“Why do you have to dramatize? Why do you have to feel so sorry for yourself?” said Ruth wearily.
“I dramatize? I feel sorry for myself? The truth by you is to dramatize? When I say to you it’s your life, take it and do what you like with it, this is by you to feel sorry for myself?”
“Thank you,” said Ruth ironically, “thank you very much for giving me my life, for telling me that I can run around with men in the streets, for telling me that I couldn’t have felt the pain you did when my husband died, and for letting me know I don’t belong. All of a sudden I don’t belong.” Ruth’s voice was beginning to rise, to sound cracked and ugly in her own ears. Try though she might, she could not stop. “I have this much of a home, of a family left, and you want to take this away from me too. How much does a person have to give to be accepted, to be taken in, and not to have it thrown up to her that she is a stranger? When my child was born and right away you said that he would be named after your sons I said nothing. Did I ever say to you that I too had a dead father and mother whose names I wanted should live in my children? No! I kept still to please you, to please Isaac.” Ruth felt the tears rising and dug her knuckles into her eyes, trying to stem the onrush. But it came anyway, overwhelming now that it had broken to the surface. Stupid, stupid, she told herself, to become upset, especially now. What did he want from her? Why didn’t he leave her alone?
The sound of her sobs rasped along his nerve ends, quivered through his body to his fingertips. He had come too far. He had come, begging to know, to understand, and suddenly a mirror had been flipped up in his face and he himself stood revealed as he was to another – a stranger, an enemy, an egoist. “But I didn’t mean –” He grasped wildly. “I didn’t think then – What? You’ve held this against me all these years, without saying anything?”
“What could I say?” Ruth was sorry that she had spoken. “I let it go, I forgot about it. Never mind.”
“It’s not true. Who could forget about it? If you had said anything – You think I didn’t think of your parents? I thought of the boys – they were so young, their names should be carried first because of their broken lives. There were to be other children. Where are they? Did I say you should stop having children, just like that? And if you had said anything, a word, the child could have had a longer name. But no, you wanted to have something against me. You enjoyed seeing me trying to be a good human being, and saying to yourself all the time, Yes, but how he’s wronged me.”
“No,” said Ruth. “That’s not true. I didn’t want to push myself, to make a fuss. I knew how much they meant to you. It was your family, your house. I wanted to belong too.”
“My family, my house,” Abraham choked out. “As if I didn’t try to do everything for you that you wanted. How many times did I see you take the child and turn away from Sarah when I knew she was dying to hold him in her arms? Did I say anything? Yes, once I mentioned to you that Sarah liked to carry him around sometimes. And you said, ‘But I’m so afraid she’ll drop him’ – as though she were a cripple. As though she hadn’t raised three such, such godly sons. And never once did she drop them. But your son she wasn’t fit to hold, when holding him meant renewing her life itself.” Something inside of Abraham hammered a counterpoint to his words. Was this it? Was this the only communication they could make with each other, tearing like beasts at the raw entrails and the naked heart?
“I know you’ve blamed me for everything.” Ruth’s voice was low but razor-sharp. “When he died, and you came in, I could see by the way you looked at me that you were thinking, Why wasn’t it she? Why didn’t she die instead? And I wish it was!”
“What are you saying?” He tried to interrupt, but she went on.
“It’s nice to have someone to blame, isn’t it? Not only am I blamed for living, but now I killed Ma. I never let her play with the child. Something new? Sometimes I was selfish, keeping the child to myself, because I loved him, because I had something of my own for the first time in my life and wanted to hold onto it as much as I could. So I killed Ma by you. I killed Ma.” Ruth gestured at herself as she spoke. Then she leaned forward, her eyes fixed and her face slightly distorted in his eyes as she leaned closer. “And what about you? Who was it who wouldn’t let them take her to the hospital when they might have saved her life? What did we tell you? What did the doctor tell you? But no, you thought she shouldn’t go to the hospital and she didn’t go to the hospital. You know where she went instead.”
“You can say this? You can think this?” He choked on the words. It was as though another vital part had been slashed away from him, and he was all contorted, trying to hold his wounded members in place and at the same time trying to fend off with his own fury the fury that threatened to dismember him entirely. “All this time you have lived in the same house with me, calling me Father, fussing over me, and thinking this of me! I knew; she knew, I tell you. And the doctor knew too. She didn’t want to die among strangers. She begged me not to send her away. What could I do? Even the doctor said it wasn’t necessary. He sent the tent. He even said once it might be dangerous to move her. Do you think I would have kept her if – if I thought – I could swear by God, by the Almighty –”
“You thought. You and God together are always thinking. Whatever is convenient for you God happens to think. Where do you keep Him, this God of yours, in your coat pocket? What others think doesn’t matter. As long as you –”
“Yes, what I – Now I know where the atheistic thoughts came from, that were trying to pervert my son –”
“You know, you know; what do you know?”
He raised his voice to shout her down. “And I can still think a few thoughts yet.” She glanced toward the room where the boy slept, and he automatically lowered his voice. “I can still remember a few things yet. You’ve never had your way, have you? What about when you decided just like that that the child should have spectacles. Nothing would do but for you to take him to a doctor and get him a prescription so he should look like a little – like an old man and all the children should laugh at him. Did Isaac want him to have glasses? No! He needed them like I need the creeping plague. You had to show the neighbors that we could afford to get him glasses. How much does he wear them now? But you said glasses, so it was glasses.”
Ruth choked on a semi-hysterical laugh. “Thank you, thank you. I try to look after my child and now you tell me I make a fool of him. It’s nice to know how you really thought your own grandson looked. I took him to the eye doctor because I could see there was something wrong. If I hadn’t taken him then he might have had to wear the glasses all the time now. But no, don’t let me change your mind. It was just vanity. I just wanted to impress the bootleggers all around us that we could afford to throw away money on glasses.”
“It’s never been good enough for you, this house, has it? The living he made for you was never good enough. You’re too good to live with bootleggers. They don’t breathe like you, my lady.” Somewhere at the back of his mind there was a horrified admiration for the way he could rip her words from his own wounds and with a twist send them, like knives, whistling back at her.
“And when I was pregnant –” Ruth was sobbing continuously now, so that her words emerged in choppy, jetlike gasps. “ ‘A hospital? What does she need a hospital for?’ ” Her voice rose and fell as she imitated him, her arm extended in one of his characteristic gestures. “ ‘My wife didn’t need a hospital, so why should she go to hospital?’ ” Ruth buried her face for a moment in her hands. “What did it matter to you that I was frightened? You didn’t believe in hospitals, so that was enough. You wanted me to have my child like an animal, in pain. You didn’t have to feel the pain.”
Her sobbing was like that of a child, and like a child she looked, in a crushed heap across from him. Abraham was beginning to feel the hard shell of anger melting away from him, which had dulled the pain of her attacks. “I didn’t know you were frightened,” he said hesitantly. “But you went to the hospi
tal,” he reminded himself desperately. “I didn’t really stop you.”
“No,” said Ruth. “Isaac wouldn’t let you. Over some things he decided he had to be a man and not just a – a figment of your imagination.”
“A what, you say?” An ominous fear seemed to pervade him now, an anxiety not to hear any more, and a premonition about what he might yet be made to hear. The tension was building up inside him again as he faltered. “What is this figment?”
Her words toppled over his. “Why did he kill himself working at ten different jobs at once, if not to prove that he was something you thought he was? With a heart like his he had to run around from morning till night? You wanted one son should make up for three. What did you care that God only gave him heart enough for one.”
“It wasn’t ten,” he protested. “He didn’t work for me. How can you say he worked for me? He was working for you, for your future and the child’s. I didn’t make him work – and did you try to stop him?”
Ruth’s answer was a short, choppy laugh, disdainful, contemptuous, as it seemed to him. “Stop him? How could I stop him? I knew what it meant to him. You may throw my miserable life up to me. I know I’m nothing to you. But I tried. Every one of your crazy ideas, because you were Isaac’s father; I didn’t say anything; I didn’t mix in. How many times did Isaac come to me, even before we were married, and tell me–” Ruth choked on the words, covered her face.
“What did he tell you?”
The atmosphere in the room was like a live thing pressing down on them. Because of the child, because at the back of her mind was the thought, even in her blind anger, that they must not wake the child, Ruth had not screamed her words, but they had issued from her throat like jets of steam, hissing in his face, scorching him, searing his ears, which strained in spite of him to hear damning words. And somehow this sudden choking off of the flow, this sudden silence on her part was worse to him than anything that she had said.
“What did he tell you. What did he tell you?”
But Ruth, sobbing, shaking her head violently in the negative, kept her hands pressed tightly to her face. The sudden wash of regret that had cut off her words had shocked her back to reason.
Her unintelligible sobs, her sudden withdrawal that seemed like a deliberate refusal to answer him, left him in a sort of a vacuum. Inside himself forces pressed for an explosion. He sprang up, pushing his chair raspingly back from the table. He began to pace to and fro, like some animal pent up. He pounded one fist into the open palm of the other. “You lie,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell me you lie! What would my son say about me? It’s you who tricked him into marrying you with your nice words and pretenses. You think I haven’t noticed how, after he was dead, almost on his deathbed, you were painting your lips already and dressing and fussing over yourself? Right away you had to go to work.” He scarcely even heard what he said now. His words came rushing and pouring out. “When did you fuss for him, eh? And now that he’s dead and you know he can’t come forward to show how you lie you want to spoil for me even the little pleasures of memory. But he sees you. I won’t curse you for trying to tell me that I killed my own son. He sees you and that’s enough. He sees your lowness, your tricks. He sees you with other men, yes, and married men too – you admit it yourself. So, say something now, try now to come between me and my dead!”
“Pa,” she brought out, “Pa, I didn’t mean, it’s not –”
“No, nothing. I won’t hear it. Not another word you say. Enough of your lies. I know what you are now.”
The volume of her sobs rose; long, twisted reptile sounds snaked around him, enveloping him and crushing the flimsy coat of anger in upon himself so that he was suffocating with the actual, physical sense of their accusation. “Cry” – he made a desperate attempt to defend himself against them, but the very word was choked in his throat as he turned to flee from the contracting room. The ugly, broken wail of her sobs pursued him as he ran through the living room, the hall, and out of the house. As though invisibly propelled, he headed through the hot summer air, unaware of direction, scarcely aware even of the piston movement of his legs, and totally unaware that he was speaking his thoughts aloud to the night air around him.
At first they were jumbled thoughts, full of his grievance against Ruth, against the things she had said, against the sins of which she had accused him. But her words remained and curled themselves, like some monstrous growth, around all that he had thought was good in his life. And they were true. What things had he said to her? Even in defending himself he had degraded and besmirched himself, and now stood revealed by everything that had happened as something utterly different from that to which his soul had aspired. Never before had he quarreled like that, aiming his words like blows, not to enlighten or persuade but to maim, to hurt. How had he started; what had he meant to do?
Had he really been a man like that, selfish, thinking only of himself? What had Isaac thought of him? How had his dream appeared to them, his sons? Had they seen him as Ruth saw him, as he now saw himself? Was it for his own pride that he had dreamed his sons into heroes, so that he could boast that he was the father of such marvels? Was this why they had been taken from him? He had gone about, seeking only to know, to understand what had happened. Was this his answer, that not only the dream was lost but also the dreamer?
Abraham walked. He walked downhill to the very bottom of the flats, where the warehouses backed to the river. He walked upward again aimlessly, running sometimes with the urgency of his thoughts. He passed their house again, without noticing it. He passed Polsky’s shop, where, although the butcher shop and the delicatessen had long been closed, a light still burned from behind the curtain of the kibitzarnia, where often the game went on till daybreak. Never before had he felt this way, this internal accusation that he himself was not worthy, that it had all been his fault. “I wanted everything for the best,” he tried to reassure himself distractedly, aloud, “not just for myself, for them, for the world. If it was not meant to be, why did I feel it? Didn’t he save the Torah? It’s not true what she said. I made nothing up myself. I trusted.”
Two late pedestrians turned to watch the bearded old man rush, railing, through the night. Once a motorist swore at him. But he was unaware. Not until his thoughts had worn themselves out completely in their frantic dance and lay in one throbbing, undifferentiated mass, aching in his brain, did Abraham pause to lean his head against a fencepost; as though he could no longer support what it contained.
—
The warm wind of a summer night, tugging persistently at Abraham’s beard, pulled him gradually out of his stupor. Slowly he raised his head and looked around him. He pushed himself away from the fencepost and took a few steps forward. He stopped again irresolutely. Where? The stars, distant and cool, posed indifferently in the sky. There was no command. Only the wind, threading the hair on his face, whispered teasingly of life.
Gradually his surroundings assumed a familiar shape. His eyes focused on a window on the top story of a familiar house. There came to him the whole puzzling aspect of his life to which she, this woman, seemed strangely related. Hadn’t she lurked always in the shadow of their new life in the city? A shadow moved now, past her lighted kitchen window. Somewhere must be the thread to unravel the knotted skein. Others had been led. He would trust. He would follow. He would even, if necessary, demand.
He crossed the street. He started the long climb up the stairs. He was tired in every part of him, and every separate movement seemed to require his complete concentration. He labored upward under a growing heaviness, as though he were carrying his whole life on his back up an endless flight of stairs. With each step the burden grew heavier, the stairs longer, the object dimmer, and the need greater. Slowly his limbs carried him. Several times he had to stop to catch his breath. But he could not remain for long in the vacuum of no movement. He pushed immediately on again, for it was absolutely necessary to reach the top, as though something important, after this arduous jo
urney, must await him.
He stood for a moment in the dark of the landing, uncertain, with no more stairs to climb. Automatically then he groped for the doorbell. The sharp clamor of the bell was startling. He began to ask himself what he was doing here, but the incipient question lost itself in the dream familiarity of the moment. It had occurred to him at various times in his life that a scene seemed to welcome him back, as though he had been and was come again. All of it, Laiah’s face framed in the doorway, the instantaneous change of expression from frightened suspicion to surprised pleasure, nudged for a moment at his memory, as though this had been promised or foreseen, and was gone. What remained was her immediate presence, the way she pulled him, after one swift glance behind him at the door across the landing, into the apartment, and his own surprise and lack of surprise that he should be here.
“Oh!” Laiah gasped, leaning for a moment against the closed door and holding tightly onto his arm with one hand. “You gave me such a fright. People don’t usually ring my doorbell at this time of night. But come in, come in.” She moved along beside him into the light of the kitchen. “You’re welcome any time. I always tell my friends that they can drop in whenever they wish. But did you lose the key? Well, never mind…” Laiah could feel that she was prattling but could not, for the moment, attend carefully to what she was saying and deal with her internal feelings at the same time. The surprise, yes, she could have dispensed with the instant of fright when her doorbell had suddenly rung at this time of night. But his sudden appearance, disturbed – she could see he was disturbed; it must have been a struggle for him; she could understand that too. But here he was. She could hear herself chattering on, “…midnight snack. Sometimes I can’t get to sleep without it, would you believe it? Every time – it seems to me that every time you see me I’m eating. That’s where the weight comes from. But I was just saying to myself that in the old country we didn’t care about weight, did we? Everything was more natural there.”
The Sacrifice Page 32