The Sacrifice of Tamar (25 page)

“Why didn’t you take a car service?!”

“If I spent that kind of money, Josh would have to find out. I’d have to explain…”

“You mean, you haven’t… Your own
husband
doesn’t even…” She poured herself a straight vodka on the rocks and drank it down in two large gulps. “You haven’t told anyone but me?”

Tamar nodded, “And a doctor. He said I should have an abortion.” Her eyes began to close.

“Come. Lie down. Take a little nap. We can talk later.”

“No, very important!” Tamar shook her head and tried to get up, but halfway she fell back softly into the couch pillows.

“Come on now,” Hadassah whispered, placing a pillow beneath her head and taking off her shoes. She tiptoed into the bedroom and brought out a light summer quilt.

Plump little Tamar. The only ugly Queen Esther in Ohel
Sara. Soft and pure and white. With all the stamina of whipped cream cheese. Pious and self-righteous and stupidly innocent. Terrified to death of what people would say and think. A first-quality, A-1 perfect product of Orchard Park and Ohel Sara. Of all people to have been forced to… live through such a… such a… horror! Hadassah shuddered, not wanting to even imagine what it must have been like for her. She felt her eyes sting. The son of a bitch had really picked the perfect victim. She shook her head and tucked the blanket in gently around her.

There was no question of what she herself would do in similar circumstances, she thought. She’d get rid of it. Even if it was her husband’s child. No way you could take a chance like that. Crazy even to think of it… Imagine, a little black baby born in Orchard Park to the rabbi and rebbetzin, pillars of the community. All hell would break loose! Her husband would probably divorce her. The community would just have kittens.

Tamar Finegold hadn’t a clue what it was like when a place like Orchard Park had kittens. But Hadassah Mandlebright did.

You became a nonperson. All your childhood friends crossed the street. (Yes, Tamar. I saw you do it to me, too. Don’t think I didn’t.) The butcher, the take-out food guy, the woman who sold linens, all your former teachers, staring straight through you. You would be ostracized and asked to leave the synagogue where you’d prayed all your life. And if they let you stay, no one would come up to you with friendly questions after the service. You’d be left alone, the matronly whispers shutting off the moment you appeared. You would be willed dead by the collective prayers of the multitudes. You would be cremated by silence, your living ashes scattered by the cold, unfriendly winds created by a thousand wagging tongues.

She sat brooding, watching the light fade. It was five-thirty. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone.

“Peter, I can’t make it tonight. Some old friend popped by
in a bad state. Of course female.” A pause, her tongue explored her cheek. Slowly: “Yes… I’m… sure. I know you were looking forward… Listen, don’t raise your voice!
Don’t raise your goddamn voice, I said!
You don’t own me. Nobody tells me what to do. I said I can’t make it. I’ll call you later. Good-bye.”

Men. The great Rebbe of Kovnitz had many clones.

The buzzer.

“Jenny.”

They held each other at arm’s length. “You look beautiful, except for the long sleeves and the long skirt.” Hadassah smiled, suddenly strangely embarrassed to be wearing her tightest jeans and skimpiest top. Through it all, Jenny had never crossed the street. Their relationship had continued.

“Hey, this outfit is the deluxe model,” Jenny protested, laughing. “Designed by Mrs Weinblatt herself and sold in her own shop on Thirteenth Avenue. I paid fifty-five bucks for it, so let up. You look like Miss Hollywood movie star. Glamorous. Whew!” Jenny shook her head, then her face suddenly went very sober. “How is she?”

Hadassah waved toward the couch. “Look for yourself.”

Jenny’s eyes welled. “I can’t believe it! Poor Tamar! Did she tell you… anything? Describe it?”

Hadassah shook her head. “She got hysterical at the
thought
of having to describe it. I don’t think you should probe, I’ll tell you that.”

“The best thing would be for her to let it all out, to tell everything, to scream, not keep it bottled up! So what
are
we going to do? How are we going to help her?”

Hadassah shrugged. “You know better than me! Get her to talk about something else, I guess. Beat around the bush. Try to find out what she really came here for. It won’t be easy. You know Tamar: What’s not nice we don’t show, we also don’t think and don’t say and don’t feel…”

“We’ll have to create the atmosphere. Make it just like one of those Sundays at my house where we never shut up and just told each other everything. Just talk and talk,” Jenny said.

“And not interrupt and not preach.” Hadassah looked at her meaningfully.

“Why are you looking at me? Do I ever do that?”

Hadassah grinned. “No. You just have this way of imparting all these invaluable words of wisdom all the time…”

Jenny looked at her sheepishly. “Most of the time I’m quoting someone else. I’m just sharing the wealth, I guess.”

Hadassah smiled. “Well, Jen dear, tonight’s the night to keep a little more of it for yourself. Let’s face it, if Tamar had wanted a lecture on the ‘right’ thing to do, she wouldn’t have come to
me
.”

“I hear you. So what now? I guess I should call her husband and tell him she’s staying over at my house. He’s going to ask questions…”

“You’ll think of something. Want me to call for some take-out?”

“Good idea. Call Katzberg’s for deli. They deliver: They even have Dr Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. Remember that?”

“That horrible green soda that tastes like vegetables?”

“Nectar of the gods!” Jenny laughed, catching Hadassah’s arm. “It’s good of you to get involved.”

“You know me. A real
tzdakis
,” she said soberly.

Chapter sixteen

“Hi, Tamar.”

Tamar opened her sleepy eyes wider, wondering if she was dreaming. When she saw it really was Jenny, she sat up abruptly, her nails digging into the sofa pillows. She turned her eyes malevolently on Hadassah.
“You had no right!”
she shouted, and then, drained, she almost whispered: “I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

“I don’t believe this.” Hadassah shook her head.

“But why, Tamar? She was thinking of you. Of what was best,” Jenny pleaded. She sat down next to her, putting her arm around her shoulder. “Tamar, this is a time when you need the people who love you around you. It’s wrong to shut them out.”

Tamar rested her face on Jenny’s shoulder and wept, wetting Jenny’s dress, her bra straps, straight through to the skin. Then she sat up, pale and still and slightly shell-shocked, wiping her face with a tissue Hadassah shoved into her hand.

“You may not know why you came to me and not Jenny, but I do,” Hadassah said calmly. “Not for advice about the baby—you’re
not really upset about that. If it was blue, you’d keep it and love it. I know you. You’re just terrified to death about your precious reputation, about being disgraced. You just wanted to see what a person looks like after Orchard Park bad-mouths you into the ground, spits on you, and then buries you alive. Heck, they’d have burned me at the stake if the Code of Jewish Law said it was okay! So look, Tamar! See? I’ve survived. I’m even happy. My advice to you is, screw ’em, Tamar. Do what you want and screw ’em all.”

Tamar looked up at her, a nervous smile suddenly breaking out on her tearstained face. “You could do that. You’re different from me. You always were.”

“Not that different. I just made different choices.”

“But how could you choose to do the things you did?” Tamar asked in wonderment. “How could you get a divorce after such a short time? . . . How could you ruin your reputation and leave your parents heartbroken like that?”

“Would knowing that help you make your choice?” Hadassah demanded.

Tamar considered. “Yes. Yes, I think it would.”

“Well, fine.” Hadassah shrugged. “I’ll tell you.

“I always knew my life was going to be different from yours or Jen’s; that I’d get married very young to someone my parents picked out for me. But, you know what? That didn’t really bother me because I always just fantasized it would be somebody super-wonderful. After all, they kept saying how special I was, so I just assumed the guy they picked would be some great—I don’t know—brilliant, handsome, well-connected, rich… The works. I was ready to be a good daughter. I didn’t know any better, now did I? I didn’t really know there was any
choice
involved here.

“Yehoshua Chaim came with a big introduction—what am I talking about—a big sales pitch! Madison Avenue has nothing on my mother. To hear her talk, this guy was the next Messiah,
king of the Jews. Brilliant, an
illui
. And pious—he wouldn’t even drink water on Passover because someone might have thrown bread into the New York City reservoir. And handsome… Funny, I don’t remember what she said about that. Oh, yes, I do. She said he was very ‘nice looking, a kind face.’ But he was in England, you see, the son of the Mannheimer rebbe. Heir to the great Hasidic dynasty of Mannheim.

“They showed me his picture. It was blurry and he was next to his father, who must have been sitting because he made Yehoshua look tall. How was I to know? So the drum beating began. Solucky, solucky solucky, such
mazel
such
mazel
such
mazel
, the drums beat out, until finally they actually invited him to Brooklyn for the engagement ceremony.”

“I still can’t understand how you agreed to get engaged to a man you’d never met,” Jenny sighed.

“Good point! You know why? Because I started believing the drums, and also I kept getting all these phone calls telling me what a handsome boy, what a wonderful family… Why do you agree to spend forty dollars on a theater ticket to a play you’ve never seen? The critics! Well, the critics were ecstatic. And I figured that if I didn’t like him, I would just tell them it was all a big mistake and he’d get on the next plane and that would be that.

“I didn’t like him. But he didn’t get on the next plane, and that wasn’t that. In short, he was short. He was very English. He reminded me of that butler on one of those comedy shows. He even spoke Yiddish with an English accent! Physically, he didn’t do a thing for me, but I figured, Hey, what do I know? I had never been out on a date. And all the boys I did find physically appealing were either
shkotzim
or yeshiva bums or rock stars. So I thought I better forget about sexiness. I thought there was something wrong with me. So I tried to like this guy. He had one thing going for him which I found irresistible: he was absolutely crazy about me… This doesn’t sound very convincing, does it?”

Jenny laughed. “No.”

“Not even to me. So let’s see. How can I explain why I married a not very appealing stranger? It was June. My friends were getting married. I wanted to plan a big wedding. I even had the dress picked out and my colors—rose and yellow. And he was the son of the Mannheimer rebbe. You know the trouble they have finding wives and husbands for Queen Elizabeth’s kids, and those royals from Monaco? Well, Hasidic dynasties have the same problem, a dwindling of royal candidates to choose from.

“And my father wasn’t well. And he and my mother wanted this very, very much. And despite everything everyone in Orchard Park now thinks about me, I was at one time a very dutiful, pious daughter. Tamar may not believe me, but I know you will, Jen.”

“I believe you,” Tamar interjected quietly. “Really.”

Hadassah looked at her, her expression softening subtly. “Good. Chapter Two: ‘My Marriage to Yehoshua.’

“Girls, what can I tell you? You were at the wedding. Did you ever see so many flowers, so much food, so many women in diamonds? Did you ever see a wedding with three bands—one for the men, one for the women, and one just to entertain when we walked down the aisle? And did you ever see such a lovely bride? And such a short, sweating groom? But let’s not talk about the groom. Not just yet.

“The son of the Mannheimer rebbe was a great tzadik. He learned all day, every day, until midnight. At midnight he would come tiptoeing into the bedroom, and I would feel this, well…
push
. Like I was being mauled by some not very polite stranger on a bus line. It was like, pitch dark in the room. He could have been a spirit for all I knew… I couldn’t see anything. And then all this urgent fumbling, like this is distasteful, but we’ve got to do it because it’s a mitzvah, and fully clothed, well, almost, he’d somehow manage it. And I’d feel like I’d been slimed over, you know,
used
. Dirtied.

“This went on for about two months. For two weeks every month I was a
niddah
, and he wouldn’t touch me at all, or even let me pass him a plate or fill his cup with something to drink. And you know, I’d started working, teaching in Bais Yaakov. I’d get up at six every morning, and he’d still be in bed asleep. And I’d clean up the kitchen, because he always took a snack when he came in at night and never washed out anything, just left it. And I’d get home and pick up all his laundry. And that was it.

“Well, of course, girls, I don’t have to tell you how much that kind of life appealed to me. You know how I dreamed about being a housewife and a teacher in Bais Yaakov! But I still thought I could deal with teaching, I could deal with Orchard Park. I just couldn’t deal with him! So I told my mother the truth: that I was beginning to hate the little man’s guts. So my mother, in a panic, runs and blabs to my father. And my father calls me in and I sort of… well, you know I have never really been able to talk to my father. He just zaps me with those eyes of his and I feel my blood congeal, like I’ve died and I’m being judged by
Hashem
himself, being interviewed for entry into heaven. So we talk. I told him some stuff… sort of. So then I go out and he calls in my husband. ‘She isn’t feeling appreciated,’ he tells him—of course I was standing right outside the door and heard everything. ‘You have to show you care about her, that all her
mesiras nefesh
and hard work are worthwhile. That you understand how hard she works. Buy her things, little gifts, and give them to her to make her feel loved and appreciated.’