The Rabbi (17 page)

Despite these burdens the prognosis in this case is good
.

I would recommend that the patient be considered for release from the care of the hospital following the twelfth electroconvulsive shock treatment. It is recommended that treatment be continued by a psychiatrist from whom she can receive intermittent psychotherapy, possibly with supportive therapy to be arranged for her husband
.

(signed)
Daniel L. Bernstein, M.D.

Senior Psychiatrist

He was beginning the next psychiatric report when he saw Maggie standing in the doorway looking at him.

“You walk as if you're wearing sneakers,” he said.

She moved heavily to her desk and took Leslie's file from his hands and returned it to the rack.

“You know better, Rabbi. You want to know something about your wife's condition, you ask her psychiatrist.”

“You're right, Maggie,” he said. She nodded silently when he said good-by. He put his notes into his pocket and left her
office, walking quickly down the hollow-sounding, too-clean corridor.

The letter came four days later.

My Michael
,

When you visit the chaplain's office again, you will notice that your copy of the Cabala is missing from your desk. I talked Dr. Bernstein into utilizing a passkey so that he could open the door and get it for me. He did the actual stealing, but I'm the brains of the mob. Dear Max Gross always insisted that a man should be 40 years old before attempting to assimilate the cabalistic mysticism. How shocked Max would be to know that I have been struggling with it for ten years now—I, a mere woman!

I have been meeting regularly with Dr. Bernstein for what you used to call “pscho-shmyko” sessions. Alas, I will never again feel so smug as to be able to sneer at psychotherapy. Oddly, I remember almost everything about the period of illness. I want very strongly to tell you about it. I think that it would be easiest to do so in a letter—not because I don't love you enough to discuss these things while looking into your eyes, but because I'm such a coward that I don't know if I would speak all the necessary words
.

So I will write them, now, before I lose my courage
.

As you know too well, for the past year I have been in trouble. What you could not know, because I could not tell you, was that for almost a month before you took me to the hospital I slept scarcely at all. I was afraid to sleep, afraid of two dreams that I had over and over again, as if I were on one of those amusement park rides through some mad House of Horrors and couldn't get off
.

The first dream took place in the parlor of the old parsonage on Elm Street, in Hartford. I saw every detail as clearly as if I viewed it on a television screen. I saw the worn heavy plush scarlet sofa and the two matching cut-velour chairs, with the tatted antimacassars that Mrs. Payson donated yearly with regularity and belligerence. I saw the threadbare Oriental rug and the varnished mahogany coffee table bearing two chipped china canaries under a glass dome. I saw the things on the walls; a Wallace Nutting hand-tinted photograph of a tired little brook
gamely struggling through a mustard-colored meadow, the Currier & Ives ice-skaters, a framed bouquet of artificial flowers made by my grandmother from the curls and clippings of my first haircut, and over the huge marble fireplace in which a fire never burned, a small-stitched sampler:

The Beauty of the House is Order

The Blessing of the House is Contentment

The Glory of the House is Hospitality

The Crown of the House is Godliness

The ugliest room ever put together by God-fearing but miserly parishioners
.

And I could see the people
.

My Aunt Sally, thin and gray-haired and worn from the task of taking care of us after my mother died, and full of so much love for her dead sister's husband that everybody knew it except him, poor thing
.

And my father. His hair was white even then, and he has always had the smoothest pink jowls of any man I've ever seen. I have never seen him needing a shave. I could see his eyes, light blue, that could bore their way right through you to the lie you were hiding in the middle of your head
.

And I could see me, about twelve, my hair in long braids, gawky and skinny and wearing wire-framed spectacles because I was near-sighted until the year I entered high school
.

And in every dream my father stood in front of the fireplace and looked me right in the eye and said the words that he must have said eight hundred times to us in that ugly room on Saturday evenings after supper
.

“
We believe in God, the Father, infinite in wisdom, goodness and love, and in Jesus Christ, his son, our Lord and Savior, who for us and our salvation lived and died, and rose again and liveth evermore, and in the holy spirit, who taketh of the things of Christ and revealeth them to us, renewing, comforting and inspiring the souls of men
.”

Then the dream would fade into black as if my father were a TV preacher who had been interrupted for the commercial, and I would wake up in our bed, my body tingling and goose-fleshed the way it always got whenever my father looked right through my eyes and talked about how Jesus had died for me
.

I didn't think anything about the dream at first. Everybody
has dreams, all sorts of dreams. But I began to have it every couple of nights, the same dream, the same room, the same words spoken by my father as he looked into my eyes
.

It never shook my Jewishness. That was settled a long time ago. I converted for you, but I was one of the lucky ones and found something else besides. I don't have to go into all that
.

But I started thinking about what it must have been like for my father when I threw aside the things he had taught me and became a Jew. I began to think about how it would be for you if one of our children should decide to convert, to become Catholic, for instance. I would lie there and stare up at the dark ceiling and remember that my father and I were almost strangers. And I would remember how I had loved him when I was a little girl
.

The dream lasted for a long time, and then I began having another one. This time I was twenty years old. I was in a convertible parked on a dark dirt road off the Wellesley campus, and I didn't have any clothes on
.

As in the first dream, every detail and impression came through to me clearly. I don't remember the boy's last name—his first name was Roger—but I saw his face, excited, young and a little frightened. He was a crewcut boy who wore a blue Leverett House football jersey with white numerals: 42. His tennis shorts and his underwear lay in a heap with my clothing on the floorboard. I looked at him with great interest; his was the first male body I had ever seen. What I felt was not love, or desire or even affection. The reason I had needed absolutely no persuasion to let him park his car in this dark place and undress me was that I felt a great curiosity and the conviction that there were things I wanted to know. And as I lay with my head jammed against the car door and my face pressed into the back of the cracked leather seat, and as I felt him engaging me with the same stupid diligence he would have used in an intramural football game, and as I felt myself painfully split open like a pod, my curiosity was satisfied. Somewhere far-off a dog barked, and in the car the boy made a noise like a sigh and I could feel myself become a receptacle. And all I could do was listen to the faraway barking in the knowledge that I had been cheated, that this was nothing but a sad invasion of personal privacy
.

And when I awoke in our dark room and found myself lying
in our bed next to you, I wanted to wake you and ask your forgiveness, to tell you that the stupid girl in the convertible is dead and that the woman I have become had known only you in love. But instead I lay there through the long night, sleepless and trembling
.

The dreams came again and again, sometimes one, sometimes another, so often that they became all mixed up with my wakeful life and at times I couldn't tell what was dream and what was not. When my father looked into my eyes and talked of God and Jesus, even though I was only twelve years old I knew that he was seeing me as an adultress and I wanted to die. My period was five weeks late and one afternoon when I started to flow I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and trembled because I couldn't cry, and I didn't know whether I was a college girl welcoming the curse or a fat, forty-year-old woman happy because I was not going to have a baby that didn't belong to you
.

During the day I could no longer meet your eyes or let the children kiss me. And at night I would lie rigid in bed, pinching the flesh of my arms to keep myself from falling asleep and dreaming
.

And then you took me to the hospital and left me and I knew that it was as it should be, because I was evil and should be shut away and put to death. And I waited for them to kill me, until the shock treatments began and the fuzzy lines of my world began to snap into place once more
.

Dr. Bernstein advised that I tell you about the dreams if I really wanted to. He believes that once I have done so they may never bother me again
.

Don't let them cause you pain, Michael. Help me wipe them from our world. You know that your God is my God, and that I am your wife and your woman, in body and mind and fact. I spend my time lying on my bed with my eyes closed, thinking about how it will be when I leave this place, about the so many good years that I have left with you
.

Kiss my children for me. I love you so much
.

Leslie

He read it many times.

It was remarkable that she had forgotten the boy's last name. It was Phillipson. Roger Phillipson.

She had said it to him only once, but he had never forgotten it. Seven years ago, awaiting dinner at the home of a rabbinical colleague in Philadelphia, he had chanced to look through the tenth yearbook of his host's Harvard class. The name had flown out of the page at him from beneath a picture that smiled with insurance-man sincerity. Partner, Folger, Phillipson, Paine & Yeager Insurance Agency, Walla Walla, Wash. Wife, the former something or other of Springfield, Mass. Three daughters, nordic names, ages 6, 4, 1½. Hobbies, sailing, fishing, hunting, statistics. Clubs, University, Lions, Rotary, two or three others. Life's goal, to play touch football at the fiftieth class reunion.

A few weeks later, during Yom Kippur services at his own temple, he had repented, seeking atonement in his empty belly and asking God's forgiveness for the feeling he had experienced toward the smiling picture. He had prayed for Roger Phillipson, wishing him long life and short memory.

 

13

The letter heightened the concern he felt for Max.

That night he lay in the brass bed, trying to remember what his son had looked like as a baby and as a little boy. Max had been a plain child, escaping ugliness only when he smiled. His ears had sprung from his head like—what were those things, sonar receivers?—instead of lying flat. His cheeks had been full and soft.

And today, Michael thought, you go to his wallet to borrow a stamp and you discover that he's a hulking male with sexual desires. He brooded.

His imagination was not dampened by the fact that Max and Dessamae Kaplan had entered the house twenty minutes before and were making noises in the living room. Low laughter. And a variety of other sounds. What is the sound of a wallet leaving a pocket? He found himself straining his ears to catch
it. Keep your wallet in your pocket, my son, he pleaded silently. And then he started to perspire. If you must be that stupid, my son, he thought, be sure and take your wallet out of your pocket.

Sixteen, he thought.

Finally he got up and put on his robe and slippers. He started down the stairs. He could hear them plainly now.

“I don't want to,” Dessamae said.

“Come on, Dess.”

He stopped, halfway down, and stood on the dark stairs, frozen. In a second he could hear a small sound, regular and rhythmic. He wanted to run away.

“That feels so good. . . . Ah, that's good.”

“Like this?”

“Uh-huh. . . . Hey—”

She laughed, a throaty sound. “Now you scratch my back, Max.”

Ah, you dirty old man, he told himself. You filthy middle-aged voyeur. He hurried down the stairs, stumbling a little, and pushed into the living room, blinking against the light.

They sat cross-legged on the rug in front of the fireplace, Dessamae holding the ivory Chinese backscratcher.

“Hello, Rabbi,” she said.

“Hi, Dad.”

He said hello. He couldn't look at either of them. He went into the kitchen and brewed some tea. They came in and joined him for the second cup.

When Max left to take her home he went up the stairs and crawled into the brass bed, falling into sleep like a man dropping into a warm bath.