by Pat Conroy
“I won’t be much trouble,” Max smiled.
“Ginny Penn’s already boiled up a dozen eggs,” Silas said, helping with the horse. “You ought to start up a store and stay put,” Silas said. “Aren’t you tired of peddling door to door?”
“Yes,” said Max.
This was the way that Max Rusoff met his best friend in the New World and how the destiny of one Jewish family became intricately bound with a Christian one. The lines of fate operate with a dark knowledge all their own and their accidental encounter would change the lives of all around them. Both men knew much about solitude and had been waiting for the other’s appearance for their whole lives. In less than a year, Max had opened his first small store in Waterford and had brought Esther, daughter of Mottele, the Butcher, over to America to be his bride. Their wedding party was given by Silas and Ginny Penn McCall. Many of the best people in Waterford attended.
In 1968, Max and his wife Esther took a trip to Israel and in Yad Vashem, the memorial to the slain Jews of the Shoah, Max found the married name of Anna Singer among the slaughtered. She had been with the Jews of Kironittska who had been taken to a huge pit and machine-gunned by SS gunners. For an hour, Max stayed at Yad Vashem and wept over the impossibility and innocence of his love for Anna Singer. There was something about the purity of his love for that beautiful girl that represented the best part of himself. Though he was sixty-five years old then, he still felt like that sixteen-year-old boy struck dumb by the comeliness and charm of that pretty, flashing-eyed Jewish girl. He could not bear the thought of her kneeling in her nakedness and shame, of Anna dying unpraised and unhonored and buried in an unmarked pit. He never told Esther that he had found Anna’s name. Max had a dream on the same night he read her name on the list of the dead.
In this dream, he saw Anna Singer and her husband and children rousted out of their homes by the Nazi beasts. He watched the fear on Anna’s face, the same fear he had briefly glimpsed on the night she had been ravished in her own home as her father lay dead in the courtyard. On her face, Max saw that Anna knew that she was about to die for the crime of being the chosen of God. Her hair looked like dark fire that ran down her shoulders. As she approached the pit, holding hands with her children, she walked between a jeering line of Nazi soldiers.
In this dream, Anna began suddenly to dance, but the dance was invisible to the soldiers and to the other doomed Jews around her. It took Max several numbed and bedazzled moments to realize that Anna Singer was dancing for him, acknowledging through memory and time that lonely, dishonored Jewish boy who had loved her from afar, but had loved her with a fury that burned brightly all the years of his life. She danced and the birds began to sing and the air smelled of mint and clover as the line of Jews kept being pushed forward to kneel a last time and die.
Suddenly, Max saw what had inspired the graceful dance of Anna Singer. On one side of the pit, there was a butcher shop on a narrow street of Kironittska and a strong sixteen-year-old butcher had come out to see what the commotion was all about. He came out muscled and shy into the sunlight. The young Max stopped when he saw Anna dancing and he bowed deeply and would have joined the dance but there was great work to do.
Before he began he looked at her and saw that Anna had transfigured herself into the girl who had once come into his shop with her mother. She knew that Max loved her, and being a girl with choices to make, this time she would make the correct choice. She shouted across the pit, yes, yes to Max, yes always to Max, my avenger, my protector, my love.
Max Rusoff went up to the two remorseless and cowardly Germans firing bullets into the helpless throng of women, children, and rabbis, and he cleaved their heads like the ribs of sheep with two powerful blows. Then he went along the stiff line of Nazis and leaping in the sun and putting his cleaver through their brainpans, sinking as deep as the eyeballs, cut them down one by one as he made his slow, bloody way to his love. His strong arms were covered with the blood of Germans when he finally stood before her and bowed his head to her and offered a battalion of slain Nazis as her dowry.
Then the blood was gone and only sunlight remained and Anna kissed Max tenderly and invited Max to the dance at last. They waltzed toward the butcher shop and whatever life there is on the far side of time. In each other’s arms they danced toward the field of paradise where the stars shone like a love letter from a generous God.
Max awoke to machine gun fire and the sight of Anna Singer’s bullet-riddled body tumbling with her children into the pit.
When he returned to Waterford, Max went to the synagogue he had helped build with his own hands to say kaddish for Anna Singer.
In the American South, he prayed for her soul. By this time, the townspeople referred to him as “the Great Jew,” not for anything he had done in the universe, but for what they had seen him do in their town. When he traveled to Israel that first time, he went as mayor of Waterford.
Chapter Sixteen
I spent the rest of the morning running errands for my mother. Dupree and I went back to Rusoff’s Department Store to buy her a new nightgown and makeup. We also bought her three wigs she could wear in the coming weeks when her hair would fall out due to the chemotherapy. We bought her the best wigs available in Waterford and Dupree wore one of them all the way back to the hospital as he told me about his days among mental patients at the state hospital. He worked well with manic depressives and had an inordinate empathy “for schizophrenics of all flavors” as he described it.
In the early afternoon, the nurse helped my mother get into the nightgown we had bought her and she was wearing one of the wigs when I came in for my daily ten-minute visit.
“The wig must’ve cost a fortune,” my mother said.
“Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “But Dupree helped. He pitched in five bucks.”
“The gown’s lovely,” she said.
“Makes you look like a movie star.”
“Where’s John Hardin, Jack?” my mother said.
“I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
“Would you keep your eye peeled?” she asked me. “He can be a handful, that boy.”
“That’s what I hear,” I said.
“I called Leah today,” my mother said, surprising me.
“What did she say?”
“She invited me to Rome,” Lucy said. “I promised to visit her as soon as I am strong enough. I also invited her to come home for a long visit. I’d like her to be with me when the loggerheads come in to lay their eggs, from May to August.”
“The turtles’ll lay whether she’s home or not,” I said.
Lucy said, “I’m in charge of the program over on the Isle of Orion. We monitor the beach. Count the turtles. Make sure their eggs are unmolested.”
“Leah would love that. Look, a whole crowd wants to come in now. Grandpa’s out there. Everyone wants to see you, Mama. I’ll come back later. I have to leave on Sunday.”
“You can’t. That’s not fair,” she said.
“It’s not fair to Leah for me to be away this long.”
“Who’s keeping her?”
“Charles Manson just got paroled,” I said. “He really needed the work.”
“Get on, you. Come see me tomorrow. Please look out for John Hardin.”
When I arrived back home it was not yet three in the afternoon; I saw Ruth Fox sitting on the veranda of my father’s house. I turned off the motor and laid my forehead against the steering wheel of the car. I felt bruised and exhausted to the point of insensibility. Closing my eyes, I did not think I could bear one more confrontation or ghost from my complicated past. I especially had no desire to exchange harsh words with the mother of the woman I had most adored. I thought of Leah in Rome and how much I missed her. How much more had Ruth Fox suffered, I thought, by losing both Shyla and Leah in the space of a single year? I looked up at the silhouette sitting motionless and patient in the white wicker chair. Wearily, I got out of the car and walked toward my mother-in-law.
/> Even in the harsh sunlight, Ruth’s beauty touched me and I thought how uncommon it was for one town to have produced this generation of beautiful women. In a sudden revelation, I saw what Shyla would have looked like in her sixties.
Ruth was trim as a girl and silver-haired. As I approached her, that long shock of hair looked like something stolen from the night sky. Her eyes, in shadows, were dark even in broad daylight, so I could not read what she was thinking as I drew near her chair.
The marsh behind the house with the tide rushing into the creeks took on a darker smell, like a beast in hiding, as I faced a damaged part of myself and my past. Though I tried to think of opening words, no gambit presented itself. I stepped onto the veranda. In silence we studied each other. We had been dead to each other for too many years. Finally, Ruth spoke.
“How is our Leah?” she said, her accent a gentle echo of the Pale of Settlement, the shifting borders of Eastern Europe.
“So,” she spoke again, “I ask you, Jack, how is our Leah?”
“My Leah is fine,” I answered.
“She is a beautiful girl,” Ruth said. “Martha brought us pictures. She even made a nice video of Leah talking to us.”
“Leah’s a great kid, Ruth,” I said.
“We need to talk.”
“We’re talking right now,” I said and I heard more coldness in my voice than I had intended. I saw in her face Shyla’s face, and there was also Leah’s face, and the connection startled me.
Ruth said, “We need to review our relationship from A to Z.”
“Start with this,” I said. “We have no relationship. Our relationship ended the day you and your husband took the stand and tried to take my child away from me. Everyone understands the nature of the mistake now, but only because I won. If you had won, I would never have seen Leah again.”
“You have every right to hate us,” she said.
“I don’t hate you, Ruth,” I said evenly. “I hate your husband. I’ve never hated you. You didn’t tell the judge that I beat Shyla and Leah. Your husband did.”
“He is the most sorry,” Ruth said. “He knows he wronged you. He would like to explain some things to you, Jack,” she said. “I would also very much like to explain some things.”
“You can start with ‘the lady of the coins.’ ”
“I have to end with ‘the lady of the coins.’ I cannot begin there,” Ruth said, her face pale and fragile in the stark light.
“Those were her last words,” I said. “They make no sense to me. Martha says you know what they mean. Tell me.”
“Those words will make no sense until I tell you the whole story, dear Jack.”
“Please don’t call me ‘dear Jack.’ ”
“Did we not love each other, Jack?”
“You loved me until I married your daughter.”
“We are Orthodox Jews. You cannot blame us for being upset when our daughter marries a Gentile. Your parents were equally upset that you married a Jewish girl.”
“I’m merely keeping the record straight,” I said, and I sat down in the porch swing and began to rock gently back and forth. “You treated me badly.”
“If I had explained to you the meaning of ‘the lady of the coins …’ ” She stopped as she fought to compose herself. Then she continued, but each word was hard-earned. “Then I could not have blamed you for Shyla’s death. By blaming you, Jack, I could take an action. I blamed you so that I would not plunge into despair.”
“So you let me plunge into despair instead.”
Ruth Fox looked at me. “Jack, you know nothing of despair.”
I leaned toward her and whispered fiercely, “I’ve got a working acquaintance with it.”
“You know nothing of it. You know its edges. I know its heart,” Ruth said firmly, quietly, and convincingly.
“Here we go again,” I said, irritated. “The Holocaust trump card.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is the card I choose to play. I earned my right to play it. So did my husband.”
“And play it you have,” I said. “If Shyla didn’t eat everything on her plate, your husband would scream ‘Auschwitz.’ ”
“Will you see my husband, Jack?” Ruth asked. “He very much would like to see you.”
“No. Tell that sorry son of a bitch I never want to see him again.”
Ruth stood up and walked over to me, but I refused to meet her gaze. She took my hands and kissed them softly. Her tears fell until my hands were covered by tears and kisses and the touch of her hair.
“I ask you to see my husband. I ask it for me.”
“No,” I said, emphatically.
“I ask you to see my husband,” she repeated. “I ask it in the name of Shyla. The little girl that we conceived. The one you loved. The one who bore Leah. I ask it in Shyla’s name.”
I looked at Ruth Fox and saw the woman who was my wife’s first hermitage. I thought of Shyla inside Ruth’s body and Ruth’s enormous love of her troubled daughter and wondered how I could possibly survive if Leah ever killed herself. It was Leah, not Shyla, who made me rise.
“I’m going back to Rome, and Mom’s going to try to visit us if she gets enough strength back by December. Leah and I’ll fly back with her after Christmas. Mom wants to go to Mass at the Vatican on Christmas Eve.”
“Leah, here in Waterford,” Ruth said.
“I loved Shyla. Anyone who ever saw us together knew I loved your daughter. I’m sorry I was Catholic. I’m sorry she was Jewish. But love works that way sometimes.”
“We know you loved her, Jack,” Ruth said. “And Martha told us that you’re bringing Leah up as a Jew. Martha says you take her to the oldest synagogue in Rome each Sabbath.”
“I promised Shyla if anything happened to her, I wouldn’t let Leah forget that she was Jewish,” I said. “I like to keep promises.”
“Leah,” Ruth said. “Will you let us see her?”
“I’ll let you see Leah as much as you’d like, but on one condition.”
“Anything,” Ruth Fox said.
“I’d like to know what you and George knew about Shyla’s death. We don’t have to blame each other for anything. I can tell you what she said and was thinking in those days leading up to the leap. I have no idea what she knew about your past. She was always sad, Ruth, but I’m sad and that was one of the things that brought us together. We could make each other laugh. I thought I knew everything about her. But I didn’t know the important things, the ones that’d save her.”
“My husband is waiting to see you.”
“Tell George I can’t now,” I said. “But when I return with Leah … Then we’ll start.”
“Have you visited Shyla’s grave since you returned?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said, almost angrily.
“It is a nice stone. Very pretty. You would like it,” she said.
“Leah and I will go together.”
Back at the hospital, I watched as Dr. Pitts walked my grandfather, Silas, and my father in to see my mother. The brothers were again comfortable with me around them and when Dallas came in from the law firm we went over the day’s activities together. My mother’s doctor was talking about releasing her to her own bed in less than a week’s time. In the distance, we heard the honking of horns far down the river. Dallas began to tell us about a divorce case he was working on, when Dupree went to the window and looked out.
“The bridge is open,” Dupree said. “Tee, get those binoculars.”
“I’ve got them in my briefcase,” Dallas said. “There’s an osprey with chicks nesting on a telephone pole near my office.”
The horns grew louder in the distance.
“Slow boat at rush hour,” Dallas said. “Nothing worse.”
“Rush hour in Waterford,” I said.
“Town’s grown,” said Tee.
“There’s no boat,” Dupree said, looking through the binoculars.
We joined Tee at the window and looked downriver at the open bridge.
“Has to be, bro,” Tee said. “They don’t open the bridge for exercise.”
“I’m telling you. No boat,” Dupree repeated.
“John Hardin knows the bridge tender, Johnson,” Tee said. “Keeps the guy company sometimes.”
“Why did my heart just stop?” Dallas said.
My father came up behind us and said, “What’re you boys looking at?”
“Where’s John Hardin, Dad?” I asked.
“He’s fine. I just told your mother. I saw him at the house this morning. He looked like a million bucks. All he wanted was to borrow a gun.”
Dupree lowered the binoculars and looked at our father with a baleful gaze. Lifting the binoculars, Dupree studied the bridge again and said, “Jesus, I see John Hardin. He’s holding something. Yeah. Congratulations, Dad. It’s your gun.”
“You lent a gun to a paranoid schizophrenic?” Dallas said.
“No, I lent one to John Hardin,” the judge said. “The boy told me he wanted to do a little target shooting.”
As we looked back out the window a man appeared on the span in the center of the open bridge, running full speed. He did not break stride and we watched in fascination as he dove headfirst into the channel of the Waterford River.
“That’s Johnson,” guessed Tee, and the four of us took off, sprinting together down the hospital hallway toward the parking lot.
In Dupree’s car, with Dupree driving fast through the tree-lined streets, we could see the flashing blue lights of three squad cars spinning in unison at the edge of the town side of the bridge.
“They take maritime traffic very seriously, boys,” Dallas said. “This ain’t local law he’s breaking. The feds’ll be all over this one. They also don’t like motorized traffic disrupted at this time of day. And they sure don’t like guys with pistols taking over the only bridge to the sea islands. They could hurt John Hardin.”
Dupree drove, taking the back streets, avoiding the traffic that was backed up from Anchorage Lane to Lafayette Street, but he had to force his way between a line of cars that was backed up on Calhoun Street, which led directly to the bridge.