Open Doors

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Please. It’s the holiday. I have to bless candles.” Her voice was faint but steady.

  Elaine watched as Sarah held a match to the wicks of the tall white candles set in the brass candlesticks that had belonged to Neil’s mother. The flames leapt up and she passed her hands over them and then lifted her warm fingers to her eyes as she whispered the benediction. She spread her arms out, as though to embrace the flickering lights themselves, and murmured the supplementary prayer for the holiday. Elaine’s voice joined her daughter’s in those gentle words of gratitude.

  “Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who has granted us life and sustenance and permitted us to reach this season.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Sarah said softly but her face was ashen and her hands trembled.

  Elaine seized her daughter’s shoulders and gripped her in a fierce embrace. She willed her own strength into her daughter’s quivering body, pressed the warmth of her lips to forehead and cheeks grown cold with fear.

  “Of course, he’ll be all right.” Her voice resonated with maternal authority.

  Sarah nodded and breathed deeply. Color returned to her face. She tucked stray tendrils of chestnut-colored hair beneath her kerchief and bathed her wrists in cold water.

  Elaine was grateful that Leora and Ephraim dashed into the room just then and even more grateful that the children seemed unperturbed by their father’s absence.

  “God’s going to be mad at Abba if he’s late for the seder,” Ephraim said cheerfully.

  “Oh, I think God will forgive him,” Sarah said calmly. She was still pale but her hands did not tremble as she filled the wineglasses and carried out the seder plate.

  Their guests arrived. Two of Moshe’s students, tall young men with soft curling beards who greeted Elaine in Oxbridge accents and presented Sarah with a bouquet of roses. A Russian family newly arrived in Ramat Chessed, the parents gold-toothed and chubby, the children wide-eyed and silent. The Evenarises, the younger children darting in first, followed by Ruth who carried a covered casserole and Avi whose cane clicked rhythmically across the tiled floor.

  “Michal,” Ruth called out gaily. “Where’s my soldier daughter? I’ve made that lamb dish you love.”

  She paused and looked around the room.

  “They’re not here yet,” Sarah said and Ruth stared at her.

  “Has Moshe called?” she asked.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Were they traveling on the tunnel road?” Avi asked. “There was a report—”

  “That was Moshe’s plan,” Sarah said. “And yes. I heard the report.”

  They would not repeat the words of the newscaster. They spoke the cryptic language of adults intent on protecting children from a dark and threatening reality. Words were dangerous. Silence was safer than the revelation of that which had not yet been ascertained.

  “Let’s begin the seder,” Sarah said softly.

  Her cell phone was tucked into the pocket of her dress and she touched it as she might touch a talisman. As long as it did not ring they were safe.

  They took their places at the table, opened their haggaddot. Elaine wondered how they would manage to sing the songs, to read the story, to celebrate the tale of freedom, enchained as they were in their own fear and apprehension but the children asked the four questions in a sweet chorus and Avi’s strong voice began the chant of response.

  “We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt,” he intoned but before he could go further the door opened.

  Moshe stood in the doorway, flanked by Michal and Gideon.

  Sarah rose from her seat, her cell phone clattering to the floor. She hurried to her husband, whispered his name, lifted her wide blue sleeves and fell, like a wounded bird, into his outstretched arms.

  The room was electric with relief and excitement. Their contained grief exploded into joy. They waited for Moshe to wash the grime of the journey from his face. Michal changed out of her uniform into the bright green linen dress Ruth had brought for her. Elaine looked at her, startled by a marked change. Michal had lost the glow of casual innocence. Her face was newly serious, her gaze uneasy. She saw that Ruth, too, stared at her daughter with concern and moved closer to cover Michal’s hand with her own. But Michal did not lift her eyes from the hagaddah as the reading of the ancient tale continued. They chanted and sang and read the text swiftly and seriously, filling and refilling their wineglasses at the prescribed times, dipping the parsley in salt water, grimacing at the taste of the bitter herb and creating matzoh sandwiches with the charoset.

  At last the meal began and it was only when the soup was served that Avi asked the question that had haunted them even as they completed the reading and focused on the ceremony.

  “What happened, Moshe? Did you see the attack?”

  Michal’s spoon clattered to the table. She hurried from the room and Gideon followed her.

  “Our car was one of those attacked,” Moshe replied.

  Sarah pointed to the children and lifted a finger to her lips.

  “No,” he said. “It’s good that they know what happened. You can’t protect your children but you can prepare them. There is a lesson in what happened to us for them.”

  “Then tell us, Abba,” Leora insisted.

  “There were several snipers, positioned in the overhang near Modiin. They all fired at once, each aiming at a different car. The van in front of us went out of control briefly and then sped away. The driver of the car behind us was wounded. I could see his face in my rearview mirror—a student I think, very young, red-haired. The bullet must have broken his cheekbone because I could see the blood running freely.”

  “And your car?” Ruth asked.

  “I rolled up the windows as soon as I heard the disturbance. Gideon, of course, is experienced. He pushed Michal onto the floor—she was frightened, so frightened. He released the bolt of his rifle although, of course, it would have been impossible for him to see his target. I accelerated even as he took aim, but before he could shoot a bullet came through the window. A silver bullet that I knew was zipping straight toward my heart and I knew too that I could do nothing to avoid it. To stop the car would have been suicide. It was impossible to slow down or back up. I said the Sh’ma and continued driving, pressing down as hard as I could on the gas pedal. I wondered why I felt no pain. I wondered why there was no blood. The bullet could not have missed me. For a wild moment I thought that I might even be dead, that I was living in a nightmare, driving in a dream.”

  “But you weren’t, Abba.” Leora climbed onto her father’s lap, pressed her small hand to his lips as though to feel his breath, lay her head against his heart so that she might hear its beat.

  “No. Of course I wasn’t,” he said and stroked her hair, threaded her braid through his fingers.

  He placed his hand on his jacket and they saw now that a jagged hole had torn through the fabric. He unbuttoned it and removed a small leather-covered book from the inside pocket. Lodged in the soft leather, penetrating through to the pages of the book, was a silver bullet.

  “Your Book of Psalms,” Sarah said and reached over to take it from him. She passed her fingers across the leather worn smooth by constant use, touched the bullet that might have claimed her husband’s life and, with sudden force, she pulled it loose.

  “It was your marriage gift that saved me,” Moshe said.

  “It was God who saved you,” Sarah replied.

  “Baruch HaShem. Blessed be God.” Their voices rose in unison.

  Elaine’s heart beat too rapidly. Her palms were damp, her face afire with a fury she could neither comprehend nor control. She stared in bewilderment at her daughter, at her grandchildren, at Ruth and her family, at the devout young men who had abandoned their lives in England to chase after the blessing of this elusive God whose name they endlessly blessed. Didn’t they realize that their faith was flawed, their gratitude, their unquestioning gratitude, unreciprocated with compassion, that their loving kindness was too often met
with inexplicable cruelty? She stood, trembling, overwhelmed with grief and fear. She would rescue her daughter, her daughter’s family. She would pelt them with the truths they could not, would not see. Like Moshe, she, too, had the parental mandate to protect and to prepare. Her words came in a rush, her voice rising, her throat dry. Her lips parched.

  “But what about the red-haired young man in the car behind you—the student—or perhaps he was a young father—surely he was someone’s son—is his family saying Baruch HaShem?”

  They looked at her and she read the surprise and sadness in their eyes. They pitied her because she could not believe as they did, because she refused the comfort of faith. She stared defiantly back at them and then left the room. In the kitchen she clutched the counter so tightly that her knuckles whitened.

  “Mom. Mama.”

  Sarah’s voice was very soft but Elaine did not turn. She washed her face and went into the bedroom. She brushed her hair, wrestling with the tangle of dark curls tinged with silver. She stood at the window and looked across at the houses opposite. Candles burned in every window. Tables were covered with white cloth, and silver goblets overflowed with scarlet wine. She saw women with flushed faces carrying in serving platters and bearded men rising to pass around plates laden with the thin round matzoh that had been carefully watched as they baked. She was an outsider, an alien, an observer of a life to which she could never lay claim. There was no perhaps. Possibilities did not abound. She had her truths and they had theirs. What might have been would not be, but the very heat of her anger had cleansed her, offered her new and realistic hope. Other doors would open; there would be new tomorrows.

  At last, she returned to the table and took her place. When Yuval cried, she went to the nursery and took the baby into her arms, cradling him throughout the rest of the seder, soothed by the sweet warmth of his breath against her skin. No mention was made of her outburst, no protest offered to her words.

  Three days later Peter called from California. Lauren was scheduled for surgery at the end of the month. Elective surgery but still worrisome. Would it be possible for Elaine to come out to the coast and help with the children? Elaine heard his unspoken words. It’s my turn, Mom. I want my turn.

  “Of course, I’ll come,” she said. “I’ll leave right after Passover.”

  “Your brother needs me,” she explained to Sarah who watched her pack.

  “I understand,” Sarah said sadly.

  She knew that it was more than Peter’s need that impelled her mother to leave Jerusalem but she asked no questions, offered no arguments. She would not jeopardize the new closeness that had grown between them. They had spoken truth to each other. Strength had flowed from heart to heart. She watched as Elaine spread bubble paper to encase the tiles that would crown the mosaic.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said. Her fingers traced her father’s name, silver letters that soared to the evening sun so tenderly etched onto the enamel. “Look, Leora. See what Savta has made.”

  The small girl gravely studied the tiles. She touched her grandmother’s hand.

  “You’ll come back, won’t you, Savta?” she asked.

  “Of course I’ll come back.”

  Elaine smiled at her daughter, at her granddaughter, and turned away so that they would not see the tears that streaked unbidden down her cheeks.

  nine

  The Mylar balloon was a bright pink, exactly matching Renée’s T-shirt and only a shade paler than the bouquet of roses she would carry in her other hand. Peter Gordon had asked the vendor to stencil the word Eureka in silver across its surface, followed by Welcome Grandma! but he saw now that he should have chosen a darker color so that his mother would be able to read it even from a distance as she made her way toward them in the LAX baggage area. Troubled, because such details were important to him, as members of his production teams quickly discovered, he carefully outlined each letter with a black magic marker.

  “What does ‘eureka’ mean, Daddy?” Renée asked, turning from the guest room window where she had been watching Jose, the Mexican pool boy, desultorily skimming leaves from the sun-streaked water.

  “It’s the motto of the State of California. And it means ‘I have found it,’” Peter said, smiling as he etched in the final letter.

  He remembered still how that single word, inscribed on a Hilgard Avenue bench, had impacted on him when it was explained by the student guide who escorted his group of incoming freshmen across the bridge and onto the UCLA campus all those years ago. That mandatory tour had taken place in early autumn, a Los Angeles autumn which was, really, hardly different from a Los Angeles summer. Back home in Westchester the leaves were already turning and his father had surely lit the first fire of the season to ward off the evening chill. Peter, a continent away, had imagined his parents sitting before it, wearing their matching sweaters and sipping their glasses of wine, a violin concerto blocking out the sound of the wind that rattled the brittle branches of the maple tree. His mother would have murmured something about seeing to the storm windows, his father might speak of snow tires, of winterizing the basement. They would smile at each other, content that they would be insulated against the chill of encroaching autumn, the cold of winter, and turn back to their books, their music.

  But in Los Angeles, the sun burned with a golden brightness that caused him to shield his eyes from its radiance. Bougainvillea in brilliant shades of fuchsia and subtle tones of purple grew along the grassy paths that led from one terra-cotta walled building to another. He had watched a tiny hummingbird sip nectar from the scarlet bristles of a bottlebush tree and looked up at the blue-misted Santa Monica Mountains in the distance and thought to himself, “Yes. Yes. I have found it! Eureka!”

  The student guide’s words, so carelessly tossed out, had become a mantra of a kind, a validation that he had found, in this sun-drenched state, the light and freedom to be himself, to live by his own lights. He had known, even then, that he never wanted to leave California, that he never wanted to return to that large sprawling home of his childhood where he had always felt himself oddly excluded. Perhaps it was because he felt himself to be sandwiched between his older twin sisters—Sandy who shared his mother’s artistic talent, Lisa who had always known she wanted to follow their father into medicine—and Denis who shared their parents’ love for music, their penchant for solitude, and whose melancholy troubled and absorbed them.

  Peter had felt himself the perennial outsider, always hovering at the edge of the family, isolated from their interests and concerns. From childhood on, he had been the producer of his own life, crafting his own scenario. Lauren, who was lethargically pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, advised him, in the supercilious tone she used when discussing anything professional, that he suffered from what she called a “middle child” syndrome and he had not argued with her.

  He had, however, never told his wife how Elaine and Neil had been surprised when he decided to attend UCLA and even more surprised when he told them that he wanted to study finance and film production.

  “Finance?” his father had asked, pronouncing the word slowly, as though it were plucked from a foreign lexicon.

  “Film production will be interesting,” Elaine had said but he had discerned the doubt in her voice.

  Still, they had not objected to his choice. They were, as always, accepting parents, who respected their children’s decisions, practiced at withholding judgment and granting reasonable consent. They acknowledged that Peter was the child whose interests were so alien to their own. Finance. Film production. They shook their heads in amused bewilderment but raised no objections. Were they actually relieved, Peter, wondered later, that he had chosen a profession so distant from their lives, that he would live on another coast and not impinge on the solitude they clearly craved?

  It was another thought he had not shared with Lauren. He did not want to add fuel to the smoldering fires of her resentment of his family.

  Eureka, he had written to
his parents in his first letter home but they had never asked him what the word meant. He wondered if his mother, seeing it scrawled across that welcoming pink balloon would ask about it now.

  “Hold the balloons, hold the flowers,” he instructed Renée, thrusting them into her reluctant hands and turning her toward him.

  “Hey, you’re only meeting your mother at the airport, Peter. You’re not choreographing a scene for a film.”

  Lauren stood in the doorway watching them, her lips curled into a derisive smile, her hazel eyes narrowed. She had just returned from her morning run, and the pale blue tank top that hugged her breasts was sweat-darkened. Her fine blond hair, tied back into a lank ponytail, glistened damply and she dabbed at her narrow-featured face with a sodden neckerchief.

  “You don’t have to practice holding those props, sweetie,” she told her daughter and Renée immediately set them down and dashed out of the room.

  “That was a stupid thing to say,” Peter said, struggling to keep his tone neutral.

  He did not want to have a scene with Lauren, not with his mother arriving that day and her father invited for a family dinner in the evening. He was concentrated on avoiding any unpleasantness at all. Too much was at stake.

  “Was it? I think it was pretty accurate. You’ve been preparing for this visit the way you prepare for a major production. You redecorated the guest room as though it were a film set,” Lauren retorted dryly.

  She glanced around the room and he followed her gaze.

  He had, he admitted to himself, opted for the autumnal colors that he knew his mother favored. Unlike the pastel hues that dominated the rest of their house—the California palette, their decorator, an expensive Rodeo Drive innovator, had called it—he had chosen a russet carpet, draperies and a bedspread in graduating shades of gold and amber, and placed Elaine’s own ceramics on the rosewood bureau and bedside table. He had resurrected the enamel box she had crafted for them as an engagement gift, an offering which Lauren had never liked and never displayed, and set it next to the radio, already tuned to the UCLA classical music station he knew she would seek out. The bookends of a dark cobalt glaze that she had made for his college room were in place on the desk.