Jephte's Daughter (19 page)

“You are that child, Batsheva, and Isaac is the scholar I can never be! Don’t you understand?
I
did not choose him! God has chosen him for you by giving him such brilliance. He is the finest scholar in the Jewish world, a gifted man. Your children will have his genes and our genes. They will illuminate the world, as your grandfather and uncles did. It would be different, my child, if you had been a boy. Or if your brother had lived. Or,” and for the first time, Batsheva glimpsed the enormous bitterness and anguish that coiled around her father’s soul, twisting it and shaping it, “if Hitler had never walked the earth. But things are as they are. I have done my best. If you walk out on him, then the vow will be broken, the chain lost, and their souls will curse me in the darkness! Batsheva, please! You cannot run away, my child, believe me…”

“Aba, please! Don’t upset yourself. Here, lie back now. Sha. It is all right. It will be all right,” she murmured hopelessly, smoothing back his furrowed brow with complete devotion.

“I had no choice. You have no choice. You must stay with him and continue the role you have started.” And then, slowly and painfully, Abraham Ha-Levi told his daughter about the train that had rattled on its way to Auschwitz, about vows, about God, and about fate.

She emerged an hour later, pale and weary, drained of anger and of hope. Later that day she packed her suitcase and left the hotel room where she had been staying with her mother and went back to her own home. The house was dark and cold and smelled of stale smoke. On the stove, someone had placed a kettle of soup and she thought of Esau, willing to sell his birthright for a plate of soup. She could understand him now. Birthrights. If only I could sell my birthright for this soup, she thought, I really would. I would gladly sell it, she laughed out loud, taking a large, steaming bowl and draining it. And as she crawled into the comfort of her soft bed she felt that sleep was the greatest father of them all; asking no questions, full of comfort and unconditional love. So that later that night, when her husband crawled in beside her, she did not have the strength to turn away. She thanked God for the darkness, for sleep, and for the blessed sheet.

Isaac Harshen’s mother viewed the door to her son’s house with irritation. So much to do to prepare for the holidays, and here she was giving this silly, spoiled child all her time and attention. But someone had to take her in hand before she disgraced the whole family. With the sigh of the martyr, she used the key her son had given her to keep, opened the door, and stepped into the house. It was a little after eight and yet the room was still shrouded in darkness. “
Aztlanus ve batlanus
,” she said out loud, laziness and frivolity. Thursday morning and no smells of cooking fish or chicken soup filled the air, as they did in the houses of good Jewish daughters all over the city. She herself had been up at five to say her morning prayers, to hang out the laundry, and to prepare four or five cakes for the Sabbath meal. “Still in bed?” she called out loudly. “Well, time to get up now, daughter-in-law. What will your husband eat for the Sabbath if you sleep all day?” She listened for some response, but heard none. “Fast in sinful sleep, I wouldn’t wonder.
Atzlanus ve batlanus
.”

She bustled about, pulling up the blinds until sunlight flooded the room. She looked around, wiping her fingers over the shining tables. Well, at least the child knew how to dust. She was not impressed that the floors and windows sparkled; the cleaning girl did that work. All the child needed to do was a little cooking and she hardly did that. Her poor son, her poor Isaac, saddled with this skinny, useless creature. She had been watching the girl’s flat stomach now for months with the eyes of a trained expert but saw no change. Even for that she seemed to have no talent. Poor, poor Isaac. With a heavy, forceful tread, she lumbered to the bedroom door and knocked loudly with fat-padded knuckles. Ever since she had witnessed that disgraceful scene at the hotel and demanded Isaac give her a key, she often came into the house in the early morning before Batsheva got out of bed. Usually the girl at least had some shame and got up when she arrived. But there was no sound on the other side of the door.

She turned the doorknob. Batsheva was sitting in front of her mirror, combing her long hair. She did not turn or acknowledge her mother-in-law in any way, but continued to comb her hair until it bristled with electricity and shone like silk. She wore a loose, shapeless polyester dress with dark gray and green flowers. Suddenly she smiled and turned to face Mrs Harshen. “Do you like it, Ima? It’s the dress Isaac brought me home. He has taken all my clothes away. Did you know that? Yes, of course you did, didn’t you? You must have helped him pick this out. It’s your taste, isn’t it?” She twirled around the room and laughed a little hysterically. “He says my clothes are too loud, too bright. I will attract men’s attention to myself. So he has taken away my clothes and bought me a whole new wardrobe, my wonderful, generous husband.”

Mrs Harshen stared at her. A crazy woman. For all her
yichus
and her family tree. A
meshugenah
. This was why her father and mother had hidden themselves away all these years and then bought themselves a
chasan
.
Oy vey
, my poor son. The girl spoke in English, and so Mrs Harshen understood very little of what she said. But her face, so pale with two feverishly bright spots on her cheeks, and her eyes tortured and unseeing—demonic eyes, soulless eyes such a color, so light—said a great deal. Mrs Harshen was not a perceptive woman but a shrewd, rather cynical observer of human behavior. Among her friends and her family, she was a vigilant searcher for backsliding of character revealed in hemlines that were too short, hair that strayed beneath hats and wigs, new clothing more than twice a year. At the butchers, she noted who purchased too expensive cuts of meat, or who paid the extra ten cents to have the butcher do the salting and soaking of meats, something every frugal housewife should do herself.

Mrs Harshen knew something was wrong with the young creature before her but she was incapable of attributing it to anything as frivolous as unhappiness. The girl’s svelte slimness was now almost bony, her pretty high cheekbones gaunt and hollow. All that was clear to Mrs Harshen. She was just incapable of understanding how a bride with a fine husband—a scholar—a home, and money, could want more out of life. She did not imagine that her experience with life had left any gaps and so, uncomprehending, she labeled it craziness and dismissed it. Anyhow, she had come for a specific purpose this morning and she was anxious to finish with it. “I vant to speak mit you frankly,” Isaac Harshen’s mother said, then switched to Yiddish. “Someone told me they saw you yesterday wearing a scarf and that your hair stuck out a finger’s length.” She folded her arms across her ample breasts belligerently. “Is this true? No.” She held up her hands, palms outward. “Don’t answer.” She walked over to the girl and lifted her hair from her shoulders, her tongue making a clucking sound of disapproval. “It doesn’t matter. I know you want to do the right thing. But such long hair, you make it hard for yourself to cover it. Now you see me, I have no problem.” She took the strawlike wig from her head. Underneath, it was full of graying stubble, like patches of poor grass on an untended garden. “A pious
maideleh
should do the same. Do you want me to help you? It will make things much easier for you. Do you have a razor?”

Batsheva snatched her hair away and backed toward the bedroom wall. She stared at her mother-in-law. “Like a caged animal,” Mrs Harshen later told her son, throwing up her hands. “So I told her, ‘Listen, I came to help you. If you don’t want, I’ll leave.’ Then I guess she gave it some thought and decided to do the sensible thing. She didn’t say a thing, just walked into the bathroom and brought me a razor. A mess to clean up, let me tell you, my son. Hair so long and thick. I saved it. Maybe the wigmaker will be able to use it. She’ll give me a good price. Of course, I will give the money to charity.” Mrs Harshen was pleased that her son nodded at her with appreciation, a slow smile spreading across his face. To turn sin into a good deed was a noble thing indeed.

“I’m worried about Batsie.”

“Bats who?” Graham MacLeish chuckled, mixing the drinks and trying to keep his bathrobe closed.

Elizabeth leaned back luxuriously into the soft pillows of her brass bed. The room was still a little dark, so she squinted at the letter in her hands, rereading it. It puzzled and worried her. “Batsheva. A little student of mine from California. Actually, she’s not so little. She got married about a year ago.”

He sat down beside her on the bed and leaned forward, kissing the warm full place between her breasts and carefully balancing the drinks in his hands. “Fascinating stamps. Jerusalem. She’s visiting Jerusalem?”

“No, she married a guy there. Never saw anything like it. Her parents are these Hassidic Jews and her father just picked her out a husband and she married him.”

“Obedient girl. What I wouldn’t sacrifice to find myself such an obedient girl…” He had put down the drinks and climbed in beside her. His hands pushed the silk nightgown gently off her shoulders and he buried his head in her red-gold hair, breathing in its rich fragrance. “Someone who would satisfy my every lust on demand.”

When was she going to stop being embarrassed at seeing Graham MacLeish without his clothes on? They had been lovers for months, and yet her image of him—tweed jacket, pipe, suede shoes that stamped the floor to make an emphatic point—the image she had carried around for four long years dogged her like a ghost. In bed, she had to force herself to remember that this mortal, this firm but aging flesh, was The Graham MacLeish, stuff of her student fantasies. It was not in bed she loved him most. She loved him most when he was fully dressed, bent over his work in the clear circle of lamplight at his huge English oak desk. She loved him best when he read her papers, thoughtfully puffing on his pipe, his rugged, lovable face drawn into serious lines of concentration. She had to admit it. She loved him still as the best teacher she had ever had. Now she pushed him away gently. “This letter has really taken away my appetite. Listen to this:

“That’s what took so long. It went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then some enterprising postal clerk forwarded it here.

“Well, why haven’t you written?”

“A long, dirty story. Her father paid me off to get out of town so he could influence this poor child to marry a man she didn’t even know.” She saw him look at her queerly, eyebrows raised, the look he gave her whenever she did anything classless and American, like eating food in the street, or talking too loud.

“And you took the money?”

“Yes, Graham. I took it. A month later I sent it back though, when my scholarship came through.” His face kept a kind of amused contempt that annoyed her. “I wasn’t the rich mistress of an important professor then.” He had very little money between alimony and child support and often they shared expenses for food and utilities. Cultured Englishmen never intimated problems with money. Too low class. The arrow hit its mark.

“I see.” He stiffened.

Guilty, she reached out and drew him down to her, planting an urgent, penitent kiss on his lips. “Sorry. Please listen to the rest.