“It will all be fine,” he said aloud.
When the bus pulled up, he watched my mother, fourteen and lanky, slouch her way along the aisle, down the steps. When her feet touched ground, she burst into a run. He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp. Against her better judgment, he persuaded my mother to devour the entire candy bar before they got to the bottom of the drive, where the hickory tree fingered the sky, awaiting my grandmother’s next attempt on its life.
The candy bar spoiled my mother’s appetite for dinner, but in the interest of peace, not wanting to betray my grandfather, she forced herself to clean her plate.
6
My grandfather saw my grandmother for the first time in February 1947, at Ahavas Sholom synagogue.* She had been posed beside a potted palm, in a fox stole and sunglasses, under a banner that read try your luck! The fur was on loan from the president of the Sisterhood. The dark glasses had been provided free of charge by the president’s husband, an ophthalmologist, to treat a case of photophobia brought on by chronic malnutrition. I assume that the text painted on the bedsheet banner, part of the decor for Congregation Ahavas Sholom’s inaugural “Night in Monte Carlo,” was coincidence. The pose, however, had been calculated with utmost strategy.
Without consulting her, the sisterhood had decided that even though she was a widow encumbered with a four-year-old daughter, my grandmother, transferred safely to Baltimore from a DP camp in Austria, was the leading candidate for the position of wife to the new rabbi. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society canteens and then the kitchens of Park Circle and Forest Park had conspired to ensure that my grandmother regained her shape, her color, and what the president always referred to as “that gorgeous head of hair.” My grandmother was courteous, conversant with literature and art. She had ambitions and the talent, it was said, to be an actress on the stage. Her feline face and French accent, at times impenetrable, led more than one admirer to compare her to Simone Simon. In spite of suffering and loss, she laughed often, smiled easily. She strode into rooms with actressy shoulders and the humble swagger of a girl who had come of age among hardworking nuns.
A few times, it was true, she had come out with utterances that made no sense whatsoever, in French or English. It was also true that when she was not smiling, she fell into taut silences, seemed to listen for footsteps on the other side of doors, studied shadows in the corners of rooms. When taken to a Baltimore public library for the first time, it was reported, she had made straight for the recordings of Highland reels. The first two peculiarities were put down to her being a relative newcomer to English and a girl who had endured and survived the unspeakable. (Nobody could account for the love of bagpipes.) If one sometimes sensed a weird crackle around her, a scorching like dust on a solenoid, it was believed by the Sisterhood—and seconded by many of their husbands—that this mysteriously added to her allure.
The new rabbi, freshly graduated first in his class from the Jewish Theological Seminary, had charmed everyone with his brilliance and élan, his tailored suits and his faint delicious odor, unexpected in a rabbi, of gardenias. But he displayed a troubling streak of self-will. All his life he had been the pride of his family and the joy of his teachers. As a result he had learned to prefer his own ideas to those of other people, even with regard to subjects, such as the woman he ought to marry, about which he could be expected to know very little. Overt matchmaking attempts, each to a thoroughly eligible candidate, had not turned out well. The Sisterhood caucused and agreed to authorize the use of wiles.
To ensure that the target of the operation could not fail to notice her when he put in his scheduled appearance at “Night in Monte Carlo,” the Sisterhood had posed my grandmother beside the rented palm tree just by the main door of the synagogue’s reception room. Two Sisterhood members were deployed here to pin my grandmother down. Mrs. Waxman, married to a judge, had been the chief sponsor of my grandmother’s petition for refugee status. Mrs. Zellner, among the first Jewish graduates of Bryn Mawr, spoke excellent French. Playing on my grandmother’s sense of obligation and her hunger to speak her mother tongue, the women were prepared to hold her on the spot for however long it took the rabbi to arrive, at which point they would merely put my grandmother in his way, so that afterward—a key to the strategy—he could operate under the impression that he had discovered his future bride for himself.
The rabbi was late. The reception room filled with congregants who knew nothing of the Sisterhood’s maneuverings and were eager for the evening to begin. The chair of the fund-raising committee stepped to the dais. He had prepared a welcome, studded with mildly off-color puns about spades and craps, but when the microphone gave him a mild electric shock, he was obliged to break off his speech. The Sisterhood president shoved her husband toward the dais, where the hired musicians, Jews dressed as fanciful Cubans, loitered with their instruments. The ophthalmologist crouched down beside the chairman of the fund-raising committee. He took the man’s pulse and helped him unbutton his collar. Other male congregants offered assistance in the form of impromptu puns on the words shock, current, spark, what a revolting development this was, and so forth.
The fifteen-year-old sound technician struggled to locate and swap in a new mike, a task in which he was hampered by his mother’s constant reminders that he ought to hurry. A scrum kicked up around the table of dairy appetizers, awakening old antipathies and reinforcing new ones. Meanwhile the thong of small talk and college French that the Sisterhood tiger hunters were using to lash their goat to its stake stretched ever thinner. A second microphone was found and tested. The board president was certified fit to conclude his speech.
“Please,” he enjoined all those who had come to try their luck that night, “lose as much and as often as you possibly can.”
The lights were lowered. The dance band generated a supper-club ambiance. Over the cha-cha-cha, the chatter, and the rattle of dice and roulette balls, my grandmother’s handlers found it impossible to maintain their grip on her. She took a package of Herbert Tareytons from her borrowed beaded clutch.
“I find it is very warm in this room,” she said, still unsuspecting her status as prey but conscious of the strain on the conversational tether. “Excuse me, please. Maybe I will have a look at the beautiful moon.”
All at once the moon of Mrs. Zellner’s face was suffused with delight. In her relief she may have tipped her hand slightly.
“Mais voilà le rabbin!” she cried.
*