An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  But it was a different rav he faced now, he realized, one in the midst of his own heartbreaking tragedy as his elderly wife lay in agony from the merciless disease that did not differentiate between saints and sinners, the very old and the very young. The cold lips of the Angel of Death were already brushing her forehead as the rav helplessly watched, his prayers unanswered.

  He’d aged, shockingly, Yaakov saw, startled. Always impeccable, now ill-fitting black pants fell around his ankles in folds, and the fringes of his tzitzis hung outside his white shirt and dark jacket reaching sloppily almost to his knees. His long salt-and-pepper beard, normally meticulously groomed, was untrimmed and almost completely white. The velvet skullcap worn beneath his huge, respectable black hat sat askew on his suddenly fragile skull, exposing the vulnerable pink scalp beneath. His tall, distinguished frame seemed to have shrunk, the shoulders bent in suffering as they made an effort to straighten every now and then as if buckling beneath a familiar weight that had gradually—without his even being aware—grown too heavy to bear.

  Yaakov cleared his throat.

  The rav looked up, a surprised smile brightening a face that seemed already deeply etched in mourning.

  “I don’t want to bother you, Rav. You are so busy. Your office is full.”

  “Yes, always full,” he murmured distractedly. “But come sit down a little, Yaakov. How are you?”

  “Baruch HaShem,” he answered mechanically.

  “Of course. Baruch HaShem. But tell me anyway.” The old man’s eyes sparkled almost mischievously for a moment.

  “It is so hard to leave, Rav. I feel my heart is breaking.”

  The rav seemed surprised.

  Could he have forgotten that this was to be his last day? But before Yaakov could belabor this hurtful suspicion, the rav came around from behind his desk, taking both of Yaakov’s hands in his own.

  “A beginning and an end. That is every day of our lives. That is what we have in common as human beings, Yaakov, every day of our lives. And to every ending, there is a new beginning.”

  “I dreamed of a different life.”

  “Yes, it is so hard to dream and live and not to find what we want. So much has been given to us, but somehow not what we want. There is always something missing, always something we could have had, should have had. We do not understand why God denies us these things; why He is deaf to our prayers.” The rav glanced out the window, his eyes suddenly unseeing. “We cannot understand, but that doesn’t mean our just and loving God doesn’t have His reasons. If we have faith, every experience we undergo in life, good or bad, will bring us closer to Him.”

  “Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like that. Sometimes, it just feels like a punishment. It is so painful.”

  “Yes, very painful,” the rav repeated, unseeing. “Like a burning, taking away all our impurities with it.”

  Was that true? Yaakov wondered. Did suffering refine, or did it simply destroy? He didn’t know. But what he did know was that his life had undergone horrors that had ended in transformation, and in the end, he had found great joy. What he did know was that the future was unknown. What would it be like to wake up in the morning and take the subway to an office where not the words of Torah were spoken but only numbers? How much money was earned? How much was spent? At what profit? All of his days were already bartered and sold to this slavery. Out of this, he would have to do the impossible, squeeze out time for the glory of studying the word of God.

  There would be compensations. When he came home, his children—well-dressed and well-fed—would be there to greet him, and his wife—his lovely wife, who gave meaning to his life, his beautiful Leah, who had helped him rise above his despair—would also be there waiting.

  What would he have done without her? What would he have been able to do without her? It could have all happened in exactly the same way and he could be alone, or greeted by some widow into a living room with a white linen upholstered couch no one was allowed to sit on, and fancy armchairs covered in plastic that would have stuck to the back of his thighs. Or some bitter divorcée, her face filled with annoyance and hatred, watching his every move, waiting to catch him out, to say, “Ah, you men, you are all the same!”

  Instead, he would come home to a happy place, a kind woman who loved him, children jumping into his arms, smiling, his children, his motherless children, with a mother now, to care for them and love them …

  “Are you all right, Yaakov? Sometimes I think maybe I pushed you too hard to remarry.”

  He smiled into the rav’s anxious face. “Finding a new wife was the best thing that could have happened to me, Rav. You were so right. I was broken, and she helped me to heal. She’s a gift from God.”

  The rav seemed glad to hear this, but surprised. “Yes, when we are young…”

  There seemed to be a question at the end of that statement, something unsure, incomplete.

  “I don’t think age matters, Rav. Wasn’t it you who told me that this is what God asks of us, to live in partnership, men and women, not to be alone, that this is God’s will?”

  The rav gave a self-deprecating smile. “Yes, I remember something of that nature. I remember telling it to you. And was it true?”

  “Yes, Rav. It was true.”

  The two men, the older man who had fulfilled every dream that Yaakov had ever had, and the young man about to plunge into a life he had never planned for, never expected, and really never wanted, embraced, each feeling their courage and ability to face the future somehow strengthened.

  “Don’t be a stranger.”

  “Never, Rav. And I wish a refuah shlama to the rebbitzen.”

  The rav nodded, his eyes once again seeking the unknown.

  7

  LEAH’S SHAME

  One look at Fruma Esther’s face told Leah everything she had to know.

  “Come in, please, Bubbee Fruma. I can explain.”

  The old woman crossed the threshold cautiously, looking around as if she expected some evidence of an infestation—mice, rats, roaches—that would turn the familiar terrain of her deceased daughter’s home into a suddenly foreign and slightly disgusting place. But there were only the baskets of laundered clothes, the newly vacuumed old carpet, the well-dusted photographs, and beyond them the made-up beds. Order reigned. And except for the industrious sounds of the hardworking dishwasher and washing machine, the silence was broken only by the whirr of Leah’s computer sitting in the center of the dining room table, surrounded by piles of folders.

  “The children?”

  “All in school and day care. It’s ten o’clock, Rebbitzen,” Leah answered patiently, wondering what was implied by the question.

  “Baruch HaShem,” the old woman replied automatically, sighing.

  “Baruch HaShem,” Leah echoed nervously. Was the sigh a sign of relief? And if so, what was she expecting when she showed up midmorning?

  “It’s good we can talk, Leah-le,” Rebbitzen Fruma Esther murmured. “You know what it’s about.”

  “Yes, the music.”

  “Sick? Who’s sick?”

  Leah looked at her, confused. “The music,” she said again, louder.

  Fruma Esther touched her ears, embarrassed. Maybe the hearing aid batteries were low? Not sick. Mu-sic.

  It had been three days since the neighbors knocked on her door. In that time, Leah Howard Lehman had had time to consider the matter. Her initial reaction had undergone a gradual shift from horror, embarrassment, and an acute desire to apologize profusely to that of a considered defiance: this was the privacy of her own home, after all! This was her music, lively and joyous, which she had been sharing with the sad orphans that had become her stepchildren, giving them some joy. They were doing nothing wrong, and it was certainly no one’s business, except her own and probably Yaakov’s. Her only sense of discomfort came from the fact that she had not shared what had happened with him.

  There were several very good reasons for that, she told herself. First, he was
so busy with the transition out of kollel and into his new job. She knew just how much this weighed on him. Why should she add to his cares by sharing this petty confrontation with the neighbors? Besides, she told herself, hadn’t she settled the matter? Hadn’t it all blown over? At least, she had not heard anything further since she’d gone back to playing the yeshiva boy choir tapes. Finally, and most truthfully, she hadn’t broached the subject because she was ashamed of herself for having given into her longing to revisit a little bit of her old life.

  What was so terrible about that? Not everything in the secular world, in the first thirty-four years of her life, had been bad. In fact, she had enjoyed so much of it: the concerts in Carnegie Hall, the ballet and opera at Lincoln Center, the Sunday strolls through MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yes—if you were asking—her old playlists.

  She remembered the girls in the women’s religious study program in Israel who’d ripped out their nose and belly button rings, lasered off their tattoos, and draped their bodies in the drabbest, most middle-aged, calf-length skirts and button-down cotton shirts available to mankind. How they’d vied with each other to adopt ever-more radical stringencies, as if a sincere belief in God and adherence to His actual commandments wasn’t good enough! They wouldn’t wear a jean skirt even if it went down to their ankles. They wouldn’t wear the color red, or a white blouse that might allow a hint of what lay beneath. They ate nothing that did not come straight off the shelves of tiny haredi grocery stores, even if supermarket shelves were groaning with products that were perfectly kosher, bearing the stamp of approval from the Orthodox Union. They even boycotted milk chocolate from Israel because the cows might have been milked by non-Sabbath observers! Who thought this stuff up? There was a whole playbook of piety-signaling signs that they hoarded and displayed with zealous delight to impress each other and their rabbinical mentors. She had always found this kind of behavior a bit sickening—childish, even—with a large, disgusting dollop of self-hate. She had always refused to participate, earning herself more than one pious lecture and dirty look.

  But the time she had spent in Boro Park had altered this firm stance, she realized. There were some things to which you had no choice but to submit, like the length of your wig (not too long or too short!) or the height of your heels. Stilettos were considered whore-like, and flats too stylish. Even before she married Yaakov, especially in the throes of trying to convince skeptical and hostile matchmakers of her sincerity and worthiness to join the community, she had taken care to present the outward appearance of conformity to the dress codes around her. When in Rome … right? she’d told herself.

  But as time went on, she’d found herself being forced more and more to conform to new (and often, in her eyes, irrational) demands that always took it a little bit further than the time before, until she felt almost crushed beneath their weight, and the self she had been close to disappearing altogether.

  The latest was water. Water! Some rabbis were forbidding using tap water to wash dishes, or brush your teeth, or wash vegetables because they claimed there were bugs in Brooklyn water, particularly in Boro Park and Flatbush, which broke the biblical prohibition against “eating any crawling thing.” They demanded that you filter all the water you used.

  She’d tried. Then one day, when the children were fighting and the phone was ringing and she was trying to prepare soup for dinner, she gritted her teeth and filled the soup pot directly from the faucet. While she still diligently checked over lettuce leaves and cauliflower, holding them up to the light; still poured rice and lentils out onto the table then carefully checked them grain by grain as she swept them into a container, her days of boycotting the Brooklyn municipal water pipes were over.

  Strangely, she hardly felt any guilt. The only thing that bothered her was how she hadn’t had the courage to talk it over with Yaakov first. But the water supply and the Foo Fighters music were the least of it. There were other things, far more serious and gargantuan, that she was keeping from the man she loved. How had that happened? And how much longer could she keep it up? Perhaps, she admitted to herself, dancing to her old playlist had been her stubborn way of fighting back against so many things she was being forced to do that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about or share.

  “What happened that the whole neighborhood is talking?” Fruma Esther demanded, settling herself heavily into the sinking cushions of the worn sofa as she gave up the effort to divide her dwindling strength between this confrontation and the considerable effort needed to keep herself standing upright.

  “Is it?” Leah swallowed. “No one has said anything to me.”

  “It’s spreading around the neighborhood like a disease, a virus. My phone doesn’t stop ringing.”

  “And what are they telling you?”

  “Loud, prutza music coming from my saintly Yaakov’s apartment. The children like wild animals jumping up and down, naked. And you…”

  Leah’s heart contracted. “What about me?”

  “Without your hair covering, behaving just like them … like the two-year-old.”

  An ache stabbed her heart, yet she refused to give in. “My hair was covered. The children got hot, so they took off their shirts. Look, all I did was try to bring some joy to your poor grandchildren. They are suffering, Bubbee Fruma.”

  All the exasperation suddenly left the old woman’s face. “What did you say … suffering? Since when?”

  Leah moved her chair closer, describing the conversation with Chasya. Fruma Esther leaned forward, listening intently, her face pinched.

  “She said that … my little Chasya? That she looks out of the window, waiting for her mameh to come home?”

  Leah nodded, unhappy to bring this elderly woman such news even in self-defense.

  They sat in silence for a few moments. “So you wanted to make some fun for them, to make the house freilich, that’s all, right?”

  “That’s all, Bubbee Fruma.”

  “And they were playing, and the music was on?”

  Leah nodded.

  “But why secular music? You couldn’t find an Avraham Fried tape? Yaakov Shwekey?” Her eyes lit up. “Or Lipa Schmeltzer? He’s very freilich, they tell me.” She never listened to music, except at weddings and bar mitzvahs when she had no choice. A person had time for such things? And anyway, her hearing …

  “I got a little tired of playing the yeshiva boy choir tapes. And you know what? Maybe I also needed some cheering up! It’s sometimes not so easy for me either, Bubbee Fruma.”

  The elderly woman straightened her back, her hands suddenly gripping each other. “Something is wrong between you and Yaakov?”

  “No, of course not. But it’s not easy,” she repeated. “I have all this work to do”—she waved toward the computer—“and there is no money left over for a cleaning girl. And I need to shop and cook and take the children to school and pick them up … and sometimes, the children need me at the same time my computer needs me. I’m trying my best.”

  So this was a different story altogether. She had come to chastise and warn but found herself aching to comfort and protect.

  “I will talk to them, Leah-le, find out which one of the yentas is spreading these lies. God watch over us, they should be so ashamed, so ashamed!” She shook her head. “Just wait,” she fumed. “Wait until I get my hands on them. Keiner zet nisht zein eigenem hoiker. People who see dirt everywhere except on their own faces! The sin of gossip is worse even than the music of shkotzim.” She stood up unsteadily. Leah jumped up to offer her an arm. She took it gratefully.

  “Don’t feel bad. It’s a big mitzvah, Leah-le, what you are doing for Yaakov, for the children. To make them a clean home, a kosher home. To bring them happiness. There can’t be a bigger mitzvah in the world, my child. I wish I could help you more.” She shook her head helplessly. “There was a time in my life, not so long ago, when I was a real balabusta. You wouldn’t believe! Shabbos dinners for twenty-four. Cholent pots as big as potato sa
cks! And the challahs I’d bake! Twenty challahs for every Shabbos, hand kneaded with the finest flour and oil. And now…” She shrugged. “What am I good for? I can’t even lift little Mordechai Shalom anymore; he’s too heavy for me. The Aibishter should only bless his shaine kepelah. My eyesight is not good.” She didn’t continue her litany of woes, somehow ashamed of admitting how swiftly the floodwaters of age were rising over her head.

  The latest disaster was her hearing.

  While she had worn a hearing aid for years, somehow it wasn’t working as well anymore. When people spoke to her, she sometimes had to pretend, half the time guessing when she answered. And sometimes she got it terribly wrong. She could tell as people smiled at each other at her answer in a mocking way and repeated the question. She had to go back to the ear doctor. But she was putting it off. What if … what if nothing could be done anymore, and she’d be deaf as well as half-blind? Oh, it was no fun to grow old! Thank God Yaakov had found a young woman to care for her grandchildren. To love them. She tightened her lips. Let anyone say a word against her Leah-le. Just let them.

  “And Shaindele, her friends, the girls from her school, they also heard the rumors? They are teasing her again like before?”

  Leah felt her cheeks grow warm. She hadn’t even considered that! How awful if it was true! “She hasn’t said anything. At least not to me.” Their relationship was so much better now, but still tentative—as it was between any adult and teenager—the ups and downs rapid and unpredictable. What if she ran to Yaakov with the gossip like before? That’s all she needed!

  * * *

  At least it isn’t as bad as last year, Shaindele thought. Those horrible days! The whispering behind hands, the giggles, the side glances, the silences when she entered the classroom that filled her heart with apprehension and dread. This time, only a few of the girls had even mentioned it, dafka the nice ones. A few of her friends had come to her privately, asking straight out about the rumors flying around. They’d been honest and respectful.