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Overview
Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780156027458 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 712 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.76(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In her mid-sixties, Zipporah Zangwill, born in Boston to longtime residents of that name, for over forty years married to Peter Duffy, who teaches philosophy in New York, and herself well-known as a "social" anthropologist, has informed her family, a large clan, that from now on she wishes to be known as Zoe-sending out cards to that effect, along with an invitation to a celebratory party.
To Peter, who has perhaps been aware of her progress toward some decision that will mortally affect their lives, if not this one, she has merely shown the cards, ordered from the same stationer who had always supplied the formal announcements the years had required: engagements and weddings of the children, anniversaries of all kinds, plus bids to those coveted "theme parties" she threw when some professional or affectionate interest erupted. And of course the two change-of-address announcements, of yore.
These newest cards, thinner than any of those and modest in size, say simply "One of our Sundays," giving the date. The time would be known by custom as afternoon, the eats to straggle along with individual noshing, and focus hard as dusk falls. A footnote, lower left, in small but legible print, says: "From now on Zipporah asks to be known as Zoe..." It's not certain whether the reason for the party is this.
Few phone to inquire. For some grateful elders in the circle, she is their only fount of surprise. The Duffy children-Gerald, Charles, Nell, Erika, and Zachary, all grown now-do mildly mention it, in no order of age status except whoever had the smarts and the sass to speak up first. They chat constantly, over a sibling network maintained either coast to coast from their homes or now and then from sites no longer as strange as those their mother had all their young lives gone to. Their feeling on her travels had long since been expressed by Mickey, a former youngest son, whose age was fixed, he having died at twelve: "She never really leaves us. And she always comes back."
The network isn't kept out of duty. All the Duffys have the kind of family feeling that filches away their attention even from those they are married to. Charles, an academic always somewhere in the middle of the country, is also their median voice. "They're so close a pair. They never skimped us. But it helped us close ranks." His puns, as a part-time lawyer as well as a physicist, make Nell sigh. "A pun should be more illegal, Chuck. But I hear you."
Nobody in their immediate family is a naysayer, though Erika tends to marry them. "Maybe Ma just wants to shed her identity. I do now and then."
Gerald, who has a wife who does that constantly, keeps quiet.
Zach, now the youngest, speaks for all of them. "Hope not."
Peter, when shown the cheaper cards, merely quirks: "Wise of you, not to jump to Tiffany."
"One hundred sixty-four of them? Would've cost the earth."
"Will you tell them why?" He's looking at the footnote.
Her answer, with her handsome eyes wide: "I don't have to tell you."
"No."
They kiss. She's as intense, he as genial, as on the day they met in front of the Alma Mater statue on the Columbia campus, where she'd lost the very high heel of one shoe, and he'd picked it up. The legend is that in trying to fit the heel on her shoe again, he'd knelt, but saying carefully, "This means nothing." Yet then offered his arm, so that she could hop to the shoe-repair shop across Broadway. Instead, she ran barefoot across the hot macadam, he following.
Waiting for the shoemaker, they exchanged:
"Zangwill? Any relation to Israel Zangwill who wrote the Melting Pot? English Jew, 1914."
If they were, her father had said, they were very collateral. "No. But we did come from England, and are Jewish, of course...You in History?"..."No. Philo." By that time they were outside the shop door. "And you?" he'd said..."Anthro. So I can travel." Three years older than she, he had already done some, promising himself more..."You're Catholic, of course," she'd said; "'Duffy.'"...A smile from Peter. "Of course. Lapsed." Wiggling the foot in the repaired shoe, she'd said to that, half-smiling: "Lace curtain?" A Boston term he hadn't known, having grown up in the Bronx. "We're 'lace curtain Jewish,'" she'd joked. "Still morally Jewish, though we don't go to synagogue more than once a year. And we don't say 'lapsed.' Our word for it is 'reformed.'"
Before they slept together that very night, a fact not in the legend, they'd agreed that whatever their families had or had not declined to, it was impossible for either an anthropologist or a philosopher to believe in God. "Not a personal one," Peter had said. "We must leave ourselves some room. For-uh." He'd meant to spend the rest of his career defining that "uh."
"Oh sure," she'd said. "Impersonality is in."
The family, as all within refer to it, is now very large, but considers itself to be the opposite of that chill term "extended."
The outsiders' opinion of the Duffy-Zangwill ménage is: "Close. Ve-ry close. By joint intention, no doubt. But the flavor is Jewish. Peter's the one living son of a stray Irish couple emigrated from Dublin. Had a brother who died. After Peter's marriage, the two older maiden sisters wouldn't speak to him. But you know Zipporah." Or Zippy or Zee. "She's won them over, don't ask me how...Ever been to one of her and Peter's Sundays? Friends welcome."
"Not a lot of our Duffys in the States when I was your age," Peter says to his youngest grandson, Bert, on one of those Sunday afternoons. "All must have stayed back home. You might see your very earliest ancestors in some remains at the British Museum. Called 'the Sutton Hoo treasure,' if you really want to check."
"But there're lots of us Duffys now," Bert said.
"Did my best." She and he had had four early on, then two more, when near that age called "menopause" by the less sexually interested.
The Boston Zangwills had been amused. The Long Island and Westchester ones, younger connections in Roslyn, Manhasset, Mamaroneck, had been appalled. Such large broods were out of fashion, and not practical if a woman wanted to keep her waistline or a man hoped to send his kids to private school. And hadn't past generations of Zangwills done well enough? Since Zipporah's own maternal grandparents had had nine, she'd had nearly that many surviving aunts and uncles and fourteen first cousins. Her own children were providing young Bertram with nearly the same.
"If we still did math with multiplication tables," Bertram says, looking over the crowded living room he has known since a toddler, "I could just multiply cousins. But that wouldn't be very modern either, would it."
"I'm leaving room for you to say what's modern, m'boy."
"You never called me that before." Bert is now past sixteen.
"Seen it coming," his gramps said.
When Bert got his card from Zipporah, some weeks before the party, he'd brought it to Peter's attention that next Sunday.
"You seen this coming, Gramps?" He never uses first names for his elders in the informal style parents like his encouraged. He had campaigned to attend a public school, but had lost.
"You know the story, brother. Your grandmother runs. She can't hop."
'Brother'?" Bert says. "I find this family very confusing. But reading the Bible has helped." Although he had said, "Nah, never mind," when the possibility of a bar mitzvah was faintly dangled, he has elected to go to Hebrew school, which some in the room consider odd, or even retrograde.
"Old Testament or New?"
"Both. On my own. Hebrew class, they just do the commentaries."
"Just like at my university," Peter sighed. "And?"
"The New Testament? Very late stuff. The Old has the bang."
"The creation, yes," his grandfather says. "Uh."
"Anyway, I hear Grandma, I mean Zoe, is making the party just a real one. Not a potlatch, like when she tried to let us in on Amerindian ethic. Or that icky German one. Turnverein, Munich, 1939."
"She still feels guilty about the Holocaust, Bertram. She had no one in it...And anthropologists try to live what they teach and vice versa." He grins. "S'helped me no end."
"Oh, her real parties are great, yeah. Last year, that big downtown warehouse, some of the oldies took sick so they wouldn't have to come to-great. I got to lay a girl. Only a cousin. But a girl."
"Oh. But that friend you brought, you always bring-"
"Oh yeah, him. The Shine."
"Bertram. That's a racial epithet." Though the young man they can both see across the room, leaning against a wall and talking languidly to a couple of his contemporaries, isn't very black.
"Not with him, it isn't. It's what he calls himself. Capitalized. The Shine. He could call himself The Sheeny, he says, for the other half of him, but it wouldn't have as much dash. He likes to refer to himself in the third person. Told Granma-Zoe, it's because maybe he's gay. She was very empathetic. Told him she does that third person stuff lots of times, even though she's not. Not gay."
"Ah. No, I guess not."
"Nor me. I'm like you and her. Not even bi. Not even worried-that I'm not worried. About sex, that is."
"But the family confuses you?"
Bert stands tall. Gilt blond, with Zipporah's thin, not quite Roman nose, he is intermarriage's finest product, with his father being Peter and Zipporah's eldest son, Gerald, and his mother a Jewish Finn. He has only one flaw, the crooked pinkie often called a baseball finger. "How come a Jew got that?" the rabbi joked at the confirmation Bert did go through, "But it'll keep you from being a Jesuit. I understand they have to be perfect physically."
"I'm yeah tired of having such an open mind. And you know what? I think so is Granma."
"Funny," his grandfather says. "An open mind is what's kept me going. But about her-mmm. She's a bit...lost her breeze...Oh, not physically."
Bert grins. "Those high heels. She runs for a cab, she looks like a chicken with its head cut off. But fast."
"Bert. You grew up in Westchester. You go to Dalton. Or is it Riverdale? Where would you see a chicken with its head cut off?"
"Voodoo garage, out in Queens. I go there with The Shine, he comes to the Yeshiva with me. We're on a project, see?" He can't control the grin. "At Collegiate."
On the double, they are both yakking. Bert goes pink, Peter slaps his knee. "Voodoo. That's where you saw Zippy go for the cab," Peter gasps. "And where she and The Shine talk third person? Wish I'd been there. But your grandmother won't ever let me on location with her. She says Jewish mockers are a dime a dozen any cocktail hour. But Christian ones anywhere are a serious proposition. Pit-bulls, she calls us. Trailing the cathedrals behind us."
"No more 'Zippy,' gee," his grandson says. "I always liked to hear you say it...Zoe, Zo-ay? Fooey." He looks uncomfortable. "But yeah, we think something is like serious with her."
"Bert. Spill."
"It's creeping around the school too. That's how we recognized it."
"What is creeping around your bloody school?"
Bert looks about to cry. "We think Granma is beginning to believe in God."
"Ho-lee," Peter whispers. His hand goes to his cheek. "Haven't said that since I was your age." His tall grandson stands eye-to-eye with him but is avoiding this. "So. You make a show of feeling small before the Lord, so you can feel big before everybody else? I remember that...And are you and that con man friend of yours her messengers? Or is this a private observation, courtesy the sixth form?"
"Seventh, Gramps...No, it's just-like you recognize it on somebody."
"I see." He puts a gentle hand on the boy's shoulder. "Let's go have a Coke. No-a beer."
In the kitchen, which is always immaculate and quiet during a normal afternoon hour, when both mistress and the long-term maid, Jennie, maybe taking their naps or walks, are elsewhere, Peter says, "Cookie jar?"
"Jennie will have a fit."
"Your grandmother didn't want to have any help at all, once we could afford. Professionally, she already had to have so much ethnic tenderness. 'I could never keep a maid in her proper place,' she said. So I told her I'd do it for her. Not that we've succeeded...Take as many cookies as you want. It's Jennie's job."
"In our house, the maids come and go."
Peter is not fond of his oldest's son's wife, Kitty, a woman who changes her clothes five times a day. But he'll forgive her anything for having had Bertram. "Generations differ. In mine, even middle-class kids had an obligation to steal from the larder. Yours, there's all kinds of silly food lying around." He rubs his fingers free of cookie. "Now, let's discuss this immortality business."
"Is that what? I thought it was her we-"
"Uh...By the way, do I seem to you vaguer than usual?"
"Not so I noticed."
"Thanks. My trade, we get away with murder...But I must be getting older. Can you believe, yesterday at the florist's, having the new assistant send my sister a birthday plant, I couldn't remember my own name. Then the owner breaks in, 'Why Mr. Duffy, you've an account with us'...And at my age, seems we also get obscure little rages...Or can't recall what trousers are for."
Bert bursts out laughing. "Wear jeans."
"Used to. They gave me up...Listen, kid. Your age, you believe in your own death? Oh, not by war. Or motorbikes. Your own natural death. Like everybody is supposed to expect?"
"Funnee." Bert's voice is wee. "No, I don't. I know it's-crayzee. And I don't think of it much. But when I do, it's like I'll beat therap. An exception will be made."
How great he looks. Nothing will ever dent that cheek.
"Not crazy, sonny. It's strongest at your age. But everybody believes the same. Right until the blinds pull down, maybe...Even those who never stop thinking about dying. Hypochondriacs."
"You're not one of those."
Both voices tremor to what's being said. To the wonder of its being said between them.
Peter clears his throat, has a little trouble with it. "No."
"Nor Gran."
"Zipporah?" Just saying that lifts his grandfather's head, as the Sunday crowd often marks. "Half her folks live past ninety. She's convinced she'll take after the right half. And means to carry us along with her. Her mother's half had a saying: 'Just keep out of sight of the Lord's eye.' Even for Brookline at that time, they took the prize for being invisible. You bump into one of them and it was like to a squeak, with a shadow. As for money, pots of it, some had. But like the Chinese, never on display. Gave your grandmother the subject for her dissertation. Primitive Images. She went to Melanesia for it. Said she could have stayed right at home."
Jennie can be heard on her way up to the kitchen.
"I should look it up," Bert says. Going down the book-lined hall, they pass the shelf of works written in this house.
"Yes, Byron. Do."
Byron is Bert's older brother.
His grandfather is checking his watch. "No, it's Sunday. This is not the office." The watch is upside down on his grandfather's wrist. It does not have the days of the week, surely. No, same old watch. He sees that Gramps's slippers, fancy velvet ones Bert's own mother had insisted they give for Hanukkah, are on in reverse.
His grandfather's uplifted palms seem to adhere, then part to bang his thighs. "My ideas...the rest of me won't handle them." Then a whisper. "Last time this happened...there were flowers." His face supplicates.
What put the right words on Bert's tongue he can't explain, he tells The Shine later.
"Your name is Peter Duffy," he said.
And there Peter was again: former commander in the Naval Reserve, holder of a chair in semantics and head of this household-Gramps.
As the time nears for Zipporah's "nameday" party, as some are calling it, most family members intend to address her as usual, until instructed otherwise. "Front-face," they say to each other. Why would a woman who has been Mother, Mom, Ma, Cousin, Aunt, Grandma, as well as "a distinguished byline" want to sink herself under a name most likely a monosyllable, at best stretching to two? Outsiders are more careful, citing only the opinion first given them by some relative. Cousin Grace thinks the name change must have to do with Zipporah's not yet looking like a matriarch. But Grace is such a flirt. Two former brothers-in-law of the Duffy daughters, men who are still familiars here and still rivals, chat each other up. "Bet you it has something to do with copyright." The second one counters, "I have it otherwise from Aunt Bee." That great-aunt, applied to, is careful not to roll her eyes, which might suggest she thinks Zippy has a lover, so speaks to her own lap. "Alice says"-her elder sister in Brookline-"Alice says we must be grateful for any family theme."
Attendance is perfect, down to second cousins once removed and the brood of step-grandchildren whom the several divorces and remarriages of the Duffy children have brought into the fold. Even for some minor public functions this would be a fair crowd, but the rambling apartment gently accommodates, as family rooms of any size seem in the end to do, with children squeezed together or on the floor, grown-ups perched on the arms of chairs, bathroom doors flapping. The men, too proud to do anything but stand when in close quarters, and the half-asleep nodder on the best sofa give the whole scene a mulling ease. For the younger parents there is that sense of the plush or at least settled comfort that generational quarters provide, combined with irritation at the bric-a-brac, and covert glances at pieces possibly choice.
All present have lived some part of their lives here. Schooldays lurk in the bookshelves; the mantel photos will earn the same old comments and stories. The feeding will be enormous. Old jokes have begun to pop. Norman, the Duffys' next-door neighbor and lawyer, has obliged with some variant of the one he brings out at Christmas: "Who are all these Yid Duffys? The Pope will want to know."
To Norman, the synagogue is "a social infrastructure," not a vision. He never goes to schul, plays cards with those who do and violin with those who don't; gives generously to "charity," among those the Jewish ones; but never excuses his lack of religious observance, his stated attitude being: "We Jews already know who we are." Yet it is rumored that he has left Temple Emanuel a considerable sum, with the stipulation that they give him a proper burial. Some have heard that he has offered to pay the tab for Zippy as well, if she wishes the same. She has never indicated.
Since the death of his wife, by whom there were no children, he has had two quiet mistressess, one Jewish, one not, both of whom ultimately married other men but kept Norman on, for lawyer and friend. As to clubs, he claims himself "unclubbable," with acid comment on most. A coveted weekend houseguest, often accompanied by some woman of appropriate age, he refuses dinners where invited as an extra man. "I don't need that career." Any matchmaker has long since given him up.
Since he and his wife had no kids, there's no way of knowing what schools they might have sent their children to-as yet one of the surest ways of measuring how far a couple might be straying from Judaism, and toward what. Surely, however, he has made certain familiar adjustments toward the mainstream? Yet nothing angers him more than the word "assimilated" as applied either to him or to Jews whose habits resemble his. When a young California associate, referring to rich Jews in his state who contributed largely to Israel "so that they never have to go there," added cannily, "Half-and-half does it, eh? Out here, unless you observe, you hardly feel Jewish at all," he wasn't rebuked. But he got no more business.
None of the Zangwill side, either back home in Boston or in Zipporah's own later household, has espoused Israel, on the grounds that it was now as much of a national state as a religion, and with too much dogma pimpling the original holy tolerance. In Zipporah's middle years, invited to lecture there as "a prominent Jewish woman," she had finally agreed to be presented as an "anthropologist interested in national customs worldwide."
Her first address, touching lightly on tribal rituals and structures all the way from Mesopotamia to Maine, had engendered enough warmth, and the pleased laughter spouted from sily customs reported from elsewhere, so that when she'd ended with a firm inclusion of the tribe of Israel, "which has variously permitted or stipulated that women serve in the army, but does not grant them equal divorce legalities," courtesy had prevailed. While at the mayor of Jerusalem's reception, certain women had flocked to her side from the pool of those who stiffly had not, and even a few men had veered toward her, if only to teeter at her elbow to "explain."
At her second lecture, enticingly dubbed "Slavery and the Camps," all went well as long as she stuck to Greece and Africa-and the U.S.A. Then had come her "unfortunate peroration," as one report called it: "Of course, refugee camps like yours are not death camps, except perhaps for the young. And our U.S.A. Indian reservations, like the Palestinians', are merely 'colonial.'"
"When I sat down," she told the American press, "I could hear the intake of breath. Then there was silence. Somehow, that's worse than being shot at." As she once had been in Kurdistan, when interrogating too near some poachers. "You hear a whole hall draw breath through its teeth, it's like they're casting a rope. Then one man got up to shout that I was a blot on 'Sacred be his name,' the author of The Children of the Ghetto, of whose blood I could not be. I said, no, I wasn't kin to him, but I rather saw him standing up to wave. Then a couple near me rose in the aisle, the woman screaming she had lost two sons on a schoolbus blasted by terrorists and didn't have to listen to assimilated American trash."
The worst, expressed only to Peter, was how she had felt for that couple, though from the whorl where you fully see how little the right opinion counts. But that man's face had purpled exactly the way Norman's did at the hated word, prompting her to quote him exactly, this being what had engaged the American press. "Why is it that we Jews never think of it as us assimilating them?"
In the lore of the Duffy-Zangwills, this rejoinder is repeated at least once at every such gathering.
Along the bookshelves are copies of a philosophical review to which Peter has for forty years contributed his essays, saying, "It's the kind people subscribe to out of virtue, and put aside 'to read later.'"
Next to these, a few copies of Zipporah's one book: Images of God. Begun as that dissertation, and pursued, she suspects, from preconscious images of her own that will neither surface frankly nor let go, her study, parlayed through the decades, has enabled her to travel in the field, on a slim but continuing staircase of grants and awards. She feels no guilt over that connection; energy of pursuit is real, whatever it springs from. "Funny," she once said to Peter, "how Jewish a child can be, even with the parents scarcely being it. We were never denied we were. Maybe that was it...There is an edge of conduct where you can simply not mention it. We always did, though. So for me, and I still feel it, being Jewish is being sincere." Why should that be? In the mess of ethic-babble everybody was now living in, why does that "sincerity," often not voiced, give her such relief? "Even power," she'd said.
Peter is careful to say he's no longer a Catholic, if the situation arises, but gets no such boost. "I may even cherish that identity. But it doesn't carry the same weight. I'm just saying what I'm not."
"You are what you are in those." She points to the line of magazines here and there including a special issue devoted to him, where the cover of the end one, 'In Search of the Double Vision,' was just visible. Then comes her array of single publications, from articles to monographs, and finally, the book.
"Well, it hasn't hurt the children," Peter had said. "What we are and what we aren't. Not at all. Though we probably shouldn't say."
Rather, their bit of diversity, mild when you come to think of it, had endowed their offspring with an all-over-the-lot confidence. That could give trouble and had, but could be said to have finally weighed in to the good for all of them, if in predictably diverging styles.
Why had she and Peter kept this vanity-row of their work on display, and in that particular cranny of the library wall? Some must wonder. Answer: the children had demanded it. As backup? In any case, the lineup was low enough on the wall for a child to reach, and over the years one or the other had been seen doing so, even throughout the gangly years when they'd had to kneel.
She doesn't need to squint to see Mickey there, the lost one. A dead child never dies, not at any age. One loses them, one's nails scrabbling for them in the dirt of memory. Or, almost sighted in some white Alhambra of dream, you feel them nearly with you, your throat swollen with the news, though you must not open your eyes. Mickey has his back turned, just as he used to; she won't have to see the blank face. He and his pal from the fourth grade are just home from school with their sacks of after-hours books. "Here's where they got married," he's saying. "This shelf." The pal traces the spine of her book with a forefinger. "Gee, oh, dee-" he says. "God."
Having one subject only can work to make a scholar heard. And of course that one: "Gee-oh-dee." Much of her zealous accumulation from Asia and Africa already being "in the canon," it was her zeal that was first lauded. Her allegiance to one side of the never quite outmoded anthropological argument still brings her flack. For she believes that religions, cultures, had originated in sites around the globe, not in one sacred place, from which dispersed.
"Naturally, this offends everybody with a probable Eden in the pocket," Peter had said to Norman, shortly after they had met. "At least in the religious camp."
Not to his surprise, Norman responded, "She will learn that is where we Jews still are."
"Catholics don't pay much attention to image talk," Peter had said. "Too used to them. Every little plaster saint assures us of one registered vote."
To which Norman had said, "Us? We?"
Then both of them, smiling at Zipporah consolingly, clapped each other on the shoulder and made for the Duffy bar, whose liquor supply was always ecumenical.
But "the chosen," as all Jews, reformed or not, must still consider themselves, remained the most offended. "Graven Images!" headed the review in an obscure periodical (later reprinted in a daily edited by the reviewer's brother-in-law):
Anthropology is not Judaism. Interfaith can only go so far. Ms. Zangwill-Duffy's handsomely illustrated volume pays deference to the observed connections between say, Renaissance Madonnas and African fertility goddesses. But her untoward interest in what she dubs "the eyes of God"-"from the blind eyeballs of stone sculpture to the wide-eyed stare of Asia Minor terrazzo, and on to the bas-relief whose sidelong stare is suely Egyptian"-is a silly iconography, which in fact dares to see "God's eyes" even in Jewish bridal-headpiece designs.
Any Jewish schoolchild knows that Jews do not make idols, golden or otherwise. As with the God of Israel, the Jehovah of the Desert, whose name was never to be taken in vain (the word adonai, or Lord, being substituted when reading the scripture), so the image of the Lord our God cannot be lightly invoked. Nor can the spiritual be assimilated, into casual, latterday scholarship."
Seeing the book, two of her daughters-in-law-to-be, one a stormy young woman of Irish-Catholic extraction and renegade rather than lapsed, the other from staid Cleveland Jews whose faith had long since been subsumed into philanthropy, asked Zipporah eagerly, "You using the two names now, married and maiden, maybe should we?" and, seeing her taken aback, "Oh, as women, y'know, not religion-wise."
How lightly she had answered them. Had dared to? For even a modern Jew will pay attention to the old superstitions. Name the Lord God in his own right, as simply God? Many a backslider will. But put a lien on the future, with some remark the little demons who handle providence are always lurking for? Even in her own family, faded mildly toward the secular, the adult heads would have nicked back in a hush quickly over with, and sealed with an abashed smirk. Jews don't cross themselves. But a child at the proper level can see them hide thumbs and be warned.
"Oh girls," she'd said, laughing, "I'm coming not to want to be watched."
No guardian angel clucked. Jews don't have those either.
"Oh you're so right," Agnes, the elder of Peter's two sisters interposed, safe in just such protection. "Like for one's stocking seams."
The two younger women stare. Where on earth, these days, do these two old biddies get those heavy-duty stockings, with seams to be sure, straight up Agnes's thick calves?
Theresa, the younger sister, who has a skittish air to her, maybe because of that, says, "Altman's. They went out of biz, we stocked up, Agnes did. Took all they had." She wears a virginal crown of braids, from a constant touching of which her fingertips come away black. "Hard," she added, while the two swanlings waited, their pretty beaks raised. "To be watched."
On this, her nameday, as each wave of memory rolls in, Zipporah is holding herself in plain sight, the way an aerialist does, just before swinging from ring to ring. Ordinarily, she wouldn't have dreamed of making herself visible. This is family, and after the first greetings and embraces at the door, the invigorating Sunday mood takes over. As hostess, she has normally been free to prowl unassumingly behind the busy façade while people chatter, catching up.
Today, they're ostentatiously carrying on as if all is as usual. She finds herself taking a fierce pride in them for that, meanwhile nursing her own sense of shame. The worst that can happen to a devoted couple except death is happening to her and Peter; some would call death preferable. She's trying to stage-manage destiny, all the time knowing that the play is going on the rocks.
Meanwhile, the change of name will be seen by many here as no more absurd than her other pretexts for these parties, all of those excused and even relished as part of her eccentric professional life.
"Lovely to have a look-see," a relative might gush, leaving a potlatch, but with a headshake, "when you yourself keep such a fine household." Which often meant such a generously Jewish one.
Norman saw these parties as a canny solicitation to the young who thronged them. "All parties are schmaltz, when you come down to it." In his mind he has never given them, beyond passing out cigars. Wives took care of the sentiments. He's sure to see the shift to "Zoe" as a silly one. As it may be. She has never disliked the stern, semi-biblical sound of Zipporah. Peter teases that it has helped her to act accordingly.
At the time, the name-change had seemed such a simple ruse to keep the family scrutiny on her, not him. And she had wished to keep the Z. But why had the idea of the shift come so quickly to her? From what buried niche in her psyche? Perhaps the discomfort she now feels is specifically Jewish? Because one tenet of her lax upbringing had been upheld without compromise. For a Jew to change his last name, no matter how ill-awarded in the past, was to commit an indignity against Jewish history. And the first names must chime in tune. In Brookline, there had been few "Christian cop-outs" or "country-club monikers," as her father had dubbed them. At least not in his generation. Names acquired by intermarriage, as with her children, were quite acceptable. His sneers were against Jews of the blood only. As so much of Jewish morality is? Perhaps there are ukases against name-changing in the Talmud? Or more likely, jokes? She must ask Bert.
Perversely, she's savoring the last of the Sunday afternoons likely to take place in this house. (She alone knows that it is a preamble to what she prays to keep dark for as long as may be allowed.) People will still be wandering in. Not to be subjugated to the formal limits of "cocktails at six," or "supper served From: __ To __," is a joy confessed to by many. The oldest cousin, deaf and given to loud remarks to her companion from that solitude which the deaf think they own, will at some point punctuate the buzz with her, "Take heed, Mariella, you don't see a get-together like this anymore. This is an At Home."
So it is, and nowhere near its height. A couple not seen for years, now living abroad, may suddenly drop by. The pair around the corner will surely be as late as they are faithful. Her own son Charles, marooned in his physics lab by a universe that stares at him like a basilisk, but who claims to share an extrasensory perception with his mother (he doesn't, that was Mickey), may fly in, on a schedule whose regularity he doesn't seem aware of-the last Sunday of alternate months. Peter no longer invites students on Sunday; they are a different sort of family. She has learned to fend off strays from her travels, like the Chinese pair who, confused by the warmth here, returned later that night with their bags. Friends of the family's young are always welcome, however, sometimes staying overnight.
When she herself was hovering on the cusp of the teens, the grandparents' Sundays had worse than bored her. She and her cousins, briefly and loudly adored, then squashed under the press of adults, had been consigned to sneaking about unnoticed, or else to making alliances in the kitchen. Yet was it "down in the teen dump," as her cousin Eustace, an older gangler of like temperament, had called it, that she'd acquired a lifelong habit of feeling always more the observer than the observed? Even the only one?
This will vary in degree of course, wth where she happens to be, and she has been teased by Peter or a suddenly astute child as to how this connects with her profession. One of the pleasures of their marriage, almost the deepest, is that he too is an observer, though the solitary or even troublesome aspect of that doesn't occur to him, and his and her verdicts of what they see, even if together, are never the same. At a concert, seeing her inspect those in the seats ahead before the music begins, he'll analogize, "Royal Opera House, Copenhagen," but she'll answer, "No, this is a cathedral audience, a provincial one." Or at a public session in which members of the Senate of his own university are performing in clacking euphony, she'll mutter, "I wouldn't insult any ethnic rite I've attended, by comparison: oh, maybe the parrot house at the zoo. Where are you?" His answer, eyes closed, "At Chulalongkorn University, where they held a lecture in Thai in my honor...I'm being most careful not to cross my legs or point the toe." Where to do that would have been insult. She'd whispered, "Go ahead."
When had that kind of interchange all but stopped? Don't scratch among the bygones, Zipporah. Try not to watch him so, Zoe. Look at your crowd.
Here in the long double living room they are disposed as in a painting, a woman's head turned over a shoulder toward another, men sitting by age with their natural confreres, there the women's legs crossed at the ankle, there one draped along a sofa. Some of the men hold cigars between their spread knees. Only a few are standing formally, yet the room suggests one of those genre pictures of a family, perhaps English and knee-breeched, of some minor grandee or local patriarch; though there are no characters like that here, surely. Nothing royal-if even that Goya comes suddenly to mind, the one with the dwarf princess in it, she can laugh; the children here are all sturdy and fine. And she herself is not hung with jewelry. But yes, she's a matron surveying what her loins have made, and upheld for the ages to contemplate. There's even a border of painter's greenery visible in the background, though not from a royal preserve, or English county, but from the west side of Central Park, in which there are no hinds or hares.
She and Peter, once he'd been awarded tenure as professor, had managed to buy a run-down single residence on West End Avenue, once a very minor "mansion," two floors of which they had rented out to other faculty-a tetchy arrangement, not lasting well. That the street was known as the residence of choice for rising middle-class Jews hadn't consciously swayed them, yet a chance meeting with the broker who'd had it for sale would have to be counted in. She had been a client of Norman's, who later enabled the Duffys to sell what they had bought from her very profitably, in time to buy that "very good deal" from another client of his, which had brought them here. So, once again, if only by according to "the way things were," they had made the recognizable trek of Jews of that sort to Central Park West, bringing their mixed mores with them. For what Peter brought, acknowledged subversively by some of the Jews themselves as "less flashy," was always to be reckoned with.
How is it then that their style of life, though relaxed, is still recognizably Jewish, to both outsiders and themselves? Domestically so, it would be said, because of the wife; yet where the husband was the Jew, the wife the shiksa, the bias could be even more pronounced. While at the Duffys, a couple whom some would consider too exotic to account for any statistic, could religion be coming back, with Bert?
Or does all of this fix on sequestered strains of blood and conduct only serve to romanticize what her traveling trade blasts at? In Tierra del Fuego, that symbol of the inaccessible, where a few castaways had produced the entire small population, new blood was now yearned for. Else one saw either too many vacant angel-faces, or extraordinary mariners for whom the modern world has little use. Can't the rabbis who mourn the rise of interfaith marriage see that one way to atone for the ravages of the Holocaust is to tolerate that more and more people might have a bit of Jew in them? Even if not adopting the motto she had early affixed to all her position papers on tribal practice, whether exotic or nearby: Since it's going to happen anyway...
She sneaks around the periphery of the crowd. What better way to clean out scrambled thoughts than to go into the kitchen?
From a see-through in the pantry, via which she can survey all the living room, she stares out on her own tribal heath. This small aperture, whose flap can be unobtrusively slid aside, had endeared the apartment to her, even beyond the view, which after the first shock of ownership and the compliments of visitors, one rarely stops to scrutinize. The possession of a view seeps into the consciousness, both psychic and financial, and only lastly into the visual: if it were denied her, claustrophobia would surely ensue. But in truth, a view always there is a perspective one gazes at most when thinking of something else.
This biddable little pass-through window, set in at eye-level in bookshelves that bear the true library on the outer wall, and cookbooks on the inner kitchen side where she is standing, performs a function never confessed even to Peter, though no doubt he knows. It keeps her in her place. Her ordinary domestic one, in fact unopposed to her professional one. Rather, embedded there. For what is anthropology except the study of the slots people are born to, and of how little or greatly the people and the slots may seem to diverge?
Behind her, in the large, homely kitchen, the young people of the family, teens to twenties, are helping to set up the "spread," provided by her but always augmented by what some will insist on bringing, in a convention that shouldn't obtain for family. Underneath lie certain long-persisting statuses, even guilts. Wine, from those who must have their vintages, no matter what. The richest cousin's yearly jar of homemade jam; the poorest's costly store-bought chocolates. The Duffy sisters' Dundee cake, made from an inherited "receipt," and as rock-hard and durable as their faith. Testimonials all.
And here she stands, seen clearly through the spyglass of her own profession: ZZD, as the monogrammed wedding presents, not yet redistributed, still say, a woman of a generation now more than midway along a calendar almost parallel with its century. One who has remained "domestic" in spite of her sporadic encampments along what some scholars have called "an undigested itinerary" or worse: Bessarabia, Melanesia, the Kalahari Desert, an India nowhere near Agra or Kashmir, and Spartanburg, North Carolina (to investigate a curious Gullah maladversion of "cross-eyed"). Who remains ever more domestic than many would require of her? Who insists on rmaining the fulcrum of this-? This longhouse, log cabin, dacha, tent-for-a-night...cave. In which occur whatever ruttings, carnivals, or masses said privately or in unison, to godheads not necessarily divine. This-house.
Which, if it is typical, will harbor some inmate or habitué who keeps the scabs of evasion raw. Who won't allow dogma to rest easy. Or, as in this case, the lack of one.
And there he is, seen through her aperture.
Not a resident, nor yet only a visitor, though he may not turn up for years at a time. One who whether he's met those here seldom or over the years seems to know the very brand of their socks. And can speak, as if idly, to that small or swollen throttle of the heart in all except the youngest here: Are we still Jews?
Even if she hadn't seen him, she would know he'd arrived, by the scent of packages always delivered by some minion to the back door, and now being opened with "ohs" and "ahs" of recognition behind her: sturgeon, whitefish, sable, smoked salmon, cold cuts, matjes herring, pickles, and special dishes not always definable...There he is. Lev. And still alone? Before she has a second look, he passes out of sight.
His shaggy black head, not so much barbered as sprouted, will yet be visible somewhere in the palely comfortable room, at first sight of which he'd murmured, "Almost 'decorated.' But not quite," and on seeing Peter had overheard, adding, "Saved by the books."
"Oh yes, Lev can smile," Peter had said that time, almost a decade ago. "But we may never be sure whether for us or against."
Lev has adopted them. Without a by-your-leave, which is clearly how he does everything, even perhaps how he had married Libby, the shyest granddaughter of "the Boston Z's." All that those here know of their romance is whatever Libby had chosen to say, up until her death from breast cancer when their twin boys were nine: "We met when I was at N.Y.U. studying film and Levi was in a business course at your city college."
Lev would smile. "The City College. I don't know of another one."
This slight playfulness, as between the two cities, was the only tension ever observed, Peter said after Libby's death: "She was really a girl more likely to be single. In a past generation she might not have been allowed out alone. Film must have been the way she could remain quiet, and still have a life. He grabbed her out of that. Never regretted. But the physical side of her may have known best. She did die."
She had been the only one who called him Levi. "Otherwise," Peter dared to say to him when they first met, "you might be dubbed Leviticus, far as we know." But even Peter got nowhere as to the facts.
"Only the rumors, Zip." In Boston, where Peter shortly went for an academic conference, he had stayed at the college; the two branches of the family were not that close. A lunch at the Harvard faculty club had been mutually agreeable. "From your cousin James." Uncle to Lev's dead wife. "Seems it was rumored, at the time of the marriage, that Lev had once studied for the rabbinate, no one could say where. 'More likely in the provinces,' James said. And had either not qualified, or had left...'But to go from that to being a diamond merchant? And in your town, Peter, where we understand that can be quite dangerous?'...You know James."
"All of them-" she'd said. Apparently the Z's up there have let things be. Libby's parents, who have many grandchildren, see the boys occasionally, who Lev always posted up there on their own.
"But Peter, you'll have imagined more. I know you." When she and Peter estimated others was when their trust in each other's confidence reached its height. In a kind of variation of love, she thinks now. But can it now go on?
"Lev is too savvy about New York not to be from here," Peter had said. "And about one area. I would guess, or rather I see him, as a Hasid. Who maybe got out. Somehow, I don't think he was pushed. Not Lev. I see him...slicing off his forelocks, saving up to buy some cheap normal pants and jacket he wouldn't steal, and lighting out."
"Still won't," she'd said. "Steal. And in his trade to be honest-yes, maybe dangerous. How he'd earned college: 'he was "a runner,"' Lib said. Not saying for what. But I could see she admired him for it."
"Like maybe such a quiet woman would admire risk. And after school maybe, he went back to it. And for the money."
"That huge diamond engagement ring he gave her? He told me once, how to divide that between the twins would be worse than the dilemma of King Solomon over that baby."
"Hmm. He's always referring, isn't he," Peter had laughed. "Maybe that's why he's chosen us for second family. Or you, rather. And brings you all that kosher-style food. I think, Zipporah"-when Peter called her that, he was always serious, "that no matter what Lev did once, or maybe because he did it, he still wears, maybe only in his head, what a man of his faith does. That leather thing with the strings, that has the Jewish law inscribed on it."
"On vellum," she'd said, quick as a flash. "Though actually I've never seen one...Not worn on the Sabbath. Every other day, at morning prayer."
"Funny-how you speak of your tribal habits, as just that: from a tribe."
She'd grinned. "One of the many dealt with in my profession? Maybe that's why I chose it. Women can't wear the phylactery."
"And I've done the same. The tribe of Duffys. As exemplified by my sisters. A place in heaven assured. Where they can arrive in their Dobbs hats. Or, if death isn't quick, but dirty, a Monsignor of influence will surely get them into the Mary Manning Walsh Home."
"No-the one true way isn't ours."
It had been her turn to say that. Peter often made other scholars sore by always finding new ways of asserting this. And saying it so well. "Funny, too. How it was your sisters discovered Lev packs a gun."
"Faith recognizes faith."
"They call him 'the mobster.' Not to his face."
"No. But they will manage to let him overhear. That much is owed to God."
A word he's easier with in company than she. Because she might be asked to define it?
And what precisely do the Jews owe?
"Lev never again brought the twins here," she said. "After that once."
"A big family group-it attracts. But also affects."
And that time, he had first brought the food.
"To get the sons started on it, d'ya think? On kosher. Or to keep to it. He knows that we don't." Not for generations, in her case. She wouldn't know how. "But in a family setting." She giggled, a habit only when with him.
He waited for it. "Or," he'd said, "to convert us?"
They had been standing together at this very opening, the better to see the assemblage of those they had given birth to.
"Peter, look. He has brought them agan. The sons."
They'd been in their early teens then, dressed to the nines in boarding school jackets, and hanging back foolish, though they were nice-looking enough.
"Lev's a truthster," Peter had said. "You just watch."
She had. Though not recently with Peter. For weeks she's felt him to be avoiding their usual chatter. All the years before there has been a babble of talk between them. "Like the talk you would get in the best society," he'd said. "If you could find it." She adding, "If it were limited to two."
Underneath, allowing them to be superficial, silly, and lighthearted, were what he'd hailed as "the great ordinaries": birth and death, say, and whatever might be etcetera to those. Those facts to which one must say "Um..." These they don't bother to discuss. It seems to her that they have paid tribute enough in their happy, almost musical, fleshy dialogue. "Especially do you do that, pay tribute, when you conceive a child? Whether or not you know?" she'd once asked while in his embrace. "Perhaps," he'd said. "Could be that's why we've had so many of them. For these times." As with everybody they know, "the times"-the decade, the year, the century-are always in mind, as the largest fact of all, other than being alive in them.
Behind her now she hears the kitchen talk of the young as they unwrap Lev's packages, the older teens and college-age grandchildren, nieces and nephews, hooting at a recognized specialty, and instructing the younger young.
At first Lev had patronized a delicatessen, both the food and its wrappings impersonal. As the menu evolved, he must have enlisted a subcommittee of Orthodox housewives.
Now she imagines perhaps one unsung, elderly genius who cooks, wraps, and marks each package and dish in her odd script, saying to her own flesh-and-bone scrambling round her, "Here: take this. Leaves only eleven to the dozen, but those backsliders will never know. And this-taste! Made only for the high holidays-but what's that to them?"
Some old granny, bending her wig over the feathery dumplings you must prick while cooking to keep them light, although which of her sons, wives now bothers? Even the wigs they wear now, so polished, like shiksa hair. And the names they call their male children, names for the outside, no longer the given ones from the prophets: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the old Hebrew ones that can be properly chanted over a circumcised squawler or a patriarch's wooden coffin. "Here A-aron-what's your other name yet-Ah-len? Here, Ikey, you'll never be Ir-win in this house." The old woman's daughters-in-law would also go more easy on the girls, for whom husbands must be found: maybe not so many Esthers, and the Leahs now smartly called Lee. What are the names of the two boys Lev has now and then brought over to sniff her household, from the branched menorah to the mezuzah over the door? The old woman maybe doesn't want to hear. Or about what is said of the father. "A good man, Levi, not a Beelzebub, only lost to us..." You have to cook for such a man, you use dishes separate from even separate ones. And say over each dish the prayer for the prodigal son...
Behind her in the kitchen, the girls, names are rather plain at the moment-Janes and Annes, the Sarah that can straddle either New England or the Bible, milkmaid Nancys or Sues. Among the boys, the Simons and the Adams are demi-British, rather than from the Testament (doesn't matter, my loves, I merely observe)...and Lev out there is still alone, the sons in a kibbutz in Israel. Whatever he does about women-he would do something-he doesn't bring them here. Just as well. Not that she wouldn't accept; this house is built on acceptance.
Meanwhile, he's her bit of mystery. The great eternals are changeless. You may either worship at that status quo, or ignore it. The small human mysteries-as you experience your life, there's less of them. But what remains of them between people you can still see evolve, thrilling to the endless combinations.
To which Peter had once said, "Um, yes, Zipporah. But Lev, as you imagine him, is the mystery you do and don't quite want to solve." When her husband looked smug, it was because, regretfully almost, he could state an opinion. "Lev stands for your Jewishness. Or the remnants thereof."
She was almost angry, almost as angry as Norman would be.
"Oh it's the same for me," Peter had said quickly. "At sixteen, when I was leaving the church, I had dreams. Of punishment. Until one cured me. I was on my deathbed, and the Pope himself was giving me an extreme unction. He was wearing a Dobbs hat."
When they'd stopped laughing she'd said, "Lev does treat me-with a kind of intimacy. As if there's something we share. But it's the flirting courtesy to older women that Jewish men used to have. Like my father used to tease my mother's ninety-six-year-old grandmother, who lived with us. That if he'd been around when she was young he would have asked for her hand...she loved it. Saying, 'Ah, Moshe-excuse me, Maurice. You could still carry me off.'"
"Ah. Maybe that's why my sisters, whom Lev is always nice to, worry about his gun."
When they'd chortled again-what fun they've had in their time!-he said, "Lev respects orthodoxy. Like many an apostate." And then, teasing, "Saw him examining your linen closet."
"He spied it out as the only closet we keep locked. 'Not even the liquor. Why this one?' So I showed it to him."
"You showed him? You never show anybody, even women. You're ashamed of your fix on all that embroidery. On towels. Lace-edged napkins. Linen tablecloths nobody uses now-even for banquets, the caterer for Marcy's wedding said." Called "niece Marcy" because there was also an aunt.
"The bride wanted pleated paper. But was afraid to say...And I do use the pillowcases. Not often the monogrammed ones. My mother's dozens. Linen so soft on the cheek you can't get anymore. And I put out the guest towels, just to remember. Nobody uses anymore, except now and then one of the oldies, to show she's still a lady. Usually some guest. The family, they know you can't get home laundresses either.
"We used to have Idas. All of them black and all of them named that."
"They recommended each other. Maybe it was their joke on us."
And now, Jennie, herself a woman of color, won't allow anybody else "in my kitchen," which she feels to be identical to the whole apartment, almost.
"So now, you go to Zimbabwe, and anywhere else you can get in?"
"Ah, you sly."
"Looking for conclusions. Of what you know in your heart never concludes. Same as me...So why're you ashamed of that closet?"
"Didn't say I was." But she'd been caught, half wanting to be. "Men don't have that fix. Only in the garages, stuff they'll never again use. Here in the city, maybe a drawer-for the old baseball they caught at game, the compass they used on hikes. A T-shirt with a letter on it. A clutch of ties that are too narrow or too wide...All the padding that we use to get through life. That's what that closet is to me."
"Not because you're a professional, and ashamed to be domestic?"
"I didn't know you thought so little of me."
"I don't-" he'd said.
Down on the floor then, clasped from ankle to mouth. Not a Sunday, a Saturday. Jennie out on her day off, their brood grown, and what she and he do here will no longer breed. This is the golden mean of sex, when the genitals converse one step beyond the conversation, the hips idle and jolt, mouths punctuate in time with knees, and a breast is a lure for the head only. While streaming from between the legs, thoughts murmur, retreat.
"Early on, I was kind of hiding that closet. Not now. Because in what I do abroad I see the padding, worldwide."
From the shaman dances one has never before seen, to the sacred garments these hallow...The carved penis sheath a headman showed me, kept in six wrappings, the last bit of cloth "six fathers back." The rare kimono hung on a wall, never worn, nor likely to be....
"Now I can't help knowing how the padding links up." With the ceremonials. "And when I get home, I see it again every time."
Open your closet, Zipporah, and see the padding a bride was entitled to, that a matron accumulates. What's hiding under your neat piles of huck towels, linen sheets forty years white? Maiden lives unraveling in the old hope chest language: hemstitch, drawnwork, trapunto, appliqué..."In the old days, Jewish families ran to a lot of spinsters," my mother said. "Will you look at this work? And we don't even know their names."...
"Because early on, the padding is joy, an occupation," she says, sitting up. "Like money-making is, to some. But the older you get, and the more I see of it, what you have is how you've passed your life. It's not just what you'll leave behind. It's what you'll have to answer for."
He too had sat up. "To whom?"
Always that question they'd thought solved the day he picked up her shoe.
"Who indeed? You and I cut off our forelocks long ago."
When the unbelievers hang their heads so, whom are they honoring?
It's so often the woman who breaks a silence, she thought now. But that time, I held out.
Some one of the young ones has brought her a kitchen stool, slipping it under her so deftly, then vanishing, that she doesn't see who. They know her habits. "Shh-Zipporah's in her tower," had she heard one of them say?
A phrase picked up from Charles, overheard saying it to that scamp, his first-born son. By her watch, Charles is still to be waited for. Also several from Boston, who surprisingly had asked to come. Has she been asleep? The chair, counter-high, raises her above her window, but she can see what she is after, well enough.
Sometimes, she isn't sure of the progression of Sundays. Part of their strength is that they blend. But the day she remembers couldn't have been long after that Sunday.
It's again a Saturday, actually. The big room, empty of people, has again the dusk that comes post-love. Savoring it, they haven't yet been to the shower.
"So what did Lev think of your closet?" Peter says.
"He said-oh Peter, he looked aside for the longest time. Then he said, 'Shelves that pull out. Libby would have gone down on her knees.'"
"Ah-h? Remember what James told me?" Once she'd died, James had said resentfully, up in Boston, Levi had never again mentioned her name. Not even to the boys.
"And then Lev reached in the closet and touched one pile, the one that has my mother's banquet cloth. We never in our lives had banquets, but she made one. And I swear, Peter, it was like he was smoothing a woman. And he said, so I could hardly hear it: 'Libby claimed any Jewish woman worth her salt was a linen freak.' Then he took the key from me and locked the closet himself."
"He sure knows how to get round you all right, all right."
"Ah yes, love. I've always been an easy mark."
"Come on. I didn't mean-"
"No, you're on the ball," she said. "He did ask me to do him a favor."
"Oh?"
"It was the week after he'd sent the boys back to Israel again, remember?"
"Do I. Even Norman said, 'For once I feel sorry for that tight-mouth. He adores those boys. And they him, I hope. But that line he's in-even a tough cookie needs a little relief.'...Um. Don't tell me Lev wants you to act for him as a-what do you call them-a schatchen? He want you to find him a wife?" Peter seems to find this uproarious. "All those candidates you could supply. Six-armed sub-goddesses from south India. Those doctoral students you say are so elegant, from Senegal via Paris. Or those Polynesians you said yourself they wear their bare skin as if it's their mufti..."
Was it as far as back then that she'd first noticed how pink with the effort to speak his forehead could be? Not sexual, surely. Though he has never talked like the boys in the back room, he and she are free enough on that score. But there will now and then be a slippage of language that eludes her. A repetition, often of where they'd been and what had been said-in order to pin it down? Odd analogies? He and she have a taste for them, though conceding that the lingo of many a scholar they know can sound like Tibetan on a fast-forward tape. Yet recently his jokes, puns-comparisons-seem insufficiently on the mark.
"Mane," he'd said to her, in the bathroom one morning. "Carousel horse." She'd turned to see him holding puzzledly the tufted English toothbrush, made of real bristle, that she always bought when passing through London. "So it is," she'd said, long since accustomed to traveling and arriving in a scurf of foreign oddments. "Hard to tell Mom's own ratpack from her artifacts," her own girls had agreed. So, when recently he had said, staring at the dining-room mantel, laden with her trophies, "We are so-so-; we are so-," expelling it finally: "so-gourd," she had later quoted him. "Clever, was it?" he'd asked. He couldn't recall saying that.
But he'd remembered to twit her about Lev. "Marriage broker, are you? Well, this house was built on brokers: a real-estate one, a lawyer-and now a diamond dealer? Don't tell me he's speaking for one of our girls?"
His quips had never before been aimed at what she was. Now was there a touch of what her aunts and uncles had called rishus, a Hebrew word she was not even sure how to spell?
"No. I won't tell you," she'd said. "You never told me-that dream."
What Lev had said as he closed the closet door, testing it with a pull, was, "Would you keep something here for me, if I bring it? For the boys, that is-just in case? I don't want to keep it in my office safe."
Just incase. A phrase familiar to anyone reared in the depths of family, and in hers still that Oriental tag of the Jewishness. Their care to refer to both God and disaster sidelong.
"Of course, Lev," she'd said.
Yet months would elapse before he came again. Only last fall it had been, the first Sunday of the holiday season, when all the family gathered, even from the distant grade schools and colleges, and she took it upon herself to reinvite those hangers-on who might be too humble or shy. He'll turn up whenever, she thought in passing; he's not one of those.
This time he brought no delicatessen with him. Only a small brown paper bag he'd handed her as they stood again in front of the opened linen closet. She'd felt the flattened bag, whose contents, wrapped in cloth maybe, seemed scarcely to expand it, but hadn't peered inside. He'd watched her enclose the bag in a white one of her own, which she'd marked MOTH CRYSTALS-DO NOT OPEN, and place it well behind the stack of banquet cloths. If those reminded him, this time he didn't touch. But when the door was locked again she'd seen his tremble of relief and said, "Let me give you a cup of tea."
They'd gone to the kitchen for it. "Jennie's on her annual," she'd said. "She always has to be pushed." He'd said, "I figured." And he had come early, before the crowd.
When they'd had a cup, and a slice from the stock of homemades Jennie always left, he'd brought out the tiny, domed red plush box whose function was all too clear. "No, Lev-" she'd already said before he had a chance to open it. On Libby's engagement ring. "Not moth crystals," she said. "No, Lev. You can't pass that problem on to me." It had been her acknowledgment that he'd already passed along something.
"With luck, the boys will come into the business when they're of age. Otherwise, businesses of their own." He'd swallowed, then gone on. "Here's their address."
A man's name in Tel Aviv.
"He lives there now. I knew him from here; we were students together. I would trust him with my life." He swallowed again. "I have. He's their guardian."
She stared down at the address, the name. And they had been students together. "A rabbi...yes." And from her too, Lev was wanting a pledge. She'd held out the fourth finger of her right hand.
At once he'd said, "Send them what we locked away...in the event that anything should happen to me."
"Or to me?" she'd said, but only as a formality. At merely a young sixty-five, she wasn't yet thinking about that. Let it remain that, with a hush for others gone ahead.
"Oh you, you'll live to be a hundred."
The phrase has been said to her before. Crushing a sugar cube between her teeth she'd corrected him. "Ninety-four. All on my mother's side went about then. And always with some smart crack between their lips. You wouldn't believe they'd have the breath for it."
"You will." When he smiled you could well see what Libby had seen in him.
"My trade's a gabby one, Lev. But it's the stones that really speak." Jewelers call diamonds "stones"; had she meant to pun or hadn't she? Looking down at the two rings on her fingers she'd said, "I can't really wear yours, you know. People will ask. And it quite outshines my other one." Chosen by Peter and her, the smallest carat stocked.
He'd cast it a glance. "Pure enough." Lightly he'd flicked the bigger stone. "Got it on discount, else I couldn't have afforded. Wanted to impress her crowd. But they weren't."
"Hoo. Cousin Charlotte? Never called Lottie. Token lady on half a dozen boards, pioneer on a couple never before 'mixed.' Shirtwaist manners. Atoning for all the rest of us Jews who mightn't have those."
He'd mimicked: "'We run to the plain Tiffany setting, Lev. And not the platinum. The gold.'...So pass the ring on, Zipporah. Or sell for charity. It's good enough for any of God's altars. Or your favorite."
"Mine are not always God's," she'd said. "You still believe?"
She has had to be professionally quick on gesture. For those body movements that aren't the sign of the cross, or the palms pressed to each other, but grow from other hallowed pasts. The way a "primitive" foot turns inward, then slyly stomps. Or a thumb rubs an amulet, worn in the proper place.
Or smooths the place where it should have been. Lev wears no sideburns, or the briefest possible. A fingernail had flicked, if not caressed, where that long braid would have been.
"I got Him too on discount," he said.
He'd left before the crowd arrived. Her and Peter's crowd. He must know he's an object of gossip there. But in a way, so is everybody else; that's half why they come.
"Off to the office," he'd said this time, as if he now owed her that.
"On a Sunday?"
"Weekends are the danger time, in the district. I check. But also, I phone the boys from there. It's like a quiet we share...And I have all my goods around me...I give them pointers." His voice trails.
"Lev. You must be hungry. You-look hungry. Stay to eat."
The classic mother-cry that women of their race were mocked for? She shrugged. So did he. He kissed her hand.
Seeing him to the door, a ritual of the house, they found Peter and his sisters there. For a minute, standing there in phalanx, they seem to be barring Lev's way. Tipping an imaginary cap to them, he'd lit out.
Strange how, seen in this sudden, half-hostile phalanx, the three Duffys still resemble. She has a flash of the three young auburn heads they once were, as seen through the rain of the past: Agnes, Theresa, Peter: milk-white skin, rose-hip mouth, the boy as much as the girls. She can smell the meal, often quoted, that they'd be going to: fresh pork, soda bread, a sweet with a cuddly name. The mother's a fine cook. The two girls, rising to be office managers, will mostly eat out. The brothers will have escorted them to dances in vain. No man will be good enough for them, except the round-collared ones they can't have.
But as kids, were they as pouter-pigeon-breasted as now? Peter, shifting his glance to her, retracts his lower lip. The "girls" pull in theirs; has she caught them at something?
"Peter wouldn't let us in the door," Agnes, the elder sister says in a shuddery voice. Terry, her follower though smarter, says low, with a glance to the living room beyond, "Actually tried to slam the door in our face."
"Blather!" Peter says. "You two been rushin' the growler?" His voice is far-off. She knows the old term for going for beer, but has never heard him drop his g's. There's a kind of coarse, greedy-eyed luminosity uniting the three of them. Like might collect in one of their churches when the congregation filed in to worship a saint, after a Saint Patrick's Day brawl.
And so help me, what crossed my mind then I'll spend any time we two have together atning for. I thought I saw the color of his soul, and that it was nothing like I had really ever seen before. And I thought: This man's too Christian for me...
Then Terry skreeks, "Watch out, Ag-he's going to hit us-like Mam did Dad."
While under her own blistered stare Peter turns into himself again, or half himself. Saying, "Come, Sis. You are welcome here. But take care milady here doesn't marry you off."
When there's grace in the young, one swears it will abolish all creeds, all flags. For here came Bertram to our side. There's no shadow on him yet, of what he may become. Just a decent sixteen-year-old, with the slow stalking gait of one who may already have had to mediate at home. So has staunchly fixed his sights on what and whom to adore.
"Gramps. Come and sit with Norman and me...Here you go."
Copyright © 2002 by Hortense Calisher
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Reading Group Guide
It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, our hero, one Baudolino, saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own long and winding-and thoroughly fantastical-story. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander-who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa-adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous, colorful friends. Spurred on by myths and legends, and by their own vivid reveries, this merry band sets out in search of the Holy Grail, the most beloved chalice in all Christendom, and Prester John, the legendary priest-king said to rule over a paradisiacal kingdom in the East-a vast, phantasmagoric realm of creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens. As always with Umberto Eco, this abundant novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. Partly a medievalist historical fiction, partly a philosophical dialogue, and partly a meditation on religion, myth, love, desire, language, society, and countless other symbols and systems, Baudolino is, above all else, a fast-paced adventure yarn. This is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.
1. Who isnarrating the first chapter of this novel? What scenes, characters, and events described here show up later in the narrative? Consider this passage, near the end of the chapter: "I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didnt know before. But when you write you write only what you now allready so patientia Im better off not knowing how to write." How does this passage exemplify the novel's complex if not conflicted treatment of self-expression and communication (written, verbal, and so on)?
2. One of the few constants in this brisk, far-flung, and episodic adventure story is Baudolino's predilection to stretch the truth, rearrange the facts, fib, lie. What ironic points might Eco be making about the links between falsehood and history? Should all of history, in effect, be seen/read/understood as historical fiction? What are the "little truths" and "the greater truth" mentioned in Chapter 40?
3. Compare and contrast Baudolino's two "father figures." What sort of life does each man lead? How does each man die? What does each impart or pass onto Baudolino-physically, emotionally, and spiritually?
4. Discuss how, if at all, Baudolino the character both embodies transcends the many paradoxes at work in Baudolino the novel: sacred and profane experiences, high and low vocabularies, royal and common families, real and imagined miracles, etc.
5. Acknowledging this novel's many and various literary allusions, one reviewer described its protagonist as "a resourceful cross between Voltaire's Candide and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man." But what mythic traits, if any, did you identify in the character of Baudolino? How did he echo, for example, the Questing Hero? The Trickster Fool? Any others? Discuss.
6. What is the "green honey" that appears at several points in this novel? What does it do? Why is it so prized or disdained? And how does it relate to the novel's core struggle between illusion and reality?
7. "The limits of my language means the limits of my world," as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked famously. Given Baudolino's almost super-human ability to learn any language, how would you label or define the limits of his world?
8. Who is Niketas? What dramatic and conceptual roles does he play in this novel? Explain how he influences and participates in the story Baudolino is telling-or doesn't he? How does the journey Niketas is making thematically relate to the journey Baudolino is describing? What is the "single thing" Niketas chooses to believe regarding Baudolino's tale? (see Chapter 26) And is this "single thing" is true or correct?
9. Discuss Baudolino as a mystery story. What, in your view, are its defining questions? Why is Baudolino forced to kill the Poet in Chapter 38-and why, a few pages later, does Kyot tell Baudolino (regarding the Grasal), "What counts is that nobody must find it"? And which of the key queries in Baudolino remain unsolved throughout?
10. Look again at the last two chapters of this novel. What happens to our hero in these final pages? How and why does Baudolino change at the end of the novel? How and why does he stay the same? Explore the question of whether Baudolino is ultimately a tragic or comic tale.
Copyright (c) 2002. Published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Inc.