Poring over the job listings in the newspaper, Max did not see any openings for professors of French literature. He realized with a shock just how unqualified he was for any kind of practical work. He had given himself over entirely to a life of the mind. He could not plumb a drain, build a chair, sew a jacket, lay bricks. He barely spoke English. He had no driver’s license. Finally, the doe-eyed Mrs. Schwartz set him up with a cousin of hers who owned a carpet remnant store on Flatbush Avenue. His days were spent heaving rolls of wall-to-wall carpeting from shelves to the floor and back to the shelves again. Eventually he was promoted to sales. The women loved his accent. He sold a deep-pile taupe remnant to the mother of a quiet dark-haired girl named Maxine, of all things. Just twenty, she stood at the back of the shop as he spoke to her mother. Now and then he caught her observing him and she smiled very slightly. Three days later she returned, ostensibly to buy a welcome mat. Max asked her to dinner. At one point during the meal he made her laugh; she flopped her head back and howled. That laugh was what made him fall in love with her. His instinct was correct: Maxine was passionate, loyal, vivid, and hardheaded. Once his divorce from Suzielle came through (hurried along by a French bureaucracy eager to split mixed couples), he proposed. Max and Maxine.
After the war, as the attempt began to scrape Nazi pus from the rotting abdomen of Europe, Max, with the help of Maxine, opened a carpet business in Flatbush. His refinement lent the place class. Maxine’s practical streak kept it in the black. Within a few years the couple had opened a store in Manhattan that also sold high-end rugs from Turkey and Morocco. By this time Max and Maxine had three children: Sam, David, and Dinah. Once they could afford it, Max moved the family to the Upper West Side. He became a member of the Metropolitan Opera, sent his children to private schools, took courses at Columbia to satisfy his intellect. A total believer in assimiliation, he put up a Christmas tree along with the menorah. Sam became a doctor, David a journalist.
It was Dinah who strayed back to her roots. She met an Orthodox girl from Brooklyn on a camping trip with the 92nd Street Y. The two corresponded, and Dinah went to spend the weekend with her new friend. Without Max or Maxine realizing it, Dinah was gradually falling in love with Judaism. She majored in Jewish studies at Brandeis, and started dressing more and more modestly. Maxine, a straight talker, asked her if she was planning on becoming a nun. Dinah responded passionately that she had had enough of Max and Maxine’s indifference to their religion. She didn’t understand how they could simply throw away five thousand years of tradition, an incomparable history of suffering and resilience. She made a break with the family, married an Orthodox yeshiva student from Long Island, started what she hoped would be an enormous family, and cut her parents off.
Over the years, the rift was sutured together but never healed completely: Max simply couldn’t understand why, when the feast of American Possibility was laid before her, his only daughter decided to leave it untouched and eat gefilte fish instead. Dinah covered her dark hair in a wig, grew her skirts below the knee, and sent her children to be educated in religious schools that gave short shrift to secular studies. This was what Max could never forgive: his grandchildren would grow up ignorant of the great European culture that was their birthright. Yet, Dinah contended, they would lead deeply spiritual lives, live according to the word of G-d, and anyway, who needed more than the Torah, the Talmud, all the commentaries, and, for the boys if they got that far, the Zohar? There was a world of knowledge in those books; it took a lifetime to understand half of them. What was so wonderful about secular materialism?
Dinah was fertile as well as obstinate: she gave birth to seven children, the youngest of whom was Pearl. So, all in all, I had spawned twelve generations. Fuck you, Hitler! What a deity. To think that I, sybaritic stage strutter, libertine valet, son abandoner, police informant, and apostate, should end up as patriarch to a vast tribe of Israelites … These were my children.
As the news sank in, I began to play the part: crossing Pearl’s coffee table, I affected a grandfatherly shuffle, my wings tucked officiously behind my back as I inspected my descendants. I saw myself with a well-tended white beard, a neat paunch, green slippers, and—a yarmulke. Yes: overwhelmed by the strange, intransigent beauty of our way of life, the indestructible story line of our people, joy and terror mingled in me, building into awe as I contemplated the fate of the Jews. I was vanquished. The Old Man had concocted a logic so deep and so wide I could not but drown laughing at the folly of my own life. The care he’d taken! Honing each detail until it sparkled. Only love could fuel such dedication to a single, humble being. Could it be he lavished equal attention on every soul?
An alternate cosmology presented itself to me as I stood there trembling: before Creation, when Hashem was nothing but a perfect mind, something funny occurred to him. Like a baby letting out his first guffaw, he cracked himself up, burst out laughing, and exploded into the physical world.
I submit, I thought feverishly. You triumph. Not only do You exist, You are everything. You are good, You made evil. There is nothing but You in all the universe. I was a fool to think I was raising Masha up, bringing Leslie down. It was all You! But he wasn’t done with me yet. My religious ecstasy had taken me so far from awareness of my own body that I had flown into the kitchen without knowing it. And there was Masha, formerly the object of my lust, now my great- (times five) granddaughter, wearing a pair of horrifyingly skimpy shorts and platform shoes, hunched over the cold stove, eating from the cholent pot—from the stew meant for the coming Shabbat—with her fingers, just as Hodel did when she was possessed! The girl turned then and looked in my direction, checking the doorway, her eyes the eerie multicolors of oil on a black pond. Her lips had gravy on them. Her snarled hair hung down, half covering her face. The river demon. That’s what she was. “The iniquity of the sons shall be visited on the third and fourth generations.” Well, he went further than that in my case. This thing had survived nearly three hundred years. The creature’s cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her shorts and she flipped it open, turning toward the stove to hide it. I flew behind her and read over her shoulder:
open your front door
43
Masha opened the door. It was Derbhan Nevsky, his clothes blazing white, hopping from one foot to the other.
“I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday,” he whispered, exasperated.
“It’s Shabbos,” Masha said, leaning her hip on the doorsill. The sight of Nevsky irritated her.
“You’re not going back to that, are you? This is not the time,” he said, looking up and down the street.
“I just didn’t think of turning on the phone till now,” she said, shrugging. “What do you want to tell me?”
“You got the part,” he announced. “In the Rathgar Kennet musical—My Alchemy. You got it.”
“What? I thought that was all over.”
“It was. They cast a girl, got her out there, and she didn’t work out. Kennet fired her, reviewed all the audition tapes. Now they want you. We gotta get you to Mexico.”
“When?”
“Now. Shooting started September first. There’s a fitting scheduled for tomorrow morning.” Behind Nevsky, mute threads of far-off lightning glimmered in the sky. Nevsky swiveled around to see what she was looking at.
Masha stomped upstairs screaming with excitement, broadcasting the headline of her triumph and imminent departure through every room in the house. Rueful, jealous, proud, I watched her take off, a blur of limbs ascending. That was my path she was taking. Hovering sadly in the air, I saw myself reflected in her, purified, my debasements burned away, my talent deepened. Our shared fate was hers to complete. My girl was going to be glorious!
Masha rushed into her room, opened the closet, and removed a small light-blue child’s suitcase, the only one she owned. Flipping the clasps and opening it onto the bed, a thought came to her. It didn’t matter how long she had. She would just eat up whatever time she had left, grab it
with both her hands, consume it, and apologize to no one. That’s what she would do.
Pearl invited the small, nervous agent man into the kitchen, gave him a cup of coffee and a blintze. She sat down beside him, feeling a strange kind of relief mixed with mourning. She knew that Masha had to go. In a way, she even wanted her to. That was the worst of it.
“Will they take care of her?” she asked him.
“Take care of her! She’ll be treated like a queen. I’ll make sure of it. This director may be a genius, by the way.”
“But … what happened to the other girl, the one they chose first?” asked Pearl.
“She wasn’t Masha. That was her problem. This is Masha’s part. Sometimes things have a way of aligning themselves,” said Nevsky mysteriously, pressing the edge of his fork into the blintze. “These are spectacular, Mrs. Edelman,” he said, chewing rapidly.
“Thank you,” said Pearl. Nevsky looked up at her solemn face and winced. It was so unpleasant being face-to-face with open pain.
“Masha can’t help being what she is, any more than that fly can turn himself into a ladybug,” he said, pointing a leathery finger in my direction. In the process of performing my morning ablutions in a droplet of water, I rubbed my forepaws together in prayerful assent.
Her attention drawn to me, Pearl stared down for a long moment. I knew this was the end. I didn’t move. I was ready. Nevsky watched, his loaded fork poised midair, as my progeny raised her hand. The canopy of her palm stiffened above me. I spread my legs wide, lying prostrate on the table, and prepared for my execution.
Please, El Shaddai, Creator of all things, listen to me! I cried in desperation. I got it all wrong! I frittered away my life in sin, You gave me a chance to return, and what do I do? I mess it up again, thinking only how to hurt You, ruin people’s lives. But now I swear I’ve learned my lesson. I beg You: let me be born as a man again. I promise to be good next time!
As Pearl’s killing hand descended, I heard a dark sound, a kind of cosmic drumroll, clustering, echoing, tumbling—down from a mirthful sky.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Max McGuinness, whose dogged research helped me penetrate some of the mysteries of life among eighteenth-century Jews, and whose knowledge of the French Enlightenment was crucial to my own understanding; Suri Weingott, who welcomed me into her home, allowing me a view of her family life, its rituals and traditions; Rabbi Ellen Lippmann, Rabbi Scott Fox, Shulamit Kadosh, and Julia Bolus, for their advice and expertise; Gene Spiotta, for opening up the world of fire rescue and the culture of volunteering, as well as being an inspirational figure; Jane Spiotta, for her hospitality and the tours of Patchogue; Peggy Gormley, for the hours inside the eruv in Far Rockaway; my agent, Sarah Chalfant, for her early enthusiasm and constancy; my editor, Jonathan Galassi; my dear Daniel, Gabriel, Ronan, and Cashel, who have helped shape this book, each in his own way.
About the Author
REBECCA MILLER is the author of the short story collection Personal Velocity, her feature-film adaptation of which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. She is the writer-director of Angela, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and, most recently, the novel and film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. She lives in New York and Ireland with her family. Visit her online at rebecca-miller.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Also by Rebecca Miller
NOVEL
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
STORIES
Personal Velocity
FILMS
Angela
The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Personal Velocity
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Copyright
Jacob’s Folly
Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Miller.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-44341-828-7
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
information is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-44341-826-3
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1 Auckland,
New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com
Jacob's Folly Page 35