Now when he thinks of letting her leave India alone, he feels the weight of abandoning his unborn child, and when he thinks of himself in this light, it is too much to bear. What will she say to him now—what will he say to her? Pacing the synagogue at night, he practices. Forgiveness is a word he often uses, though he is not sure if he is simply rehearsing a script or if his asking for it comes deeply from the heart. How can he be certain—what is the test of his intention?
In India, he thought he might bury the ghost of Misha and the ghost of Pan Doktor and the story of the house on Krochmalna Street, but this is no more possible now than it had been thirty years ago, stepping off the barge into this city that sheltered him. He will keep his ghetto memories. They will weary him. They will question his time on this earth, and they will challenge his love for Lucy. This he cannot change, though with the years, he might grow a second heart: he might love this world more than his ghosts.
With the Jewish New Year approaching there is much to do. He must collect donations and assign seats. He must contact their caterer with the numbers of all who’ve confirmed and arrange a special menu for the children. He must speak with the new cantor; the old cantor, who’d known Jaryk for fifteen years, has retired to Florida. Here there is enough of a life to keep him busy, and of course there are the boys from the docks—maybe they’re cooking up a game now, and they could use his gunner’s arm on the field. But thoughts about Lucy keep coming back. When he cleans the pews into a dull shine, he sees her face in the light.
* * *
………………
He makes a plan to visit her at the city employment office, where he will say “Lucy, please forgive me,” where he will make amends for leaving her for India, for not choosing to return when she asked. The next morning he gets on the 4 train between a suit and a man with dreadlocks, is reminded of why the rush hour is so named; many push to board the train, though so few seem to be happy about the dawning of the new workweek. Lucy had talked about moving up-country to start a family, leaving the clock-in-clock-out behind. He’d told her he could learn how to build a cabin, told her he could build anything with his hands.
He enters the Municipal Building at nine o’clock in the morning. A receptionist with a cone of blond hair greets him.
“I’m looking for Lucy Gardner in employment admin,” he says.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I don’t,” he admits. He wants to say that he knows her, that in fact he is the father of her unborn child, but in the next moment she’s thrust a clipboard of paperwork his way.
“You’re lucky she’s got a light morning. She can see you at nine thirty.”
He takes a seat in the waiting area. Sandwiched between two men with frayed fedoras, he fills out the forms. There are questions about his history. Where does he come from? What jobs can he do? What are his strengths?
Outskirts of Warsaw, he writes.
Bookkeeping, accounts receivable, handiwork, minor construction.
For strengths he writes: endurance.
At nine thirty, the receptionist leads him into Lucy’s office, but in Lucy’s chair there’s a man with his feet up on her desk. He’s wearing a gray blazer, hair slicked back, a big smile aimed at Jaryk. “Pardon, didn’t realize she had a client coming in.” In his voice Jaryk hears a Southern accent, like Lucy’s but more pronounced.
As he collects himself, Lucy enters. She’s wearing a long, loose dress, no makeup, and the pair of bangles she found shopping with Mrs. Pal. She seems lost in thought and at first doesn’t notice him. Then she stops in her tracks and looks from the man at her desk to Jaryk and back again. “Can I help you?” she asks.
At first, he’s not sure if she’s directed her words at him. They sound so foreign, callous even. He holds up the paperwork. “I thought we could talk. I even made an appointment.”
“Jonas, will you give us a minute, please?”
Jonas whistles under his breath as he leaves. It feels as if he’s being mocked, and who, anyway, is this man who puts his feet on Lucy’s desk?
“I wanted to see you,” Jaryk says, after Jonas has left. “I wanted to explain things.”
“I just got out with Glenn Adkins. I’m in no mood, and I can’t talk about us at work, Jaryk. I have clients to take care of.”
He remembers Glenn Adkins, the musician-turned-security-guard that she’d once spoken of as someone she might reform. “I understand. Can we meet sometime? Maybe at Veselka? Tonight, tomorrow, the day after?”
“I don’t think so,” Lucy says slowly. “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Of course, I get it. I dropped out of thin air.”
“Yes, you dropped out is right.”
She’s tapping her nails on the table, a nervous rhythm, and everything in him says, “Run.” Says, “She won’t have you back.” He sees himself out into the clamor of the lobby, then out into the noise of downtown.
“I’m not ready for that,” he hears her say again and again. There’s a wedding rehearsal being held at the synagogue, which means he can’t be back until the evening, at which point he’ll help the cleaners with the dishes, reassemble the bibles into neat piles. For now, he’s left to wander. From City Hall he fords the walking lane of the Brooklyn Bridge, heading south, unsure where he’ll go.
Lucy’s coworker Jonas troubles him, or maybe the man isn’t a coworker at all but an intimate friend; either way he knows their connection is more than happenstance. That look they shared said he means something to her. Of course he might well have expected it, had he set aside more time to think about Lucy and not his troubles in India. It’s been more than a month and without a word from him, what is she to expect? If she’s moved on, found another partner, it wouldn’t be strange. But he can’t hold this thought for long; soon it’s broken by a fear that he has missed his chance. All good things which come in time. All good things which come only at certain times, not for long when they do come, and if one does not love when called—so the rabbi has said—then what is lost is often lost for life.
Come Brooklyn he boards the train to Green-Wood Cemetery.
Misha’s grave bears fresh flowers. A bunch of yellow roses, long stems of lavender, a few lilies. But in Jaryk’s absence who would have tended the grave? He can’t imagine any of the men from the docks stopping to pay their respects. Not that they didn’t care for Misha, but they have families and long commutes and who would make the time? Still, he’s grateful for the flowers. He’s grateful for the silence that the cemetery offers. All this noise of the city and now, finally, a moment of quiet with a brother.
He’s never had a gravestone to come to; everyone else he’s lost remains without testament. Everyone but Misha. He checks the knapsack the Pals gifted him, where in a sealed container he’s carried Misha’s ashes thousands of miles home. To his dearest friend he wants to say that the summer hasn’t gone according to plan. He wants to say: “Things fell apart when you left me.” The gravesite is pristine. In fact, the whole cemetery is a gorgeous landscape with hills of blooming grass, some evidence even of wildflowers in the thickets, the road far enough away to forget the city. He sits on the grass to hear whatever Misha’s spirit will impart. The last edict Misha had was to start a family with Lucy. He gave it a go at first, there’s no doubt of it, though later he lost sight of Misha’s words: “Most important thing is family, then food, then everything else.”
He hasn’t eaten, so after Misha’s ghost keeps the silence for another hour, he feels weak enough in the knees to take his leave.
“I’ll come back soon, and often,” he says to Misha.
He heads back to the city. He gets his own table at Seven and a Half Dimes and orders a plate of fried mackerel. In his knapsack, he discovers two of the green tomatoes the Pals gave him on his last day. They’ve ripened to a tender red now. Each has its own taste, a sweetness tha
t makes him remember the confections Mrs. Pal made him, so dense and moist, like nothing he’d tasted before, the sweetness sticking to his tongue for hours. That last day in Calcutta they’d helped him arrange what few things he was taking home. Avik and Priya washed and pressed his shirt while Mrs. Pal directed the operation. How strange a life—that he’d met them at all, that he’d grown to depend on them, at least for a while, as family.
On his way out, he stops at the Fulton Fish Market, where Earl Minton is manning the books.
“Look at you, Mr. Adventurer,” Earl says.
At Misha’s funeral, Jaryk mentioned he’d be going far east for a while. The docks boys had given him their silent respect then, but now he’s back. Surely, they’ll want stories.
“I directed a play in India,” Jaryk says. “Hundreds of people showed up.”
“You did now, did you?”
“Misha was supposed to, but I did in his place.”
He tells Earl about all the necessary repairs at the synagogue, how soon the halls will fill with families for the Jewish New Year. “Oh, and I visited Misha’s stone.”
“Did you like the flowers?” Earl says.
“So, it was you, then?”
“A bunch of us pool money. I just go and put them on the ground. Misha was more than a colleague to us.”
He’s sad to have assumed Misha would have been forgotten so easily, grateful for these old friends.
“And what about the lady of your life? The one Misha was always bragging about?”
“She’s swell,” Jaryk says. He wishes he could speak to Earl about his Lucy troubles, but he has no language for it. Not with Earl, from whom he learned the art of bookkeeping, nor with any of the men who’ll start showing up at the pub as soon as the sun sets.
“And your boys, Earl, how are they?”
“The oldest is off to the polytechnic this year, will you believe that? He’s good at math.”
“Gets it from his dad, I know.”
“Well, keep coming with that flattery,” Earl says with a wink. “I’ll tell the boys you’re back.”
Now Jaryk surveys the unvarnished stools where beer stains have seeped into the wood, surveys the long bar with its upturned mugs and the pool table with its canvas warped by time—all evidence of conversations had, drink consumed, lives passing through. He can imagine Rebecca down in the basement, double-checking her accounts, making sure no girl at the bar is frenching away the tips.
He heads outside to the pile of burlap bags where he used to lunch with Misha. In the clear evening, schooners practice their foghorns. It would be simple to live another life, to return to the docks, or bury himself in his work at the synagogue, though also impossible now—across the island, there is Lucy with his child. Maybe she is setting her laundry out to dry. Maybe she is penning a page in her journal. He closes his eyes, sees again the sweet chaos of her nightdresses on the floor. A little courage is all he needs. If she rejects him, then so be it. He’ll still volunteer himself a father, no matter what else happens. As others have done for him, he will now do for his own. He takes a deep breath. What he has been unable to confront appears to him now—not the terror he once felt, only the possibility of the future, its alarming brightness subdued by the setting sun.
He dips his feet into the water, takes the ashes from his knapsack, and lets Misha’s remains merge with the tide.
* * *
………………
A little courage, he thinks, knocking on the rabbi’s chamber. It’s early enough into evening that the rabbi’s likely awake, though he’s been known to take the occasional catnap during “office hours.” It was a tradition the rebetsin started many years ago when so many of the congregation sought the rabbi’s counsel that a first-come-first-served list had to be posted. Nowadays, there’s no need for a list. After the rebetsin’s passing, the rabbi spurned his office hours at every opportunity, and whenever he was available, he grew a reputation for answering questions with cryptic puzzles; a few months into the new routine the office hours were returned to the rabbi for quiet and contemplation.
Jaryk knocks again.
“Yes, Mr. Smith,” the rabbi calls. “The door is open.”
“I’m here for your office hours,” Jaryk says. “I need your advice on something.”
“Yes, I guessed that,” the rabbi says. “Shall we take a walk in my library?”
Jaryk helps Rabbi Samuel from his chair and slowly they walk toward the basement room known as Books and Other.
“What was it like to be in Tagore’s town?” the rabbi asks.
“It was like being in the country,” Jaryk says. “So many trees. Some deer running loose. Then there is this university, and the students seem happy to be there. It was like no other place.”
“So the journey was long but fruitful?”
“It was, I think.”
The rabbi fiddles with his key chain until he finds the right one.
“What are we looking for?”
“A personal memento,” the rabbi says. He has Jaryk take down a stack of scrapbooks. The rebetsin called these their “yearbooks,” because they would chronicle the life of the congregation—all the auspicious events, with a few good pictures to help memorialize the year. They skim through several volumes until they reach 1939.
“It’s in the center,” the rabbi says.
“What is?” Jaryk flips through and there in the middle of the scrapbook is a picture of Rebetsin Sarah and the rabbi, their faces pressed close to the camera, both grinning fiercely. The rabbi doesn’t have any gray in his hair, and the rebetsin looks like she’s just graduated college.
“I had been meditating on this picture,” the rabbi says. “I had been trying to remember where in this fortress I put it. It took me a long time to remember. A couple of months, I’d say.”
Rabbi Samuel slips the picture into his coat pocket and takes Jaryk’s hand. They lean on each other heading back to the office. “What did you want to ask me?”
“Oh, it was nothing, really,” Jaryk says. He doesn’t want to trouble the rabbi any further. Soon, his employer will return home for the night, where in the darkness and solitude he’ll witness again the rebetsin’s beauty in the photo and perhaps remember what it was like, those first few months of love.
He helps the rabbi back to his office, bids him good night.
“It is a short life,” the rabbi calls after him. “Don’t wait too long.”
* * *
………………
What he wanted to ask the rabbi was simply this:
“Is it all right for me to bring a child into this world?”
Except he’d already conceived a child, so it was too late to ask that.
In the chamber of books, the right question seemed to be: “After everything, am I capable of love?”
It was simple enough, but not a question he would ask a man who thought so often of his deceased wife.
Down in the synagogue’s bathroom he shaves his beard, revealing the skin underneath to be a shade lighter, and there’s something comforting about the sting of the balm he applies to his cheeks and chin, a familiar hurt. Afterwards, he dons one of the suits he’s saved in plastic, and though it’s too loose in some places and too tight in others, still it makes him feel like a different person. There’s an early chill in the air tonight. South along Second Avenue several garbage bins have been set aflame, and groups of young men huddle next to the warmth, eyeing Jaryk with a challenge he refuses to take on. It’s not a neighborhood he could live in, and he never relished visiting Lucy in her apartment on Seventh and First, preferring instead her company at his place. Entering her building, he’s stopped by an old woman who needs help getting her walker through the door. Her name is Mrs. Esperanza, and he tells her that Lucy is an old friend. Up the staircase, leaning on his elbow for support
, she says, “Lucy’s just darling. One of these days I’m getting her to play for me.”
In the dimly lit hallway, Mrs. Esperanza needs his help to open the lock.
“You want coffee? I make the best,” she offers.
“Another time, ma’am.”
On the second-floor landing, he hears someone trudging up the stairs and turns to see her in the shadows. She’s wearing a loose summer dress and heels. Her lipstick glows in the near-dark. Even at a distance, he can smell her perfume, though it’s a scent he doesn’t recognize.
“I always wanted to put some lights in here,” he says. “I can hardly see your face.”
She grinds a heel into the cawed wood of the railing, marking a decision, which one way or another will alter the course of his life. There will be no turning back, he thinks, when Lucy speaks.
A Choice
She dreams of The Little Prince. All this while, she’s had premonitions of a girl, but after reading her father’s letter she’s not so sure. A beautiful boy, maybe, with a bowl of dark hair falling around his ears. A child content at times to be alone with his imagination. A child who’ll do good in the world. A common wish, but that he’ll help others, heal the sick. “Oh, I always thought you were to be a concert pianist,” her mother once said. Nothing goes exactly as one might imagine, but a child who’ll use his hands to mend the world—is that too much to ask for?
She dreams of The Little Prince, then of Jaryk. She’d assumed that he’d be home before summer’s end, begging to be excused for his long absence, but now that Labor Day has come and gone and there’s no trace of him, except in her journal and in her thoughts, where she’s begun to feel less of the love that sustained them their first winter and more of a dull ache, which sometimes, at night, could be called regret, not for the child—no, she’s glad for motherhood—but for the time that she spent burrowing into him, that time which feels now as if it’s come to nothing.
A Play for the End of the World Page 26