Jephte's Daughter (32 page)

“Now, David, we need your opinion about this. We are discussing the moral imperative of poetry. Now, my good friend Roger,” she nodded at an intense young man with dark, nervous eyes, “maintains that all art is removed from life. That it has no purpose except to exist. The way a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. However, I maintain that there is such a thing as moral and immoral art.”

“For example?” Roger interrupted.

“Well,” David’s deep voice broke in, “what if one writes a compelling poem about the rape of a small child, from the point of view of the rapist, which absolves him of all guilt, which shows the utter rightness and beauty of the action? It might be wonderful art, perfect verisimilitude, but totally immoral, don’t you agree?”

“No, I don’t.” Roger shook his head. “Once you start preaching in art, once you put shackles on the artist, you are lost. It isn’t art anymore. It’s some preachy sermon. The artist has one responsibility. That is to his art, to make it as perfect as he can, a criticism of life. To do this, he must be free, totally free. Every culture is full of taboos. If the artist adhered to them all, we would never have real art.”

“I agree with David.” Ian shrugged. “The artist, because of his power, has to accept responsibility for the moral consequences of his art. We don’t work in a vacuum. We are dealing with real minds and hearts that are profoundly influenced by what we do. That doesn’t mean I think we need outside censorship. We must discipline ourselves. Artists, priests, scholars, and teachers are all in the same boat. We are molding minds, hearts. There are so many fakes around.”

“Oh, I agree totally.” Roger sneered, his eyes shifting from one brother to the other. “The priest and the poet. Two sides of the same coin, wanting to change the world to their own spiritual calling. Rarefied humans, too good for the rest of us.” He walked off with a shrug.

“Roger paints erotic pictures of large, elderly nudes.” Elizabeth giggled. “So I think you’ve offended him.”

“Do you know what the most beautiful poetry in the world is? It’s the Bible, because it combines the perfection of feeling with the perfection of words,” David mused, when the laughter over Roger subsided. “It follows Milton’s prescription, it’s ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate.”’

“I had no idea there was any poetry in the Bible.” Elizabeth looked up, interested.

“Well, there hasn’t been a great deal of understanding of biblical poetry. It started with Lowth, an Oxford poetry don, who gave a series of thirty-four lectures that were published in 1753 under the title:
De sacra poesi Hebraeorum pracelectiones academicae
.”

“
Nahamu nahamu ’ammi, yo’mar ’Elohekhem, daberu’al laev Yerushalaym we-qire’u ’eleha
,” Batsheva said softly.

‘Be comforted, be comforted, my people, sayest the Lord, speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call unto her that her wars are ended, her sins are pardoned…’ Isaiah, Chapter Forty, verses one and two.” David smiled at her. “It’s so beautiful in Hebrew, the comforting
oo
sounds, wonderful onomatopoeia. You can just feel the soft comfort of the words.”

“Wow. I’m impressed!” Elizabeth said, more than a little impressed.

“David never ceases to amaze me. The man is a walking storehouse of knowledge on every topic on earth. He is an incredible scholar with a mind like a sponge—never loses a drop. He is interested in everything from pre-Columbian art to the mysteries of the Trinity. Puts me to shame.” Ian grinned.

The mention of the Trinity seemed to pour cold water on Batsheva, who was basking in the joy of having spoken Hebrew and been understood, having met someone who not only knew Hebrew but the Bible as well. He was so familiar, so close to being like her and yet so intrinsically alien and strange. He was forbidden, much more than any food or drink. He represented a whole culture that was in locked opposition to her understanding of the world. The old combat of Jew against Christian. Three could not be one, and one was not three. The Jew, still waiting for the Messiah to come and end all suffering, could never be reconciled to the Christian, whose Messiah had come and gone, leaving the world to suffer on.

She was afraid to look at him. So she looked at Ian instead. He surprised her. She had expected someone dark, ascetically thin and tall with the high, hollowed-out cheeks of the poet, dressed in tweeds. Instead, he was solid and square-shouldered with a broad chest and powerful arms and legs. He was very fair with a strong square chin and a high, intelligent forehead. His light-brown eyes exuded a lively energy. He was dressed like a farmer—soft red-flannel workshirt open at the collar, faded jeans and work-boots. She looked from brother to brother, startled at David’s dark, almost Italian coloring, his tall, slim body. They were so totally, startlingly, different in looks. What must their parents look like? she wondered. Yet there was a similarity of spirit: They were both aggressively alive, intensely part of the world, yet floating above it all, in some calm, superior sphere of the universe reserved for the real aristocracy of this world, people who possess generosity of spirit, intelligence, and knowledge.

As her eyes rested on David, she felt a shock of fear go through her. She wanted, she realized, to touch him, to smooth back his straying thick hair, to trace the broad dark brow to the crease of the laugh lines around his eyes, to feel with her lips, the tips of her fingers, the soft throb of the pulse in his temple. “I…I have to leave. Thank you, Elizabeth. It’s been wonderful meeting you all. David, Ian.” She nodded quickly, panic taking hold of her, and turned abruptly, almost rudely, to go without looking up at him again.

“I’ll get your coat, Batsie.” Elizabeth rose, puzzled. They searched for the coat under the mound on the bed and finally retrieved it. “You just got here. Why are you going? Didn’t you have a nice time?” Elizabeth asked, mystified.

“I…the babysitter has to leave early.” She didn’t look up, but plowed on toward the door.

But David was already there, waiting for her.

“I’ll take you, Batsheva.” He held the door open for her.

“No, really. I live so close by…”

“Please,” he said, his eyes forcing hers to meet his. “I have to get back to the seminary early. My car is right outside. I would dearly love the pleasure of your company, if only for a few more minutes. Please.”

“I can’t,” she whispered miserably. But he had already tucked her arm comfortably through his and she knew there was no way to escape even if she had still wanted to.

She closed the door behind the last guest, kicked off her shoes, and padded tiredly back into the living room. She was weary from the responsibility of hostessing, of being bright and cheerful and witty. He had come. The thought exhilarated her and filled her with despair. She wanted to close her eyes now and savor every moment, remember every glance exchanged, decipher every remark for subtle hints, the way schoolgirls do with their first innocent crush. There had been women around him all evening, but he had sought her out. But maybe he was just being polite—after all, it
was
her party. He was that type, gentlemanly, courteous. Old-fashioned in so many ways, like the soft shuffling country boys of her youth, except with a mind and talent that she could only admire, the way one admires in awe any natural wonder.

She tasted the triumph once again. Ian Hope had accepted her invitation. He had been in her house, sat on her sofa. She looked toward it with pleasure, remembering, and a sudden shock pierced through her. “I thought you’d gone.” She looked at him almost horrified. He had been stretched out there all along, and she hadn’t known it! An irrational disappointment flooded her. She had wanted to revel in the illusion, the daydream, and here he was, dangerously, uncompromisingly real. Did she really want that?

“I wanted to be alone with you, Elizabeth.” The words thrilled her to an extent that made her feel foolish and uncomfortable. She began to be afraid, to wish he would go, or that he would never, ever go.

He got up and paced the room, running his hands roughly through his wild shock of hair, disheveled as a lion’s mane. “I’m no good at this sort of thing at all. No good at all.” He seemed to be talking to himself. He stood in front of her, his hands gripping the sides of a small glass of brandy. “You see, when I am alone, just me and a pen and paper, I have all the words in the world. But when I need to use them to communicate face-to-face, I am as speechless as a newborn baby.” He put down the glass and clasped his hands behind him in frustration. Elizabeth watched him carefully, dreamily. His energy frightened her. She was used to Graham’s sophisticated calm, his lifeless, cheerful wit that he used as clothing to cover up the appalling emptiness of his soul. This man hid nothing. His willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve was wonderful and confusing to her. It was a challenge she was unsure she could meet.

He sat down on the sofa and looked into the dying embers of the fire and let his hands fall helplessly between his knees.

She couldn’t bring herself to sit next to him, so she sat at his feet. He smoothed the bright gold-red of her hair, threading his large, vibrant hands through the hair at her temples, then massaging them backward, spreading her hair around her shoulders.

“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I would love to make love to you,” he said with simple honesty that took her breath away. She felt her body shiver, her back arch from the soft massage of his hands over her shoulders and back. She closed her eyes, almost afraid to breathe, waiting. But he did not continue. He drew his hands away and pushed them deeply into his pockets, stretching out his solid, handsome legs.

“But I won’t. I can’t.”

She opened her eyes, a shock of fear going through her. He was standing by the fireplace now, his chin resting on his closed fist. “Why not, Ian?” My God, how foolish and needy she sounded! How obvious! She hated herself, but felt that she had no choice. She forgot how to play games with him, or she didn’t want to remember.

“Because I want more than that from you. I want everything or nothing. I want you to know everything about me—every awful, rotten thought I’ve ever had, every unkindness I’ve ever done. I want you to be perfectly clear. I am a serious man who wants serious pleasures.” He took her hands in his and kissed her fingertips, gently, softly, each one in its turn. “I am more vulnerable than any woman—most men are. We are fragile, really. I am terrified that you would find out something you couldn’t bear about me. So I want you to know me first; then we will decide together.”

“But I want you now, Ian,” she pleaded like a little lost girl.

She understood him perfectly and it terrified her. It would be so much easier to go to bed with him now, to feel his body cover hers, to keep herself closed off and hidden from him, giving him only the obvious. It had been enough for Graham, for every other man she had ever known. She was terrified of what he was asking her and wanted to seduce him, to take the easy way out.

He understood that, and resisted her, though she could see it took all his strength.

“No, I don’t want that.” He shook his head and moved away from her. “We must be friends first. Like little teenagers.” He smiled. “Boyfriend and girlfriend. We will date. I will show you all my terrible poems that I keep hidden from everyone else. I will tell you the unacceptable feelings of jealousy, avarice, and gluttony I feel in the middle of the night.” He smiled at her, a self-mocking, revealing smile. “And then, when you know it all, you will tell me if you can love me the way you have never loved another man.” He understood her, she saw. Her suspicions, her callousness. But also her ability to criticize, to demand quality. He frightened her. Commitment frightened her.

“You are like your friend Batsheva, you know.”

“Like her? How?”

“You are both pure souls that life has just washed over, tossing you around but never really changing what you are inside, essentially.”

“And what is that?”

“There is a diamond-hard purity in you. An innocence. I’m afraid no man could ever live up to it. Certainly not a poor specimen like me.” His face fell dejectedly.

Her hand touched his face and he saw the smile spreading her lips. “And you are like your brother. A saint. He was very good to Batsheva, wasn’t he? I hope it wasn’t wrong of me to ask him to cheer her up. She’s been so depressed lately.” She felt herself on safer ground now. She had just been steering blindly, but now she was grateful to have reached this impartial ground. She saw he was disappointed at having been deflected, but he brightened with sudden interest.

“Is that why he paid her so much attention? He is usually so shy with women. I wondered. But now I understand it all. He considers it a ministry. Perhaps even a conversion ministry.”

“It would be very wrong of him to see Batsheva that way. Anyhow, he’d be wasting his time, believe me. Why is he becoming a priest anyway? He seems such a normal, sensitive person. How can he shackle himself to such a…” her nose wrinkled in distaste, remembering the hard, stern men who had been the priests of her childhood, “such a…limiting profession?”

“Don’t ask me to explain David.”

“But you are brothers! You must know how this happened to him.”

He had moved closer to her as she spoke and she could feel his breath move the wisps of hair near her eyes. He put his arms around her and held her for a moment.

“Please, Ian,” she whispered, running her hands with a subtle pressure down the length of his back and feeling him breathe in sharply. He led her to the sofa and sat down, pulling her down to his lap, and pressed his head against her shoulder. “No. I am a greedy man. I want more than that. Much more, if you will have me.”

She felt the insistent pressure of his solid flesh against her soft shoulder and stared ahead, frightened, into the dark glowing embers of the fire. The glowing unpredictable wood could, at any moment, leap out with a passion of flames hidden deep beneath its soft light, or die altogether, burnt out until the end. She sat there, afraid to move, watching and wondering how it would all end.

Getting into the car with David seemed an act of such intimacy that Batsheva turned rigid with embarrassment. She couldn’t stand being near him, she told herself. He made her impossibly uncomfortable. The ride with him was agony, her whole body held in a stiffness of resistance. He said little, but spoke in a soft, joking way, making fun of himself, confessing all his sins, telling her how his thoughts would wander during prayers to soccer and the pimple on the tip of the Father Superior’s nose. He told her how he disliked the bare, simple room in the seminary and longed for colors and pictures and wonderful clutter. He told her about his childhood in the estate near the Lake District, and the wonderful hikes through the woods he’d take, trying to figure out where Wordsworth had stopped and taken inspiration.

Slowly she felt her body relax, all the tension flying away like air from a punctured balloon. He was harmless, how could she have thought otherwise? Slowly she began to interject sentences, interrupting him to share scenes from her childhood. She told him about Faygie, the butcher’s daughter, walking advertisement for her father’s strict
kashrut
, whose defiantly rolled-up skirt had once cost her father hundreds of dollars in unsold pounds of meat. She explained to him that the photos she took were carefully chosen, a way of thanking God for the beauty of His creation. Sometimes they would finish each other’s sentences, interrupting each other in agreement and approval, and their voices would dance together in confusion and pleasure.

Neither of them wondered when he passed her house and continued to drive. They found themselves at the other end of the city and rejoiced at how far away they had gone and how long it would take them to get back to where they had to go. And more and more it became apparent that there was still so much more they had to say, and no time at all left to say it in. They kept discovering things about themselves in the other’s words, ideas about life, and people, and the world they had thought but had never heard expressed aloud by another human being until that moment. And each time it happened, they were silent, trying to make sense of it. They seemed to know each other so well. And yet, when they thought about it, there could never have been two human beings so far apart both in where they had come from and where they must go.

David felt himself in a state of almost shocked incomprehension. He had come to Elizabeth’s to minister to another human being, perhaps even to start the long process of winning her over to the beliefs that sustained him. He had begun the evening with a wonderful glow of calm righteousness. Christ was within him, and he would reach out with Christ’s mercy to aid a suffering fellow human being, for Elizabeth had told him a story that paralleled the truth of Batsheva’s tragedy, but left out the true details. He knew that Batsheva had escaped from an unhappy marriage and from a suffocating society that had taken her freedom of expression from her. He knew that she was a deeply religious Jew, but had, in the righteousness and purity of his earlier state, believed that could only be a mistake forced upon her by a lack of understanding. She did not know Christ, and therefore, she rejected Him. She did not know the freedom He could bring her, the joy and kindness and light of salvation that would be hers once she reached out to Him.

But then he had met her, and his rigid sense of mission had lapped out of him, petered out. He had listened to her speak about her God, about Jerusalem, and he had seen the fire illuminate her face.

“What is it like, Jerusalem?”

She hesitated, wanting to be precise. “It is like having God move in with you. He is so close, you feel Him in the air, the clouds, the mountains—especially the mountains.” She closed her eyes, remembering the soft lines of the hills that rose up and faded in the distance, becoming an experience that led your eyes straight to heaven. “I used to feel all day that He was by my side. When I brushed my teeth, when I dressed, when I sat down to eat…there was always a prayer to be said, something to be thankful for.”

He listened to her and grew more and more confused, almost angry. She accepted her relationship to God with such simplicity. She was so close to Him. He thought of his own heartbreaking struggle for faith. Nothing was natural to him. He was never sure, perfectly sure, there was a God. A doubt, like a small crack in a wall, entered the solid armor of his persona, and he began to question the sincerity of his ministry, his worthiness to comfort and lead her.

He was not sure of anything, anything. But then, when he opened the car door for her and saw her radiant eyes, her beautiful, graceful movements away from him, movements that ended with her agonizing disappearance behind the closed door of her home, he became absolutely certain, as certain as he had ever been about anything in his entire life, of one thing: that he must see her again.

Batsheva leaned against the door for a moment as it closed behind her, steadying herself. It was late and the babysitter was curled up on the sofa, asleep. She decided not to wake her and walked softly into Akiva’s room. His small, bright face, framed and made white by the dark mass of hair, looked so angelic. Usually, when the ache of homesickness wracked her, his face was drug enough to still the pain. But now even as the sight of her son filled her with happiness, it left the yawning chasm of her loneliness unfilled.

She undressed slowly. How her body pleased her tonight, the elegant, firm stretches of her soft skin; the wonderful slimness of her waist and hips that rested on long, white legs. She was astonished at herself. She had not felt like this since…she tried to remember, and her memory seemed almost fictional, like a dream she had once had. But then she did remember—that day, thinking of Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky, thinking of the strange and wonderful lover who would cover her body with his. She hugged herself, wanting to weep with the aggravation of it, the pleasure of it! A man who had touched her so deeply, so physically and spiritually! A man of such alien, dangerous belief, opposed to everything she held sacred! She felt the hot tears of anguish and joy rise, blurring her eyes. Yet she could see clearly, so very, very clearly, her inner vision. David, his body lean and beautiful, bending close to hers, enveloping hers with its warmth; his open, generous face, his dark-blue eyes looking at her full of kindness and gifted intelligence. Those warm, beautiful, unforgettable laughing eyes.