Jephte's Daughter (5 page)

“Seriously, Elizabeth,” Batsheva laid an urgent, earnest hand on the older girl’s relaxed arm, “don’t you think she had no other choice? I mean, it was either Vronsky and no child or Karenin and his cold, old hands. But it was such a terrible, mortal sin.”

Desperate. Mortal sin. Novels had not improved her vocabulary in the proper direction, Elizabeth decided. Oh well. She peered at her sideways through slit-opened eyes. Why, there were tears in her eyes, the little dope! Reluctantly, she moved herself into a less comfortable and more serious position.

“Oh, it was much worse than a sin, which can be delicious, my child. It was plain dumb. If women killed themselves over every missing link of the male gender they screwed, there would be no continuation of the human race as we know it.” Oops, forgot where I was.
Screw
is not an acceptable word in the Ha-Levis’ home. They had no television. Batsheva went to very select movies that Ha-Levi Elder personally screened before she was allowed to see them. She had never even been to the theater or a ballet. The school she went to was about the same as St Mary’s, except it was full of rabbi-teachers, instead of nuns.

They certainly had gone far afield from the original topics of study: diagramming sentences, pluperfect subjunctives. She had begun tutoring the girl on the finer points of grammar as a way of earning food money. She had been an English literature freshman at UCLA and Batsheva a ninth grader. Without realizing it at first, the lessons had gotten off the track and they had wound up learning literature: D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Henry James…anybody the snobbish, wonderful, exquisite Professor MacLeish had pronounced worth reading. Blond Viking with the Oxford accent.

And always, the tutoring sessions had gone beyond the books and they had wound up discussing philosophy, boys, makeup, Elizabeth’s latest live-in. Sometimes she felt the girl was living vicariously through her. Talk about strict parents! Compared to old man Ha-Levi, Elizabeth’s old man, with his belt and his drinking and his 12
P.M
. curfews, looked like Robert Young. She felt sorry for the poor kid.

To be fair though, the guy had always been nice to her, even though she knew he disapproved of her close relationship with Batsheva and the books that she gave the girl to read. Why he hadn’t fired her (thank the Lord, because the money was paying for room and board: He was a generous man) was a mystery to his credit. But he gave her, rationally or irrationally, the willies. Bearded patriarch in his thousand-dollar funeral suits. Jews. She didn’t understand them, didn’t feel fully comfortable with them. There weren’t any Jews in Cortland, California, pear center of the nation. Just good Methodists and Presbyterians. Even Episcopalians were considered strange.

She had gotten to know many at UCLA. A few times she had even been the shiksa at boys’ homes, enduring their parents’ fake cordiality. Don’t steal my precious boy, designing Gentile! It was a role she could do without. But most of them had been nothing like the Ha-Levis. It was hard to believe they practiced the same religion. There had been ham sandwiches for dinner with a glass of milk. Golf games on Saturday mornings. One day a year in the synagogue for Yom Kippur.

It wasn’t that the Ha-Levis were stricter, “orthodox.” They lived a whole different life that went far beyond food and weekends. Every single minute they were awake, there was some other rule they had to keep. They had blessings to recite over everything that went into their mouth. And there was precious little that could go in: Meat had to be from a kosher butcher, even the milk had to come from cows that were specially watched. They prayed three times a day, at least the old man did. Batsheva every morning. It was as if the house itself were some kind of a tabernacle and every movement was part of a religious ceremony. Wake up, wash your fingertips in ritual water three times each. Say morning prayers. Blessings over breakfast, before and after. Kiss the prayer box hanging on the doorpost as you leave the room or enter it…You didn’t visit God when you needed something. You carried Him around with you every moment of the day. And He was heavy.

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re trapped? Don’t you ever feel that you’d like to run away with the chauffeur and have a Big Mac at McDonald’s with French fries and a Thick Shake?” she had asked Batsheva early on in their relationship, with reckless disregard for getting the ax if the old man overheard.

“You don’t understand, Elizabeth. It’s not my parents who are asking me to do this. It’s God. Jews have been chosen to be holy. In what they eat, how they dress, how they behave…”

“You really believe that, huh?”

In answer, Batsheva had brought out some photographs of a snake she had taken at the San Diego Zoo. Very nice shots. Child had a great eye.

“You see those diamonds—how perfectly they’re shaped, how beautiful the pattern is? There has to be a God, don’t you see?”

Faith, clear-eyed and unquestioning. Blessing or curse?

Remembering, she sat up and looked at Batsheva, narrowing her green eyes—the clear, appraising eyes of a smart country girl come to the big city.

There was something truly fine about Batsheva, Elizabeth thought with just a touch of envy. A delicacy of feeling that made her sympathize with everyone. She was the type who would have become a Mother Teresa, washing off lepers’ hands. There was something really sincerely undesigning and young about her, and not just a veneer to please parents and teachers. She was clean in mind, body, and spirit like a young athlete.

She had also been young like that. Pear Princess in Cortland. Summer prom dresses. Let Bats out of her bubble and into the real world to claw after love, money, friends, and we’d see how far her innocence lasts. She admitted to herself that she loved city life with all the honest greediness of a child in a candy store. Like a tame lion thrown back into the wild, she had made some dangerous escapes and learned some hard lessons about the price of living in the jungle.

At first she had been attracted to men with chiseled features and square jaws wearing raw-silk business suits. But as soon as she got close to them her heart would slow down, her eyes narrow and clear, her nose sniffing out bullshit the way only a country girl’s can. She was too smart and too sincere herself to settle for facades. Her mother’s honest Methodism: “Rather a sincere insult than a false compliment.” Yes, Mama.

She was looking for someone better than the rough, slow-talking boys she had grown up with, and with her instinct she realized these men were not nearly as good. They were like cardboard cutouts. Their needs were basic and predictable. They saw people as disposable, to be used up for their ideas or bodies or connections and then discarded. Oh, they made lots of noise about openness and freedom, but essentially that was it. The women were like that, too.

She had been careful not to be used, but had experimented with using. She had gotten a rich boy to help her find, furnish, and move into an apartment with hints about his sharing it and then had dumped him as soon as the work was over. Other men had helped her in math and science, or gotten her part-time jobs. Her full-breasted figure gave a misleading clue to strangers. It made her seem soft and yielding and simple when in truth she was just the opposite.

She found her meetings with Batsheva a welcome respite from all that. In a way, the girl was like her younger self, the self that still believed in people. A refreshing escape from the real world. She looked at the girl so innocent of her beauty. Voluptuous innocence. It would be so easy for her to go the same way. Thank goodness old Abraham was keeping her under lock and key. Maybe he was not so crazy after all.

“Shameless hussy! Go put some holy clothes on your holy behind so we can do some work. If Daddy sees you like this, he’s sure to chalk it up to my corrupting influence and order thirty lashes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like that. He’s not so bad.” Her voice had a stiffness in it, a formality.

Uh-oh, as usual, took it too far. Honor thy father and mother. “Sorry.” She clapped two hands over her mouth. “As usual, verbal diarrhea.” She was talking too much. Pure nerves. But it was done. The letter was sitting there, along with faculty announcements and late papers, awaiting his pleasure. White envelope, neat, businesslike. A formal proposal.

“You haven’t answered me. Why did she?”

Elizabeth ran exasperated fingers through her hair. “She?”

“Anna!”

“Seriously, if you want my opinion, she did the right thing. Life is just a game. When you lose too many points and back yourself into a corner, the smart thing is just to bow out gracefully. She left with some self-respect. A life with Karenin would have frozen off anybody’s tits. And Vronsky was, in the final analysis, a total ass. They were all using her. It made perfect sense and took courage for her to take control of her life again.”

“By killing herself? Oh, Elizabeth, those cold heavy wheels crushing her face…”

“Messy, but effective.”

“Would you ever do such a thing? I mean, if…”

Sitting in the dark, nursing a drink, fending off the losers hour after hour, watching the door open and close, but it never being him. Going home alone. A stone fell into her stomach, crushing the butterflies. “No. I…don’t think so.” Her face was serious for a moment, losing some of its gay cynicism. “Too much of a coward, I guess. Now, no more delay tactics. To work.”

“All right, but I have to sneak up to get dressed. Wait for me in Aba’s study.”

She had been in the Ha-Levi house countless times, but it had never ceased to amaze her. Unworthy envy, bury your green head, she told herself, looking at the polished brass, the gleaming grand piano. It always reminded her that no matter how far she went, she would always be a country girl, her eyes wide with wonder at the rich people’s banquet. She didn’t like to be reminded.

She wasn’t in a good mood when Batsheva came back. The lesson was on Wordsworth. Time and remembrance at Tintern Abbey. You had to be in the right state of mind for old Wordsworth.

“Wordsworth is turning to past experiences as a relief from present stress. For Wordsworth, nature, landscape, is a spiritual restoration,” she read without much interest from her notes. She could almost hear MacLeish’s deep, melodic voice. Impressive as hell. “Nature is the anchor, guard, and guide of all my moral being.”

“I love the Romantics. Wordsworth, Coleridge. They’d understand my snake. They could see God in the diamonds.”

“In a way you’re right. The translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. What I like about them is this idea of the continuum. Like a rainbow. They believed we are all one great chain of being, interconnected with each other, with nature, and that you have to break the boundaries of the ego and establish a connection with the universe. They believed that we choose what we shall see and hear and what we make of it. They believed that there is an organic, creative principle at work in man, in society, in nature, and God and poetry. It’s a world that’s constantly in flux, a world of becoming, not being.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Look, the minute you say, ‘I am Batsheva Ha-Levi, religious girl who likes hamburgers and tall men with glasses,’ you are setting limits. This is what I am and what I will always be. The Romantics believed that was the death principle, dejection. But if you say, ‘I am Batsheva and each moment whatever form my life is to take is slowly unfolding within me and will continue to do so,’ when you don’t set any limits but work with this creative principle, you have joy.”

“In other words,” Batsheva said, excitedly, “God can have no world without man, because it’s man’s perception that allows the world to exist. There is no good or evil without man, who must define good by rejecting evil.”

Elizabeth’s jaw dropped. “Very nice. You think of that by yourself?”

Batsheva smiled with modest pleasure. “It’s been on my mind, but you can’t talk about this stuff with teachers, especially rabbi-teachers. But let’s stop now,” Batsheva finally begged her.

“I guess you won’t be needing me any longer, now that you’re off to college yourself.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Batsheva that these lessons would ever end. And it was not at all certain that that was where she was off to. She had idly browsed through college catalogues she had sent away for secretly. Paris, London. She wanted to learn photography. She wanted to learn Torah and Kabbalah, and how to be a holy person. She wanted to have beautiful babies to cuddle and fuss over. To have her own house with beautiful furniture and to be its undisputed mistress. She wanted a life filled with adventure. Her parents had not spoken to her one way or the other concerning the future, and it made her nervous. We shall see,
maideleh
, her father had said gently, stroking her head when she asked if she could continue her studies in a seminary and the university. But I must apply now, she had pleaded, but he had turned away with an odd silence. Impulsively, she hugged Elizabeth. “Don’t ever let’s stop seeing each other. Promise me you’ll always be a friend, no matter what.”

Elizabeth hesitated. She believed in words, in their power and obligation. She believed it when someone told her they would talk about love again in four years. Believed that he wouldn’t forget. Sweet little dopes, the two of them. Sisters. She hugged her back. “I promise.”

I honor and respect my parents like a good, religious Jewish girl, Batsheva thought. But I don’t understand them. She had studied the Torah, the Mishnah. Her father had even paid for special tutors to teach her Talmud, which girls in Bais Sarah were not considered bright enough to learn. Talmud, the reserve of male scholars, rabbis, contained the basis and rationale for the Law, for all they did.