“Yes.”
Two hours in the cold for a misbehaving kid seemed excessive, but he knew even less about the disciplinary habits of these people than he did about their footwear. He looked through the glass door for the Jew in the big fur hat, thinking he might have a word. The walls of the lobby or vestibule, a large spartan expanse with an angled modernist ceiling, had been papered with cutout onion domes and pointed arches to evoke a Persian mood. A large banner slung between two raked poles just inside the entrance read the road to shushan in mock-Arabic script. A few people were milling around by the door to the sanctuary, among them the Jew in the hat. A slender young woman stood beside the Jew, got up like a sideshow Salome in bangles and veils.
“You need me to put in a good word for you?” he said to the little girl. “I got an in with the warden.”
“What?”
“Who said you have to sit out here in the cold for two hours?”
“I did.”
“You did.”
“Yes.”
“Because you were bad.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’re punishing yourself.”
She nodded.
“What did you do that was so bad you had to punish yourself?”
“Mama said I was discourteous.”
“Who to?”
“The rabbi.”
“Really? How were you discourteous?”
“I asked him why he wears the same perfume as our downstairs neighbor Mrs. Poliakoff.”
“Oh-ho.”
“What?”
“What kind of perfume does Mrs. Poliakoff wear?”
“Jungle Gardenia.”
My grandfather laughed, and after a moment, with a degree of caution, the girl laughed, too.
“It’s funny,” she suggested.
“It is to me. Very.”
“Yes, it’s very funny.”
The door opened again and the Jew with the big fur hat was there, wearing a dime-store Santa beard and a Chinatown mandarin coat.
“Look, all of the bad little children are here.”
My mother stopped laughing and looked away.
“You know, I’m pretty sure Ray does wear Jungle Gardenia,” my grandfather said to my grandmother. “I think this one has paid her debt to society. Maybe we can let her come back from Siberia, huh?”
“I have been out here three times telling this to her!” my grandmother cried. “There is nothing you can tell to this one. I said to her, ‘You were rude, please, for two minutes, go and sit in a chair over there—inside of the room, not outside of the building. For two minutes! She says, ‘No! I am so bad, I am going to sit outside for two hours.’ I have been begging to her, please, come inside, you are going to catch a pneumonia!” My grandmother pronounced the initial p. She turned to my mother. The beard flapped up and down. “Do you want to get sick and go to the hospital? Do you want to die?” She sounded exasperated, even angry, and yet at the same time there was a theatrical trill in her voice, as if she were only playing the part of an exasperated mother at her wits’ end. Maybe that was just an effect of the comedy beard. “Is that what you want?” she said.
“No,” my mother said.
“I’m glad to hear that, because if you die, then I will have to kill myself, and I don’t want to die, either.”
My grandfather thought this kind of talk might be carrying things a little too far, but he wasn’t sure. He seemed to remember his mother engaging in rhetoric of this sort with him when she was at the end of her own wits. He was not sure how he felt about such talk, or he knew that he disliked it; but on this woman, it fit. In her pain and her vividness and her theatricality, she seemed to have access to some higher frequency of emotion, a spectrum of light invisible to his eyes.
At the mention of suicide, my mother looked up at her mother, intrigued. “Why will you have to kill yourself?” she said.
“Because without you I will have no one, and I will be totally alone, so what is the point then, I might as well die.”
“Okay, okay,” my grandfather said. “Nobody’s going to kill themselves, and nobody’s going to be alone.” He looked down at my mother. “I’ve been telling the rabbi he smells like Mrs. Poliakoff since before the war. And I don’t even know Mrs. Poliakoff. You think maybe I ought to spend the next two hours out here with you, punishing myself?”
“No,” my mother said. “I’ll come in.”
“Then so will I,” my grandfather said. He opened the door to the shul. “Come,” he said. He held out his hand to my mother. He was not certain he had ever held out his hand to a child in this way. He wanted my grandmother to see that he could hold out his hand to her daughter and that, when he did, her daughter would take it. If he could get the kid to relent and come in from the cold of a Baltimore afternoon, that would be another way for him to begin to mend what the war had broken.
For a second or two my mother seemed to consider taking his hand. In the end, though, she just got up and scurried inside. My grandfather was disappointed, and disappointment filled him with resolve. He would work at the kid. He would do what he needed to do until he had gained her trust and hopefully her affection.
“I’m sorry,” my grandmother said. Even through the fake beard with the preposterous hat, her eyes sought his, and searched his face, and saw his disappointment and his resolve. My grandfather was not sure anyone had ever looked at him like that unless they were hoping to clean his clock. At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.
“It’s fine,” he said. He pointed to the beard, the caftan. “What’s this?”
“I am playing the part today of Mordecai, obviously. In the purimspiel.”
“That explains the shoes.”
“Your brother is Vashti.”
“In the veils.” That was Ray flouncing around outside the door to the sanctuary, vain and imperious as a queen of Persia. “Typecasting. Hey.” He put a hand on her arm. Even through the sleeve of the Chinese coat the charge of contact was there. “Doesn’t that thing bother you?” he said.
He pointed at the shtreiml. As he recalled, a proper shtreiml was made with the tails of some furry little animal, a marten or a mink. My grandmother looked confused by the question.
“You got something like eighteen mink tails on your head there.”
She did not look horrified by this information. The memory of screaming horses and peeled hides did not rack her like a fever. Instead she looked . . . It was hard for my grandfather to describe. It would have been easy enough for him, considering what came after, to recall the look that passed across my grandmother’s face that afternoon as one of embarrassment, discomfiture, the look of someone caught out in a moment of self-contradiction. But in the end the word that he settled on was impatient. She pursed her lips and gave her shoulders a little Gallic shrug, as if to suggest that he must already know the explanation for her tolerating the touch of death against her skin.
“It’s for the play,” she said.
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