The Saturday Wife (3 page)

The decision to enroll at Bernstein Women’s College, affiliated with the well-known Bernstein Rabbinical College, had been made after long discussions with friends and counselors. Although the tuition was thousands of dollars a year and she could have gone to any city college for free, she was advised by all that she wouldn’t like city colleges. They were too big, too impersonal, full of public high school riffraff. There was no social life. The bottom line was she was afraid to venture out, despite her bravado, from the sheltered yeshiva day school environment she had known, to face the real world, where her new sophistication would be laughed at by hip young New Yorkers who slept together and indulged in
drugs and all kinds of other perversions she could only just imagine with equal parts loathing and envy.

But there was one thing you had to give Bernstein, the one true incontrovertible fact which made all those student loans a worthwhile investment: it was turning out to be one, long
shidduch
date.

Everyone was a matchmaker: the girls, the teachers, the teacher’s cousins, the girls’ cousins. It was the official bride pool for Bernstein Rabbinical College as well as Yeshiva University, with its well-regarded medical and law school, a fact well-known to all the parents shouldering the burden of their daughters’ unjustified and outlandish tuition.

Many of the girls were out-of-towners from tiny Jewish communities where available religious Jewish men were either under ten or over forty. Enrolling at Bernstein rescued them from horrible Young Israel weekends in Catskill hotels and being relentlessly pursued by the proverbial kosher butcher from Milwaukee: over thirty, overweight, and oversexed. Here, in a relaxed and respectable atmosphere, every Ruchie could find her Moishe. And vice versa.

The out-of-towners were usually the sheltered daughters of rabbis, pretty and sweet and innocent, with very little dating experience. Most of them had endured at least a year of long-distance courtships in which relatives and friends and professionals had found matches for them in places like Monsey, Brooklyn, or Baltimore. The dates arranged necessitated expensive cross-country plane trips, a situation that understandably left most of them languishing in solitary gloom on Saturday nights. When they moved into the dorms at Bernstein, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

In contrast, the native New Yorkers, used to a plethora of possibilities, found the fix-ups from Bernstein and Yeshiva University left much to be desired. Most of the guys were short and pale and wore glasses. They showed up dressed like they were on their way to a Rabbinical Council of America convention. Moreover, most were victims of severe rabbinical brainwashing on the subject of physical contact with the opposite sex outside of marriage. The
negiah,
or “touching” laws, were basically one loud NO! NOT ANYPLACE, ANY TIME, ANY BODY PART, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! This left some of the young men severely challenged on this subject, making Delilah feel as if she had a rare communicable disease. Even the most adventurous managed little more than casually stretching an arm out onto the back of her subway seat.

Gee, that was a thrill.

Some, at least, had looked normal enough: a crocheted skullcap, a nice sweater over an open-collared shirt. There was one universal problem, though. Anyone willing to be fixed up was almost always someone who couldn’t find a date on his own. And for good reason.

Delilah kept on going, though, always allowing herself to be persuaded by the hard or soft sell of the people who were setting her up, that this one “was different.” And why shouldn’t she trust them? After all, they had nothing to gain from making her miserable. In fact, most of them were involved in matchmaking because they considered it a good deed. Indeed, there is a widely held belief among religious Jews that achieving three successful matches earns one a free entry pass to the best neighborhoods in the World to Come.

The system in Bernstein worked this way: The guys would come into the dorm lobby and give their name and the name of the girl they were taking out to the housemother, who would then call up to the girl’s room, announcing him. The girl would then come down to the lobby and tell the housemother the name of the boy. Sometimes, seeing the girl who spoke his name, the boy would sit perfectly still until he could quietly slip out the front door.

It was quite a show. When she had nothing better to do on a Saturday night, Delilah delighted in hanging around the lobby to watch. Which is how she got involved with Yitzie Polinsky.

The boy was striking: tall and very slim, with broad shoulders and thick rock-star hair that fell adorably over his eyes. He wore a dark skullcap that melted right in and was hardly noticeable at all. His jeans were faded in all the right places, and to top it off he had on a black turtleneck and a kind of bomber jacket of brown leather.

You could tell the housemother didn’t approve at all. But when he gave her his name, her eyes lit up: the son of the very famous Rabbi Menachem Polinsky of Crown Heights. The housemother pushed her reading glasses to the top of her gray wig, looked him over again, lips pursed, and then shrugged. Allowances had to be made. She called up to the girl.

Delilah recognized her name: Penina Gwertzman, a cute little out-of-towner from Kansas or some other impossibly goyish place. Petite, with long dark hair and an ample figure, she was from a very religious family and had been carefully brought up. Yitzie wasn’t her type at all. He was Delilah’s type.

She watched as Yitzie’s eyes took in Penina’s body in long, slow strokes. Satisfied, he smiled and got up, sauntering over to her, his hands in his pockets. The nearer he got, the more Penina tugged nervously at her long pleated skirt, as if willing it to grow a few more inches.

What a waste, Delilah thought, watching them walk out together into the night, already making plans.

TWO

I
n the morning, Delilah made inquiries. “I heard Penina went out last night with Yitzie Polinsky,” she mentioned casually to her roommate, Rivkie. “How did it go?”

Rivkie, who had not a suspicious bone in her body and who considered any kind of gossip a mortal sin and so never listened to or repeated anything of value, said she thought she’d heard something not so good about it. Coming from such a source, Delilah knew it was going to be major, major breaking news.

She knocked on a few doors of reliable yentas and got the goods: a disastrous date that had ended scandalously, with tears and angry phone calls and possible repercussions for Yitzie, who was slated to follow in his father’s footsteps, if only he could shed his yeshiva-bum reputation.

Yes! Delilah thought, thrilled.

She settled her face into the right lines of worry and concern and knocked on Penina’s door. “I just heard. Are you all right?”

The girl’s big, obviously cried-out eyes, welled. “Does everybody know?”

Delilah took a step back. “No! It’s just that I happened to be waiting down in the lobby and saw him come in. I mean, that leather jacket… . He looked a little dangerous to me, so I asked to make sure you were OK.”

Penina’s face was stiff.

“It’s just… I’ve had some bad experiences myself.”

The girl suddenly melted into an angry puddle of damp emotions.

“It wasn’t my fault!!” she cried passionately. “They told me he was a brilliant Torah scholar from a very important family, who was going to take over his father’s congregation one day soon.” She blinked and two large tears rolled down her fresh pink cheeks.

Delilah caught her breath in joy. “What… did something… happen?

“He said he was taking me to the Village. I didn’t know what village! I thought he meant Boro Park. But it wasn’t… . I didn’t see a single Jew. Then he took me inside some restaurant. But it wasn’t a kosher deli or anything. It was really dark. And I didn’t see anybody eating, or smell pickles—you know. It smelled like… liquor. There was a stage, and some girl with very uncombed frizzy hair was singing! Imagine, Yitzie Polinsky—the son of Rebbe Polinsky, who everyone calls a saint, who is known to be so stringently pious people are terrified of him and they worship him—imagine
his son listening to a woman’s voice,
which everybody knows is forbidden! Anyway, we sat down at this little table. I couldn’t see a thing. So”—she wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath—”at first I thought I was imagining it, but then I realized he had his hand on my knee. And then he put his other hand on my shoulder, and his fingers started playing with my hair and then moved underneath my collar… .”

Delilah bit the inside of her cheek, handing the girl a tissue. “Oh!” She shook her head in outraged sympathy. “The creep.” She waited impatiently what she hoped was a suitable moment of commiseration. “And then what happened?” she asked eagerly.

Penina’s eyes looked up over the tissue with sudden suspicion. “What do you mean? Of course I told him to take me back immediately!”

“Oh, yes. Of course, of course! That’s exactly what I… thought. Meant. I mean, what else could you do? Did he?”

Penina stared down at the tissue, then blew her nose again miserably. “He said he had to make a phone call first. I waited and waited, but he
never came back. I wound up paying the check, and I didn’t even have enough money left to take a taxi! I had to use the subway. I was petrified!” She sobbed.

Delilah made an O with her lips and held it. “I have a good mind to call him up and tell him off. You wouldn’t happen to have his phone number, would you?”

“You would do that? For me? But we hardly even know each other!”

“Doesn’t our holy Torah tell us, ‘Before a blind man put no obstacle’? It’s my sacred religious duty. We wouldn’t want another innocent young girl to go out and have such an experience, would we? I mean, he has to be stopped!”

Penina blinked. “Sharona Gottleib fixed me up. She said her grandmother was friends with his grandmother… . I’ll never speak to her again!”

Delilah sighed heavily. “I understand.” She patted the girl’s soft white hand with its little fourteen-carat birthstone ring from Mommy and Daddy. “I will talk to Sharona. Trust me, I know exactly how to handle this.”

Penina stared at her, her eyes welling once again. “You would do that? For me? Meet with him and tell him off?”

Delilah patted the little hand.
“Kol Yisrael aravim zeh le zeh.
” All Israel is responsible one for the other.

She found out where his father’s shul was and arranged to sleep over at a friend’s house nearby. She wore a demure outfit that covered everything. Still, she sensed the cold eyes of matronly disapproval pointed like lasers at the top of her blond head to the bottom of her spiked heels as she walked down the narrow aisle of the women’s section in Reb Menachem Polinsky’s synagogue. She took a seat near the high
mechitzah
—the religiously mandated barrier piously separating the men from the women. It ran the entire length of the synagogue, giving the men almost the entire room, and confining the women to a small, cramped space. As usual, the more Orthodox the synagogue, the more demeaning and uncomfortable the women’s section. Still, she was just grateful that at least she was in the same room with Yitzie, as some stringency kings had created synagogues where the women were shunted off to side rooms in completely different parts of the building,
where only a handful could see or hear anything. Discreetly, she lifted the little curtain and peered inside at the men’s section.