The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  As Stu Katz promised, the epidural works like magic; childbirth is not quite painless, but somehow empty of high drama. Rosalie senses the contractions as they surge through her body and she receives them with indifference. Stu announces the birth of their baby boy and hands Rosalie her swaddled infant, along with a pill that prevents her breasts from leaking milk. Eight days later she wears a brand new dress to the baby’s bris. Charlie is named for Chaim, Sol’s father; the middle name Samuel is for Shmuel, Rosalie’s father. The baby clings to Rosalie and is slow to walk, but once he takes his first steps Charlie runs around the shul with abandon and in time leads the other children in jaunts around the building. Charlie teaches them where to hide from their parents and shows them the cot where the custodian sleeps, his toupee loose on the pillow. At night, Rosalie reads him stories of K’tonton who was as big as a thumb and fell into the folds of his father’s tallit. She calls Charlie my happiness, my honeydew, my boychik sunshine.

  Two years later Rosalie gives birth to another son. She has the same epidural nurse, the same Stu Katz, the same sensation of surge, the same pill to dry up her milk, and another new dress for the bris. Sol wants to name this son Pinchas in memory of the Radish who singled out Sol as his protégé before he died. No Pinky in this family, says Rosalie, and they name him Philip. As soon as he can walk Philip becomes Charlie’s next in command. At shul he sticks out his tongue at the congregants and at home he plasters wet peas into his hair. Philip pulls at the ends of Sol’s mustache, and at night he can only fall asleep if Rosalie lies beside him.

  Once a week Sol and Rosalie hire a babysitter and go to concerts in Manhattan. Sol reveres Leonard Bernstein, and he listens to recordings of the Mahler symphonies with rapture. He explains to Rosalie how a single large gesture—the sweep of Bernstein’s hands at the perfect moment, his own arms raised to offer a blessing at the end of services—can blaze a hole through the sky and change the direction of a life. Nathan Samuels gives his rabbi and rebbetzin orchestra seats to West Side Story. After the final standing ovation Rosalie tells Sol she is pregnant again.

  “If we are blessed with another boy,” says Sol, “let’s name him Leonard. Aryeh. A lion. In honor of our great conductor.”

  “It’s bad luck to name for the living,” says Rosalie, but Sol says that the superstition only applies to a member of one’s immediate family.

  In 1961 Stu Katz has grown sideburns, and his office teems with women wearing batik muumuus and iridescent lipsticks. This time the surge that roars beneath the blanketing silence of the epidural fills Rosalie with curiosity and she wonders what she is missing, what is this pain that other women bear in childbirth, while she watches television and waits for Stu to tell her to push. When she holds her third son in her arms Rosalie tells Stu she might like to try breastfeeding—what do you think?—and he says, why bother when your other babies grew so strong on formula, and you, rebbetzin—such a role model!—should leave that to the hippies.

  Sol speaks from the pulpit of how their three boys mark the ideal American Jewish family: one child for each parent and a third child to represent one who was lost in the Holocaust. He rests the baby on his shoulder while delivering his sermons. Rosalie watches Lenny’s face staring out from his paternal perch, and she sees herself in him, eyes scoping the room, mouth shaped into a half smile. After she reads to him at night, Rosalie rests her fingers on the curls that drape his forehead, letting them linger as he drifts toward sleep.

  Day after day the three boys pull at the hem of Rosalie’s skirts. She feels as if her life is tossing her around on its wild sea and she will land on a shore far away from the cove made of turmeric rocks that she once thought of as her true home.

  She says to herself, no one ever tells you that the incessant demands of small children will colonize your brain and make you forget the woman you once believed yourself to be.

  She says to herself, no one tells you that you will fall in love with the journey, no matter how unexpected it seems.

  She says to herself, no one calls to you and says, I am waiting, darling. I will wait. However long it takes.

  And how would she answer? My children wait for me too. They need me to trim the edges of their cheese sandwiches, pour them apple juice, cut their nails, and hem their pants before Shabbat so they won’t shame their father whose eyes shine with love.

  One year follows another. Charlie’s snowsuit is passed down to Philip and the same snowsuit is passed down to Lenny and they call it the Three Brothers’ Snowsuit. Each year is held aloft with the poles of holidays that intercept the flow of time. The warp is the calendar; the weave is made of the boys who grow taller and the husband whom Rosalie has learned to desire. Some nights after the boys are asleep Sol goes into his study, puts a Frank Sinatra record on the turntable, and waits for her. Rosalie tiptoes in, stands behind his chair, and kisses the back of his neck. Sol rises, wraps his hands around her waist, and they dance far into the night.

  One summer morning Rosalie wakes up to the faint scent of turmeric on her fingers. She sniffs her palms but the source of the smell eludes her. No, she thinks, I haven’t forgotten him at all. Walter lives here on my hands; Sol lies beside me in our marriage bed. Milk and meat. Two classifications of food, each distinct. Separate dishes, different utensils. Rosalie uses cornflower-blue dishtowels for dairy, red-checked towels for meat. And then there is the waiting time. Some people count six hours between eating milk and meat, some three, Sol says, according to the custom of their tribe.

  Walter is named assistant professor of religion at UC Berkeley. He rents a single-room house in the hills that he calls his studio. A pair of black-framed windows face the Bay; the morning fog obliterates the view but at night the Bay Bridge lights up like a string of pearls. Walter’s life radiates from this single large room cornered by a kitchen barely wider than his arms and a bathroom the size of a small closet. In his Introduction to Religion class, some students ask if he is a Jew, if he survived the Holocaust, and Walter says, “Yes and yes, end of conversation. Now turn to your source sheets and look up the Sanskrit definition of samskara. For this week’s essay, select a family story from Genesis, reflect on the text’s unconscious imprints, and then write about the hidden traces—samskara—in your own lives.”

  Walter teaches one class, then five more; at night he sits on the floor of his studio and grades papers. He places an ad in the local weekly for an artist’s model and in time he has three young women in rotation, each of whom becomes an eager lover. After he sketches the contours of each one’s body, he rubs spices onto her skin as he once did with Rosalie but none of his lovers summon her and no one can take him back to the past. In the parade of women who have passed through his life, Sonia feels to him like a distant relic that has changed shape through erosion, while Rosalie is perched at the edge of every thought.

  One afternoon Walter tears a sheet of paper from his sketchbook and writes.

  Dear Rosalie, I long for—

  Dear Rosalie, I long for the upper geniza where we first kissed—

  Dear Rosalie, I hope you are well and that Sol treats you as—

  Nothing works. He rips out another page and another, and then writes a few words that spill onto the page like tears. He phones a rabbinical organization and asks for the address of Rabbi and Mrs. Kerem, old friends of mine, he says.

  On Kol Nidre night the boys gleam in their holiday outfits: navy blue suits for Charlie and Philip, pale blue Fauntleroy for Lenny who stands sandwiched between his brothers. Picture-perfect. Rosalie tousles the hair of her three sons and tells them to pray for her.

  “How about just this once?” asks Sol. “Everyone notices the rebbetzin stays home for Kol Nidre. Missy Samuels asked me if you’re pregnant again.”

  “Tell her I’m on the pill. Tell her I keep the little blue box in our medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin. Tell her to ask Stu Katz about my reproductive life. He knows everything, just like a pulpit rabbi should.”

  “For Go
d’s sake, Rosalie. It’s Kol Nidre. This matters.”

  “And it matters to me. Very much. I can hear every word from the porch.”

  “Once, when we had the tent, yes. Now it’s not so easy.”

  “How would you know what I hear or how I pray? This is enough for me. It’s perfect.”

  “I can’t build this shul without you,” says Sol.

  “And your shul includes this porch. I’m the outer edge of your boundary.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning nothing,” says Sol. “I just wish—”

  “Wish what? That I would be a different kind of rebbetzin? More earnest, more devout?” She lays her hands on Sol’s shoulders and kisses his cheek. “Look at me. I’m yours. And while you lead your flock in Kol Nidre I will be here. In our sacred little home. Ours.”

  Alone in the house, Rosalie challenges herself to find a glimpse of holiness, something she can think about before she begins her twenty-five-hour fast. She sits at her husband’s desk and sorts through his file of readings. A source sheet with obscure Talmudic references makes her feel sad; a newspaper clipping with popular Jewish jokes makes her feel even worse. If he only quoted a Hasidic master like the Ishbitzer, maybe Sol would be a different rabbi, a different man. Yet she is not disappointed. Her husband has learned to satisfy her and while she misses the daring she enjoyed with Walter, Rosalie has grown to love the way Sol removes his tallit kattan before they have sex, how he is slow and passionate, how he sometimes bursts into tears and thanks her for being his companion on this journey.

  Underneath a pile of bills, Rosalie finds Walter’s handwriting. Unmistakable. The winged W that takes up the entire page.

  June 10, 1966

  Dear Sol and Rosalie,

  I tracked down your address through a rabbinic organization. I trust you are taking care of each other on the holy path you chose. My address is below. I hope you will stay in touch.

  Herzlich,

  Walter Westhaus

  23 Rose Terrace

  Berkeley, California

  Over the years Rosalie has imagined Walter in all his homes. First in Chicago, a city Rosalie has never seen. At times she imagined him holding onto a railing during the famous winds, crouching close to the sidewalk to keep himself tethered to the earth. Then Berkeley. When she watched the students protesting the war on the news she tried to picture Walter holding up a placard but her imagination failed her.

  She tried to forget him, worked to banish him from every thought. When she shampooed the boys’ hair and sang, Gonna wash that man right out of my hair, her children laughed but for Rosalie the song was all about Walter. She tried to forget him when she pulled out spice jars and sniffed coriander and cumin, simply to remember the feel of the spices on her skin, and then she would challenge herself to let go of her longing.

  But then she would wake up with a start in the middle of the night and realize she had lost him. She had forgotten to think of him when Charlie had the flu and the chimney needed repair, when Philip refused to go to school in second grade, when the car was in the shop and Sol was away at a conference—one ordinary encumbered day after another—but then when Rosalie felt calm again, there he was, waiting, asking for nothing.

  And now. His cursive W rests in her hands. She copies his address on a scrap of paper and tucks it into her pocket. As the opening strains of Kol Nidre drift into the house, Rosalie runs to the porch. The first notes of the prayer run down her spine. Another year of life, unbound, new, open to possibility. With Walter’s address in her pocket she is connected to all that she loves: the boys and Sol, the shul that has become an extension of their home, and on the other side of the country, Walter, found.

  She stands alone on the porch and listens to the chant wafting from the shul, the words encircling her body like a gown. As Kol Nidre is repeated in its third and loudest iteration, Rosalie laughs. What she feels is not happiness, but something pulling at the edge of her skin that wakes her up. Nothing is enough. One life is not enough. The prayer that invites her to open her heart to God is her own call to Walter.

  THE LITTLE ASTONISHMENTS

  November 1967

  After teaching his Monday night class on Maimonides, Sol shuts off the synagogue’s master switch and lingers in his office. With his desk lamp as the only source of light in the building, he feels as if he is illuminating a path in a dark wood. The rabbinate was supposed to be like this, at least most of the time. Years back the Radish had counseled Sol to expect some challenges but assured him that he would grow to love his work. Torah sells itself, his teacher had said. As long as you express its meaning, your suburban Jews will lap up its words like the sweetest milk. But that hasn’t happened. No one praises his sermons; no one asks him for advice. After he conducts a funeral, Sol gently touches the mourners’ shoulders, hands out business cards, and says, Call me anytime, but no one does. He blames this on Briar Wood. The Jews who moved here came for the top-rated schools, reasonable taxes, forty-seven-minute commute to Grand Central, and the gleaming Cosmos Diner with plastic menus as tall as Talmud volumes.

  No one comes to a town like Briar Wood for the rabbi.

  At first Sol thought he was reaching the students in his weekly Ask the Rabbi Anything class with four pre–bar mitzvah boys. The group was free-spirited; Mike, James, Mitch, and Ron loved to debate the Thirteen Principles of Faith and whether or not cheese rennet was kosher. Sol taught them the she’elah-teshuvah game, and was impressed with the boys’ associative leaps. But after a handful of classes, the foursome stopped showing up. When Sol stumbled upon them getting high behind the parking lot, they averted their gaze.

  “Why?” shouted Sol.

  James looked up. “Our parents bribed us to come to your class. And it worked, rabbi. We raised enough money to buy a stash.”

  “That’s educational,” said Sol.

  “You were building community,” said James. “That’s what you get paid for, right?”

  When he called the boys’ homes to report them, Mitch’s mother said, “I’m sure you’d prefer they hang out behind the shul than near the train tracks. And if you care to listen to my real troubles, I can tell you about the restraining order I placed on Mitch’s father, but because he always shows up for morning services, you wouldn’t believe me. If you see us in shul on Shabbat—all dressed up and mouthing the prayers—you assume our lives are picture-perfect. If you want to know what’s going on with us—any of us—just show up at the church AA meeting. Or come to the Cosmos Diner one night. You can overhear the lurid accounts of our lives, and when you find the details unbearable, turn on the jukebox to block out our voices. We are spilling our guts all over this town, rabbi. And you’re missing all the interesting parts.”

  Sol never phoned a congregant again. He had no right to intrude on their private miseries and even if he did, what would he offer? A she’elah and teshuvah? A ruling about cheese rennet? A psalm? A slice of cake?

  Pastoral disappointment tells one kind of story, but communal hope dictates another. After the Six-Day War the synagogue swells with members. Hebrew classes become popular, and congregants crowd into the social hall to perfect their Yemenite, Cherkessia, and Debka steps at Israeli folk dance parties. Sol remembers the oversized map of Jerusalem that was tacked on the wall of his boyhood Hebrew school classroom. He would imagine his body lying across the hand-drawn diagram of the Old City, his head resting on the Damascus Gate and his feet on the Zion Gate. Now he visualizes his hands touching the stones and monuments, the heels of Rosalie’s shoes clacking like castanets as she approaches the Western Wall.

  The synagogue grants Sol a one-month sabbatical to Jerusalem. Rosalie packs up the boys’ belongings in a single shared suitcase and packs two bags for herself: one for her clothing, and one for her hats and shoes. Charlie, Philip, and Lenny are quickly absorbed into the hive of children who play in the streets of the German Colony; they are invited to other boys’ homes for lunch an
d dinner, leaving Sol and Rosalie alone in their subletted flat. Every evening they sit together on the balcony, gaze out beyond the minarets and honey-colored rooftops, and hold hands in silence. Come morning, Sol strolls over to the yeshiva where he fills himself with new interpretations, new ways of looking at the Bible. The light is different here, he says to Rosalie. The Bible comes to life with new music.

  Rosalie finds her way to the women’s side of the Western Wall, wraps her head in a scarf, pulls up a folding chair, and leans her forehead on the cool stones. She has not written to Walter, but she carries his address folded inside her wallet, and often touches the scrap of paper like a talisman. Write to him, already, she thinks. Just four words: I wish you well. The sound of her sobs bounces off the stones. I can’t and I won’t but I need to and enough with the craziness, rebbetzin, you have three beautiful sons and no business—She imagines her longings seeping into the Wall, where they will be absorbed and carried elsewhere, freeing her from this impossible desire.

  She returns the next day, hoping that another session of resting her head on the stones will offer some form of transcendent relief, but she only feels sodden and achy from sitting on a folding chair. She watches young women sway in prayer, and wonders how they are so good at piety, while she is such a bullshit artist with her headscarf, her scrap of paper, her confusion.

  You don’t have to believe, her father once said to her, but you should live with some measure of faith. Rosalie hands an elderly woman some shekels in exchange for a small book of psalms. She runs back to the Wall, rips out the last page, and around the margins of the 150th psalm she writes WALTER & ROSALIE. She folds the page into a tiny square, stands precariously on a chair, and pushes it through a crevice, higher than anyone could possibly reach.