The Family Tabor

by Cherise Wolas

  He wants that knowledge and more threaded into his daughters’ lives.

  He wants them to learn their Bat Mitzvah H’aftorah portions in the warm confines of a cantor’s study, as he did not, but his father did, and all the men who preceded his father, when they were still Tabornikovs. He wants his daughters on the bema in adorable dresses, the Torah unwound in front of them, speaking aloud the Hebrew words in clear, sweet voices that would wash over the family and friends come to celebrate that passage with them.

  He realizes that he wants his children to be Jewish.

  Which they are not.

  With Elena as their mother, there has been a hiccup in the matrilineal blood.

  He realizes he is again questioning the boundaries he and Elena unthinkingly crossed to effect their union, a questioning that began on the drive, but perhaps earlier than that, and there’s more, so much more now in his head.

  He realizes he is contemplating changing the terms of their marriage, asking Elena to allow him to bring religion into their lives, and not in some fair way. He does not want equal time for the church, not when there are more than a billion Roman Catholics and less than fifteen million Jews in the entire world, not when Elena has said her own needs are fulfilled by her secret visits to church. He wants to insist on Hebrew school for the girls, the acquisition of a temple membership. He wants to host the High Holidays at their house, and attend Friday night Shabbat services. He wants the girls to light the Hanukkah candles, one for each night, until the whole thing is ablaze. He wants them all to eat matzoh for eight days, to read the Four Questions aloud at the Passover table, to taste the sweet honeyed nut of the haroset, the sharpness of horseradish slivers.

  Would Elena agree to any of it, to all of it, to forfeiting equal time for Catholicism?

  Would he and Elena still fit, or mostly fit, or fit as they’ve been fitting of late, if he were to become an observant Jew?

  He imagines himself the opposite of a person who abandons spouse and children; he wants to bind what he has created, cohere this Tabor unit while still in its relative infancy.

  He sees it now. The literal hole in his soul. That is not at all new. That has, instead, been within him for a very long time. This is why the spirits gather around him each night and refuse him his sleep. This is why he feels his Jewishness bubbling up, seeking release.

  He is trembling inside, as he stares at the pure, at the infinitely ageless, at the revelations that exploded into being before his eyes.

  He needs to be perfectly aligned with his own people.

  He needs to sink himself into the loamy earth of his ancestors, to learn their ways, to make their ways his.

  And another tremor runs through him, for it’s not only a need; it’s a want.

  He wants to sink himself into the loamy earth of his ancestors.

  And it’s the kind of shock that comes after the fact, when looking back with hindsight, one says, Of course, how did I not understand this before?

  Elena is staring at him, but he keeps his eyes focused at the view beyond the large picture windows, takes in the blue fabric of the sky, the rays of hot sun beaming down upon the tall, strong cacti, the endless rolling sand, how everything is one out there in the desert.

  The conversion of his own nonobservant philosophy into something else, the potential tossing away of how he has lived his life up to now—it has happened this fast, in an instant.

  “I’m just telling a story,” he finally says.

  Elena pulls away from him, covers herself with the sheet. “Simon—”

  He reaches for her hand, tells himself to say nothing more, but when he looks at her, his heart refuses to heed.

  “I think I want to be a Jew.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FROM HER STUDY, ROMA hears the laughter of her daughters and granddaughter, their individual characters captured in those different trilling sounds.

  No calls from Jeanine McCadden on either voicemail. Should she be the one to initiate, to see how things are going today? Or will it interfere with the therapeutic process? It is a debate she always has; sometimes she preempts a patient’s parents, sometimes not. She doesn’t have much of a handle on Jeanine yet, and none at all on the father, so she’ll let it play out.

  She peeks into Simon’s old room, expecting only to find Isabel deep in her nap, but Harry has her curled up in his arms, the two of them sound asleep. She tiptoes past, then pivots, retrieves her cell phone from her study, opens its camera, and snaps a photo. Such a precious moment ought to be memorialized. There is a little guilt, too, in the action. There are so few pictures of Simon as a baby, as a child; their life here in the desert was only a month old when she became pregnant with him, and picture taking was low on the list of settling in, then caring for an infant, for two little girls, for house and husband, getting her practice off the ground. It’s a reflexive, reflective act she tries to remember to undertake—to snap lots of pictures of her grandchildren—so while there is a noticeable absence of Simon in the family photo albums, at least there will be many of Lucy and Isabel, even if they never end up under clear vinyl, are only in that cloud her children talk about, where treasured memories are apparently saved forever these days.

  She tiptoes out, and in the hallway emails the photo to everyone, herself included, because no matter how many times her children have shown her how to get her cell phone pictures onto her computer, she can’t remember what to do, nor can Harry. Something with a cord, with a slot? Or are they automatically on her computer if only she knew where to look? Who knows and who cares. Another important thing she’s learned about life all these years: beyond the indispensable requirement of mystery, one must figure out shortcuts for everything that is superfluous.

  In the kitchen, she lifts out the jugs of home-brewed iced tea and fresh-squeezed lemonade from the fridge. She knows everyone would prefer she made the Arnold Palmers sweeter, but she likes it this way, a little tart, a pinch from summer.

  Dulcet chirps coming from a cell phone. Not hers, which is on the counter, but another, behind her on the island. She leans over, looks at the screen, at a name that hugely intrigues, and though she will be taking an unsupportable liberty, will, without a doubt, be stepping over a very solid line, she is a mother, and the name represents one of those mysteries in life—Valentine Osin, about whom Camille reveals nothing—and she picks up her daughter’s phone, and slides what she’s supposed to slide, and says, “Hello.”

  The connection is bad, as if the caller is in a wind tunnel or phoning from a different galaxy, and Roma can’t hear any voice on the other end, and she keeps saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” walking across the kitchen, intending to deliver the phone to Camille, but then she hears a click, and knows the call has been dropped, or the caller has hung up, and she looks at the phone in her hand, and debates whether to tell Camille that her phone was ringing, or that she missed a call from Valentine Osin, or that Roma answered it.

  She puts Camille’s phone down and decides to say nothing, which agitates her because she counsels honest and open face-to-face communication. And her agitation increases because her ability to have that kind of communication with her children is limited to today and tomorrow. With Camille and Phoebe currently objects of fascination for Lucy, this would be an opportune moment to find out what Simon’s exhaustion is about. Maybe Simon and Elena fell asleep after unpacking. Or maybe they’re taking advantage of being together without children demanding their attention. Bravo for them, Roma thinks. Then checks the clock on the stove. This afternoon interlude of theirs has lasted more than an hour—enough already. She would like some time alone with her son, so where the hell is he?

  SIMON IS ON THE bed watching Elena. She is naked, kneeling at her suitcase, tossing things out, searching for her one-piece swimsuit, which she finds and pulls on, and a long dress, which she drops over her head. Without looking at him, she says, “I’m going to swim laps. You can come if you want. Swim off whatever is going on with you, what
ever this is.”

  At the door, she says, “I’m not mad,” but her eyes are unblinking and this is what she says when she’s furious. At home she would have slammed the door, but here she is circumspect, only the soft catch of the lock, and Simon is left behind with the clarifying awareness of the fear he’s not wanted to broach, that Elena has pulled away, that all is not right between them, that all hasn’t been right for a while, that things are not as either of them have continued to pretend that they are. A blatant awareness reiterated for him by the blinding sun crashing through the large windows, slicing through him like a heated blade.

  In the hallway, Elena leans against the wall and closes her eyes. Exhilaration floods through her, then confusion, and neither emotion is what she would have expected to feel from her husband’s abrupt interest in Judaism.

  Does this mark the beginning of a midlife crisis? When the husbands of a few of her former editors hit forty, they bought themselves the clichéd muscle cars, screwed up their marriages with affairs; one gave his wife the passwords to all their financial accounts and disappeared, emailing pictures of himself on a tropical beach sporting a ponytail and a soul patch. But Simon is a decade away from forty. He’s too young to be experiencing a need to remake his life. And if he isn’t, if that need has hit him years early, she’s not going to pretend she doesn’t find those other alternatives preferable to what his proclamation about wanting to become a Jew might mean.

  She is the first generation removed from Salamanca, Spain, piety imbued in its plazas and campos, its capillas, catedrales, iglesias, and ermitas, its conventos and monasterios. She was raised an excellent Catholic girl in Los Angeles, attending church sometimes thrice weekly, always with trips to the confessional; how could it be otherwise when her mother’s maiden name is Abaroa, Basque for refuge, when her father’s last name, her last name, Abascal, means priest’s street. Her family home, where she remained until marriage, overstuffed with her parents and all four of her grandparents and an all-everything God.

  The first time Simon brought her here to the desert, to this house, to meet all the Tabors, she was already in love, consumed, as she had not expected to be, not when she knew no Jews intimately, when her lengthy flirtation with Jesus was only a few years behind her. She had been anxious, but how quickly Harry had welcomed a Catholic into their Jewish enclave, as her own parents had not done immediately with Simon. She wasn’t wearing her tiny silver cross that day, but Catholicism was imprinted upon her nonetheless, and when Harry asked, “Are you practicing?” Elena understood he was gently trying to assess the state of affairs between her and his son.

  She had been lying when she said, “Only sometimes,” but he had thoughtfully considered her answer before asking, “Isn’t it something you either do or don’t do, believe in or not?”

  She had blushed, for how could she explain how conflicted she was, and afraid that loving Harry’s son was reducing her love of God’s Son, or how sheepish she felt in her confusion that a serious Catholic girl, raised to follow every one of her religion’s precepts, was overriding those precepts, breaking the rules, because of love? She had wanted to say she believed all prayer, whatever its form, wherever it took place, was good, but she didn’t, because she uttered those most important to her in church, and she wasn’t attending as devotedly as she once did, as she always had, and she feared that loving Simon was diminishing her essential relationship to the Divine.

  She hadn’t known then whether Harry and Roma were serious Jews, or Jews mostly in name only, a fact about Simon she found infinitely comforting when thinking about where their love was taking them. There was enormous comfort, too, in learning that Simon was mildly resentful of the command-performance assemblies when the Tabors gathered together on a few of the Jewish holidays, saying he would only ask her to attend with him on the two important holidays that took place in the fall.

  Of course, it’s been more than that all these years—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the autumn, Hanukkah around the Christmas season, Passover around Easter—and although she always feels a little traitorous to her own beliefs, she’s enjoyed it more than she expected, because they aren’t very religious and because even their serious holidays become parties, with food and wine and laughter.

  Still, she’s made sacrifices because of Simon, sacrifices she’s not thrown in his face. Even today in the car, she could have said, “I hide going to church because I’m constantly debating whether I made the right choice marrying you, having children with you, and I question our ability to last for the long haul, and not just because we have different religious beliefs.”

  What she knows absolutely is that if Simon had told her at the start of their relationship that he wanted to live a Jewish life, she would have ended them, cast away whatever was forming between them, before it went any further. She did not want then, and does not want now, to take on Simon’s lineage, no matter that it belongs to the man she … yes, loves, but not as much as she once did.

  If Simon’s midlife crisis behavior were to devolve into those stereotypical actions, she would divorce him instantly. She has no tolerance for such recklessness, for the excuses that invariably accompany the breaches of trust and of vows.

  But if it’s Judaism he embraces?

  Does she divorce him?

  Her family, what would they say? Irate when she married out of the faith, outside the walls of their church, they’ve come around because they are caring people, because they love her and their granddaughters, because they’ve learned to love Simon, whose undeniable charm was insufficient at first to overcome his not being a Catholic. If Simon becomes a serious Jew and she divorces him, they will be miserable, fretful about her place in the eternal afterlife, excommunicated for all time.

  She pushes away from the wall, walking fast to the heart of the house, then slows her steps, commands herself to regain calm, to allow this time in Palm Springs to play out, to keep an open mind whenever Simon decides to articulate exactly what he means by that statement.

  Perhaps she’s wrong about what she imagines he wants. But it doesn’t feel like she’s wrong, and a crucial truth hits her: she’s stepped too far away from her own religion and will not return to the arms of God in the guise of another. She does not want to be married to a practicing Jew, and her slow pace gives way, her feet speeding up with anger.

  ROMA IS ADDING ICE cubes to the pitcher when Elena sweeps into the kitchen, her pretty face closed up tight as a fist, her turquoise caftan whipping to and fro, and Roma thinks of an ocean wave whose beauty alters when it crashes on the shore.

  “Doesn’t a midlife crisis happen in midlife?” Elena says in a clenched voice Roma has not heard her use before, and then her daughter-in-law is out the sliding glass doors, speed-walking to the far end of the pool, ignoring the girls’ greetings and Lucy’s “Mommymommy, MOMMY.”

  Roma watches Elena roughly pull the caftan over her head, throw it onto a chair, step onto the diving board, halt at the end, her feet curling over the edge, her calves flexing, her toes lifting up. Her dive is as refined and polished as a ballerina’s, and yet the splash she makes is incredibly violent.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  STERN STERN STERN STERN stern stern stern, the word is zinging from his brain stem through his thalamus to his cerebral cortex, like a shiny silver marble in a pinball game, and Harry wakes with a start.

  Where is he?

  In a bed, but not his own bed in his own room. This is a twin. He’s in Simon’s old room, where his granddaughters sleep when they visit.

  Isabel. He put her down for a nap, and there is the slightest imprint in the sheet, the shallowest indent in the pillow, proof she had been here, but now he is alone. What did she think when she opened her eyes, saw her sabba asleep in her bed? He hopes she wasn’t frightened. He hopes she giggled.

  There is a curious hush in the house, as if an eon has passed, and his watch says he’s right; it’s nearing five. The afternoon has slipped away like a shadow.


  A story. He had been telling Isabel a story, the story. He must not have reached any part unknown to him for he had fallen asleep, an impossibility if another atrocious truth had revealed itself to him. But it hadn’t, and so he slept, and he feels calmed by these hours of repose.

  But still, what point had he reached in the story before his voice trailed off and then ceased? He tries to recall, searches deep inside for that secret vault whose existence has shocked him and rocked him and altered his world, and the word that woke him up, stern, begins ricocheting again, this time in front of his eyes. His heart thumps hard in his chest, echoes in his ears.

  Stern, as in the tone of a voice, the look on a face?

  No, as in Stern, and Harry’s not sure whether it’s his own internal voice or that dry, unfamiliar one he’s hearing, and a fine sheen of sweat coats him, and he sits up quickly, fighting to free himself from the tangled duvet, though he feels so very cold, inside and out.

  Stern as in …?

  Come on, Harry.

  I don’t know.

  Come on.

  I really don’t know.

  Think.

  I’m thinking.

  Think harder.

  I’m trying.

  Oh.

  Right.

  Max Stern?

  Right, Harry, Max Steeeeeerrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnn.

  Stern, wiped from his mind for more than thirty years, but Harry can picture him clearly. A tall man. Taller than most in the Hebraic tribe. Strong and solidly built stock by way of emigrated Poles who settled in New Jersey, and his personal accomplishments at Harvard Business School. Bright and sharp, quick with repartee, with witty life anecdotes. A colleague at the brokerage firm, arriving a few years after Harry. More than a colleague—with Max Stern’s arrival, the Jews at the firm doubled. Two Jews who proved themselves smart, savvy, dedicated, and loyal. Consummate lieutenants, each rising to tandem positions one rung below their commander in chief. Flip sides of the same coin, both sides needed for the coin to function as currency, to get the job done. Harry was the trading authority: overseeing the stable of traders buying and selling stocks, bonds, gold and oil and all other commodities, options, futures, and derivatives, for the firm’s clients; buying and selling it all for his personal clients, too. Max Stern was the wiring authority, in charge of settling all client trades. They had been close work friends, though neither needed to say that making themselves a tight-knit cabal wouldn’t do.