The Belief in Angels (36 page)

Ms. Wheaton introduces me to a woman she calls “her partner.” I don’t understand it then, but later when Leigh and Timothy and I scarf
real
desserts at Brighams, Leigh says, matter-of-factly, “Ms. Wheaton is a lesbian.”

Then she takes another bite of her Chocolate Mocha ice-cream.

I am practically inhaling my Butter Crunch sundae, but I put down my spoon and stare at her. Timothy keeps eating his sundae.

“So?” he says through a full mouth of Pistachio.

“Huh,” I say, but I’m thinking a million things.

Ms. Wheaton is now much more interesting. The only lesbians I have knowingly met are friends of Wendy’s who go to college at Northeastern with her. They live near Leigh.

I know they’re brave to live in Withensea and be open about their lives. Withensea is small-town-minded and scary because of this sometimes. I like them a lot, but they make me nervous because being a lesbian, or even being a friend of a lesbian, is totally uncool in Withensea. Here, everybody acts uptight about everything. Being different in any way makes other people nervous. It’s basically a rubber stamp for social failure.

As far as our own difference, David and I have managed to create a bubble of homogenous existence at school and with our friends although life at the house continues to challenge the boundaries of normalcy. Since David went away to college I feel compelled to try extra hard to blend in with my peers and identify myself independently from my family. I still feel nervous about Social Services showing up, even though Wendy no longer uses this threat to her advantage.

Leigh says, “I think it’s pretty fab.”

Timothy and I finish our ice cream and say nothing else.

Samuel, 67 years | September 19th, 1977

IT’S BEEN A long time and yet each year, on this day more than others, the sorrow of loss strikes my heart in its deepest chamber.

The clock that sits on the nightstand tells me the date and the time. This is the clock that Yetta traded for her grocery stamps at the A&P. Ruth would prefer we buy another, more modern one. But I can’t bear to part with the things I shared with Yetta in my first marriage. Ruth understands.

In the year of Moses’s death, this woman, Ruth, became my wife. She is the woman I finally find my passion with. She is my
bashert.
It seems strange, people don’t talk about such things, I know—things like old men finding passion—but it is my truth.

Ruth kindles something ancient in me. Fire. The fire that grows out of embers buried under trampled ash. Fire that grows big but doesn’t swallow all the air. Splendid, multicolored fire that is strong but doesn’t destroy. Fire that doesn’t smell like flesh or bones but like fine wood and earth and flowers.

It breathes, this fire. It extinguished the worst of the anguish I felt after the loss of my sweet grandson.

Ruth and her daughter, Bethyl, came back to sit
shiva
with me after Moses’s funeral.

They prepared the meal of condolence. The rabbi and other men from the congregation visited every day to make a
minyan
and sing the blessing for Moses
while Ruth and Bethyl prepared our meals, cleaned the apartment, and sat on my living room couch while I sat on the low stool.

Over the course of those seven days of mourning, sitting in my apartment with shrouded mirrors, Ruth reflected all the history of my life, and out of the history I found small miracles. In astonishment, I understood that all those small miracles had led me to my small apartment, sitting in a room with shrouded mirrors with my true mirror, Ruth.

After I had shared my stories of my young grandson we began to share our own stories with one another. We waited for Bethyl’s absence to talk of other things. Those things were the horrors we had witnessed and withstood. The memories that survivors can only share with other survivors. The things we keep behind our eyes like lidded vaults.

There were things I shared in those seven days that unburdened my soul simply because of Ruth’s finely tuned acceptance. Her unblinking eyes released my fears. Her tears released my own. Her touch made my skin—like a dried old leaf—crumble. Underneath, there were bright new limbs that grew stronger with each embrace.

There were things I learned in those seven days of
shiva
that changed my life forever.

Ruth taught me how to take my guilt and move it into a space where it has no power over my own survival. I hadn’t realized how much the pain of surviving the people I loved had shaped every interaction I’d had with every person I knew.

Ruth was on the same train I am put on after being arrested as a conspirator for the Polish Home Army, the resistance movement during the war. She told me she had watched the murder of her family—her precious mother and father, her two brothers, and her younger sister. She never volunteered details regarding their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. I never shared the details about my own family’s violent tragedy. We shared that particular sorrow, but it was also our own.

After being transported to the camp at Majdanek, Ruth—then Rinna—was selected to become a servant for the camp commandant. He lived outside the camp, in the town of Lublin. She was pulled from a line of women at the camp within an hour of her arrival. This line, she later learned, had led directly to the gas chamber, as they were murdering Jews immediately after they came inside the camps in those last months.

This death camp, Majdanek, is different from the other Nazi death camps. The others were hidden in forests or in places where there were no witnesses. Majdanek is in plain sight of the city of Lublin. The camp is separated from the city by just a farm field. The smokestacks with the acrid, sour smell of burning flesh
were clearly visible from the nearby homes. The entire city of Lublin witnessed the crimes at Majdanek.

Ruth shared her horror at looking from the windows of the officer’s home to see the billowing gray smokestacks of human ash and at hearing the machine guns in those final days, murdering the last of the Jews.

She said this man and his wife were kind to her. I find this hard to believe, that a monster would have compassion for a Polish Jew, but she insists they treated her well. She said they kept her safe even as they packed and fled the city before the liberation of the camp. The officer told her to stay on in the home, a home that had formerly belonged to a Polish Jew who was killed at the camp. The officer and his wife never returned, of course. Later he was tried and executed like the rest of the criminals they caught.

Eventually Ruth married a man, another Polish Jew who had been a part of the Polish Home Army, the resistance. He had returned to Lublin after the war. It was this man, her husband, who convinced her to move to Boston, where his brothers had come before him.

The man, Bethyl’s father, had died young in a factory accident, leaving Ruth to raise her daughter alone.

Ruth and her daughter were active in their synagogue, more orthodox in its practice than our current synagogue. They left that congregation as a result of its old traditions and ideas and joined ours mere months before we met again.

Our rabbi encouraged Bethyl when she shared her wish to study theology and someday become a rabbi herself. He agreed with her that it is simply custom and not law that stood between her and her goals. Now she is a
cantor
for the congregation, and while she loves her work she is also studying and organizing other women to petition the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to admit female students. Bethyl is the daughter who will make me proud.

Wendy, in comparison, has only become more of a disappointment. Now her behavior seems intolerable, although nothing has changed. My open heart has opened my eyes to my own daughter’s cruelty.

Soon after Moses’s funeral, Ruth and I made plans to marry. We waited a year until after our synagogue’s
Yahrzeit
observance of Moses’s death to have our celebration. But then we did celebrate.

Ruth made a small wedding with her first husband and my own, with Yetta, was remarkably simple, although Rose campaigned for a more elaborate affair. This time, we agreed, it was time for a proper wedding ceremony. My one regret was the absence of my closest family members. Rose, Mocher, Oizer, my parents—all were gone. The other surviving members of the family, Oizer’s children and my
youngest siblings, who came to America with
Foter
and
Mater
so long ago, have families of their own now, children whom I have never met.

It was best not to invite them. Too much bad memories for everyone.

Wendy and the children, David and Jules, were included, of course, although I worry about Wendy and her behavior towards Ruth and Bethyl. Something about my new happiness seems to make her angry and she makes every interaction a battle. In the beginning I believed the sorrow of Moses’s death caused her to resent my joy. As time goes on, I see that it is Wendy’s manner to destroy what is good in the world and perceive it as her enemy.

The wedding reception took place in the synagogue basement, which is lavishly decorated for the occasion. Wendy dressed like a meshugener in something fit for maybe a circus. Her nebish boyfriend drank too much wine and had to be put to bed, like a child, in the car outside the synagogue. Wendy and I loaded him in through the side door of her van like a potato sack after he fell from the chair he sat on in the reception hall.

“You obviously spent a lot of money on a wedding to this woman. How did she talk you into that?” Wendy says as she catches her breath with me on the parking lot sidewalk.

“Ruth is a wonderful woman and I wanted to please her with a good wedding. This is a nice way to start a marriage, no?”

“It’s not like you to spend money on anything, never mind a frivolous thing like a party. I’m starting to worry about you … about this woman, and her control over your finances. Will she be writing my checks now?”

“After all this time I take such good care of you and the children and the
nebish
here, and your good-for-nothing husband before him, now you complain I spend a little money on myself to make a good wedding?”

“I’m just saying—”

“You’re worried that you won’t be inheriting all the money when I die, that I spent too much on the wedding, no? Maybe you counted on a better inheritance and now that there’s another woman, another family I care for, you think there will be less for you?”

A light drizzle of rain has begun and the hot asphalt gives off steam that rises like a hot shower. The rain mingles with the dirty street. This smell always reminds me of Paris, where it seemed to rain constantly. Wendy’s voice draws me back to the moment.

“You say
family.
You’re not supporting her daughter as well, are you?”

“And what if I am? It’s my money to do with as I wish. Bethyl is a good girl.
I will take care of her as long as she likes. She’s a scholar. She wants to be a rabbi. Imagine that, a female rabbi?”

“She’s highly unattractive, nearly as old as I am, and I don’t see a guy around. It’s good you don’t mind taking care of her; you’ll be doing it for the rest of her life. Speaking of taking care of, the dishwasher broke. I need a couple hundred to replace it.”

I am wondering how long it would take for her to bring up something she needed me to pay for.

“Yes. Why don’t you bring Jules and David for dinner sometime this week and I can settle it then.” I don’t argue that washing the dishes without the machine won’t kill her. It’s not like she doesn’t have time for these things. Today I will let her think I believe she really needs this machine to wash the dishes.

On that day, five years ago, I am mostly joyous. Wendy and the
nebish
were there making fools of themselves, of course. But the one true dark spot that day was my deep worry for my granddaughter. For you, Jules. Do you have a memory for that day? I wonder.

We stood at the buffet table. The table held an enormous selection of foods. Steaming roast chicken with aromatic spiced carrots. Ruth had insisted we offer fish with the meat and we also had fresh lox, bagels, whitefish, and capers. There is Ruth’s homemade noodle
kugel,
the cinnamon smells mingled with the fresh challah from our favorite bakery. The same bakery had supplied our grand wedding cake and the sugary
rugelach, halva,
and specially ordered
hamantashen
pastries. My mouth watered at the luscious smells and succulent sights.