The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  The holidays are a month away. Sol spends his time writing sermons and organizing the services that will take place in the tent. Rosalie samples paint chips for the empty rooms, but she loses interest in Plymouth Green and Burma Jade, and can’t imagine how this big house will ever fill with the voices of children. She enrolls in a driving school and passes her road test. For her first solo drive in the Dodge, she cruises down to Manhattan and parks outside the Seminary. As if she never left, she marches up to the upper geniza and looks for traces of Walter. New file cabinets line the walls and the Torah scroll has been removed. She searches the bookshelf and file drawers for leftover hints—his powdered spices, bottles of whiskey—but finds nothing. She scans the books on the shelf but the Mei HaShiloach is gone. No more words of the Ishbitzer, no more sprigs of faded freesia left to fall.

  Rosalie saunters downstairs to the lower geniza and passes a custodian who asks if she is lost. She shakes her head and runs to the broom closet, hoping to find something he left behind, but the room smells of disinfectant. Rosalie bursts into tears and lies down on the cold floor, her face close to the wet mops. She inhales the sickening stench of ammonia and tries to pretend she is smelling turmeric or coriander, but her imagination fails her and she covers her mouth to muffle her sobs. When her crying softens into a whimper, she rises, straightens her skirt, and exits the Seminary for good. As she drives home under a darkening sky, she decides to tell Sol that she is ready. She will be patient with him and she will teach him how to be patient with her. She will touch him and she will allow herself to be touched. She will map his body and she will allow him to map hers.

  She is ready for her marriage to begin.

  The Kol Nidre service marks the annulment of all vows, the annual window of time when all past promises are broken, creating space for new prayers. Every synagogue in the world is saturated with expectation, crowded with men and women who have waited all year to listen to the swell of the Kol Nidre melody—the notes in a minor key that descend a staircase, lower and lower, and then rise up with hope. Every folding chair in the Temple Briar Wood tent is filled, except for Rosalie’s because she has a headache and doesn’t want to leave the house.

  The tent stands fifty yards from their backyard, close enough to hear the prayer from the open porch. As Rosalie stands alone under the darkening sky the spell of the Aramaic wraps around her like a celestial dress. The low notes of Kol Nidre take her down to the cellar of her deepest longing and the high notes pull her into the night air, along with everything she wants to leave behind: every dashed possibility, every regret, every moment of sadness.

  The prayer is recited the first time in a whisper, the second time to be heard, and the third time to be as declarative as a trumpet. Who needs a synagogue to receive this? Rosalie has a porch. She can be alone and take stock of her life. This, now. This husband, this house, this tent that will be Sol’s lifeblood, these congregants that he will draw out of their homes and welcome to a place of sanctity.

  Rosalie makes a pact with herself and decides that she will always stay home on Kol Nidre, close enough to hear the words, yet distant enough to let the prayer resonate in her bones. If every Jew is standing to face a Torah scroll on the first hour of the Yom Kippur fast, Rosalie will face a yard, a tree, a night sky. Closer to Walter. Closer to remembering how she felt when they climbed the stairs from the lower geniza, how her skin was a fibrous membrane that could hold memory and music, and if she listened well enough, the symphony of her own body would teach her everything she would need to know.

  PART TWO

  The small truth has words that are clear;

  the great truth has great silence.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  VINEYARD

  March 1952

  On a rainy Sunday in March, Sol digs a hole in a patch of earth in central Westchester, the very spot that will mark the foundation of their synagogue. Rosalie watches her husband bite his lip as the shovel hits the dirt and splatters mud on his new suit. He pauses for a moment, lifts the shovel above his head and shouts, “Shehecheyanu! We have a shul!”

  Rosalie’s hair is done up in a beehive for the ceremony and she wears a tweed dress and heels. Nathan and Missy Samuels are named the first board members of the real Temple Briar Wood—Nathan will be president and Missy will represent the Sisterhood—and the four of them hold hands and dance the hora around the hole, raising their arms in unison.

  The die is cast, thinks Rosalie. Our lives will be etched on this patch of land. This man who calls out my name in his sleep is the rabbi whose words will inspire these first families, when they lie down and when they wake up, when they love and when they work, when the women gossip about who is pregnant and whose baby has colic. The words that Sol delivers from the lectern every Shabbat morning will be the words the men recall when they stand behind their folded newspapers on the train platform each weekday morning. The words of his Rosh Hashanah sermons will echo in their brains when they feel an occasional vague thirst at the back of their throats, wondering if the quiet streets of Briar Wood are bold enough to sustain the yearnings that once seemed so vast.

  Nathan and Missy and the other first families of Temple Briar Wood call themselves the charter members, the foundation-stoners, or the niners because all together they are nine couples, plus their small children who lay their hands in a corner of wet concrete they name the Children’s Square. Some of the foundation-stoners refer to Briar Wood as the shul; some call it the temple, or the building-that-is-no-longer-the-tent. When they dedicate the synagogue, Sol says, “From now on, we will call Temple Briar Wood The Shul, as if this is the only shul in the world.”

  Rosalie asks how they can ever sustain a congregation with only nine families, and Sol says the math is simple. “We need ten men for a minyan, a prayer quorum. At first, three men will show up: an elderly man who recites the Mourner’s Kaddish, another man who comes on Shabbat morning out of habit, and his friend who comes out of curiosity, then out of devotion. You start with those. And then you add. Only the men count, of course. You add the widowed father who has moved in with his son. The son will accompany his father to shul even though he does not remember the prayers he learned as a child. Then the son’s own son will grow and he will need bar mitzvah lessons.

  “Others you will find by pacing the nearby streets when you are desperate for a minyan at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. You will spot a mezuzah on the doorpost and knock. Here you will find them: the man you rouse from morning sex, the man who repairs his car in the first light of day, the man who flips pancakes for his children. Rabbi! We were just sitting down to breakfast. Honey—the rabbi needs a tenth man. Tell him to take his strange tribal customs elsewhere. Sshh—he can hear you! Put on your pants. I’ll finish the pancakes.”

  “And you, Sol? Is this what you want?”

  He kisses Rosalie. Everything he needs is here. The walls of his synagogue will contain multitudes. He will convert his beloved texts into words of meaning for those who enter. What more could he want?

  “I hope so,” he says.

  In Chicago Walter buys a pair of lined boots but they don’t warm his feet. A single wool scarf is useless on the coldest winter days so he wraps two of them tightly around his neck and then yanks them off because they constrict his movement. He can’t get warm in the winter and he can’t cool off in the summer. He yearns to return to the time before he arrived in New York, back to the long afternoons he spent reading under a tree in Shantiniketan. Walter would trade the life he has now for a single hour in the dusty Indian heat, fresh dates sweetening his tongue while he memorizes poems by Rumi and Tagore.

  He is a doctoral candidate at the Divinity School and Paul oversees his work. Walter teaches an occasional class. He touches upon what he learned in Shantiniketan but the lecture halls and seminar tables are weak settings for the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad’s honey of all beings. His mind hooks on certain lines: As a man acts, as he behaves, so does he become. Whoso doe
s good, becomes good: whoso does evil, becomes evil. . . . Whatever deeds he does on earth, their rewards he reaps. Walter weaves himself into the ancient words: as I act, as I love, as I become. Whoso fucks his chavrusa’s fiancée just months before her wedding becomes the man who loves a woman who will never belong to him.

  Most evenings Walter eats dinner alone in a Hyde Park coffee shop. Every morsel of food tastes bland and he sprinkles his own garam masala mix onto the mashed potatoes and chicken pot pie. Had he stayed in India, Walter could have returned to Bombay and married Kavita. He would be a father by now, he thinks. He would be the father of an Indian-German-Jewish child they would have named for Sonia. Sanjiv for a boy, Satya for a girl. No promises kept, Sonia. Your Walter is a refugee who won’t tether himself to any post in this strange country.

  Women alight on Walter’s body like butterflies in a garden. He has hesitant, brief affairs: a single night with a teaching assistant, a furtive hour with an English major in a library stack. Trish is a ballet student, Ellen is an anthropologist, and Deidre works at the coffee shop. He sleeps with each of them in turn and repeats this in a weekly cycle. When Walter makes love to Ellen he calls out Trish’s name, but when he falls asleep in Deidre’s arms he dreams of Rosalie and is surprised when he wakes up next to a Jamaican waitress who chants his name in a singsong dialect that makes him swoon. He closes his eyes and reaches back to find Rosalie in the path of his dream but she is gone.

  Ida Wachs and Lotte Kerem join Rosalie and Sol for Shabbat dinner at their new dining table. The formal chairs have wide seats, plush with green velvet, and Ida’s feet don’t touch the floor.

  “Why such enormous chairs?” she asks Rosalie. “Are you expecting your children to be giants?”

  Lotte beams with pride, as if she was born to sit at the throne of her son’s new Ethan Allen set. She turns to Rosalie.

  “What a dignified table for your family, rebbetzin! So rabbinic.”

  Sol stands, goblet in hand, ready to recite kiddush.

  “Do you want to tell them, sweetheart?” He winks at Rosalie.

  What is she supposed to say? That she hates this ornate table and only agreed to buy it as a concession to Sol’s taste? That the man in the Ethan Allen store stared at her Capri pants and sneakers, then whispered to Sol that his wife should dress like a real rebbetzin? That when the table was delivered and set up, Sol proposed they make love, right there, in the place where the challah and roasted chicken will sit every Friday night of their lives? That his proposition was—so far—Sol’s most brazen suggestion and a good one? Should she tell them that?

  “Rosalie?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she says. “A little bit.” She holds up three fingers.

  “B’sha’ah tova!” says Lotte. “Not so little!”

  “May you have a girl,” says Ida. “You are meant to have a girl.”

  “No limits!” says Lotte. “May God bless you with a healthy baby!”

  Lying in bed that night, Rosalie runs her hands over the faint rise of her belly. A girl, she thinks. How lovely. A baby girl to wipe away the past, claim their territory as a new family: Sol, Rosalie, and the baby. An elemental threesome, their own Garden of Eden.

  Rosalie miscarries later that week. As she weeps in bed, she thinks of a seed being flushed away, a seed that held her intended first child. She is certain this baby would have been a girl. News in the small synagogue travels fast; Missy Samuels and her new Sisterhood friends Bev and Serena deliver casseroles and pastries to their rebbetzin’s door. Each woman hugs Rosalie and says, “Soon, rebbetzin, soon.” And Missy whispers in Rosalie’s ear, “First we will make a shul and then we will welcome your children.”

  Sol becomes Temple Briar Wood’s tradesman of holiness and Rosalie his helpmate. In time the men come in numbers slightly greater than the required ten and then the women follow the men to shul, wearing doilies or hats on top of their teased beehives, pulling their children along, girls in patent leather shoes, boys in their first dress slacks. On the High Holidays that Sol calls The Big Show he peers down from his red velvet seat on the bima and notes how many chairs are empty and how many full. When he speaks he pounds his fist on the lectern and shakes his forefinger for emphasis, a sermonic gesture he learned from Morris just before they graduated.

  Rosalie counts on frizzy-haired Bev to decorate the sukkah with popcorn balls, paper chains, and cardboard Stars of David dangling low enough for the smallest children to touch. Sol relies on Nathan’s father to chant the Torah portion and serve as a cantor. In time the layers of involvement become thick and textured until the shul has a board, with Nathan at the helm. When the congregants exit the sanctuary, Sol greets each one and says, “Have a good week, and give my regards to your mother.” And then he whispers to Rosalie, “I think I got it wrong. I can’t remember if the regards should be for the father instead of the mother and how do I keep track of all these names and lives in my care?”

  When delivering his sermons, Sol’s voice rises with each sentence; he caresses each word and enunciates the final syllables emphatically. The details teach us how to live! Our forefathers teach us that the furnishings in the Tabernacle were placed from the inside outward, from the most sacred to the least. This teaches us many important lessons! We should live our lives from the Sabbath outward. What do I mean by this? Think of Sunday as the day closest to the holy Sabbath. How many of you come to morning services on Sunday? You should carry over the Sabbath for at least one day, help us make a minyan and then stay for coffee and cake.

  Rosalie sits in the front row, listening to the people behind her rustle through their prayer books, counting how many pages remain until the service is finished. What would wake them up? Certainly not Sol’s empty words or his pounding fist. Rosalie believes the congregants deserve a love story: the Song of Songs rendered as a modern love affair. She would deliver it, of course. She would speak of her love for Walter, but she would tell it slant and disguise all the facts. Rosalie would set the story in prewar Poland and portray Walter, Sol, and herself as Hasidim who craved to hear the voice of God. Sol would sit in the first row and would frown at her, but Walter, if Walter ever set foot in a synagogue, would be proud. Everyone would be wide-awake. Missy Samuels would listen with rapture and she would grab Nathan’s hand; Nathan would fantasize that if Rosalie were the rabbi the shul would be teeming with congregants, aroused by her words. How lovers touch—now that would prompt people to wake early on a Saturday morning, dress in their best clothes, and take up their seats in this paneled room.

  When Rosalie can’t sleep at night, she stands in front of Sol’s bookcase and brushes her hand over the spines of the Mishnah, the volumes of Talmud, and Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. She lets her fingers trace the letters burnished onto the brown leatherette, and then lingers on an English translation of the Song of Songs that Walter sent them as a wedding present. Rosalie caresses the inked inscription on the opening page, follows the line of his handwriting:

  Rosalie and Sol,

  Blessings on your house.

  Herzlich,

  Walter

  This is a dangerous act for her, this simple brushing of her fingers against his handwriting, bringing something dead to life. Walter had written their two names as if it were one name, RosalieandSol, in his precise painterly script. The W in his name takes up half the page, his winged spirit etched in the book. When Rosalie follows the curve of Walter’s hand shaping the cursive W she can feel his hand on her neck, his fingers brushing her jaw, pausing at her bottom lip. She brings the book to her nose and tries to summon the memory of cardamom or turmeric, but the pages hold no scent.

  Walter came to the Seminary; they had a few precious months, no time at all. Long enough to open an envelope, read a message, and tuck it back inside.

  Paul has found an adjunct position for Walter in Berkeley, teaching South Asian religions with an occasional foray into Jewish studies. He teaches a class in creation myths, and compares the lonely
Lord Brahma who split himself into man and woman to the lonely Jewish God who created Adam and Eve. He talks about how the lotus flower that sprouted from Lord Vishnu’s navel gave birth to Lord Brahma, the mother of creation, and how this flower image relates to the Jewish concept of the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of God.

  You are on your way, Paul tells him. The refugee I found in Bombay has become my true protégé. Together they edit a book on the religious themes in Tagore’s poetry and Paul composes Walter’s bio for the flap: Walter Westhaus was a prized student of Tagore in the Shantiniketan ashram—even though Walter didn’t study with Tagore and spent most of his time in Shantiniketan longing for a home and waiting for Paul to take him to America.

  When the synagogue building is complete, Sol commissions a sign to be posted on the lawn: TEMPLE BRIAR WOOD, COME FOR A VISIT & STAY FOR A LIFETIME. Just as Missy Samuels had predicted, Rosalie grows round with a healthy baby, the first to be delivered by Stu Katz, Briar Wood’s unofficial obstetrician, the self-declared master of the epidural who promises pain-free deliveries. In her ninth month Rosalie falls asleep with a pillow sandwiched between her legs, her immense body moored to the bed.

  When her breath grows shallow in the final weeks of pregnancy, Rosalie makes a decision. She will banish Walter from her thoughts, along with the narrow-waisted dresses that she will never wear again. He was a young woman’s fantasy, a dreamscape from another phase of her life. She is no longer too young to be a mother. She is too old to pine for the upper geniza and the lower geniza, for every touch and every word and every rub of powdered spice. She cannot live an impossibility. She prepares the house for Passover, purging it of chametz, those leftover crumbs that must be swept away from every kitchen crevice and every coat pocket. As she tapes shelf paper to the cabinet shelves, she reviews the litany of everything she and Walter did. With the mere thought of every kiss, every game, every word he spoke, Rosalie pulls off the ache of her longing. With every rip of tape, she unpeels Walter’s skin from hers. She summons the sound of his voice and then she lets it echo into the distance. She imagines Walter getting smaller and smaller until he is a bit of chametz she sweeps to the back of the cabinet.