They’d been driving for about twenty minutes and had another twenty to go before they got to the bluff at Point Dume. “I only ask because I need to use the little girls’ room, Ma,” Edith said, though Roz suspected that she simply wanted out of the minivan and away from them. She was still and forever Daddy’s little girl, after all, and had been the most outspoken of the three the last time they were all at Point Dume, after they had all climbed back into the station wagon and Julian explained that once they got back to Dallas, he was moving out.
“Your mother thinks it’s best,” he’d said, pulling out of the scenic overlook.
Even then, he refused to take any responsibility for himself, Roz thought. At the time, though, she’d thought she’d finally taken her shot at sparing her children and herself even more grief, though she hadn’t been brave enough to go through with it in the end. Several years later she would try once more, with an equal lack of success. Her inability to leave the man kept surprising her, as if her attachment to him was a separate entity with separate wants and desires and not a part of her—how different our lives might have been if I had been able to control it, she murmured.
“What? What was that, Ma?” Edith asked, and for the first time that morning, Roz registered fear in her daughter’s voice.
“You think I’m stupid, dear?” she asked, eyeing Dietrich, who she imagined gave her a conspiratorial grin out of the side of his mouth. “You must think I’m a monster. Well, maybe I am. But I can’t possibly let you out of the car just yet.”
“You can justify this any way you want to, Ma, but this thing we’re doing is just plain uncivilized. I know what kind of man he is—was,” her daughter said. “Only weren’t you always telling us to blame his behavior on the way he was raised? Blame the environment, not the individual, you said. Besides, he was my father and now his skin’s all blue and he’s sloshing around in wet pajamas, freezing to death. It’s indecent. You could at least turn on the heat back here, Ma. Dietrich, make her turn on the heat.”
Roz couldn’t help herself and laughed quietly, wheezing for breath. She could feel her heartbeat, a terrible sign, a thick, boisterous thwack against her rib cage. “I’ll humor you,” she said, removing the oxygen from her nose to turn around in her seat and address her dead husband directly. “Julian, your daughter thinks that you’re freezing to death. I’d like to point out the black humor in her use of the phrase, and ask you if it’s true: Are you freezing to death? You can tell me, but you’ll have to speak up,” then she laughed again, which rousted the others from sleep, though not Julian, who remained quite dead to the world, she thought, mirthful. Oh, what pun I’m having.
“Oh, Ma, for shame,” Edith scolded.
“What? What’s going on?” Mo asked with a start. “I dreamed I found where the old man stashed the Afikoman, and every last one of those Krugerrands was mine.”
“Those coins belonged to my parents,” Roz said. How utterly like Julian to turn a happy, innocent game into a blood sport, pitting his kids and grandkids one against the other. This year he’d even outdone himself by hiding it on his own person, which was, even for Julian, beyond the pale. “He had no right to them. No right at all,” she said indignantly. “When we get home, I’ll divide the coins up.”
“Isn’t it a little late now to find your inner feminist, Ma?” Edith asked. “I mean, no offense, but it seems pretty silly to cry over spilled doubloons since you spent your entire life letting him hold your money hostage.”
“Edith, how about showing some compassion, huh?” Jacob said.
“Oh, you mean like she’s showing Daddy? Like she’s showing any of us?” she asked. “I cannot believe I’m a party to this. I teach ethics, for fuck’s sake! They’re going to chuck me out of the academy. But we can make it right if we just turn the van around, go back to Mo’s, and call the authorities. What do you say, y’all?” Edith’s adopted Georgian brogue deepened whenever she was nervous.
“Now, Jacob, your sister has a good point,” Roz said. “I don’t want any of you to think I’d ever stop loving you or hold a grudge if you didn’t want to help.” She had expected their loyalty and cooperation but realized that making them accessories after the fact only intensified her sense of wrongdoing.
For a second, the air in the car went stiff and silent, as they descended the steep, winding hills of the canyon, Roz’s ears popping from the change in altitude. Jacob leaned forward and set his hands on Dietrich’s shoulders, kneading them gently. The sight of her son being so open with his sexuality had an odd, calming effect on her, and she shut her eyes, imagining Julian’s fingers on her own shoulders. She could not recall a single moment in her marriage when Julian had reached out spontaneously to stroke her cheek or grab her hand or tousle her hair. Physical affection hadn’t been in his DNA, and she’d come to terms with that, because she’d had her kids, most of all Jacob, to love her.
After that moment on the cliff, when they’d made their decision and then unmade it, Roz stopped examining the life she might have led without Julian and instead began to live the life she had chosen with him. The decision had really been made years ago at her mikveh, her Jewish cleansing ritual, when she’d been reborn as Rifka, a testament to her revived covenant to Adonai and His reclamation of her, as the rabbi who supervised her conversion explained.
As Julian liked to remind her, she was already a Jew because her mother had been born one, so it was an utter waste of time to go through the hoopla of converting back. But it wasn’t for herself that she’d embraced the conversion, attending Torah study three nights a week and brushing up on the trials, intifadas, inquisitions, and tribulations of the Jewish people—all these rituals and rites of passage she should have already been familiar with but wasn’t because she’d been brought up a staunch Catholic, the religion forced upon her by her fearful immigrant parents. No, Roz converted back for Julian, because she wanted to be a good Jewish wife to him and a good Jewish mother to his children, which was why she’d gone to such lengths to renounce Christ. And in the beginning, she attended services at the synagogue with a fervent dedication and really got into Shabbat, the rituals surrounding that most holy of days. Yet like everything else, Julian let her know where she faltered and when, how she kept bungling the blessings over the candles, how her Hebrew was rudimentary, until she felt as if she’d converted for nothing—she felt fraudulent, not Jewish enough for Julian or for her in-laws, who looked down on her, and certainly an absolute failure in her mother’s eyes—“What rational, thinking person,” Trudy Overland had asked her on her wedding day, “chooses Judaism willingly? Not even for love would I have done what you did, Rosalyn. And you’ll find that Julian Jacobson will make the worst kind of husband because he is the worst kind of Jew.”
Flabbergasted, Roz decided never to speak to her again. She told Julian that her mother was nothing more than a self-hating Jewess masquerading as a disillusioned, bitter hausfrau. She omitted what her mother had said about him because why give her the satisfaction? That Trudy disliked him because he was a Jew made about as much sense as her fervent belief that her German neighbors were Nazis. All of it preying on Gertrude Oberlander’s imagination until she ended up drowning herself in the duck pond at the end of the block.
Roz heard heated murmurs in the backseat, Edith’s beseeching recriminations and her brothers’ replies, all of it inaudible to Roz, who detected mutiny and decided to deal with it justly and swiftly, or else lose the fight or, even worse, her children. She was about to give the rebellious trio a much-needed pep talk about loyalty when the front seat filled with humming. Soft and gentle, then increasingly loud, and she understood then what Dietrich was trying to do.
At first, Roz was outraged that he would hum what sounded like the German national anthem. Though far less vituperative than Julian on the subject of the Holocaust, Roz still took offense with Dietrich’s tasteless choice in tunes until she realized what it was and looked upon this blond-haired, blue-eyed young man differently
. Julian had loathed Dietrich’s Aryan looks, going so far as to ask him during a lull in the Seder if he’d packed his Hugo Boss, a crass reference to the supplier of the uniforms of the SS and the Hitler Youth, a query that seemed to cause great consternation among her three children and resulted in a breathtaking sequence of dirty looks and silent exchanges between them, though she couldn’t figure out why they’d taken such exception to this particular offense of Julian’s. Roz didn’t laugh along with Julian, yet she also did nothing to rebuke him. She had learned long ago that it was better to let Julian have his bit of fun than to interfere.
Looking at Dietrich sitting there with his back straight and his fingers still gripped around the wheel precisely, she cringed at the uncomfortable memory. For years, she’d been complicit, had said and done nothing to protest against Julian—alas, she thought, Edith was right—and for the first time since she’d hovered at the edge of the pool and looked down at the body of her husband spinning in slow motion through the bloody water, she understood that she herself might have been the agent of her own demise, her own angel of death. How much longer could her body have borne the swallowing down of regret, disgrace, shame, rage, and hostility? Of course it had broken down under the weight of her silence.
She glanced out the window at the rushing blur of inky-black hills, while Jacob jumped in at the beginning of the second verse and then Mo came around and joined them in the third. It took Edith until the sixth, yet there she was, singing along with her brothers and Dietrich, who led them in this rendition of “Dayenu,” which was exactly what she’d had—enough—when she’d begun to hatch her plan after Dietrich’s confession on Thursday.
“ ‘Day-Day-yenu, Day-Day-yenu, Day-Day-yenu, Dayenu Dayenu,’ ” they sang, their voices filling every crevice of the minivan and crowding out the unnatural darkness that had seeped out of the far backseat. She had tried her best to be a good, caring wife and a good mother to his children. She had left her childhood home, family, and friends behind in New York and had followed him down to Dallas, because she knew without having to be told that that’s what you did for the man you loved—like Jacob had done for Dietrich, she thought, listening to them harmonizing, Jacob a tenor, Dietrich a baritone. So what if they sang off key; at least they were singing.
She and Julian never sang. They had sex twice a month, then not at all these last dozen or so years. They took walks around their planned and gated community. They met friends for dinner and went to the movies. Mostly he chose, just as he chose where they went on vacation, how long they would stay, and how they would get there. The idea that she would live out the rest of her days alone in that gigantic house on Christopher Columbus Court suddenly overcame her. If her children had been listening, they might have misconstrued her nervous giggles for sobbing. She kept her face turned to the glass, humming to herself, Ding, dong, the kvetch is dead.
While the kids went on singing and the eastern sky gradually undid the dark, Roz increased the dial on her portable tank another notch, drinking in the rush of oxygen, which made her giddy, as if she’d swallowed a magnum of champagne. She was drunk, twirling around with Julian at Edith’s bat-mitzvah reception, the last time they ever danced together, and then she was sneaking off to meet Doug Butterfield behind the bema, where, among the black choir robes, they held hands and kissed like the star-crossed high-school sweethearts they had once been. No one suspected a thing. A second chance, a way to redeem her failure after Point Dume, to untangle from Julian, to resettle in her beloved New York City, to renounce Judaism. She could divorce Julian and remove her children from his house, from the arid wasteland that was Dallas, and return herself and them to civilization, the sumptuous offerings of Manhattan: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, the New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, Walter Reade Theater, and even the streets themselves, which teemed with life. She would make it up to them for having had to endure the unbridled tyranny of Julian Jacobson and detoxify them by exposing them to New York—now wouldn’t that be something.
The next day, the Sunday of Edith’s bat-mitzvah weekend, Julian and Roz were to hold a brunch at their house for the out-of-town guests and relatives. Well before dawn, Roz woke the kids, told them to get dressed, then hurried them to the car, Edith sniffling, whining, and asking where they were going without Daddy. “On a trip,” Roz said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” the girl snapped, then fell quickly back to sleep. Mo sat in the passenger seat, sullen and contemptuous of Roz for having interrupted his sleep—he was like his father that way, not a morning person at all—while Jacob, in back of Mo, wet his finger and drew on the window. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what he was writing and froze, because it looked as if he’d spelled out D-O-U-G, though when she blinked, she saw he’d formed a word even more eerie and surprising: D-E-A-T-H.
“Jacob, are you all right, honey?” she asked soothingly.
“Oh, yeah, I’m swell. I was just thinking that what you’re doing will kill him.”
She understood what he meant—that this would ruin Julian, that it would take him a long time to get over it, if he ever did. But hadn’t she heard the faintest whisper of hope in his voice when he’d said it? “Jacob, honey, you don’t actually want your father to die, do you?” she asked tentatively.
“What you’re doing is good, Mom. It’s a good plan,” he said. “It’s not like he doesn’t deserve it. The only problem is, well, I guess it might not kill him. A few months from now, he’ll just find another woman to marry, then she’ll give him a new family to torture. So it’s a good plan, but it’s also a faulty one. If you want to kill him, I think there are better ways to go about it.” Leave it to Jacob, her death-obsessed, precocious boy, to say what was on his mind and, if she were honest, what was on her mind as well, as chilling and disturbing as it might have been. “I mean, there are ways to go about torturing him the way he—”
“Jacob, stop,” Mo said.
“—tortures us. You could, for example, leave him for another man. I mean, that’s what I would do,” and he pressed himself against the front seat, his hot, sour breath in her ear. “That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? So who is he, Mom? Is it that guy at Edith’s reception, the big one who looked like a fat Ken doll?”
The light changed to green, but Roz couldn’t make the car go. She sat there, staring with hard, glassy eyes at the light, which turned amber, then red again. She never could put anything over on Jacob, who knew her better than anyone, including her own husband. There it was again, that tremendous bond of theirs, which even Roz occasionally found unnatural. Jacob knew she was being crushed under the profound, indelicate weight of her marriage, as a woman, a wife, a mother. She had to get out from under it or it was going to pulverize her. Jacob had been begging her for a while to leave Julian’s house and never look back.
“Who? Huh? What are you babbling about, Jacob? Mom’s not leaving Dad for a guy named Ken. Are you, Mom?” Mo asked, absolutely unable to believe that she, Roz, would ever do such a thing. Moses, her eldest, her dumb jock of a son, did not possess an ounce of Jacob’s self-awareness. Another reason she had to leave. It pained her to think he might become more like his father with age and that under Julian’s tutelage she could turn around one day to find Moses an equally unseeing, narcissistic, and supercilious man. She feared he was becoming a bully. And just to prove her right, he reached back and smacked Jacob in the face with the open palm of his hand.
Jacob howled, waking Edith, who screamed, “Mom, Jacob’s nose is gushing,” while Roz pressed down on the gas, and they shot through the light.
By the time Roz pulled the car into the IHOP parking lot down the road, Jacob’s chin was dripping with blood, soaking the neck of his T-shirt. Now they had to flee for sure or else face Julian’s wrath once he laid eyes on his youngest. There is no way I can manage it, any of it, she thought, settling Mo and Edith into a booth—“She’ll have a sugar-free hot chocolate wi
th sugar-free marshmallows, if there is such a thing,” she said to the waiter, who looked upon her with pity. She gave him an awkward half-grin, then led Jacob into the women’s toilet to take care of what she feared was a broken nose.
After inspecting it, she determined the nose was merely bruised—she knew broken when she saw it thanks to football- and basketball-playing Mo, whose nose had already been reset twice in his fourteen years. The bridge was swollen, the skin throbbing, yet Jacob was far calmer than she was, even as he demanded that she make Mo apologize for his brutality and then turned the scrutiny on himself.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I was being disrespectful to you,” he said. She found his restraint unnerving. In the mirror, she caught sight of herself, her wide, sleepless eyes, the unmade-up face with its new lines that she was sure had not been there yesterday, and shockingly, streaks of her son’s blood in her long flaxen hair.
She rinsed out her hair—she had no memory of running her fingers through it, but then it wasn’t every day she wound up with blood on her hands. She looked at the dizzying profusion of blood that had run down his chin and neck, sopping his T-shirt. The sight of him conjured in her a fierce resentment toward her eldest, but she tamped it down and told herself to let it go because this wasn’t her battle, it was Jacob’s. Still, she wondered if it’d go down in that little notebook of his: May 26, 1994, Mo bashed me in the nose with the palm of his hand. I’m sure he’ll never apologize.
Roz cleaned him up as best she could, using the last of the paper towels in the dispenser, dabbing gently at his nose, the blood caking his nostrils. She was surprised he didn’t balk when she moved down his long, lean torso, wiping away the dark speckles. He remained his usual pliant self, bending and bowing to her every command without pother or back talk. It was the sort of moment between them that imbued her with the hope of a renewed intimacy between mother and son, a return of the casual comfort that they hadn’t had since he’d become more aware of his body. If it’d been either of the other two, she would have had a rebellion on her hands, but not with Jacob, whose concern was the only thing that stood between her and the oblivion of her marriage. She’d been so lonely for so long and here, finally, was an ally, a vital piece of herself that had gone missing ages ago and that had been made flesh again in Jacob.
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