Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  Beside me, Hodel slept, her stomach growling. I leapt out of the bed. The floor felt icy against my naked feet. I searched in the dark for a pair of wool stockings, but I couldn’t find any. The bare window was a black square. Within it, the young moon shone. Panicked, I lit a candle beside my bed. As the flame grew, huge shadows leapt onto the walls. The bars of our iron bed became enormous stripes from floor to ceiling. My own shadow was a giant. The air in the room felt hectic with malign power. The sounds coming out of Hodel’s belly were inhuman. I was filled with panic. My Jew’s box was in the hall near the door. I carried it into the middle of the bedroom so I could see. I unlocked the bottom drawer where my pistol dagger was. Holding the weapon in my hand, I loaded it as Aaron had taught me, my hands shaking. I was so afraid. I kept thinking of what my cousin Gimpel had said, about Hodel needing an amulet against the evil eye. What was wrong with her? I sat down on the rocking chair in the corner of the room and watched her sleeping, the long knife in my hand, its loaded pistol resting in my palm. Every time she moved, I gripped the weapon, expecting her to fly out of the bed and attack me.

  After several hours, the terror receded, I got cold and sleepy, and, convincing myself that the worst Hodel was going to do to me that night was infect the air around me with her carrion farts, I went to bed, sliding my weapon under my pillow. In the morning, I swallowed my bread quickly, while she was still sleeping. I had a terrible urge to wear the pistol dagger on my hip in that thick, tooled Spanish sheath. I imagined how wonderful it would be to walk through Paris armed like any Frenchman. If I hid it with my coat, who would know? Maybe I should just wear it around the house. I threaded the sheath onto my own belt and slid the still-loaded pistol dagger into it. It felt so good to be wearing it. So powerful. Hodel stirred and rubbed her eyes like a little child. I swiftly drew on my coat and skullcap. She sat up in bed and smiled at me. She had dark circles around her eyes. My heart went out to her.

  “I am going to work,” I said, lighting a fire in the hearth to make her some tea. I noticed that my hand was shaking.

  “So early?” she asked.

  “I’ll go to prayers first,” I said, grabbing my prayer shawl bag. I served my little wife tea in bed, feeling guilty for the murderous night I had spent ready to stab her in the heart. Then I left, armed.

  15

  Masha meandered down her leafy block, her own private fly perched on her shoulder. Her chest was still clear of pain, but she felt altered. The oddest thoughts had been filtering through her head since she sang in front of the men last night. It had been humiliating, yet she couldn’t help wanting to do it again. It was like an itch you weren’t allowed to scratch. Why had Hashem given her a nice voice if she wasn’t allowed to use it freely? She knew asking why was a fruitless undertaking. There were so many rules, likes and dislikes the Creator simply had, the way some men don’t like blueberry muffins. And, if you love that man, you don’t serve him blueberry muffins. It was simple. And yet.

  As for me, I was thrilled. My girl had made an enormous leap by singing in front of the men and breaking the Law of Torah. As I saw it, she had crossed over to my side. The sky was the limit now. She wandered up Beach Nineteenth Street past Kitov Hebrew Bookstore, Kosher World Supermarket, Chapines Bakery, the library. She had never been inside the public library, with its panoply of secular novels, and wondered what it was like in there. Who went. She kept walking, past the nursing home, past Heddie’s Dry Cleaning, the last outpost of her own turf. There she paused. The next neighborhood was a ring of uncertainty. She had never walked it before, though she had passed through in a car many times.

  It was a beautiful day. The shining sun made her feel brave. She walked on. Here, the strangers stood around chatting, or sat on front steps in aimless lassitude, devoid of her neighborhood’s bustle. Uneasy but determined, Masha walked close to the side of the buildings, past a sign advertising live chickens. Two tall men in colorful knit caps loped by her, laughing in shrieks, as if the street were their living room. They turned their eyes to Masha with disinterested curiosity as she passed them, their minds on the joke. Her throat constricting, Masha lowered her eyes and kept walking. Pearl would have died to see her walking down this block. The smell of fried meat, sweet and fatty, seemed to ooze from a graffitied doorway. A young woman in a red leather jacket, short caramel-dyed hair, big hoop earrings, tight jeans on wide hips, marched by, holding two tiny children by the hand. The woman’s eyes traveled down Masha’s long black dress. A few blocks later, a yellow Volvo marked the beginning of yuppie territory. That was where she saw it, next to the pharmacy: Bridget Mooney School of Acting. The building also housed a tuxedo rental place and a podiatrist, both on the second floor. Masha stopped and peered into the plate-glass front of the acting school. A young girl with a flame-shaped thatch of white hair was manning a large wooden desk. Masha pushed the door open and entered.

  “Hi,” said the white-haired girl.

  “Hi,” said Masha. “I … was interested in maybe … taking a class.”

  “Sure. We have a new term starting next week. Here’s a schedule.” The girl stood up, sliding a folded orange pamphlet across the desk. Her torso was very long and narrow. Masha thought she looked like a Q-tip.

  As Masha perused the schedule, she heard a door shut. She looked up and saw a woman traveling down the hall thoughtfully, her head down. She walked with a slight limp and used a cane. Her free hand hung loose by her side; it was in the shape of a claw. Thick-waisted, immaculately coiffed, wearing high-heeled boots and a fitted skirt, a pair of reading glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, she looked up, saw Masha, and stopped. The skin around the woman’s eyes was swollen up like puff pastry. She peered out from under the doughy lids, her gaze curious, penetrating, covetous maybe. Then she turned and stalked into one of the rooms off the hallway.

  “That’s Bridget Mooney,” said the Q-tip girl. “This is her school. My name is Shelley.”

  “Hi. Can I keep this?” Masha asked, holding up the brochure.

  “Sure,” said Shelley. “You should come. She’s a fantastic teacher. She’ll change your life.”

  Outside, Masha sat down on a bench in the weak sunshine and read the schedule. I settled on the splintered wood behind her and tried a little internal ventriloquism.

  Masha: The classes are at six p.m. on a Tuesday, and at eleven a.m. on Saturdays … I definitely couldn’t do it on Shabbos.

  Me: That leaves Tuesday nights.

  Masha: No way could I tell Mommy and Daddy.

  Me: But why not just take the class, who would it hurt?

  Masha: I’d be with guys all the time … and performing in front of men …

  Me: There’s nothing wrong with just taking the class. It wouldn’t be performing, it would be learning.

  Masha: But there would be guys there. They’ll think I’m weird ’cause I won’t shake their hands …

  Me: Or just shy …

  Masha: How could I possibly get out of the house at night?

  Me: What about a job that goes till eight or nine at night, and get Tuesdays off?

  Masha: But what kind of job goes till eight o’clock?

  Me: A pizzeria!

  Masha: No way would Mommy let me work in a pizzeria.

  Me: But if it’s Jewish?

  I remembered having passed Mendel’s Pizza on the way over. We walked over there and peeked in. Everyone behind the counter was male, wearing a yarmulke. No way would they hire a girl. Then, as we passed the Jewish Care Nursing Home, Masha stopped. The nursing home! She could get a few shifts there. They were always looking for volunteers or low-paid staff. She walked over there and asked the lady behind the desk if they needed anybody to work the evening shift, from four to nine. They did! It was all arranged in a heartbeat. I was horrified at the idea of having to spend time with smelly old people, but Masha didn’t seem to mind at all. She ran home to tell her mother. But when she had almost reached the house, she stopped. Where would she get the money
for the class? It cost three hundred dollars a term! She had a hundred and fifty saved up from babysitting. I suggested maybe they would let her man the desk at the school, like the fluff-haired girl, who was clearly a student. Maybe she got free lessons.

  Pearl was delighted by the idea of Masha volunteering, and maybe eventually working for pay at the nursing home. It was a mitzvah to do volunteer work, and also she was convinced that Masha needed structure in her life, to keep her from being so moody until she could get her married. Then she would be too busy to be moody.

  The next day, Masha walked over to the Bridget Mooney School of Acting and asked to speak to Bridget Mooney. It took a while, but eventually Bridget limped out in her high boots, leaning on her cane. She had the look of a grizzled demimondaine.

  “What can I do for you, honey?” she rasped.

  “Well, um …,” Masha began. Shelley was looking up at Masha curiously. When she met Masha’s gaze, she winked.

  “Come into my office,” said Bridget in a low, smoky voice. She turned and walked with her unhurried, hip-swinging limp down the hall and through a doorway. Masha followed. Bridget’s snug office was cluttered with memorabilia. The walls were covered in photographs of theatrical productions and individuals. Bridget as a voluptuous younger woman figured in many of them.

  “Sit down,” said Bridget, her chair creaking. Masha sat. Bridget scrutinized Masha, her head cocked, blinking her reptilian eyes.

  “Are your eyes dark purple? Or am I seeing things?” she asked.

  “They change in different light,” said Masha, feeling her cheeks go hot.

  “You’re an amazing-looking girl. So. What is it?”

  “I wanna join your class this term, on Tuesday nights, but I only have a hundred and fifty dollars. I plan to make more, but I, ah, I was wondering if you ever let people work for classes, or is that irritating? Like, I thought maybe that girl out there …” Bridget’s claw hand was resting ominously on the mahogany desktop. The nails, Masha noticed, were polished light pink.

  “Have you ever done any acting?”

  “I did all the productions in high school. I always got the lead … I dropped out of college after a year, so I didn’t get to act there.”

  “Where did you go to high school?”

  “The Torah Academy.”

  Bridget paused, taking this in.

  “Aren’t those productions all girls?”

  “Yeah,” said Masha. “But they’re very good.”

  “I’m sure,” said Bridget. “But … how would you feel about having a male scene partner? You’d have to rehearse, and …”

  “It’s okay, I could …”

  “I have a feeling for who you should be paired up with, but I don’t want to give him to you if you’re not going to be willing to do the work,” said Bridget.

  “I’ll work,” said Masha.

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean … how can I say this? I’ll be frank. From your outfit, I’m guessing … are you Hasidic?”

  “No,” said Masha. “I mean, it’s similar, we’re Torah Jews, but we don’t, we don’t have a rebbe, we don’t speak Yiddish. We don’t, like, have a town in Europe we’re associated with, but we basically follow all the same rules—it’s less strict … I have cousins who are Hasidic. It’s hard to explain.”

  “But you can’t, for example, wear pants?”

  “No,” said Masha.

  “Or be alone with a man who isn’t your relative?”

  “I could do it if the door is open, like for work. Women work all the time, we manage.”

  “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  “No.” Masha blushed.

  “Would they approve if they did?”

  “I’m twenty-one. I’m allowed, right?”

  “Okay,” said Bridget. “You’ve got me curious. Come here at six on Tuesday. We’ll work out the details down the line.”

  16

  The morning after I bought the pistol dagger from Blond Nathan, the sky liquefied. It rained hard for days, then weeks. Paris was sodden. The Seine was engorged. Drains overflowed; tangles of earthworms writhed in crumbling logs of shit. Mme Mendel guided Hodel through this chaos one evening, firmly insistent that her daughter purify herself after the two-week period of being unclean, whatever the weather.

  Throughout Hodel’s menses, and for seven days afterward, I had been forbidden to touch her. We slept in separate beds. She was not even allowed to hand me a glass of water. No contact whatsoever was permitted until she had been ritually cleansed, after which copulation was a must.

  Had we lived in Metz, or indeed any town with a decent Jewish population, Hodel could have gone to the ritual bathhouse and been cleansed in a vessel of immersion filled with water fed from a living spring. But we did not have a mikveh in Paris. Much like the country women who lowered themselves into rivers, our women had to cleanse themselves in the water of the Seine. There were, however, several bateaux de bain stationed along the Seine, and one of these was available for use by the Jews.

  As she always did, Hodel began the ritual by washing in our wooden tub at home. Every bit of her had to be scrubbed clean. There could be nothing—not one particle of dirt—between her skin and the purifying water. Once she had scrubbed herself, washed her hair, cut her toenails and fingernails (making sure to burn the nails lest her sister-in-law step on them and lose the baby), and removed her jewelry, she waited for the sun to set, then walked the winding streets to the Seine, her mother’s arm clamped firmly through her own.

  On an average day, the water of the Seine is gentle enough to swim in; after three solid weeks of heavy rain, the river was a torrent; you couldn’t hear your own voice over the rushing water. Yet there was business to be done, and the boatman, his skiff modified for Jewish patronage, was on the lookout for ladies in need. When he spotted little Hodel and her freakishly tall mother waving their white handkerchiefs in the darkness, the man dispatched his wife in a rowboat. Battling the current with her single oar, the woman managed to keep the little boat level long enough for Hodel and Mme Mendel to jump into it from the riverbank. The next few minutes were treacherous; the boat nearly capsized several times, and Hodel, terrified, was soaked in river water and rain by the time she climbed onto the lurching deck of the bathing boat. A Jewish lady, Mme Zimmerman, acting as attendant that evening, dutifully pulled my little wife to a standing position, and they staggered about trying to enter the tentlike screen that covered the deck for modesty’s sake. In lieu of a vessel of immersion, a barrel with holes in the bottom had been nailed to the side of the hull. This was so that the Jewish women could lower themselves into the water in the barrel safely and modestly, dunk under, and return via the ladder.

  As Mme Mendel told the story to us later that night, weeping with rage: once inside the protective tent, Hodel disrobed and stepped from the tent out into the darkness, her arms held by Mmes Zimmerman and Mendel. Naked, shivering, my child-wife walked down the few slimy steps into the barrel filled with frigid, churning water. Halfway down, the women released her. But Hodel slipped! She fell in a diagonal, hitting a rotten board in the side of the barrel. The thing gave way, and Hodel disappeared under the water. Mme Mendel screamed at the boatman furiously, to no avail. She watched as her daughter popped up several yards away and whirled limp, like a belly-up dead frog, pale skin glazed by the roiling water as a clump of orange peels and a stiff dead cat sped by her. A few more seconds, and Hodel was swallowed by the darkness.

  I imagine my little wife waking up just as she was passing under the Pont Notre-Dame; struggling and choking by the Pont au Change; fainting again—probably from shame at her nakedness—somewhere around the Pont Neuf, and ending her journey snagged among the many narrow, tethered skiffs that lined the Seine. This is all I know for certain: a washerwoman abed in her laundry boat—plying her darker trade, as so many of them did when not bleaching clothes—woke to find a naked Hodel clutching her starboard side. She pulled the bleeding girl out of the
water, dressed her in clean linens, and brought her to her family apartment.

  Hodel spent two full days in the washerwoman’s crowded home, unable to remember where she lived, as all the men in our community, a quarter of a mile up the Seine, searched the river for her body. Even the Paris police lent a hand.

  At last Hodel’s address dawned on her. She arrived at our doorstep one afternoon in an immodest décolleté, her face a blank. Beside her was a woman with a large, firm bust and lined face—the laundress, who, I suspected, used her hands for more than just soaping underwear. I handed the louche rescuer a livre for her trouble. She seemed pleased, though she was clearly shocked when she saw from my mode of dress and our interior decoration, which included a menorah, that Hodel was a Jewess.

  The next morning, Hodel woke up and asked for some meat. Her mother fed her a bowl of beef broth. Hodel drank that, but she wanted flesh, too. Mme Mendel brought some beef left over from the Shabbat. Hodel ate it ravenously, then went to sleep. When she woke up, she said she was hungry again. I brought her a chicken leg. The color began to return to her cheeks. Her intestinal problems seemed to be healing, as well. No extra trips to the latrine. What’s more, she arranged her dolls on a bench by the window and didn’t take them into bed with us that night. I almost reminded her, but thought better of it. Once we were settled in bed, with the candles blown out, I jumped in surprise when I felt her little hand on my belly.