I turned back to the girl’s mother. “Mrs. Finkelstein, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I came here to try to convince you to report Fraydle’s disappearance to the police.”
Sima shook her head. “That is my husband’s decision, Mrs. Applebaum. He will decide if that is appropriate. For now, we are looking for her ourselves.”
“I understand that, Mrs. Finkelstein. But I also know that the longer you wait, the harder it will be for the police to find Fraydle once you do go to them. The trail will be colder. Do you understand what I mean?”
The woman nodded her head slightly and stared down at her hands. They were work-roughened and red and the nails were bitten almost to the quick. Her cuticles were torn and chewed. She grasped her right hand with her left, twisting her wedding ring.
“Mrs. Finkelstein. Sima,” I said, “please, we must do something here. What if she hasn’t run off? What if something really happened to her? Every minute you wait makes it less and less likely that you’ll find her.”
The rabbi’s wife looked up at me, gathered herself together, and spoke. “I know you are trying to help. But this is not your business. My husband will find Fraydle. He does not need the police or any of you to help him.” She rose from her chair and walked out of the kitchen. Grudgingly, I followed her. I walked out the front door that she held open for me, down the steps, and out the gate.
This family, these people, were a mystery to me. Like my own grandparents, theirs had probably come to America from a shtetl, a tiny, Jewish village in Eastern Europe. The isolationist life steeped in tradition and religious observance that Fraydle’s family led in the heart of Los Angeles was not much different than the lives led by our respective great-grandparents in Poland, Lithuania, or Russia. My assimilated life, with my non-Jewish husband, was two or three or ten worlds apart. How was it that people from the same place, brought up in the same religion, ended up so entirely different?
I trudged back to Nettie’s store and found her crouched on the floor, blowing soap bubbles for Isaac, whom she’d propped up into a sitting position. He was giggling hysterically as Ruby chased the bubbles around the store. The few customers who’d arrived in my absence did not seem to mind having to wait to make their purchases. All of them older women, they leaned against the counter and smiled at my children.
When Nettie noticed me, she hoisted herself up off the floor with a groan and busied herself checking out the line of waiting women. When they’d all left, she turned to me.
“And? What did she say?
“She refused to consider it. She said her husband knows best.”
Nettie snorted derisively.
“Nettie, tell me about this match of Fraydle’s.”
“The Hirsch boy? A wonderful match for Fraydle. An important family. And wealthy.”
“Yes, you told me that. Did Fraydle agree to the match?”
“Everyone agreed. Baruch is thrilled. The Hirsch family is happy. The boy likes her. It’s all set.”
“And Fraydle’s mother? What does she think?”
“Ah, Sima.” Nettie shook her head. “Sima wants Fraydle to choose for herself. Sima is a big believer in love matches. Don’t ask me why; hers certainly wasn’t one. Her parents chose for her and that was that. And Sima and Baruch have been very happy. Happy enough. Anyway, they have a lovely family.”
“Did Fraydle choose what’s-his-name, Hirsch?”
Nettie looked uncomfortable. “Ari Hirsch. The boy’s name is Aharon, but they call him Ari.”
“Did she choose Ari Hirsch for herself?” I was getting insistent.
“Not specifically,” Nettie replied.
“What does that mean? Not specifically? Did she say she would marry him or not?”
Nettie shrugged her shoulders. “She didn’t agree, not exactly. But she didn’t reject him, either. She told Baruch she needed more time. She said she would do as her parents asked and marry, but she needed more time to decide if she wanted to marry Ari Hirsch.”
A thought occurred to me. If this marriage was so important to her father, and if she had refused to obey him, would he, could he, have tried to force her?
“Nettie, I have a question for you. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but what would your brother have done if Fraydle refused to marry the boy? Would he have made her do it, anyway?”
Nettie looked at me. She shook her head firmly. “Baruch, maybe he would have tried to make Fraydle marry Ari Hirsch, but Sima wouldn’t stand for it. I told you, she always insisted that the girl be allowed to make a free choice. She would never have let my brother force a match on her daughter.”
A possibility was beginning to occur to me.
“But let’s say somehow Rabbi Finkelstein got Fraydle to do it. Would Sima object to the marriage once it had happened?”
“A marriage is a marriage. Once it’s done, that’s it.”
“Look, Nettie, there’s got to be a reason your brother is refusing to get the police involved in the disappearance of his child. Maybe he’s unwilling because he knows where she is. Is it possible that your brother sent Fraydle to the Hirsches, maybe against her wishes, and without Sima knowing about it?”
Nettie looked at me. To my surprise, she did not seem at all shocked at my question. “Anything is possible,” she said.
Twelve
BY the time Peter walked in the door at ten o’clock that night, I’d already decided what I was going to do. He came into the bedroom and found me standing over Isaac’s changing table, which we’d moved into our room once we’d realized he wasn’t going to be sleeping in his and Ruby’s room any time soon. I was holding my nose and dabbing at the mess in front of me.
“Hey, honey,” Peter said, kissing me on the cheek. “That’s gross.”
“I know. Totally disgusting,” I agreed. “Why is it green? I swear this kid did not eat anything today that was this particular shade of fluorescent green.”
“Here, you take a break, I’ll deal with this.”
I handed over the box of wipes and, after washing my hands, stretched out on the bed.
“Listen, Peter, my mom’s been bugging me to go visit her and my dad in New Jersey.”
“I can’t possibly get away right now.”
“No, I know that. I was thinking of just me and the kids.”
“Okay.”
And that was it. No Please don’t leave me. No I’ll be lost without you. Nothing.
When I told my mother that we’d decided to come out and visit, she positively crowed with delight. She inventoried all the baby items she needed to borrow or buy and almost hung up on me in her eagerness to get started setting up the kids’ room. I managed to get plane tickets for the next redeye to New York. Thank God for frequent-flyer miles. I debated using another 25,000 miles to get Isaac a seat of his own but decided to risk having him on my lap. After all, how many people would be flying to New York in the middle of the night in the middle of the week? I packed three suitcases full of everything I could imagine ever needing, including a breast pump, ten changes of clothing for the kids, every infant medication known to humankind, and an assortment of toys, games, rattles, and dolls. You would have thought we were setting out for a year at the South Pole, rather than a week in Northern New Jersey, the shopping-center capital of the world.
The next evening, Peter drove us to the airport and insisted on parking and taking us to the gate, even though I’d offered to martyr myself at the curbside check-in. He schlepped my sixty pieces of carry-on luggage for me and entertained Ruby while I gave Isaac one last preflight diaper change. When the preboarding announcement came, he grabbed me and wrapped me in a bear hug.
“I’m going to miss you guys,” he croaked, resting his face on the top of my head.
“We’ll miss you, too.” I reached up to kiss him, but Ruby wriggled in between us, forcing me to step back and out of his arms. He gave her a kiss goodbye and then transferred all the various bags to me. I walked down the ramp pushing Isaac
in his folding stroller, holding Ruby’s hand, with Isaac’s car seat in the other hand, the diaper bag around my neck, a flight bag full of snacks and toys hanging from each shoulder, and my purse clenched in my teeth.
The flight was every bit as horrific as I’d expected, and then some. While it had certainly occurred to me that Isaac might spit up all over himself, I forgot that a goodly portion could land on me. I’d brought plenty of changes of clothing for him, but none for myself. By the time we got off the plane we were a sight to behold.
My parents swept us up in their arms and packed us into their massive Chrysler. We stopped at my grandmother’s nursing home on the way to their house, and my parents entertained the kids in the solarium while I held my grandmother’s hand. She didn’t recognize me. My mother had prepared me for that, but it came as a shock nonetheless.
Once we got back in the car, I fell asleep immediately and barely woke up to walk into my parents’ house and crawl up the stairs to my old room. Hours later, when I’d slept enough to recover from the flight, I ambled downstairs to find my children happily playing in the kitchen in which I’d grown up. The radio was, as usual, earsplittingly loud. My parents’ radio is perpetually tuned, full blast, to a news station. Until I started spending time at friends’ houses in grade school I’d assumed all families carried out conversations over the blare of a radio announcer yelling, “You give us ten minutes, we’ll give you the world.”
I walked across the room and turned off the radio. I rubbed my eyes and smiled at my mother and father.
“What time is it?”
“Two in the afternoon,” my father answered. His hair had grown even more Einstein-like in the months since I’d seen him. It stood up in soft white peaks all over his head. His blue eyes looked out of a crinkled face and his cheeks were slightly reddened. I kissed his bald spot.
“Hi, Daddy. I’ve missed you.”
“We’ve missed you, too, mamaleh. Ruby here is teaching me how to color a rainbow.” Ruby was perched on his lap, a red crayon gripped firmly in her hand. Next to my tiny girl, my father looked even older than his seventy-five years. Sometime in junior high school I realized that my parents were much older than those of my friends. My mother had me when she was forty, long after she’d given up hopes of having a child. My younger brother came along just two years later. Back then, before the dawn of the age of Pergonal and Chlomid, that was decidedly rare.
My parents came from a different generation than the other parents they saw at ballet recitals and Little League. Their Brooklyn accents and the yiddishisms peppering their speech gave them a vaguely Old World air. They cared more about politics and social justice and less about material acquisitions than most of the other grownups I knew. As an adult, I grew to be proud of them and glad to have been raised in a house where Woody Guthrie songs were sung at bedtime and a McGovern poster hung in our window well into the mid-seventies. As a child, I’m ashamed to admit that they embarrassed me.
I walked around the table to where my mother was sitting, holding Isaac. She was feeding him a bottle full of yellowish liquid. It gave me a moment’s pang of concern. The only thing he’d consumed thus far in his life was breast milk.
“I’m giving the boy some chamomile tea,” my mother said. “It says in that book over there that it’s good for them.” She pointed to a brightly colored tome on the kitchen table. I pulled it over and read the title: The Holistic Baby.
“Wow,” I said.
“Listen, alternative medicine is a perfectly legitimate thing. Don’t be so dismissive,” she said. My mother has always been willing to jump on any new philosophical bandwagon, especially if the word “alternative” can be used to describe it. She was a beatnik, a hippie, an ardent feminist (that one stuck) and now, apparently, she was into the New Age. But she always looked exactly the same. Like a Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn.
“What dismissive?” I protested. “How am I being dismissive? I just said ‘Wow.’”
“It was your tone.”
“What tone? There was no tone.”
“Ladies, ladies,” my father interrupted. “Could we please have five minutes of peace and harmony before the fighting begins?” That’s my father’s job. Mom and I argue, and he steps in and referees.
“Mama and Grandma are fighting?” Ruby said, sitting bolt-upright on her grandfather’s lap.
“Nobody’s fighting,” I said. And we really weren’t. We were just bickering, like we always do.
“Hi, Ma.” I kissed her on the cheek. She handed the baby over to me. He immediately began rooting around my shirt front, so I sat down and took out a breast to nurse. My father blushed and began closely studying Ruby’s drawing.
“So, Ma, are you taking time off while we’re here?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, nodding her head vigorously, the tight gray curls of her perm bouncing like so many little antennae. My mother’s undying loyalty to the hairstyle she’d chosen in the mid-seventies is a source of mystery to me. Every three months she spends two hours in Hair-omatic, having her steel-colored locks tightly wound up in pink rods. Because she’s rail-thin and about four foot ten, she looks decidedly like a Q-tip. In fact, when I was in my senior year of high school, she greeted trick-or-treaters wearing a white tunic and tights, with her hair dusted in baby powder. I was the only one who got the joke. The other kids all thought she was supposed to be a nurse.
I popped Isaac off my nipple and propped him on my shoulder where he promptly let loose with a tremendous belch. My parents burst into a round of applause. You would have thought he’d just hit the winning run in the World Series.
“So, Ma, Daddy, do you know any Hasidic Jews in Borough Park? Preferably Verbover.” I asked.
My father wrinkled his brow and tapped his chin with one finger. “Margie, didn’t the son of one of your Russian cousins become a Hasid?” he asked my mother.
“What tsuris that family had. They weren’t here six months before Anatole, the father, had to have bypass surgery. They were burned out of their first apartment, and the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. Then, that terrible thing with the daughter’s baby. It was born d-e-a-d.”
“And the Hasidic son?” I reminded them, just in case they’d forgotten that I had actually asked for something other than a litany of familial tragedy.
“What was his name, Gene? Do you remember?” my mother asked.
“It was something Russian. And then he changed it to Jewish. Like Sasha to Schmuel. Or Boris to Binyamin. Like that,” my father answered.
I rolled my eyes. Getting a straight answer out of my parents was harder than getting Isaac to sleep through the night. I bounced the baby on my knee, trying not to express my impatience.
“I remember!” my mother shouted. “Josef. That’s his name.”
“What’s Russian about that? Or Yiddish for that matter?” I asked.
“Nothing. Who knows where your father got that. He’s senile. Ignore him.”
“What senile? It’s spelled with an F, that’s Russian.”
“This Russian Josef, do you think I could call him?” I asked.
“I don’t see why not,” my mother said. She picked up the phone and riffled through her ancient Museum of Modern Art address book. She found the number and dialed it on the telephone stuck to the wall next to the fridge. My mother’s hair isn’t the only seventies throwback in my parents’ house. They don’t own a cordless phone, but rather make do with a couple of ancient appliances that they used to rent from Bell Telephone. The one in the kitchen has an extra long cord that is still twisted in the knots I made while talking endlessly to my high school girlfriends about whether Larry Pitkowsky did, indeed, like me or if Maxine Fass was his dream girl. They also have a couple of old TVs, one of which has a pair of rusty pliers permanently attached to it in place of the channel dial. I think the dial got lost sometime when I was in elementary school. Back then the set only reliably received two channels, PBS and some religious station out
of upstate New York. My mother used to insist that that was precisely enough TV. PBS gave us a little culture and the religious station allowed us to understand the true soul of America. Or something like that.
My mother mouthed “machine” at me and waited for a moment, then said, into the phone, “Josef, this is your cousin Margie. Margie Applebaum. Remember my daughter, Juliet? The one who went to Harvard Law School? She’s in town and would love to talk to you. Give us a call.” She left the number and hung up. There are an infinite number of ways to work the words “Harvard Law School” into a sentence, and my mother has mastered them all. I’ve heard her respond to an innocuous comment about the weather with a declamation on how her daughter had suffered through the bitter Cambridge winters while attending law school.
“Not home,” she said.
“So I gathered,” I replied.
I sat quietly for a while, sipping at the coffee my father had poured for me while my mother was on the phone. I could think of only one other Hasidic Jew who might be willing to give me a little insight into their community. She might even know the famous Hirsches of Borough Park.
Libby Bernstein nee Barret, my freshman-year roommate at Wesleyan University, was a daughter of a Daughter of the American Revolution and member of the Mayflower Association, who had somehow ended up an Orthodox Jew. Her husband, Josh Bernstein, was a couple of years ahead of us at college. They’d begun dating at the end of our freshman year. After he graduated, Josh moved to Brooklyn. He’d started out as a run-of-the-mill, assimilated Jewish kid, but as he got older he become more and more interested in religious Judaism. After graduation, he joined the Verbover Hasidic community. After a while Josh must have realized that he couldn’t be an Orthodox Jew and date a shiksa. He broke up with Libby, and she was utterly devastated. She spent two weeks crying on the shoulder of every one of her friends, me included, and then took off for Brooklyn herself. She begged Josh to take her back and promised she would do whatever it took to be with him.
The Big Nap Page 10