by David Miller
“After today she’ll have to hide it all,” I explained.
Jane asked why.
“So as not to be a temptation to men,” I told her, and covertly looked for my father. There he was, in a shadow, apart. My eyes discovered his eyes. He turned his back and gripped his throat.
“It’s a very anthropological experience,” Jane said.
“A wedding is a wedding,” I answered her, “among us even more so.”
“Is that your father over there, that little scowly man?”
To Jane all Jews were little. “My father the man of the cloth. Yes.”
“A wedding is not a wedding,” said Jane: we had had only a licence and a judge with bad breath.
“Everybody marries for the same reason.”
“No,” said my wife. “Some for love and some for spite.”
“And everybody for bed.”
“Some for spite,” she insisted.
“I was never cut out for a man of the cloth,” I said. “My poor father doesn’t see that.”
“He doesn’t speak to you.”
“A technicality. He’s losing his voice.”
“Well, he’s not like you. He doesn’t do it for spite,” Jane said.
“You don’t know him,” I said.
He lost it altogether the very week Isaac published his first remarkable collection of responsa. Isaac’s father crowed like a passionate rooster, and packed his wife and himself off to the Holy Land to boast on the holy soil. Isaac was a little relieved; he had just been made Professor of Mishnaic History, and his father’s whims and pretences and foolish rivalries were an embarrassment. It is easy to honour a father from afar, but bitter to honour one who is dead. A surgeon cut out my father’s voice, and he died without a word.
Isaac and I no longer met. Our ways were too disparate. Isaac was famous, if not in the world, certainly in the kingdom of jurists and scholars. By this time I had acquired a partnership in a small book store in a basement. My partner sold me his share, and I put up a new sign: “The Book Cellar”; for reasons more obscure than filial (all the same I wished my father could have seen it) I established a department devoted especially to not-quite-rare theological works, chiefly in Hebrew and Aramaic, though I carried some Latin and Greek. When Isaac’s second volume reached my shelves (I had now expanded to street level), I wrote him to congratulate him, and after that we corresponded, not with any regularity. He took to ordering all his books from me, and we exchanged awkward little jokes. “I’m still in the jacket business,” I told him, “but now I feel I’m where I belong. Last time I went too fur.” “Sheindel is well, and Naomi and Esther have a sister,” he wrote. And later: “Naomi, Esther, and Miriam have a sister.” And still later: “Naomi, Esther, Miriam, and Ophra have a sister.” It went on until there were seven girls. “There’s nothing in Torah that prevents an illustrious man from having illustrious daughters,” I wrote him when he said he had given up hope of another rabbi in the family. “But where do you find seven illustrious husbands?” he asked. Every order brought another quip, and we bantered back and forth in this way for some years.
I noticed that he read everything. Long ago he had inflamed my taste, but I could never keep up. No sooner did I catch his joy in Saadia Gaon than he had already sprung ahead to Yehudah Halevi. One day he was weeping with Dostoevsky and the next leaping in the air over Thomas Mann. He introduced me to Hegel and Nietzsche while our fathers wailed. His mature reading was no more peaceable than those frenzies of his youth, when I would come upon him in an abandoned classroom at dusk, his stocking feet on the windowsill, the light already washed from the lowest city clouds, wearing the look of a man half-sotted with print.
But when the widow asked me – covering a certain excess of alertness or irritation – whether to my knowledge Isaac had lately been ordering any books on horticulture, I was astonished.
“He bought so much,” I demurred.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “How could you remember?”
She poured the tea and then, with a discreetness of gesture, lifted my dripping raincoat from the chair where I had thrown it and took it out of the room. It was a crowded apartment, not very neat, far from slovenly, cluttered with dolls and tiny dishes and an array of tricycles. The dining table was as large as a desert. An old-fashioned crocheted lace runner divided it into two nations, and on the end of this, in the neutral zone, so to speak, Sheindel had placed my cup. There was no physical relic of Isaac: not even a book.
She returned. “My girls are all asleep, we can talk. What an ordeal for you, weather like this and going out so far to that place.”
It was impossible to tell whether she was angry or not. I had rushed in on her like the rainfall itself, scattering drops, my shoes stuck all over with leaves.
“I comprehend exactly why you went out there. The impulse of a detective,” she said. Her voice contained an irony that surprised me. It was brilliantly and unmistakably accented, and because of this jaggedly precise. It was as if every word emitted a quick white thread of great purity, like hard silk, which she was then obliged to bite cleanly off. “You went to find something? An atmosphere? The sadness itself?”
“There was nothing to see,” I said, and thought I was lunatic to have put myself in her way.
“Did you dig in the ground? He might have buried a note for goodbye.”
“Was there a note?” I asked, startled.
“He left nothing behind for ordinary humanity like yourself.”
I saw she was playing with me. “Rebbetzin Kornfeld,” I said, standing up, “forgive me. My coat, please, and I’ll go.”
“Sit,” she commanded. “Isaac read less lately, did you notice that?”
I gave her a civil smile. “All the same he was buying more and more.”
“Think,” she said. “I depend on you. You’re just the one who might know. I had forgotten this. God sent you perhaps.”
“Rebbetzin Kornfeld, I’m only a bookseller.”
“God in his judgment sent me a bookseller. For such a long time Isaac never read at home. Think! Agronomy?”
“I don’t remember anything like that. What would a Professor of Mishnaic History want with agronomy?”
“If he had a new book under his arm he would take it straight to the seminary and hide it in his office.”
“I mailed to his office. If you like I can look up some of the titles –”
“You were in the park and you saw nothing?”
“Nothing.” Then I was ashamed. “I saw the tree.”
“And what is that? A tree is nothing.”
“Rebbetzin Kornfeld,” I pleaded, “it’s a stupidity that I came here. I don’t know myself why I came, I beg your pardon, I had no idea –”
“You came to learn why Isaac took his life. Botany? Or even, please listen, even mycology? He never asked you to send something on mushrooms? Or having to do with herbs? Manure? Flowers? A certain kind of agricultural poetry? A book about gardening? Forestry? Vegetables? Cereal growing?”
“Nothing, nothing like that,” I said excitedly. “Rebbetzin Kornfeld, your husband was a rabbi!”
“I know what my husband was. Something to do with vines? Arbours? Rice? Think, think, think! Anything to do with land – meadows – goats – a farm, hay – anything at all, anything rustic or lunar –”
“Lunar! My God! Was he a teacher or a nurseryman? Goats! Was he a furrier? Sheindel, are you crazy? I was the furrier! What do you want from the dead?”
Without a word she replenished my cup, though it was more than half full, and sat down opposite me, on the other side of the lace boundary line. She leaned her face into her palms, but I saw her eyes. She kept them wide.
“Rebbetzin Kornfeld,” I said, collecting myself, “with a tragedy like this –”
“You imagine I blame the books. I don’t blame the books, whatever they were. If he had been faithful to his books he would have lived.”
“He lived,” I cried, “in boo
ks, what else?”
“No,” said the widow.
“A scholar. A rabbi. A remarkable Jew!”
At this she spilled a furious laugh. “Tell me, I have always been very interested and shy to inquire. Tell me about your wife.”
I intervened: “I haven’t had a wife in years.”
“What are they like, those people?”
“They’re exactly like us, if you can think what we would be if we were like them.”
“We are not like them. Their bodies are more to them than ours are to us. Our books are holy, to them their bodies are holy.”
“Jane’s was so holy she hardly ever let me get near it,” I muttered to myself.
“Isaac used to run in the park, but he lost his breath too quickly. Instead he read in a book about runners with hats made of leaves.”
“Sheindel, Sheindel, what did you expect of him? He was a student, he sat and he thought, he was a Jew.”
She thrust her hands flat. “He was not.”
I could not reply. I looked at her merely. She was thinner now than in her early young-womanhood, and her face had an in-between cast, poignant still at the mouth and jaw, beginning to grow coarse on either side of the nose.
“I think he was never a Jew,” she said.
I wondered whether Isaac’s suicide had unbalanced her.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she resumed. “A story about stories. These were the bedtime stories Isaac told Naomi and Esther: about mice that danced and children who laughed: When Miriam came he invented a speaking cloud. With Ophra it was a turtle that married a blade of withered grass. By Leah’s time the stones had tears for their leglessness. Rebecca cried because of a tree that turned into a girl and could never grow colours again in autumn. Shiphrah, the littlest, believes that a pig has a soul.”
“My own father used to drill me every night in sacred recitation. It was a terrible childhood.”
“He insisted on picnics. Each time we went farther and farther into the country. It was a madness. Isaac never troubled to learn to drive a car, and there was always a clumsiness of baskets to carry and a clutter of buses and trains and seven exhausted wild girls. And he would look for special places – we couldn’t settle just here or there, there had to be a brook or such-and-such a slope or else a little grove. And then, though he said it was all for the children’s pleasure, he would leave them and go off alone and never come back until sunset, when everything was spilled and the air freezing and the babies crying.”
“I was a grown man before I had the chance to go on a picnic,” I admitted.
“I’m speaking of the beginning,” said the widow. “Like you, wasn’t I fooled? I was fooled, I was charmed. Going home with our baskets of berries and flowers we were a romantic huddle. Isaac’s stories on those nights were full of dark invention. May God preserve me, I even begged him to write them down. Then suddenly he joined a club, and Sunday mornings he was up and away before dawn.”
“A club? So early? What library opens at that hour?” I said, stunned that a man like Isaac should ally himself with anything so doubtful.
“Ah, you don’t follow, you don’t follow. It was a hiking club, they met under the moon. I thought it was a pity, the whole week Isaac was so inward, he needed air for the mind. He used to come home too fatigued to stand. He said he went for the landscape. I was like you, I took what I heard, I heard it all and never followed. He resigned from the hikers finally, and I believed all that strangeness was finished. He told me it was absurd to walk at such a pace, he was a teacher and not an athlete. Then he began to write.”
“But he always wrote,” I objected.
“Not this way. What he wrote was only fairy tales. He kept at it and for a while he neglected everything else. It was the strangeness in another form. The stories surprised me, they were so poor and dull. They were a little like the ideas he used to scare the girls with, but choked all over with notes, appendices, prefaces. It struck me then he didn’t seem to understand he was only doing fairy tales. Yet they were really very ordinary – full of sprites, nymphs, gods, everything ordinary and old.”
“Will you let me see them?”
“Burned, all burned.”
“Isaac burned them?”
“You don’t think I did! I see what you think.”
It was true that I was marvelling at her hatred. I supposed she was one of those born to dread imagination. I was overtaken by a coldness for her, though the sight of her small hands with their tremulous staves of fingers turning and turning in front of her face like a gate on a hinge reminded me of where she was born and who she was. She was an orphan and had been saved by magic and had a terror of it. The coldness fled. “Why should you be bothered by little stories?” I inquired. “It wasn’t the stories that killed him.”
“No, no, not the stories,” she said. “Stupid corrupt things. I was glad when he gave them up. He piled them in the bathtub and lit them with a match. Then he put a notebook in his coat pocket and said he would walk in the park. Week after week he tried all the parks in the city. I didn’t dream what he could be after. One day he took the subway and rode to the end of the line, and this was the right park at last. He went every day after class, An hour going, an hour back. Two, three in the morning he came home. “Is it exercise?” I said. I thought he might be running again. He used to shiver with the chill of night and the dew. “No, I sit quite still,” he said. “Is it more stories you do out there?” “No, I only jot down what I think.” “A man should meditate in his own house, not by night near bad water,” I said. Six, seven in the morning he came home. I asked him if he meant to find his grave in that place.”
She broke off with a cough, half artifice and half resignation, so loud that it made her crane towards the bedrooms to see if she had awakened a child. “I don’t sleep any more,” she told me. “Look around you. Look, look everywhere, look on the windowsills. Do you see any plants, any common house plants? I went down one evening and gave them to the garbage collector. I couldn’t sleep in the same space with plants. They are like little trees. Am I deranged? Take Isaac’s notebook and bring it back when you can.”
I obeyed. In my own room, a sparse place, with no ornaments but a few pretty stalks in pots, I did not delay and seized the notebook. It was a tiny affair, three inches by five, with ruled pages that opened on a coiled wire. I read searchingly, hoping for something not easily evident. Sheindel by her melancholy innuendo had made me believe that in these few sheets Isaac had revealed the reason for his suicide. But it was all a disappointment. There was not a word of any importance. After a while I concluded that, whatever her motives, Sheindel was playing with me again. She meant to punish me for asking the unaskable. My inquisitiveness offended her; she had given me Isaac’s notebook not to enlighten but to rebuke. The handwriting was recognizable yet oddly formed, shaky and even senile, like that of a man outdoors and deskless who scribbles in his palm or on his lifted knee or leaning on a bit of bark; and there was no doubt that the wrinkled leaves, with their ragged corners, had been in and out of someone’s pocket. So I did not mistrust Sheindel’s mad anecdote; this much was true: a park, Isaac, a notebook, all at once, but signifying no more than that a professor with a literary turn of mind had gone for a walk. There was even a green stain straight across one of the quotations, as if the pad had slipped grasswards and been trodden on.
I have forgotten to mention that the notebook, though scantily filled, was in three languages. The Greek I could not read at all, but it had the shape of verse. The Hebrew was simply a miscellany, drawn mostly from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Among these I found the following extracts, transcribed not quite verbatim:
Ye shall utterly destroy all the places of the gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree.
And the soul that turneth after familiar spirits to go a-whoring after them, I will cut him off from among his people.
These, of course, were ordinary unadorned notes, such as an
y classroom lecturer might commonly make to remind himself of the text, with a phrase cut out here and there for the sake of speeding his hand. Or I thought it possible that Isaac might at that time have been preparing a paper on the Talmudic commentaries for these passages. Whatever the case, the remaining quotations, chiefly from English poetry, interested me only slightly more. They were the elegiac favourites of a closeted Romantic. I was repelled by Isaac’s Nature: it wore a capital letter, and smelled like my own Book Cellar. It was plain to me that he had lately grown painfully academic: he could not see a weed’s tassel without finding a classical reference for it. He had put down a snatch of Byron, a smudge of Keats (like his Scriptural copyings, these too were quick and fragmented), a pair of truncated lines from Tennyson, and this unmarked and clumsy quatrain:
And yet all is not taken. Still one Dryad
Flits through the wood, one Oread skims the hill;
White in the whispering stream still gleams a Naiad;
The beauty of the earth is haunted still.
All of this was so cloying and mooning and ridiculous, and so pedantic besides, that I felt ashamed for him. And yet there was almost nothing else, nothing to redeem him and nothing personal, only a sentence or two in his rigid self-controlled scholar’s style, not unlike the starched little jokes of our correspondence. “I am writing at dusk sitting on a stone in Trilham’s Inlet Park, within sight of Trilham’s Inlet, a bay to the north of the city, and within two yards of a slender tree, Quercus velutina, the age of which, should one desire to measure it, can be ascertained by (God forbid) cutting the bole and counting the rings. The man writing is thirty-five years old and ageing too rapidly, which may be ascertained by counting the rings under his poor myopic eyes.” Below this, deliberate and readily more legible than the rest, appeared three curious words:
Great Pan lives.