by J. J. Gesher
“How old are you?”
“Old enough to know that you can outlast me.”
Jacob sat down on a nearby bench. Langston scooted in next to him.
“Do you live with your mother?” Langston asked innocently.
“No. She lives nearby. A short bus ride.”
Langston was quiet for a moment. “When I grow up, I’m going to live right next door to my mom.”
Jacob smiled. Mothers and sons, an invisible cord. When he was Langston’s age, he tripped on the playground and banged his head on a bench hard enough to give him a black eye. Fearful of concussion, his mother stayed up with him all night—chatting about nonsense, playing board games, and nudging him to stay awake. As a boy, he was exasperated by her devotion. As a man and father, he understood completely.
Langston bounced the ball, shaking Jacob from recollection. He looked at Jacob. “Did your mom come to take you home?”
Jacob shrugged. “She’d like that.”
Langston took the ball and dribbled toward his house. “I hope you stay,” he called over his shoulder.
Jacob sprawled on the cot in the caretaker’s room. Because his mother claimed him, he could no longer pretend he belonged in Brent. He was grateful to Mo for giving him a home and to the choir for reminding him of his purpose. But it was Rosie—beautiful, intelligent, generous—who had reached him with her body when words could not penetrate. He was grateful for her kindness, yet ashamed of his desire. His mother’s presence caused a swirl of conflicted emotion. In making love to Rosie, had he sullied his love for Julia? His wife hadn’t been gone long enough for him to be with another woman.
His mother knocked on the door and opened it a crack. “Ya’akov?”
Jacob sat up, and Hava entered the room and sat down next to him.
She measured her words. “These are good people here. But they’re not your people. You need to be with your own.”
“All my life, you told me to be a good Jew. Look what it got me.” His voice rose in agitation. “All my life, you told me to stay away from the goyim, like they would poison me. They didn’t poison me. They nourished me.”
She waited for Jacob to finish his argument, and then she stated firmly, “I want you to come home to Brooklyn.”
“There’s nothing for me there,” he said flatly.
“Of course there is. You’ve got your students, your congregation. All your friends. Naomi’s children.” Then standing up she added, “your mother.”
Jacob turned his face away.
“Tomorrow,” Hava said gently. She shut the door behind her.
On her last night in Brent, Hava baked two desserts: apple strudel and cheesecake. Although Langston was usually a fussy eater, he ate both with gusto. After dinner, he did his homework at the kitchen table while Mo and Rosie cleaned up. Outside, Jacob and Hava sat on the porch.
Hava ran her hand over the rocking chair she sat on. “This is a lovely chair, Jacob. They taught you well in Israel.”
Hava knew immediately that her reference to Jacob’s rehab was ill timed. He was so distant this evening. He’d eaten his dinner in silence, not even complimenting his mother on her baking.
Hava kept up the chatter, hoping somehow to connect him to the present. “You got your father’s handiness. I can’t even sew a button on a pair of pants.”
Jacob cut her off. “I got nothing from my father.”
He saw that his words had pained his mother. Her cynical response caught him off guard. “Perhaps you’re wrong about that. Maybe anger is inherited…or at the very least, learned.”
The screen door creaked open. Jacob looked up to see Rosie silhouetted by the light of the house. The pinks and mauves of the scarf wrapped around her shoulders made her skin glow.
Rosie saw the two of them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Jacob rose from his rocking chair. “We weren’t talking about anything important.”
Hava wanted to disagree—Jacob’s relationship with his father was all-important, but she knew instinctively that she should make herself scarce. Jacob had hardly spoken all evening. The minute Rosie appeared, he came to life.
Hava excused herself. “I was going inside. The night air is delicious, but I’ve had enough. Gute nacht, zisse kinder.”
Rosie looked at Jacob for translation.
“Good night, sweet children.”
Hava squeezed Rosie’s arm, and then she kissed Jacob on the forehead and went into the house.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Jacob sat back down in the rocker. Rosie perched on the railing.
“Do you always speak German to your mother?”
“That’s not German. It’s Yiddish.”
“What country speaks Yiddish?”
Jacob smiled. “All of them and none of them. It was the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe. My parents would speak it when they didn’t want my sister and me to understand. So, of course, we learned it.”
Jacob continued rocking in silence.
When he finally spoke, his voice was subdued. “Right before my family got on the bus, my daughter Miriam asked me to buy her gum. She wanted me to teach her how to blow bubbles. What harm would it have done if I had bought her the gum? Maybe they would have missed that bus…”
Rosie was unsure how to respond.
Jacob continued, “Why was that basketball game so important? I should have been with them…”
“Stop. You can go round and round with ‘what ifs’ forever. The universe is indiscriminate. Completely random. It had nothing to do with you.”
Jacob sat with his anguish for a long moment. Finally, he asked, “What if I said that I wanted to stay here?”
Rosie studied his face.
“There’s too much pain back there,” he continued.
“The pain will follow you no matter where you live,” she said softly.
She left her perch on the railing and sat on his lap. She put her head on his shoulder, and they rocked. The chair creaked gently as it cradled them. They were as comfortable with each other as they were with the silence of the Southern night around them.
“We did what we were supposed to do,” Rosie whispered. “We breathed life into each other.”
Jacob said nothing for the longest time. The truth screamed at him through the evening quiet. There was a pattern to his life. He had run when he wounded his parents, he had run when he used drugs, he had run when his family died. Fight or flight—and he always chose flight.
He stopped rocking and took a deep breath. “I’m going home.” There—he said it. Until that moment he had been ambivalent. “I have to confront my grief. And I have to do it alone.”
“I know,” Rosie replied gently.
“We can keep in touch, phone, email…” he said hopefully.
“No. That will hurt too much…close your eyes,” Rosie ordered tenderly.
Jacob closed his eyes, and Rosie kissed each one.
“Now me,” she said. Jacob took her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids. It was understood. Only people who love you kiss your eyes. She leaned on his shoulder, and they rocked again in the still night air.
Jacob and Hava were scheduled to leave on the two o’clock train, so he had more than enough time to attend the Sunday service. Privately, Jacob tried to get Hava to join him.
“I’m not going to sit there with Jesus staring down at me,” she insisted. “I’ve never set foot in a church, and I don’t plan to start now.”
“Come hear the music.”
Hava was adamant. “The rabbis forbid it. A Jew cannot enter a church.”
“Visiting a church doesn’t make you convert to Christianity.”
“I know that.”
She felt the fear spread from her stomach to her chest. Jacob had changed, and she didn’t know him. Her Jewish identity was all encompassing and uncompromising. She was deeply disturbed by Jacob’s participation in church services, yet she didn’t want to argue further. S
he didn’t want to know how many prohibitions he had broken. All she had to do was get him back to Brooklyn, where no one would have to know.
She softened. “You go. Don’t worry about me.”
After breakfast, Hava watched Mo, Rosie, Langston, and Jacob cross the street and join the congregants arriving for the service. Hava went to the living room and turned on the electric fan. The morning was stifling, like Brooklyn in August. She stood in front of the fan, bending down so the moving air would cool her sweaty neck.
She set her overnight bag by the front door. Jacob had insisted they take the train back to New York instead of fly. The journey would give him time to adjust. When she looked out again at the church, she saw that everyone had gone inside. The service had begun.
Unable to contain her curiosity, she crossed the street and stood outside the sanctuary. Through the door, she could hear the pastor’s impassioned sermon.
“Oh Lord,” he began slowly. “You have tried my heart. You have visited it in the night. You have tested me.
“You—have—tested—me,” he repeated, with emphasis on each syllable. “How many of us here have been tested by the Lord?” The congregation responded with mumbled affirmations.
“How many of us have overcome sadness, illness, disappointment, and loss?”
Hava wasn’t sure she could ever overcome her own sadness, but finding her son had eased her anguish. Jacob had survived, brought from the depths of maddening grief by these kind people. She offered her own prayer and walked back to the house to wait for them.
Mo carried Hava’s bag to the truck. Jacob carried the coat that Mo had bought him at Walmart and a backpack with the few possessions he had accumulated. Rosie walked them to the curb in front of the house. She’d already offered the excuse of papers to grade so she wouldn’t have to accompany them to the train station. She’d never liked public displays of emotion, and hers were in turmoil. Quickly, she hugged and kissed Hava and then Jacob, and turned back to the house. She didn’t want Langston to see her so upset. It was important to keep up the façade that they would all see each other again.
By the time Mo’s truck arrived at the station in Tuscaloosa, the train was pulling in. Jacob bent down to Langston’s eye level to say goodbye.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said.
Langston took a round gray rock from his pocket and showed it to Jacob. “It’s slate.”
“I used to collect rocks when I was a kid.”
“This kind of rock comes from deep inside the Earth,” Langston said.
“And now it’s yours. That’s something else.”
“It’s my lucky rock. I want you to have it.” Langston handed him the stone.
Jacob carefully put the rock in his jacket pocket and hugged Langston close. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”
He stood up and turned to Mo. Their handshake turned into a bear hug.
“Must be gettin’ old,” Mo mumbled, turning away. “Can’t stop my eyes from leakin’.”
Jacob and Hava boarded the train. Mo and Langston held hands on the platform and waved as the train slowly pulled out of the station.
On a hill above Brent, Rosie sat in her car. From this vantage point, she could see the whole town. She imagined she could hear the far-off whistle of the train as it pulled out of the station. Rosie knew that Jacob had to go home. What she didn’t know was that her heart would break.
CHAPTER 42
Jacob spent the first week back in Brooklyn at his mother’s apartment, receiving guests and making small talk. He resumed the grieving process that was interrupted nearly a year before. People didn’t ask him where he had been or why, but he knew they speculated about it behind his back. Rabbi Weiss came in the afternoons, and they studied a passage of the Talmud together. Reading the ancient Hebrew text was familiar and comforting. Still, when a section spoke of a benevolent God, Jacob could barely pronounce the words under his breath.
Like the biblical Jacob who wrestled with the angel, he struggled with his faith. He had observed the rules—and what did that get him? He was the “good boy,” a dutiful son who’d turned into a “fine man,” a devoted husband and father. Why the punishment?
Jacob struggled to work things out for himself. The rabbi told him that he had also experienced a crisis of faith as a young man. Jacob dismissed him. The rabbi referred to the normative questioning of a young adult, not the barren skepticism of a man who had watched his family perish.
Jacob’s childhood friend David accompanied him one morning to visit the old row house he’d shared with Julia and the children. They walked through the silent house slowly, painfully. Jacob picked up the novel that Julia had been reading, the girls’ hairbrush, Yossi’s Yankees hat, hoping to find some comfort in the objects. Nothing.
David told him that his wife would organize a group of women to sort through the house and give the clothes and toys to the needy.
“Not yet,” Jacob said. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
Hava couldn’t resist writing Detective Rosenberg a note. She debated whether to walk into the station with Jacob, or call Rosenberg on the phone. She wanted to see his face when he discovered that Jacob was in front of him, not dead from suicidal grief. She wanted to wag her finger and give a big “I told you so.” She took out her box of stationery and wrote in perfect script.
Dear Detective Rosenberg,
Through the grace of God, we found Jacob.
He is home and healing.
Thank you for all your concern.
Hava Fisher
Jacob put off contacting Barbara and Steve, Julia’s parents, for as long as he could. His grief had subsided enough for him to function, and seeing them might tear the wounds open again. His palms were sweating when he finally dialed their number.
Jacob circled their Upper West Side block several times. He feared they would judge him for running away, and question why he stayed away so long. He couldn’t possibly tell them about those months at First Baptist. What could he say about Langston—or Rosie—that would not sound like betrayal? He nodded to the doorman on his way into their building. No turning back. When the elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, Steve and Barbara, noticeably aged, stood waiting.
Jacob saw emotions tumbling over one another on his mother-in-law’s face. She was excited to see him, and yet wounded that he was there without her daughter and grandchildren. Julia’s father stood, shoulders pulled up around his ears, both hands shoved into his pants pockets. He looked like he was going to extend an arm to shake Jacob’s hand, but instead both arms spontaneously enveloped Jacob. The two men held their breath trying to remain in control.
The three of them—once legally bound, but now permanently untethered—remained suspended until they could talk. Awkwardly animated, Barbara ushered them into the apartment, littering the hallway with half-finished sentences of concern and waiting coffee cake. Jacob prepared himself. Julia’s parents had questions that needed to be answered. He owed them honesty.
Jacob fell into a new routine. He moved back into his home. He couldn’t bear to change anything. He needed to live with his family’s absence, with the silence that penetrated his sleep. Although there were regular invitations from friends and colleagues, he preferred to eat at home by himself. His beard grew fuller.
He returned to teaching at the yeshiva. He was no longer the exuberant educator who acted out Talmudic arguments for his students’ amusement. The boys, in turn, no longer shared gossip or invited him to shoot baskets after school. They were scared to say something wrong, to show too much joy or enthusiasm. They were all afraid of Jacob, as if his loss were an infectious disease.
As Jacob walked the streets of his neighborhood, he could sense people sidestepping. His tragedy was well known in the community. Grief was his constant and only companion—when he woke in his empty bed, sat at the vacant breakfast table, stood on the crowded subway.
He knew what his community expected of him—a ne
w wife, eventually a new family. His mother’s friends were biding their time, waiting for Hava to give them a signal so they could make a shidduch, an arranged marriage, with a divorcee or a widow, someone who would bring him a “new normal.”
Being back in Brooklyn made him feel like he had never left. Sometimes, he’d pick up the phone to call his wife, and then remember that it was impossible. Even though so much time had passed, his internal body clock couldn’t shake the rhythms of family life—early waking, before-school schedules, homework, bedtime rituals. Once he put animal cookies in his basket at the supermarket—and then remembered there were no children at home to eat them. He took long walks to tire out his body so he could quiet his mind for rest. Sleep seldom came.
He gradually adopted a “fake-it-till-you-make-it” attitude, returning to the practices of Orthodoxy—eating only kosher food, reciting blessings before and after meals, covering his head at all times. It was easier to go along with the community than stand against it. He suspected that he would never vanquish his doubts about God and accepted his inner debate as part of a lifelong process, an argument between faith and doubt.
Jacob also found himself thinking of Brent. He wondered if Mo’s new medication for arthritis was working, if Langston had joined the peewee basketball league, if he was still practicing with the same determination. He wondered how the choir was managing without him. He often thought of Rosie, but he didn’t reach out. She’d asked him not to be in touch, and he respected her wishes.
In all his confusion, he knew one thing for certain: love mattered. What he felt for Julia and his children had been real, and even though he could no longer touch them, he could still feel the pulse of that connection. He also knew that what he felt for Rosie, even in his sleepwalking state, was a kind of love.
When Jacob felt strong enough, he returned to synagogue. His suit fit him differently—in the months away, he had grown leaner, more muscular. He put on his old black fedora and, with his mother, walked the three blocks to the synagogue. After months in First Baptist, the synagogue looked both familiar and strange. He was living in a time warp, alternating between feeling that nothing had changed and he’d been gone for only seconds, to feeling that everything had changed and his months away were a lifetime.