The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates

by Jacob Bacharach

  “Yes,” Abbie said. He stood in the threshold. As they walked back to the big truck that they’d somehow arrived in silently, the smallest, who’d hardly spoken, turned back and said, “Yinz have a blessed evening. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  Then, once again, there was nothing, no word or indication that anything was ever going to happen, and the evening took on the retrospective fogginess of a dream. Arthur Imlak stopped by several times in the interim. No one ever said anything about anything. They gossiped about people at the club. Arthur amused them with the story of a dispute between the Chislett brothers, the one of whom had long imagined building a sort of hunting lodge and entertainment complex near Laurel Caverns, the other of whom felt gambling was an affront to the Christian God. “You know,” Imlak said. “Guns and slot machines. There are rumors that Harrisburg is going to approve gaming soon. Lord knows, we need something other than the lotto to part the poor from their hard-earned disability.” He smiled down at Isaac. “Don’t you agree, big guy?”

  Little Isaac said something that sounded very much like, “Fuck.”

  Imlak grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Fuck.”

  • • •

  There’s a police report, and there was a brief news clip at the time, which used the word accident. Veronica and Phil and Edith were out touring the property on a drizzly Sunday. The plywood on the framed-in houses was turning dark with rain. The newly excavated foundation holes were full of mud. Veronica was in a good mood. She’d even, after the arbitration, managed a halfway reconciliation with her brother, though she thought that he regarded her oddly, uncomfortably, whenever she came to the house to see her nephew. Isaac was quite taken with her. He as yet had trouble with his Rs and called her Wanny. She’d never especially cared for children, but she loved the giggly, swishy little boy. She wondered if she should tell her brother that his kid was definitely going to turn out to be gay. She expected to visit them later that week.

  Then there were three men coming over the hill. It didn’t immediately occur to either woman what was happening—they might have been contractors, or local guys looking for a place to drink beer and smoke. But it was immediately clear to Phillip Harrow what was going on, as he later told the police. “I only saw it one other place,” he told them. “Back when I was in college. I worked at a construction company one summer up in Cleveland, and the plumbers were on strike, so they tried to hire some non-union guys, and then a couple of guys from the local if you know what I mean showed up to straighten them out. It was the same look.”

  So Harrow puffed his chest and crossed his arms and waited until the men arrived. He noted, as Abbie had, that they appeared unfinished, cobbled together from the ugliest parts. “You’re trespassing,” he said.

  The big one turned his head as if about to consult with one of his companions, but it was a feint. He struck Harrow once, backhanded, across the face, so impossibly hard that his feet lifted off the ground as he fell.

  “Oh my God.” Veronica put her hands up in front of her. She became, as she did when she was afraid, immediately lawyerly. “Whatever it is, whatever it is, I’m sure we can work it out,” she said.

  Harrow groaned and lifted himself on an elbow. “Motherfucker,” he said.

  “Yes we can,” the big one said. He took another step.

  Veronica mostly thought about the cell phone. She’d left it in the car. At that time there was barely any reception in that part of the county. “What do you want?” She imagined they were about to be robbed.

  Harrow had got up and lunged at the man, who stepped—for his size, daintily—aside and, as Harrow stumbled past, planted a huge, steel-toed kick into his ass, sending him skidding face down in the mud.

  Edith turned and ran. Can you blame her?

  “Hey!” one of the men—Boochie—yelled. “We just wanna talk to you!”

  She ran down the grassy hill and through the wide gully beside the highway. That stretch of it had opened to regular traffic a year earlier. Veronica called after her, and those men called after her, but she was running and probably didn’t hear. An irony: had the development ever been completed, the Department of Transportation would have erected a wire fence down there to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. She clambered up the incline to the breakdown lane beside the highway. Almost no one used the road then, or ever used it, other than a few long-haul truckers who knew that it was a quick shortcut down to I-68, that it beat the low-gear haul up over the mountain on 40. You have to assume, the police later suggested, that she intended to wave down a vehicle in some obscure and probably vain hope of getting a motorist to call for help. Veronica called after her again. Edith heard her. She stopped in mid-wave and turned back. The driver never saw her. The weather was weird, humid and rainy, and his windshield had been fogging up even with the windows open and the defroster on. He didn’t even hit her head on, just clipped her. But he was doing seventy-five, and he was hauling a full tanker of gas. He weighed just under the legal max of eighty thousand pounds. You can imagine. There’s nothing a human body can do but break beyond repair. He braked too hard when he realized he’d hit someone. The truck jackknifed and lifted off the road. It rolled and skidded. A few seconds passed. There was a lick of flame. It exploded. The force of it knocked those of them who were still standing to the ground.

  13

  “So Mayer,” Adam Martens said, “how come you never told me yer joosh?”

  If in his mind, Isaac said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” and walked invincibly away, then in the second-floor hallway of Laurel Highlands Junior High School he looked at the speckled linoleum and muttered, “I don’t know.” Elementary school had passed, for Isaac, as a largely undifferentiated blur, unmemorable and accidental, friendships determined by proximity, the coming and going of days like the cycling passage of time before the invention of history. In the evenings, he’d help his mother do the dishes while she had her extra glass of wine; in the mornings, Abbie would drive him down the mountain and drop him off at school, bellowing some aria or other and conducting with both hands as he steered with his knees.

  Now everything had a brittle intentionality to it. Kids from all of the different elementary schools mixed together, and friendship was a matter of secret affinities that he didn’t understand. How could you know what anyone liked until you became friends? It was as if the other kids had developed a form of telepathy over the summer and self-organized based on some Linnean principles of common interest to which he had no access. They’d all grown larger, and he felt tiny. On the first day, he’d said hello to a girl in his homeroom whom he’d known since the first grade. She looked at him as if he had worms growing through the flesh of his face and said, “Gawd.”

  Since then he’d kept his head down and moved with a discretion bordering on invisibility. He spoke only when called on, although Mr. Krupp, his English teacher, had taken an obscure liking to him when Isaac was the only student who could name the eight parts of speech. In fact, he’d forgotten interjection, but he divided verbs into lexical and auxiliary, and this caused Krupp to actually get down on his knees in front of the class and cry, “Be still my heart, boy. My life isn’t wasted after all!” Everyone looked at Isaac and laughed at him, but he felt, hazily, for the first time that year, as if he belonged to something. Krupp, meanwhile, ignored the laughter and kept going. “But you forgot,” he said, and he climbed onto an unoccupied nearby chair and hollered, “INTERJECTIONS!” The chair slipped sideways and Krupp went sprawling across the floor. “No, don’t help me, I’m fine,” he said. He conducted the rest of the class lying on the ground.

  Most of the kids thought Krupp was a weirdo, not only for his behavior, his habit of mock-weeping when students were wrong (i.e., frequently), his occasional decision simply to play audiobooks unrelated to any particular lesson plan for an entire class period, excerpts from literature and biographies that edged into the inappropriate and indecent—Isaac, particularly, remembered a segme
nt from a history of Catherine the Great which wavered on the edge of the pornographic in its depiction of her sexual awakening—but also for the fact that they frequently arrived for second period to find the room darkened, the blinds drawn, and Mr. Krupp at his desk with his head on his arms in the dusty twilight. Alone among all the teachers Isaac ever had, Mr. Krupp kept his desk at the back of the room, and the kids would file in and sit uncomfortably at their desks until—sometimes as much as ten minutes later—their teacher would begin talking at them from behind. Once, one of the girls flipped the light switch as she walked into the room, and Krupp moaned and cried, “The light! The light!” Isaac, of course, recognized some of these symptoms from Sarah, who rarely left her bedroom before ten thirty, and who’d forced Abbie, much against his grand natural vision, to install heavy curtains on her windows.

  It was in Krupp’s class that he met Jake, who was seated beside him based on Krupp’s obscure system of seat assignment. He based it on what he called “the small serendipities which are the numina, the true, old gods of education,” to the bewildered class on the first day. Jake’s last name was Isaacs, and this struck Krupp as impossibly fortuitous. Jake was one of only four black kids in the school, and while he seemed generally and effortlessly popular—he was funny; he played soccer—he was sometimes treated by kids and teachers alike with a certain anthropological curiosity that Isaac had noticed and found extraordinary and inappropriate. Jake was also in the honors track, and this was treated with open curiosity, including by most of the teaching staff. Jake took it all with a resigned humor that seemed to Isaac to be quite impossibly graceful. He quickly became Krupp’s other favorite when, after a section in which they read bowdlerized excerpts from Moby-Dick, he’d answered Krupp’s searching, “Call me blank? Call me blank?” with “Crazy!” Krupp’s eyes widened and he looked as if he didn’t know whether to chuckle or to die. Then Jake said, “I’m just messing with you Mr. K. It’s Ishmael.”

  “Be still my heart,” said Mr. Krupp. “Boy, I could kiss you.”

  “We should probably get to know each other first,” Jake said.

  “Mr. Isaacs,” Krupp said, and he wiped a real tear from his eye, “I may reconsider my thoughts of suicide. Thank you.”

  Jake always made a point of greeting Isaac, but he still seemed, to Isaac, unapproachable; kind but distant; friendly only out of general disposition. But later in the school year, he helped Isaac twice in very short order. First, in health class, which was conducted by one of the appalling gym teachers whose constant hassling of the boys who avoided showering after phys ed harried Isaac almost as much as his awkward interactions with his peers. Mr. Dubinsky’s boys’ health class was conducted with an air of backslapping barroom grotesquerie that Isaac found both embarrassing and terrifying, and although Dubinsky touched vaguely on the subjects of sex and hygiene, his principal interests were in the application of first aid, and his examples were all drawn from hunting accidents. Isaac, who’d already embarrassed himself by asking if the four-point deer that Adam Martens had bragged about bagging was a buck or a doe—he didn’t understand what the points referred to—would never have chosen to speak, but he was called out of the pleasure of his own inattention by Dubinsky saying his name sharply and, evidently, for at least the second time. “Mayer!”

  “Yes, Mr. Dubinsky?”

  “I asked, what do you do if you’re out hunting with your buddy and he gets bit by a snake?”

  “He gets bitten by a snake?” Isaac repeated.

  “Yes. A poisonous snake.”

  Isaac reflected briefly. With most teachers, with most adults, he was able to read the response they desired in the questions they asked and the way that they asked them; adults, really, were absurd in this way, unsubtle and indiscreet as a big TV. But Dubinsky’s world was alien to Isaac, who never knew what the hell the hairy monster was getting at. So he filtered every action and adventure movie he’d ever seen, and he said, “I don’t know. I guess maybe you’d suck the venom out of the wound.”

  And Dubinsky, without missing a beat, smirked and said, “Yeah, well, what if your buddy got bit on his penis?”

  Isaac flushed and felt as if he were going to piss in his pants, and the rest of the class howled, and Dubinsky grinned as if he’d just wrapped a good set in Vegas. Then unbidden from the back, someone said, “Man, that’s fucked up, Mr. Dubs.”

  “What did you just say to me, Jake?” Dubinsky glared toward the rear of the room. Isaac was unable to turn. He stared down at the desk.

  “I said that’s a fucked up thing to say.”

  “Young man, you better not be using that language with me, unless you want to take a trip down to administration with me. And I don’t think you want that.” He crossed his arms.

  Jake shrugged. “I mean, you can take me down there if you want, but I don’t know if Mr. Genarro wants to hear how you’re talking about sucking boys’ penises or whatever.”

  The class was quiet, and everyone but Isaac stared at Dubinsky, who’d now turned pretty red himself. Dubinsky uncrossed his arms and turned and walked back toward the blackboard, though as he went, he shook his head and muttered, ostensibly to himself but loud enough for everyone to hear, “Typical black.”

  Isaac wanted to thank Jake, but after class he found the thought of revisiting that moment of mortification, even in thanking someone for ending it, too awful, and he ducked out as was his habit. A few days later, it was Adam Martens. Martens closed his locker and leaned against it and said, “So, Mayer, how come you never told me yer joosh?” Martens was tall and horrible and occasionally, apropos nothing, would fix smaller boys in his stare and say, “Worthless,” and then laugh to himself and walk away.

  “I don’t know,” Isaac said.

  “Like, don’t you believe in Christ or nothing?”

  “I don’t know,” Isaac said. “No.”

  “So then, how do you pray? If you don’t believe in Christ.”

  “I don’t know, Adam. We pray to God.”

  “God is Christ.” Martens shook his head. “It’s obvious.”

  “Not to us. We believe something else.”

  “Yinz probably say just a bunch of spells and shit.”

  “We don’t say spells.”

  “Well,” Martens shrugged and pushed himself away from the locker. “I don’t stand next ta no juice.”

  It later occurred to Isaac that he had no idea how much or little of this Jake overheard, but there he was, suddenly, passing by, and stopping to say to Martens, “Man, leave the dude alone, Martens, you redneck motherfucker.”

  “Whatever, worthless,” Martens said. He flipped them off. “See you queers later.”

  “Thanks.” Isaac kept his eyes fixed on Jake’s feet.

  “Shit, man. No problem. He’s a degenerate.”

  Isaac finally let himself look at Jake, and he found himself smiling, although even that seemed like something he should be wary of. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “You know so. Anyway, I heard him at lunch the other day. He’s just pissed that you didn’t invite him to your bar mitzvah even though you invited Sandy and Aiden.”

  “Sandy and Aiden are Jewish. They’re like the only people who I invited.”

  “Yeah, but Aiden and Martens play baseball together.”

  “Well, I don’t think I can invite someone who doesn’t stand next to Jews.”

  Jake grinned. “Shit, you ought to invite me. I mean”—his smile grew—“I’m just a typical black, but I do stand next to Jews. Plus, I could get down with some spells and shit.”

  “Really?”

  “Shit, yeah. Sounds cool. I’ll wear my Farrakhan tee-shirt.”

  “You have to wear a button up.”

  “Relax, Isaac.” Jake put his hand briefly on Isaac’s shoulder. Isaac blushed and felt himself start to get hard. “I’m kidding.” He clapped Isaac’s shoulder once more and headed to next period, and Isaac whirled and stared into his locker until it was safe to move.

/>   • • •

  For years, the Mayers nominally belonged to a Reform congregation in Pittsburgh, attending the occasional High Holy Day service, but generally giving practical Judaism a wide berth, not least because Abbie felt his own luminous experiences transcended any meaning to be found in the sing-song liturgies of ordinary secular Jews. But then Sarah decided that Isaac ought to become Bar Mitzvah, and, since it would be mad to drive in and out of Pittsburgh that frequently, she had them join Tree of Life synagogue in Uniontown, where Isaac found himself, suddenly, the sole Hebrew School student of Rabbi Patrick MacDowell, a former bank teller and Catholic who, having married a Jewish woman in his late twenties, first converted and then, at the age of thirty-one, dedicated himself to the task of becoming a rabbi. (The few other Jewish kids all went to temple in Morgantown, where there was a larger Jewish population, and this had been Sarah’s intention as well, but Abbie felt Morgantown to be entirely tainted by the presence of Phil Harrow, and insisted they stay local.) Now in his forties and a widower—his wife had had a rare and undetected cardiac condition—MacDowell presided over a congregation so demographically similar to the one from Abbie’s memories of his own youth that it tipped into uncanny parody. On their first Rosh Hashanah there, MacDowell had exhorted them in his dvar Torah to understand that though God’s requirements may seem perplexing, a call to something impossible, they reveal themselves in due time as something other than what we may once have thought them to be, for instance, him, a nice Scotch-Catholic boy, becoming a rabbi. While he spoke, Myrna Markoupolous waddled over and, having introduced herself in a loud, wavering voice, proceeded into a story about how the rabbi had failed to come to visit her in the hospital after she’d had a stent put in the year before. Sarah had been appalled; the rest of the congregation had ignored her; Abbie smiled too broadly and suppressed his urge to laugh, and Isaac, then twelve, stared miserably at the floor.