by Ilana Masad
“So, wait, what did you hire her for?” This isn’t what Maggie wants to know, really. But it’s a way to keep the conversation going.
“Well, now, let’s see,” Leeza says, pondering. “It’s pretty much what she does now—I mean, what she did,” she corrects herself, her pale cheeks reddening. “If what Dena Gershon tells me is correct. The first job must’ve been planning the break-fast we offer after Yom Kippur—you know, getting the tickets printed and sent to everyone who bought one, talking to caterers and getting a good price, hiring extra cleaning staff for after, making sure everything ran smoothly on the day itself, etcetera. We knew she could do it because she did the same thing at Shlomo’s synagogue the year before. This must have been, what, the early eighties?”
“No,” Hannah says. “No, a bit later. She started working for us after Shlomo . . . well, after she couldn’t find other work, remember?” She puts her hand on Leeza’s thigh as she leans toward her and leaves it there.
“Oh yes, that’s right,” Leeza says. “Your mother was a very kind, caring woman, Maggie.”
Maggie’s eyes are stuck on Leeza’s hand, now resting on Hannah’s. She notices that Leeza is perspiring underneath too much white facial makeup, though the house is cool with central air. The older woman catches Maggie’s gaze and yanks her hand back to her lap.
There is a jittery silence.
“Excuse me,” Peter says, stiff. “I am feeling indisposed.” Can you feel indisposed? Maggie wonders. Isn’t it just a thing you are? Isn’t it the kind of thing Victorian women said about having their periods? She watches Peter march out of the room without a backward glance.
She isn’t sure if she’s more pissed off at him or these people making him uncomfortable, these people who don’t seem to belong here, who Iris couldn’t have belonged to, could she? Maggie feels the chutzpah that Iris always says she was blessed with bubbling up.
“So this is awkward,” she says, her voice a forced cheerful. “Why did they get divorced?” She stares the woman with the head scarf down, waiting, but it doesn’t seem to work. The woman just looks away and fiddles with her hair, pushing the flyaway wisps under the scarf, though they continue to escape.
“Rakefet,” Hannah says quietly, her accent Americanizing the name so Maggie now retains it. “She has a right to know.”
Rakefet continues to stare at nothing for a moment, but then sighs again and leans back in her seat. “Family is family, you know. I love Shlomo, despite everything.”
Maggie wants to scream with frustration when Rakefet doesn’t keep going. It takes a good deal of effort to control her tone when she asks, “What’s ‘everything’ mean?”
“Every relationship has its problems,” Leeza jumps in before Rakefet can answer. “And it’s not for us to judge what—”
“Oh, stop protecting him, ” Hannah says, stern, grabbing for Leeza’s hand again.
“I’m not, I’m—”
“You don’t want to air out dirty laundry, I get it, but this is Iris’s daughter and she asked us a question and deserves an answer.” Hannah waits, looking at Leeza, who finally nods and looks down at their entwined hands. Could it be that these two biddies . . . Maggie wonders, but Rakefet interrupts her line of thought.
“My brother beat Iris,” she says bluntly. “At least, that’s what we all think. Your father might know for sure, but neither of them ever admitted it to anyone. But, you know, she had bruises, and I remember his temper from when I was young. He slapped our own mother once when he was drunk at Pesach and blamed the alcohol. I didn’t—I blamed him. So, there, there’s the dirty laundry. Even rabbis can be terrible men.”
Maggie feels like a stone has plummeted into her belly. She just can’t picture her mother ever shrinking before another person. She seemed always like a woman who never had a doubt. Like a woman who knew her place in the world and in her own skin. It dawns on Maggie that whatever else her mother was—and she has some choice words she’d have loved to hurl at her if she were alive—Iris was strong, and that her strength felt like a kind of protection between Maggie and the world, even long after moving out and having her own life. She won’t ever have that again. She’s a woman without a mother, she thinks, and somehow, the world is a little less safe now.
This makes her feel so melodramatic that she immediately reminds herself that Iris’s strength wasn’t all good. She never backed down during arguments, and once she had an opinion she could defend, she would defend it to the end—even when she was wrong—or passively aggressively hear the other person out but in a way that always made Maggie feel judged.
But maybe she wasn’t always like that, Maggie thinks. Maybe it was leaving that horrid man that made her more secure. Maybe it was surviving him. A rabbi, no less. That her mother was married to a rabbi is . . . bizarre. Or maybe not, she thinks, trying to puzzle it all out. Maybe that’s another reason Iris had a lukewarm relationship to religion, that on-again, off-again desire to celebrate holidays, the halfwayness of lighting Shabbat candles occasionally but working through the sabbath.
She doesn’t know what to say. So she says something stupid in this room full of Jews. “Jesus Christ.”
Hannah nods, her face severe. “You’ve got that right. Anyway, Iris was much better than Shlomo ever was, and everyone knew it. He doesn’t have a congregation anymore, you know. He’s just a cheap officiant for hire now. For once, a bad man got his just desserts—a disappointing life.”
“Well, that’s nice, I guess?” Maggie says. She looks back at the photos in her hands, these images of a woman who is Iris but who isn’t her mother yet, a woman for whom Maggie is years and years in the future. It’s an odd sensation, looking at them, the first images of her mother’s face she’s seen since her death—but it isn’t her mother’s face, at least not yet. She wants to see the just-desserts man, but the pictures are all of Iris alone or with other women. Maggie doesn’t know who they are, who Iris was at that time, and she puts the stack down, overwhelmed.
As if she can tell, Leeza gets up. “We’ve taken up enough of your time, sweetie,” she says. “Tell your father that we’re available if he needs anything, all right? He should come to our shul sometime.” She bobs her head sideways toward Hannah. “She’s our rabbi, and we have a very accepting congregation. I’m sure they’d all welcome a goy in mourning.”
“Leeza,” Hannah admonishes. “He’s not just a goy. Besides, he married a good Jewish woman, that counts for something.”
“I know, that’s what I’m saying!” Leeza says, and they each kiss Maggie firmly on both cheeks before walking out.
Rakefet stays behind for another moment and looks at Maggie with something like regret, or sympathy, or maybe just pity. “Shlomo wanted to come,” she says. “I wouldn’t let him.”
“He did? Why?” This makes no sense to Maggie.
Rakefet fiddles with her scarf again. “I think he was hoping that your mother had a bad life, a bad family, an ugly husband and children, tsuris, you know, like him.” She pauses, then adds, “He would have been disappointed to see how well she made out.”
Maggie nods. She’s crying in that quiet way again. It seems she’ll never stop spontaneously leaking tears. She hopes it’s true, that Iris considered this life a good one, but then she wants to tell Rakefet about Abe, and the cheating, to tell her maybe this Shlomo would have been happy after all if he knew that Iris wasn’t satisfied with any of them. “Thank you for coming,” she says instead, reaching for a tissue.
“No, no. Thank you for opening your doors to us,” Rakefet says. “The girls meant it, you know. We really are here if you need us, okay? Here, let me leave you my card, just call or email if you need anything, all right? The girls made your brother write down their phone numbers and emails earlier already.” Maggie realizes that by “the girls,” Rakefet means Hannah and Leeza. She likes that they’re still girls to this woman—political
ly incorrect as it might be, she finds it, in this instance anyway, sweet.
Maggie takes the proffered card, accepts the hug and kiss on the cheek, and walks behind Rakefet to close the door. She looks at the card and smirks, her eyes dry again. Rakefet appears to be a Reiki healer in Los Angeles. It seems like an extremely un-Jewish profession.
* * *
• • •
MAGGIE NEEDS TO get going, but she’s tired. She wants more answers, or at least someone to talk to about this. Why wasn’t Ariel around when all this came out? And Peter? Why does she keep needing to deal with these bombshells alone? She texts Lucia and tells her that her mother was married to a rabbi who beat her. She tells her that she’s exhausted and wants to just come home already. She writes that she is angry at her father and at Ariel and at Iris for dying. The thing about texting Lucia, she thinks, is that it never feels like she’s going to be judged.
Until, that is, she’s sat there staring at the ceiling, phone in her lap, for ten minutes. And then she starts to feel sheepish. Lucia hasn’t written her anything today at all. Maybe she’s sick of Maggie’s whining; maybe Maggie should chill. So she steels herself, reminds herself that if she really, really needs to, she can go to Allison, the only friend she’s comfortable approaching with this sort of thing—Blair and Harper are a good time, but Maggie doesn’t feel close to them in that way, and she hates burdening Gina, who’s usually exhausted from taking care of her dad. But more than that, Maggie reminds herself as she gets up, she knows how to deal with shit on her own.
The rest of this should be easy, she thinks, now that she knows a bit about what she’s getting into with these letters. Well. Not easy. But easier.
A series of loud thumps make her drop the car keys she just picked up from the counter. She runs to Peter’s office and finds him standing in the middle of the room with the baseball bat that usually lives under his and Iris’s bed, surrounded by piles of his big, heavy art books, stacked up to the height of his waist. He’s clearly just knocked down one column, which lies scattered across the floor between him and the door.
“Dad!” Maggie yells. “What the fuck? You scared me. I thought you blew your brains out.”
He blinks at her slowly. “Margaret Krause, please close the door. I need to be alone.”
“No. What are you doing?”
“We had guests. I couldn’t access the kitchen. This was the next best thing.” His glasses are off, and he looks like a crazed father in a melodramatic scene on TV, his face red and puffy, but he’s deflating before her eyes, as if he can tell that he’s a ridiculous sight. Maggie feels like she could knock some shit down herself, though, so she steps over the fallen tomes and kisses him on the cheek.
“Take care of yourself, Daddy. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“You’re leaving?” he asks. “Again?” He almost sounds like he cares, though his tone is still flat.
“I have to. It’s . . . I’m trying to fulfill Mom’s wishes,” she says.
He nods, takes a deep breath. As soon as she shuts the door to his office, she hears another loud tumble of books. Ariel peeks out of his room and raises his eyebrows at her. “Everything okay?”
“Just Dad being Dad, I guess. I’m heading out. Keep holding down the fort, okay? They’re gone, by the way,” she adds, gesturing to the now-empty living room.
“Oh. Cool. Wait, no, you’re going? You just got back!”
“Yeah, well. I’m not done yet. So did you hear, Mom was married to a rabbi?”
Ariel shrugs. “Yeah. It’s weird. Do you have to go?”
“Yeah. You okay?”
“No,” he barks. “Are you?”
“Yeah, no. Fair enough.” She turns to go, and Ariel trails her all the way to the car outside.
“So did you find anything out? Like, with the letters?” he finally asks, hands balled up in his pockets making visible lumps in the sides of his jeans. He isn’t looking at her. She’s not sure he really wants to know.
“How about this,” she says. “I’ll tell you all about it when I deliver all of them, okay?”
He sighs, and his hands come out of his pockets. “Yeah, okay.” He waves as she pulls out. Lucky, she thinks. He has a few more days to imagine their mother as the woman they thought they knew, more or less. But, she reminds herself, he’s the one staying here with Peter and whoever comes to sit shiva. She hopes Leona is still hanging out with him, for his sake.
She sets Google Maps to the address of the only post office in the zip code belonging to Harold Lake Brooks, and begins to drive.
IRIS
APRIL 2, 1977
Years later, Iris would remember the first time Shlomo hurt her being April Fool’s Day, 1977. But it wasn’t. It was the day after and there was absolutely nothing funny about it. That day, Iris walked to the synagogue office to join Shlomo with paperwork—they had written a letter of introduction that they were going to send to the congregation, which wasn’t too pleased with the coming transition. They’d known the old rabbi for years, a white-haired, long-bearded man whom Iris secretly compared to the man on the Bridge of Death in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. She didn’t tell Shlomo this, since he didn’t usually find her humor very amusing. She discovered after they’d gotten married that he was really much more serious than she’d thought.
But Iris was ready to be serious. She’d gotten up late to find Shlomo already gone. He’d let her sleep in, a peace offering, perhaps, after they’d argued over something inane the night before. In the bathroom, she was disappointed to see red on the toilet paper after she wiped. They’d been half-heartedly trying to get pregnant. Iris had stopped taking her birth control right after the wedding because early in their courtship, she and Shlomo had discussed how much they both looked forward to raising children. This was one thing they agreed on wholeheartedly. But as for trying . . . well, Iris had to admit that sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, or at least she hadn’t found it to be so yet. She’d been a virgin when they married, more because there hadn’t been anyone else whose intellect she respected enough to be attracted to before. She’d gone out with some boys in Brighton Beach, boys whose families went to the same shul she and her parents attended during the High Holidays, boys who went to the same Jewish camp in the summer as she did. But she’d known most of them since they were all in diapers, and the boys she’d met who weren’t Jewish made her uncomfortable, because she couldn’t imagine bringing them home to her parents. They weren’t religious, really, but they both clung to certain aspects of their upbringing. More than that, they’d made it clear to her that after what they’d seen and gone through in the war, they didn’t trust goys and never would. They never talked about what happened in detail, but over the years, Iris had heard stories from friends and their relatives.
But it wasn’t the stories that made her parents’ reality settle in her mind; the thing that haunted her memory all the way to her marriage was discovering the shoebox under their bed. It was a Saturday, and her mother had gone out to offer some of her goulash to old Mrs. Winceslass, who lived next door and was ill. Iris and her father were playing hide-and-seek in the small apartment, and while he counted loudly to one hundred in their narrow living room, she went to wriggle under her parents’ bed, a bold move since she wasn’t usually allowed in there; but her mother had left the door open on her way out, and that was enough of an invitation for Iris. While she waited for her father’s slow search to begin—“Is she under the table?” he would ask in his hard-won, accented English, and pull the tablecloth up with a flourish, and then sigh dramatically, and say, “No! She is not! Where is she?”—she discovered the box. Inside, she found several rubber-banded together rolls of cash, maybe for emergencies, a faded red ribbon, and a photograph that was so battered and old that she couldn’t make out the details of the faces. But she could tell it was a family: two tall people and two little ones, parents and
children.
When her father walked in and discovered her under the bed with the box open and her hand in front of her clutching the picture, he became very still. He told her to put the photo back and come out. She was scared, since her mother always said her father would whip her if she did something bad, though he had never laid even a finger on her. But the threat was there, the possibility that he was just holding back for something bad enough.
“Come,” he said, and sat her on his knee in the living room like he had when she was very little. He patted her back a couple of times and she waited, twisting the silver ring with the little blue stone she got from a cereal box around and around on her finger. The ring had made the skin under it green days ago already, but she refused to take it off. It made her feel powerful, and she pretended it had magic powers and could zap whoever she wanted. If her father tried to whip her, she could kazzam! the belt right out of his hand.
But it turned out she didn’t need to. Instead of punishing her, her father explained to her quietly that her mother had lost everything in the war. Everything. A husband and two young children. Iris had already known that her mama was much older than many of the other women who bore the same title. Now she understood why. For many years after the war, her father said, her mother hadn’t wanted to have other children. She didn’t trust in peacetime or safety. But she got pregnant despite their best efforts—and Iris didn’t understand until she was older that this meant that she, herself, was an accident. Much, much later, when she would get pregnant with Ariel, part of the reason she decided to have him despite her age and the possible risks to her health was that her own mother had kept her. She felt she owed it to the universe, to the god she wasn’t certain of.