“Probably the same design principle is at work.”
“Damn, I’m starving.” Benny was peering out the window at the restaurant billboards. “What say we go put on the feedbag, eh?”
I checked my watch and shook my head. “I can’t. I have to be at the rabbi’s house in a half hour. I’ve barely got enough time to drop you off.”
“The rabbi again? Give me a break.”
I looked over at him and sighed. “I made a promise.”
“Promise,” he snorted. “Jonathan owes you big time.”
“It’s not about owing, Benny. He’s Orthodox. It’s a big part of his life.”
“So? You’re Reform. What’s that? Chopped liver?”
“He was angry with me, Benny. I can understand.”
“Understand what? Jonathan’s a good guy and all, but he’s got some chutzpah giving you grief over being Reform. Give me a break. My grandfather was Orthodox. It’s a wacko throwback cult from the Dark Ages.”
“No it’s not. Look, I promised him I’d give this a try.”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s tonight’s topic?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“Speaking of which, I got a topic for the rebbe.”
“Oh?” I gave him a look. “Not another query about the status of your job application for lifeguard at the mikvah?”
“Very funny. I’m talking a topic for the ages.”
“Really?”
“I’m talking one of the haunting mysteries of Jewish law.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s hear it.”
“Ask that learned scholar tonight to explain the origins of the eleventh commandment.”
“The eleventh?”
“The one that applies only to Jewish women.”
“Which one is that?”
“Come on, Rachel, don’t act coy with me. This is the one they hide from the guys.”
“How’s it go?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“Thou shalt not giveth head.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious. You ever read the laws of kashruth? You wouldn’t believe the things you can put in your mouth. Pickled herring, fried chicken fat, that grotesque mucus that comes with gefilte fish, chopped liver, boiled tongue, bone marrow, schmaltz—even certain insects, for chrissake! Bugs! You’re telling me this isn’t a wacko cult? What kind of religion says yes to cockroaches and no to cocks?”
“It also says no to lobsters.”
“The hell with lobsters. I can live without lobsters.”
I gave him a look.
“Really?”
He paused. “Well, maybe not. Add them to the list. Ask him tonight. Ask him what kind of religion bans lobsters and blow jobs.”
“Maybe I’ll save it for another night.”
“Wait.” He jabbed his finger at me. “Bacon, too. Lobsters, bacon, and blow jobs. Listen, I’m not asking for the answer to the riddle of human existence or for the secret to the afterlife, Rachel. All I’m asking for is why the only thing that ever gets blown in a Jewish home is a shofar.”
Chapter Four
It’s my fault,” I said glumly.
“Your fault?” my mother said. “Don’t talk ridiculous. What is it with these men? Your father, alev asholem, tried that same number on me before we got married. You know what I told him?”
“What?” I asked, amused.
“I looked him right in the eye,” she said, wagging the serving spoon as she reenacted the event, “and I warned him, ‘Seymour, if you’re looking for a girl who’ll do that crazy stuff with you, then you better keep looking because I’m not that kind of girl.’”
I couldn’t help but smile as I imagined that scene. My poor father. He never knew what hit him. My mother is the most determined and exasperating woman I know. Life trained her well. She came to America from Lithuania at the age of three, having escaped with her mother and baby sister after the Nazis killed her father, the rest of his family, and whatever semblance of religious faith my mother might ever have had. Fate remained cruel. My mother—a woman who reveres books and learning—was forced to drop out of high school and go to work when her mother (after whom I’m named) was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. My grandmother Rachel died six months later, leaving her two daughters, Sarah and Becky, orphans at the ages of seventeen and fifteen. Two years later, my mother married a gentle, shy, devoutly Jewish bookkeeper ten years her senior named Seymour Gold. My sweet father was totally smitten by his beautiful, spirited wife and remained so until his death from a heart attack two years ago on the morning after Thanksgiving.
“And you know what?” she continued. “Your father never brought it up again. Never.” She nodded with satisfaction, but then noticed an empty centimeter of space on my plate. “How about some more brisket, doll baby?”
“Oh, Mom, I’m stuffed.”
“Potatoes?”
“Really, Mom, I’m plotzing. It’s delicious, but I couldn’t eat another bite of anything.”
“Wait, I’ve got strudel.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Then let’s take a break first. I’ll help you clean up the dinner dishes.”
I washed, my mom dried.
As I soaped one of the dinner plates, I said, “I still think it’s my fault.”
“How could it possibly be your fault?”
“I might be able to connect with these traditions if I were a more spiritual person.”
“You’re plenty spiritual. A saint should have the soul you do. But this Orthodox nonsense isn’t spiritual. It’s superstition.”
“You sound like Benny.”
“Benny’s no dummy. Orthodox Judaism.” She shook her head. “Ridiculous rules and rituals. Worse than ridiculous, and you know why? Because the point of those rules and rituals is to remind us that men are special and we aren’t. That’s why I told Seymour to forget it.”
“Mom, it’s not that simple. For every Orthodox Jewish man there’s an Orthodox Jewish woman, and those women don’t feel oppressed.”
“How do you know?”
“I know, Mom. Take the rabbi’s wife. Sylvia is brilliant and successful, and she loves every ritual connected with the religion.”
“Including this mishagoss she told you about tonight? What’s it called? Nadah?”
“Niddah.”
“Niddah, nadah—whatever. It’s just Jewish men passing rules to make women feel unclean and inferior.”
For the past five weeks, I’d been spending an hour one night a week in Rabbi Isaac Kalman’s study trying to learn the laws, customs, and traditions of Orthodox Judaism. Although my father had been Orthodox, my sister, Ann, and I were raised as Reform Jews. When my mother told my father that she wasn’t going to do that “crazy stuff” with him, she made sure the ban included her children, too. But now, like my mother before me, I’d fallen in love with a devout Jewish man. Unlike my father, however, Jonathan was a widower with two small girls. And unlike my mother, I was willing to at least give Orthodox Judaism a try.
Dating an Orthodox Jew was a new experience. In addition to the strict observance of the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday—no cars, no telephones, no electric appliances, no work—there were exacting rules about food, prayer, and sex. Although few organized religions celebrate the joys of marital sex more than Orthodox Judaism, the counterweight is a stern prohibition against premarital sex. I suppose it added a touch of nostalgic charm to our relationship, as if we were a pair of high school sweethearts from a 1950s sitcom. It added plenty of frustration, too.
Tonight, though, had been a real test of faith, because tonight the topic had been the laws of niddah. Due to the subject matter, my teacher tonight had been the rabbi’s wife, Sylvia Kalman. She’d explained that a woman b
ecomes a niddah at the onset of menstruation. The niddah phase lasts almost two weeks, since the woman must have seven consecutive “clean” days after her period ends. She ends the niddah by going to the mikvah, or ritual bath, and immersing herself in the waters. She emerges physically and spiritually cleansed.
From the onset of menstruation until the ritual bath twelve to fourteen days later, Jewish law strictly forbids not only all sexual activity but all physical contact between husband and wife. Indeed, sexual intercourse with a niddah is punishable by the severest penalty, kahret, the Jewish version of excommunication in which the sinner is spiritually cut off from the destiny of the Jewish people.
The rabbi’s wife had sensed my resistance. As she no doubt had done for scores of women before me, she explained the various rationales the rabbis offer. The laws of niddah give the woman a special time to herself. They protect a couple from the dangers of overindulgence and over-familiarity, which could lead to monotony and restlessness. The laws of niddah, some say, are designed to increase the love between the man and woman by creating a monthly honeymoon. As the Torah promises, when the wife returns to the marital bed after the end of niddah, “she will be as beloved to her husband as she was when she entered the chupah.”
“It’s a beautiful mitzvah,” Sylvia told me. “A monthly blessing.”
I tried to believe—I really did—but my heart wasn’t in it. To me, the various explanations sounded more like rationalizations for a set of rules concocted by a neurotically squeamish guy—the same guy who’d come up with those obsessive washing-of-the-hands rituals at Passover and other holidays. But the rabbi’s wife believed in the wisdom and the beauty of the laws of niddah—truly believed—and she was no fool. Sylvia Kalman held a Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught modern European history at St. Louis University. She seemed the embodiment of the joy that Orthodox Jewish women shared with their men. I wanted to believe the way she did. Despite my mother’s assurances, I knew the failure was my fault.
“Niddah, smiddah,” my mother said as she poured us tea. “When you get to be an old lady like me, you don’t have to worry about that monthly stuff anymore.”
“Old lady? Come on, Mom, you look gorgeous.”
With her high cheekbones, trim figure, and curly red hair (colored these days to cover the gray), Sarah Gold was still a good-looking woman at the age of fifty-four. I called her my “Red Hot Mama.”
“Ah,” she said with a dismissive wave, “enough with this Orthodox craziness. Have another piece of strudel and tell me more about Angela.”
I’d already filled her in on my prison meeting. I went through some of my unease about the original conviction.
“Benny’s right,” she said when I finished. “What’s done is done. That’s why we have juries. There was just too much evidence against her. Everywhere you looked there was something that said guilty. Even that piece of glass that she used to cut off that poor man’s penis.”
“That’s another gap in the evidence,” I said.
“Rachel, it was her blood on the glass. The DNA test confirmed it. Even I remember that.”
“Mom, I know it was her blood. That’s the point, in fact. Yesterday, I got a copy of the results of the blood tests. There were traces of two drugs in them: a steroid and a muscle relaxer with a long name. Fluni—uh…” I paused, trying to remember. “Flunitrazepam.”
“Sounds like something from a Groucho Marx movie.”
I said, “The cops interviewed her internist as part of the investigation—mainly for his insights into her mental state. He said he prescribed the steroid for some sort of sinus infection. Over the years he’d prescribed sleeping pills and Valium for her, but never that drug.”
“So maybe another doctor did.”
“I doubt it. According to a note in the file, the drug is legal elsewhere but not in the U.S.”
“Rachel, honey, maybe she had muscle cramps the last time she was on a cruise or overseas on vacation.”
“They didn’t find any more of those pills in her medicine cabinet.”
“So maybe that was the last pill and she pitched the bottle.”
“She hadn’t been out of the country for a while.”
“So it was an old bottle. No big deal. Your father had pill bottles dating back to the Korean War. So does your aunt Becky. There must be plenty of people with expired prescriptions in their medicine cabinet.”
She leaned across the table and placed her hand over mine. “Rachel, honey, listen to your mother. What do you have? A blood test showing on the night of the murder she took a muscle relaxer that she must have bought on a trip overseas? And that’s going to prove she’s innocent? Even our criminal justice system isn’t that crazy, and you know what I think of our criminal justice system.”
After we finished our tea and my mother had forced me to take four slices of strudel she’d wrapped in aluminum foil, she walked with me to the front door.
“So is Jonathan going to be out of town the whole summer?” she asked.
“Possibly. He told me the government has thirty-eight names on its witness list. Jonathan thinks it may take three days just to pick the jury.”
Jonathan Wolf was representing one of the defendants in a huge securities fraud prosecution in the federal district court in Manhattan. The trial was scheduled to last two months. At least the timing worked well for his daughters, whose school year ended a week ago. His parents still lived in Brooklyn. Although Jonathan would be living in a mid-town hotel during the week, his daughters would get to spend the summer in New York with their grandparents.
Jonathan and I met as litigation adversaries a year ago. I’d detested him from the start. My mother, of course, decided that he was the perfect man for me. I told her no way—he was far too arrogant. She told me it was pride, not arrogance. I told her if that was pride, he had too much of it. She told me he sounded like someone else she knew. I told her forget it. She told me mothers know best. I told her not with this guy you don’t. She told me to give it a few months. I did.
It’s amazing how much smarter mothers grow over time.
“When did you talk to him?”
“Last night. Sounds like the pretrial stuff is going okay.” I paused. “I really miss him.”
“He’s a good man. A little crazy with this Orthodox stuff, but still a good man.” She gave me a fierce hug. “I love you, doll baby.”
“I love you, Mom.”
Chapter Five
I waited for Sheila Trumble in the marble rotunda of City Hall. We were scheduled for combat this morning with Nathaniel Turner, aka Nate the Great. Although I hoped we could reason with him, based on my last telephone conversation with him I was afraid that a battle seemed more likely.
I was a few minutes early and happy to spend the time enjoying the interior of my favorite city hall. Unlike the standard Greco-Roman structures that house the mayors of America, the St. Louis City Hall resembles its counterpart in Paris—a resemblance that is hardly coincidental. When the St. Louis city fathers decided to build a new city hall in 1890, they chose to recognize the city’s heritage by selecting a French Renaissance Revival design based on the Hôtel de Ville de Paris. The result was striking, with an interior as lovely as its exterior. I was standing in the rotunda, whose walls were illuminated by a graceful set of three-pronged globe lamps. Directly ahead, the grand marble stairway led up to a four-story interior courtyard that was capped by gold-leafed archways and pastel murals of scenes from the early days of the city. High overhead, a ceiling of stained-glass skylights bathed the interior in a soft glow that could almost make you forget the nasty business transacted behind so many of those imposing doors.
“Rachel?”
I turned to see Sheila Trumble approaching, her low heels clicking against the marble floor. She was a handsome woman in her fifties with an aquiline nose, short-cropped black hair streaked
with gray, and keen blue eyes. She was dressed, as always, with that understated elegance that whispered “exquisite taste” and “big bucks.” She had plenty of both. Sheila was, after all, the wife of Carson Trumble III, who had the good fortune (literally) to be the son of the founder of Trumble Communications.
I smiled, delighted to see her.
“Did you meet with Angela yesterday?” she asked when she reached me.
“I did. She sends her greetings.”
“That’s sweet.” Her smile faded to a concerned frown. “How is she?”
“Hanging in there.”
She nodded sympathetically. Sheila Trumble was high on my list of quality people—a genuinely fine woman who’d somehow avoided the perils of wealth. Oh, yes, she and Carson were members of the right clubs, sent their children to the right private schools, and owned vacation homes in the right places (Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard). But unlike her social peers—whose definition of a charitable act required a designer gown, a good table, a boldface blurb in the society column, and a flattering photograph in the Ladue News—Sheila’s commitment to philanthropy was authentic and totally without glitz. She did her good deeds down in the trenches, tutoring third-graders three times a week at an inner-city elementary school and taking part in several rehab projects for Habitat for Humanity each year. Typical of her no-nonsense attitude, a month before her first Habitat project she’d hired a carpenter to train her in the tools of his craft. She wanted to make sure she’d be useful on the job site. She was, too. I’d worked alongside her on a project last winter and watched in amazement at her adeptness with a nail gun.
Although the tutoring and rehab projects would have sufficed for many volunteers, Sheila’s overriding allegiance was to the Oasis Shelter, which she founded sixteen years ago and which brought us together today. Back at the beginning, she’d been spurred into action by the plight of her cook, Pearlie Brown, who was trapped in a physically abusive relationship. Sheila found a vacant two-flat in north St. Louis, signed a one-year lease for the entire building, and helped Pearlie and her two children pack up and move in. By the end of the first year, there were six battered women and eleven children living in the building. During the first year, Sheila shopped for all the groceries herself, arranged day care for the children, and hired the security guards posted around the clock to keep out the angry husbands and boyfriends. But by the time of the gala tenth-anniversary celebration at the Hyatt Regency, the Oasis was a self-sufficient shelter—a model, in fact, for other cities—having expanded to include the adjacent apartment building and a full staff of professionals to help the women turn around their lives.
Trophy Widow Page 4