Chains Around the Grass (16 page)

“Show us, God, loving-kindness,” she prayed, able to cry now, feeling the full burden of her responsibility. “Just in all Your ways. O Rock, slow to anger and full of compassion, spare and have pity upon parents and children.” She enfolded her son’s hand, the long, awkward fingers of an adolescent boy and caressed them. She wondered again if she should she have brought Sara. Everyone had convinced her that a six-year-old had no place at a funeral. But what would she be able to tell the child, she wondered, that would be as definite and irrevocable as this box being lowered into the ground? How would she explain it without sounding as if she was making it up and thus had control over the telling, the beginning and the end?

And what was the beginning? Ruth thought helplessly. A dream in a boy’s head on the boat ride from Russia? Hesse? The gene of some unknown ancestor? Or was it, quite simply, a scenario in the unfathomable mind of God? And was this, then, the end? Or only the imagination failing, despair, the part in the tale where the teller himself gives up or dies. And what was left then, was the middle in all its confusion and injustice; the middle, which had to be seen to be believed.

This solid box, already obscured by layers of earth, would have told the child everything she needed to know, she realized. And as they threw the last spadefuls of earth over it, she was pierced by the knowledge that these well-meaning but foolish people had robbed her daughter forever of the only sight that would have eventually brought her some measure of understanding and comfort. And she, by abdicating control to them, had allowed it to happen.

“Yours, O Lord, is forgiveness and compassion. Whether a man live one year or a thousand years, what does he gain? He will be as though he had never been. We know, God, that Your judgment is just and it is not ours to brood over the standard of Your judgment. You are just, O God.”

Yes. She must accept this. But she could not accept that this dead man was her husband. Not yet. Nor her own terrible crimes against those she loved.

“God has given. God has taken. Blessed be the name of God.” She saw the men surround Jesse. Some like Morris, out of

piety, and some like Reuben, out of simple bossiness, draping the child with the fringed prayer shawl that was too long and too broad for his narrow shoulders.

She saw Jesse tremble with rage, but stop short of shrugging it off. She saw how his eyes wandered from man to man, finally resting on the man newly covered in earth. He pulled the striped wool prayer shawl close around him.

Morris held out a prayer book. Ruth wondered if her son would take it, or if he would scream, rejecting their canned lamentations, their ritualized mourning. I could find myself in that scream, she thought, amazed. It would create a place to rest all the horror, the injustice, the ugliness now wandering homelessly, forbidden to enter the calm beauty of prayers written in tranquility.

But the boy took the prayer book, comfortable among the men, wanting to prove himself worthy to remain. He read where Morris’ insistent finger moved down the page, dutifully reciting the prayer of a son for a dead father, his tongue tripping over the unfamiliar words as Morris whispered corrections in his ear.

“Yisgadal Vyiskadash Shmei Rabbah…”

Morris took the prayer shawl off the boy’s shoulders, folding it neatly; his eyes catching the mound of freshly turned earth. “Big ideas,” he thought with irony, but not without compassion, wiping cold tears from his eyes. “A big hole in the ground.”

Then he gripped the boy’s hand firmly, turning him away from the grave. “Come, son,” he said. “It’s enough.” He tried to sound fatherly and was surprised at the cold, pedantic firmness of his words. The boy shrugged him off, staring with unblinking defiance until appalled, Morris looked away, feeling the yeasty rise of resentment bubble up amidst the warmth of his compassion.

Jesse watched him go, then turning back toward the grave, he slammed his fist into the palm of his hand so hard Ruth heard the dull thud of his bones against his flesh. She knelt, tearing out the grass and throwing it back toward the grave, as was the custom. Then she put her arm around Jesse and she, and her son, and all the men and women who had gathered there walked away, stopping only to wash the uncleanness, the touch of death from their hands.

He shall make death vanish forever, and my Lord, Who is merciful even in stern justice, shall wipe away the tears from all faces…

Chapter fifteen

Ten days after the funeral, Ruth sat in front of the big picture window at Reuben’s house, studying the patchy winter lawn and the faded blue of the sky. The faint sunlight streaming through the glass penetrated her clothing, going straight through to the marrow of her bones. She leaned back enjoying it, wondering and feeling guilty over the heat and calm she had not expected to feel again.

It was a small thing, really, something she was embarrassed to even think about, that seemingly permanent shiver that ran along her bones; the feeling that her body was somehow open now on all sides, vulnerable and separate. She had felt it first after leaving Dave’s body behind at the hospital. Then, she had considered it just a spasm, a chill born of circumstances, objective and treatable: button the top button, put on warmer gloves. The real cold had begun later, at home in bed. It was having so much room, being able to spread out and roll over; never coming up against anything to stop you, to hold you still and warm and firm, and knowing it was not for just a day or a week or a year…

She felt flushed, almost blushing, as if the mere awareness of her body was a subtle form of disloyalty. And yet she didn’t move away, because with the warmth came a kind of quickening, something akin to strength.

Now, she thought. I can do it. I can go home.

They had stayed at Reuben’s for the shiva, the traditional seven days of mourning. Dave’s family and hers had come and gone, sitting in circles around her, talking in low tones, discussing the weather and politics and the stock market. They had asked her sly, prying questions about the future, clucking over the children with that obscene, hidden mixture of horror and unconscious relief people cannot help feeling over someone else’s tragedy. And she had sat beneath them on a low stool, in a ritually torn dress, forced to listen.

Reuben and his wife had been kind. Nice. Sorry. One part of her recognized and appreciated this. But mostly, she looked at them like strangers: where had they been years ago when they took in outsiders for partners? When they’d sent Dave away with empty hands? When their help could have meant a different life for them all? Now, she thought, who needs you? Let someone else stay here and watch you play the good family. I don’t want to be your audience anymore.

It would be a small victory.

When she asked Reuben to drive them home, she saw him hesitate. “Stay a few more days,” he urged, and Ruth hoped, but could not be sure, he was sincere.

Maybe that was the worst part. Not trusting anyone anymore.

It was as if a curtain had been drawn aside, allowing her a glimpse into a world so unlike any she’d ever imagined, that her very view of reality had been changed forever. For if a human being could do something like that—pretend friendship, then rob another man, a man with three young children, a good, kind man who had worked so hard, so honestly for his money…

If a man could do that…? What was Hesse spending that money on—money distilled from the sweat of a thousand cold, dark mornings when, rising at dawn, a man had left his wife and family to wash and dress and go to work? Hotels in Florida? A good dinner?

And did he feel good there, basking in the sun? And did the food taste good to him as he chewed and swallowed it, with no aftertaste of the dead man whom he had crushed and squeezed dry?

If a husband could talk the wife who loved him into giving away their life savings; no, could take it behind her back and give it away without her knowledge or consent…then, anything was possible. She thought of her children. For their sake she must do it. Be on her guard. Never trust. Never love again, not completely. Never.

“It’s nice of you, Reuben, really, to offer. But I think it’s better for the children if we go home,” she lied, in the full knowledge that her children were fine, better off with Reuben’s charity than with her own proud incompetence. It was she who would be better off at home in the dingy apartment in the housing projects, out from under the stares of Dave’s snotty sister and sister-in-law, whose disapproval beat down on her like the harsh light of a police lamp shone into the face of a suspect as he is grilled by detectives. Silently, the relatives probed her crime, disbelieving her show of innocence. But the crime she felt guilty of was not the one for which she’s been indicted.

For them, Ruth’s crime has always been that she isn’t stylish enough. Modern enough. Most of all, she’s too religious. Fanatic, they whisper behind her back. What they mean is that she lights candles Friday night and knows how to make the blessing over them in Hebrew. They themselves don’t know any Hebrew, and Sabbath candles are but a faint and distant memory in the Long Island mansions, and in the suburbs of Pennsylvania. Such things are embarrassing. Uncomfortable. (They won’t admit dangerous. Even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee when Jew became synonymous with Communist, which was synonymous with traitor. After all, it was only a few years after Hitler. They were careful to disassociate themselves with Jew, Communist, traitor, religion, candles, Hebrew, blessings. These things had nothing to do with them, with any good American). For them, Ruth will never be quite American enough to satisfy their implacable standards, the standards of first-generation Americans deathly anxious to cause no inconvenience, to arouse no contempt. And part of that—or perhaps in addition—was the fact that she never kept a neat home. Didn’t even own dish towels and had inefficient, outdated appliances…

Her crimes were endless.

Even to her own family, to Morris and Harriet, who went to the synagogue and kept a charity jar full of quarters and did not hold her religion against her, she was a dismal failure. Forgetting their role, they had long come to believe that their sister had committed an act of wanton recklessness with her marriage—for she’d joined herself to a dreamer, a man who hadn’t had a steady job, or a union to buy him a plot or help with the gravestone or provide insurance for the family he’d left behind. And now, being dead, his failure—and hers—was clear and irredeemable. Even the little they’d scraped by with between

dreams was gone, the family left penniless, and a burden upon hardworking, dues-paying, union employees…

Enveloped in pervasive shame of unclear origin, and of a general nature, was it any wonder Ruth plotted her escape?

Reuben did as she asked.

But standing before the door to their apartment, studying the scraped red metal, the doorknob covered with greasy fingerprints, she closed her eyes and panicked. Paint fumes from a newly rented apartment wafted through the halls, transporting her back to her own moving day a little over a year before with its sawdust and newly cut wood; to Dave fumbling, hopeful, for the key, dragging her dancing through the bare, unknown rooms.

“Ma,” Jesse shifted the suitcase he had insisted on carrying, rebuffing Reuben’s offers of help. The handle cut deeply into his young flesh.

She opened her eyes. Now, her hand on the knob, she had no illusions about what lay on the other side of the red metal: the silent, slightly seedy reality that would never change. Nothing frightening, all familiar, and yet more ghastly, really, than finding a ghost. She tried to focus, putting Louis down and rummaging through her bag for the keys, hoping she hadn’t done anything markedly stupid like losing them. What if they were lost? Her fingers dove with panic into the sticky underworld of pocketbook debris. Unthinkable! There would be no way of getting in, and they’d be forced to call Reuben again and to remain in the hallway. Fatherless, homeless.

“Ma!” Jesse’s voice unexpectedly hit a man’s deep note and Ruth looked at him startled, and oddly comforted.

“It’s in there, Jesse,” she said, handing him her purse.

He found the key and opened the door. The acrid smell of the room hit her like a furnace blast.

“Ma, I’m hungry,” Sara said.

“Ungry,” Louis echoed, tugging at Ruth’s skirt.

She felt the children’s soft, heavy bodies leaning against her and for the first time she understood: however radically her life had been transformed, nothing had really changed. The floor would still have to be mopped, the pots scrubbed. Bread needed to be spread with peanut butter and jelly; packages would have to be carried and Louis wiped after he went to the bathroom. And, she realized with terror, the rent would still have to be paid. Yes, the rent.

She felt a sense of annihilation, as if each thing in itself was so tremendous it could not be accomplished, let alone the sum of all things.

“Gimme me some money, Ma, and I’ll go get somethin’ to eat,” Jesse offered. “I’ll get this show on the road.”

She looked up at him. He was so much like his father. Maybe this was how God intended to save her. For surely, someone, something, must save her.

She counted out her money.

There was the hundred Morris had pressed into her hand (God bless him.) A fortune for Morris. But at least—his father’s son—he would enjoy the dividends of a mitzvah, a good deed, however burdensome. Reuben’s fifty; the twenties the other relatives must have slipped inside when she wasn’t looking. And that, she thought desperately, was that. There was no savings account. No insurance, because insurance salesmen, as Dave had so often insisted, were all crooks. Something inside her rumbled like laughter.

Painfully, she peeled off five dollars. “Let me write you a grocery list.”

“I’m not a baby,” he argued, cutting her off. “I know what to get.

He left before she had a chance to say anything. Secretly, she was glad. In the kitchen, she cleared off the table from week-old crumbs, sponging the stale puddles off the counters. She rinsed the tea kettle and set the water boiling for coffee, gaining comfort from each small accomplishment.