The Englishman

chapter 17

SUNDAY IS THE LONELIEST DAY I have yet spent in the South. I try to be honest with myself. Am I hankering after the owner of a certain lakeside cabin, or do I feel sick at heart because this afternoon Freddy and Marga, Bernie and Elvira, Avi Young, little Rabbi Ostrovicz and all their friends will gather at their shul for Kol Nidre? There are few things that make one feel more of a social failure than sitting home alone on a holiday. This is the first Yom Kippur eve on which I don’t at least have dinner with friends or go to my parents’ house, but before I jump into the mire of self-pity—while the men at Beth David are immersing themselves in the waters of the mikveh to wash off their sins—I call myself to order.

In the spirit of the day I do what I should have done days ago, I walk over to the main house to visit Karen. My news of her is almost ten days old, and apart from the fact that she is at home again—which I know because I saw her feeding the chickens—I know nothing. And it’s none of my business, of course. I would never do this in New York with a neighbor I know as little as I know Karen Walsh. But we are not in New York, and after all I was present when she announced the pregnancy.

These German-Scotch-Irish are a hard-to-read bunch, though. I don’t think I am welcome at the kitchen door yet, so I walk around to the front. Literally one second after I ring the bell, the door is yanked open by a twin dressed in a frilly gown—they are all fixin’ to go to church. Trust the silly Jewish Yankee to come visiting at ten on a Sunday morning. Pop Walsh seems to consider his reaction for a few moments while everyone is staring at me, then he nods his head into the direction of the kitchen.

“’Morning, ma’am. Karen will be at the back, if you’ll go through.”

No idea whether I’m welcome or whether he’s merely too polite to slam the door in his tenant’s face.

Karen, at any rate, is glad to see me, but she looks drawn and anxious. She sits me down with a mug of coffee—she has herbal tea herself—and I make no bones about the fact that I saw them drive off the other night and that Jules told me about the two miscarriages. She seems taken aback by my straightforwardness, but if I’m going to visit the complicatedly pregnant, I’m not going to make small-talk. And as before, my blunt approach works and she pours out the story of her failed pregnancies. Apparently this time the problem is a blood clot in her uterus that may be leaking blood needed to nourish the fetus. It is inoperable, and the blood thinners that could be prescribed have the downside of bleeding out not only the blood clot but possibly also the fetus, so they are not an option until a later stage of the pregnancy.

“So I can only pray and take things easy.” She smiles wanly. “Neither comes naturally to me, I must confess.”

Maybe that is why Karen and I understand each other. Once she has opened up, she doesn’t stop talking, and I listen.

I am, in a tiny way, atoning for my cowardice. I would lack the courage to do what Karen is doing, endure pregnancy after pregnancy (there was a miscarriage before the twins as well as the two after), complication after complication, weeks and months of fear. I encourage her to talk, but neither of us mentions the monster at the horizon: what if the baby dies?

When I stroll back to the cottage, Jules is sitting on my porch. She has her feet propped up against the table and her hands hitched up inside the sleeves of her sweater with only the tips of her fingers peeping out, and she is texting. This is not the first time I…well, do I say caught her? It is not a word that her behavior suggests. She sits on the steps of my porch, sometimes on the porch, sometimes on the big sawn-off tree trunk at the back, and when I look out the window and see her or when I come home and she is hanging out in what I consider my backyard, she doesn’t seem to feel that I have any cause to feel irritated. Perhaps the tree trunk isn’t part of the lease? The porch certainly is.

“Hi, Jules. Did you want something from me?”

She shrugs in the manner of a fifteen-year-old, without putting down her phone.

“I just couldn’t stand it at home any more. They don’t talk about anything else any more but the…baby. It’s always the same—no, actually, it gets worse each time.” She shrugs again, pushes the phone into her kangaroo pocket. “And it always ends the same way.”

I lean against the railing and cross my arms. I sympathize with Jules, I do. But I don’t much feel like switching on the psychotherapist each time I talk to her.

“How’s your life going?” I ask, cheerfully. “How’s the driving coming along?”

She gives a hollow laugh. “Been grounded.”

“Why? Were you caught…” I end that question on three dots, because I suspect there may be several things she might be caught doing, particularly at the pickers’ camp, that wouldn’t amuse her family at all.

“No! I told you, I don’t do that stuff!” she insists hotly. “They’re making me help my mom cook and clean. School is allowed, but no fun.”

“You know this means an awful lot to your mom, right? It’s a really big thing you can do for her at this time, helping her and—you know, playing along. I understand that from where you’re sitting, all this sucks.”

“Sure does.”

“But you’re almost grown up, and you’ll begin your own life soon, and your mom will still be here, growing tomatoes and…well, being a wife and a mother. That is her job, and you gotta allow her to do that job.”

I’m impressed at how well I put that, and even Jules has no retort ready.

“Sweetie, not for nothing, but I gotta ask you to—”

“Oh, hiya!”

Her face lights up, and she bounds past me toward the steps. Startled, I turn round, and like a stray ginger dog, Logan Williams has appeared in front of my cottage.

“Nice place, Dr. Lieberman.” He smirks up at me.

“Come on.” Jules pulls at the sleeve of his over-sized sweater. “The others said twelve o’clock!”

Making sure that I see him grab hold of Jules’ hand, he follows her around the cottage and toward the pickers’ camp. It’s almost deserted now, except for a trio of Poles in a camper van. The boys I see working on the farm, the girl is the blond hippy I saw with Logan in the woods. If that’s the arrangement—sex with the Polish hippy, holding hands with Jules—fine. Presumably Logan knows that I know that Jules isn’t legal yet and that he is more than six years older than she is. If he were committing a felony, he wouldn’t flaunt it in my face like this. I hope.





“Hey, Jew girl.”

“Hey, gay boy.”

Over the music of some public place I hear Tim chuckle into his phone.

“Listen, you said you weren’t going with Freddy Katz to his synagogue, so my compassionate heart was rent at the thought of you sitting all alone on the tomato farm, in the Southern diaspora, pining for your people.”

“G’mar chatimah tovah to you, too. Tim, are you drunk?”

“It’s twenty past seven, how can I be drunk? I’m at Mairie’s Pub in Beanes Road, that’s off James, near that pizza place. D’you wanna come out? Or is that a terribly goyish thing to ask?”

“Would you stop getting at me for my religion?”

“Sorry, sorry. I just thought, if…if you’re lonesome tonight,” he starts crooning. “Are you?”

“A little, yeah,” I say. Understatement of the semester.

“Then come out! We’re sitting at the back, underneath The Pogues.”

“We?”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot, Cleve is here, too.”

I’m going from G’mar to Gehenna in a glass of Guinness.





The second thing that hits me when I push myself onto a three-legged stool in a corner of Mairie’s Pub is that Tim is, notwithstanding his protestations, on a fair way to being plastered. There is one empty pint glass on the table, one almost empty, and one half full. The latter one is Giles’s, who has just been brought a sandwich with fries.

Tim says he’ll do like they did in the olden times, have beer instead of solids, but what am I having? His innocent question makes me sigh. Well, since I’m obviously not doing Yom Kippur this year…

“You’re supposed to fast, aren’t you?” Giles states rather than asks.

“Moses supposes his toeses are roses.”

“But Moses supposes erroneously. So, not fasting. Have some of my chips.” Unfazed, he inches his plate toward me. “The sandwich is grilled chicken, so you can’t have any of that.”

It’s not as if he had looked up to greet me. Giles Cleveland doesn’t do greetings. I’m getting used to that, particularly since I am also getting the impression that he is very attentive, very tuned in to me. Without really looking at me. I can’t really look at him, either. His face has been so vivid in my mind, and I have been imagining such things that he would be embarrassed if he knew. Angry with me, maybe.

“I’ll have half a Guinness, please, Tim, and a veggie pie or something like that. Whatever. But veggie.”

“I’ll go.” Giles jumps up and blends into the crowd at the bar. He is wearing frayed light blue jeans, a dark blue hoodie, and sneakers. I think he looks lovely, but then I always do. He does not, however, look like a guy who dressed up for a Sunday night out, and I am disappointed that meeting Tim and me in a bar doesn’t even merit a change of clothes. Maybe my choice of a pleated tartan skirt, knee length, with opaque black pantyhose, Mary Poppins boots, and a black sweater was a naff idea for an Irish pub, but at least I made an effort. Cleveland, on the other hand, couldn’t care less whether I think he looks nice.

What am I saying?

He returns with three beers and three small bags of potato chips.

“Compliments of the bartender.” He grins.

“What’s the joke?”

“He wanted to know who the girl is with, and did she know that she’s wearing a County Leitrim tartan.”

I smooth the pleats of my gray-and-red crisscrossed skirt, a little awkwardly because squatting on this low stool I am showing more leg than I had intended.

“Well, at least I get a compliment from somebody…”

“What did you tell him?” Tim takes the pint off him.

“Sorry?”

“Who the girl is with.”

“I said she’s my wife.” Giles shrugs, utterly poker-faced, and Tim cackles into his beer.

Yeah, big joke.

I am still not sure why the boys want me with them tonight. Tim asks me a few things about Yom Kippur, and Giles listens but doesn’t contribute any questions, except hadn’t I celebrated Rosh Hashanah at Freddy Katz’s synagogue?

“I did, and the crazy thing was, I met a guy I knew at school, at home, and my mom recently met his aunt and gave him my phone number—you know what mothers are like. Well, Jewish mothers, anyway. Maybe you don’t know.”

“You met your childhood sweetheart from Queens in a synagogue in Shaftsboro?” Tim squeals. “God, your people really are few but well organized!”

“Bernie wasn’t my sweetheart! Quite the contrary. But yeah, it was weird.”

Giles is watching me, and I am ashamed. I know why I tell them about Bernie (and neglect to mention Elvira), and it has a lot to do with the woman who was waiting for Giles in their cabin by the lake yesterday. It also has a lot to do with his long, hard, be-denimed thigh next to my pantyhosed one.

The whole conversation is a little desultory. I eat my quiche, finish my beer, insist on getting the next round—Coca-Cola for Giles and me, more Guinness for Tim—and have the barman hit on me, playfully, in a charming Irish brogue.

“Eh, lass—why did you throw yourself away on a stuck-up Englishman?”

I push my money across the counter and give him my sweetest smile.

“Oh, but he’s a fantastic shag!”

I am still grinning when I set down the drinks, and Giles avoids my eyes so sheepishly I have to grin even more.

“So, what’s the, um, beef?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, not for nothing, guys, but I’m assuming there is more to come, apart from, ‘Will you really fast all day?’ and ‘How does atonement work?’ Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate this. I was getting a little lachrymose at the cottage, to tell you the truth. But there’s more, right? Has something happened?”

Giles glances over at Tim; Tim inhales and slumps against the wall behind him.

“They’ve drafted me onto the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel!”

Apparently three of the six members of the current committee have resigned over the investigation of Nick Hornberger’s misdemeanor, and procedure in the case of resignation is to immediately replace the former members.

Now I see why Tim is deliberately getting legless tonight.

“But—you’re in such a vulnerable position, with your tenure review pending! You shouldn’t be made to involve yourself in this kind of thing!”

“You’d think, but their logic works the other way around. I’m vulnerable, so I can’t refuse. And we’ve been taught all the legal stuff, and there’s no time to train new members. Besides, imagine the noise when it becomes public that a new hearing panel had to be appointed because half of the current members wanted nothing to do with it! Worse and worse. No, it’s all hush-hush, business as usual, normality at all times.”

“But why do people volunteer for these committees in the first place if they’re going to cave in the moment a really distasteful case has to be heard?”

“Oh, Anna! Such innocence!” Tim mocks me. “They’re afraid the evidence will mean they’ll have to fire Hornberger, and they want nothing to do with that!”

Innocence, indeed.

“In that case, shouldn’t they stay on the panel and see if they can bail him out? By hook or by crook?” The two men look at me blankly until I have caught up with them. “Oh, you mean, they know he’s a lost cause? Oy!”

“Oy is right. I don’t know how else to interpret this mass resignation. Presumably they know more than we do. He must be in it up to his neck.”

“But,” I say for the third time, “I just don’t see it! It’s evident and plainly obvious that he and Natalie were having an affair—who knows for how long? Maybe since her undergraduate days! But she was friendly with him in the Astrolabe, after the first faculty meeting. I saw them! I sussed them because they were so natural and familiar with each other!”

Tim stares at me and blinks.

“It totally kills me when you use British slang in that Noo Yoak voice of yours. I would so do you, Anna, if.” He looks at Giles for corroboration.

“And I will so gag you, Timmy-my-man, if you don’t watch your mouth,” Giles says.

Tim, three-quarters drunk at this point, seems offended at this unambiguous announcement, but Giles smiles at him in a way that shows how little amused he is.

And I am sick at heart.

Because the first thing that hit me when I walked up to the two men huddled around the small table underneath a poster of The Pogues was the lamentable but undisputable truth that I have fallen in love with a married man who is also a tenured colleague.

For the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.

And for the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart.

For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.