“No,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have done something like what the congressman did at his age either. I wouldn’t have slept with an employee, young enough to be my daughter. Would you?”
He didn’t reply. He was flipping through his address book. “I’ve operated on about a million lawyers. There’s got to be a good one in here somewhere.”
AVIVA AND THE congressman both claimed that the affair had been over for some time. I know what she told me, but I cannot say if this is true or not. It may have been, as he said, that he had been giving the intern a ride home. (I will tell you that they were not going in the direction of her apartment in Coconut Grove or our house in Forestgreen at the time of the crash.) It was certainly bad timing that she was in the car when that old woman turned left.
Occasionally, a news story captures the imagination of a region, and so it was with the congressman and my daughter. I could tell you the details of how the story played out, but even if you didn’t live in South Florida, there is nothing you haven’t heard or can’t imagine. It played out exactly as these stories always play out.
The congressman and Embeth went on a news show. They claimed that the affair had occurred during a time of trouble in their marriage. The time of trouble had passed, they said. They held hands. He had manly tears in his eyes, but he did not cry. She said she had forgiven him. She said that they had a real marriage, not a storybook one. Something like that. I remember she wore an ill-fitting purple tweed jacket. What must she have been thinking?
Because it was an election year, the congressman’s staff took great pains to distance itself from Aviva. They characterized her as the Lolita intern, a Lewinsky wannabe, and a variety of other synonyms for “slutty.”
It did not help Aviva’s cause that she had kept a blog, detailing her months working for the congressman. The year was 2000, and I did not even know what a blog was when I found out that Aviva had been keeping one. “Blog?” I said to Aviva. The word felt foreign on my tongue. “What’s that?”
“It’s short for weblog, Mom,” Aviva said.
“Weblog,” I repeated. “What’s a weblog?”
“It’s like a diary,” Aviva said. “It’s a diary that you keep on the Internet.”
“Why would anyone do that?” I asked. “Why would you do that?”
“It was anonymous. I never used names. Until everything happened, I had about three readers. I was trying to make sense of my experiences by writing about them,” she said.
“Then buy a diary, Aviva!”
“I like typing,” she said. “And I hate my handwriting.”
“Then make a folder on your laptop and save a Word file called Avivasdiary.doc in it.”
“I know, Mom. I know.”
Aviva’s blog was called “Just Another Congressional Intern’s Blog.” As she said, she didn’t use his name or her own, but people still figured out it was her. Decoding Aviva’s blog became an unofficial South Florida pastime for a while. She tried to have it taken down, but it wouldn’t be taken down. This blog was like a zombie. It would not be killed. She’d have it removed and it would show up somewhere else. You can probably still find it somewhere on the Internet if you look hard enough. I will tell you that I read it—most of it; some of it with one eye closed—but it was really quite boring except for the sexy parts. And the sexy parts gave me no pleasure. I felt the same way when Roz’s and my book club read the Story of O.
Aviva was forced to take a leave from U of Miami because the press were disturbing the other students in her classes.
She moved back home, and she waited out the storm as best she could.
One other thing I could say about this period is God bless the Forestgreen gates. The press could not wait on our lawn but instead had to wait outside those gates for us to leave. Roz brought us food. Her offerings included matzo ball soup, sweet and savory kugels, tongue sandwiches on rye, loaves of challah, bagels, lox, herring, and hamantaschen, as if we had a sick friend or a death in the family.
A quick story about hamantaschen, while I’m thinking about it. A week before the end of the school year, Rabbi Barney summoned me to his office. He held out a fig hamantaschen. “Rachel, have a hamantaschen,” he said.
“No thank you,” I said. In general, I do not care for hamantaschen as I find them low on fruit filling and often dry in the cookie part.
“Please, Rachel, take the hamantaschen. My mother bakes them twice a year. It’s a big production for her. She has a special recipe. Also, she has lung cancer. This might be the final batch of Harriet Greenbaum’s famous hamantaschen.”
I thanked him for the generous offer, but I told him it would be wasted on me. I told him my feelings about hamantaschen. But he kept insisting so I took it, and I bit into it, and honestly, it was delicious. High fruit to cookie ratio, and not dry in the least. She must have used a stick of butter. It was so delicious and sweet, I almost wanted to moan.
“Rachel,” he said, “we’d like you to resign.”
I was in the middle of chewing the hamantaschen. I needed a beverage but none had been offered. It took me almost twenty seconds to swallow the hamantaschen. “Why?” I asked. Of course I knew why, but by God, he was going to say it.
“The scandal with Aviva. It’s no good for us.”
“But, Rabbi,” I said, “I am not the one in a scandal. It’s my daughter, and she is an adult, a human being separate from myself. I cannot control what she does.”
“I’m sorry, Rachel. I agree with you. It’s not Aviva’s affair, it’s the fund-raiser that’s the problem. The board felt that you compromised yourself by advocating for the fund-raiser with the congressman last year. It has the appearance of impropriety.”
“I didn’t know about the affair!” I said. “And I had nothing to do with the fund-raiser. You must remember. I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
“I do remember and I believe you, Rachel. I believe you. It’s how it looks.”
“I’ve given twelve years of my life to this school,” I said.
“I know,” said the rabbi. “It’s a rotten business. We want to make it as copacetic an exit as possible. You could say you’re resigning to spend more time with family. Everyone would understand that, the year you’ve had.”
“I won’t say that!” I said. “I will not lie!” I had half a hamantaschen left, and I was considering throwing it at the rabbi. Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.
“Is something funny?” the rabbi asked.
“Everything’s funny,” I said.
“Well, sleep on it.”
“I don’t need to sleep on it.”
“Sleep on it, Rachel. No one wants to fire you. No one wants another scandal. If you resign, you can still find work somewhere else.”