An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  It all went through her head, an avalanche of words, impressions, and feelings: the way she felt splayed out on his couch. The way he’d brought his chair close to hers. How she’d blushed when he told her he “wanted to be her friend.” How he touched her skirt when he’d said, “I want to know every detail of what you did with him.” The threat: “Get comfortable!” The things she’d told him about Duvie and how he’d said, “You need someone more experienced.” The way he’d pulled the pins from her hair …

  And then the word came to her, the perfect word that explained what was wrong with Yoel Grub, what was unacceptable and unspeakable. “When I’m there with him, it’s not tzniusdik.”

  Leah looked at her blankly, trying to remember exactly what that word meant to haredim. You used it to describe clothing, which was either tzniusdik and acceptable, or not tzniusdik and wanton. You used it to describe a person’s behavior among other people, to describe a loudmouth, an exhibitionist, as opposed to a modest, shy person. And then it dawned on her, tznius, tzniusdik: that also described physical relations, situations, between the sexes. Stunned, she looked into her stepdaughter’s young, frightened eyes.

  “Are you telling me that this psychologist, this Rabbi Yoel Grub, hasn’t behaved in a tzniusdik way with you?”

  The girl nodded, relieved.

  Leah’s head was spinning. “Are you sure it’s not just a misunderstanding? Can you give me some details?”

  “The first time I went to him, he had a picture of women at the beach in bathing suits on his wall. He asked me why I kept looking at it, and I said I didn’t think rabbis had pictures like that on their walls. And when I came back the next time, it was gone.”

  “So you told him you didn’t like the picture and he took it down. That was nice of him, right?” Leah said, bewildered.

  “And whenever I told him about what I did with Duvie, he never said what any rav would say, that it was wrong, that I shouldn’t do such things. Instead, he seemed to like it! Something’s wrong with him!”

  “Maybe he was just being understanding, trying to help you.”

  “No, no! I can’t explain it. With the picture, it was like I caught him and he was trying to cover up. And with Duvie … he was demanding details. He got all excited, Leah.”

  “But that could just have been your imagination, honey.”

  “He keeps touching me!”

  Leah’s mouth opened in astonishment.

  “He touched me over my skirt, and then he reached over and took my hairpins out, told me to dress younger. He gives me the creeps, Leah.”

  Honestly, Leah was getting the picture. But she was still doubtful. Had this been happening anywhere else, she would have been instantly wary and would have taken Shaindele’s side immediately. But because it was Boro Park, and because Yoel Grub was apparently so highly regarded by the frumest rabbis who sent all their teenage girls to him, how was it possible that something could be so wrong?

  Leah put her hands in her lap, squeezing her fingers until the knuckles were white. She took a deep breath. “Shaindele, you’re sure, about the touching? You couldn’t have imagined, misunderstood … You’re absolutely certain?”

  Shaindele nodded, tears streaming silently down her cheeks. “He asked me to sit in his lap, Leah. He asked me if I wanted him to caress me the way Duvie did. He said he was older and could do it better.”

  Leah felt her heart begin to pound. This was no misunderstanding. There was not a single doubt left in her mind that Grub was grooming her. Thank goodness Shaindele had had enough sense to figure it out in time and ask for help.

  “Oh my good Lord! Come here, sweetie.” She gathered the girl in her arms. “You did the right thing, telling me. And you are never, ever going back to that sicko again, you hear me? We will find you someone else from outside Boro Park. A professional.”

  “But what about my school, the principal? And what will Tateh say?”

  “Never you mind about that. I’ll deal with all that.”

  The girl wrapped her arms around her stepmother’s shoulders and leaned into her. “Thank you, Leah. Thank you so much!”

  “Try to relax, honey. Be glad you were smart enough to figure this guy out sooner rather than later. I’m sure a lot of the other young girls the rabbis sent to him weren’t. I’m very proud of you, Shaindele.”

  These were the words that in the future the girl would hold on to and carry with her. For what was to come, she’d have no choice.

  25

  A RAY OF HOPE

  Yaakov was sitting at his desk trying to concentrate on his work. Outside, the sun was shining, and the sky was blue. He had felt the spring coming the moment he stepped out of the house that morning. In only a few weeks, it would be Passover, the official inauguration of springtime.

  How he looked forward to all the preparations that turned the house upside down! Everything would be thoroughly cleansed. All the most beautiful dishes and cutlery, used only one week a year, would be unwrapped from their cartons and readied. Special groceries would be purchased, unique dishes prepared.

  This is what I need, he told himself. Renewal. Spring. Beauty. To get in touch with the ancient story of the Hebrews released from brutal slavery to freedom and life as sovereigns in their own land.

  He leaned back, stretching his cramped arms. Often he found his fingers heavy and dead as they roamed over the keyboard, the pins and needles painful as he rubbed his circulation back into life. He closed his eyes, thinking of the time not so long ago when all a man had to do was fill in some simple numbers in worn ledgers to know everything they needed to know about their enterprises: how much spent, how much earned or lost, the profit. While the bottom line wasn’t that much different today, the ways one got there were labyrinthine, cut up into arcane specializations that were being sliced ever finer: amortization, standard engagement revenue, transaction tax. He himself was involved in the audit division and focused on liabilities.

  It was actually a bit depressing focusing on loans, unpaid utility bills, bank overdrafts, mortgages, expense accounts—each one a negative. He often thought he’d be happier in assets, or even equity. If his lifeblood and the hours of his day were to be sacrificed on the altar of such work, he wanted to feel himself at least part of a successful enterprise.

  But this way, he knew so very little about each client. He hardly ever got to meet one of them in the flesh, these niceties being handled by gentiles in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits and handpicked silk ties. Often, he missed the humanity that would have turned the numbers in the ledger into a comprehensible human drama. Were all these hotel bills, for example, strictly necessary, or a cover-up for something nefarious? And the loans that had been taken out, were they a wise choice, harbingers of progress and expansion, or frivolous measures boding ruination? He would probably never know.

  As low man on the totem pole, he was tasked with the unfolding of crumpled receipts that needed to be put in order. Measuring his worth as he did according to other criteria altogether, he didn’t actually mind that. This was, after all, simply a job for which he was being paid. But the boredom! The lack of intellectual stimulation and challenge! It was doing to his once fine mind what the keyboard was doing to his fingers. Often, to his embarrassment and chagrin, he found himself dozing off. He had taken to playing games with himself to keep alert, making up stories to explain the receipts and expenditures, some of them quite risqué. More often, he went on automatic, allowing himself to use the time to think about his family, his problems, his hopes and dreams, and especially his fears.

  He often thought about Leah. He was more in love with her than ever, he realized, longing to see her when they were separated, suffering through the obligations that prevented him from spending more time with her. It seemed as if they were always being pulled apart. From the moment he got up in the morning, all his religious obligations hit him like a fierce undertow, tearing him out of her arms and dragging him far away: shower, get dressed, daven, eat, a
nd then once again board the dirty, crowded, dilapidated tin box that took him far from her to an alien place he more or less despised. And then, when he was at last released, his children awaited him with their little anxious eyes and grasping hands, clamoring for his time and affection. The precious little time left unclaimed he had piously invested in Talmud study classes to assuage his guilt at leaving kollel and to combat the rot he feared was spreading in his soul. Aside from his children and Leah, they were the only part of his life that brought him joy.

  And where was his wife, his Leah, in all of this? While she never, ever complained, he missed her so much, especially when their beds were pushed apart and they could not legally resume their intimate life together. He found it maddening.

  All this came to him as a strange surprise. After all, the rhythm of married life for a devout Jewish couple never varied, and he had experienced all this before with his first wife. I somehow forgot that part. He shook his head. Or is it so much different this time around?

  Leah was not the bride of his youth, when everything was new and thus unquestioned. She was the wife of his maturity, when everything in him had ripened and bloomed and deepened, his desires as well as his problems. The difficulties of his new secular job in an alien culture among strangers had hollowed out an emptiness in him that had not existed when he was a young husband among his own kind in kollel. He needed comfort and connection more now than he had then, more than any other time in his life.

  And in the middle of this wrenching struggle to keep his balance and walk the tightrope between this difficult new job, his family responsibilities, and his spiritual life, had crashed this enormous, unexpected asteroid from outer space: Shaindele’s secret treachery!

  It was unthinkable what had been going on behind his back. Unthinkable! Unheard of! That a daughter of his … He had never heard of anyone in his family or among his friends being faced with such a challenge. He was torn between the instinctive fury, disappointment, and disgust that welled up in him, and an equally instinctive fatherly love. It was his little, orphaned girl, after all, and she had suffered so much.

  But why should suffering lead to wantonness? It had not, after all, affected his sons that way, those serious young Talmud scholars learning in one of the Jewish world’s most respected yeshivas. Why, the reports he regularly received about their piety, their diligence, and their intelligence were glowing!

  He gnawed his lip. Yes, the decision to send them off to Baltimore to board in yeshiva and spend Shabbos and most holidays with his brother’s family had been wise, if wrenching. He missed them so much. But by shielding his sons from all the harsh realities of their mother’s death, he had allowed them to fall all the more heavily and with crushing consequences on his teenage daughter. While the boys’ lives had scarcely changed, for Shaindele, it had been a life-shattering upheaval, the burdens of housekeeping and childcare falling on her like an avalanche.

  He felt sympathy for her, he did. But he refused to accept that as an excuse for her outrageous behavior. Through the millennia, Jewish girls had always faced harsh realities: the pogroms in the shtetlach of Europe, the upheavals of immigration, and finally the Holocaust itself. Religious girls, far from losing their faith and their piety, had been the stalwarts, the ones who made it possible for the Jewish people to continue despite all odds.

  As a member of a religious family and community, he had always been taught that women were naturally stronger and more pious with a boundless emunah. Even in the times of Egyptian slavery, it had been Jewish women who had risen to the challenge, saving the nation from annihilation by enticing their despairing husbands to continue marital relations even as Jewish babies were being thrown into the Nile. From their unwavering faith had finally emerged Moses, a redeemer.

  So no, he couldn’t fathom what had happened to his daughter. It simply broke his heart, filling him with guilt and depression. Only now, with this new, school-sanctioned arrangement with the psychologist, had a small ray of hope begun to shine into the dark recesses of his soul. He pinned all of his hopes on Rabbi Yoel Grub, who everyone said specialized in young girls who had lost their way. Only Grub could give him back the little girl he loved so much, bright and whole, healed from all the ugliness that had deformed her life. Please God that it would happen! He had it in him to forgive. He knew he did.

  Tonight, Leah would be going to the mikvah. The longing in his heart to be with her once more, a husband and lover, banished all his misery. He would take the whole night to himself, he thought. He had already put in a call to Meir telling him he would not be able to come to their weekly study session together. He would buy her flowers and candy, just as he did when they were going out. He would wipe his mind and heart clean of all the aggravations, doubts, and unhappiness that infected it. He would be with her, only her, in completeness and devotion, the way he had not been for so long, he told himself.

  Then he sighed, taking up the little pieces of paper and smoothing them out, trying not to think about the people who generated them.

  26

  LEAH, YAAKOV, SHAINDELE

  The bright flowers were damp against his hands. His heart leaped up with anticipation as he viewed the fragrant pink roses, magnificent dotted purple stargazer lilies, the peachy pink alstroemeria. He was glad then that he’d spent the extra time and money to let the florist work her art instead of grabbing a ready bunch of predictable red roses from one of the buckets. He rejoiced, too, that he’d splurged on the chocolates: kosher Swiss pralines boxed in festive gold with a large red ribbon that had been curled with the joyous and delicate devotion given a favorite little girl’s precious hair. His whole body felt light as he clutched his gifts heading home along the dusty streets of Boro Park, barely conscious of his feet touching the cold ground.

  “Here, these are for you, my lovely wife,” he would say to her when she answered the door. And her face—her lovely, kind face—would dimple, her beautiful eyes deepening with joy, as she flashed him a smile of pure, white light. She would take his gifts and lead him past the children to the intimacy of their bedroom. “I have been to the mikvah,” she would whisper into his tingling ear, as she …

  “Shalom aleichem, Reb Yid,” a voice boomed into his consciousness.

  He looked up, his face blushing red as if his thoughts were flashing across a neon sign emblazoned on his forehead. It was a person he vaguely recognized who sat near him in the synagogue.

  “On your way home? I’ll walk with you. Flowers, candy? It’s a simcha?”

  Yaakov’s heart sank. He knew the man meant well and was just being friendly, but he fiercely did not want his company or his intrusive questions to replace the silent joy of his anticipatory dreams. To make things worse, the man was elderly, and his pace was slow. But Yaakov could think of no way to extricate himself that would not be unkind.

  It could not have taken more than ten minutes before the unwelcome companion turned off, bidding goodbye. But to Yaakov, it had felt like hours. He tried to make up for it by increasing his pace, almost running. Once home, he didn’t bother waiting for the elevator, taking the stairs two at a time. Instead of ringing the buzzer, he used his key, turning it as quietly as possible so as not to alert the children.

  But their small, perfect ears were not fooled.

  “Tateh!” Chasya and Mordechai Shalom screamed, attempting to jump into his arms.

  “What’s this, what’s this, Tateh?” Chasya cried out, trying to wrest the candy from his hands, crushing the bow.

  “Stop!” he shouted at her in exasperation.

  The children froze, their smiles transformed into frowns. Mordechai Shalom broke out into huge wails of indignation.

  Leah came rushing into the room. She looked at him with shocked disapproval.

  “I’m sorry, I just…” He held out his offerings to her.

  Her frown vanished, confusion taking its place. “Yaakov … thank you. But what happened with the children?”

  He watched as she hu
rriedly set aside his carefully chosen gifts on the dining room table, turning her full attention back to the children, crouching down and cradling them in her arms.

  “I didn’t want them to … They were ruining…,” he faltered, coming close to her and lifting Mordechai Shalom out of her arms into his own. The child was still sobbing softly.

  “Tateh frightened you?” he asked remorsefully. “I’m so sorry, Icy, Cheeky. They were presents for Mommy. I wanted to keep them pretty for her. Will you forgive your tateh?”

  Mordechai Shalom nodded, his thumb in his mouth, his little body shaking from big, trembling intakes of air.

  Yaakov reached out to Chasya, too. But she pulled away, burying her face in Leah’s skirt. “Tateh didn’t mean to scare you,” Leah whispered, nuzzling the child’s ear.

  Something about this focus on his crimes suddenly filled him with unreasonable anger. “Can’t Tateh come home and have two minutes’ peace?” he fumed, putting Mordechai Shalom down and stamping his foot, which set the child off again, joined now by his sister. But this time, Yaakov didn’t care.

  “These children have to learn a little discipline. I never jumped up and down on my father. I would never have dared,” he said with more vehemence than he’d intended, his spoiled hopes turning bitter as he watched the ignored bouquet already beginning to wilt, the festive ribbon of the pralines flattened against the table from the weight of its bright cardboard box.

  Leah, shocked, said nothing. This was so unlike him. Then she sighed. “Come, children. Say good night to your tateh and come to bed.”

  Yaakov went into the bathroom. He stared at himself in the mirror, shaking his head slowly, astonished. How had it all gone so wrong? He washed his face with cold water, patting it dry. She was waiting for him alone in the living room. The flowers, he saw, had already been carefully placed in a large glass vase of fresh water.

  “They’re gorgeous, Yaakov. Thank you! What’s the occasion?” she said, reaching for the chocolates and smiling as if the whole wretched scene with the children had never happened.