rounded beginnings of her breasts and deep between them.

“It is what they are wearing to the theater this season,” a saleswoman told her decisively. “It looks perfect on you.” She bought the dress.

On the weekend, he took her to the National Theatre. They sat in the stark, excitingly modern lobby and listened to a pianist in an evening gown and a cellist in a tuxedo play Mozart and Bach. All around them well-dressed people held drinks and listened quietly with real interest. It was all so…so…civilized. Yes, that was it. Civilized. She felt a calm invading her body, streaming through her like the warming alcohol. Did one need anything else? Pleasant company, wonderful music and theater, fine liqueurs? What did one need with all the heavy burden of tradition, of family, of religion weighing one down?

She looked at Robin’s long, smooth fingers that held her bare arm solicitously, as if she were a precious, delicate objet d’art, and she remembered Isaac’s heavy insistent hands, his firm grip of ownership. She had gotten free of him! Perhaps she should get free of it all, religion, tradition, heritage, birthrights. Throw it all overboard like so much extra baggage. She felt it all holding her down like an anchor of lead when she wanted to rise, like a hot-air balloon, bursting and expanding with untried possibilities. She wanted to rise and soar above it all. And up there, she would find a different stratosphere. She would find calm, wonderful, peaceful, civilized calm.

They took their drinks out onto the balcony and watched the lights on the boats resting on the Thames illuminate the dark silken ribbon of water. The theater was a beacon of light in the dark night, full of music and exquisite shades of feeling. Afterward he took her to the Dorchester for a late supper.

“Are you sure you can…” she began delicately, looking around at the elegant lobby, full of marble statues and jewel cases.

“Afford it?” His perfect white teeth gleamed with pleasure. “Yes indeed, my dear.”

“Good evening, Lord Haversham.” The maître d’ approached them hurriedly.

“Good evening, Albert,” Robin replied calmly.

She didn’t have time to dwell on her confusion, because a moment later she was face-to-face with a menu such as she had never encountered before. She put it down nervously. She had never been to a nonkosher restaurant. There listed before her was a cornucopia of forbidden foods: beef slaughtered without rabbis testing the sharpness of the blades to ensure the animal felt no pain; beef unsalted and unsoaked to rid it of blood; forbidden mixtures of meat and milk or cheese; ham and pork and shellfish. She shivered. Even the wine, brought in a gleaming silver decanter by a deferential waiter, was forbidden. For wine, unlike liquor or beer, also had to be supervised by rabbis for the entire process, from picking the grapes to the final product.

“Shall I order for you?” Robin looked up, amused at what he interpreted as her endearing childish delight in such a selection, her inability to choose among such tantalizing possibilities.

She hesitated, feeling trapped by a combination of her own desire to try everything, and a deep-seated fear, an almost terror of straying from the familiar path. Was she ashamed of who she was? “Please,” she finally whispered miserably.

Misunderstanding completely, he ordered for them both. “You really haven’t told me much about yourself, Betsy,” he began, leaning back and sipping the wine. The waiter had just filled her glass. She held it, feeling the smooth globe moisten and cool her palm. Betsy had been Elizabeth’s idea, but she had trouble relating to it. Betsy Wetsy. Sweet Betsy from Pike. She smiled. “There’s nothing much to tell. I’m divorced with a three-year-old son. I’ve enrolled for the spring term at the university and I take photos to earn my keep.”

“No alimony or child support?”

She shook her head. “I have no wish for contact of any kind with my ex-husband.”

His brows arched. “That bad, was it?”

She smiled. “Worse.”

He reached his hand across the table. “My gain, the fool.” His hand covered hers so warmly. “You haven’t touched your wine. It’s wonderful. Do.”

“Yes. I’m sure it is.” He was being so nice. She wanted so much to fit in to the beautiful place. To feel at home in the calm, cultured room. She brought the shimmering liquid to her lips and saw his eyes rest on the smooth curve of her neck. She closed her eyes, gulping it down, and felt it burn through her body, hot with accusation.

“But you haven’t told me anything. Where were you born? Who are your parents? What kind of flowers do you like? Do you sleep on your back or your stomach?”

She laughed. “Are you sure you’re an economist, not an anthropologist?”

“You’re always laughing at me,” he reproved her, hurt turning his features serious. “I am mad about you. I want to swallow you whole, to know you completely.”

The wine was beginning to work, making her reckless and sleepy. “I am a runaway princess, a barefoot heiress. I was born and raised in New York, and I lived for a time in California. During the school year I went away to boarding school where they filled my head with important information about God. My parents were very conservative and didn’t like the Hollywood influence on their pristine, virginal offspring, reader of dirty literature and dreamer of wild dreams.”

“Say, this is more like it! What kind of literature?”

“D. H. Lawrence mostly, who, incidentally, was a terrible prude. Ran away with the mother of children he was tutoring, a fat German
hausfrau
. Insisted on marrying her. He tried to beat her, you know, except that he was so frail and she was so big that just a mild defense on her part laid him out flat. Poor David Herbert.” She shook her head, commiserating.

“Let’s drink to him, shall we?” Robin laughed, tossing his handsome head. “To David and Frieda.” He lifted his glass and drained it.

She was beginning to feel slightly woozy as she lifted the glass to her lips and sipped again. Each time the liquid touched her lips, she felt polluted, poisoned. When she finished, to her horror the waiter brought the first course. She stared at it. Prawns on a delicate bed of smoked meat.

“Smoked ham, a delicacy the way they do it here. Frightfully good.” He ate heartily.

She picked up her knife and fork decisively and cut the meat. She wound it around her fork and lifted it to her mouth. She saw the accusing faces of her father and Isaac rise up before her, the shocked and horrified faces of the kindly bearded men who had been her teachers at school. She touched the meat to her lips and felt her head swim. The fork dropped to the floor. The waiter rushed to replace it.

“Are you all right, dearest?” Robin’s voice was full of concern.

She pushed back her chair abruptly. Her legs felt like rubber. “Will you excuse me for a moment.” Without waiting for his murmured concern, she wound her way with as much dignity as she could through the softly humming room and felt the eyes of the men turn and linger as she passed. In the ladies’ room, all green and white like a lovely spring garden, she heaved miserably. She touched her face with cold water and washed out her mouth many times. She spent a long time drying her lips and replacing the lipstick. She stared at herself in the mirror. The red lips. The white, shameful cleavage. The red dress that clung to her tiny waist, her slim hips.

Who are you? she wondered. No one I know, or like very much. A woman trying once again to please a man, the way I tried to please my father, to please my husband. I don’t know who I am yet, she thought. But surely, I am not the same as the people sitting here in this room enjoying this meal. Perhaps one day I shall be. But not now, not today. She went back to the table. She was tired of playing games.

“Feeling better?” he got up and helped her into her seat.

“Yes. Thank you.” She saw the dish had mercifully been removed. In its place, the waiter brought a large lobster. Red and ugly. She breathed deeply. “Robin. I have a confession to make. I can’t eat any of these things, or drink the wine, because I’m Jewish.”

Robin’s placid face puckered in confusion. He pushed back his hair with his hand, trying to concentrate, to assimilate the information. “But what’s that got to do with the food?”

“It’s not kosher,” she said simply and went white when he burst out laughing.

“Don’t tell me people still believe in all that rot? I mean, didn’t that go out with the Middle Ages?”

“You mean like ghosts who are holy and virgins who are mothers?” she said with cold fury.