Before she’d received permission, the Rav’s decision had loomed large in her mind, but afterward, once she had the letter, she took it for granted. It was like securing a loan. Taking the money and forgetting the debt.
How gratified she’d been at Eva and Maja’s party when everyone complimented her, told her it was wonderful the way she’d brought up all the food herself. She was flattered by that. She’d not fully considered that they were thinking that she’d done well, despite the limitations she was working with. They were impressed she’d managed to pull off the party and the store. But it wasn’t her, it was her position that they marveled at. Elizabeth holds the Rav’s letter in her hands, the pure white typing paper with its two neat creases. The envelope, ripped open, has fallen to the floor. What a contortionist she must seem to her Kaaterskill neighbors, making a business in Hamilton’s back room. What a marvelous object she is to them. A ship in a bottle. How did she get in there? How could she get out?
With nervous hands she picks up the phone and calls the Rav’s office. The rebbetzin answers the phone.
“This is Elizabeth Shulman,” Elizabeth says. “I—my husband and I received a letter from the Rav. We need to set up an appointment.”
“Let me look at the calendar.” The rebbetzin’s voice is thin and distant. “Thursday?”
“Would it be possible to do it Sunday?” Elizabeth asks. “My husband is in the city during the week.”
“The Rav doesn’t have hours on Sunday,” Rachel Kirshner says.
Her tone pricks at Elizabeth. She is so cold, as if Elizabeth were asking some presumptuous question. And then Elizabeth realizes something. She must not get Isaac involved in this. She mustn’t get him tangled in her mistake. It would be unfair and cowardly for her to bring him all the way up to Kaaterskill for this meeting, as if he should somehow defend her for decisions she made independently—indeed, against his advice. “I suppose I can come Thursday,” she says, “but I’ll have to come alone. My husband will be in the city then, because he works there, and I don’t want to ask him to lose a day because—because it’s mine really,” she says. “It’s not his store at all. It’s mine, so it isn’t necessary for him to be there.”
SHE wakes up many times on Wednesday night, and once she wakes shivering, the blanket having slipped onto the floor. Drowsily, reaching for the blanket and pulling it over her, Elizabeth searches for and remembers the events of the day, and what is worrying her. Her dread of the next day’s audience with the Rav brings back a long-forgotten memory of the night before a contest at school when she woke up shivering in the dark, thinking of the teachers waiting for her to recite a pasuk from B’reishit. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? Like school. Like her daughters in the corridors. She has been called out of school to explain herself.
All the next day on her stool behind the Dutch door, Elizabeth rings up groceries for her customers. The young mothers pushing strollers with ungainly babies, some of them sprawled in sleep, some awake and screaming. The older women, who come in pairs, clutching their square-cornered, short-handled pocketbooks, and ordering her about peremptorily. She is nervous even as she marshals her defense. She hasn’t done anything wrong, she tells herself. But her conscience is troubled. She knows that there is something wrong, if not in what she has done, then in the way she has done it. She feels guilty, as if now at last she is being held accountable for thoughts and feelings that have become strong and disrespectful, perhaps even opportunistic. Stop, she tells herself. Stop imagining the meeting this way—as if it were a court-martial, for heaven’s sake. She tries to shake off these thoughts as she closes up early and puts out her handwritten note, Closed at two today. She smooths the back of her skirt where it always creases from the stool. It is ten to two.
Heart pounding, she climbs the hill past scraggly blueberry bushes and ragweed and approaches the Rav’s house with its glassed-in porch. Silently, Rachel Kirshner shows her into the Rav’s library and leaves her there in the dark, book-lined room, almost exactly like the library in the city. The furniture is the same, the desk placed in the center of the room with the large table behind it. But instead of the old Rav, the middle-aged Rav Isaiah looks up from his desk, a much younger face. “Good afternoon,” Isaiah says. “Where is Mr. Shulman?”
“He is in the city,” Elizabeth answers, steadying her voice.
“I see,” the Rav says mildly enough. Clearly, he won’t refuse to talk directly to women as his father had. “Please come sit down.”
She takes a red leather chair near the desk.
“Mrs. Shulman,” the Rav says, “I have some questions about the store.” He pauses there.
Elizabeth says nothing. Instinctually she holds back. She needs to see where he’s going.
The Rav keeps waiting. He waits until he makes her silence uncomfortable. Until it seems there in the library that she is keeping something from him.
“What has disturbed us,” he says at last, “is that there are reports you have been selling food that is not sanctioned by our community.” He leans toward her across his desk.
She has never seen him this close. Behind his glasses his eyes are warm brown, not black. His hair is threaded with white.
“What are you asking me?” she inquires respectfully, but with precision, as if she were in court.
“I am concerned,” Isaiah says, “that you have been pushing your letter of permission from the Rav, zichrono tzaddik livracha, farther than it was meant to go. Bringing up food from outside, catering events—if in fact you have been doing these things. These were not provided for in the original license. And what I am asking, first of all, is, were you doing this? Bringing up food with other hechshers.”
She stiffens slightly. “Yes,” she says.
“And did you bring up food for a party?”
“Yes,” she says.
He knits his fingers and rests his two hands together on the desk. “Well,” he says, “of course, you understand that this is well beyond the scope of the permission given to you.”
“But it wasn’t forbidden,” Elizabeth says. “It wasn’t clear—”
“If it wasn’t clear, then you should have asked,” the Rav reminds her. “Unfortunately you did not ask. You took it upon yourself to interpret his permission as you wished. Then you sent me a request to renew your license. Now”—he picks up her letter. There is a hard quietness about him as he sits there in front of her and silently reads her request to reopen the store next summer. “I am in a position,” he says, “—have a responsibility—to uphold the halachic standards of this community, and I don’t think I can renew a license that has not been honored. It may be true that you did not violate the arrangement, such as it was. But it is clear that you did not honor it either.” He puts the letter down, simply places it, her store, her idea, on the desk.
“No,” Elizabeth says, “I don’t think that’s entirely true, because the work I did was good work, and I did it in the way I had presented it to him—”
“A license from the Rav is not a blank check.” Rav Isaiah speaks more quickly than before. “And the Rav’s signature is not to be misapplied. His name on a document is a matter of trust—”
“And trust in me?” Elizabeth asks. “Is it an agreement if only one party determines what kind of trust it is, if only one side writes it and signs it, gives it and takes it away?” As soon as she speaks she regrets her words, but she could not help herself. She sees that the Rav is angry, but she is angry too.
Rav Isaiah looks at the frank-faced woman across his desk. One thought galls him; one thing enrages him. She would never have spoken to his father this way. She would never have dared. He takes a breath; he collects himself before he speaks. “I can’t allow this to continue,” he says. “You are not honoring your commitment. You will have to close the store.”
“Let me explain the situation,” Elizabeth says, her face reddening.
“I think I understand the situation quite well,” the Rav tells her
. “It will have to stop. Immediately.”
Then Elizabeth can say nothing. He has made his decision, and there is nothing else to say.
SHE walks back to Hamilton’s store. She strides down his narrow aisle to her Dutch door in back. James Boyd has already arrived with the week’s delivery. He and Ira are unloading the truck together, stacking boxes and carrying two at a time up Hamilton’s back steps.
“Hello,” Elizabeth hears James calling. “Hello, anybody home?” They walk into the little storeroom where Elizabeth stands among the boxes and the freezer cases.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth says, “I’m going to need your help packing up these things. I’m going to have to return them to the city—and the ones you’ve just brought too.”
“Now, wait a second,” James says.
“Of course, I’ll pay you anyway,” she tells him.
“Hold on—we drive to the city and pick up this load and now you say you don’t want the stuff?”
Pale, Elizabeth stands before them. “I’m going to have to close the store,” she says.
“I don’t understand,” James says.
“Well …” She hesitates. She doesn’t know how to put it. “I had permission. I had a sort of a license, and I don’t have it anymore.”
“You lost your license? I didn’t know you needed a license to sell frozen chicken breasts,” says Boyd. “And why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“It just happened. This afternoon,” Elizabeth says. “You were already on the road.”
“Can I put this stuff down?” Ira asks from behind.
“Look, if you think I’m driving all the way back to the city—”
“Oh, no, not today, of course not today,” Elizabeth says. “We’ll set another day. Next week. I’m going to have to call the suppliers in the city.”
James starts to speak and then stops.
Elizabeth sees that he is almost afraid to make her talk. Another word and she’ll be crying.
She tells him she will call later. In a few days. She writes him a check and records it in her checkbook. She writes a check to Hamilton for the whole month’s rent. It is a lot of money. A lot of wasted money. She closes up her gray cash box and puts her ledgers in her old canvas tote bag, silk-screened Kendall Falls Library.
She cannot explain it to James Boyd or to Hamilton. The Rav has taken her store away from her. He has decided to take it away. And there is no recourse for her. No way to appeal or argue her case before the Kehillah. The decision is made. She can’t negotiate.
Elizabeth has never questioned the Rav’s judgment before, the old Rav’s decisions on halachic matters. That self-cleaning ovens are acceptable for cooking on Pesach, but continuous-cleaning ovens should never be used on that holiday. That families should eat in their sukkahs on the eighth day of Sukkot. His determinations about education for the children, the tunes sung on Shabbes, the kind of clothes the men should wear, or the hair coverings for women. They were all such small things, transparent, and easy, like air. She never experienced disapproval; she never did anything to merit a rebuke. But when she made something new, the Rav took it from her. When she found something for herself and for the community, then he took it away. He looked at her across his desk as if she existed only on sufferance.
Tremblingly, Elizabeth packs up her makeshift store. She takes down her fluttering calendar. Of course everyone will talk about it. Of course everyone will know. She is shaking, angry to the tips of her fingers. She pulls the Rav’s framed letter off the wall and it drops from her hands. The cheap glass cracks, and one piece shatters on the floor.
“What’s that? What’s that?” Hamilton calls out from the front of the store over the grinding of the ice machine. “You break it, you buy it.”
But Elizabeth closes the Dutch door. She shuts herself into the windowless storeroom. Sitting with her feet up on the rungs of her stool, she ignores the ice machine and the bell ringing as customers come in Hamilton’s front door. She holds herself and rocks softly back and forth, hot and flushed from the close air.
BY EVENING all the summer people know about the store’s closing. The women talk about Elizabeth on their porches, and in their lawn chairs. When they call their husbands in the city, they tell them that Elizabeth Shulman has lost Rav Isaiah’s permission and shut down her business. Even the children know something of the story. They talk about the store as they pedal up Maple. They call to each other in their flock of bicycles. “Ruchel’s mother closed her store. Did you know that?”
“The Rav made her close it down.”
“Ooh.”
“What did she do?” “Nothing!” Ruchel shouts.
Even Beatrix has heard about Elizabeth. She and Cecil have heard from Nina that something has gone wrong with the store, and that Elizabeth has closed up shop. Beatrix thinks it over, pacing on the porch. Back and forth she walks, considering Elizabeth’s situation. Then at last Beatrix says to Cecil, “I’m going over to talk to her.”
“All right,” says Cecil.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I’m far too comfortable where I am,” Cecil admits. Deep in the wicker couch, he is reading his TLS.
Beatrix sighs. “It was such a lovely image I had in my mind, Elizabeth twiddling her toes in the twentieth century with Hamilton as her sort of duenna. I don’t see why she had to close. I wouldn’t have done it—”
“You are not Elizabeth,” says Cecil, “to state the obvious.”
“I meant in her position.”
“You would never be in that position,” he says.
“Don’t be so literal. Could I tell her?” Beatrix calls back from the porch steps. “Are we telling people?”
“If you want,” says Cecil.
In the twilight Elizabeth’s children are playing with an old soccer ball. Elizabeth is watching on a lawn chair in the grass.
“Elizabeth?” Beatrix lopes around the side of the bungalow in white jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. “How are you? Nina told us there’s been a rabbinical eyebrow raised at you. I was just coming to say My God, and how awful, and—you know—how absurd. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Elizabeth says.
Beatrix looks at her carefully. “No, you aren’t,” she says.
Elizabeth smiles. She cannot describe to Beatrix how she feels, so small and sick and cold.
“Well,” Beatrix says, “I wanted to tell you something. I hope it cheers you up. You’re the first one I’m telling. We’re reproducing ourselves. We’re having a baby in March.”
“B’sha’ah tova!” Elizabeth uses the traditional formula, May the baby be born at a propitious hour. She does not mention her own pregnancy.
“I’m a bit … terrified about it,” Beatrix says, sitting down on the grass before Elizabeth. “Not just the pregnancy and the labor, but the child. I’ve been working so long on my papers and my lectures. I’m only used to thinking about my mathematics, and my career—I’ve never liked distractions. And the thought of having something so distracting as a child … You’ll have to advise me. You’ll have to tell me how I’m going to manage.”
“You’ll manage beautifully,” Elizabeth exclaims. “You’ll see that when it happens and when you have the child you’ll forget all about not having distractions….” She speaks reassuringly and, she hopes, cheerfully to Beatrix. And as Elizabeth talks, she finds to her relief that her voice does not betray her. She does not sound like a person whose heart is broken.
“It is winter,” said the swallow, “and the chill snow will soon be here. In Egypt the sun is warm on the green palm-trees, and the crocodiles lie in the mud and look lazily about them. My companions are building a nest in the temple of Baalbec, and the pink and white doves are watching them, and cooing to each other.”
—OSCAR WILDE
The Happy Prince
1
WHEN the High Holidays come again, Elizabeth goes with Isaac and the children to the Kirshner synagogue in the city, and the
y walk inside with the other families, dressed up in their best fall clothes. She sits with the girls in the balcony, and the other women nod to her, or touch the children as they walk by. The women who speak to Elizabeth ask when the new baby is due. The others just look at her. They know something about the store. Elizabeth senses their curiosity and turns away.
She sits among them, but she feels perfectly alone. She hears the voices of the congregation; she sees the letters in the book in front of her, and her lips move, but she is muffled by her own thoughts. She knows she has lost something. She does not belong to them in the same way anymore.
Elizabeth read one summer in Henry Adams about the monastery on Mont-Saint-Michel, which is surrounded by water on three sides at low tide. The tide came in each day and transformed the place into an island, sometimes trapping tourists overnight. Elizabeth has been that kind of tourist, taking day trips, and staying longer each time, until, at last, entranced, she forgot about the time. But she was a tourist in the other direction, traveling off the island to tour the mainland, leaving her small and perfect world. The water rushed in behind her.
She shouldn’t be thinking these things in shul. Feeling sorry for herself on this day. What is she, if she can’t sit among her neighbors without knowing she has their approval? What was she thinking all those years? Was all her time in shul really only about other people, so that now, isolated, she cannot pray? Disappointing, unflattering, but perhaps it’s true. Perhaps a certain sociability and desire to please are all she ever had for God.
Despair and confusion wash over her. She has to steady herself, steel herself to sit there during the long morning Rosh Hashanah service. She finds the pages for Sorah and Brocha. She listens to Rav Isaiah when he talks about tshuvah, return, repentance, and redemption.