Invisible City (19 page)

“Did you get her?” says the girl from
The Insider.
She’s dressed for a stand-up: lipstick and foundation, no hat. I try to ignore her and knock again, more softly. “Ms. Dryden, could you just tell us if Frank is planning to come home?”

I hear a lock turn—everyone does—and like dogs sensing a squirrel, we all point our noses and notebooks and camera lenses toward 3E. But the door stays closed. And behind it, a woman’s voice.

“Please,” she says softly. “Can’t you please just leave me alone?”

“What’s she saying!” yells the kid from TMZ.

“Shut the fuck up, asshole!” shouts Bill, but he doesn’t move from his pose, so he not only practically shatters my eardrum, but spits in my hair, too.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dryden,” I say again, putting my hand on the door. I look at Maya and she nods. Keep going. “Are you planning to take Frank back?”

“Please, can’t you just go?”

“I’m really sorry, but none of our bosses will let us leave until we talk to you. It won’t be long, we just want to know if Frank is coming home. If you could just open the door for a minute…”

“Missy!” shouts TMZ. “Have you seen the photos? Ask her if she’s gonna do another soft core.”

Bill whips around to yell at TMZ, but he moves so fast, he forgets to lower his lens and smacks the chick from
The Insider
right in the face.

“Oooooh!” yells TMZ, sounding like a middle school boy witnessing a playground dis. “You okay, Chrissy?”

Chrissy is not okay. Chrissy is bleeding. She’s got her pretty leather glove pressed to her mouth. Bill’s kneeling, tending to his lens, which appears intact. He looks up at TMZ and hisses, “If you fucked up my lens, I’m gonna fucking kill you, motherfucker.”

TMZ puts his hands up, like in surrender. “Tell your fucking reporter to tell porn mom if she don’t come out, we’re gonna be on her and her kids and her fucking whatever all day every day until she jumps out the window.”

“Hey!” I say. I look at Chrissy and I look at 3E and I’m not sure which to attend to. Chrissy’s lip is split. She’s done for the day—you can see it in the tired, blank sheen that’s fallen over her eyes. I’m done, too.

CHAPTER TEN

Sara Wyman arrives at the Starbucks a few minutes late. She has the rumpled, distracted look of a librarian, with ruby red–rimmed eyeglasses and half-gray hair cut in a shapeless bob.

“I saw the article about the gardener,” she says after we sit down. Up close, her face is much softer than it seemed at the funeral. She’s probably forty-five, and has very few wrinkles. “Not much real information there.”

Touché.

“Yeah,” I say, pulling out my notebook and pen. I’m going to get this right. “I’m hoping to round that out. Fill it in, rather. I spoke with a young woman she used to babysit. And her sister-in-law.”

“Miriam,” says Sara. “You mentioned that.”

“You said you knew her, too?”

Sara nods. “First,” she says, “I need to set some ground rules. I will tell you what I know, but my words do not appear in the newspaper unless I approve the language.”

Letting sources approve their quotes is frowned upon. But I’m not really in a position to be picky. At least I can use her name.

“Absolutely,” I say.

“Rivka began coming to my gatherings about a year ago. I host a weekly group at an apartment near the United Nations. We have an open door policy. People hear of us through friends. Those who come are unhappy in their Orthodox identity somehow. They come to have a supportive, positive place to think and question. To sort things out with the help of others.”

“Do you know why Rivka started coming?”

“She had just lost a child,” says Sara.

“Yes,” I say. “Someone else mentioned that. A miscarriage?”

“No. The baby was nearly eight months old. A little girl named Shoshanna. She was devastated. Rivka said it was asthma. The little girl had a breathing attack. She was devastated, and I think it changed her.”

“How did she change, do you think?”

Sara sighs. “I didn’t know her before, but she was angry. And she talked about feeling that she had just woken up to the anger. At the group meetings, she kept things close to her chest, but when we met separately she was less circumspect. You said you’d met Miriam?”

“Yes.”

“Rivka spoke often of Miriam. You know she’d been away for many years.”

“Away?”

“Yes. Miriam had problems. Mental health issues, we call them now. Rivka said that starting around age eleven she just couldn’t act like everyone else. She wouldn’t always wash herself, things like that. Seemingly purposeless defiance. And she had rages. Rivka said she gave herself a concussion banging her head against the kitchen wall when she was barely thirteen. Rivka and Miriam had been friends since they were very young, and Rivka went to live with the family after her mother died and her father was unable to care for her.”

“Miriam said Rivka’s mother had worked for their family,” I say.

“Yes, I believe that was the background. She died of cancer and the Mendelssohns took Rivka in. Her brothers went upstate, to the grandparents, I think. Rivka remembered Miriam being punished a lot. Locked in a bedroom. Made to miss meals. The parents didn’t know what to do. And she got worse as she got older. She was expelled from school.”

“What happened?”

“Rivka said that Miriam pulled her hair out. It’s a nervous habit, of course, and now we know it’s somewhat common for young women with certain kinds of mental disorders. The other girls made fun of her. One day the class was in the kitchen, and Miriam … well, something happened with a kettle. Rivka said Miriam poured the boiling water on one of the girls. Right down the back of her neck. The girl was in the hospital for weeks and her family made a big stink. You can’t blame them, of course. I believe that was when Miriam was sent away—the first time, at least. To some sort of hospital.”

“But Rivka stayed?”

Sara nods. “She said she felt terribly guilty about the way the family reacted to Miriam’s … departure. She told me that they didn’t speak of her at all in the years she was gone. It was as if she hadn’t ever been there.”

“Rivka didn’t want to go back with her father?”

Sara shakes her head. “Rivka’s father was not much of a presence in her life, even before her mother died. She told me that now she could see he had mental problems, too. He spent his time at work—I believe he was a clerk of some kind—or shul, or his bedroom. He jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge when Rivka was sixteen.”

“Oh my God.”

“It was considered a great blessing in the family when Aron proposed to Rivka.”

“Really?”

“You seem surprised.”

“He’s much older.…”

“Almost twenty years, I think. But that isn’t terribly unusual. He was away in Israel most of her childhood.”

“I’ve met him a couple times. Honestly, he kind of scared me.”

“You met him, I assume, just after the violent death of his wife.”

I nod.

“Aron is a generous man, from what I can tell. He helped find a match for Miriam, which was not an easy task, despite their wealth.”

“And Miriam never had children.”

“As if things weren’t bad enough for Miriam, yes, Rivka told me she was infertile.”

I flip back through my notebook to find the word Chaya used. “I talked to a girl who said Miriam was … akarah?”

“
Akarah,
yes. That means barren. Who said that?”

“Um, just a woman who knew her. A young woman. She was very pregnant.”

Sara shakes her head. “Miriam does not need more scrutiny from the community. I’m sure her infertility is a great sorrow for her. She and Aron were two of eleven in their family.”

“Jesus.”

Sara laughs. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. She has dimples in both cheeks. “They were fruitful and they multiplied. Heshy, Miriam’s husband, I believe has health issues as well. Couples without children do not fit into Hasidic society easily. They are suspicious. Something must be wrong, people think. And of course something
is
wrong. But something is always wrong, isn’t it?

“I think that when she came to me, Rivka had been very unhappy for a very long time. She told me she’d never felt right about the way the family—and everyone else—treated Miriam. From what Rivka said, Miriam was a wonderful, sensitive friend to her, especially throughout the tragedies of her childhood. But what could she do?” Sara pauses. “Rivka started reading. Secretly, of course. She spent time in bookstores, in Manhattan, away from the community.” The Strand, I think. Like my mom. “She started reading religious philosophy, but quickly began reading about mental illness. She believed Miriam was very definitely bipolar, with borderline traits as well.”

“But she was never diagnosed? Or medicated?”

“That’s unclear. A few months ago Rivka mentioned she was considering a trip upstate to the hospital where Miriam had stayed. I think she suspected it wasn’t actually a hospital.”

“What would it be?”

“Some sort of home for inconvenient family members, perhaps. Run by a rebbe. Where she was kept but not really treated.”

“Do things like that exist?”

“Oh yes,” says Sara. “It’s informal, of course. Money is donated from the community.”

“Are they locked in?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been to one. It can’t be much worse than some of the state-run homes for the disabled. You’ve read about those, right?”

I have. Tales of violence and neglect; lots of hand-wringing, not much corrective action.

“Rivka was angry when she learned that what made Miriam act the way she did was something that was so out of her control. ‘Miriam wasn’t bad,’ she told me. It had been a revelation to her. She said it took several years, but that she finally convinced Aron to bring Miriam home to Borough Park. She’d felt pain about her friend as long as she could remember. The way the community dealt with Miriam’s illness—and Rivka’s father’s, probably—terrified Rivka. I remember her saying that it interfered with her love of Hashem. You’re Jewish?”

I nod.

“Then you know. Jews, we are all sons and daughters of Hashem, God. He is accessible to us through how we live our lives. Where I grew up, where Rivka Mendelssohn grew up, everything is about Hashem. From our hairstyles to our clothing to when we rise and where we go and what we eat and when we eat and what we do and do not have in our homes. It is very difficult to live this life without an abiding devotion to Hashem. And to the community itself. To the idea of living apart. To creating more Jews here and living our values.”

“What are the values, exactly?”

“What I described. Exalting Hashem, modesty, family, prayer, tradition.”

“And Rivka Mendelssohn rejected those values?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. But she was beginning to reject how she felt she was forced to express them. And then she fell in love.”

Aha.

“And that changed everything that hadn’t already changed inside her. I think. She told me she didn’t mean for it to happen—and I knew that. I watched it! They were just drawn to each other. From the moment they met.”

“You saw them?”

She sighs again. “They met at one of my gatherings. Both were new. I never saw them alone together, but I could tell. When she told me, I knew who she was talking about.”

“When was this?”

“Last spring. It was just warm.”

“And when was the last time you saw her?”

Sara pauses. “It was … more than two weeks ago. We had coffee. Here, actually. She met me at lunchtime.”

“Did she seem…?” I don’t even know what to ask. I wonder if Rivka sat in this very Starbucks chair. I wonder what she ordered.

“Like she was worried she’d be murdered? No. She seemed relatively happy. She told me that her son had been chosen to sing in shul. Apparently he has a beautiful voice.”

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

Sara shakes her head. “Not until I read it in your newspaper. It is true, then?”

I nod. “So she didn’t tell you?”

Sara shakes her head.

“Is it possible the baby was … out of wedlock?”

“Anything is possible, of course,” says Sara. “But Rivka would know that sexual intimacy out of her marriage would mean … Well, it would mean the end of her marriage. Her husband would ask for a divorce immediately. The rebbe would grant it quickly and she would be out of her home. I doubt very much that her brothers would take her in. She would be considered a very bad influence, especially if they have children, which I’m certain they do. I don’t know if Rivka would be willing to risk all that could come from an affair. She was a cautious woman. She cherished her children, and she would lose custody in a divorce.”

“Automatically?”

Sara nods. “In Brooklyn and other Hasidic enclaves, family court judges are influenced by the wishes of the community. In a custody case, a rebbe and other powerful members of the community will testify that the children will be confused if they are exposed to a parent who is less religious. And even if they are granted some kind of visitation, very often the children are poisoned against the parent who left. Their family—even the family of the absent parent—will talk about that person as if she is dangerous. Children, especially young children like Rivka’s, become frightened. They do not want to upset their primary caregivers and so many begin refusing to see the less religious parent. I know many, many people who have lost all contact with their children after a divorce.”

I stare at Sara. I knew my mom came from an insular world; a world of rules with no easy path out. I knew how her world had fucked her up, and through her, me. But what I hadn’t known—what I hadn’t even suspected—was how the tentacles of that world reached into the secular systems that are supposed to be our great equalizers. Blind justice, my ass.

“Do you think her husband knew?” I ask.

“About Baruch?”

“Baruch?”

Sara purses her lips. “I did not mean to tell you his name. Do not put his name in the newspaper.”

“I won’t,” I say.

She is silent a moment, and I can tell she’s considering whether she should go on. I wait, and then ask another question.