“No. It’s my dream in life. Some of them are pretty cute. Nice bodies. Plus—”
“Stop it.”
“I’m nervous. The family, you know.”
“I’m the one who should be nervous, Russell. And you’re changing the subject.”
“I need a drink,” I said.
“Changing the subject again.”
“My dad makes a decent martini.”
“And again. You can’t give yourself totally to him. God comes to earth, you hold back. Is that what it’s going to be like to be married to you? Are you going to be one of these husbands who lives behind his armor? Out with the guys all the time? Talking sports all the time? Sex at night and silence in the morning?”
“Am I like that now?”
“No, but the way you are with Jesus worries me.”
“The way you are with Jesus worries me. And here we are at the street where my parents live, and we’re right back to square one again. Perfect.”
“Your fault,” she said.
“And you’re the one who knows. The therapist. The one who sits in judgment as people parade their troubles before you. As if you don’t have any of your own.”
Which was a terrible thing to say, a stupid thing. But I am not the finest human being in the world, and I’m not going to make myself out to be for the convenience of this story. In fact, after worrying over it, I have decided to include this personal material precisely because it demonstrates my, our, humanity. For me, for all of us, being around Jesus didn’t suddenly turn us into perfect lovers and perfectly happy saints-on-earth. He came down into the grit and dust and nastiness of ordinary life, and, while it hardly seemed to touch him, the reverse was true also: his divinity did not wash off on us. We still had our own expanding to take care of, our own bad dreams to wake up from.
I found a parking space a block from my parents’ house, locked the car, and we walked toward the front steps with a good three feet of air between us, Zelda smoothing out the front of her dress and me chewing the inside of my cheek and remembering I hadn’t brought anything for a here-we-are gift. Which, in my family, was a kind of sin.
FIFTEEN
My parents live in a triple-decker. For those who don’t know, a triple-decker is three boxy, one-story apartments stacked on top of each other, usually with three porches front or back and a flat roof. In the old days in North Salem, it was mostly recent immigrants who lived in triple-deckers: the Irish and Italians and Jews, the big families from Nova Scotia or Russia who didn’t have much money and weren’t quiet. My parents belonged to that basic demographic—Mom from a clan of dark-headed Neapolitans, and Dad’s people from the no-man’s-land that has been Poland and Ukraine at various times in history. He was a typical Jew: big, athletic, terrible with money. And she was a typical Italian Catholic: blue-eyed, and a lousy cook. Despite their own weirdnesses, they had been good parents to me, and excellent parents to my brother Steven Anthony Bernie Thomas, or Stab for short. Stab had been born with particular challenges and still lived with our parents in the triple-decker, which they now owned. They occupied the top floor and rented out the two lower apartments.
As we started up the wooden front steps I turned to Zelda and said, “My hair look okay?”
“Who cares?” was the answer.
“Thanks. You nervous, too?”
“Of course.”
“They’ll love you.”
I was trying to patch things up, but when Zelda got mad she thawed at the rate of snow melting on a December day in Nome. Up the two flights of stairs we went in painful silence. The smells—old wood, brick dust, paint thinner, the tenants’ cooking—swirled through my mind, stirring a million memories. On the small landing at the top, Zel moved aside so I could stand at the door, and I gave my signature knock—three quick taps, a pause, then two more.
I heard feet hitting the kitchen floor in a familiar fast rhythm, and my mother’s voice, “Stab! Walk! Please!” and then the door was flung open and my twenty-seven-year-old baby brother had his arms wrapped around me and was trying to lift me off the floor while making loud grunting noises, “Unh! Unh! UNH!” He eventually let go, grabbed my hands one at a time, and kissed them with a loud smack, and his face, his misshapen face with the almond eyes and loose mouth and bad shave, was lit up like a wet street in front of a house on fire. “Ma, Russ is here! Pa, Russ is here!”
It was a greeting that restored your faith in your own lovability. It was pure Stab. I hugged him back, kissed him, and then, with one arm around his shoulders, turned so that we were facing Zelda, and I said, “Stab, I would like you to meet my fiancée, Zelda Hirsch. Zelda, my great brother, Stab.”
“Mom! Dad!” Stab yelled out, and his big voice went booming back into the apartment, down the stairs we had just climbed, and out through the windows onto Shirley Street. “Russ is ENGAGED! His girlfriend is a FOXY BABE!”
Zelda reached out to shake my brother’s hand, but Stab was having none of that. Almost exactly her own height, he grabbed her by the waist and pressed his lips to hers, and then put his face to one side of her neck and squeezed hard. I could hear the breath being pressed out of her lungs. The next sound was my mom’s heels on linoleum. Another hug, another introduction.
“Oh, my sweetheart!” my mother said to no one in particular.
And then my father was behind her, booming out, “What’s this? What’s this news?” with so much relief in his voice that it made me laugh. Since the divorce, he’d been worrying that I’d gone gay. I knew it without a direct word being spoken, knew it from his anxious questions about girlfriends, about what had really happened between Esther and me, about what kinds of things I did when I wasn’t working. I teased him mercilessly. “I go to the clubs in New York, Pa,” I’d say. Or, “I’m always at the gym, getting buff.” Or, “I have to hang up now, they’re coming to interview me for Out Media magazine.”
In any case, I introduced him to Zelda and could see that he appreciated her, in a manly way, and I even liked it that he almost broke my fingers with his fatherly congratulations.
“What are we doing, standing out here?” my mother squealed. “Come in, come in!”
In my family’s house, you sat at the kitchen table even when you weren’t eating. Stab ran and got the extra chair and held it for Zelda as she took her place there. He then stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. And she endeared herself to me still further, and to the rest of the Thomas family, by putting one of her hands over one of his and holding it there.
“All right already,” Pa said. “I’ll run down to Schwab’s and get the champagne. We don’t have any in the house. Ma’s making blintzes.”
“Lasagna,” she corrected.
“Call and get Schwab’s to deliver,” I said. “We need to talk.”
A sudden silence fell over the little kitchen, with its old porcelain sink and gas stove, its crucifix hung discreetly to the side of one cupboard, its Give Thanks for This Day calendar, on which a bright, happy saying was printed below the name of each month: EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON AND THE REASON IS BLISS! and so on.
“What’s the matter?” Mom asked.
And Stab, still proud that he’d been vouchsafed the facts of life a decade or so earlier, said, “Is she PG?”
Zelda laughed.
“No,” I said. “We wanted to come and tell you about the engagement in person. You’re the first ones to know. That’s all.”
“So I’ll run down to Schwab’s then,” Pa said.
I put a hand on his arm. “Call, Pa.”
Pa called. Mom had already assembled her weapons—the ricotta, the flat lasagna noodles, the jar of sauce—and Stab sat with us at the table and asked Zelda one hundred and five questions, the types of things my parents would have asked if they hadn’t worried so much about her liking them: How had we met? What did she do for a living? How much money did she make? Had she been married before? Did she know that Russ had been married before and that “it hadn�
�t worked out, that’s all, nobody’s fault, it just hadn’t worked out.” Did she want to have children and would she like him to tell her how they were made? And so on.
When Stab heard that Zelda’s parents had died when she was young, and that she’d been raised in foster homes, he got tears in his eyes and kissed her on each ear. The nice thing about having someone like Stab in the family was that it was hard to keep secrets, and secrets are what eat families alive. Secrets, lies, the holding-back that grows larger and becomes habit as the years pass—we didn’t have much of that, and so even though the family was trays weird, as the French say, we’d never had any major troubles, and we felt the bond when we were with each other, and I was hoping that Zelda was feeling it, too, on that sunny afternoon and that she was forgiving me for my lack of faith.
It took Mom a while to overcook the noodles and get the lasagna in the oven, and the kid from Schwab’s about the same amount of time to hustle over with three bottles of good champagne. My father and I had a hand-slapping contest in the hallway as to who would pay, but I let him win, and soon we could smell the food cooking, and Stab was settling down, staring at Zelda and grinning a grin that would cheer up a dead man. In another little while we had the table set and were sitting around it with the food and Pa was raising a toast.
“To my famous son,” he said, and then he caught himself and added, “to the older of my two famous sons. And to his beautiful, smart, nice bride-to-be, all the health and happiness on the earth.”
“Amen,” my mother said.
“And good sex!” Stab said—it was the kind of thing he said in all kinds of company, in the supermarket, in church, at funerals—and I took it as a good sign that everyone laughed.
Zelda was sitting next to me. After the toast, and after we’d made some progress on the lasagna—which wasn’t half bad for a change; my mother must have rushed things, because she’d somehow avoided messing it up the way she usually did by deciding to be creative and tossing in a handful of chives, or some other original and amusing oddity she’d misheard on the Food Network—Zelda started nudging me with the side of her shoe. I thought, at first, it was a love touch, her way of making up. But after the second or third time, as each nudge became more forceful, I realized she was urging me to get the second big piece of news out onto the table.
I kept telling myself I’d raise the subject at the next pause in the conversation, or after the next bite of lasagna, or the next glass of champagne (Pa and I were both going at it a bit hard for that early hour). But I couldn’t bring myself to break the happy mood by introducing the Jesus Stuff. At last, the meal was finished, my mother was at the freezer pulling out three or four cartons of ice cream, and Zelda had taken to more or less standing on my new $215 wingtips with the heel of her shoe.
I cleared my throat. “There’s something else,” I finally managed to say, and I could feel my father’s eyes shift over to mine and lock on. My mother was doing what she always did when she got nervous: overfeeding people, bustling from cabinet to refrigerator, bringing bowls to the table, spooning out ice cream, four different flavors to a dish, without having asked what anyone liked.
“You got fired,” Pa said. The dime-sized birthmark on the side of his chin twitched.
I shook my head. “I quit.”
“I had a feeling. What—”
I held up a hand, looked at Zelda, told my mother to sit.
“She is PG!” Stab yelled.
“No, pal. She isn’t. Not yet. When that day comes, I’ll tell you first, okay?”
“Why did you quit?” my mother asked. “Were they giving you a hard time about your nationality?”
“He quit because we met Jesus,” Zelda said.
It was her inaugural venture into Thomas family conversation, and though I know she was trying to make things easier for me, it was, let’s say, a misstep.
“Oh, Christ,” my father said. By now, his birthmark was jumping all over the place.
“Arnie, stop it. You know I hate that,” my mother said.
“They’re Jesus Freaks,” my father practically shouted. Once he got started on an idea, once he formed an opinion, there was no stopping him. We’d be on vacation someplace, in a pool at some resort he couldn’t afford to take us to but had taken us to anyway, and he’d start in with some other guy about nuclear power, or taxes, or unions, and he’d be off and running. He was especially opinionated on the subjects of religion and politics. The “fake Christians,” he called certain groups of people. The “so-called Jews,” the “nut-Muslims.” “Mister Rich Republican with the Dyed Hair” was his name for our former governor. Like that.
“Pa, wait a second,” I said, holding a hand up to him like a traffic cop at the intersection of Proselytize and Debate streets. “It isn’t what it sounds like.”
“Sure it is,” he said.
“Pa, it isn’t.”
“Sure it is. You quit your job, you found Jesus. Plain as the nose on my face.”
“Arnie. Stop. Now.”
“Pa, willya?” Stab said.
“Gang up on me. Your brother and his wife are Jesus Freaks, he quits his job.” He turned to me and the hairs in his ears were twitching. “How are you going to support a family, can I ask you that?”
I sat back and looked at him for a few seconds. I said, “Pa, Zelda doesn’t know you. She’ll think you’re certified.”
“Gang up, gang up,” my father said.
Zelda put a hand on his arm, and he looked at her, startled. No one ever touched him when he got into these moods. “Mr. Thomas,” she said.
“Arnie.”
“Arnie. It came out wrong, what I said. Let Russ explain. Please.”
He grumbled and muttered and gnashed his crowns. “All right. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Nice impression you make on your son’s fiancée,” my mother couldn’t resist saying at that moment.
“Ma,” I said, and though I said it kindly it brought tears to her eyes. Stab hugged her, my Dad downed the rest of his champagne and poured another glass. I was ready to storm out the door. In short, it was the usual family scene at 98 Shirley Street. I took a breath and squeezed Zelda’s hand under the table. “Pa,” I tried again. “Ma, listen.”
“What about me?”
“Stab, my pal, I figured you were already listening. We have something funny to tell you. Not funny exactly, but different, okay?”
“Okay,” Stab said, and then, “Pa thinks you’re gay. So is Zelda really a man?”
“No, but thanks. Zelda’s not a man.”
“What’s the Jesus crap?” my father said. “Spit it out.”
“Arnie!”
“Don’t go crying on me now!”
“STOP!” I yelled, so loud that even Zelda was startled. And then, more quietly, “Stop. All right? Listen, just listen. After I finish talking, if you think I’m a nut, that Zelda and I are nuts, say so. Say, ‘You’re a nut,’ but for Pete’s sake at least give me a chance to say what I have to say.”
“Notice that he used the term, for Pete’s sake,” my mother remarked pointedly, to my father. “There are ways for smart people to express themselfs without taking the Lord’s name.”
“Start in on me,” Pa said.
“STOP!” I reached out and refilled Zelda’s champagne glass, and then mine. She drained hers. “What Zelda said is true, sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?” she said.
I held up another hand to her. “A month or so ago a three-year-old kid fell off a fire escape in West Z, and everyone thought he was dead until some guy stepped out of the crowd and apparently brought him back to life. I covered the story. I was skeptical. Very skeptical. But then, a couple weeks later, a girl who was dying in the hospital up in Wells River was cured, and the same guy was at the center of the story. So I’m skeptical again, but maybe a little less. The rumors were flying, okay? A couple of the big media outlets mentioned it, but they were careful not to make a big deal of it, not to make
it sound like it was real. Then this guy, the guy who apparently was doing the saving and the curing, he calls me on my private line. We had a sort of secret meeting. He was impressive, but I still wasn’t sure about him until he sent a dream to Zelda, and told me in advance that he was going to send it.”
“So?” my father said, when I paused for a breath. “This makes you quit your job?”
“He calls himself Jesus, Pa. He cured one kid and brought another kid back to life.”
“A trick. He’s a doctor with a complex. Big deal.”
“I thought so, too, but now I don’t think so anymore. I think he might be the real thing.” Zelda kicked me under the table. “I think he is the real thing. I’m sure he is.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“He’s running for public office and he asked me to quit my job and work on the campaign, so I did. Zelda left her practice, and now she’s working on the campaign, too.”
A stunned silence. They were all staring at me, though Stab’s eyes would occasionally flicker over to Zelda and then back again. “You met God?” he asked, in a voice filled with awe.
“I think so. Yes. Or at least some kind of holy man. I did. We did. You can meet him, too.”
My father leaned in. “Of all the things you ever did, Russ. All the stupid things—don’t let me make a list in front of Zelda here—and I include the marrying of what’s-her-name—”
“Esther!” Stab put in happily. My mother shushed him.
“This takes the absolute cake, okay? I think you might be a screwball, okay? A nut. Maybe it’s a good thing for your fiancée to find that out now rather than later. Save everybody some pain. Sorry. Just what I think. I’m being up front about it.”
My mother kept silent, looking at my father when he spoke, then at me, at Zelda, squeezing Stab’s hand. Her pretty blue eyes made the rounds of the table and then settled on my father and caught fire. “You atheist,” she said, icily.
He did not look at her. “I’m a Jew,” he said.
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