The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  Paul takes Walter’s hand and holds it against his wet cheek.

  “You’re crying,” says Walter.

  The concert hall empties out and the two of them sit in their seats until an usher asks them to leave.

  Maya has colic. She screams more than she sleeps; Rosalie weeps from exhaustion, and longs for the brief spells when the baby gets milk-drunk at her breast and falls into a deep nap. She wonders if the incessant crying is a curse. Her boys were such easy babies, but Maya’s face is set in a hard, wizened scowl. But one day, seemingly out of nowhere, Maya quits crying and her features soften. Rosalie gazes at her face with new understanding. The baby does not resemble Walter or Sol; Maya looks just like Rosalie. No one would ask her to explain why she doesn’t look like her father, the rabbi. She would go to school and she would go to camp and on Shabbat she would listen to her father deliver words from the bima, and no one would ever doubt that she belonged to him.

  After Sol bathes Maya at night, he wraps her in a towel, and sings, Yessir, that’s my baby, no sir I don’t mean maybe, yessir that’s my baby now—oww.

  On weekday afternoons Walter rushes home from the university and waits for Rosalie to call and tell him when he can come to New York to see Maya. He can’t concentrate on grading papers; his class lectures are based on old notes, outdated research. He has abandoned his drawing of Sonia and he no longer invites models to the studio for inspiration or for sex. Weeks go by. Then months. Walter stares at babies in their strollers and asks their mothers and nannies, How many months old? Why does the baby need a pacifier? Where did you buy such a pretty blanket?

  When Rosalie finally calls, Walter doesn’t tell her he has been waiting. Years ago when they used to speak late at night, Rosalie’s voice was sultry and the hours unfolded before them like an open field. But now she speaks quickly and her voice is harried.

  “Tell me about her,” says Walter.

  Rosalie rushes through her words. “What’s there to say? She’s a baby. Delightful, cooing, babbling. A girl who notices everything.”

  “You talk so fast and say so little. Slow down. I want to hear this again.”

  “Oh, Walter. I’ve got six loads of laundry and Sol is at a meeting. There’s no time.”

  “You sound different.”

  “I’m a new mother. Of course I sound this way.”

  “This is not new for you.”

  “But for you it is.” Rosalie closes her eyes and waits. She wants to offer him something, but has no idea what to say.

  “When, Rosalie?”

  Two years later, Walter is invited to speak at a conference in Boston and he arranges for a stopover in New York. Walter and Rosalie sit side by side in a crowded terminal at JFK. They lightly hold hands while Maya runs in circles, pretending to be an airplane, shrieking with pleasure.

  “You can play with her,” says Rosalie. “Go ahead.”

  Walter hesitates at first, but then he lopes along, following Maya’s stride, waving his arms, tears streaming down his cheeks. Rosalie glances at his face and winces. She remembers the names he called out at Eden Ranch, and how he filled the night air with words she didn’t understand. She had never known anyone so very alone, and now he seemed more alone then ever.

  Just before they part, Walter tells Rosalie that in Sanskrit, the word maya means illusion.

  “Our daughter is no illusion,” she says.

  “I get it now.”

  “Get what?”

  “Everything.”

  “It’s about time—”

  “—that I’ve become like the rest of you?” asks Walter. “Well, yes. I’ve arrived.”

  “Welcome to the aching world of ordinary mortals. Join our little party. Joy in one corner, heartbreak in another. Now help me trim the crust off their sandwiches and watch where you dribble peanut butter because half the children are allergic to it, and give me the back of your hand to wipe up their snot.”

  “Do you disdain me?”

  Rosalie bursts into tears and Walter wraps his arms around her. He reaches for Maya, places her awkwardly between their bodies for a moment, kisses the top of her head, and then turns away.

  Charlie and Philip live in Manhattan and only return to the house for holidays and an occasional Friday night dinner. To Charlie, Rosalie no longer seems like the same mother who raised them; he can barely remember the clothes she wore when he was Maya’s age. Philip believes Maya is the replacement child for Lenny, and looking at her prompts old sadness. Maya’s presence in the house makes her brothers feel as if the door to their childhood has been closed a second time; first when Lenny died, and now with this new addition.

  At shul, Maya is everyone’s child, passed from shoulder to shoulder, lap to lap. During services congregants reach out their hands to touch her. When she jumps on her lap, Missy shouts, “Oh, lucky me!” Bev calls her my girl, my maidele, my Maya.

  On a Shabbat morning in the middle of winter, the synagogue is packed with bar mitzvah guests. While the boy gives his speech, Sol peers down from his velvet chair, Rosalie sits in the front row, and Maya loiters in the aisle, smiling at the congregants. Rosalie turns around to beckon Maya back to her seat, and she sees him in the very back of the sanctuary, wearing a suit, leaning against the doorframe. She looks again. A man in a suit, yes. But Walter? Rosalie rises and walks to the door but when she gets there the man is gone.

  She never asks Walter if he passed through town that morning to have a glimpse of his little girl, but Rosalie believes that he did.

  A year later Sol and Rosalie arrive in Jerusalem for the wedding of Missy and Nathan’s son. Maya sits between her parents in the back of a taxi that races through traffic.

  “Where are we staying?” asks Rosalie.

  “The American Colony,” says Sol. “Right near the wedding venue.”

  “Find another hotel. Please.”

  The driver glances at them in the rearview mirror.

  “But we already have a reservation.”

  Rosalie stares out the window. She can’t go back to the American Colony with her husband. That hotel belonged to Walter, not Sol. It was impossible to trespass from one life to another, as if she could put on a different skin. And yet she did it again and again, made the interweave of three strands possible and beautiful and wrong all at the same time. Those three words were her braid: possible wrong beautiful, wrong possible beautiful, beautiful possible—

  “Not that hotel,” says Rosalie.

  “I thought you’d be pleased. Walter stayed there, as you recall. Anyway, the Samuels arranged everything; we’re their honored guests.”

  “Of course we are. Nathan kept you employed so you could one day officiate at his kid’s wedding, pro bono.”

  “They mean well, Rosalie; don’t mock them.”

  Maya listens to her parents banter. The driver mutters something about the congested streets, takes a detour through Old Katamon and speeds through the narrow alleys, calling it a shortcut.

  “Stop the car,” says Rosalie. “Let me off here.”

  “Are you carsick?” asks Sol.

  “No. I’ll meet you later. The American Colony will do. Whatever. Just let me out.”

  “Mommy! I’m coming with you!” calls Maya.

  “Rosalie—”

  She leans into the window. “It’s okay, Sol. I just need time to walk.” Maya runs after Rosalie and asks where they are going.

  “To visit an old friend.”

  Rosalie steps through the familiar blue door framed with bougainvillea. The courtyard is empty, and at first Rosalie doesn’t notice Madame Sylvie sitting in a corner, shaded by a tree.

  “That old lady scares me,” whispers Maya.

  Madame Sylvie approaches and kisses Rosalie on both cheeks.

  “Asseyez-vous.” She turns to Maya and asks if she would like some cake. Maya nods. Her eyes follow the ancient woman as she disappears into the house and returns with a slice of lemon cake. She takes a bite and tries to make out what
Madame Sylvie says to her mother.

  “I have thought of you often. I regret that I couldn’t offer you an astonishment back then, nothing beyond a strange braid. You have suffered a great loss, n’est-ce pas?” Sylvie taps Rosalie’s chin with her wrinkled hand, coaxing her to meet her eyes. “You lost a child; it is written on your face.”

  “Yes. A son. This is Maya, my little girl.”

  “This one is a great blessing.”

  Rosalie’s body shakes and she begins to sob. Madame Sylvie leads her into a corner.

  “Ma chère,” says Madame Sylvie. “A woman with two men has an impossible life. Better to suffer with one.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “I didn’t come for an astonishment today.”

  “Ça ne fait rien. You will take what I have to offer.”

  “I don’t want anything now.”

  “You walked through this door for a reason. Now shut your eyes. You and your daughter are alone in a dark cavern. You look around for one of your men but the darkness overwhelms you. You call their names but the sound of your own voice echoes off the cavern walls. Birds fly out. Your daughter holds your hand tightly. You keep walking until you find the opening to daylight.”

  “That’s it? After all this time?”

  “What do you expect?”

  “I was hoping for guidance, for comfort.”

  “Then why did you come to me?”

  After the wedding, Rosalie walks alone to the Western Wall and tucks a note between the stones: Ani Ma’amin. I believe. With all my strength I believe that the man I saw in the back of the sanctuary was Walter and he will always find his way to Maya. And one day she will understand.

  Rosalie sits cross-legged in front of the Religion shelves at the new bookstore in town. She scans the books that bear Walter’s name and reads sentences at random. She skips from page to page and book to book, listening for the cadence of his words, hoping to find him in the prose. But his books don’t bear a trace of his voice, his touch. The purple binder was their secret project, separate from the books that define his career. She wishes his words would help her understand the shul she has grown to love, but she can’t find the connection between Walter’s temple of religious scholarship and her Temple Briar Wood. Walter held every religion in his brain and what does Rosalie hold? A paneled room filled with Jews who bring themselves inside every seventh day (a selected few, barely) and three times a year (a selected many, barely) whose yearnings and voices have become her entire geography. Walter’s flights take him to New Delhi and Istanbul and Oxford and Paris for conferences and book parties, with stopovers in New York so he can appear like a ghost at the back of the sanctuary, behold the sight of his daughter, and then disappear. He lives with his peacocks in a studio where no one cooks a meal or shuckles in prayer or pours her little-girl body into his arms. Rosalie’s trajectory is limited to the cubits of a prescribed life that seems very small and quite vast. She sits on the floor of the bookstore and ponders this until closing time. She drives home, kisses her sleeping daughter, and slips into bed alongside her husband.

  Every night after her bath, Maya runs into Sol’s study and climbs onto his lap. He takes his tallit out of its bag and wraps it around both of them. Sol opens a volume of Talmud to a random page and points out the words to Maya. He lays his hand over hers and leads her fingers around the black letters, the two of them exploring where black ink meets white paper. Rosalie watches them from the corner of the room. Maya concentrates on the words and twirls her hair in ringlets just as Rosalie did when she learned with her father.

  She’elah: How is the world passed down?

  Teshuvah: Only the days can answer this question.

  THE FOURTH NIGHT

  December 1985

  Time bites all of them. Years back, if Rosalie skipped Shabbat services for a few weeks, she would have missed the sight of a woman in the first blush of pregnancy, a baby taking its first steps at the edges of the sanctuary. Now she notices other passages of time—reading glasses, receding hairlines, the swell of congregants who rise to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish for a parent, a sibling, a spouse. When she stands in the back and notices the slight insults of age that form on their skins—tiny brown spots on Missy’s hands, the gradual sprawl of Serena’s hips, the bulges that puff beneath Nathan’s eyes—Rosalie realizes that time is biting her too. Her periods have eclipsed, her ankles have widened, the skin on her knuckles has thinned. Her own mother died two years ago, and Sol’s mother soon after. She never arranged another rendezvous with Walter because Maya was getting older and she did not want to invite the inevitable query.

  She sends Walter a postcard:

  We were able to build a bridge for ourselves but we cannot build one for her. She doesn’t know you. How I wish this were otherwise.

  R.

  At Maya’s birthday parties, Rosalie invites her to make a wish before blowing out the candles. Every year, Maya closes her eyes and tries to envision something she wants, but she can only imagine things that defy ownership. I wish for white flowers. I wish for an arched doorway. I wish for a footpath that crosses a river. She once wished she could meet Lenny, but she realized that was impossible and cancelled the wish.

  After one of her parties, Sol asked Maya what she wished for. She didn’t think he would understand the flower, the doorway, and the footpath, so she said, to hear a great symphony. The next week Maya sat sandwiched between Sol and Rosalie at a New York Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s Ninth, which felt unbearably long and made her restless. When Sol asked if she liked the music, Maya said, I’d like it better if the music were made of words. Sol smiled and turned to Rosalie. She is ready to study Talmud. Our little girl is just like me.

  When Maya is eleven she overhears her mother talking on the phone late at night. “Maya will know everything. We will figure this out.” When Rosalie hangs up, Maya asks why she was talking about her and why she looks so sad.

  “That was an old friend, buttercup. Someone far away,” says Rosalie.

  “Madeline from London?”

  “Yes, honeybunch. You guessed it.”

  Maya knows her mother is not telling the truth. She can hear it in her voice. When she talks to Madeline, her mother seems to be unloading secrets. When she talked to this friend, her mother sounded sultry; her voice seemed to caress the words as if she didn’t want to let them go. This friend was not Madeline.

  She often spies on her parents at night, sneaking up on them in every room except their bedroom. She watches her mother join her father in his study, wrap her arms around his neck and plant a kiss on his good ear. She watches them dance to Frank crooning “Fly Me to the Moon,” Leonard smoking “Dance Me to the End of Love,” Dionne singing “I Say a Little Prayer.” After, they sit side by side on the sofa and study the liner notes to their favorite albums, reading the lyrics to each song as if they are studying a sacred text together. One day she saw her mother pick up an unopened letter with a postmark from India and her father snatched it out of her hands. The letter is for me, Rosalie. This one is mine.

  Rosalie tells Sol she wants to offer a class on Hasidic thought, spin out the teachings from the Ishbitzer she learned from her father. She has three students: Missy, Serena, and Bev, and she sets out a plate of homemade cookies, along with a source sheet. While Rosalie is teaching her class, Sol sits in his study and retrieves a letter he received from Walter a few months back. He holds the thin paper to his nose, sniffing the chalky aroma of onionskin and dried ink. The letter is tinged with words of affection: How we are woven together, I have not forgotten the geniza, I love you both always. He reads it again and again, permitting himself to feel a semblance of joy at their rekindled friendship. Now it is possible, he thinks. He picks up the phone and dials Walter’s number.

  “Thank you,” says Sol.

  “For what?”

  “For your letter from Varanasi. For the sermons. For letting me cry on the
phone for hours and hours after Lenny died.”

  Walter laughs. “That’s a long list!”

  “Dayenu!” says Sol. “Any one of those would have been more than enough.” His voice breaks.

  “How is your messy brew these days?”

  “Sometimes I feel as if I’m racketeering; other times I feel as if I’m doing holy work. I marvel at the rabbis who are good at this—their sincerity is completely aligned with their intent and they become masters of spiritual leadership. But I’m not one of them; I’m the other kind.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “What else would I do now? It’s a soft job. I’m supporting my family, my commute is a few steps across a parking lot, and my president leaves me alone. I have time to study now and I’m finally dipping into the Zohar!”

  “You? Mysticism?”

  “Yes!” Sol reaches for a book, opens it to a flagged page. “Listen to this. This mystery is that the flowing, gushing river never ceases; therefore, a human should never cease his river and source in this world, so that he grasp it in the world that is coming.”

  “You’re practically quoting Tagore! From Gitanjali. Listen: All things rush on, they don’t stop, they don’t look behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.”

  “Remarkable,” says Sol, beaming. He rises from his desk chair and spins in a circle. Their minds are in sync again, he thinks, just like when they were young.

  “You seem much better now,” says Walter.

  “I owe it to my daughter,” says Sol. “Maya brings us such joy. When she learns Talmud with me I feel utterly complete. For a preteen, she discerns startling patterns in the text.”

  Walter doesn’t respond.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Of course,” says Walter. “I’m always here for you.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So find a way to know. Make time for your old chavrusa.”

  “Look. I have a two-day conference in New Haven next week, and plan to spend a night at a colleague’s place in Manhattan. I was hoping to see—”