Tremble (34 page)

On the last day of shiva, the seven-day formal mourning period, Miriam and Myra ushered friends and mourners from the house, uncovered the mirrors, replaced the photographs of Aaron, and gave the last of his clothes away to charity.

Dressed from head to toe in black with a heavy wig covering every strand of her light brown hair, Miriam collapsed in a chair. It was the first time she’d been alone since Aaron’s death, and, with the clarity that comes with grieving, it finally occurred to her that her life would never be the same again. It was a terrible realization. As she reached for a piece of matzo—Miriam had dropped ten pounds in weight in under a week—she began to shake with fear of the void that had suddenly opened before her. What was she to do now?

“Continue living. This is what all widows do—believe me, I know. Tomorrow you will go back to your job at the kindergarten, then you will come home and we will eat, maybe take a little walk, go to shul, and eventually the pain will subside. Time blunts everything.” Myra spoke as if she had read Miriam’s mind.

The retired academic had aged twenty years in a week, her face collapsing further in on itself as if grief had literally punched her. Her eyes, which had always retained the mischief and flirtatiousness of her
youth, had dimmed, and she could hardly walk for the sorrow of losing her only child. Leaning heavily against the back of a chair, the ancient matriarch pulled herself toward the table.

“Maybe God has blessed us; maybe you are with child?” Myra’s face filled briefly with hope, but Miriam shook her head and squeezed down the sorrow that filled her chest for the hundredth time that day.

That night the widow turned back Aaron’s side of the bed as she always did, wiped her face clean with cold cream, peeled off her wig, and pulled on the heavy flannel nightgown he had given her as part of his wedding gift. As she reached into the cupboard for a new tube of toothpaste she noticed the bottle of aftershave tucked behind some towels. “It is a small sin of vanity,” Aaron would say, smiling. “God forgives us the small sins.” Remembering, Miriam opened the bottle. The scent immediately conjured up her dead husband. Furtively she splashed some behind her ears then breathed in. It was like he was holding her again in his arms. Carefully replacing the bottle she went to bed.

Her side of the bed was glacial. It was now December and New York City had plunged into its usual big freeze. Thankful for the woolly socks on her feet she stretched her limbs over to Aaron’s side. It was strange not to bump immediately against his body. He used to take up three-quarters of the bed and Miriam found herself even missing the little slope his weight made that she constantly had to avoid rolling down. Sighing gently, grateful for her faith and her belief in heaven, where she would see her husband again, she began to drift off into sleep. And then she heard it.

It began like a low growl. Then grew to a rumble that shook the bed and rattled the windowpanes like an aberrant wind. Miriam recognized the sound immediately but, horrified, hoped she was imagining it, that somehow it was a trick of the mind. Regardless of her wishes, the sound grew louder. Terrified, she buried her head in the pillow, shut her eyes tightly, and began to mutter a prayer her mother had taught her to ward off evil spirits. But the noise grew. Audible outside of her own head it was undeniably real.

Should I listen, Miriam wondered as the sound climbed to its shrill peak, culminating in the high-pitched whistle she knew by heart. And if I do listen, will that encourage it? And what
is
it? Is it a dybbuk wanting to possess me? Or a manifestation of Aaron himself?

“Aaron?” she whispered, finding her courage, but the only reply was a truncated snort followed by a sound like air rattling in the back of the throat.

“Aaron,” she ventured again, “is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

But again all she heard were the sound waves rising and falling in the pattern Aaron’s snore always followed, a sequence as familiar to Miriam as the shape of her own hands. Sighing deeply, she stared into the dark and listened for another hour until, lulled by the familiarity of the noise, she fell asleep. Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, the file, long forgotten, slipped out from behind the filing cabinet where Aaron had hidden it the night he died.

“I didn’t sleep so well last night. What about you, dear?”

Myra, immersed in a voluminous yellow dressing gown that seemed to swallow up more of her flesh daily, sat at the head of the table and peered button-eyed at Miriam.

“Not so well,” Miriam replied cautiously, wondering if it was possible that the old woman had experienced the same phenomenon as herself.

“It was windy. The wind got into my bones. I had to switch the light on and remember why I was still living. It
was
the wind, wasn’t it, dear?” She grabbed her daughter-in-law’s hand with her bony fingers and squeezed it tightly.

“I don’t know, Myra.”

Her mother-in-law’s gaze did not falter. “Sometimes they leave a shadow of themselves behind. Could be a stroll they took at the same time every evening, could be a favorite seat they sat in—it just takes a little time before the shadow fades. I loved my son, Miriam.”

Myra’s eyes misted over slightly. Without another word she finished her matzo broth and left the table.

Miriam returned to work as usual at the kindergarten, but mourning had made her numb. The world began to stream past her rather than through her. Helping the little girls learn their Hebrew alphabet, she
wondered how she would live her life now with the one element that had given it meaning gone. Her future as she had imagined it had been completely stolen from her. There would be no children, no more of the security she had felt in her husband’s arms.

She looked around at the innocent faces staring intently at the blackboard. “
Abba, ima
, father, mother,” the children recited. Was it a sin to feel this empty? Surely life itself was a blessing, Miriam rationalized, trying to jolt herself out of sliding despair. Dreading the thought of returning to an empty house, she turned her face to the blackboard to hide her sorrow.

By the time she arrived home the events of the night before were weighing heavily on her mind. Myra had made a stew; they read a little poetry together, then prayed. Afterward the old woman retreated to her bedroom to surf the Net for articles on Kant while Miriam retired to sleep.

The widow stared at the bed for a while. Could she have imagined the snore? Having had no experience with ghosts, or indeed anything supernatural, she couldn’t tell whether the room felt haunted or not. It was the same as it had ever been: Aaron’s grandfather’s clock ticking away on the desk; their wedding photo next to it, both of them staring out bashfully; her slippers tucked under the foot of the bed. Everything was in place, except Aaron himself.

It was with some apprehension that she pulled on her nightgown and took her place in the big cold bed. She left the bedside lamp on for a while, trying to concentrate on some bills her husband had left her to settle. Finally, when exhaustion pulled at her jaw and made her eyelids twitch, she switched the light off and settled down to sleep.

Again, it began. Very quietly this time, seeping up through the mattress to settle on the pillow beside her like a hovering mosquito. Miriam was too frightened to move. The buzz grew louder, rumbling to its crescendo, climaxing with the descant shriek only to subside again. Five seconds later it started all over again, this time a good ten decibels louder, as if it were deliberately trying to get her attention. As far as Miriam could tell, it had remained geographically fixed in the one place, somewhere in the center of the pillow, purring like a cat.

She lay there pondering what to do next. Hoping to find some physical manifestation of her husband’s ghost she tentatively stretched her arm across the bed. Her fingers touched nothing—just a chilly patch
of empty sheet. Half an hour later she was still wide awake. The snore was now filling the room like a pounding jackhammer. Suddenly, between snorts, Miriam heard another noise: the click of the door handle. Her heart jumped at the possibility that it might be Aaron, miraculously returning to retrieve his snore, but instead the unmistakable rasp of her mother-in-law’s voice sounded out.

“Oi! What a racket! Miriam, are you still alive in all this noise?”

“Yes, Myra, I’m still here, but what shall we do?” Miriam howled, bursting into tears.

The old lady hobbled across the room and climbed into bed beside her, on Aaron’s side. Miriam, amazed by her mother-in-law’s fearless audacity, waited for some reaction from the auditory specter, but, undisturbed by Myra’s presence, it continued snoring, not even catching its breath, so to speak.

“Do? We do nothing. I’m an intellectual; I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you hear that, Aaron?” the old lady yelled, causing Miriam to clutch her arm in fright.

“Enough with the snoring!” she continued sternly. Suddenly the sound stopped. Pleased with herself Myra turned around to Miriam. “You see, a good son always listens to his mother.”

But just as the last word left her lips the snore started up again, this time even louder. Myra stroked her daughter-in-law’s hand absentmindedly while she pondered the dilemma.

“This is what I think: both of us are suffering from phenomenology—a philosophy I read about on the Internet. Aaron’s snore exists only because we think we are hearing it. It is a manifestation of our own grief, nothing more. The snore does not exist outside of our minds—do you hear that, Aaron?!”

As Myra jerked her head to shout at the snore her hearing aid popped out of her ear. Plunged into sudden silence the amateur philosopher beamed smugly. “You see, I was right. Now he is gone, just like that! Boof!”

Miriam steadied her mother-in-law’s frail shoulder as she slipped the hearing aid back into the old lady’s ear. As her hearing returned Miriam saw a glimmer of fear finally thread its way across Myra’s wizened features.

They spent the rest of the night in the living room; Myra on the couch, Miriam on the fold-out. Miriam wore earplugs and took two Valium (supplied by Myra) while her mother-in-law slept soundly without her hearing aid, a copy of Rilke’s
On Love and Other Difficulties
resting across her shrunken chest, as if to ward off any other unwanted supernatural visitors. One story above them the snore whistled on uninterrupted throughout the night.

In the morning they held a conference.

“Mother, I think we should go straight to the new Rebbe. He will know what to do. Maybe there was something wrong in the way we buried Aaron, God forbid. Maybe there is some rational explanation in the Bible.”

“The words rational and Bible do not go together. May God forgive me for speaking so ill of the Torah but you forget that I was both a scientist and an intellectual before I married Aaron’s father, God rest his soul.”

A scientist? Miriam racked her brain trying to remember what her mother-in-law was actually qualified in while Myra hobbled over to a dusty cabinet and pulled out an ungainly reel-to-reel tape recorder that looked as if it had been designed in the 1950s.

“We will switch this on and see whether we can record the snore. If we succeed, we will have empirical evidence that the phenomenon exists outside our own minds,” Myra declared, comforted by the thought of logical action.