In Case We're Separated Read online

  Rebecca knew Sonia as a cousin, and Sonia’s children—the boy, Morris, and, eventually, five sisters (Clara, Fanny, Sylvia, Bobbie, Minnie)—as slightly more distant cousins. At nine, Rebecca scolded Cousin Sonia for insufficient attention to the Passover restrictions, and Sonia spoke sharply, then touched Rebecca’s arm apologetically. Rebecca began taking the trolley herself to help Sonia with the children. She took good care of them, but was too strict about keeping them clean and quiet. She had unruly curly hair and a neat little nose rather like Reuben’s, not that her father ever looked up from the Talmud to notice her. Cousin Rebecca didn’t laugh, Morris and the girls complained. They sat her down and played her their favorite of a pile of records that their father had brought home one night, along with a Victrola: it was called “No News but What Killed the Dog,” and told a story Rebecca found sad, though the others shrieked with laughter.

  Rebecca finished high school and found a job typing. It was a Jewish company and they gave her Saturday off, or she wouldn’t have done it. Sonia’s children didn’t see her as often once she was working, but sometimes she’d come on Sundays. “Can I help, Cousin Sonia?” Rebecca would say, walking into the preparation of a meal or the bathing of small children. She said it so often that “Can I help, Cousin Sonia?” became a household joke, and the girls said it to one another whenever anybody picked up a dishrag or a paring knife.

  Sonia had never learned to read—Sylvia tried to teach her, but Sonia’s eyes became red and watery and the project was abandoned—but the children read Goldie’s letters out loud to her and she dictated replies. Sonia mentioned Rebecca only occasionally in her letters, not wanting to make her children wonder or make Goldie sad. Rebecca stared when Sonia’s girls talked about Aunt Chicago, as they called Goldie: Aunt Chicago ate in restaurants, went to plays, and wrote letters containing sentences about the bedroom.

  One day Fanny screamed because she’d read ahead in a letter from Goldie to her mother. Sonia screamed, too, before she even knew what had happened. Aaron had disappeared: one day he had taken his shoes to the shoemaker’s for new heels, and had never returned. The shoemaker said he didn’t remember Goldie’s husband or his shoes, and that was that. Goldie’s oldest son had been talking about quitting school and going to work. Now he did so, and Goldie took a job in a dress factory.

  Sonia pictured her brother-in-law, in shoes run down at the heel, walking into nothing—finding, at last, some fragment of life where for some reason nobody told him about what he couldn’t believe in. “It’s a disease,” she told her family. “He can’t remember where he lives. The police will bring him home when they figure it out.”

  Goldie wrote, “At last it’s quiet around here, but I miss you-know-what.”

  Joseph sent Goldie money. He had worked in a furniture store for years, and now he was part owner.

  Several years after Rebecca graduated from high school, a friend married and quit her job, a good job: selling and keeping the books in a store that sold musical instruments and sheet music. The friend told the two bosses (who never yelled, she said) about Rebecca, who was hired after an interview, even though they were not Jewish and she said she wouldn’t work on Saturdays. “I understand,” said Mr. Hardy, the younger boss, nodding respectfully.

  The store was called Stevens and Hardy. Mr. Stevens was an elderly man who could repair any musical instrument, while polite Mr. Hardy, who knew little about music, talked to customers. He was a widower in his forties, with two daughters. The third week Rebecca worked in the store, she was straightening the racks of music in the evening, after Mr. Stevens had left and they’d closed, when she was suddenly gripped around the legs. She looked down, alarmed. A little girl whose hair needed combing had seized Rebecca’s skirt and was hiding her face in it.

  “What’s wrong?” Rebecca said.

  “Mama died.” Mama had not just died, but that was what was wrong. The little girl, Mr. Hardy’s younger daughter, Charlotte, was playing a private game with Rebecca or her skirt. At the moment she was not grieving. Nonetheless, Rebecca bent compassionately and touched the child’s hair, figuring out who she was.

  A tall woman appeared. “I’m sorry, miss,” she said. “Charlotte, get up.”

  Charlotte stayed where she was. The woman was Mr. Hardy’s sister. She and Rebecca spoke politely, and then Mr. Hardy came out and introduced them.

  The girl still knelt at Rebecca’s feet, still with Rebecca’s hand on her hair. Facing the child’s father and aunt—two well-dressed, blond, self-confident Americans, descendants of George Washington for all Rebecca knew—Rebecca felt for a moment like a participant in an unfamiliar religious rite such as she imagined took place at a church she passed (all but averting her eyes) on her way to work.

  “Get up, Charlotte,” said Mr. Hardy. Charlotte stood at last, flushed and laughing, and Rebecca’s feeling passed. Rebecca swept the floor while Mr. Hardy replaced the trumpets and saxophones that customers had examined in the course of the day, and rechecked lists he’d made, as he did every night—sitting in his tiny office with the door open, singing jazz melodies extremely softly and slowly. When everyone left that evening, Mr. Hardy’s sister and Charlotte went out first. Mr. Hardy held the door for Rebecca so as to lock it behind her, and he turned and looked at her in a way that seemed expectant. “Your daughter is pretty,” Rebecca said.

  Mr. Hardy’s cheeks reddened, and then—standing in his coat, holding his hat at his side—he changed suddenly. He seemed to grow slightly shorter and wider; his limbs seemed rounder. It was as if a clever mechanical model of a human being had been replaced by a live person, inevitably less precisely assembled. Mr. Hardy was a gentile, but when he grasped the brass doorknob, Rebecca realized, it felt round and hard to him, exactly as it did to her. She suddenly pictured his arm, under his coat and shirt, full of tangled veins. “How did your wife die, Mr. Hardy?” Rebecca said. “If it’s all right to ask.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “She had a ruptured appendix.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  A few weeks later, after Rebecca had found herself having occasional strange thoughts about Mr. Hardy—not just about the veins on his arm but other parts of his body—he invited her to come for a walk. It was spring, and still light when they closed the store. They walked to a German bakery where they drank tea and ate coffee cake. Rebecca, who brought her lunch in a bag, didn’t object. The bakery wasn’t kosher, but Mr. Hardy was such a conscientious person that she knew he didn’t understand and she didn’t want to make him feel bad. The walk was repeated.

  Her parents didn’t ask why Rebecca came home from work later and less hungry. Everything about the music store baffled them; there was no point in inquiring. But Rebecca was surprised at how readily she ate at the bakery, just because poor Mr. Hardy was a widower, a man to be pitied—as if the kosher laws had an exception for tea with the grieving. She asked him questions about his daughters, about his own life. Rebecca was well behaved, but not shy. At last, on a day when she was particularly enjoying Mr. Hardy, enjoying the look of his neck coming out of his shirt collar, she blurted out, “I’m not supposed to eat at a place like this.”

  “Even though it’s not pork?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents mind? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “They don’t know.”

  Timothy Hardy was not accustomed to concealing his behavior or feeling ashamed of it. He’d assumed she understood he was courting her, and that her parents would, too. Before asking Rebecca to walk, he’d decided he probably would marry her. He planned to give up pork and to accompany her to the Jewish church on Saturdays. He thought her parents would be doubtful at first—he was not Jewish, he had been married, he had children—but they would be reassured when they realized what an upright and serious-minded son-in-law he’d be.

  Rebecca had liked Timothy Hardy’s seriousness from the start. He reminded her a little of Cousin Sonia’s husband, Jose
ph, who’d parcel out a small chicken with scrupulous fairness to his many children, making ironic, self-deprecating comments, sometimes inaudible except for their tone. Timothy Hardy was not ironic. Irony alarmed him because he couldn’t endure the risk of being misunderstood, yet Rebecca had misunderstood him completely. She had not guessed he wanted to marry her. Rebecca didn’t know gentiles could marry Jews.

  “Tell them,” Timothy Hardy now began to urge her, though he still didn’t mention marriage. “Tell your mother I’ve asked you to drink tea. Let me visit her.”

  “What will you talk about?”

  “I’ll tell her I’d like to take you to a concert. She’ll see that I’m not young, but that isn’t so bad.”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” said Rebecca. She tried to imagine her mother, who was engaged these weeks in embroidering a Torah cover for the shul, putting down her work and rising to greet Timothy Hardy. It wasn’t just that Leah would object to him. She would be as alarmed by his interest in her daughter as if Rebecca reported that the streetcar or the lamppost on the corner wanted to visit her at home.

  Mr. Hardy stopped asking her to take walks. He’d spoken of his mother, now dead, with a warmth Rebecca envied, and she knew he wouldn’t allow himself to lead a young person into disobedience to her parents. “Whenever I went to see my mother,” Timothy had confided one afternoon, “she’d insist she had known just when I’d get there. At last I went to visit her at six in the morning, and she said, ‘Well, Timothy, I am surprised to see you!’ ” After that story he blinked several times, smiling hard, his dimples showing and his mustache looking stretched. Rebecca understood how daring—how loving—it had been for him to go so far as to play a trick.

  After taking some walks by herself in a different direction, Rebecca knew that she loved Timothy Hardy, and that he’d given her up because she was too cowardly to tell her mother about him. If she was in love, she thought she ought to be brave enough to tell Leah, even though she was now sure that Timothy Hardy would never take her for a walk or to a concert or anywhere. When she looked at her broad face in the mirror, with heavy curls falling over her forehead—the alert face of someone about to follow instructions carefully—she was astonished to discover that it could be the face of someone in love. She thought she’d like to die saving the lives of Timothy Hardy’s children.

  One evening, Leah was alone, embroidering near the window, when Rebecca came back from visiting her cousins. The day was fading and it was time to stop and light the lamp, but Leah had kept working, making neat silvery lines and loops, soothed and enchanted by her own skill. When Rebecca came in Leah smiled apologetically. “I should have more light,” she acknowledged. Leah’s eyesight wasn’t as good as it had been.

  It was unusual for Leah to sound apologetic or tentative. She was a firm, vigorous person who followed the elaborate dictates of her religion precisely, picturing herself as a small but muscular horse pulling a sledge. Leah had had a deeply pious father and now she had a deeply pious husband. She was grateful to both of them, feeling obscurely that if they hadn’t taught her to be quite so scrupulous, something bad would have been freed in her. Her father and husband didn’t seem to experience something Leah had known from childhood, a slightly exhilarating, slightly nauseating awareness that truths might also be false. Sometimes a compelling, hateful picture appeared uncontrollably in Leah’s mind: the embroidered Torah cover, for example, smeared with feces. Leah knew to keep her head down when that happened, whisper a prayer, and keep embroidering. She’d brought up her daughter carefully.

  Rebecca lit the lamp. Her mother looked up and smiled, and Rebecca thought that Leah looked surprisingly young at that moment, with her double chin and the bags under her eyes momentarily in shadow. A look of query passed over Leah’s face, and it was almost as if she’d invited her daughter’s confidence, and so Rebecca, still in her coat, slid into a chair, rather than seating herself properly, and said, “Mama, I think I love Mr. Hardy.”

  “I think” was a lie, Rebecca’s bow to convention, her effort to sound as she thought she should. She had always been so good that she’d had no practice speaking of hard subjects. Everything she’d said up to now had been something she knew her parents wanted to hear.

  Leah looked up, so startled she thought for an instant that she must have imagined rather than heard her daughter’s words, and her hand went to her mouth. “Sha!” she said involuntarily, though nobody could hear them.

  “But I do.”

  Rebecca suddenly grinned at her mother like a baby, and her wide face glowed. Leah’s hands prickled. She saw herself sitting in her chair, the Torah cover in her lap, as if she were someone else: she had a sensation of disconnection from herself, which she’d had only once before, when someone told her that her father was dead. She said, “He won’t . . .”

  “He did. I think he’s changed his mind, so there’s nothing to worry about, but I want to tell him I love him, just so he’ll know. He’s a good man, Mama. Sometimes when we walk together, he says just what I’m thinking. It’s as if he’s Jewish.”

  “Shhh.” Leah shook her head hard. It was beyond consideration. They would have to hold a funeral. “You must stop talking like this.” It was her fault. Leah should have thought about men. She should have pointed Rebecca toward a man at shul, or spoken to a friend. In Europe it would have been simple. “Rebecca,” she said, “would you bring me a glass of water?”

  Rebecca hurried out, still in her coat, and brought it, stretching her arm and the glass of water toward her mother when she was still halfway across the room. Leah started to rise and accept the glass, but its surface was slippery, or Rebecca, with new recklessness, let go too soon. The glass did not fall for a moment. Somehow it seemed to rise, and the water—Rebecca had filled it too full—rose in a circle, as well, as if a heavy fish had dived, making a wave that broke over the hands and arms of Rebecca and her mother, and the Torah cover that was still in Leah’s other hand. For a moment the water resembled feeling, pure and intense. Then it was just water, and the conversation ended with mopping, broken glass, apologies, and consultations about damp embroidery.

  Just after the front door of the store had been locked the next evening, Rebecca stood in front of Timothy Hardy’s desk as if she wanted to request permission to buy ink for the ledger. He looked at her over the rims of his glasses. “I would like to tell you that I love you,” said Rebecca. “I know you don’t want to take me walking anymore, and of course we couldn’t . . . I told my mother—”

  Timothy sprang up, letting his glasses fall to the desk and slide onto the floor. He seized her by the shoulders. “Marry me,” he said. “I will become a Jew.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I mean I’ll convert.”

  “I don’t think . . .”

  “Your mother will change her mind when I convert.”

  She shook her head tearfully. He kissed her.

  Timothy went to a synagogue he’d noticed on the Lower East Side. He knew enough to go on Saturday, but he couldn’t read the Hebrew information saying what time the service began. He thought 10:00 A.M. would be fine, and when he arrived he saw men coming out and going in, so he walked in behind them and sat down. All around him, men were swaying and murmuring, stopping to converse, swaying and murmuring again. Eventually the scrolls in their silk cover were brought out and Timothy was amazed to see something lavish and colorful in this drab setting. The service went on for hours. When it was over, Timothy approached the rabbi, hat in hand. “Excuse me,” he said, “I would like to become Jewish.” He wondered if the rabbi spoke English.

  “Put on your hat,” the rabbi said, and Timothy took that as a dismissal, apologized, and left. Maybe he could find a different synagogue.

  Rebecca noticed that her mother looked frightened for weeks after their conversation, and she worried that she’d damaged Leah’s health with her surprising admission. She didn’t mention Mr. Hardy again. When they were alone in the store, sh
e and Timothy planned their life. She couldn’t resist these conversations. She would care for his children, and they’d have more. “Maybe you’d better come see the furniture,” he said. “You might not like Lucy’s taste.” Lucy was his dead wife.

  “We’re keeping Lucy’s furniture,” said Rebecca, sounding like her mother.

  “You are the bride.”

  “Bride shmide.” She’d found her true work and wanted to get busy. She’d learn to laugh so Timothy and his daughters could laugh. Her cousins could teach her jokes. She’d get them to explain what was so funny about that record “No News but What Killed the Dog,” which consisted of a recital of disasters.

  One evening Timothy told her that the rabbi who was preparing him to become Jewish, after discouraging him several times, had explained an unexpected next step. It was necessary for Timothy to be circumcised. He looked at Rebecca with love and some embarrassment, and she slowly took in what he was saying. Rebecca had allowed herself, for a few seconds at a time, alone in her bed, to consider that Timothy had a penis, but now it was as if lights had been turned on in a room that should be dark. Staring into Timothy’s face, Rebecca acquired a rapid education. Her father must have a penis, too, as well as Cousin Joseph and his son, Morris. When they were little Jewish babies, their little penises had been cut. She had been to a bris more than once. She knew all about mohels and what they do, but she had never allowed herself to think the thoughts she thought now, that baby boys grew into men, that their penises grew, too, that men who were not Jewish had different penises, that a different penis hung at this moment in Timothy’s trousers. Involuntarily she glanced down, and then she glanced down frankly. “It will hurt.”