What did any of that matter?
Her most valuable possession is her mind. And that mind is working again, the flexibility and suppleness she had always relied on, returning, revealing to her a new vista, new paths to explore.
No matter how long her visits home, she has never once unpacked. She lives out of her suitcase, as if prepared for a quick getaway. She doesn’t want to make a quick getaway now, and though she traveled light for this weekend, she begins hanging her things in the closet, folding them into drawers.
When her phone rings, she answers and says, “Are you in the Cradle of Humankind?”
“I was, but it’s midnight here, so I’m in my hotel room in Johannesburg, drinking a beer. You haven’t responded to my last three emails and I was worried about you.”
It’s hard to remember her sluggish mind, because it’s moving now at Mach speed, and Camille thinks: He’ll be on this dig for five and a half more months, and in that time I will have assembled my proposal for the American Widow study, and convinced Dr. Jin to give me what I need, and thrown out all my used clothes and furniture, and perhaps sublet my empty apartment, and turned down any offer from the Peace Corps, and hugged those I have come to love at Lilac Love goodbye. By the time he returns from the Cradle of Humankind, I will be myself again, or a new version of myself, living in a vibrant new future. And I might want his love, his ring, his children, in that vibrant new future. Or not. Who knows? I don’t have to make any final decisions.
I can wait.
I should wait.
I want to wait.
“It’s been a little crazy here,” she says. And she tells Valentine about her father having gone missing, but that he’s safe, on a plane, an unanticipated trip, and when he returns, she thinks he’ll have marvelous stories to tell.
And then she tells him about her drive to Palm Springs, and her thoughts on the drive, and about the Fluttering Women at the gala, and how those women have given birth to a potential study she’s contemplating. “That’s great, Camille. Really great,” and she hears her enthusiasm reflected back to her.
And when he asks, “Is there a substantial enough population in Seattle for your needs?” she knows she has five and a half months and so doesn’t answer his question directly—“I’ll figure out the geographical considerations,”—and that suffices for her bearded physical anthropologist with two-million-year-old sand under his fingernails, who says, “I miss you, Camille. I won’t push about marriage, just know I want to be with you for all time.”
After she and Valentine Osin say their goodbyes and disconnect, Camille gathers her few toiletries together, to set out on the bathroom counter—the moisturizer she has begun using, the under-eye cream, a lipstick in the most unobtrusive shade she could find, the round pot of blush and the brush Phoebe insisted she buy the last time they were together in Palm Springs and went wandering around the better outlet mall.
When she opens her bathroom door, she is surprised to find that Phoebe has left her own open. It is an invitation, she realizes, to continue the conversation that has begun again between them, that hints of intimacies that might be shared. Tonight, when they are both in their beds, she’ll say, “Phoebe, can you hear me?” and she imagines their whispers once again traveling through the tunnel of gleaming tiles, their words reaching each other’s ears, finding safe havens.
FIFTY-EIGHT
EVERYTHING’S IN THE CAR except for our suitcases,” Elena says.
The sun is moving across the sky, rays lighting up the bed that separates them. The next time Simon is here, when he has brought Harry home, will he stay in this room that has become theirs, or return to the room of his childhood? He doesn’t know.
“Everyone’s heading outside to see us off,” she says. “We should get going. Traffic’s going to be bad.”
She is looking around, at the agapanthus duvet, at the large picture windows, at the cacti beyond, and Simon’s heart stutters. This might be the last time she’s here with him.
A turn, and she’s moving, through the doorway, into the hall, lost from his view.
The suitcase wheels are quiet on the marble floors as he heads into what Elena has always called the heart of the house. He hears his family outside. His mother is talking and Lucy is answering, and Elena laughs, and he wonders if only he is aware that her laughter is forced.
The newspaper he tossed onto the stone table is still there. Into the side pocket of his suitcase, something easy to read while waiting tomorrow for the plane to take off. Already he’s thinking about what he needs to bring, wondering if their shelves at home hold any books about Judaism or Jewish history. Yes, there’s one, a fat tome he’s never cracked, bought because he heard the author on NPR: The Story of the Jews.
He lifts their bags into the back of the SUV, then hugs each of his sisters, and Elena does the same, and Lucy and Isabel are up in their aunts’ arms, then kissing their savah, then in their car seats; and Simon is hugging his mother, telling her he’ll call when he lands, will keep her informed every step of the way, and she says, “Chief Hernandez just phoned. Upset about Harry. Wishing us all luck. Wishing you luck.” Then Simon is in the driver’s seat, securing his seat belt, checking on his smiling daughters. He releases the emergency brake, coasts down to Agapanthus Lane, and turns left.
THERE IS A LATE-AFTERNOON perfume rising from the cacti flowers, and inside Roma’s chest tiny birds are batting their wings.
“Mom, both of us are staying. I’m staying until Simon and Dad are back,” Phoebe says.
“I may stay longer,” Camille says. “Would that be okay?”
“You can stay forever. You both know that,” Roma says, and pulls her daughters close.
“Let’s go in. I’m going to open some wine and Camille and I are going to make dinner,” Phoebe says.
The house is mellow with sunlight.
The kitchen is clean and not the way it usually is when her family has come and gone. They’ve eaten only two meals in the last two days, and no one has cooked anything.
Phoebe plunges in the corkscrew, a neat yank, and she’s pouring, handing a full glass to Roma.
Camille is taking stock of the contents of the refrigerator, setting out green cartons of vegetables that no one consumed, the salmon steaks that were never grilled. The island fills with cutting boards and knives, a colander dripping water when Camille finishes rinsing the mushrooms, the scallions, a red pepper shaped like a heart.
Soon, her daughters are cutting and slicing and dicing and chopping, seasoning the salmon.
These last two eventful days seem to have reconfigured them. They have a new rapport, or perhaps regained the old, before their differing personalities formed a distance greater than the actual mileage that separates them. Phoebe presents herself as thoroughly modern, when she isn’t, not truly, whittling away these past years at her natural softness in order to find the sharp angles she thinks she needs to survive. Camille, at the forefront of her personal vanguard, donning the role of a solitary, when really she aches for closeness, a desire she refuses to acknowledge, as if by acquiescing to sustained intimacy she might lose sight of herself. They work well together, swapping between chef and sous chef, preparing a dinner Roma can’t imagine eating, but will, to please them.
“We’ll call when it’s ready, Mom. About an hour, right, Camille?”
And Camille says, “Exactly.”
“We love you,” they say when she leaves, glass in hand, the wine kissing the rim. She hears Camille asking Phoebe if they should lighten the mood, play some music, flip on the kitchen speakers. Even with this new or renewed spirit of friendship between them, some things never do change, the younger always first requesting approval or dispensation from the elder before doing what she wants to do. Roma is down the hall before Phoebe responds.
SHE THINKS ABOUT GOING into her study and calling Jeanine McCadden again to set up an appointment to meet with Noelani tomorrow, to begin a new assessment of the girl, to determine if ther
e is a monster in the house or not. But she doesn’t. She lacks the energy, and her voice will betray that she isn’t her usual calm, controlled self.
She thinks about returning to the back patio, sitting again in Harry’s favorite chair, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she makes her way to their bedroom, places the wineglass on his nightstand, sits on his side of their high bed.
Harry is not dead. He’s alive, on a plane that touches down tomorrow afternoon Israeli time.
In a few hours, Simon and Elena and Lucy and Isabel will wind up the curvy road to their house. A trip made in silence, she’s certain, though she’s uncertain as to the reasons.
She thinks about how family is an amalgamation of the solid, the liquid, and the vaporous. A shambling creature made from accidental love, a meshing of beliefs occasionally disarrayed by inevitable bafflement, and the creation of others adorned with names signaling hope for their natures, prospects for their futures. Whether there is love, happiness, contentment, success, health, and satisfaction, or sadness, trauma, and tragedy in any family, so much is dependent on ephemeral luck.
And she thinks about primal wounds. Of the wounds her family has suffered as a result of Harry’s flight from home, of the psychic repairs that will be necessary; of the wounds Simon and Elena’s family will suffer, if they cannot right whatever is wrong; of the wounds Jeanine’s family has already suffered because of Noelani, and will continue to suffer if her psychological issues are not fully resolved by the hoped-for diagnosis of achalasia and its surgical mending, and if Roma doesn’t immediately determine what the running means to the girl. Before their first session, she researched the number seven and also the meaning of Noelani’s name—mist of heaven. How does that little girl’s name, how do the meanings of all of their names, figure into the composition that becomes family. Melodiously symphonic at the best of times, atonally dissonant at the worst.
In German, Harry’s name means home or house ruler. It also might have a Phoenician origin, although in Hebrew, it means exalted brother. It’s also the name of the king of Tyre in the Old Testament.
In Hindu mythology, Roma is an alternate name for Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity.
Phoebe is Greek, and means shining one. In Greek mythology, it is one of the names for the goddess of the moon. In poetry, Phoebe is the moon personified.
In French, Camille means young ceremonial attendant. In Latin, virginal, of unblemished character.
Both daughters were made in the countries from which their names were selected.
Simon’s name, taken from Harry’s deaf ancestor, means one who has heard.
Elena means shining light or bright one.
Lucy’s given name is Luz, meaning light in Spanish, taken from the title of the Virgin Mary, Nuestra Señora de la Luz, Our Lady of the Light.
Isabel, a Spanish variant of Elizabeth, is actually from the Hebrew elīsheva, meaning God is my oath.
None of this gets her any closer to some unclear truth she’s seeking.
Camille’s idea of music. That’s exactly what Roma wants to do, listen to Harry’s favorite, hear Leonard Cohen singing the song with Hineni in it, immerse herself in the music Harry was listening to before he fled—if only she remembered what the song was called.
His bedside cabinet is well organized. His CDs lined up. Stacks of stapled articles he’s printed out on his laptop, returned by the detectives and sitting on the coffee table in the living room. She glances through a few of the older articles, recognizes those he’s shared with her at night when they were reading in bed. She pulls out the Cohen CD with “Hallelujah” on it. She’s never told Harry that she thinks other artists have rendered that song far more exquisitely than its creator. She finds the track, and when it begins, she picks up the latest article in Harry’s stack, one from the New Yorker, and reads a random paragraph.
“There again, it’s a beautifully constructed melody that steps up, evolves, and slips back, all in quick time. But this song has a connective chorus, which when it comes in has a power all of its own.”
She goes back to the beginning. It’s an article about Leonard Cohen, and the strange serendipity does not completely surprise her. Those were Bob Dylan’s words about Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
She flips ahead several pages.
“Some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights you can’t get off the ground.”
Cohen’s words about a concert he gave in, of all places, Jerusalem, when he was having problems on stage. By then his songs were personal meditations, but that night, he couldn’t find his natural depth and stopped. And tried again. And stopped. And tried again.
“I turned around and the band was crying, too. And then it turned into something in retrospect quite comic: the entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, ‘What else can you show me, kid? I’ve seen a lot of things, and this don’t move the dial!’ And this was the entire skeptical side of our tradition, not just writ large, but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic, because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche: Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say? … I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was, take it more seriously.”
She’s hearing this analytical rumination in Cohen’s worn voice, confiding, intimate, “a fantastical growl … lordly,” just as the journalist wrote.
On the last page of the article, she reads:
“What I mean to say is that you hear the Bat Kol.” The divine voice. “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it … At this stage of the game, I hear it saying … ‘just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage.”
Is this what happened to Harry Saturday night? Did he hear the Bat Kol? Did he hear a divine voice singing of a deeper reality he couldn’t decipher, that he desperately needed to try to understand? Was it a compassionate voice? Despite her fury, she hopes that it was, that whatever lifted him away, spurred him on, spurred him forward, came to him in love and light, with kindness and compassion.
She looks out the large windows. She’s lost track of the sun, missed it bursting into primary colors, fading into pastels, then setting.
There is a quiet knock at the bedroom door and then Phoebe and Camille are on either side of her again, their arms wrapped around her again.
“Come join us,” Phoebe says and kisses Roma’s cheek.
Camille kisses her other cheek. “We’re listening to the same Leonard Cohen song in the rest of the house.”
Family is the “connective chorus”—a Dylan phrase about one of Harry’s favorite Cohen songs Roma will honor by appropriating for them all.
Phoebe lifts the untouched wineglass from her father’s nightstand. She takes a sip, hands it to Roma, who does the same, who passes it to Camille, who sips, too.
They leave the dimming room, moving toward the soulful music, the instrumental notes swelling and rising, that eroded voice lifting them up, replenishing their strength, imbuing them with a sense of the eternal. Forward they go, as if on their own quest, out of the darkness and into a splendor of light. It is not the white light of omniscience that dazed Roma this morning, but another variety, love-filled and containing a rainbow, and she looks into the reflection, the refraction, the dispersion, for the colors beneath the rainbow that Tatiana once told her to look for when she was a child, and though she doesn’t see them, not yet, she hopes all that bright purity marks their safe passage through limbo.
SACRED GEOGRAPHY
FIFTY-NINE
YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT to do, Harry. I know that you do.
Staring up at the blue-lighted plane traveling across the blackening sky, he had called out to God, and those were the words
that he heard, resounding in his head, in that dry voice turned familiar. And his life simply halted, as if suspended, as if he were suspended in air. It was not the clout of death, nor how he thought death might be, only a cessation of everything, an overwhelming absence that rendered him both deaf and blind. He was terrified at first, but as the terror lifted, he calmed, and with that calm came a clarity pure as a diamond: the truth of how life worked, how it had worked for his parents in the Bronx, for his grandparents and great-grandparents in the Pale of Settlement, for all the Tabornikovs in all the past centuries. Truth made of a substance finer than any crushed mineral. He believed in the big bang and in evolution, in science and rationality and logic, but discovered, with an absence of surprise, that he could believe in something more, something else, in an alternative universe in which one’s spirit, one’s existence, the living of that spiritual existence, obeyed more poetic rules. He felt that finely crushed substance sifting into him, marking the beginning of time, the choosing of his people, landing softly upon those rocks of hard knowledge now wedged into the spaces of his soul he hadn’t realized were empty until today, empty since he made that first trade and then said genug, back in another life, in a forgotten year that belonged to the prior millennium.
That finely crushed substance, weightless though it was, was potent, magical, altering him, returning to him sight and sound, but changing how he was seeing, how he was hearing, a levitation, an ascension of sorts, and it was then that he assumed the profound duty he owed to the person he had wronged, the authentic, existential, and cathartic need to repent for what he had done. An unassailable obligation, despite his committing those wrongs so long ago, regardless of having spent his life since then altering the impoverished existences of so many.
The Family Tabor Page 34