She’s never imagined Simon could be this way. She’s never heard this soft voice from him, never seen such a flat stare, as if she ought to know what manyovoth means, as if only her explanation will spring her from a strange trap it feels like he’s setting.
“I’ve never heard that word before. What is it?”
“It’s the password Dad put on his laptop yesterday. I hoped you would know what it means.”
“I don’t. It sounds made up.”
Camille has been tapping on her phone and says, “It’s not one word. It’s two: many ovoth. Ovoth is a Hebrew word that means ghosts. So Dad’s password was many ghosts.”
“Does it make sense to you now, Mom?” Simon asks.
“It doesn’t. It means nothing to me. And I don’t know what it would mean to your father. He’s not a believer in ghosts.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wondering why she’s apologizing, why she sees disbelief in Simon’s eyes. “Simon, I really don’t know what it means.”
“Fine,” he says, clipping the word. “So we’ll move on. On Friday, Dad was looking up articles about Leonard Cohen in his office.”
“Okay,” Roma says.
“Do you know he likes Leonard Cohen?” Simon asks.
“We all know he loves Leonard Cohen,” Phoebe says.
“His voice, his truth-telling skills, his poeticism. For not changing his name as Dylan did,” Camille says. “We’ve been hearing those reasons for years.”
“I didn’t know that,” Simon says.
Roma thinks, How do you not know your father likes Leonard Cohen?
But she says, “How is Leonard Cohen relevant to any of this?”
“Dad played a particular song of his on Friday, and looked up the definition of a word in that song.”
“What song? What word?” Roma asks.
“‘You Want It Darker’ and the word was Hineni. The word means—”
“I know what that word means.”
“You do?”
“I do. Here I am.”
“What do you think it means to Dad?”
“Simon, just tell us what you’re thinking,” Phoebe says.
“I thought maybe Dad was sick and hadn’t told us. ‘Here I am’ could mean being ready for death.”
“If he were ill, I would know,” Roma says.
“Are you sure? Maybe taking off this way is a symptom. Maybe he has early dementia.”
“Based on all of this, he may be crazy, but he’s not physically ill, and he doesn’t have dementia.”
“Has he ever talked to you about walking a route through the Bible?”
“One of those walking tours through Israel, Egypt, maybe Jordan? Corresponding to Bible stories?” Camille asks.
“Yes.”
“No,” Roma says. “Why?”
“The Cohen song goes, ‘Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.’ I thought it was possible he was sick and wanted to go there to kill himself.”
“Simon, your father isn’t sick and he would never do that to us.”
“Well, he left us without a word.”
The tentacles of that truth spread among them; then Roma says firmly, “There has to be a reason.”
“That’s what I want us to figure out.”
“Then ask helpful questions,” Phoebe says.
“I’m trying to piece together my impressions based on what I saw on his office computer and what he was researching on his laptop yesterday here at home.”
“Fine,” Phoebe says. “Continue.”
“I was thinking of the hikes Dad and I used to take, and how every year he knew more about San Jacinto.”
“He bought a book about it when you were eight. It’s here in his study, underlined, highlighted. He used to make notes for himself. Why is that important?” Roma says.
“Why would he hide the fact that he was studying up on San Jacinto on the fly? Because he did hide it.”
“He wanted to keep you interested, Simon. He wanted to impress you. He wanted you to want to keep taking that hike together.”
“Do you think Dad tells lies?”
“Simon, enough. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure yet. Please answer the question, Mom.”
Is her son interrogating her?
“It’s human nature to lie,” she says. “Even when we think we aren’t lying. And when we know we’re lying, most of the time it’s to save someone from hurt, or to save ourselves from idiocies that mean nothing.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I do. I see it every day in my work. The self-protection afforded by lying starts very early in life. In a world of deliberate, or unintentional, or unknowing lies, you have to filter out the irrelevant. Your father and that book, he thought he was doing the right thing, so move on.”
“Yesterday, Dad researched the laws for forgiveness.”
She’s lost trying to understand the connections her son is making.
“I’ve never heard of the laws for forgiveness,” she says.
“About how to ask for forgiveness on Yom Kippur from someone you’ve harmed.”
“Are you saying your father needs to seek someone’s forgiveness?”
“Maybe.”
“Your father has done stupendous work in his life. Who would he need to seek forgiveness from?”
Simon leans in closer, stares at her intently.
“Maybe from one of the many ghosts?”
“Simon, there aren’t any ghosts.”
“Maybe there aren’t, but maybe there are. Does Dad know a man named Max Stern?”
It isn’t, immediately, a name that she recognizes.
And then she remembers the man. A lovely man, with a nice wife. Her name, too, began with an M. An old country name: Masha? Magda? He belonged to a time in their lives that has no meaning for Simon—he wasn’t even a thought back then. For Phoebe and Camille, that time has probably been reduced to the old Connecticut house, the huge tree out front with a swing attached to a heavy branch, the snow, and the tiny dogs.
What does Max Stern have to do with anything?
“Max Stern?” she asks.
“Yes, Max Stern,” Simon says.
“I haven’t thought of him in years. Why are you asking about him?”
“Did Dad and he work together at Carruthers Investments?”
“They did. The only Jewish men there. Then Max got very sick. That was hard on your father. He would call Max often.”
“So Dad kept in touch with him?”
“Yes. But then we moved here.”
“And when you moved here?”
“Not at all.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Distance probably. Back then, men didn’t call each other up on the phone to chat or write each other letters.”
“Not even email?”
“There was no email then. No one had their own personal computers. Cell phones weren’t common. But what does it matter? Max had leukemia. He had been out on medical leave for quite a while when we moved.”
She feels bombarded by Simon’s questions. When he looks away, she finds her breath, until he stares at her again.
“Has Dad ever kept a secret from you?”
She understands immediately what Simon is asking. Has Harry ever kept something secret from her that she now knows? That long-ago time she hasn’t thought about in nearly as long, when Harry confessed his secret, it was clear as crystal this morning. But that’s not Simon’s business; it’s none of the children’s business. A man makes a mistake, rights his ways, he’s entitled to keep that mistake private.
“That’s an impossible question to answer. By its nature a secret is kept hidden, so how can one ever know if they know it?” Her statement is objectively true.
“Listen, Simon,” Phoebe says, and Camille hears the lawyer-voice her sister uses when she wants to be heeded, when she’s impatient. “We all keep secrets. I’m sure you’ve got some secrets. Why would Dad be any d
ifferent than the rest of us? What exactly are you getting at?”
Roma has always been able to read her children’s thoughts, but, this moment, Simon’s are impossible to decipher.
His voice is soft again when he asks, “Do you know what happened to Max Stern, Mom?”
“I told you. He had leukemia. I’m sure he passed away.”
“I don’t think he did,” Simon says.
“Don’t think he did what?”
“I don’t think he passed away.”
“Why?”
“I think he ended up in prison.”
“Simon, where are you getting this from?”
“I keep telling you, from the articles Dad was reading on his laptop yesterday.”
Roma closes her eyes. “It was before we left for the gala. I had to shake him, tell him to get ready.”
“So now we know when,” Simon says.
“What were the articles about?” Phoebe asks.
“About Carruthers, and an insider trading case, and Max Stern.”
“It can’t be the same Max Stern,” Roma says.
“I think it is, and I think he’s still alive.”
“Alive? More than thirty years ago, Max Stern’s prognosis was dire, he was given less than a year.”
“I think he’s alive, and he became a rabbi.”
“A rabbi? Those articles must be about a different Max Stern. The Max Stern your father worked with loved what he did. And he wasn’t religious. No more religious than us.”
“I think it is the right Max Stern. And that Max Stern went to prison. Then he became a rabbi. And now he’s a rabbi who lives in Jerusalem.”
“Simon—”
“I think it’s possible Dad needs to seek forgiveness from him.”
“Why?”
“That I don’t know. But I think Dad is on his way to Israel to ask Max Stern to forgive him. What that something is, or why that something propelled him last night to take action, that’s anyone’s guess.”
He pauses, and Roma can see her son pausing dramatically like this in a courtroom, and then he says, “I think someone needs to go find him. And I think it should be me.”
She needs space from Simon’s challenging tone, a chance to think quietly, to read those articles for herself, to see whether Simon’s interpretation of whatever Harry was looking at is correct.
The only thing any of them knows for certain is that Harry is on a plane to Tel Aviv, perhaps headed to Jerusalem.
Simon’s conjecture about Max Stern must be wrong.
But she knows she’s not thinking clearly. The momentary respite she felt learning her husband is not dead is curdling into ferocious fury about his disappearing this way, all the hours that passed without a call to allay their worries, to explain himself. She has an overpowering need for violence, to slam doors, rend her hair, scream like a banshee, destroy whatever is in her path. Because it feels as if Harry, with his singular action, has torn the strings of their hearts.
A CREAK AND THE hidden gate swings open revealing Elena and the girls, and the courtyard grows noisy with her granddaughters’ laughter, their small feet slapping across the concrete, yelling, “Hi, Savah, hi, aunties,” racing into their father’s arms. Simon lifts them and carries them to Elena, standing motionless at the gate, a remote and unhappy sentry.
She is too far away to overhear what Simon is saying, but Elena’s tight face begins to relax, then neither says another word. Finally, Elena lifts her hand toward Simon’s cheek, but it comes to rest instead on Lucy’s head.
Whether Max Stern is real or not, Simon is right: he should be the one to find Harry in Israel. It can’t be her. She needs the distance that exists between them right now, and Simon needs distance from Elena. Sometimes distance is the only thing that can clear the vision.
The violent compulsion has drained from her body; only her fingertips are still tingling. Tingling as they once did when Tatiana held her hand tightly while incanting the Shabbat prayers. But that tingling was about love, and this tingling is about the opposite, and Roma imagines raking her nails down Harry’s face until he’s bleeding and scarred.
FIFTY-THREE
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, ELENA COULDN’T have imagined holding herself aloof from the Tabor clan, but today she can. And she is. Alone at one end of the table near the big pool, empty seats down to where Simon sits, flanked by his sisters. They have been discussing the mystery of her missing or lost or presumed-dead father-in-law, who apparently is in none of those states, and she understands nothing; it’s a foreign movie she’s watching, trying to construct the story from hand gestures and facial expressions. The three siblings have bonded into a tight triumvirate. She wonders how to make it a quartet, how to become one of them again, if only for the short term, but she doesn’t know the words to cross the divide, and if she did, she’s not sure she would use them.
“I think I need to go there now,” she hears Simon say.
“Where do you think you need to go now?”
Only when they turn to her does Elena realize she’s spoken aloud. And like a delayed echo reverberating up from a deep chasm, she hears the anger in her voice.
“I haven’t filled you in on everything, sweetheart,” Simon says. “Want to take a walk?”
Elena doesn’t, but nods.
“Will you check on the girls?” she asks Phoebe and Camille. “They’re in their bedroom changing.”
“Of course,” her sisters-in-law say in unison.
SIMON LEADS THE WAY through the hidden gate, past the open-air carport, where Harry’s old gold coupe sits regally, down the winding drive in their usual tandem, past the enormous Margaret Mead palm tree, past all the flowers, their colored petals soaking in the late-afternoon sun.
When they reach Agapanthus Lane, Elena turns right and Simon follows.
“I’m glad you and the girls went to the hotel.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Did they have fun?”
“Isabel was brave. She went down the baby slide by herself. Refused my hand. And Lucy went down the biggest slide this time. She was nervous at first, but then I had to pull her away to eat lunch.”
“Something’s changed in her.”
“It happened at breakfast,” Elena says. “She was talking in regular sentences. Not repeating a word over and over.”
“That’s amazing.”
“I know. I don’t know why, though.”
“Is that important? To know why?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know what’s changed inside of her?”
“Yesterday, I would have said yes. Today, I’m only grateful.”
Elena looks at him. The Simon she knows doesn’t talk in platitudes. Nor does he let anything go until he understands every facet. She thought her anger had cooled over the afternoon, but it’s again white-hot.
“You don’t want to know what’s changed inside of our daughter? Well, I do, Simon. Just like I want to know what’s changed inside of you. But first there’s Harry to talk about. What happened last night? Where did he go and why? And where are you planning on going?”
Agapanthus Lane ends in a cul-de-sac guarded by an enormous bristling cactus. In all their years taking this walk—dating, engaged, newly married, new parents pushing Lucy in her stroller, then Isabel—they always reach out and touch one of its rubbery green leaves, careful of the thorns. Elena watches Simon touch a leaf now, but she doesn’t. And she notes that he notes that she doesn’t, and her refusal to maintain their small ritual is a meaningless act, but she wants to hurt him however she can.
They turn around and walk back down the lane, and Simon tells her what he learned and what he thinks he’s figured out, and to Elena his explanation goes on forever, until he finally says, “That’s everything and that’s why I have to go find my father.”
At the entrance to the Tabor drive, Simon asks, “Do you want to head up?”
“No,” she says and deliberately walks faster to make
Simon catch up.
When he does, she says, “So Harry is not actually missing. He was never actually missing. Instead, he has taken an inexplicable flight to the Middle East.”
“To Israel.”
“He has taken an inexplicable flight to Israel. Where he is hoping to find someone he may have wronged a long time ago.”
“Right.”
“And you want to go to Israel to find him.”
“He’s alone there. Under some kind of intense personal duress. You know him, Elena. It’s completely atypical behavior. He doesn’t go crazy. He doesn’t run off. He plans the trips for the people he brings here meticulously, no detail overlooked, everything plotted out well in advance. He does the same for the trips he and my mother take. But he had to go right then, so instantly he told none of us about it, and didn’t call when he might have. And now, when he’s completely unlike himself, doing things he has never done in his life, he needs someone in his corner. He needs one of us. And it should be me.”
“Are you going to come back a Jew?”
She sees Simon is startled by her question, but it’s the one that matters if they have any kind of a future. She thought through all of that this afternoon.
“I am a Jew. You told me that yesterday.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“I don’t want that.” She decided this afternoon to be clear with him, so there are no misunderstandings down the line.
“I know.”
“But you might.”
“Yes. I might.”
“More than might.”
“I just want the opportunity to explore it for myself.”
“I want you to hear me, Simon. I do not want to live in a Jewish household, beholden to rules that have no meaning to me.”
“I know.”
The Family Tabor Page 31