Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  Thus, with one simple question from her mother, Claire, the woman who had reduced the awesome New York Public Library to a manageable system for her needs, who had set up an international research team, who had systematically scoured the remnants of worlds gone by for the trails of jewels, who had marched with Alexander, Darius, and Augustus Caesar, who had seen Jerusalem fall and be retaken so many times in the Crusades, who had finally read the great message hidden from the Spanish empire by a Marano Jew, who had trapped the English bulldog in its lie, and who, more importantly, had found herself to be a strong and uniquely capable human being, who had dared to love, now was reduced to a nasty petulant little girl hating herself. She could have said bitterly, “Thank you, Mother.”

  But that would have perpetuated it. Instead, with great and painful tenacity, she forced herself not to proceed in this line of defense, but to remain quiet and vulnerable, awaiting Mother’s traditional silence. Ordinarily, she would attack more, feel more guilty, and then Mother would move in to pick up the pieces.

  Omar the Great used a similar tactic in capturing Egypt, Syria, and Byzantine Palestine for Islam. His battlefield timing was supposed to be impeccable. Claire doubted Omar the Great could have taught Lenore McCafferty Andrews a thing.

  “Are you going to convert?” her mother finally asked. Funny, that was the same thing Reb Schnauer asked when she had gone to him for instruction for Arthur’s family Passover seder.

  With Reb Schnauer, however, it was a far cleaner negotiation. Claire had simply said no and then, in hearing about how he had planned to help her, realized it would be like going to a neurosurgeon to find out about a headache. She just wanted to know about seders. So she had gone for the more digestible, if not more detailed, accounts in synopsis books, which felt in a way like cheating after so much original research on the cellar.

  “No, Mother, I am not preparing to convert. Why did you ask?”

  “I read where so many are doing it.”

  “Where did you read it?”

  “I think there was an article once about it in the Toledo Blade.”

  “Could that have been an article about one woman converting?”

  “Yes. It was a lovely story. So many are doing it, that’s why I asked.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, good. Not that I am against any religion. I just feel that the Jewish religion is best for Jews—do you know what I mean?”

  Stop. Don’t attack. Don’t say anything, Claire told herself.

  “Do you know what I mean?” Mother repeated.

  The answer had to be shrewdly pleasant, letting the thrust pass like Alexander treated the war chariots of Darius.

  “Yes, Mother, I know what you mean,” she said.

  “Oh … well … good,” said Mother.

  And it was over. Mother had not only been told about Arthur, but had been informed that he was Jewish and that Claire would not be coming home for Easter. As to living together, Mother had to assume it. And, therefore, it was as good as told.

  On the way to the seder in Hazlet, New Jersey, Claire asked Arthur if he were nervous.

  “About the killings?” asked Artie.

  “No, about seeing your sister Esther. I mean she’s like your mother.”

  “She’d like to be.”

  “But aren’t you nervous about what they’ll think of me?”

  “I love you. I don’t care what they say.”

  “What could they say?” she asked. She had dressed defensively in a plain blue suit, formal enough for the dinner but in no way exotic. She had swept back her hair tight in a bun so none would fly out, and her white blouse had a delicate collar so the suit would not exude any power. She wore a simple strand of pearls. Arthur’s answer was totally insufficient.

  “I don’t care what they could say. They could say anything,” he said.

  “Like what?” asked Claire. She grabbed the closest forearm, the one he was using to steer with.

  “If we’re going to make it there alive, you’re going to have to let me steer, sweetheart.”

  “What could she say specifically?”

  “Esther could say anything. She thinks like my mother.”

  “I hate that. Disapproval from someone who isn’t even there.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to disapprove?”

  “I’m not Jewish.”

  “So?”

  “Oh, c’mon Arthur. Don’t tell me they wouldn’t prefer I was Jewish. I mean, let’s be open about this.”

  “They probably would, so what? But they don’t know you. They don’t know you yet. Let them meet you.”

  “This could be the most important dinner of my life. I want to marry you,” said Claire.

  “Good.”

  “That’s it? Good? Good?”

  “They’ll love you, Claire.”

  “We’re talking about living together forever, and all you can say is ‘good’? Is that the great joyous affirmation of marital union? Is that what we’re dealing with?”

  “No, we’re dealing with your fear, darling,” said Artie.

  “Then tell me they’re going to love me.”

  “They’re going to love you.”

  “I don’t need sarcasm at this time. Now, was the seder better formalized in the Babylonian or the Palestinian Talmud?”

  “What?”

  “The Talmud. The Talmud. What you’re supposed to know and live by. It’s supposed to tell you everything.”

  “Ask my Uncle Mort. He’s what we call the melech. He actually does the seder.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know there’s a mention of the laws of the Mishnah. I remember Mishnah, if that’s part of the Talmud.”

  “You don’t know what the laws of the Mishnah mean, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not a good Jew.”

  “I don’t see you go to church on Sunday. How come you’re a good Presbyterian?”

  “You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian.”

  “Same here.”

  “Oh, no. Without adherence to the law in every aspect of your life, without the study of the Talmud, you are not a good Jew.”

  Artie knew where she got that from, the crazies in the black hats from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, nee Linzer, Poland. But he did not argue with Claire. She never said anything that she didn’t seem to be able to back up with several arguments, including her opponent’s. And in Judaism there were arguments going on for five thousand years.

  The rich fabric of Judaism, the laws and the people, the study and the practice, the constant interpretation of life and law, the meaning today and the history for which Claire had prepared—all came down to a somewhat overfurnished living room in a suburban community, with a Mercedes Benz sedan in the driveway, and the crucial words coming from Esther Modelstein: “So Claire, how long have you and Artie been seeing each other?” Esther, like the rest of the women, wore somewhat conservative dresses but adorned them with heavy jewelry. They all used more makeup than Claire, but Claire understood that if she had dressed as they did, they might find fault. This living room with the wall-length couch and track lighting over original prints and deep pile carpeting was really an examining room, with Claire as the specimen.

  “Long enough to appreciate each other,” said Claire. She smiled broadly. The test had begun. There was an attempt by Esther, a rather handsome woman, to put down Arthur and see how Claire would react, and Claire did not go for that. She did mention, however, that Arthur had great talent, great potential, and that she saw Arthur using it more fully in the future.

  “If running after people to arrest them is a future. I mean who would want to know the people he deals with?” asked Esther with a little laugh. The other women smiled.

  Claire smiled. She had to be careful here. She couldn’t allow herself to denigrate Arthur in front of the women, but she couldn’t directly disagree with reality also.

  “Arthur has many options,
and I think he is going to be using them more,” said Claire. There was talk about homes and children and husbands, and even a few jokes. But the women—there were four others, not all immediate family—understood every loaded question and every precise answer, even though there were smiles all around. And through this Claire Andrews proved herself sufficiently in touch with reality, specifically Artie, to be worthy of proprietary rights to him, heretofore owned by the family women whether Artie knew it or not.

  Artie and the rest of the men thought the women were having a polite conversation that was going rather well.

  “You’ve got a winner, Artie,” said Esther, giving him a peck on the cheek.

  “Yeah, I think she’s kind of nice. I love her. We’re getting married.”

  “When?” asked Esther, delighted.

  “We haven’t set a date yet,” said Claire. She was delighted, but she understood that this initial acceptance would be conditional, even precarious until they were legally married.

  “So you’re sort of engaged?” said Esther.

  “Like that. A bit stronger. I’m here,” said Claire.

  “Yes, you are, and we’re glad to have you,” said Esther.

  If the meeting lacked religious overtones, the seder, with the salt water to mark the Red Sea that opened on the Jewish flight from Egypt and the matzohs commemorating the unleavened bread the Jews were forced to eat, was an absolute desecration.

  While Mort conducted the seder in Hebrew, reading from the Haggadah, the rest of the family ignored him and talked of the New York Yankees, the stock market, how much television newscasters were making, women’s fashions, international politics, laser technology, bras, furniture that wouldn’t hold up, antisemitism, red meat, and cholesterol versus sugar as a danger to the human body.

  The only one trying to listen to Arthur’s Uncle Mort, and trying to follow the seder ritual, was the Presbyterian from Carney, Ohio. And she kept being interrupted to give her opinions of things. She felt cheated and thought Arthur had been cheated in his upbringing. She wanted to beg them to let the seder be the important event of the evening, but she dared not sound like the prophet Elijah, for whom the silver cup at the head of the table was named. She was here for Arthur.

  It was inevitable—the subject that had been in the newspapers and television a few days before finally came up.

  “Go ahead, tell them. It’s been on their minds,” said Artie. “It’s okay to talk here, I’m sure.”

  “Is this really the place and time to discuss it?” asked Claire. Uncle Mort looked up briefly, waved as though the family was a useless part of the ceremony and did not matter, and then went on with his seder.

  Reluctantly, and partly because they were going to talk about other things anyhow, Claire laid out her strange findings on the Tilbury Cellar before Arthur’s family, while Uncle Mort softly chanted Hebrew prayers, retelling a flight of a people from an empire that ceased to exist more than three thousand years before. And Claire knew this was a ceremony so old Christ Himself had participated in it, presumably with more religious attention.

  She told of the strange events leading to her discovery of the Tilbury Cellar, of the pall of death that hung over all who came in contact with its pieces. There were so many mysteries about the saltcellar her father had shown her back in Carney. The greatest was the fact that it had jewels at all. And such great ones.

  “Why?” asked Claire. She saw everyone at the table leaning toward her, except Uncle Mort and Arthur, who pried a piece of glistening pastry from a pile in a Wedgwood dish, careful to brush off the white tablecloth.

  “Listen to her, Artie,” said Esther. “This is interesting.”

  “I know it,” said Artie.

  “Shhh,” said another aunt.

  “What about the curse?” asked Esther.

  “Nonsense,” said Artie. “You get that much dough involved there are gonna be bodies.”

  “Shhhh,” said Esther. “Let her talk.”

  “It’s not the money and not the jewels,” said Claire. She knew the table was rich with ceremonial dishes, but unfortunately she was the real center. Her plain blue suit and plain makeup with the hair defensively in a bun were set among the more ornate Modelstein women.

  “Right, they found the ruby still on that dealer after his office was ransacked. Tortured,” said a round-cheeked nephew with curly black hair and blue eyes. Claire thought Arthur must have looked like that at his Bar Mitzvah.

  Mort stopped his prayers and tapped the dinner plate. He picked up the cup of Elijah and poured out ten drops as everyone joined in pouring out ten drops of their wine, representing the ten plagues God had visited on Egypt forcing Pharaoh to release the Jews.

  At this point, Claire wanted so much to stay with the seder, but the family wouldn’t let her. So she told them about tracking the gems through history, seeing them come up again and again, until once they joined that which would become the Tilbury, they were never mentioned separately again. The family especially liked the tale of the Seven Eyes of Seville becoming a message of evil, from the perfection of seven to the evil of six.

  “How did you know they were the same stones?” asked the nephew. “What if they were other stones?”

  “Good question,” said Claire, smiling. If only this conversation could have taken place in the living room, she thought. “A friend of mine in Bensonhurst says everything has questions, especially facts. And some have big questions and some have small questions. So for want of any other system I grade each fact according to believability, from highly probable down to highly improbable because on most facts we do not know for sure.”

  The men were nodding. They liked the way she talked logic to the boy.

  “So I would grade my answer to your question as only slightly possible. There were not that many diamonds that size at that time in history. They were not as plentiful as today. They were not a business then.

  “And so we take the most probable statement from a Jew that this thing is ‘not of God’ and add to it another statement from a Muslim toward another of the gems, the one hundred and forty-two-karat Jennings sapphire, the one with Poseidon enthroned. The Muslim was Omar the Great, and he mentioned in his Jerusalem chronicles that this sapphire or something it was attached to was a ‘lesson’ of some sort. And also attached to this cellar formed in 1588 was the great ruby that we know was given to Elizabeth’s mother by her father, Henry the Eighth, who took it back before he executed her.”

  Even Mort was quiet now, putting down the Haggadah.

  “And so a captain in the Royal Argyle Sutherlanders now tells us there are two of these cellars with Christ’s head rubies, Poseidon enthroned sapphires, and six polished diamonds, and he has the second one imitated, he says, from the original.”

  There were several snorting laughs around the table.

  “The first one supposedly is still where Britain claims it always was, locked in Windsor Castle without anyone allowed to look at it,” said Claire. “I will tell you I had a deuce of a time even finding out what it looked like. How Captain Rawson’s ancestors could have copied it, I don’t know. The Crown just didn’t show it that often, the last time, I believe to a Count Orofino Desini around 1600.”

  “So they’re lying. So what? Governments always lie,” said Artie. He didn’t want Claire whipping up a crusade at a seder table. It had been hard enough to get Claire to take down the maps and notes from the wall. He didn’t want his family pushing her into putting them up again.

  “A queen shouldn’t lie, not to Claire,” said Esther.

  “May I ask all of you what it really means to any of us if a queen somewhere for state reasons, whatever they are, tells a lie?” asked Artie.

  “Claire’s got a claim to this thing, too,” said Esther angrily. “That’s a big powerful queen there. This is a single lone American girl, someone you’re supposed to love, Artie. That’s what.”

  “Whose side are you on?” asked Uncle Mort.

  “A l
ot of people have been getting killed, if none of you noticed already,” said Artie.

  “You should be catching the murderers and not running away from them,” said the nephew.

  “Where d’you live, kid?” asked Artie.

  “She has every bit as much right to that cellar as the Queen of England herself. The law is the law. That’s it. If you don’t believe that, get out of the police department. You shouldn’t be there anyway, should he, Claire?” asked Esther.

  “I never saw Artie as a cop,” said Uncle Mort.

  “It’s your father’s cellar,” said Esther. “And if you need a good lawyer—”

  “It’s not my father’s cellar, and Arthur had the courage to help me understand that. He can be quite courageous if he has to.”

  “You’re in love,” said Esther.

  “I am, and contrary to popular opinion, love does not cloud the vision—it enhances it. I think you really mean infatuated, and that only with his good looks. I think he’s the handsomest man in the world.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “So what’s with the Tilbury Cellar?” asked Esther.

  Claire nodded. “Gems mean different things in different ages, such as diamonds meaning love today and wisdom in another age. But only when I was in Bologna did I see the sort of massed gems on a smaller scale that were in the Tilbury Cellar.”

  Claire paused, fingering her wine glass. Uncle Mort had put aside the silver cup of Elijah reserved for the head of the seder table, the melech. “They covered the foot bones of a saint. People didn’t so much revere the relic as something holy, but as something powerful. It could do things for them.”

  “It’s an Italian custom,” said a knowledgeable uncle.

  “No. Not just Italian. All of Europe was like that in the fifteen hundreds. I think the cellar hides a relic important enough to send a captain of the Royal Argyle Sutherlanders around the world searching for it.”