Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

  Imagine, having a close relative who had her photos hanging in a museum! Her mother’s own older sister! Afterward, maybe she’d tell Malca about her own plans, her secret, dazzling, equally wild plans. Or maybe not. When the time came, Malca would be the first person they’d contact. She was her best friend, but she was no hero. She’d talk. In the meantime, Rivka lay back, closed her eyes, and dreamed.

  17

  Murray Hill, Manhattan, September 2007

  Hannah Weiss Gordon leaned back on the black sofa, trying to find a comfortable position. But it was a mission impossible. Either some former tenant had stained and disposed of the bottom pillows, leaving behind barely covered springs, or the Chinese-immigrant slumlord who squeezed rent out of naive and desperate college students like herself had found it in a junk pile like that, hauling it up the five flights anyway just so he could advertise the place as “semifurnished.”

  She slid to the hardwood floors, from which, at least, one knew what to expect. Just as she’d adjusted her earphones and got her computer settled in the perfect center of her lap, the phone rang. She ignored it. But it rang and rang and rang, until finally she heard her landlord’s antediluvian answering machine pick it up.

  “Hi, honey, it’s me. Got a minute?”

  She wasn’t expecting that. She lunged for the phone.

  “Mom? When did you get back from London?”

  “Oh, hi, sweetie. Late last night, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “How is everybody?”

  She heard her mother sigh. “‘Grandma Rose,’ the kids told me, ‘our parents aren’t divorcing us, just each other.’ So I guess the message has been delivered consistently and often. Actually, there isn’t much anger that I can see. Your brother Jonathan and his wife are like polite distant cousins at a family reunion that can’t wait to leave.… Let’s hope that attitude will be enough to get them and the kids through this without anyone falling apart. And since it is Jonathan, I suppose we’ll all have to trust he’s doing the right thing for everyone.”

  Jonathan, unlike her, had followed their mother’s footsteps into the creative arts, and he enjoyed a growing reputation as a set designer. This gave him, as far as their mother was concerned, creative license with his life as well. Had it been she getting rid of a perfectly good spouse, there would have been hell to pay, she thought resentfully.

  “Tell me the truth. How do the kids look?”

  “Sad. She bought them a dog.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. A black-and-white mongrel from the pound.”

  “So their father moves out and a dog moves in. I’m glad I’m taking women’s history and not psychology. Grandma and Great-grandma’s generation had quite a different take on splitting up families.”

  “Which is why I moved out of Williamsburg forty years ago and never went back,” Rose snapped at her daughter.

  “Something you never let us forget,” Hannah murmured, barely audibly. She took her mother’s abhorrence of anything remotely bourgeois personally, considering herself a staid and sensible member of that much-maligned class, her hopes pinned on a tenured college professorship with a steady income. With a father who was a legend, and a mother who was also famous, her goal was a calm, normal life out of the spotlight. For that reason alone, her mother’s family interested her. Although they couldn’t be considered “normal,” they were certainly more down-to-earth than either of her parents. “I never understood why I could never even meet your family.”

  “Oh, that again … Trust me, it was the best thing I could have done for you.”

  “I’d like to discuss it with you anyway. Can we meet soon?”

  “Well, that’s odd! What brought all this up just now? Besides, I have nothing to add to what I’ve already said over the years. I saved you from the Taliban, believe me.”

  Her mother was prone to exaggeration for effect. Hannah had learned not to take her literally. “It’s hard, Mom. I’m a women’s history major, after all. That’s what I do all day, research the way different women lived their lives. I think it would be interesting to meet them.”

  “You are assuming, aren’t you, that one of them wants to meet you?”

  “Well, actually, I’ve gotten a letter…”

  “From one of them?”

  “It’s your sister Pearl’s daughter, Rivka.”

  “What does she want, your kidney?” she joked, trying to hide her confusion. Pearl’s daughter! It had been so many, many years. She felt overwhelmed with conflicting emotions.

  “That’s low!”

  “Okay, okay. I give up. What?”

  “I’ll show you the letter when we meet.” She hesitated. “Mom, in all these years, your family never once called you? Never once wanted to meet your children?”

  Rose wondered how much of the shocking, heartbreaking aftermath of her escape from home to share with her inquisitive and demanding daughter. For now, at least, nothing seemed the perfect answer. “When do you want to do this?” she asked reluctantly.

  “Tomorrow? Lunch?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … I’ve got all these new negatives to work on … What about early next week?”

  “This can’t wait a week.”

  “Why not? It’s waited over forty years…”

  “This isn’t about them; it’s about me, your daughter! Why am I always the last one on your list of priorities? After work, self-fulfillment, friendships, fame, travel…”

  Not for the first time, Rose heard the pain in her daughter’s voice. Some of it, she knew, was justified. She was not going to win Mother of the Year. But she had done the best she could under the circumstances, she comforted herself. As Hannah’s father always said: everyone had the right to screw up their children in their own way.

  “Okay, okay! Tomorrow it is.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I appreciate you taking some time off from your busy schedule…”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No, not at all.… I really do appreciate … So meet me at NYU at Chik-fil-A in Weinstein Hall.”

  “Oh, does it have to be on campus? All those chatty students, all that noise…”

  Hannah exhaled silently. “So what about Blue Hill Farm on Washington Place, right near the West Fourth subway station?” she said as politely as she could.

  “Okay, see you tomorrow.”

  *

  “Dear Cuzin Hannah, may G-d let you live long,” Hannah read above the din of the lunchtime crowd. “I am your couzin Rivka, the daughter of your aunt Pearl. Maybe you are shocked to get such a letter from a person you don’t know? I am very sorry I never met you. The daughters of two sisters who come from the same mother, this is very tragic. I do not know how this thing happened or who we should blame. And so I write to you, a stranger, and hope you will show some chesed to me.”

  “What does that word mean, ‘che-sed’?” Hannah asked her mother.

  “First of all, it isn’t pronounced like the past tense of cheese … It’s like clearing the back of your throat when you are getting ready to spit! ‘Chhhhe-sed.’ It means a pure good deed, a favor you do with no desire or expectation of reward.”

  “Got it.” She continued: “I am a Bais Yaankov girl, seventeen years of age. I am an excelent student, my teachers all say this, and I very much long to continue my learning. Emes?…”

  Hannah paused. “What…?”

  Rose got up and walked around, looking over her shoulder at the page. “It means ‘to tell the truth.’”

  “Emes? I want to be a doctor! But my parents—may they live long!—forbid me even to think such a thing, because in a secular college they are afraid I will lose my purity and faith and intermarry. Instead, out of this fear, they have found me a man they say I must marry in the next few months.

  “I have met this young man twice, and my parents are already arranging the vort.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like an engagement party, only it’s the kind of en
gagement you can never break. It’s easier to marry and get a divorce.”

  “Gee whiz!” Hannah shook her head, looking down at the paper and continuing to read: “I am desperate! I have a right to live my own life. Everybody has that right!”

  Rose shifted uncomfortably, coughing, the words eerily familiar but unplaceable. “Wow!”

  “Yeah. I know,” Hannah said, without looking up.

  “I wish to run away from home before this happens, but I have no wear to go. Please couzin, I don’t know who else to turn to. Everyone in my family is against me! No one understands. Please call me on my cell phone 9 - - - - - - - - -

  “Rivka.”

  Hannah folded the letter up, slipping it back inside the envelope and handing it to her mother over the small table in the crowded restaurant. Rose lifted her palms in horror, drawing back.

  “Honey, if you call this poor girl back and offer her assistance, your life will become a living hell. And so will mine.”

  “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not the half of it.”

  “Mom, even if she was a total stranger, we should want to help her! But she’s blood. How can we just turn our backs?”

  Rose hesitated. “Listen, I’m not saying I don’t have tremendous sympathy for her. But as my mother used to say: ‘You don’t need sharp teeth to eat borscht!’”

  “Come again?”

  “In other words, you don’t need to be a genius to figure this out. First of all, imagine what would happen if I facilitate another runaway bride from the house of Weiss? They’d have the final proof—not that they need it!—that the awful things they’ve believed about me all these years are true. That I made the choices I did not because I was different, but because I was evil.”

  Hannah was flabbergasted. “Mom, after all this time, you still care what your family thinks about you?”

  Rose hesitated. “You don’t, can’t, understand what it’s been like for me, Hannah. Besides, it’s dangerous.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous. They’re just old-fashioned Jews, not goodfellas. What can they possibly do?”

  “Oh, my little naive princess, are you ever clueless! They will send their thugs here and put you and me and little Rivkaleh into the hospital.”

  “Give me a break. Thugs?”

  “Oh, you better believe it! You think you can’t bash someone over the head with a crowbar if you wear a skullcap and a black suit? You think their beards interfere with their fists? Think again. Don’t imagine that stuff is just made up about them having modesty patrols that roam around beating people up. It’s for real. And they do it all for the sake of heaven.”

  She actually looked scared, Hannah thought, shocked. This was nothing like the fearless woman she knew as her mother. “Well, you left, and you are still here to tell the tale.”

  “But I never told you anything about what I went through,” she answered with uncharacteristic bitterness.

  Hannah shook her head slowly. “When I got this letter, I thought that you, of all people, would sympathize and know what to do. After all, doesn’t she remind you of someone you once knew?”

  “Yes, and that’s just the problem. I know what’s lying ahead of her if she goes through with this. She doesn’t, and neither do you. Besides, as you can see from her letter, she’s naive and impulsive. She wants to be a doctor? She can’t even spell!”

  “But you had the same horrible education and look at what you’ve accomplished with your life! We could help her to go back to school, Mom. We could guide her. I’m sure she’d be so grateful…”

  “Yes, grateful, at the beginning, until the tug of the family kicks in.… It’s like the pull of the magnetic field over gravity. We’ll take her in, try to help her, and then she’ll get discouraged and homesick and look down that long, lonesome road ahead among strangers in an unfamiliar world. She’ll have guilt dogging her every step, thinking God is going to punish her for having a brain and wanting to make her own choices. Then, she’ll blame us for everything and go back home and get married. Maybe she’ll invite you—certainly not me, the scandalous aunt—to the wedding. But you better not go, because your crime of trying to help her will be viewed as so unforgivable that even Yom Kippur will be wasted on you. My family believes some crimes can never be forgiven, and some people are so low they can never repent. And you will be one of them right alongside of me.”

  Hannah looked stricken, Rose thought, brushing her daughter’s dark curls out of her serious, dark eyes, her heart aching for her sensible, kind, liberal daughter who gave money to refugees in Darfur and bought bag ladies lattes in Starbucks. She was so much like her father. “I know you want to do the right thing, honey. But sometimes, it’s not so obvious what that is. Do you really need this in your life right now?”

  In my life, Hannah thought, the faint hope she’d secretly harbored that her mother might somehow rescue her by offering her own spacious apartment as an alternative slowly slipping away and the reality of another person intruding into her tiny, private space becoming dreadfully real. Where would she sleep? Not on that couch.… With midterm exams coming up and a bunch of papers to write, did she really have time to deal with this?

  Besides, maybe her mother was right. Not getting involved would force her young “cuzin” to rethink the whole thing before it was too late. Or was that just a rationalization on her part, a selfish but prudent desire to bar the doors of her ordered life against strange and uncontrollable forces?

  “Okay, I hear you. But one day you are going to have to tell me everything.”

  “One day…” Rose smiled tepidly, her mouth dry.

  Hannah stuffed the envelope back into her handbag, the way she did unsolicited mail from various worthy charities, hoping to delay both the disappointing answer to their requests and her conscience pangs. In the meantime, she hurried to classes.

  *

  The course was Women in European Society and Politics. The lecture hall was filling up. She scanned the room and saw Jason looking over his shoulder at her with a roguish smile, always at least half a flirt, if not a whole one. He waved.

  She squeezed past dozens of knees to get to the seat he had saved (for her or Stacey or Deidre…). His long legs were snugly outlined in worn jeans with strategically placed fashionable rips. His thick, navy blue sweater with the little polo player smelled of fabric softener, the way his blond wavy hair smelled of conditioner. But nothing could drown out the reek of testosterone that oozed from his every pore, at least in her imagination. In a room full of women, he was like a lighthouse.

  “Hi. Have you seen this?”

  It was a printout of the new Web site for NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

  Proposals are invited for a panel to be entitled “Documentary Techniques in Pornographic Film and Video” … a panel of three presenters will explore a recent and profound trend that appears across pornographic genres: the emphasis on capturing “real” sex through narrative techniques typically found in the documentary film tradition …

  “This is the reason I switched to history. Tell me, is everyone in your department a pervert, or just the vast majority?”

  He snorted with laughter.

  For months, he had been playing at something that she had yet to figure out. On the one hand, he had never asked her out, but on the other, he saved her seats and could talk to her for hours whenever he ran into her. Once, he even showed up at her apartment. He’d sat there eating her potato chips and sipping her beer until finally hinting he’d like to spend the night.

  As if. What did girls who said yes to these kinds of proposals do the day after? Ignore it? Exploit it? Forget it? And were they really capable of doing any of the foregoing without feeling embarrassed, stupid, or used?

  Still, she didn’t blame him for trying. She was even a bit flattered. Everybody wanted something. As far as she was concerned, the only unforgivable crime was seeking her friendship just to meet her famous moth
er.

  All her life she had had to deal with those kinds of opportunists: girls in high school who became her best friends in order to get her mother to give them tickets to gallery openings. Teachers who befriended her and then got her mother to give free talks to their favorite charities. Boys who introduced her to friends as the daughter of Rose Weiss, the famous photographer.

  Given that he wasn’t guilty of that, and the fact that there wasn’t a great selection of men in women’s studies, she kept hoping against hope something worthy might develop.

  “Busy tonight?” he asked.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, we’ve got that midterm coming up…”

  Of course. What else? Free tutoring.

  “Sorry,” she murmured, hiding her disappointment.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, Jason. Really.”

  She settled back, annoyed, waiting for the lecture to begin.

  She’d taken up women’s studies to be inspired. Instead, the more she learned about the lives of women, the more depressed she felt. She’d always held on to the belief that feminism had transformed the world. Yet as much as things had changed, when she studied the modern world in light of what she was learning about the medieval world, the more she realized that they had stayed the same. Men still ran the world, initiating relationships and controlling them.

  Take the medieval concept of Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Didn’t every fundamentalist sect today have the same “barefoot and pregnant” attitude toward women? And in the name of multiculturalism, was this attitude not now receiving respect in the Western world, which it didn’t deserve?

  Among Jews, though, there was an interesting twist. While fundamentalist Jewish society also glorified the stay-at-home housewife whose “pride is within her four corners,” it also, rather ironically, threw women out into the working world, insisting they support their families so their husbands could sit and learn the Talmud. And so even hundreds of years ago in the shtetel, pious daughters were taught to speak, read, and write in several languages, as well as to do rudimentary math in order to sustain the family business.