by Mary Gordon
Devorah is thrilled and a bit frightened by the George Sand poster on Maria’s side of the room. On her wall she has a Chagall print of musicians in the shtetl and van Gogh’s sunflowers. Devorah feels so lucky to have found Maria. Maria gives her a more exciting life than she’s ever known. This is something you should know about Maria: she has often made people feel lucky to be with her.
Because Devorah is always with Maria, she is often with Joseph. He is in love with her quietness, her smallness, her white skin, and her flame-colored hair. But he doesn’t let her know. At night in his bed he burns with desire for her white skin and the patch of flame between her legs. He confesses, he confesses each week, and the priest says, “Don’t sweat it; why don’t you go out for crew or track?” As though the only acceptable form of sweat is a particularly athletic one, not one induced by guilt or dread. But he does sweat it. He sweats it for fear of his body’s nature, and he is happy only in art history, where he studies the Cycladic forms he loves because he feels they have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with him.
He still wears a jacket and tie everywhere. When the Buddhist monks set themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam, he can’t sleep for nights. He sees the flames. He feels the flames. He does not protest. He feels he is a coward; he is frightened for his scholarship. Maria is involved in protest after protest but never rebukes him, never says a word. For which he is grateful, for which he is abashed.
He likes working late at the library. Sometimes Maria and Devorah come by at ten o’clock and tease him, call him a grind. Once Devorah comes up behind him, puts her cool white hands in front of his eyes, and says, “Guess who?” and he is aroused and full of self-hate for his arousal. He says to himself, “She’s only a girl, and if she had any idea she’d be appalled.” He can’t speak to her for a minute without getting an erection; he thanks God, to whom he still prays, that she has no idea how he dreams of the flame-colored patch between her legs. He works into the night. He does a paper on Thomas Aquinas and his teacher is floored. Maria regularly cuts classes for political activities and does her papers by staying up all night; sometimes she is praised for brilliance, sometimes caught up short for carelessness.
Maria goes to Washington on the Pentagon march, but Devorah and Joseph don’t. They are both afraid, he of being arrested and losing his scholarship, Devorah because, as an Orthodox girl, going to a demonstration is so far from anything she can imagine for herself it isn’t even a temptation. Maria comes back and tells them about tear gas and about how she had to take her earrings off because “the pigs rip the earrings out of girls’ ears just for the fun of it.”
Devorah speaks to him about her religious crisis, which it is not fashionable to be having in the bloody smoke-filled autumn of 1968. Martin Luther King has been shot, Robert Kennedy has been shot, Vietnam is on fire, the ghettoes are burning; who can be thinking about religious crises? So Devorah tells her secret to Joseph, not to Maria, her best friend, who is busy with the war and the ghetto.
Her secret is this. She is a highly intelligent girl from an Orthodox Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her mother supported her in her struggle with her father, with the community, to go to college. Her mother said, “She must honor her God-given gifts.” Nights of weeping, pleading, before permission is granted, reluctantly, tentatively: she is allowed to go to Radcliffe (close enough for them to keep an eye on her) to study music, so that later she will return and teach music to the children of the community, and they will be able to present her credentials as proof that their children are getting the best. She would teach the girls; the boys only below a certain age. The community convinced itself, as the brothers at Portsmouth Priory had done, that sending one of their own into the large, dangerous world would be proof of their great strength.
But something happened to Devorah that split her soul, like a tree struck by lightning: she listened, in her history of music course, to the choral music of Bach. She attended a performance of the St. Matthew Passion. She didn’t ask the rabbi whether this was allowed; she simply went, knowing she risked transgression. And she was seized. Seized with a desire, not only to hear the music, which would have been permissible—certainly she could listen to it on the radio or the phonograph—but also to sing it. She felt that those notes needed to come from her throat. She tells Joseph that the notes of Bach are burning a hole in her windpipe, that every morning she wakes feeling she can’t breathe. No one would understand but Joseph, she says. She knows what Maria would say: You have to march to your own drummer. But she is thinking of her dark-eyed, severe father, her abashed, overawed mother who supported her in her ambition, the teachers who believe in her, the millions killed by Hitler only twenty-five years ago. Yet every morning she wakes feeling she can’t breathe.
Joseph looks at her and knows himself a failure. Every word she says makes him more in love with her. Being in love with her makes him desire her, and he knows it is impossible; his body is not his friend, although Father Martin at the Newman Center says, “Of course it is. But it is a friend that must be reasoned with.” Joseph cannot control his body by his reason; he is in love with Devorah, he longs for her with all his mind and soul and heart, the way he has been told—but never experienced—that he was meant to long for God.
He understands that Devorah is frightened. She studies in the library with him and Maria, listening in the music collection to the powerful notes of Bach, which are dangerous to her, eating holes in her windpipe like acid. Or are they an angel’s hand, strangling her? Every Friday she goes home to her family and comes back Sunday morning with bags full of kosher food. Every Sunday night, she cannot sleep. Every Monday morning he sees olive-colored pouches beneath her large light-green eyes.
Joseph has no idea how to help her; when she speaks to him, he is mostly silent. (Later she says his silence was the best thing; when she was with him she felt, for the first time in her life, not alone.)
In her distress, she becomes more beautiful to him; her skin grows more translucent; he can see the bluish veins under her skin, the color of milk standing in shadow, the blue veins of her white hands. Her hands are very small, perfectly formed. Her nails are beautifully shaped; Joseph is fascinated by the white moons above her cuticles. He wants to kiss her hands. He wants to take her fingers in his mouth. Her green eyes burn and deepen with her suffering, and he can’t help her. He wants to say, I would give my life for you, do you understand? He wants to take her in his arms, but he believes it would be a violation, though afterward (his joy in those first days of rushed confession! The crescendo section of the romance, if it were a romance, would begin right here) she says she had longed for him to take her in his arms, but he’d been right to hold back; it would have frightened her; it was only his silence that allowed her the courage to love him.
But he has always known that, left to his silence, she might never have made her move. It is Maria, a wind rushing, who gives her the confidence.
Devorah talks to him about hearing Bach’s Magnificat. She is embarrassed; it seems like something out of the nineteenth century (they were juniors by then and they’d studied the great novels of the nineteenth century). And it certainly doesn’t seem like the thing to be talking about when their friends are marching in the streets shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
He knew what had happened to her when she’d heard the Magnificat. Maria was sitting next to her; Maria was the one who had to sit with her on the steps and bring her water; Maria has always been great in a physical emergency.
Walking the streets of Rome, along the Tiber, past the synagogue, he thinks of Devorah listening to the Magnificat. Beautiful girl, my beautiful beautiful girl. Dead now, under the ground. The terrifying thought: Pearl might join her. Pearl, too, is a beautiful girl. The beautiful should not be allowed to be among the dead. He remembers a line of Virgil that he had copied down while he was still in college. “Among the dead there are so many thousands of the beautiful.” H
e was struck by the word thousands; what a negligible number after Hitler’s and Stalin’s millions. Now the wire that is his spine tingles with shock.
He knows he was the first to tell Devorah of her beauty, which, until he told her, she didn’t know about. She’d been brought up like a princess in a tower, the tower of Orthodoxy: serious and devout and, in all that time, all the time of her girlhood, because no one had told her she was lovely, she hadn’t looked at herself with pleasure. She had dressed herself for modesty; she had combed and braided her remarkable hair as another task; she’d washed her beautiful face with the same utilitarian attention she’d given to brushing her teeth.
When Joseph thinks of that time, it is always autumn; they are sitting under trees in full gold, trees that flame like her brilliant hair, trees that the light struck so that the leaves were platefuls of light; even their veins were illuminated. Some stories shape themselves around an image, and if Joseph’s story shaped itself this way it would be around this: the gold leaves of the sugar maple under which they sat in Harvard Yard.
She tells him that she would go down to the river with the music of Bach, stand by the water, and sing her heart out, Latin words, German words, words spoken easily, she knew, treasured by those who had destroyed her people twenty-five years earlier. But the words come out of her throat, she says, like those ribbons of words formed from the mouths of angels in a medieval painting. She signs up for voice lessons; she tells Joseph this while Maria is in Washington being teargassed. Telling him how frightened she is but that she has to be part of it, and it has to be just that, just that music, or she will die, literally die of strangulation. And she knows that to be part of it she will have to leave everything she has, everything she is.
Joseph hadn’t understood—it wasn’t common knowledge, of course—that it was impossible for her, keeping her faith, to sing in public. Orthodox women, women as observant as she was brought up to be, are not allowed to sing in front of men. She could have sung in private. But not the music she desired, the great choral music of Bach, the music she said was irreplaceable.
The fifty-year-old Joseph would have urged her to find another music she could call irreplaceable. The fifty-year-old Joseph would have told her, Train, of course, train with a woman teacher, but choose, for example, Schubert’s Lieder as the irreplaceable music. Sing in private, sing by the river or in your room, sing with other women, sing in front of young girls, but do not shape your life as if beauty can sustain you, because in the end you are not one of the rare ones and it will not.
But the twenty-year-old Joseph is silent when the twenty-year-old Devorah says that what she is in the service of—that music—is important and beautiful and true forever. If this story were a tale, this might be true. But it is not a tale, it is more complex; the form changes quite near the end. And so the fifty-year-old Joseph can no longer be sure that anything is true forever.
Over the years he has been tormented by questions about his wife. Not of infidelity, no, nothing like that. He has been tormented by the question of whether Devorah was drawn to something she called beauty, something she believed was important and true forever, in order to be far away from her own people, from their misfortunes and the suffering they’d borne. Was that music important in the camps that were exterminating her people? Many of them were run by men who believed Bach’s music to be eternally important and beautiful and true. Was what she called beauty just a liberation from the fate of the Jews, which she was terrified to be part of?
Joseph is right that if Devorah hadn’t spoken to Maria, but had spoken only to him, she wouldn’t have done what she did. He had never heard her sing; she couldn’t sing for him without automatically throwing everything away. Singing for Joseph would have made everything irrevocable. But she could sing for Maria and still, she believed, leave room for choice.
Maria falls on her and says, “You have no choice. You have a gift. The gift that it is death to hide.” Maria is in love with the seventeenth century. “Devorah, we are not of the party of death, we are of the party of truth.”
Devorah adores Maria. She loves it when Maria explains the Magnificat to her. “Oh, yeah, the Magnificat, oh, sure. My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.” Easy for Maria to rattle off, as if she were saying the pledge of allegiance. Easy for people with her kind of Catholic education to impress people with a knowledge of medieval or Renaissance iconography when it was something they’d learned by third grade, like the names of presidents: St. Lucy is holding eyes on a plate, because her eyes were gouged out by the Romans; you prayed to her when you had conjunctivitis. St. Apollonia’s teeth were pulled out by those same Romans; you prayed to her before you went to the dentist. “Oh, sure, the Magnificat,” Maria says. “Mary is saying, ‘I’m a big deal, but not really; it’s not really me, it’s really God. I’m not the important one, it’s only what I make larger, what I reflect.’” Joseph has often thought that of himself, but he never told Devorah that the piece of music that was so important in her history told the story of his life.
Maria goes with Devorah to audition for the chorus. Maria sits with her afterward in the dormitory bathroom while she vomits. Maria says, “You see? They knew when they heard you that you were extraordinary.” Maria gets the money from her father for special voice lessons recommended by Devorah’s teacher, who says Devorah has gone beyond her and suggests somebody in Boston.
It happens so quickly, as things do in romance. Joseph and Devorah begin spending more and more time together. Maria is entirely absorbed in politics; she is almost never in their room; Devorah doesn’t even know where she is on the nights she isn’t in the bed her father paid for. How does it happen that one day he gets the courage to take her hand, to kiss her, to hold her in his arms? He doesn’t even remember which came first, the decision to tell her parents she has to sing the choral music of Bach or his assurance that if they disown her he will take her as his wife. They are twenty years old; the whole thing seems entirely straightforward.
They decide that Devorah must, as Maria said, “confront her parents.” Her parents tell her she cannot devote herself to singing, in public, the choral music of Bach, music that was written in the language of the murderers of her people, music that insists that the Jews killed Christ, and furthermore she cannot sing in public, in front of men, and still be their daughter. She says she will no longer be their daughter, she will be Joseph’s wife. Joseph, a non-Jew. They sit shiva for her; they declare her dead.
It all happens in a matter of three months. They wait until they are both twenty-one. Seymour Meyers, unexpectedly romantic, becomes their protector; he agrees to pay Devorah’s tuition. As Joseph’s wife, Devorah is not under the authority of her parents; they are given space in married-student housing. They are no longer children of a family (although Joseph had never thought of himself as the child of a family); they are on their own. On their own to devote themselves to Devorah’s gift.
Seymour Meyers tells Joseph that the honoring of Devorah’s gift—which he believes very great—will require money. He offers Joseph a place in his business after graduation. Instantly, Joseph gives up his dream of studying the art of the Middle Ages. He had, in his first year, attracted the notice of Professor Stivic, a Polish émigré (pleased that the gifted young man was also of Polish ancestry) whose specialty was reliquaries. There was something about Joseph as a young man that made older men want to train him, to groom him, to imagine him in their place after their death.
Joseph loved the idea of reliquaries, the elaborate casing for the proof of corruption: bone, tooth, sliver of nail, scrap of bloody cloth. Jewels, gold, silver, then the window: peekaboo, the proof—all flesh is grass. No, worse, the saint is nothing but a bone, a tooth, a nail, a scrap of cloth. The embellishment is all.
He does not acknowledge his own disappointment; this is drowned in his new love. Rather, he regrets that he has to disappoint Professor Stivic. He could disappoint either Professor Stiv
ic or Dr. Meyers and Devorah. And what had Professor Stivic done for him? Had he rescued him and his mother from starvation? Had he given Joseph his intact body, left his family, offered him love unto death? There is no question. He must be able to earn money to support Devorah’s gift, which he believes is far, far greater than his own. In doing this, he will also be repaying Dr. Meyers. It was only later that he wondered. Did Seymour Meyers become their protector because he saw that in doing so he would be buying an excellent steward for his business and his fortune, thus ensuring the welfare of his daughter, who had no interest in the business and thought money was an evil thing, having no idea what it provided in the way of the good things of this world?
. . .
Joseph has also often wondered: If Devorah had only spoken to him and not to Maria, what would have happened? Perhaps she would have seen her situation as sad and impossible and stayed with her people. He would never have held her in his arms. He would not have devoted his life to her and her gift; perhaps she would still be alive, the mother of children. He had thought she wasn’t very interested in children. She never seemed attached to Pearl; she was mainly worried that Pearl might be carrying germs, exposing her to sore throats. When Maria and Pearl came to visit, it was Maria who interested Devorah. It was one of the reasons he had spent so much time with Pearl: to free Maria and Devorah for what they called ladies’ lunches or girls’ night out. He hadn’t minded. On the contrary, when he looks back, the days he spent alone with Pearl are of the greatest value. What will be lost to him if she is no longer in this world! His Pearl of great price. But not really his. There is no name for what they are to each other, no tie of blood or law. That does not mean the bond is not of gold. Only that there is no name for it.