“Natalie?”
Her father sighed. “It’s a math book. Teddy and Natalie found it in the garage last fall. I started teaching them some simple equations. Teddy really enjoyed it. Then after the accident, Natalie wanted to keep studying with me. Abe brings her to the office on Thursdays.”
“Natalie comes to your office every week to study math with you? Really?”
For a moment her father looked like he might cry. “Sometimes we talk about Teddy, about the things he liked—comic books and baseball cards.…”
Judith could not believe what she was hearing. It was too much to take in, too many revelations in one day. She couldn’t put all the pieces together or reconcile the man she had grown up with her whole life with the one sitting across from her in the booth.
“I suppose your mother needs to be told about Radcliffe.” Her father was back to practical matters. “Would you like to tell her, or would you like me to do it?”
“Maybe it’s best if we tell her together.”
“All right,” he agreed. “We’ll do it tonight.”
Judith checked her watch. “I really should go, or I’ll be late for my two-thirty class.” She got up from the booth and adjusted her sweater. “Do you want to walk back with me?”
“You go ahead. I think I’ll stay and have a piece of pie. I used to love the apple pie here.”
Judith stared at him. “You know, I love apple pie too. I used to always look forward to Aunt Helen’s pie on Thanksgiving.”
Judith’s father shook his head. “I didn’t know that.”
“It’s something we have in common then.”
Chapter 48
ROSE
(September 1957)
Rose still couldn’t believe Judith was leaving, but Mort was adamant. “We can’t hold her back,” he said. Rose knew it wasn’t so much the fact that Judith was going away that bothered her. It was the fact that Mort and Judith had decided it together. There was something between them that night, an easy solidarity Rose had never sensed before. She didn’t like it.
“You had no problem holding her back last time!” Rose snapped at him after Judith was out of the room.
“Last time we didn’t know a lot of things that we know now,” he answered.
“So you know things now? What could you possibly know?”
“I know how hard Judith is willing to work for her education. How much it means to her.”
“If you didn’t know those things when she graduated from high school, you were a fool.”
“Then I was a fool, Rose.” Mort held up his hands in defeat. “But five years ago she was a child. This time she’s a grown woman, and she’s determined to go. She has a full scholarship. She doesn’t need our permission or our help.”
“Then why are you so quick to give her both?”
Mort cleared his throat. “Before Teddy died, you told me I didn’t pay enough attention to Judith, that I didn’t encourage her. Do you remember that?”
Rose wouldn’t answer him. “Look, Rose. We both know how bright Judith is. We can’t keep her from this kind of opportunity just because we’d rather have her at home.”
It’s not because I want to keep her home, Rose thought. She walked away from Mort and went upstairs to Teddy’s room.
After Teddy died, Rose hadn’t been able to go into his bedroom. She kept the door closed and pretended not to notice if Mort or one of the girls wandered into it. It was only a few months after the funeral that she was finally able to muster the strength to go inside. She had been surprised by how neat the room was, until she remembered that Teddy had died on a Thursday. On Thursdays she usually made the beds and tidied up the bedrooms. She must have done that the morning before he died.
That first time she was in Teddy’s room, Rose had wandered around in circles. She wanted to touch everything. Did the bedpost feel different? The desk? What should she do with his books and his clothes? Rose had opened the door to Teddy’s closet and found the tall wicker basket that served as his hamper spilling over with dirty clothes and sheets from that morning in December. She picked up the basket to carry it downstairs to the laundry room, but on the way down the steps, the scent emanating from the sheets overpowered her, and she let the basket drop. She watched it fall, tumbling down the steps and knocking into the walls of the stairway, until it landed at the bottom with a thud.
Rose never washed the sheets or the clothes. Instead, she folded them neatly and placed them, unlaundered, in the back of Teddy’s closet. Teddy’s scent was all she had left of him, the last tangible trace that could conjure him to her.
After that day, Rose went to Teddy’s room every now and then when she wanted to be alone. She would pretend she was dusting if anyone asked, but the girls never did ask, and Mort never questioned her. She would sit at Teddy’s desk and stare out the window, and sometimes, when she was particularly upset, she would open up the closet and pick up the sheets. She would hold them close to her chest and breathe in the scent she had almost forgotten. Sometimes in Teddy’s room, as surprising as it was to her, Rose almost felt like she wanted to pray.
Rose had never paid attention to the prayers that were spoken at the services she attended. She was not a religious person, and, like many women her age, she had never learned how to read Hebrew. After Teddy died, however, she found that bits and pieces of certain prayers started popping into her head at different moments. Some fragments had tunes and some were just words. Tidbits from holiday prayers and arbitrary blessings would come together in combinations that made no particular sense to her. Most of the time she didn’t even know the meaning of the Hebrew words she was humming.
After her argument with Mort, Rose felt a new incantation composing itself. So she went into Teddy’s room and opened the closet door. She clutched the worn sheets and let the words fill her head. This time they came to her as a melody, something she had learned as a young girl, from the end of the Mourner’s Kaddish. Oseh shalom bim’ro’mav, Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, V’al kol Yisrael V’imru, V’imru amen. The melody repeated itself over and over, until part of the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer the rabbis read every year on the High Holy Days, interrupted it. This time it was in English. Who shall have rest and who shall wander, Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued, Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented …
There was no question that she was being tormented now. And somehow Mort was the one finding peace. How could that be the result after all the trouble she had gone to, all the sacrifices she had made to give her husband what she thought he wanted, and all she had lost in that terrible process?
*