The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Audrey’s expression hardened. “Oh, she’s finally joined us.”

  Rosa looked at her sister. “Has there been any more news?” Karla, who was a hospital social worker, was the most likely to have absorbed and understood any medical information that had been dispensed.

  “They’ve done a scan,” Karla said. “It showed there was activity on both sides of his brain, which is very encouraging. He’ll definitely have incurred some damage, but from what they can tell so far, it’s in the motor cortex, which suggests his speech hasn’t been affected—”

  “Oh, none of them know what they’re talking about,” Audrey burst out. “They’re all cretins—that’s why they’re working at this dump and not at a proper hospital in Manhattan.”

  Karla took a ragged tissue from her pocket and began dabbing it at her eyes.

  “Don’t start blubbing, Karla, please,” Audrey said.

  The room fell silent.

  “These people don’t even know who Joel is,” Audrey said after a moment. “They’ve got a fucking girl taking care of him, for God’s sake.”

  “Not a female, surely?” Rosa said, with a smile. Keeping score of Audrey’s antifeminist remarks was a private hobby of hers. She had a fantasy that one day she would compile them in a book and present the volume to her mother as a Christmas gift.

  “Don’t give me that,” Audrey said. “I’m telling you, she’s a teenager. She doesn’t look as if she’s started her periods yet.”

  “You mustn’t worry,” Karla said. “I’m sure she knows what she’s—”

  “Shit, where’s my pot?” Audrey interrupted. She patted frantically at her pockets. “Lenny, where did I put that pot you gave me?”

  The sides of Lenny’s mouth turned down in an expression of complacent cluelessness. “Dunno.”

  “Can you remember where you had it last?” Karla asked.

  Audrey ignored her. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said, standing up.

  Karla got down on her hands and knees, to peer beneath the chairs. “Could you have left it in the bathroom?”

  Lenny made a desultory show of looking down the back of the sofa.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Audrey murmured, peering at the floor around her feet. “Where did I put it?”

  Rosa watched her brother and sister creep around the room, two wary satellites to Audrey’s sun.

  “Oh!” Audrey cried suddenly, as she pulled a baggie from one of the side compartments of her pocketbook. “Here it is! Panic over.”

  “Well done, Mom!” Karla said.

  “D’ya wanna go and have a smoke?” Lenny offered. “I’ll come outside with you.”

  Audrey shook her head. “Don’t be daft, Lenny. What if they bring your dad up while I’m gone?” She sat back down on the sofa and closed her eyes.

  Her children watched her.

  “Another thing about that girl doctor,” she said presently. “She’s got this horrible little mouth on her. It looks just like an arsehole.”

  Lenny and Karla giggled. Rosa studied the floor with distaste. Her mother was always congratulating herself on her audacious honesty, her willingness to express what everyone else was thinking. But no one, Rosa thought, actually shared Audrey’s ugly view of the world. It was not the truth of her observations that made people laugh, but their unfairness, their surreal cruelty.

  “You should eat something Mom,” Karla said. “I could get you something from the cafeteria.”

  “God, no.” Audrey made a face. “I couldn’t keep anything down.”

  “You’d feel better if you ate,” Karla said. “You need to keep your strength up.”

  Audrey opened her eyes now. “Would you stop going on about food, Karla?”

  Karla stared at her hands.

  “Actually, Karl,” Lenny said after a moment, “I wouldn’t mind an Almond Joy or something.”

  Rosa looked at her brother disapprovingly. “Go get your own Almond Joy, Lenny.”

  “It’s all right,” Karla said. “I don’t mind.”

  Lenny shrugged. “If she wants to go…”

  “Don’t be so lazy,” Rosa insisted.

  “I really don’t mind,” Karla repeated.

  “For God’s sake, let her go, Rosa,” Audrey put in sharply.

  “Would you get me a coffee, too, while you’re down there?” Lenny asked. “Black, two sugars?”

  Rosa stood up. “I’ll come with you, Karla.”

  In the elevator, the two sisters smiled awkwardly at each other.

  “How’s Mike?” Rosa asked.

  “He’s good.” Karla’s face took on a defensive expression. “He’s coming as soon as he can get away. He’s in a very important union meeting this afternoon. They’re announcing the state election endorsements tomorrow.”

  “Oh, yes?” Rosa said politely. Karla always spoke of Mike’s job as a union organizer with the reverence of a missionary wife describing her husband’s evangelical work in Borneo.

  “I see Mom’s being her usual charming self,” Rosa said after a moment.

  “Well, she’s under a lot of strain, Rosa.”

  Rosa sighed. It was hard graft trying to work up any sororal intimacy with Karla. Most siblings—however estranged from one another—could find common cause in being exasperated by their parents. But Karla refused to countenance the mildest criticism of Joel and Audrey. There was something rather tragic, Rosa thought, about this intransigent filial loyalty. Karla had always been the least noticed of the Litvinoff offspring, the one who had had to work hardest to elicit the palest ray of her parents’ approval or interest. But by some strange process, her lowly status within the family had only inflamed her ardor for the institution. She reminded Rosa of one of those people who spend four utterly miserable, unfriended years at college and then turn up years later as president of the alumni club.

  Down in the strip-lit melancholia of the cafeteria, they each took a tray and shuffled along the winding counter, inspecting the contents of the plastic display cabinets. Karla hovered for a while over a group of elderly cheese Danishes.

  “I wouldn’t,” Rosa said. “They look as if they’ve been there a week.” She stole a sidelong glance at her sister. Karla had put on more weight lately. The cowl of extra flesh around her jaw was slowly expanding, and she was beginning to walk with a fat person’s arduous, backward-leaning swagger. Rosa did not like to think of herself as being overly concerned with appearances. She disapproved of physical beauty, in fact. The reckless goodwill that her own looks inspired in total strangers had always been an embarrassment to her; she tended to regard other conspicuously attractive people as participants in a con game that she was doing her best to renounce. But Karla’s weight was not an aesthetic issue; it was an ethical one. It bespoke a repugnant level of greed: a fundamental lack of self-respect.

  She moved over to the fruit island now, hoping to lead by example. After examining a basket of wrinkled apples and blackened bananas, she settled, reluctantly, on a pinched-looking orange. Karla was already at the cash register, purchasing the Danish. She put it hurriedly away in her handbag as Rosa approached.

  “My God!” Rosa said, glancing into the crowded interior of Karla’s bag, “you’ve got a whole life support system in there.” She pointed at a tin of medicated talcum powder. “What do you carry that around for?”

  Karla blushed and snapped her bag shut. “It…it’s for my legs, actually. When I’m on my feet too long, the inside of my thighs get, you know, chafed….”

  “Oh, right,” Rosa said, trying not to sound aghast. “Bummer.”

  Upstairs, Joel had been brought back from his tests, and Audrey and Lenny were standing at his bedside in one of the ICU rooms. “You’re not going to stay here, love,” Audrey was saying, when Rosa and Karla came in. “I’m going to phone Dr. Sussman tonight and see about getting you moved to NYU.”

  Joel lay motionless on the bed, his white hair pressed flat against his skull in damp, yellowish strands, his knobbly wrists stick
ing out from the wide sleeves of his hospital gown like clappers in a bell. In some childish part of Rosa’s mind, she had been expecting the largeness of her father’s personality to have survived this physical catastrophe. She had pictured him sitting up, making jokes, imposing himself on a new environment with all his usual commanding ebullience. But whatever remained of that man in this frail, speckled creature had gone into hiding. In the frayed, faded blue of hospital issue, her father had become just another enlistee in the vast army of the sick and dying.

  “You sure you need all these, love?” Audrey was asking him in a teasing tone, pointing to the profusion of tubes sprouting from his scalp and mouth and wrists. “I think you’re showing off with all this stuff—” She broke off suddenly. “What are you grinning at?” she demanded of Karla.

  Rosa glanced at her sister. One of the unfortunate by-products of Karla’s obliging personality was an unconscious tendency to take on the facial expressions and, in some cases, the speech patterns and accents of people around her. Just now, she had been so immersed in her mother’s labored performance of good cheer that she had allowed her face to become frozen in a rictus of foolish, sympathetic gaiety.

  “I’m sorry,” Karla said, wringing her hands. “I wasn’t—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Audrey hissed, “don’t stand there looking like a smacked arse. You’re the one who’s meant to have the bedside manner.”

  “Give her a break, Mom,” Rosa said quietly.

  Audrey continued to glare at Karla. “Go on, then. Talk to him!”

  “Leave her alone, would you, Mom?” Rosa said.

  “Excuse me?” Audrey turned to her slowly.

  “You keep picking on her,” Rosa said. “It’s not fair.”

  “It’s all right,” Karla said. “Honestly…”

  Audrey folded her arms. “Oh, I see. Now that you’ve finally graced us with your presence, you want to instruct me on how to behave, is that it?”

  “I just don’t think you need to be such a bitch to Karla, that’s all,” Rosa said.

  “Don’t fight,” Karla pleaded.

  Audrey took a step toward Rosa. “Did you call me a bitch?”

  A tiny tremor started up in Rosa’s lower lip. “I was just saying—”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” Audrey screeched.

  Rosa hesitated.

  “Go on!” her mother shouted. “Piss off!”

  Rosa walked slowly over to the door. “That’s right!” her mother called after her as she left the room. “Good fucking riddance!”

  It had rained briefly while Rosa was in the hospital, and as she walked to the subway station, fizzing with adrenaline and indignation, the trees along Henry Street wept icy droplets of water on her head. Her mother was intolerable. Intolerable. She was becoming, in her old age, like one of those paranoid despots who see in every minor disobedience the seeds of a full-scale insurgency. You threw a pebble; she brought out a howitzer. Rosa would never forgive her for this.

  As she turned onto Clark Street, her phone rang. It was Raphael, calling from the GirlPower Center.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. He’s still unconscious.”

  “Fuck. Do you want me to come to the hospital?”

  “No. I’m on my way home now. I had an argument with Mom. She threw me out.”

  “What?”

  “She was giving Karla a hard time, so I told her to stop it and she freaked.”

  “She threw you out?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jesus, Ro. Do you want me to meet you at your apartment?”

  “Nah. I think I’m just going to go to bed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, really. Look, I’m at the station now. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.”

  Rosa got off the phone, feeling obscurely dissatisfied. Raphael’s unquestioning faith in her version of events had only aroused her self-doubt. Already, as she passed through the ticket barriers and entered the blackened station elevator, she could feel her pleasurable anger beginning to surrender to remorse. She should not have picked a fight—not when her father was so ill. She had flattered herself that she was defending her sister, but Karla had not wanted to be defended. And she had called her own mother a bitch! She, who prided herself on never using that ugly, sexist word. Now, as a result of her own childish petulance, she had been exiled from her father’s hospital room in his hour of need.

  The train was just coming in when she reached the platform. The subway car she boarded was plastered with advertisements for a sinister-looking Manhattan dermatologist called Dr. Z. Beneath the multiplied gaze of the sad-eyed, translucent-skinned doctor, she contemplated her sins.

  Guilt—genuine, personal guilt, as opposed to some abstract, mandatory sense of shame about being a rich white American—was a very recent addition to Rosa’s emotional repertoire. For most of her life, she had been immunized against self-reproach by the certitudes of her socialist faith. All her moral disappointment had been reserved for others—schoolmates who failed to resist the temptation of South African fruit, college acquaintances who were insufficiently concerned about the fate of the Angolan freedom fighters, bourgeois parents who pretended to socialist virtue. As a teenager, she had often been urged by her father to temper her revolutionary zeal with some sympathy for human frailty. “Only ideas are perfect. People never are,” Joel would tell her. “When you’ve lived a bit longer, you’ll be more forgiving.” But Rosa had scorned these attempts to modify her wrath. For a person as deeply offended by injustice and inequity as she was—as committed to changing the world—a degree of ruthlessness was imperative, she felt. Her usual response to her father had been to quote Lenin’s defense of Bolshevik tactics: “Is regard for humanity possible in such an unheard-of ferocious struggle? By what measure do you measure the quantity of necessary and unnecessary blows in a fight?”

  Now, though, this paradisiacal era of righteousness had come to an end. After a long and valiant battle against doubt, she had finally surrendered her political faith, and with it the densely woven screen of doctrinal abstraction through which she was accustomed to viewing the world. For the first time, she was charting her course without the guiding stars of revolutionary principles. To say that this was a humbling business did not begin to convey her desolation. All her adult life, she had imagined herself striding along in history’s vanguard like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructivist poster. Now, she had been thrown back into the ignominious ranks of bourgeois liberalism. She had become just another do-gooder, hoping to make a difference by taking underprivileged girls on museum trips. She did not—could not—wish to have her old delusions back, but how she yearned for the self-assurance she had experienced while in their thrall!

  At 110th Street, Rosa got off the train, and after pausing for a moment on Broadway to check her watch, she walked quickly over to the Ahavat Israel Shul on Amsterdam Avenue. Evening prayers had already begun when she entered the building. In the reception area, a man was standing beneath two giant Israeli and American flags, handing out chumashes and siddurim. Rosa walked past him down a dim corridor. At the rear of the building, she climbed a flight of stairs and entered the women’s balcony section. There was only one other woman present this evening—an elderly lady with a frilly, doily-like chapel cap on her head. Rosa leaned over the balcony railing and gazed down into the sanctuary, where a handful of old men were rocking back and forth in prayer.

  She had visited Ahavat Israel for the first time three months ago. One Saturday morning in December, as she had been passing the building, she had glimpsed two men in black hats slipping in the front door and had decided to follow them in. The impulse was born of a mild, touristic curiosity rather than any spiritual longing: she had never been inside an Orthodox synagogue before, and she thought it would be entertaining to see what serious Jews got up to when they prayed.

  Almost immediately upon entering th
e building, she had committed a serious faux pas by seating herself in the section of the synagogue reserved for male congregants. An embarrassing kerfuffle had ensued, culminating in her being removed from the sanctuary by two red-faced men and marched upstairs to the women’s gallery. At this point, having had her expectations of antique taboos and cultic strangeness so promptly met, she would have happily departed. But up in the gallery, she had found herself hemmed in on all sides by davening women. Reluctant to draw further attention to herself by climbing over them to get out, she had resigned herself to remaining in her seat until the service was over.

  She had understood almost nothing of what was going on, of course. The Hebrew siddur she had been given had no English translation, and her ignorance of Jewish observance was such that she could not even be sure of having correctly identified the rabbi. The synagogue itself was a disappointment. With its plastic stacking chairs and frayed green carpet runner and sad vases of dusty silk flowers, it reminded her of the down-at-heels dental practice that she had been taken to as a child. Even the mosaic on the eastern wall—a mid-century devotional abstract executed in mustard yellow and gold—had the dowdy, third-rate quality of dentist art. Still, she enjoyed the odd mixture of formality and casualness with which the congregants conducted themselves—the way they kept breaking off from the headbanging fervor of their praying to wander about the sanctuary and chat. And there was something sweet, she thought, about the way they handled the Torah—undressing it and dandling it and parading it about as if it were an adored infant. The whole thing had a faintly preposterous, Masonic quality, but it was not, she conceded, without its anthropological charm.

  At the end of the Torah service, just as the scroll was being replaced in the ark, the congregation had begun to sing a slow, mournful prayer. Rosa, who rarely, if ever, responded to music without knowing and approving of what it was about, was surprised to find herself moved. Something in the prayer’s austere melody was making the hairs on her arms stand up. A thought came to her, as clearly as if it had been spoken in her ear. You are connected to this. This song is your song. When next she glanced down at the siddur lying open in her hands, she was amazed to see the little ragged suns of her own teardrops turning the wafer-thin pages transparent.