Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  “Maggie did it,” Jane said. “I’m in disgrace. I lettered the place cards in a hurry. They’re messy. I’m the next thing to a visitor.”

  Elaine waved that away and said, “Look, just look.” Two faces, close together, white as plates under the paper lanterns: Josh whispering to Tara. He had her hands in both of his. Elaine laid her own hand on her heart. “Excuse me, I might have to cry tonight so tomorrow I’ll keep my makeup on.” Cry now, Jane thought.

  When it was all over the young people drifted out from under the lanterns and down the hill to the empty stables. “I bet they’re going to smoke a joint,” Elaine said, patting her hand. “I wouldn’t say it except to you.”

  “Not to Maggie anyway,” Jane said.

  Elaine had asked for a tour of her paintings but there had not been time. “I was studying design before I married,” she had whispered, before Maggie found her shawl for her and took her away.

  THE RABBI DIDN’T have the generalizing social gaze. His eyes settled on a person, then another. Now they were on her. Under the thick eyebrows the half-hidden eyes seemed to be green. On the way through the house to the rehearsal, he had stopped to say, “Is this your work?” Eternal question, followed by “Interesting.” Or “Lovely,” when none of it was lovely. “Jane’s colors,” you would hear them saying, with the musing calm of people under no obligation to like what might be liked in New York. A sympathy almost, for Jane in her dependence on such colors. He didn’t say anything, though he put off going outside, and ventured into the dining room with his fingers together and tipped up in what she would have said was a priestly gesture. But a rabbi was a different thing entirely. He must have a wife.

  “How is this done?” he said.

  “With a knife.”

  “Aha.” Next he would say his wife painted a little. But he didn’t; he said, “You’re a bit of a Fauve.”

  His name was Israel. Israel.

  Somewhere in the bookcases was a Bible, her prize fifty years ago for a drawing done before she could read. Where was it, with its zipper pulled by a cross, its words of Jesus in red letters? Inside, pale reproductions of unknown paintings, one of them her favorite for copying in crayon, with her thumbprints on it and her memory of smelling the page: The Children of Israel. Men, women, and children were pressing forward across a pastel desert, colored shawls blowing. The sheep, the tents, the wells: as much her own as her horse. And Moses spake, and his rod had a serpent on it. Men broke the earrings out of women’s ears to melt for a golden calf. King David sang the Psalms. Selah: a word that stirred her, a word with no translation.

  The Psalms, said their father, who alone among his law partners did not sit down in a pew on Sunday, were songs to pacify God, make him stop.

  And God did stop, stopped existing. For a while, to ally herself with her father, she had thrown herself into argument. At the dinner table her mother could not clear up the matter of Jonah, and cried with the effort to draw them into the story of Ruth. Shaking out his napkin her father said Ruth was no different from Cinderella.

  After his stroke he didn’t remember, and why would she tell him he had left a daughter empty-handed at ten? King David flown, and the angels of the Lord in fours and sevens, leaving a vague sense of maneuvers repeating themselves on a map, in map colors of pink and yellow and tan. And words—cubits and beryl, Nineveh and hyssop and concubine. As if a god would ever have cast an eye on one rock in space, and chosen some there for himself and left the rest sliding to their doom. As if a god would fashion a smaller god and send him down to test all the scrambling creatures with their slaves and wars. And they would fail the test and the god would fail at the job of testing them.

  As if, Tara would say. Tara had never gone through a painful believing phase.

  All this Jane would have liked to bring up with the rabbi, because of his green eyes. Because it was never too late to complain childishly of things taken away from you. But not only that. An awful temptation could come over you to confide in a stranger, some doctor or priest on an airplane who gave off the benevolence of authority. The temptation to start right in, ask for a judgment. To say, Help me. A man told me to go. And I wouldn’t go. I went into his closet. I picked up his black shoe with a scent in it like alcohol. I put it over my face, breathed, it was my last breath of him, his wife was coming in twenty minutes, he made me leave, he was protecting her from me. From me. And he—who was he? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you—

  But no, this rabbi’s smiling eyes could not be taken for his conscience. He would have his duty; he would be no latitudinarian. Shame on you, eyes like that might say. He was there, after all, to officiate.

  “No, we can’t have the wedding on a Saturday. Josh is observant.” It had taken Jane a minute to know what Tara meant. First she thought, He’ll have to be. So the wedding was on a Sunday, with that stupefied feeling the day would always have for her. The stopped gears of the week, the gloves, the stairs down to the paste-smelling rooms of Sunday School, where her own drawings, copied from the Bible and framed by her mother, hung on the walls. “We don’t want to be proud,” Miss DeJong said to Jane’s class, “just because our pictures were put up last year.”

  “New shoes,” said Miss DeJong.

  “No,” Jane said, hiding her feet.

  Her mother always knelt and brushed the tops of her Mary Janes. Her toes recalled the soft scuffing of the black brush. Was this Christianity? And the buckle being loosened by her mother’s fingers when she had the strap too tight. Why, her bending mother, already sick, would have been young, decades younger than Jane was now, and not that much later would close her copy of The Upper Room and die in her hospital bed, spared any knowledge that this child was going to run away at eighteen and be married for a winter to a boy known to have peddled drugs in the schools of three counties. And then come back, abandoned.

  “Taken,” people said in town. “She got taken. Thought he’d get the money.”

  “Didn’t though.”

  “I bet he got some of it. She’s that way. Where did that boy take himself anyway?”

  “She’ll never say.”

  Dewey was married by then, and his new wife Maggie repeated these things to Jane.

  Some things could not be spoken of to Maggie. Certainly not a childish sorrow unable to complete itself after years. No, for Maggie everything had a beginning and an end. A wedding, for instance, tied a ribbon around the past and put it in a drawer. Even such a past as Tara’s.

  What could Maggie be expected to know about drugs and hiding and debt? What could she know about the soiled childhood, the shame and sweet apology that boy Jane had married had had in him? The beauty of face and body. Ha! Maggie would say, for that was surely gone. But still the letters and phone calls came every year or so, from hostels and bars, from jails, from towns in Mexico, and were answered.

  All Maggie knew was that Jane had come back, that year she was eighteen, to tend the big house, tend the garden, tend her father. And paint. Oddly, to come accidentally into a reputation elsewhere as a painter, or so it was said. Certainly the trips to New York began to stretch out, the trips back, in the company of one man or another, to shorten. After their father died Jane would shut the house up for months at a time. She was not around enough to keep the horses worked, and eventually Dewey trucked them, with their dusty tack, to his own stables.

  Dewey made up for whatever it was she was up to. A brother well married who practiced law in his home town could all but undo a sister’s effect. In time he could undo even the effect of his own daughter, who had persuaded the high school history teacher to die with her.

  “I LIKED THE service,” Jane said to the rabbi. Was service the word? “When she circled him. And ‘I shall betroth thee unto me forever.’”

  “‘Yea, I shall betroth thee unto me in righteousness.’”

  “What was the other passage?”

  “That was from Tobit. The story of Tobias and the angel. The angel takes him to his wedding, helps
him through it.”

  “We all need that.”

  “He marries his cousin Sarah. Seven men have previously married her and died on the wedding night, when they went in to her. Into the bedchamber.”

  “I see. A risk.”

  “The angel drives away the demon who’s at the bottom of it. He does it with a fish liver. The smell. You know how fish smells. Imagine how fish liver smells.”

  She laughed. “You should have read us the whole story. I don’t know that one.”

  “It’s in the Apocrypha. What you call the Apocrypha. Those books in question.”

  “And the rest is fact,” she said casually, but she couldn’t provoke him.

  “It contains some famous prayers. A lot of screwy stuff has gone on. You’ve got a fish grabbing the guy’s foot, you’ve got an angel, you’ve got marrying your cousin you never saw before, and this and that. But you’ve got these great songs of prayer. Two of them prayers for death. Prayed by characters who are going to live long and prosper.”

  “Prayers for death,” she repeated.

  “Some aging, some death. But you’ve got a wedding, and much rejoicing. Property changing hands. ‘You have dealt with us,’ they pray, ‘according to your great mercy.’”

  “Which part was the great mercy?”

  “For them”—he held up both palms to excuse them—“a wedding. For us? Who can say?”

  “So . . . a demon. Of weddings.”

  “Demons. A wedding could call them out. Not just out in the desert where you have mirages, crazy hermits, guys you might mistake for a demon. In Rome they wrapped the bride up in a veil to ward off evil spirits.” He waved at the chuppah now folded and leaning against a hydrangea. “So tomorrow, somebody comes and takes all this off your hands, and it’s all over and you can sit out here and drink the rest of the champagne.”

  “I’d love to,” she said, raising her glass as the waiter came to pour, “but see all those bottles? People are abstaining. A statement, I bet, a little reminder to our family. Kindly meant, of course. ‘We’ll celebrate, dears, but we’ll reign ourselves in just the tiniest bit.’ No, tomorrow I won’t be here. I’m going to see Mr. Mayhew at the home. Mr. Mayhew who taught history. He’s at Calling Creek now.”

  “The Residence,” said the rabbi with a flourish of his big drooping hand.

  “Do you visit?”

  “So far,” he said, drawing down an eyebrow, “they have not sent for me. No, I do a little Hebrew class in the development down there. I’ve seen the place.”

  “Well, it’s not a chain, and it’s better than where he was.”

  “I believe you’re right. I believe that is safe to say.”

  As soon as Tara had thrown her bouquet and run with Josh under the shower of rice and away, the garden had gone slack. The musicians sat slack in their chairs until Maggie went over to prompt them, people were eddying onto the screened porch or down the path to the steps where Jane and the rabbi stood looking at each other tiredly but with attention.

  People came to thank her, and press their cheeks to hers. “Jane, dear, your pretty dress, now what do you call that shade?”

  “Green,” she said.

  Now Maggie was supervising a grouping of the attendants for a photograph against the rock garden. Elaine waited where she had been placed nearby for a last pose. Dewey was weeping behind one of the tall flower stands. Because this daughter, his favorite despite being the most difficult, in her hair-trigger readiness to give and take back, the one who had very nearly ruined herself and the family before her belated decision to go away after all, go to school as they had begged her to do, a northern college where despite having little intelligence to speak of, she had had great success—this daughter who had gone halfway to death and come back, who had filled a hospital waiting room to overflowing, had a formidable beauty.

  Could that be all? Some configuration of eyes, nose, and mouth, some arrangement of colors? No, there was a violent health that let Tara go on swimming lap after lap when her teammates had dragged themselves out of the pool, let her hemoglobin purge itself of carbon monoxide as Mayhew’s would not. There was an almost mindless strength of will. But beauty was the thing on which everyone, even Jane, could pin some generalized longing. Tara in white coming on thin heels belying the slow power of her walk, her arm laced through her father’s without holding on, had caused a deep indrawn communal breath. So much seemed gathered in her, and ready to be strewn on all of them like the petals out of the little girls’ baskets. And yet what was strewn? Nothing remained of whatever it was, to be theirs, or help them.

  “HELP HIM,” TARA had said, her voice a croak.

  “How can I help him? You help him.”

  “How can I?”

  “What will you do if I help him?”

  “What do mean, do? Pay you back? Dad won’t let me have my money. I’m teaching swimming. Josh has another year of medical school.” Tara drew herself up proudly. “We’re going to have kids right away. God, Jane. We’ll pay you back. Don’t think Josh doesn’t know about Avery. He knows everything. He understands. He’s the first one to really understand.”

  “Ah, the first,” Jane had said, thinking, Must I help her? Just because a black-haired amorous little girl ran into my house whenever I came back, ran into my arms, followed me, gazed as I painted, and sent me valentines? “It’s not the money. I’ll get the man moved. There’s Calling Creek. I don’t want to be paid back.”

  “What then. What do you want.”

  “Redress. For him.”

  “But what, what, what? I wish I had died.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why didn’t I, why didn’t I die?”

  “You must not have wanted to.”

  “Jane, you are the cruelest person in the family.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  But Tara had known what to say. She had said, “I love him. I do, I still do.”

  THE RABBI RAN finger and thumb down the lines on either side of his mouth. “I knew Mayhew to say hello to. I had a son at the school. The boys were not as hard on him.”

  The girls had formed a pack, and turned Avery Mayhew in. It was Tara’s fault, though the town had stood behind her. And then the first girl admitted that she had exaggerated, and then they all said Mayhew had not flirted with all of them, or with any of them: they all said they had lied outright. To protect Tara. And then, after her screamed admissions—motels, cars, her own father’s tack room—Tara would not give him up. She went on, after ruining him, to further ruin.

  “We’ll have to kill ourselves.” That was the testimony. The paper ran it under two pictures from the yearbook. The words of a fifteen-year-old sobbing into a phone, the plan of an uncontrollable girl to which a grown man, a married man, had acquiesced. A teacher.

  “Well, I’m getting ready to paint him. He has agreed to sit. More or less agreed,” Jane rambled on. That was not true. “He was so handsome, if you remember.”

  “Hmm. I looked at your portraits in there. You don’t have a whole lot of interest in the face.”

  “Well, of course, portraits are about more than the face.”

  “There’s this,” he said ruefully, clasping his girth in both hands. “But it used to be we thought the face gave you away. You couldn’t hide, say, the fact that you chased little girls.”

  “But of course he didn’t chase them; they chased him, and they weren’t little girls.”

  “No? When does little end?”

  A girl slid past them and out of the garden, wearing two scarves tied together. “Well, I’d say by the time you wear that,” Jane said. Of course it was not two scarves but a sundress. The girl was carrying her shoes and somebody had wound the ribbon from one of the stands of dahlias several times around her upper arm. “And your son who was in school here, where is he?”

  “Philadelphia. Married. Studying to be a rabbi.”

  “That must make you proud. That he wants to follow in your footstep
s.”

  “Far from it. He doesn’t see much of us. They’re Orthodox. It’s not to punish us for how we did it, it’s just . . .”

  “Does God see these things?” she said conversationally. “See who gets punished and who doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know. God is far from us. I don’t have my own congregation, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Why should you? I just didn’t want you to assign my views to the community.”

  “If my community heard my views they’d run me out of town.”

  “You mean the rich?”

  “If they’d claim me.” Why strike the pitiful note? she asked herself. There’s nothing pitiful about me. But there was, the pitiful wish to be looked at, appreciated for burning-out pigments of skin and eyes and hair that had at one time caused a stir.

  “Artists. There’s your community. Art, as we know, is taken very seriously here.” He grinned. For some weeks that summer there had been a furor in the papers about a statue in front of a bank.

  “Art by people from somewhere else.”

  “Naturally. That’s where art comes from, somewhere else.”

  “Far away.”

  “Overseas.” After a while he said, “I would have said she was your daughter.”

  “Well, thank you.” Then she thought he must have meant because the wedding was at her house. “She is my favorite. I can’t help it, she always was. Her sisters were married here too,” she said hastily. “It’s a tradition. I’m sure you met them last night. There they are, over there with Maggie.”

  “No resemblance.”

  “I have no daughters of my own. I don’t really live here. When I was growing up I loved it so. I would race out in the morning to see my horse. I would ride with my mother. She named the horses after people in the Bible. Mine was Dinah. Dinah!” she cried, as if the mare could be summoned. “One day I turned my back on her. My mother. Everything is ruined. I hate my life.”