The Saturday Wife (9 page)

They walked out into the New York night of twinkling lights and crowded streets, cars zooming, and couples walking arm in arm, their feet clicking against the pavement. He took her to a kosher delicatessen where religious couples on first dates often came. It was noisy and full of teenagers, and he regretted his choice immediately. He ordered pastrami on rye. She demurely ordered a salad, which she poked at tentatively, saying she had eaten so much all day, she wasn’t really hungry. His sandwich smelled really good, she said appreciatively. With a great show of reluctance, she finally agreed to take half, feeding it to herself in greedy little bites. Pressed, she also agreed to order dessert, a gooey pecan pie that disappeared from her plate with surprising swiftness.

“I have a sweet tooth,” she murmured, blushing a little with embarrassment.

She was so shy, he thought, entranced. So delicate, he thought in wonder, watching the color deepen on her pale golden skin as he spoke to her of his dreams and plans. She seemed immensely interested in everything he had to say, hanging on his every word as if it resonated with some hidden, kabbalistic meaning.

Basking later in the afterglow of the evening, he realized she hadn’t spoken about herself at all. She remained as much a mystery to him as when he’d set out that evening to meet her.

“So,
nu
?” Josh asked. When Chaim smiled but didn’t answer, Josh tilted his head and nodded. “Oh, I see. But I should warn you—”

Chaim’s ears pricked up.

“She’s got a bit of a reputation.”

“Delilah?”

“Well, just a few things, nothing serious—” Josh squirmed, aware that he should have had this information long before proposing this match.

Chaim interrupted him rather sharply. “Doesn’t this fall under the category of evil gossip? Isn’t it sinful?”

“When it comes to information about a
shidduch,
we are allowed to tell all. It falls under the category of
Before a blind man, place no obstacle.
”

Chaim, who wished to remain a blind man where Delilah was concerned, tried another tack. “Not all information is reliable.”

“Oh, this is. It’s from Rivkie.”

The paragon of virtue herself. Now his curiosity was piqued. This was no idle gossipmonger, no catty, loose-lipped female out to destroy for the sheer joy of feeling her own power. No. If it came from Rivkie, and if she thought it important enough to send on to Josh, who thought it important enough to share, it would be stupid of him not to listen. And yet… the girl’s body, her face, her golden hair, her mesmerizing eyes. If the information was compelling enough, it could paralyze him, making it impossible for him to reach out and take her, like the brass ring. And he had been on so many merry-go-rounds, ridden so many painted horses with their short dark sensible hair, bright eyes, and housewifely bodies that would no doubt balloon into a perfectly round
balaboosta’s
after the first child was born. He wanted her.

“What?” he asked impatiently, because he had to.

“Well, she has been around the block, if you know what I mean. She had a boyfriend, and I understand the breakup wasn’t fun. She was pretty hysterical about it.”

“A boyfriend?”

This was unusual. Religious girls didn’t have boyfriends. They had dates with prospective marriage partners. After a certain number of such dates—two or three for the extremely pious, maybe a dozen or so for lesser souls—a decision had to be made, a proposal offered that needed either to be accepted or refused.

“Breakup? You mean, she refused his proposal?”

Josh winced. “Not exactly. He never asked her. And they went out for quite some time.”

Chaim studied him. This was not good. Protocol demanded that a relationship
between a man and a woman be based on investigating the possibility of marriage, getting engaged, arranging the wedding details, then getting married. Anything else was
pritzus,
in other words, screwing around. A girl involved in a longtime relationship that had not resulted in marriage was one of two things: an unfortunate victim of an unscrupulous and non-Godfearing boy who had led her on; or a willing participant in a very unsavory and unacceptable liaison that marked her as nonkosher marriage material.

Chaim nodded, disturbed but not defeated. As he saw it, he now had two choices. Like a rabbi asked to judge whether a chicken was kosher, he could probe and probe its insides, examine its viscera, turning it over and over until he found some reason to call it
treife.
Or he could look at the chicken’s owner to see if he was a rich man or a poor man, deciding how much he needed the chicken. Thinking of her, Chaim decided on the latter tack. Under no circumstances was he willing to call this chicken
treife.
That being the case, he thanked Josh for his honesty and his help, broadly hinting that he needed no more information.

“I appreciate what you are trying to do, Josh, really. But I know you and Rivkie would never have arranged for me to meet Delilah in the first place if you’d thought there was something wrong with her behavior.”

That, of course, put Josh into a serious bind. What could he say? That he had not been aware of any of this until his Talmud study partner, who knew Yitzie from the neighborhood, had mentioned it in passing? And that only then had he squeezed the information out of Rivkie, who was on close terms with both Penina Gwertzman and Sharona Gottleib and had reluctantly sought the source of her roommate’s heartbreak—with the best of intentions, of course. Josh of course forgave her for not being worldly enough to understand the implications of such behavior. But to admit his error, he realized, would be to jeopardize his own infallible reputation, as well as that of his future wife, who had set this whole
tsimmes
boiling in the first place. Besides, all things considered, Chaim’s other marriage prospects were not brilliant, and Delilah Levi seemed to be his heart’s desire. Was it not written that
Forty days before conception a heavenly voice cries out, “This man for this woman?”
Who was Josh to argue?

He didn’t, nodding in silent acquiescence and hoping for the best.

Two weeks before the wedding, Rivkie bumped into Delilah and Chaim on a street in Manhattan. Delilah, Rivkie thought, looked great. She was wearing a blue cashmere sweater and a slim skirt of supple black leather that ended just above her knees. She had on blue eyeshadow and liner, and fabulous red lipstick that Rivkie admired but would never, ever, have had the guts to wear. Rivkie noticed how Chaim looked at her. His yearning was almost palpable, like that invisible energy field around the body Chinese doctors are always fiddling with.

Delilah, who hardly ever went to class anymore and who hadn’t been in the dorm room for weeks, was all smiles and hugs and kisses on the cheek.

“I’m having a beautiful dress made, in that building over there, on the sixth floor,” Delilah said, looking up and pointing toward a factory loft on Seventh Avenue. “We got it wholesale. First I tried it on in Saks, and then my mother got our neighbor to get it from the factory. He’s a button salesman, so he knows the wholesaler. And all I had to do was invite him to my wedding. It cost me a fraction!”

The skin of her throat was smooth and white as she arched her neck, pointing upward at the factory loft where, even as they spoke, her Queen for a Day dress was being hand-stitched by Guatemalan seamstresses in daily danger of INS raids. Rivkie watched Chaim watching her. And when Delilah turned around and spoke to him, she saw how he bent low and leaned in close with his ear toward her, looking into the distance and smiling vaguely, as if he were listening to music.

Delilah held out her engagement ring, a modest little thing but one that obviously thrilled her. “It’s a marquise,” she said, stroking it. “Isn’t that a nice shape? I mean, for the price of a marquise you can get a round stone twice the size.” She shook her head in delight. Only then did she remember Chaim. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Rivkie, meet Chaim. He’s going to be a rabbi,” she said, and Rivkie could see that Delilah expected her to be astonished, and that she herself was astonished no less.

FIVE

A
h, the wedding. Minor slights that had led to major family feuds and cutting decades-old silences had suddenly been forgiven. Animosities begun over Passover seder invitations and Rosh Hashanah cards and condolence calls withheld or insufficiently appreciated, were set aside. There was hope that all hard feelings would travel the labyrinthine road toward reconciliation, making their final exit via a white envelope containing a generous check. And so, forgotten relatives had been pursued in far away places like Hyattsville and Toronto. New cousins had been discovered. Old friends had been looked up. Addresses and phone numbers had been relentlessly tracked down with archival diligence through phone books and the Internet.

The guests came in alphabet subway trains from Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, in taxis from the Bronx, and in new Chevrolets from far-off Connecticut and Pennsylvania. They arrived early, or late, by Amtrak, Greyhound bus, and El Al flights from Tel Aviv. They poured into the hotel’s
genteel lobby, gaping at the ceilings, marble floors, and vases of flowers, before crowding the elevators down to the banquet hall. They flooded through the open doors like salmon swimming against the current in a desperate effort to reach the breeding grounds.

The glatt kosher caterer, who’d recently split with his brother-in-law in a backstabbing family coup, obviously had something to prove. The room reeked of gobsmacking culinary art: pirate ships with gangplanks and flags sticking out of the red flesh of carved-out watermelons; little marzipan Swiss villages nestled between chocolate mountains covered with whipped-cream snow that jiggled precariously as overcome children butted their heads against the table for a better look. And that was just the smorgasbord.

The older women wore long, pious polyester skirts and matching jackets from Boro Park. They wore elaborate gowns shaken out of mothballs from a child’s Bar Mitzva or wedding or Loehmann’s back-room bargains with slashed-off designer labels. They wore hats with feathers and satin bows. The most religious wore human hair wigs, newly washed and set in festive big-hair styles.