Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  My mother’s friend leaned toward me. She seemed intent on getting to the bottom of this. “Why would your mother have become religious like that?” She was slurring her words slightly. She was eighty years old; the vodka had gone to her head. “The holidays, the cooking, the endless rules? What could she have been thinking?”

  But I had stopped listening. A bit of my childhood had been snipped loose and now I was hearing it loud and clear. I was no longer in the art gallery, but back in Hillside, New Jersey. Back between my parents.

  Adon Olam, asher melach, b’terem kol, y’tzir nivro…

  My mother sat on one side of me, my father on the other. This—men and women sitting together in a Conservative shul—was not how my father preferred to daven. We used to belong to an Orthodox shul, where men and women were separated by a mechitzah, so that the men wouldn’t be distracted during their prayers. But my mother had gotten into a huge fight with Rabbi Teitz, and we had never been back.

  My father sang loudly in his Ashkenazic Hebrew. I leaned in his direction, trying to distance myself from my mother. The stained-glass windows of Shomrei Torah were new, jewel-colored, casting rainbows of light on the pale wood of the pews, the bimah where Rabbi Lasker stood in his white robe. Outside the nondescript one-story synagogue, Saturday-morning traffic whizzed by on Union Avenue.

  V’im ruchi, g’viyati, Adonai li v’loa ira Adon Olam.

  Prayer books snapped closed, the morning service finally over. Did I think about the meaning of what I was singing? And with my soul, my body too, God is with me, I shall not fear, set to a very cheerful little tune.

  “Good Shabbos.” My father’s Sabbath stubble was rough against my cheek.

  “Good Shabbos.” My mother kissed my forehead.

  We walked home single file, using the shortcut through the Pantirers’ backyard, past their tennis court. As I stood in the upstate New York art gallery—my father twenty years gone, my mother four—I could taste the Shabbos lunch my mother had waiting for us at home: cold sliced brisket and peas, a day-old challah from the kosher bakery. Lunch was the same every Saturday: she pulled the brisket, wrapped in Saran, from the refrigerator, spooned thawed peas into a china bowl. She placed the challah on its special silver and wood plate, along with a serrated silver knife. The challah was covered by a silk cloth embroidered with flowers and Hebrew lettering. Before we sat down to lunch, my father washed his hands, then made a quick blessing over the bread as he sliced it, crumbs flying in every direction. Goddamnit, Paul! My mother exploded. It happened like clockwork: the challah plate, the knife, the crumbs, my mother’s rage. Goddamnit!

  “She could have done anything, your mother,” said the friend. “I used to ask her. I used to say, ‘Irene, how can you live like this? Why would you live something you don’t believe?’”

  17.

  “Did you pray when Jacob was sick?” I asked Michael, years later.

  We were in our bright, sunny kitchen. Through the window—beyond the stone patio and herb garden—I could see Jacob in the backyard. He was throwing himself fly balls, making diving catches with his outstretched mitt, rolling on the grass. Picturing himself at Fenway Park.

  Michael looked at me as if I had asked him if he practiced voodoo, or burned incense at an altar. “Um—no. It never occurred to me. Did you?”

  My rocking chair ritual, my incessant pleading—it had been silent, private. I never said a word about it to Michael. What else was there to do? Beyond the MRIs, the CT scans, the second opinions, the research on the Internet, the national experts—what else was there to do but say please?

  “Yes,” I said. “I prayed.”

  “Did it help?”

  The question stopped me. Did it help. The fact is, I couldn’t not pray. I didn’t break it down, or intellectualize it. I suppose it made me feel like I was doing everything I possibly could. That’s what my obsessive jumble of lullabies and counting backward was all about. It didn’t cross my mind to call a rabbi, or to seek spiritual guidance of any kind. Please save my child. In the unlikely event that anyone was listening, I wanted to be sure to be heard. I was taking no chances—the same way that I cupped my hands on top of Jacob’s head and willed the firestorm inside his brain to subside.

  “It certainly didn’t hurt,” I said.

  18.

  When I was growing up in New Jersey, I had a crush on a family—the entire family—who lived in our neighborhood: Arnold, Shirley, Harvey, Eddie, and Joyce Adler. The Adlers were like gods to me. Every spare moment, when I wasn’t playing field hockey or practicing piano or doing homework, I got on my bike and rode circles around their house, hoping someone would notice and invite me in. The kids were a lot older than I was. The year I was fifteen, Harvey graduated from medical school in New York. Eddie was in medical school in Philadelphia. And Joyce was a freshman at the University of Vermont.

  The Adlers were beautiful and bright and happy. Their home always seemed lit from within, not only by glowing lamps and a steady hum of activity, but by something I couldn’t have put my finger on at the time. To me, they seemed blessed. Life in the Adler household was in sharp contrast to the tension and loneliness I felt with my own parents—but that wasn’t it. The reason for my infatuation with that family was their certainty, their absolute conviction that they lived in a world designed to please and reward them. They would always have whatever they wanted. Life would continue as planned: they were charmed, gifted, golden, and admission to their inner circle meant that some of that charm might rub off on me.

  Each winter, the family spent their Christmas vacation on the Caribbean island of Antigua. They stayed at the same hotel, played tennis with the same pro, ordered the same frozen drinks on the beach. Once, I asked them if they were planning to go to Antigua that year. The oldest son, Harvey, answered this way: Does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?

  This might, in retrospect, appear to be hubris, but really it was a form of innocence. Nothing bad had ever happened to any of the Adlers. It was an elegant, if flawed, bit of logic to proceed from there to the certitude that nothing ever would.

  But then, after their annual Caribbean holiday—from which they returned tanned and languid—Joyce went back to college and suffered a massive stroke, from which she never recovered. In the blink of an eye, she became paralyzed and mute, trapped inside her own body. It was an inexplicable, freak occurrence. She spent the rest of her life—I recently heard that she passed away in her forties—living at home with her parents. Wheelchair ramps replaced outdoor steps. The basket of sports equipment next to the garage doors disappeared forever. The family closed ranks. For the rest of my teenage years, I continued to circle the house on my bicycle whenever I could, but never again was I invited inside.

  It has been many years since I’ve heard word of the Adlers. My parents moved away from the New Jersey suburb where we all lived. But their story is embedded somewhere within me, a samskara. Had they been foolish to believe in their own good fortune for all that time—to trust that all would be well? They weren’t religious people, but they had a kind of blind faith. I, on the other hand, come from a long line of religious people who aren’t so sure that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west—much less that their own lives will unfold predictably. I was born and bred to fear the worst. And I know that the worst either happens or it doesn’t. Worry is not a form of protection. So who’s the fool?

  Occasionally I search for the Adlers on the Internet. Not much information is available. The sons have both become ophthalmologists, like their father. They’ve established private practices; moved to more affluent suburbs; had a few kids. I find myself wondering how those kids—heirs to the family whose innocence was so suddenly and completely crushed—have been raised to think of themselves. What have they inherited from the past? Do they feel blessed? Certain of their own specialness? Do they make assumptions about the future? Or perhaps they live in fear of the other shoe dropping. After all, it dropped once.


  19.

  I was watching Jacob build a tower of alphabet blocks when the first plane hit.

  Six, seven, eight, nine… I had been busy trying to remember how many blocks a two-and-a-half-year-old was supposed to be able to stack. And I was mentally ticking off the checklist from What to Expect: The Toddler Years. I did this all the time. I kept a well-worn paperback edition by my bedside. It was like my Bible. Each night I read about developmental milestones he should have/might have/could even possibly have reached.

  As I watched him play, I registered the sound of a tremendous but distant boom. Something had happened somewhere nearby, but not too nearby. A truck accident on Flatbush Avenue, maybe. A tractor trailer slamming across one of those uneven metal plates. We lived in brownstone Brooklyn, in a red brick Federal town house we had bought and moved into right after Jacob was born. It was in a neighborhood “in transition,” as the real estate brokers liked to say, which was why we had been able to afford a four-story house there. From our roof, we could see the towers of the World Trade Center.

  Ten, eleven, twelve…

  I had been sticking very close to home. My life had become small, concentrated, a single, pinpoint beam of light focused on my son. I didn’t like being far away from Jacob. Distance made me nervous. To go from our house into Manhattan meant a subway ride over a bridge, or under the East River. Each time I squeezed myself through the doors of a crowded train, my heart felt like it was going to explode—a flood building, my veins expanding as the train pulled away from the platform. And so I stayed nearby—writing in my study upstairs, or at a Starbucks in Park Slope. I told myself I liked it this way. It wasn’t because my baby had been so sick. It wasn’t because we had medicated him around the clock for a year—waiting, watching for the tiniest flicker of his eyes, a sign of an infinitesimal seizure. No. Things were back to normal now—or so I told myself.

  Jacob’s babysitter arrived with the news that something—she wasn’t sure what—had just happened. We turned on the television. It had been minutes since the first plane had hit, and the initial news coverage was chaos. One newscaster announced that this was a small, single-engine plane; another hypothesized that perhaps air traffic control had gone amok, steering the plane into the building.

  “They’re idiots.” Michael shook his head. “Look at that fire. Only a commercial jet could do that.”

  Then the second jet banked and crashed.

  We stood in our kitchen and stared at the screen.

  “Terrorism,” Michael said.

  I had never seen him like this. His eyes were blinking rapidly, but he was preternaturally calm. I could practically see his mind running through the possibilities. In his life before I knew him, Michael had been a war correspondent. This kind of composure had saved his life a dozen times.

  “Are we in danger here?”

  My mind raced. What to do? Where to go?

  I held Jacob, keeping his face turned away from the images on the TV. He squirmed in my arms as I moved through the house. I couldn’t stand still. I paced from room to room, looking around wildly. The antique chandelier hanging in the foyer, the polished wood shutters in the parlor—I had been under the illusion that my family’s home was safe and solid. I caught a glimpse of Jacob and me in the mirror above the fireplace. We were a blur. We could become rubble at any second.

  “Mommy, down!”

  Jacob scrambled up the steep stairs to his bedroom. For once, I didn’t stop to mentally consult What to Expect about whether he should have used a full sentence. What to Expect was suddenly, ludicrously irrelevant. He sat on the organic cotton carpet and went back to work, stacking blocks again.

  The first tower collapsed. A dark, acrid cloud.

  The phone rang. A friend whose husband worked at the Wall Street Journal—he had left for work that morning and now she couldn’t find him.

  It rang again.

  “Do you have a bike?”

  Now it was Jacki Lyden, our friend and neighbor, and an NPR correspondent.

  “What?”

  “A bicycle, Dani—do you have a bike?”

  Within minutes, she appeared breathless at our door and grabbed the rickety bicycle we kept in the basement. I still didn’t get it. I thought Jacki would be riding far away—maybe all the way up to the tip of Long Island, where she would then charter a boat to a safer place. I didn’t understand that some people would actually choose to go toward the disaster. That if Michael weren’t married to me and the father of our little boy, he, too, would have gone in that direction. I later found out that we had several friends—journalists, all of them—who rushed to lower Manhattan that day. As the dust-covered, devastated throngs of thousands crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, heading away from the hole ripped through the heart of the city, there were those who headed straight for it.

  20.

  I went to see the osteopath in his Connecticut office on the ground floor of a house at the end of a quiet village street. The whole way there, I kept wanting to turn the car around. What was I doing? Where was I going—and why? A poet friend had recommended this guy. I had told her about how I had been grinding my teeth in my sleep. About how, during my yoga practice, my jaw would sometimes start to tremble, trying to release. I was surprised when she suggested an osteopath. Weren’t they bone doctors for old people? But I was willing to give him a try; the poet friend told me that he had changed her life. It seemed to me that anyone who has changed someone’s life is worth meeting.

  “Any history of injuries?” he began our session.

  I shook my head.

  “None? No bad falls—not even in childhood?”

  I searched my memory. “No,” I answered.

  He looked surprised, but it was true: I had never really fallen. He swiveled on his chair and made a notation on my brand-new chart. His office didn’t look like a typical doctor’s office. No equipment, not even a scale. Scattered on his desk were a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, and a half-empty glass of water.

  “Surgery? Hospitalizations?”

  “Other than giving birth—no.”

  “Cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems?”

  No, no, and no. I felt a potent combination of lucky and fearful.

  The doctor probed more deeply into my family history. It is one of the guiding principles of osteopathy to treat the whole patient. I had learned this in the last fifteen minutes, by thumbing through a well-worn paperback about osteopathy in the waiting room: Dr. Fulford’s Touch of Life: Aligning Body, Mind and Spirit to Honor the Healer Within.

  “What about your mother? Is she alive?”

  “No. She died of lung cancer at eighty.”

  “And your father?”

  “No—car accident,” I answered. He winced slightly. I appreciated this. I watched his pen move across the page.

  “At what age?”

  “Sixty-four. Well, I should say”—here I faltered—“it’s unclear why he died. He passed out behind the wheel of the car. He had been taking a lot of different prescription medications.”

  “Why?” The question came quickly, sharply.

  “He’d had spinal surgery, and became addicted to the painkillers.”

  The doctor nodded. He had seen a lot of this.

  “What about your son? Any injuries?”

  “A very rare seizure disorder when he was an infant,” I said, and then rushed on before the doctor could wince again. “He’s fine now.”

  My cheeks felt hot. I wanted the answers to my entire family history to be as simple and fortunate as my own good health. Parents still alive. Happy and thriving in their old age. A son with no medical history to speak of, beyond well-child pediatrician visits. Everything just fine, thanks. I knew that the jottings the doctor was making on his pad told a different story.

  I lay faceup on a table as he placed his hands beneath me, gently applying a subtle, nearly undetectable pressure to my sacrum and spine. The office was dead quiet, except for the occasio
nal chirp of a bird outside the window. Earlier, while I had been reading up on osteopathy in the waiting room, a woman—presumably a patient—had come in to make an appointment. She asked the receptionist if she had seen the deep purple flowers that had begun to bloom in that part of northern Connecticut. “I saw them in Massachusetts last week but hardly noticed,” said the receptionist. “My relationship to them here is different.”

  I wasn’t sure I would ever be someone contemplative enough to consider my relationship to flowers. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be. I secretly thought that this method of aligning of body, mind, and spirit—honor the healer within?—was probably a whole lot of hokum. But meanwhile, I was here. And through all the noise and clutter in my head, in such stark contrast to the silence surrounding me, I discovered that I was indeed experiencing something as the osteopath made his minuscule adjustments.

  “What are you feeling right now?” he asked.

  I kept my eyes closed.

  “Sort of a flooding,” I said. “A warmth in my head, my chest, my jaw.”

  “I would hope so.”

  “And a sense of well-being,” I said. Puzzled. It was a well-being bordering on euphoria. Not my usual state. I gave in to it, floating. I felt soothed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so good.

  At the end of the session—which might have lasted fifteen minutes or two hours—I sat up on the edge of the table. What had happened? The osteopath reached over to his bookcase and pulled out a heavy medical text. He then thumbed through it; there was something he wanted to show me. A detailed anatomical drawing of the spine and surrounding muscles and tissue.

  “The chain ganglia”—he pointed to what looked like a strand of small beads—“are these nerves along the spinal cord right here. They’re the part of the sympathetic nervous system responsible for delivering information about stress to the body—or, as it’s more commonly known, the fight-or-flight response.”