by Lore Segal
Salman is walking out of the door of his office when his secretary calls him back. “Your wife wants you down in the chapel, right away.”
“What for? Hand me the phone?”
“She’s hung up. She said, right away.”
“Where is this chapel?”
“Next to Cedars of Lebanon’s Chase Bank branch office.”
“What’s up?” Salman asks Miriam. “We’re late for the meeting.”
“Look!”
Standing in the doorless opening, Salman Haddad looks at the potted palm, the standing lamp, the neutral space dedicated to welcoming anybody’s faith and offending nobody’s taste. Salman sees the pink soles of the kneeling man whose forehead touches the ground. A kneeling child with ecstatically upraised arms is not, on closer look, a child but a small little woman in a little dress wearing Mary Janes with lace-trimmed white socks. An old man under a prayer shawl is davening.
“Miriam, what? What did I hurry down here for?”
“Look on the wall, across from the standing lamp. You took your time, and it’s already fading!”
When questioned, the three worshippers agree that they saw a moving finger doing graffiti on the wall. What do they think it wrote? “The Lord Is One,” or “Kyrie Eleison”? It means that it is now theoretically possible to live forever. Dr. Miriam Haddad thinks that what the finger has written is “Sorry!” with an exclamation point. Salman Haddad walks over and makes out that the fast fading letters spell “Oops!” Miriam is right about the exclamation point.
In the room on the third floor, Dr. Stimson sits and waits on the edge of the bed in which Joe Bernstine lies supported by pillows and probably cannot breathe without the tube in his throat. The doctor is waiting for Joe to blink. And if they haven’t died, as the story says, they are living to this hour.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank friends who have read, thought about, and told me what they thought about Half the Kingdom, through its several changes: Allen Bergson, Deirdre Bergson, Alan Friedman, Vivian Gornick, Joyce Johnson, Gene Lichtenstein, James Marcus, Norma Rosen, Barry Schechter, Matthew Sharpe. I thank David Segal for the research I never feel like doing myself, and Angelo Pastormerlo for suggesting certain books for Joe Bernstine’s library. Thank you, Kathy Earnest, for lending me the character of Mrs. West, the piano teacher. I want to thank Dr. Eric Cassel and Dr. Flavia Golden for conversations about the procedures in emergency rooms. They are not responsible for the outcomes.
I thank the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars for the good year in which I wrote portions of the book.
Parts of this book were published, in somewhat different form, in Harper’s Magazine (May 2011) and in The New Yorker (December 24, 2007).