‘Don’t lie to me, Klara. If you didn’t do it, say so. We have a show to run. And sometimes, it feels like I care about it more than you.’
Raj designed their business cards – The Immortalist, they read, with Raj Chapal – and Klara’s new costumes. He got a tuxedo jacket from a suiting outlet and paid a seamstress to tailor it to Klara’s body. For the Jaws of Life, he ordered a gold sequined dress from an ice-skating catalog. Klara resisted – she thinks it’s cheesy, that it doesn’t look like vaudeville – but Raj says it’ll sparkle under the lights.
‘I care about this more than anything,’ she hisses. ‘And I wouldn’t lie to you. That’s insulting.’
‘Okay.’ Raj squints. ‘Tomorrow.’
13.
In June 1982, days after Simon’s death, Klara arrived at 72 Clinton for his burial. After a red-eye flight from San Francisco, she stood outside the gate of the apartment building, trembling. How had she become a person who hadn’t seen her family in years? Walking up the long staircase, she thought she might be sick. But when Varya opened the door and reached for her – ‘Klara,’ she heaved, her thin body enveloped in Klara’s fuller one – the time apart did not matter, not yet. They were sisters. That mattered, nothing else.
Daniel was twenty-four. He had been working out at the gym at the University of Chicago, where he was preparing for medical school. Now, when he pulled a sweatshirt off and Klara glimpsed his pale, muscled chest, its twin puffs of dark hair, she reddened. Acne dotted his chin, but his teenage solemnity had been replaced by a strong brow and jaw, a large Roman nose. He looked like Otto, their grandfather.
Gertie insisted on a Jewish ceremony for the burial. When Klara was a child, Saul explained the Jewish laws with dignity and persistence, as Josephus did to the Romans. Judaism is not superstition, he said, but a way of living lawfully: to be Jewish is to observe the laws that Moses brought down from Sinai. But Klara was not interested in rules. In Hebrew school, she loved the stories. Miriam, embittered prophet, whose rolling rock provided water during forty years of wandering! Daniel, unharmed in the lions’ den! They suggested that she could do anything – so why would she want to sit in the basement of the synagogue for six hours every week, studying the Talmud?
Besides, it was a boys’ club. When Klara was ten, twenty thousand women left their typewriters and babies to Strike for Equality on Fifth Avenue. Gertie watched on television with a sponge in her hand, her eyes shiny as spoons, though she turned the old Zenith off as soon as Saul came home. Klara’s bat mitzvah took place not individually on the Sabbath, as had her brothers’ ceremonies, but in a group of ten girls – none of whom were allowed to recite from the Torah or the haftarah – during the lesser Friday evening service. That year, the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards decided that women could count toward a minyan, but the question of whether women could be rabbis, they claimed, warranted further study.
Now, as she stood with what was left of her family and Gertie recited Kel Maleh Rachamim in Hebrew, something changed. A lock popped off; air rushed in, and with it a colossal tide of grief – or was it relief? – for the words she had heard since childhood. She could not recall each of their meanings, but she knew they connected the dead, Simon and Saul, to the living: Klara and Varya, Gertie and Daniel. In the words of the prayer, no one was missing. In the words of the prayer, the Golds gathered together.
Three months later, she returned to New York for the High Holy Days. It was agonizing to be with anyone at all, like rubbing sandpaper on a burn, but she still scrounged the money for a plane ticket: it was least agonizing to be with people who loved Simon, too. At first, they were gentle with one another. By midweek, though, that softness wiped off like dust. Daniel chopped apples at a fierce clip.
‘I feel like I didn’t even know him,’ he said.
Klara dropped the spoon she was using to scoop honey. ‘Why? Because he was a fag? Is that what you think of him – that he was just some fag?’
Her words ran together. Varya eyed her with distaste. Klara had filled a water bottle with clear liquor and hidden it beneath the bathroom sink, in a basket cluttered with body wash and old shampoo.
‘Keep your voice down,’ Varya said. Gertie was in bed, where she stayed whenever they weren’t at services.
‘No,’ said Daniel, to Klara. ‘Because he cut us out. He didn’t tell us shit. Do you know how many times we called, Klara? How many messages we left, begging him to talk to us, asking him why he just left? And you going along with it, keeping his secrets, not even calling us’ – his voice breaking – ‘not even calling us when he got sick?’
‘It wasn’t my right,’ Klara said, but it came out feebly, for she burned constantly with guilt. She saw it now: her brother’s departure was the bomb that blew them apart, even more than Saul’s death. Varya and Daniel were sidelined by resentment, Gertie by suffering. And if Klara hadn’t urged Simon to go, would he still be alive? She was the one who believed in the prophecies; she was the one who managed his trajectory, nudging until it canted and turned left. And no matter how many times she recalled Simon’s words in the hospital – how he squeezed her hand, how he thanked her – she couldn’t help but feel that things would have been different if they’d gone to Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia, if she’d kept her goddamn beliefs to herself.
‘I was trying to be loyal to him,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah? And where was your loyalty to us?’ Daniel looked at Varya. ‘V put her whole life on hold. You think she wants to be here? Twenty-five years old, still living with Ma?’
‘Yeah, sometimes I do. Sometimes I think she likes to play it safe. Sometimes,’ Klara said, looking at Varya, ‘I think you’re more comfortable that way.’
‘Screw you,’ Varya said. ‘You know nothing about what the past four years have been like. You know nothing about responsibility, or duty. And you probably never will.’
If Daniel had filled out, Varya seemed to have shrunk. She was working as an administrative assistant at a pharmaceutical company, having put off graduate school to live with Gertie. One evening, Klara saw Varya bent over Gertie’s bed at the waist. Gertie had her arms around Varya, and she was shuddering. Klara receded, ashamed. The privilege of their mother’s touch, her confidence, was something Varya had earned.
Gertie spent the Days of Repentance in a fog of misery. After Saul’s death, she had said: not again. She could not, once more, bear the consequences of love – so she bid Simon goodbye before he could do it to her. I don’t want you coming back.