We were at the back of a big sanctuary. Except it didn’t look like any temple I’d been in, definitely not our temple in New York, which was sleek with everything the same shade of wood. This room was fancy and gilded, a wedding cake of a place. Even the ceiling was grand and swoopy, with a field of flowers made of plaster frosting.
Shalom, y’all, indeed.
The frown man motioned to an empty pew. Most pews were empty. There were twenty worshippers here, tops. I thought about our home temple and all those bar mitzvahs—one a weekend the whole seventh-grade season—that packed the pews to capacity. I thought about sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with my Hebrew school friends in itchy slips, giggling anytime we thought the rabbi wasn’t looking. I thought about feeling a part of something, instead of apart from everything, a part of something that went deeper than the awesomeness of a brown-around-the-edges blossom.
An older couple one row up pivoted to smile at us. It might have been phony—it was hard to tell, because people in Atlanta threw smiles around like confetti. The woman was accessorized to the nines, even though it was a swelter-y September Saturday. The ceiling fans groaned, trying to move a few molecules of warm air.
This rabbi was tall and tan, like he’d possibly be good at tennis. He had hair the color of a mushroom, parted swoopily to the side, and he was wearing a khaki suit—what Dad called a Friday suit—that looked out of place against all the gold on the altar: gold curtains, gold ark, and gold candelabras that could pass for weaponry. He cleared his throat and read a few prayers in English, fast. I was so used to the guttural cccchs of Hebrew, that the plain English sounded foreign, not the other way around.
“I invite you to try to stay awake as you take in today’s sermon,” the rabbi said with the confidence of someone who could hold an audience, even if it was twenty people.
A chuckle came from up the aisle, and that’s when I noticed a guy my age, give or take. He seemed to be the only person—other than us Robbs and the rabbi—under sixty.
The rabbi launched into his sermon, but I kept looking at the guy. He wasn’t wearing a jacket but a bright plaid shirt, skinny tie, and thick black glasses, like he thought he was Buddy Holly.
“Let me ask you.” The rabbi’s voice held a twinge of southern twang. “When was the last time you had a Negro in your home? When was the last time you stopped shopping at a store because it discriminates? When was the last time you sat in the back of the bus, even when it was crowded and blistering hot?”
The questions were rhetorical, I knew, but still the answer was never. For me, the answer—even though we were northerners, even though Dad and his ad agency had done work for the United Negro College Fund—was never.
Mother took a handkerchief from her pocketbook and dabbed her eyes. I loved that handkerchief, embroidered with orange tulips, like the ones Dad brought her from the corner florist on Valentine’s Day, because red roses were cliché.
I leaned into Nattie. “Dad worked with the United Negro College Fund.” I wanted her to know everything about him that I knew. She huffed a breath in and didn’t exhale.
The rabbi slapped his palm against the pulpit. The slap got Nattie breathing regularly again. “And if you think that that is dangerous”—his voice got louder and more urgent—“then I believe it’s time you live a little dangerously.”
“If what’s dangerous?” I asked Mother, cursing myself for missing the good part.
“Button it,” she said softly.
The sun shifted, and a shaft of light poured through the big stained-glass windows shaped in arches that were vaguely Ten Commandments-y. I’d always thought of stained glass as a Christ-on-the-Cross situation. I once spent most of a Christmas Eve at Fontaine and Mr. Hank’s church, twenty or forty blocks north of here, watching Nattie count the number of glass pieces in Jesus’s right foot (the answer: eighty-three). Here, the light was turning Nattie’s ankle a delicate shade of lilac.
A man across the way had nodded off.
“This is my calling as a rabbi—a call to justice.”
Mother fanned herself with a pamphlet of upcoming activities. The accessorized woman shrugged off a capelet.
“It’s time we stand up. As Atlantans, and as Jews,” the rabbi finished. “Amen.”
“Amen,” Buddy Holly said, loud.
“Ah-mein,” I said, as Dad would have said.
As the service wound to a close, we turned in the prayer book—the same black Union Prayer Book we used in New York—to the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer. I didn’t read it; I knew it. I said the words with Mother and Nattie, the Hebrew tripping off my tongue, coming from somewhere deep inside my skin. It was a prayer for the dead that didn’t mention death. Our rabbi back home had made a point of telling us that before Dad’s funeral, the last time I’d said this prayer, any prayer, silently or out loud.
I still wasn’t keen on being here and missing who-knew-what with who-knew-whom among my shiny could-be friends. But these words: These were Dad’s words, and they had the force of familiarity.
Mother traced circles on Nattie’s back.
From behind the gold curtains, Oz-style, music rang out.
“What’s with the organ?” I whispered to Mother.
“I like it,” Nattie said. “It’s quivery.”
After the service, we followed a small parade of congregants down a hall lined with photos of girls in white dresses, as if everything here, even religion, were one big society occasion.
In a room appropriately named the Social Hall, Buddy Holly was shoveling egg salad onto a cracker. “New Jew?” he asked me, his eyebrows jolting off every which way.
“More like old Jew, new Atlantan.”
“I’m Max. Want a Co-Cola?”
“Ruth. It’s a little early in the day, don’t you think?” I fell right into his rhythm.
A pregnant woman with the spectacular bone structure of actress/goddess Sophia Loren introduced herself as Dina Selwick, the rabbi’s wife, and introduced her daughter as Leah. Nattie skipped right off, braids flapping behind her, to play with Leah.
“I figured you for a northerner,” Max said, picking up where we left off. “Around here, we drink Coke for breakfast. Heck, I drank Coke from my baby bottle.” He popped the cap off by angling the bottle against the tablecloth’s edge, as Davis had last night, and handed it to me. That trick must be in the southern-boy repertoire.
I tipped my bottle back. “Who’s forcing you to be here?”
“Not a soul.” He rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt. “I’m helping the rabbi spread the integration message to college students.”
“So it’s a job?”
“No, it’s a cause.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, that’s swell.”
He smirked with his eyes. They were nice eyes, brown, but the rest of him—hunchy shoulders, owlish eyebrows—was a lot less attractive. “Do you know the SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?” he said. “Or the Ministers’ Manifesto? About integration? Rabbi Selwick helped draft it, and it’s been signed by eighty-seven clergy.”
I knew New York things. I knew every crack in the sidewalk on Amsterdam between 110th and 112th. I knew the air conditioner over the door of Harold’s Shoes, a store for old ladies with bunions, dripped. “I—I do not.” I felt like I’d swallowed a rock, and I took an instant dislike to the know-it-all with smirky eyes. “Are you in law school?”
“Prelaw. Emory.” A few congregants jostled around the nearby coffee urn. “People here don’t care about—”
“We don’t care about what?” asked the man who accompanied the caped woman I’d seen in the sanctuary. “I’m Mr. Silvermintz, by the by,” he said with a smile that didn’t show his teeth.
“Ruth Robb.”
The man turned to Max. “You bending this young lady’s ear about how we don’t care enough about the pligh
t of the Negro? Always with the civil rights? Apparently,” he said to me, “this young man is on a mission to make us the most unpopular place in Atlanta. We’ve been threatened, you know.”
I didn’t know—how would I know? And threatened with what—boredom?
“Miss Robb, please excuse this rebel.” Mr. Silvermintz nodded before wandering off with his coffee cup and saucer.
“Rebel,” Max said. “That’s a compliment. Follow me, Ruth Robb.”
“Why would I follow you?” I asked, though I knew I would. Max’s chinos were lassoed with a beat-up leather belt, and his shirtsleeves were rolled willy-nilly—every part of him oblivious to how he must look to the world. And yet he had a whiff of that familiar New York intensity—and that was sort of great.
He jangled a fat set of keys. “No one else is going to show you the best part.”
I glanced around to see if Mother was ready to go, but she was sitting at a table with the rabbi, leaning on her elbows, looking rapt. Nattie and Leah were playing a game of tag in the foyer. Nattie looked one “You’re it!” away from making a friend.
“I guess I’ve got a few minutes,” I said, polishing off my Coke.
“This way, then.”
We walked behind the behemoth of an organ. Back here, in the not-for-congregants area, things were plainer. Max opened an ordinary wooden door, no gold in sight, and started up a narrow flight of stairs.
“I hope you aren’t planning something nefarious,” I said, going for that jokey tone Davis and his friends used, but it felt off, like I was suddenly smug.
Max walked backward until he shared my step. “I don’t have time for a girlfriend.”
“Ignore me,” I said. Still, he was close enough that I was glad I’d brushed my teeth well.
At the second-floor landing, Max unlocked a metal door to reveal a fire-escape-steep ladder. I gripped the railing on either side, wondering about the wisdom of being here. When we ran out of stairs, Max pulled a rope from the ceiling. A trapdoor swung down, and a fat square of sunlight poured over us. He climbed up into the air.
I inched myself to the top of the ladder and peered out.
Pure sky—the opening was the roof.
I didn’t mind heights—not when I was on a diving board and there was a lake under me at camp. But a roof I didn’t know and a boy I didn’t know? Nope. “I’ll stay here,” I said, white-knuckling the metal ladder.
He kneeled on the roof, his chinos grinding into the tar, and stuck his head back inside. “C’mon,” he insisted. “Are you scared?”
“I’m not scared. I’m not petrified.” It was suddenly a jillion degrees.
“You don’t have to do this—lots of people turn around right here.”
That did it. I hauled myself up to the roof, which was flat, at least. But it was gusty and loud up there in the great expanse of air. The rotunda looked a mile away.
“Just stay away from the edge, Ruth Robb,” Max said.
“Helpful.” I took a step, intending to take another. But then I lay down on the surprisingly smooth pebbles on top of the tar. I imagined I was sunning myself, trying to feel familiar and safe. Even perfectly prone, the breeze was biting. I closed my eyes. The sun looked purple from the inside of my eyelids.
“Okay, we can sit for a second.” I could hear Max settle next to me. I picked up a bunch of pebbles, letting them run through my fingers while looking for my not-afraid-of-heights strength. The sound was pleasing, rhythmic, and then a different sound filled the air. It started quietly, and then it was clear the sound was coming from Max. He was singing. He was singing something soft and smoky and bluesy. I let it wash over me, there on the pebbly, too-open roof. I didn’t want to ask Max what the song was; surely, I should already know. But then I sat up and asked anyway.
“Good, right?” he said. “McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. I’ve worn his album out.”
That bit of honesty, and that bit of blues—it was a push. I stood up and followed Max over, way over, to a swinging ladder with toothpick stairs that led to a rotunda with a copper cherry on top.
And then we were inside the dome, ringed by stained glass, miniature versions of the beauties below.
It was a View-Master view, not like New York at all. In New York, everything was foreground. You couldn’t step back and see it all. Here, there were medium-sized buildings of medium-sized shapes—no jaw-dropping Empire State, no glittering Chrysler.
Here, there were treetops and sky, wide brushes of green and blue, oceans of openness. Here, there was room in the air for clouds, for possibility.
“It’s pretty,” I said.
“Not underneath, it’s not. Underneath, it’s repugnant,” Max said.
“You’re so irritating,” I said, though possibly not out loud.
“Look down at the Fox Theatre.” He pointed slightly to the left, where I couldn’t actually see a theater, just a bunch of rooftops through a shaft of cobalt blue. “Did you know the Fox has a Jim Crow balcony?”
“I’m not even sure who Jim Crow is.”
Max ran his hands through his in-need-of-a-cut hair. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’ve heard people talk about it,” I said. “Of course.” I’d bet a hundred bucks my ears were turning red.
“Jim Crow is based on an old blackface caricature, not an actual person.” His tone was know-it-all again. “Jim Crow laws deny basic rights to blacks. It’s ‘separate but equal.’ Do you think whites and blacks can’t share the same movies, restaurants, water fountains, elevators, parks, schools, streetcars, buses? Do you think that’s equal?”
“I think that’s idiotic.” My fingers were sweaty—the heat, maybe, or the lecture, or the truth of Jim Crow, which I’d known about only by osmosis before; no one had spelled it out so clearly, ever. I rubbed my hands up and down my minty dress, leaving little splotches. “But you like hearing your own voice, don’t you?” I said.
He laughed a truly great laugh—loud and low and long, like a blues song. “The rabbi is doing good work. He’s ruffling feathers,” he said.
For some reason, Max was ruffling me.
He went back down the toothpick ladder, and I followed—one foot, then the other.
On the traffic-free way home, Mother said, “Someone at the paper should be covering the rabbi and his work with the alliance.”
“Ruth went off with a boy,” Nattie singsonged.
“He says he’s a rebel, helping the rabbi with . . .” With what? Was it desegregating the movies, or was that a metaphor? “College students, I think.” I wondered if Sara would join the cause if she were here, which she clearly was not.
Mother patted my thigh. “Keep Thursday free.”
“Can’t—there’s a debutante meeting at the Eleets’ house.”
“Not debutante, pre-debutante,” Mother said. “No one has invited you to cotillion land yet. You’re in preparation mode. And if the girls hear you’re a synagogue-goer, you’ll be in blackball mode.”
“I can miss only two meetings,” I said like it was the law.
“Ruth’s right,” Nattie piped up. “That’s in the pink booklet.”
“I don’t recall the pink booklet offering advice on how to pass yourself off as someone you’re not,” Mother said.
I rolled the window down. “It’s one thing to be dragged to services . . .”
Mother lit a cigarette and took her time breathing in the first drag. “It’s our deal: your dances, this temple. Fontaine can show you how to write a regret.”
“Regret?”
“We’re back to Thursday. We are joining the temple and the cause. The rabbi and your rebel are coming for supper. And Nattie, the rabbi is bringing his daughter.”
Nattie leaned forward so her head was between us. “Shalom, y’all.”
8
Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom
Norma opened the door and called up the stairs to Gracie. “You have a visitor.”
“Helloooo!” Gracie yelled down. She had invited me over this afternoon, post-Shabbos services (not that she knew it was post-Shabbos), so we could get ready together before the girls-ask-boys mixer.
I followed Gracie’s voice up the curving staircase to her nearly all-pink room. Gracie herself was seated in front of a vanity mirror, eyeliner in hand, hair in rag rollers, face dotted with dabs of Clearasil.
“You’re already bouffed,” Gracie said, by which I think she meant I’d back-combed and sprayed my hair into submission.
“It’s not a pretty sight otherwise,” I said, taking in just how comfortable Gracie was covered with unlovely pimple cream, in her lovely room.
Gracie bounced on the bed, one eye done up in winged eyeliner, the other naked. Her four-poster bed was festooned with a wondrous number of horse ribbons, arranged in neat rows of like colors—all the blues, then reds, then yellows, whites, pinks, greens, purples, and browns, an equestrian rainbow. We sat side by side, as if on a parade float. I scissored my fingers over a ribbon—white, fourth place. White for white lies.
“I don’t ride horses,” I said, surprised this was what popped into my mind and out my mouth, but also somehow inspired by Gracie’s ability to be so herself.
Gracie laughed. “Who cares?”
“I haven’t ridden ever. Not once, even though I said I did on your porch. I wouldn’t know a horse from a pony.”
She laughed again. “One is much smaller than the other.” Her tone was relaxed, uncomplicated, and that ease made my chin quiver. “Don’t let some silly pony make you sad. You need a nip of So Co?”
Gracie boinged up and opened her top dresser drawer, digging around under the mounds of sweaters—featherweight cashmere, most likely, just right for Atlanta nights—to extract something. A flask, of course.
I took a sip, tinier than I had at T&E, wanting to keep the booze down this time around, and laughed.
In the Neighborhood of True Page 7