I love the names of the little towns to the north: Dacada, Oostburg, Sheboygan. Sometimes, my brother and I ride our bikes to the farm in Knellsville where my father was born. We leave them hidden in a corn row while we enter the cool woods. Following deer paths, we make our way east until we reach the dropoff. Below is the shining platter of the lake. The shark fin of a sailboat. Further out, a barge with its dark load of coal. Our nostrils burn with the sharp, green sting of juniper bushes, and we rub the dusty berries between our fingers before scrabbling down the side of the bluff, clinging to exposed roots, grabbing branches, sliding the last ten feet on our butts. Already, we can hear the artesian well, buried somewhere deep in the haunch of the bluff. A stream of water runs clear and cold toward the lake, and we squat to drink from it, cupping our hands, pretending we are self-sufficient, survivors living off the land.
At night, my mother comes into our rooms to hear our bedtime prayers. When my father is home, he’ll sometimes listen, too. But he stands in the doorway, shaking his head. He thinks my brother and I are too old for this.
“Are we too old?” I ask.
My mother says no. She explains that Grandpa and Grandma Ansay never tucked my father in, so he doesn’t understand how important it is.
Sometimes, I feel very sorry for my father.
Dear God, I plead with the dark emptiness above my bed, I’m sorry for all my sins. Please bless my mother and brother and father and me, and people here and on other planets, and all animals everywhere—
I say the same thing every night, though “all animals everywhere” is a recent addition. Father Stone says that animals can’t go to heaven, but I believe that if I pray, if I have faith, all things are possible.
—and please protect everybody who has died, and everybody who hasn’t been born yet, and Satan—
After all, didn’t God say to love all things? And wasn’t Satan one of his creatures? I have an idea that if everybody prays for him, Satan will come around to God’s light once again, wake up as if splashed by cold water, and then there will be no more evil in the world. For a while, I’d been enlisting the help of kids at school, making them join hands to pray for Satan in the belly of the jungle gym, but then my teacher gave me a note, in a sealed envelope, to take home to my mother. So now, I pray for Satan in the privacy of my bedroom as my mother sits on the edge of my bed, listening calmly, rubbing my back. She has told me she prefers not to pray for Satan herself, but that I may do as I wish. When I’m finished, she kisses me, tucks the covers tight.
“Don’t go yet,” I say, but I know it’s my brother’s turn.
My mother winds the music box to conceal the sound of her footsteps moving away. Fear washes over me in shattering waves. I can’t move. It’s hard to breathe. Even before the music stops, my throat aches with unspeakable things.
Night after night, I struggle to fall asleep, to escape this paralyzing sense that something terrible is going to happen. And all it will take to stop it from happening is one small gesture on my part: holding my breath, or not holding my breath. Sleeping on my right side or sleeping on my left. Chanting eight Hail Marys, or four, or two—which is it? Sundays at Mass, I am so very careful to fold my hands with my right thumb crossed over my left, to let the Host dissolve in my mouth without brushing against my teeth, to genuflect all the way—knee touching ground—when I pass in front of the sanctuary.
Dear God, I pray, clutching my Saint Benedict medal, my rosary, the blessed icons glued to felt that Grandma Krier gives me for being a good girl. But I hear nothing but the drumming of my heartbeat, echoing deep within the coils of my mattress. And what if the sound isn’t coming from my heart, but from Satan, who doesn’t want to be saved, who is hiding there, waiting to get me, waiting to pull me down? Occasionally, this panic hits as I’m walking home from school, forcing me to count sidewalk cracks, the trees I pass, the number of steps I take. Even numbers are good, particularly fours and eights and twos; odd numbers are bad, particularly threes and sevens. If somebody gives me three cookies, I have to give one back. If my mother gives me a handful of chocolate chips, and I count twenty-seven, I must ask her to give me one more.
Why?
“Because something bad will happen if you don’t,” I explain.
My mother’s face—I can see it now. Could it be she understands? She doesn’t attempt to convince me otherwise. She gives me the extra chocolate chip.
As a child, I love my mother above all else, even my own self. Once, after reading the story of Isaac in the Bible—whose father, Abraham, is prepared, at God’s request, to slaughter his bleating son like a goat—I asked her who she’d choose if she had to choose between God and me.
“God,” she said, without looking at me, which was how I knew she meant it. “Because God came first. Without Him, neither of us would exist.”
I nodded, pretending I understood, but a window of loneliness and sorrow opened up within me, opened and opened again until it consumed me from the inside out, and I stumbled away from her as if I’d caught fire: brilliant, blinding, inconsolable.
Four
Grandma Krier subscribed to a number of religious magazines and bulletins. She kept years’ worth of back issues piled up in the utility bathroom, where we left our muddy boots before coming into the house. The cat box was there, too, along with sacks of litter and kibble, chicken feed from the mill, and, if there were new kittens, they slept with their mama on a blanket in the shower stall. People rarely used this bathroom, preferring the tidier one inside the main part of the house.
When I was in grade school, I spent many rainy afternoons curled up with or without kittens on the floor of the shower, reading through mildewy stacks of the Catholic Digest. Every issue was packed with miraculous falls and dramatic cures, illustrated with brightly colored disaster scenes. Skiers clung to broken ski lifts. Helicopters spiraled to the ground. An IV hung above a hospital bed, its occupant wrapped like a mummy.
Dear Jesus, What Should We Try Next? the captions read. Lord, Help My Baby. There Was Nothing We Could Do For Mom But Pray.
As I got older, it occurred to me that each of these stories was really the same one. The reading I’d done in grade school had prepared me to accept this, yet I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something better out there. I’d long ago exhausted the children’s corner at our local library; by the time I’d finished fifth grade, I’d read anything worth reading on the Young Adult shelf as well. Yet the main fiction section of the library overwhelmed me—how did I go about choosing one or two books out of so many? The summer before I started junior high, I came up with a system: I’d wander the aisles until I found a row of books that had all been written by the same author. My theory was that anyone who had published that much had to be good. I’d pull one at random and take it home.
But these books, too, were disappointing, though their covers alluded to an excitement earthier than anything the Catholic Digest ever promised. Well-muscled men in torn shirts clutched beautiful, swooning women in their arms. A knife or a gun was usually close by; horses sometimes figured into things as well. Many of these novels seemed to take place during the Revolutionary War, though others featured rebellious slaves, settlers confronted by ketchup-colored Indians. A few were set in medieval times. Now and then, a vampire or a dragon cropped up, which required a stabbing or slaying. Ho hum. I found myself skipping pages, skimming for words like bosom or loins: the sex scenes, if not original, could often be instructive, although they had a way of dissolving into abstracts just at the point where my curiosity peaked.
Desperate, I turned to the books tucked away in my mother’s hope chest. The hope chest was the only thing in the house, perhaps the only thing in my mother’s entire life, which she’d asked my brother and me not to touch, using adult words like privacy and respect, so we’d understand how important this was to her. We promised and then, of course, we riffled through it as soon as we got the chance, indignant at the thought that she might try to keep
secrets from us. The chest, I realize now, contained little; the bittersweet truth was that my mother had nothing to hide. Still, we rolled our eyes at the poetry she’d written to my father during their courtship, fingered the baby clothes she’d sewn for us, stared at the photographs of her father, our dead grandfather. We giggled over a little songbook in which my Uncle Don had printed neatly: Sylvia is a fly. Beneath it were a few musty-smelling paperbacks from her college English classes. These we’d passed back and forth uneasily, if they were pornography.
I choked on Daisy Miller but relished Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and, especially, An American Tragedy. I lingered over the word disrobe, which I’d had to look up in the dictionary, and then I read the scene again and again. How was it, I wondered, that a single word could be more titillating than strings of adverbs? How could I dislike Clyde Griffiths so and, yet, feel sorry for him too? How was it I could finish a book’s final chapter and find myself left with more questions than I’d had at the beginning? Difficult questions, too. I sucked each one like an unfamiliar brand of hard candy, not certain if I liked the flavor, yet unable to spit it out. The characters stayed with me in a ghostly kind of way, especially those I hadn’t agreed with, hadn’t fully understood. I found myself thinking about them off and on throughout the day, the way I thought about people I actually knew. And yet, I wasn’t sure how reading about such people, real people, made me feel. I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t, just maybe, a slightly immoral thing to do.
Until now, everything I’d ever read—from the Bible to books assigned in school—had reinforced what I’d been taught to believe: good people get rewarded; bad people get punished. Once you knew who was who, you could stop reading if you wanted. You could figure out, from that point on, how the book was going to end. Even my well-thumbed copy of the Lives of the Saints had started to leave me cold. Despite the wonderfully gruesome tortures, you knew from the start that Faith would triumph, so what was the point of reading further?
No one had ever actively discouraged me from reading. No one had ever actively discouraged me from drinking coffee, either. A cup now and then, with plenty of milk and sugar, was absolutely fine for a child. Too much, however, risked stunted growth or discolored teeth. Too many books risked bookishness, which led to acting too big for your britches or, worse, putting on airs—a tendency toward which I already leaned. And, too, reading the wrong book—like visiting somebody else’s church—could lead to confusion that over time might crack the foundation of even the soundest faith.
If my mother noticed me reading on the couch, that was fine, but if I was still there an hour later, mouth open, immune to the world, she was quick to find something else for me to do. Something that involved, say, a pair of my father’s old BVDs soaked in lemon Pledge, or the vacuum cleaner. Nothing irked her more than the sight of me lying around the house with a book, except, perhaps, when she caught me and my brother watching “the boob tube” without permission. Our house was in a neighborhood teeming with other kids: Why not go outside and play? What about a game of tennis at the junior high athletic field across the street? Weed the garden. Fill the bird feeder. Or, shovel the sidewalk. For Pete’s sake, do something.
Even I could see that reading was a kind of mental nap, the sort of activity the Bible called sloth, a habit that led nowhere. At the time, I was planning to become a heart surgeon, much to my father’s delight. It was his suggestion that I look for books about medicine, doctors, sickness. This was an idea my mother liked, too. Ask the librarian to recommend something, she said.
The librarian did.
For the rest of the summer, I read books about crippled children with heroic personalities. The particulars of each story varied, but the general plot was always the same. A child with a birth defect is born into an unsuspecting family. (Variation: an innocent child suffers an injury, or develops a rare disease.) At first, the family is left reeling from the blow. Relatives and well-meaning friends suggest that the child be institutionalized. Doctors throw up their hands and walk away. But, thanks to the power of faith (variation: positive thinking and perseverance), the family rallies around the child, discovering in the process that instead of a tragedy, this child is the greatest blessing of their lives. Shortly thereafter, a miracle occurs. The child who would never be able to walk, walks. The mute girl speaks. The boy who the very best specialists insist will never recognize his mother, looks up at her one day and smiles.
Again, I skimmed, this time in search of medical details. I learned about cerebral palsy, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, leukemia. I liked to imagine myself stricken with one of those diseases: how brave and cheerful I’d be! Of course, I’d offer up all my sufferings to the Poor Souls in Purgatory, and when I died, these liberated souls—I imagined them as flat, white disks, sort of like fancy dinner plates—would meet me at heaven’s gate. God, moved by this display, would ask me if I needed anything from earth to be more comfortable with Him in the afterlife, and I’d eloquently make a case for admitting animals. These daydreams were far more satisfying than the stories that had inspired them, and I was happy enough to return the books when school started again in the fall. There, in sixth-grade English, our first reading assignment was Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.” I liked the story well enough, but I’d read it the year before. Already, I knew by heart everything I was supposed to write about it, everything the teacher wanted me to say.
A month or so after school had started, I was walking home one day when a rummage sale caught my eye. I loved rummage sales. I loved walking up a stranger’s driveway, looking in the garage, snooping around their stuff. I loved pawing through the mismatched china, chipped figurines, and vacation souvenirs. Usually, I glanced through the water-stained paperbacks, historical novels, romances, all the covers I recognized. But today, I saw a different sort of book, a fat hardback with a glossy jacket. It was called The Chosen. Something about its cover brought to mind the books in my mother’s hope chest.
I picked it up.
I almost put it down because I couldn’t pronounce the author’s name—Chaim Potok? (I sounded it out: Chame Poh-tick?) But the plot had to do with a friendship between two Jewish boys, and now I knew I would have to read this book because I’d just met a Jewish a girl named Roberta, who had been my desk partner at the beginning of the year. I had liked Roberta because she played the violin, and because she wasn’t embarrassed to admit she was good at it. We’d even made plans to learn Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro together. But she and her family had stayed in Port for only a month before putting their house back on the market and returning to Milwaukee, where they’d come from. It was just “too difficult,” Roberta had said, and I’d nodded as if I understood. The truth was that before I’d met Roberta, I’d always thought of Jews as Bible story people, like David and Goliath, or Jonah and the whale—people who, like angels, had lived long ago. Every year at Easter time, there was a moment of silence during Mass in which we “prayed for the Jews, who were the chosen people.” As I prayed, I’d imagine people wrapped in flowing white bed sheets, wearing sandals and halos made from pipe cleaners and glitter—the costumes we kids wore on All Saints’ Day when we paraded into the church to the hymn “When the Saints Come Marching In.”
The chosen people. The Chosen. Though I didn’t know the word allusion, I recognized the concept with a little thrill of pleasure. I dug a quarter out of the pocket of my jeans, paid for the book, and started reading as I walked home.
Nothing in my life thus far could have prepared me for the world I was about to enter. The Chosen begins with a baseball game in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, shortly after America’s entry into World War II. Danny, the oldest son of a Hasidic rabbi, is batting for the Hasidic yeshiva’s team; Reuven is pitching for a progressive Orthodox yeshiva. Early in the game, things turn ugly, and when Danny hits the ball directly at Reuven, Reuven refuses to duck. The ball shatters his glasses, and he is nearly blinded as a result. Danny visits Reuven at the
hospital, and the two boys become friends. It’s a friendship that revolves around learning, around books, around intellectual challenges, and I quickly realized that the verb study, in this world, didn’t mean simply opening some books for an hour or two after supper. Danny and Reuven devour books, discuss them, argue about them, even as they reach for more. And their families seem to think that this is all perfectly normal. In fact, kids are expected to spend practically every waking hour analyzing religious texts and pondering heady mathematics. But when Danny starts to study psychology, he must keep this a secret from his religious father, for it is Danny’s birthright, as the oldest son, to become a rabbi. Soon it becomes clear that the ideas he’s encountering—those of Freud among them—can only lead him away from his faith.
Now here was something I recognized, a fear I’d been raised with, one that occupied a powerful cornerstone of my consciousness. To lose your faith was worse, I believed, than anything, even death. Why would Danny risk it? I read and reread all the scenes in which he and Reuven study together. I tasted the sweet, unfamiliar diction of their daily lives: tzaddik, gematriya, apikorsim, tzitzit. I lingered just as ardently over the names of great philosophers—Kant, Spinoza, Aristotle, names that I’d never heard before, names that the context of the prose made clear were not by any means obscure. Too much, too much, I could not absorb it all, and yet I couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t make myself stop to breathe, digest. I noticed that there were quite a few political arguments between various characters, and that these arguments were sprinkled with words like Zion and Israel—words I recognized from the Bible—but I couldn’t figure out what they meant in this context, or what, exactly, was at stake. I recognized the name of President Roosevelt. I recognized the name of Hitler. Neither of these names meant anything significant to me. Roosevelt had led the United States; Hitler had led Germany. But who, exactly, were the Allies? The United Nations? What was a “European Jewry”? It was all very confusing, and whenever I hit a long passage about the war, I skipped it, eager to get back to Reuven and Danny, their personal stories, their studies, their friendship.
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