Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

  She dialed her sister’s number. Zevulun answered.

  “Hello, Zevulun, I need to speak with Pearl.”

  “You have the chutzpah to call here, after what you’ve done?”

  She exhaled, taking the phone away from her ear and holding it in her hand for a moment. “Please, Zevulun, this is about your daughter, and it is very, very serious.”

  “Serious?” His tone changed immediately, losing its confidence and anger, becoming small. “What happened to my Rivkaleh?”

  “I don’t know. She left the gallery soon after you did. We didn’t even notice she was gone. I don’t know where she is. I wanted to let you know that.”

  She heard him call for Pearl. His voice was desperate.

  “Shoshi, what happened?”

  “Pearl, I told Zevulun, and I’ll tell you: I don’t know. She was there one minute and gone the next.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  Rose hesitated. “I didn’t say anything to her; that’s just it. I was speaking my mind to Hannah as if she wasn’t there. I said I thought she should go home to you.”

  “You did? And then, what, you let her run away? How could you?”

  “How could I? You’re her mother and you walked out on her, Pearl! She’s your daughter, and you allowed your husband to say to her he wished she was dead! Take some responsibility, won’t you?”

  She heard her sister crying. The sound broke her heart.

  “Look, Pearl, can you think of anywhere she might have gone? Some friend or relative that might have taken her in?”

  Pearl caught her breath, blowing her nose. “She didn’t go to anyone in the family. They would have called me. Everyone knows what’s going on now. After the meeting we had, we called the family and explained the situation. No one would have taken her in without calling me or Zevulun.”

  “Then what about her girlfriends? A teacher? A rabbi?”

  “I will call them, but all these people are members of our community. No one would have taken her in without first calling us.”

  She has no one, Rose thought. That’s why she came to Hannah, to me. To strangers. And we … Her stomach began to tighten into a ball of pain. “I am going to hire a private detective to find her, Pearl. Not to worry.”

  “God bless you. Please call me the minute you hear anything.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And Shoshi?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry for those terrible things Zevulun said. He was angry, upset. She is the joy of his life.”

  “You didn’t agree, then?”

  “No.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something, Pearl? Why didn’t you speak up? It would have meant a lot to your daughter.” And to me, she thought bitterly.

  “He’s my husband. A woman has to follow her husband. A mother cannot teach a child to disrespect a father.”

  “Sometimes, Pearl, you have to break the rules.”

  There was a brief silence, and then Pearl said, “Sometimes, rules are all that a person has to hold on to. When you let go, you drown.”

  They would never agree, Rose finally accepted. “Let’s hope we have another chance to talk to her soon.”

  “God willing!”

  “Yes. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Shoshi.”

  She hung up the phone and waited. As the day faded into night, the rain and thunder began in earnest, the pleasant spring weather turning unexpectedly cold. She felt sick with worry. Rivka hadn’t even taken a sweater! She warmed up a little leftover soup and ate it listlessly, barely tasting it. She waited by the phone. In the late evening, it rang. It was Hannah.

  “Mom, I made a dozen calls, but no one of Rivka’s description matches anyone brought into a Manhattan or Brooklyn emergency room. I even called Simon. He hasn’t heard anything either. I can’t think of anything more to do.”

  There was nothing. The next stop would be the police station, and the offices of a private detective agency.

  Pearl met her at the police station the next day. She seemed to have aged overnight, Rose thought, shocked, her face wrinkled and gray, dark bags edging her eyes.

  The police were correct and busy. They took down the information and took a copy of the photo Rose had taken of Rivka that day in Chinatown.

  “You sure she’s eighteen?” the cop probed. “She looks a lot younger.”

  “She’s been very sheltered,” Pearl emphasized. “And she isn’t … well.”

  “What’s the medical condition?” the cop asked. He waited patiently. “Well, ladies?”

  “She’s pregnant,” Rose finally told him.

  He gave a knowing nod and a shrug, then went back to his paperwork.

  “You say she has no place to go and wouldn’t approach a family member for shelter?”

  “We are her family. She’s left her family.”

  “Left, or was thrown out?” the cop asked, not looking up from the form he was filling out.

  No one answered.

  When the silence lengthened, he lifted his head and saw the two women staring at each other with tears in their eyes.

  They walked out of the police station.

  “So I guess it’s good-bye, then,” Rose said. “I hope we’ll be in touch soon with good news…” She turned to go.

  “Shoshi!”

  Rose turned back. To her astonishment, Pearl’s face was bright red, her eyes swimming. She clutched Rose’s hand. “Please…! Can we go somewhere? I need … I wanted … to … talk.”

  Rose felt her heart beating as if she’d run a race. “There … I mean … well … there are no kosher restaurants around here,” she stammered. “Would you agree to go into a coffee shop? You can order tea, or a Coke?”

  “Yes, yes. It doesn’t matter.” Pearl nodded, holding on tightly to Rose’s hand.

  The feeling of her sister’s warm skin on hers was shocking. Rose tried not to show how much it affected her, keeping pace with Pearl as they walked forward. Finally, there was a small luncheonette.

  “Is this okay?”

  In response, Pearl walked forward, holding open the door for her. Rose went through.

  It was fairly empty. They took a quiet booth in the corner. A young waitress, pierced and tattooed, approached the table.

  “Do you trust me to order?” Rose asked.

  “Please,” Pearl said, staring with open fascination at the girl. The girl stared back, raising an eyebrow.

  “Coffee for me, unless you’ve got cappuccino on the menu, and a Coke for her, but don’t put it into a glass, just bring a straw,” she told the waitress hurriedly.

  “No cappuccino and no menu,” the waitress said carelessly. “One coffee and one bottle of Coke, hold the glass, coming up.” She turned her back a little too swiftly, walking away.

  Rose shook her head, looking after her.

  “You can actually pour a cold liquid into a clean glass, you know, Rose. It’s only hot coffee you can’t drink out of a nonkosher cup.”

  “I know that. But I thought you might be stringent about it.”

  “So you actually remember all the laws about kosher food, hot and cold beverages…?”

  “It’s like that commercial for Crest toothpaste they kept repeating over and over again in the sixties: ‘Crest has been shown to be an effective decay-preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program’ et cetera, et cetera … It was just beaten into my head so often, I’ll probably forget my name and who my children are before I forget certain things…”

  “It hurts me to hear that all those things you learned as a child in our parents’ home mean as much to you as a commercial for toothpaste…”

  “That’s not what I meant … Geez. You know what? Maybe this is not such a good idea,” Rose said, digging into her pocketbook for change and getting ready to leave.

  Pearl reached out to her, squeezing her hand. “Shoshi, please! I’m sorry. I didn’t…”
>
  Rose exhaled, settling back into her seat. “I expected you’d want to run home as soon as possible.”

  “Why? Why would you think that?”

  Rose glanced at her sideways. “After forty-odd years, you need me to answer?”

  Pearl blushed. “I’m not proud of it. So many times I wanted to call you, to visit you…”

  Rose’s eyes widened. “Then why didn’t you, Pearl? My whole life I’ve been waiting for that call. Things could have been so different between us.”

  “You have no idea what it was like to wake up the morning of your wedding and find you gone! Mameh thought Tateh was going to have a heart attack. She tried to call an ambulance, but he wouldn’t let her…”

  Rose bit her lip.

  “And then all those phone calls! Mameh and Tateh called everyone in the family, asking them what to do. No one knew. Some people said you’d be back, that it often happened with a young kallah, that you’d come to your senses in time for the chuppah. Only Bubbee said we should call it off, that you wouldn’t be coming home…”

  “Ah, Bubbee.” Rose nodded painfully. The old woman had known her too well.

  “One of the uncles went to speak to the boy’s family. They were hysterical. They came barging into the house, made a scandal, called Tateh a rosha … That’s when he collapsed. That scared them, so they left. We never heard from them again. But later, the Honored Rav called Tateh in and told him they were asking for a huge sum of money to make up not only for their expenses but for their shame, their loss of business. If people thought there was something wrong with their son, they said, they’d also think there was something wrong with their chopped liver. They wanted the Honored Rav to arrange for a Din Torah in a rabbinical court.”

  Rose felt suffocated under this overload of burdensome new information. Even though she’d imagined this—and worse—years ago, still, hearing first-person testimony like this was devastating. “What did Tateh do?”

  “What could he do? He didn’t have any money. As it was, he’d taken out loans for the wedding. All those matching satin dresses for Mameh and me and the granddaughters…”

  “My own gown was rented for the day,” Rose said pointedly, feeling battered. “Did Tateh go to a doctor?”

  “His doctor sent him for tests to Kings County Hospital. His heart was weak, the doctors said. They warned him to be careful. Mameh went to the Honored Rav. She was desperate. I don’t know what she said, but, soon after, the Honored Rav convinced the groom’s father to drop his demands. He said God would bless him, his son, and his business if he showed some compassion. The Rav promised he would personally find his son a new shidduch and use his catering service for the shul’s kiddushes for the next year. It saved Tateh and Mameh from ruin.”

  The Honored Rav … Rose exhaled. She owed him one. Or, perhaps, they were at long last even? “What was it like for you, Pearl?”

  She shrugged. “It was a long time ago, Sister.”

  Did Pearl really need to say anything? Rose thought, a queasy ache starting in her stomach as she imagined the stares from the teachers and girls in Bais Yaakov as the news spread and Pearl became a pariah, the-sister-of-the-one-who-ran-away-the-night-before-her-wedding. “But you managed to get a good shidduch in the end, no?” Rose said hopefully.

  “At first, the matchmakers didn’t want to take me on at all. They said just mentioning my name would ruin their reputations. They said we needed to be patient, that the wound was still fresh…”

  “But by the time you were ready to date, it must have been at least three years.”

  Pearl shrugged. “People in our world have long memories, Rose. Finally, someone, a cousin of one of Mameh’s friends, told us about her neighbor, a widower with a small child whose wife had died—God spare us!—in childbirth. He wasn’t young, or particularly learned, or wealthy, and came from a family of simple, newly religious Jews. He was in no position to be choosy, she said, and neither was I.”

  A flash of pain cut through Rose’s stomach. “Did you like him, Pearl?”

  Pearl lifted her head, looking straight into Rose’s eyes. “He was a bus driver. I was twenty-two when I married, a pair of shoes left on the shelf from last season. Who was I to make demands?”

  Rose choked, something reaching out for her throat and squeezing it. She tried to press her lips together, to stop herself from crying. She coughed and coughed, dabbing her mouth with a napkin.

  “Are you all right?”

  Rose nodded, her hand shaking as she raised the coffee cup to her lips. “It’s cold!”

  “And this Coke is warm.”

  They gave each other a small smile.

  “So, is this what you wanted to speak to me about? How I ruined your life?” Rose said, trying and failing to be jocular.

  “You didn’t ruin my life! You ruined your own!”

  “How dare you!” Rose asked with a flash of sudden fury. “Do I seem to you like a person with a ruined life?”

  “You don’t seem happy to me.”

  “And you’re the great expert on happiness, Pearl, is that it? Your daughter obviously doesn’t think so, which is why she came to me!”

  Pearl looked stricken.

  “Oh, I can’t believe I said that. I’m sorry. It’s not true!”

  “Yes, it is! It’s true! You were always the successful one, Rose. Our parents’ pride and joy. I was always the clumsy, dumb youngest. Remember that time I wanted to make kiddush, and you wound up doing it, and everyone said how smart you were, while they sent me to my room and punished me?”

  “You can’t possibly remember that! You were a baby, not older than three.”

  “Yes, but Mameh brought it up often.”

  “Funny, you told Rivka a different story! Just to set the record straight: You got wine all over yourself, and I had to clean you up. Mameh whacked you and sent you off to your room, and I washed you and put you into pajamas and gave you a bottle and something to eat. When I wanted my own meal, they forced me to make it for myself because it was late and no one was left to make it for me. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let me eat.”

  “Is that true?”

  Rose nodded.

  “Then I’ve resented you for nothing for all these years.”

  “You resented me? I always thought we were so close.” Could it be true? Could her little sister Pearl have been filled with jealousy and resentment? And then something shocking occurred to her. “Tell me the truth, Pearl, did you make that noise on purpose when I showed you that book of photographs? Did you want our parents to find out and punish me?”

  Pearl wrung her hands, twisting her wedding and engagement rings around her finger. “Do you know how many times I’ve asked myself that question? The truth is, I don’t know. Maybe. Remember how I wanted you to walk me to school and you wouldn’t? The year before, a man looking like a Hassid had tried to drag me into the alley when I was playing in front of the house. I couldn’t tell anyone. I was terrified to walk to school alone. And you refused to help me.”

  Rose leaned back, shocked. “I never knew!”

  “I know that! And I couldn’t tell you! But I wanted you to keep taking care of me, and instead you started high school; you started your own life. Maybe I wanted to punish you. But when they sent you away to Bubbee’s, I realized I’d gone too far. I felt like a rosha. I stopped eating. That got Mameh’s attention. And then—I’m ashamed to even say it—I got used to being spoiled, to being the center of attention. I was suddenly their princess. I didn’t want that to change.”

  “And once I was out of the way, you were able to take over the crown permanently, right?” Rose said, the knowledge dawning on her like increments of light seeping through a curtain being slowly pulled up before a rising sun.

  “Yes, and how I suffered for it! You have no idea. It was a terrible thing.”

  “Oh, my God! In what way?”

  “To be responsible for all your parents’ happiness? To live with two people so damaged that yo
u could never even dream of doing a single, little thing that might upset them, or be looked at as rebellious or less than perfect? Your freedom cost me mine.”

  Rose was speechless. Then, slowly she lifted her head, looking straight into her sister’s eyes. “Well, you started it all, my dear Pearl. Maybe if they hadn’t sent me to Bais Ruchel, I might be sitting here next to you with a wig on.”

  “Neither of us would be sitting here, believe me.”

  Rose suddenly smiled. “Well, that would have been a real tragedy, Sister, now wouldn’t it?”

  Pearl laughed, lifting up her bottle of warm Coke and clinking it against Rose’s cold coffee cup.

  “Tell me the truth, Rose, what kind of a life did you wind up having? Have you really been happy? Has your life been what you hoped it would be?”

  “Rivka asked me the same question.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “I have no complaints. For the most part, I’ve been happy.”

  “I’ve read about all your material successes. But you don’t eat kosher anymore? You ride in cars on the Sabbath? Eat bread on Passover? You don’t daven or say a bracha on your food? Have you really found happiness living like a goy?”

  Rose was stunned by the directness of her attack, which hit her in so many vulnerable places. “I’ve found happiness living my own life, the life I’ve chosen, Pearl. It’s no one’s business, certainly not yours,” Rose said harshly, her heart aching.

  Why not tell her how much you’ve struggled? Admit the first time you turned on a light during the Sabbath, you felt sick, the first time you ate ham, you threw up? But admit, too, that once you succumbed, it got easier to live that way, and impossible to admit you still believed in a God who had nonnegotiable demands, because believing that would have led you straight back to Williamsburg.

  “What about you, Pearl? Have you been happy?”

  “I’ve also had many blessings.”

  “Even though you were forced to marry a man you didn’t love?”

  “Why would you say something like that? However my shidduch came about, God blessed me with a good man, a righteous, kind, and generous man, a person with a loving heart.”

  “Could’ve fooled me.”