I said, “Mom, that’s not important. That’s done. That’s gone.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” she said.
“I know! Did you think I came out here to accuse you or something? Because I didn’t. Not at all! That’s the farthest thing from the truth! The thing is—”
“You were a big help,” she said. “That’s what I was thanking you for in the letter.”
“Hey, I’m glad,” I told her. “Here’s the thing, though. I’m a Bialy-stoker Hasid now.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s sort of like a transcendentalist Jew.”
“Oh, Sharon!” She turned a little pink.
“It’s just who I am right now,” I said.
“If it’s you,” she said, “it’s you.”
“But the thing is, I need to know about the future. That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to ask your advice.”
“My advice?” She sounded surprised. I guess, despite being a crone now, people didn’t often seek her out as a person with a lot of wise advice to give.
I told her about my whole predicament. The way I’d changed my life, and how I was involved with Mikhail, but when it came to marriage I didn’t know what to do.
So she cocked her head to one side. “Well, I have to say … I have to say, and I think you know this about me, when it came to deciding who to marry, I wasn’t too terribly successful.”
And I said, “I know, but my rebbe said to ask you….”
She wavered a moment. She said, “Well, do you love him?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Well, that’s your answer right there. Isn’t it?” she said.
“You loved Dad, right?”
“Well, you know he was an asshole,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I know. I know. But originally, at the beginning. You loved him, right?”
“Very much.”
Then we both just stood there quietly. Since it was a fact Mom and Dad had loved each other so much once, and then look what happened to them, i.e., my mother the fragile wreck, my dad the pathological provider, et cetera. So I couldn’t help thinking, No, that’s my answer, right there.
LATER, I walked alone down by the wharves, by the whale-watching boats lying high in the water, the Portuguese Princess, Dolphin Fleet I, and Dolphin Fleet II. It was gray and misty out, and the horns of incoming fishing boats sounded mournfully in the water. Mom had offered to put me up for the night and have my palms read and my cards done, and introduce me to a terrific fortune-teller, but I’d turned her down on all counts. Being a religious Jew, I figured I couldn’t make my decisions based on tarot cards, and as for spending the night, remembering the holes Mom had dwelled in before, the newspapers piled up to the ceiling, the rotting fruit, the paths between her piles of bric-a-brac, I was a little bit afraid to accept her hospitality.
It was misty, and my hair hung down damp around my shoulders. I rested on a park bench near the arts-and-crafts huts by the water. A golden retriever was sitting there, too, leash tied to the bench leg, just waiting patiently for his human. He sniffed my backpack, which was full of kosher food from New York.
“I’d give you some, but it’s not good for you,” I told the dog, whose name, according to his collar, was Sam. “Oh, don’t look at me like that.” I ruffled the fur on his neck. We were both so down in that misty sea-weather. We were both sitting there so clammy.
He started snuffing me. He licked my hand.
“Hey, you,” I said, “don’t you think it’s always lonelier at the edge of land?”
Lick. Lick.
“Yeah, I’m just really tired. I just came from really far away. I’m far from home. Do you know what I mean?” Sniff, sniff.
“Well, I guess food is part of home. But also shelter. Also your bed. You know—just that one place you can curl up, and you can chew it up and shed all you want to—that’s what I’m talking about.”
Sniff.
“Hey, if you were mine, I’d give you the sandwich. I would.” I reached over to Sam and put my arms around him. “I wish you were mine.”
Not wanting to be rude eating in front of him, I walked all the way down the pier before I ate the lunch Mrs. Karinsky had packed for me: roast beef sandwiches on challah rolls, and plastic containers of what her kids called rubber kugel cut in squares. Mrs. Karinsky packed my lunch, I thought. Yet your mom and dad—they’re indelibly in your genes. You couldn’t deny that, even if you tried.
The water was gray and deep. The whales out there were all probably just starting to unwind after all those fleets of whale-watching boats. They were all probably just stretching out in the water together enjoying their quiet time. The whales out there, they understood about family; they lived in pods. The whales, they knew. You could tell from the bones in their flippers. You could see from those spreading bones like fingers, they had once been animals on land; they’d looked like wolves and run in packs. And even when they took to the seas, even when they were buoyed by the waters and changed their shapes and grew humongously, they swam together, and they sang together, and they were kin. They lived a communal life. They played and swam and nursed their babies in their big extended aquatic families. They called to each other through the waters, all the way across the oceans, they recognized each others’ voices They knew whose voice belonged to whom.
After feeling sorry for myself a good long while, and realizing I would never be a whale, I went back to the car. What I really need is just a nice cheap clean motel room, I thought. What I really need is a shower. What I really need is a good night’s sleep. But all I wanted was Mikhail.
A day later I stood in Brighton in front of a tall dilapidated brick building, and I checked the number with the envelope I was carrying, and I went inside. The foyer was scuffed-up white and black tile, and the inner door by the mailboxes was propped open with somebody’s old shoe, so I just let myself in and slipped inside the elevator, which was slow and saggy. Over the years the cables must have lost some of their bounce. But I made it up to the fourth floor and knocked on number 404, which was Aunt Lena’s apartment.
A tiny yet beautiful lady came to the door, and behind her a flood of light. I saw this big cluttered sunny room and the shining back of Mikhail’s baby grand piano, a swish of light satiny wood.
“Hello,” said Aunt Lena.
She was not at all the way I’d imagined her! I’d thought from her voice that she was about a hundred, and with white hair and rosy granny cheeks. But actually Aunt Lena was a firecracker, no more than seventy, and had wavy black hair and makeup, and a plum-colored dress with gold buttons.
“Hi,” I said, “I’m Sharon.”
“Yes? You are Sharon!” Lena exclaimed. “Come in, come in. He is teaching. I will get you tea. If you will wait … if you will come into the kitchen.”
Mikhail looked over the top of the piano, naturally surprised to see me there since I’d never warned him I was coming. He called something to me. Yearningly, he stretched his neck and his whole body toward me, except his arms were down, because he and the little girl next to him were playing “Lightly Row” and what looked like the girl’s mother was sitting on the couch waiting. So I went with Lena to the kitchen, which was one of those oblong rooms you get in old brick apartment buildings. It was filled with plants, and tea tins and hanging wire baskets full of onions and potatoes, and apples, and nearly black bananas, and I sat at the table, which was piled with loose-leaf paper, carefully written over in Russian, page after page in heavy black ink, which Lena told me were her memoirs she was working on, and all about how she had come from Russia to New York right after the Second World War and left everything that she had once known and gone into the fashion industry. In a low voice, something of a stage whisper, she told me all about her three husbands, one worse than the next, and what they’d done to her during the marriages, during which she had no children, and how she came to Boston years ago, pursued by a certain gentleman, whom she refused, but who had secure
d for her this apartment in this rent-controlled building, after which she went into the communications field, working as a translator for Russian patients at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, from which, only two years ago, she had retired.
“To me Mikhail is my adopted son,” Lena said. “To me he is my son altogether. His mother wrote to me before she died. She asked me that I sponsor him, and of course this was what I must do. It has not been easy for him,” she confided in me.
“Why?”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Because he is a genius!”
I leaned over to see Mikhail at the piano with the little girl. He was counting as she played. “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” On the couch the kid’s mother was also somewhat anxiously counting the beats, mouthing, “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”
“He has piano students,” Aunt Lena said. “It is not a living. Yet there is no support for music in this country. His wife said, no, she will no longer support. Income. Salary. Money. Car, plus insurance. Furniture. What she cared for was earning a living, not for him. She left him—for what?” “Shallow material things?” I said.
“A timpanist!” Lena spat out the word. She started telling me about this timpanist who had once supposedly been Mikhail’s friend, and how he played so-called New Music that had no rhyme or reason, and was the darling of the music department at Harvard, and had a concerto being written just for him—while Mikhail sent tapes yet never succeeded at the competitions, because you see there were so many pianists. Yet there were few timpanists, and he, this so-called friend of Mikhail, took advantage of the fact, and of Mikhail’s trust. Mikhail never dreamed anything was going on between his wife, Elise, and John, this so-called musician. But then, just when Elise and John were about to run off together—the piano lesson ended.
MIKHAIL was seeing the little girl and her mother to the door; he was ushering them rather hastily out of the apartment. When they were gone he rushed over to me. “Sharon. Baruch Hashem, you’re here. You spoke to the rebbe?”
So I told about my audience with the rebbe while Mikhail paced back and forth in the living room with his hands clasped behind his back. And I told him about going to ask my parents for their advice—and their answers being so noncommittal. And detached, I wanted to say. Distant! But somehow I couldn’t speak so freely with Aunt Lena in the room. It felt strange trying to tell him all this with his aunt standing there—despite the fact that she’d told me the story of her life, and had started on Mikhail’s history too. I said, “I couldn’t tell, from what they said, exactly what their answer would be.”
“Did you explain to them that this was what the rebbe advised—that you should go to them?” Mikhail asked me.
“But they don’t know the rebbe,” I said. “They don’t really”—my voice dropped lower—“they don’t really care what he says.”
Mikhail looked somewhat offended, standing there in his black trousers and his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his black velvet yarmulke on his head.
“It’s awful,” I confessed. “They don’t get how holy the rebbe is. They don’t understand the value of his words.”
Mikhail put up his hands. “It’s enough. It’s all right. I understand. What can we say? We can only try. I before did not know from the rebbe either! Time only will tell them who he is.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.
“Im yirtzeh Hashem,” God willing, “in time they will learn and they will know.”
“Im yirtzeh Hashem,” I said. “But what about—in the meanwhile … ?”
“In the meanwhile I will play,” he said, and he pulled a chair for me right up to the piano, and he seated me, just as if he were seating me at a grand table for a formal dinner party. He adjusted the bench with the knobs on each side, because he was so much taller than his little piano student. And gently he laid his fingers on the keys. Without music he played one piece after another of Scott Joplin. He played all those Joplin rags, and I’d never heard them played that way before. I’d always heard them tinny and quick and kachinking along like old-time ice-cream-parlor music, but Mikhail played them like so slowly I nearly fell off my chair. He was so sure, and he bent the rhythms in such a way—I’d never realized the “Maple Leaf Rag” could be so sexy. He was beyond good. He was a natural. All over again I felt that mix of joyfulness and awe and jealousy. I was envious of him, so at home in his instrument. But it was just a twist of envy like a twist of lime. When I looked at Mikhail I saw a person who was deep down much more subtle and humorous than I had ever thought. I saw there was magic inside of him. It wasn’t grace; it was a smaller magic of Mikhail’s own. It was his own self that shone in his eyes; it was his own energy that emanated through his fingertips.
Then he played Debussy for me. He played Suite Bergamasque like jazz. The room was starting to fill up, as if vines and plants were opening leaf after leaf. The room was starting to fill as if a twilight lavender had come inside. And I thought, This is better than words; this is better than anything I have ever said, or anyone has ever said to me. But then he stopped.
“Go on.”
“Listen.”
He played for me the niggun that had come to him. The Sign he had actually received from the third rebbe of Bialystok—which was just a melody he played out with his right hand. Just a pretty yet plain melody that sounded to me like all the other nigguns that we Bialystokers hummed and sang around the Shabbes table. And Mikhail put his hands down and he hummed. He hummed the niggun just as he said he had heard it in his ear.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
I looked down at the keyboard. I stared at the silent white and black keys. “How do you know,” I said, “that the niggun was really a sign from God we had to get married—and not just … you know, wishful thinking?”
Mikhail grinned at me. “I did wish it,” he said. “And that is why the niggun came.”
For one long moment I stared at him. I just had to take that in. I had to catch my breath while all the facts I’d delicately been balancing, like for example, that although he played like an angel, this guy was living with his aunt, and had gone nuts at least once in the not-too-distant past—all those facts came crashing to the ground. Because all at once Mikhail had told me the one thing I really wanted to know. That he wanted me underneath everything else—beneath all the signs and miracles, and even the most wonderful Messianic portents—which of course I absolutely believed, but still. He wanted me in the old way, older than the old religion. And then the getting-married thing didn’t matter anymore, and the amount of time we’d spent together, and all the matchmaking. None of it got in the way at all. I thought, He loves me. He does. And I also thought, Aunt Lena is eavesdropping on us. I was sure of that. But I didn’t really care. Instead I whispered to him, in such a low voice he had to lean closer to hear. “Okay, but there’s just one thing.”
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry for asking. It’s just a prejudice I still have. It’s just a vestige—do you know what I mean? Left over from my former life. I know people don’t do it in the community. I know it isn’t done. Don’t be shocked, okay? Please? I have to kiss you first.”
For a second he did look shocked. Then his mouth crinkled up. “You want to know if I taste like a frog or a prince.”
I burst out laughing, just hearing him put it that way.
He leaned closer just a quarter of an inch more, and he kissed me. He put his two hands on my face and he kissed my lips. He kissed me like he played, deliberately, gently, not too fast.
And there wasn’t anything between us anymore. Our religious costumes that we wore, our pious language that we spoke, the things that we believed, the innocence that we put on—none of that stood between us. We were just two people, equal seekers, and we understood each other. We really were on the same plane.
So that was how we got engaged. Aunt Lena brought out a bottle of slivovitz, and we each made toasts, and we each dra
nk shots, and Lena said again how Mikhail was a son to her and how she wished him this time everything that he deserved and that we should live a long and happy life and never want for anything, and Mikhail should one day, despite that there was no support for art in this country, achieve recognition for his gifts. She didn’t mention my gifts, but I didn’t take offense, since I realized naturally, given her age, Lena was going to be thinking more about the man’s career, and also she’d just met me. And I said we must drink to the coming of the Moshiach when truth and justice and liberation would all triumph, and Mikhail said, and also when peace would cover the earth. And then Aunt Lena said again, how she had hoped so long for Mikhail to find happiness. And she said, “Sharon, I have burned many many candles for this.”
“Really? What do you mean?” I asked.
Mikhail said, “She burns candles for what she hopes from God.” “Wow,” I said to Lena, “that’s unusual for a Jewish person.” “She is not Jewish,” Mikhail said.
My drink went down the wrong way. I started coughing and gagging, and the liquor burned my throat. Mikhail had to thump me on the back. Aunt Lena sat me down and got me water. “Oh,” I said. Cough. Cough. Splutter. Cough. “She’s not?”
“She is not,” Mikhail said.
Aunt Lena shook her head.
I composed myself. I got my breath. “But, wait …” I began.
Then Mikhail told me. He began telling me the whole history and explanation of his family, which had some Christian—very pious Christian—people in it. Despite the fact that he and his parents, of blessed memory, were of course Jewish.
“When my sister married Mikhail’s father she of course became Jewish,” Aunt Lena said. “When she died she gave Mikhail to me, and she said, Lena, he must be raised a Jewish man.”