Hush (11 page)

My mother woke me up that morning at least four times. She pounded on my bed, warned me that she would send me onto the van in pajamas, and why, oh why, couldn’t I be ready like Surie always was. I jumped out of bed and pulled on my clothes so fast that the right shoe was on the left foot. I put on one blue sock and one black, along with my dirty skirt from last week, my sister’s clean shirt from this week, and my little brother’s blue sweater that looked like the school sweater anyway. Yet before I finished, the van was outside with its long, squeaky beeps so that the whole neighborhood heard I was late.

I ran out of my room and down the hall with my mother yelling that I was always getting up at the last second and why couldn’t I be like my brother, who was waiting for the van ten minutes before it came. Here was my lunch, there was my briefcase, and who knew where my homework papers were—why didn’t I put them in my briefcase last night—and, no, she didn’t make me a peanut butter sandwich, the tuna would do just fine. And why was I running around like a chicken without a head, just go already! The van was
leaving
!”

After school, Devory came home with me. Hashem had stuffed another baby in her mother’s stomach and she wasn’t feeling well. Miriam was caring for the younger children while her mother rested. Devory, though, was too much of a handful because she never listened to anyone.

My mother wasn’t home. I had forgotten she had told me that she was taking Sruli to the doctor for a small checkup. I couldn’t find my key, so we went up to Kathy’s, hoping to watch some good TV.

My mother didn’t mind me going up to Kathy sometimes, but she didn’t know that I watched her TV. In general, my mother didn’t like goyim. But she said that Kathy was a nice goy who was just a little strange, so nothing would happen if I went up. Surie, though, said that she didn’t know how I could visit such a weirdo, with that
ichy
white cat and all those
goyishe
pictures. But I didn’t care. Fat Kootchie Mootchie never bothered me. Though he and I had never quite gotten along, we had reached a point of mutual toleration and completely ignored each other. All he did was eat and sit on the couch watching TV.

Devory and I sat comfortably on the yellow couch in front of the dark TV looking at a photo album of Kathy’s family. The pictures in the album were all black-and-white, as Kathy had been a child about a hundred years ago, though she always said it was only fifty years ago. Kathy pointed out to me a pretty picture that showed her mother holding her as a baby. I asked Kathy where her mother was today, and she said that her mother was in heaven. I was completely surprised and told Kathy that I didn’t know her mother was Jewish. Kathy looked even more surprised and said that her mother wasn’t Jewish. She was Catholic.

“Well, then,” Devory said, “she isn’t in heaven. Only Jews go to heaven.” But Kathy insisted her mother was in heaven. She said that all good souls went to heaven and it didn’t matter what religion you were. But we knew it
did
matter, and we told Kathy that the only way you could get into heaven was if you were Jewish and, of course, wore a hat. She laughed and said, “No, no, there are no hats in heaven, only souls.”

We felt terrible disappointing her, but Devory whispered to me that she must know the truth. I agreed and earnestly informed her that there was just no way her mother was in heaven and if her father didn’t wear a hat of some kind he wasn’t there either.

Then it suddenly struck Devory that Kathy’s father did wear a hat. She pointed excitedly to the picture in the album showing Kathy’s father wearing the very bend-down kind of hat like the
litvish
wore. I was relieved and told Kathy that her mother could get into heaven after all.

“Maybe,” I mused gravely, “your father was a secret Jew who never told anyone but only wore the hat.” But Kathy only laughed again and said, “No, no,
everyone
wore a hat then.”

“But if everyone wore the hat,” Devory said, puzzled, “it must have been awfully confusing to Hashem. How did He know who was Jewish and who wasn’t?”

Kathy claimed that we didn’t have to worry about Hashem. He knew. I asked her if she was absolutely sure all Christians wore hats then, and she said yes, absolutely sure, though today no one wears hats any longer except for the Pope. I asked her who that was, and she said that the Pope was the head of the Catholics, and he wore a great, tall, white hat. I was surprised to know Christians kept Hashem in their hats too. But Kathy said no, Christians kept Hashem in their church and sometimes forgot Him on the way out, but the Pope was a holy man who kept Hashem in his heart.

Devory and I didn’t have much to say to that one, and we were forced to agree with Kathy that the Pope—with the great, tall, white hat—and all those goyim from the 1950s might somehow push their way into heaven. But as for the goyim today, it was hopeless. Perhaps they could even get away with not being Jewish, but they simply couldn’t make it in if they didn’t wear a hat.

Kathy, though, was terribly stubborn. She said that, even today, her hatless Catholic uncle who had recently died had gone straight up to heaven with her mother and all the other hatless souls in her family, and that she and her husband, Leo, had every intention of going to heaven too.

We argued some more, but despite everything our teacher said, Kathy insisted that souls went up to heaven and hats stayed firmly on Earth. We left Kathy’s apartment very annoyed. She had completely undone our heaven and Earth, and I could not stop thinking of that tall, great, white hat prancing around in heaven without anyone knowing he wasn’t Jewish, and of Kathy going up there and being stuck outside the gates of heaven, crying to be let in. We weren’t worried about other goyim. We knew that except for Kathy and maybe her family, they were all evil and mean. But what would happen to Kathy? How would she get into heaven if she ever died?

Devory thought about asking Miss Goldberg, our teacher, but I told her that she shouldn’t dare. Miss Goldberg would tell my parents, and my parents would never let me go back up to visit a goy whose family dared to be in heaven.

My brother Avrum, the one ahead of me, is getting engaged tonight though he does not know it yet. In the last few weeks there have been all-day phone calls, passionate meetings, and fierce Yiddish arguments, as the matchmaker persuaded my parents to take the Cohen girl, that perfect
maidel
from a rabbi-filled family, with rich grandparents and genius hands that would bake three-layered cakes to feed to the many healthy children she would produce for their genius and future rabbi son, Avrum. My parents had made their final decision yesterday, after the
Rebbe
gave his blessing for the
shidduch
, but had then decided that it was useless to interrupt the young man’s Torah learning with distracting thoughts, when he would not meet his future wife anyway until later today when the
L’chaim
was ready.

Today was hectic and panicked in our home, as my mother brought in two cleaning ladies to sparkle up the house, prepared enough salads for the whole neighborhood, and put red roses and snow white dandelions in every room. So she hardly noticed when I left the house, mumbling something about buying tights on Thirteenth Avenue. Instead I came here, to the police precinct, and asked to speak to Miranda.

Miranda nodded her head. “But what made you come now? It is so many years later. Why did you come now?”

I did not know why I came here now. Actually, I did, but I didn’t want to explain, did not want to talk about Devory and me, how we had dressed up like brides when we were nine and promised each other that we would be married on the same day, in the same hall, wearing the same dress. It had made sense at the time. We had just been to our very first wedding, when our fourth-grade teacher got married. We had stared at her in wonder: at her flowing white gown, at her face shining with happiness, at her soft, pale hands and the jewelry that sparkled on her neck like little stars. One day we would be brides too, we told each other, and then to make it more fun than ever, we would do it together. We would sit near each other in two great white chairs. I would hold a bouquet of red flowers; Devory’s would be white. We didn’t think much about the grooms. They would work it out somehow on the other side of the hall by the men’s section. We had even drawn our dresses out in detail, meticulously copying Cinderella’s ball gown from a book on a white sheet of paper.

For a time, I had forgotten about all of this. And I would have gotten married alone, just fine, if I hadn’t seen that picture—the smiles flashing out at me, our eyes sparkling ecstatically, our ten-dollar bridal dresses drooping on our small bodies.

Maybe Devory could not forgive me for this, for getting married without her.

I told this to Miranda.

“You are very brave,” she said. “You are courageous for coming here.”

“I am not brave,” I said.

“You are. You just don’t know it yet.” She pushed a cup of water toward me. “Drink,” she said, half smiling. “I won’t write anything down.”

I drank. Miranda leaned back in her chair. She thought. “Is it your parents you’re most afraid of?”

“Yes.”

“Will they beat you?”

“No.”

“Then why are you afraid?” she asked.

“Because I need to look at them afterward. I need to look into their eyes and tell them why I destroyed their family for something they did not do.”

“How will it destroy your family, Gittel?”

“It will destroy our reputation, our
shidduchim
, everything. It is difficult to explain. I will be a
moser
.”

“What is that?”

“A traitor. Someone who tells things to the goyim.”

“Do you feel like a traitor?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you came.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I
am
a traitor.…” And I did not explain Devory’s white, white face by the window, her knocking, knocking in the wind, and why she would never let me sleep again. It was too hard to say that this was my fault, because I should have screamed out loud the first time she had come to me and held my hand so tightly from fear that I had almost cried from my own.

“Do you want to get married?” Miranda asked, after waiting for me to explain.

“Of course…,” I said, chewing on a nail. “I think. I don’t know. That’s what we do. Of course I’ll get married.”

Miranda bit the pen cap. She twisted the pen between her fingers as her eyes narrowed, and she looked at me, trying to understand without speaking.

“Do such things happen by the goyim?” I asked.

“Which things?”

“That.”

“Gittel, what’s
that
?”

“The thing that happened to Devory.”

“But you didn’t tell me what happened.”

“You know what.”

“I don’t. I just know the end. But I don’t know the why.”

“But the police asked questions. It should be in the files.”

Miranda sighed. “But when there are no witnesses, when we have only half a story, there is nothing we can do.”

A few days after our visit to Kathy, my mother informed us that she was running away to Israel. Actually, she said that she was going for only one week, but I knew that she was really abandoning us forever.

It was all my fault, really. The night before, my mother had tucked me into bed at seven thirty, my father had kissed me good night, and they had left my room looking quite relieved. I had lain in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, imagining it to be a small fluffy cloud floating slowly into my room, hovering gently over my head so that I could drift off into a deep, deep…death sleep. I smiled mysteriously. Being dead was fun. I got to lie completely straight, my arms and legs in a perfect line, my head laid back romantically on the pillow, my eyes closed prettily, and my lips just slightly open…like that. Perfect.

Then my parents would come in and wail and my siblings would stand at the door, their scared eyes wide open, and I would lie there as pleased and as dead as could be. I hadn’t quite figured out how I would see the whole scenario if I couldn’t even open my eyes. At first I just ignored this, but then I realized that there was simply no way I could see through my eyelids, and what was the point of being dead if I couldn’t see how sad everyone was. So I stopped playing dead and to my great annoyance found that I was still not sleeping. I tried counting sheep. I counted and counted and in the middle I switched to cows and then to monkeys, who were, on the whole, a lot more interesting. That’s when I heard the mice. Actually it was the steam making all those squeaking noises, but it occurred to me that perhaps they were trapped. Horrified, I visualized the tiny gray mice stuffed into the narrow metal tunnels, scuttling desperately back and forth, scratching at the iron with their tiny paws, squeaking mournfully while I lay in bed.