A Curable Romantic (16 page)

Using Almoli’s famous dreambook, she took all sorts of arcane stabs at what this emaciated apparition might mean, never for a moment thinking his nightly appearances might contain the slightest bit of prophecy. Still, there is no dream without its interpretation, and in her prayers she begged her great-great-great-grandfather, the Seer of Lublin, to intervene on her behalf, to petition the archangel Gabriel to unlock the secret meaning of these visitations. The seer proved unable to move Heaven in this regard, however. Appearing to her one night in a luminous white robe, he counseled patience: “Wait, my daughter,” he said. “The best is yet to be.”

And so when she strode so purposefully into the Sammelsohn parlor, following her uncle and her father, and saw the wretched invalid sitting
there like a waterlogged scarecrow, she couldn’t help giving out a happy gasp of recognition. Here was the boy with the fish, the boy with the fruit, the boy with the cookies and the dozen and one other things he’d presented to her each night. The excitement she felt in having at last solved a puzzle and the dizzying sense of transformation it foretold stayed with her throughout their short engagement and did much to compensate her for the repulsion she felt at the sight of my father’s physical person.

“Obviously God has intended me to marry him,” she told her worried parents.

THE WEDDING DAY
was sparkling, immaculate, the sunlight seeming to illuminate everything from within. The pink cherry blossoms trembled in the wind. The windows of the buildings along the main road, scrubbed clean for the occasion, dazzled the eyes of the only people up at sunrise to see them: the milkmen and the garbage collectors and my father who watched these men making their rounds from his room at a local inn.

Having slept not at all, he leaned against the window frame. He’d grown so thin that he no longer appeared to have one foot
in
the grave, but rather one foot
out
of it, as though, having died some months earlier, he’d remembered his wedding and had somehow managed to break free from his tomb. His arms and legs, thin to begin with, had grown thinner over the course of his engagement, and his brittle bones rattled and clicked as he dressed himself. He pulled up his breeches and belted his gartl and donned, for the first time, his stovepipe hat. Having made the necessary ablutions, having prayed the necessary prayers, he opened the door of his room and found, left there on a table by his mother, a breakfast of extraordinarily weak tea — a fleet trolling of the tea ball through the lukewarm water filled the cup with sufficient caffeine to remove from his truculent bowels the prune-sized turd that had been lodged in them since yesterday morning, causing him almost unendurable intestinal distress — and a bowl of unseasoned groats, softened by sheep’s milk and flavored by three raisins.

(It’s traditional, of course, to fast on one’s wedding day and although Father would never, for a multitude of reasons, have eaten this meal,
Grandmother Sammelsohn had secured a rabbinic dispensation to feed him, to which, for her sake, he complied.)

Still, as he grasped the tray and teetered precariously over it, struggling to lift it, he couldn’t help regarding it as though it were the last meal of a man condemned to death. He chewed his kasha as gingerly as he could (still his gums bled) and, after two bites, pushed the bowl away. He rose with difficulty and glanced one final time at the ghostly reflection of himself in the mirror, nodding towards it in parting, as though to an old friend he expected never to see again. He took up his hat and placed it on his head, attempting one last time to curl, with his fingers, the lifeless kite tails of his peyos. He gave the sleeves of his caft an a quick and inefficient brushing. Still the dandruff remained. Expelling a final preparatory breath, he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

AS FOR MY
mother, she rose that morning from her own bed, all buxom and muscular, and stood with her bare feet planted squarely on the wooden floor. The sunlight streamed through the loose weave of her nightdress, silhouetting the curves of her powerful body. Her golden hair fell about her shoulders like a kilo of challah dough. She poured water from a vessel into a basin, left at sunrise by a servant at her door, and holding her hands before her, intoned the blessing in a voice as deep and as flowing as an ancient river. She splashed water onto her cheeks, already vibrant and red, and looked out the window, at her little town. “Today,” she whispered to herself, “today today today,” the word a tart mint on her tongue, sweet and biting.

Before she unties the crisscross of laces from her nightdress and opens its collar and pulls the shift over her head (at which point, out of filial restraint, I shall cease imagining her), she records the night’s dream in her dreambook. She writes feverishly, attempting to crack the dream’s bizarre code. She knows, from her beloved Almoli, that no dream is cast in stone (apparently not even a dream image may be graven) and yet the dream had terrified her. No matter how much she attempted to ring the image with an ameliorating hedge of interpretation, it remained as frightening as a snake in a rose garden; and she couldn’t banish from her mind the image of my emaciated father in the costume of a circus strong
man lifting her over his head, as though she were a set of barbells, while in a cage nearby, a panther devoured something struggling beneath a dirty bundle of rags.

FATHER DIDN’T DIE
, of course.

According to my sisters, who loved these stories of our parents’ courtship and who, I realize as I write them down for the first time, may have embellished them to suit the requirements of their girlish imaginations, Father didn’t burn up like a stick of wood in the conflagration of our mother’s nuptial passions. On the contrary, as Grandmother Sammelsohn was happy to remark at breakfast the following day, her son, though still decrepit, appeared unnaturally flesh-colored, heartier and haler than she’d ever seen him. He blushed, pleased. Turning even redder, he laughed off her suggestion. Glancing shyly at our mother, he remarked that he had merely finally gotten a decent night’s sleep, and now it was our mother’s turn to blush. Reaching for the groats, she overturned the pitcher of milk, and my father jumped up, with an unaccustomed alacrity, to call the maid in to tidy up the mess.

The next morning, he seemed even healthier, younger, less sallow, stronger. The change was obvious enough now that others, not only our grandmother, remarked upon it. Though my imagination stops firmly at the threshold of my parents’ bedroom door, it seems that beneath my mother’s muscular caresses, my father was kneaded, pounded, dandled, coddled, cuddled, cosseted, and suckled back to life. According to my sisters, this resuscitation continued over the seven nights of our parents’ wedding banquet, until on the eighth night — and here I clearly detect the pastel mottling of my sisters’ collective editorializing — it was as though our father had been reborn with a full head of black curly hair, twenty-eight milk-white teeth, virile lips of damask red, alabaster skin, and eyes as blue as an alchemical flame.

The truth? I can only assume that perhaps Father had had a touch of tuberculosis and that it had clouded his marriage prospects for a time. I suspect further that the picture we have of him as an obscenely wretched invalid has more to do with the exaggerated concerns of his mother — who first told these stories to my sisters — than with his true
medical history. Certainly, the joyous life he shared with our mother, with whom no one could help falling in love, brought him a happiness and vitality unknown to him from his dry life as a scholar, bent over his books from morning till night, and I’ve no doubt that his work in the cherry orchards he purchased with her dowry was physically invigorating. Still, how different in every aspect is this love-intoxicated neurasthenic from the reprimanding scold I knew as a child! It’s impossible for me to even reconcile the two. Could this man whom my sisters believed emerged, completely reupholstered, from our mother’s embrace, be the same man I knew, twenty or so years later, as my father?

The two seemed nothing alike.

DESPITE HIS STORYBOOK
romance, Father wasted no time in arranging mine as a punishment, and the day of my wedding quickly arrived. With a wife and soon, God willing, a family to care for, I would be forced to put aside my revolutionary ideas and return to the quiet ways of our people.

(In this, however, my father knew me not at all. I was less interested in the overblown political treatises buried in these novels than in the love stories their authors used as a palliative to entice their readers. I was like a child who pretends to be sick for the sugar water the doctor will serve his medicine in. If I could have had the story without the politics, the sugar without the medicine, the honey without the groats, I would have dispensed with them entirely. As far as I knew, however, it was only dashing young freethinkers that beautiful women fell in love with.)

Not wishing to seem completely old-fashioned, or perhaps even embarrassed by his own methods, Father insisted I meet the girl before the wedding. I was the first of his children to marry, after all, and though this wedding was being inflicted upon me —
not as a punishment, not as a punishment
, my mother kept reminding me,
but as a loving rebuke
— still, a wedding is a wedding, and everything must be conducted in an appropriate spirit of joy. One day, I would understand all Father had done on my behalf, and on that day I would thank him. Of this, my mother was certain.

I would have thanked him then and there, if it wouldn’t have queered
the deal. Fearful of that consequence, I kept my mouth shut, or if I opened it, I mentioned neither my gratitude to my father for having arranged this marriage nor for his having prepared me so thoroughly for the wedding night, but only the downtrodden masses, exploited by the landowning aristocracy and my admiration of the Russian narod. If all else failed, a word about Czech independence or the bloody mess in the Balkans, and Father would purse his mouth, his thin lips becoming a lily-white seam inside the opening of his beard — like many a saturnine fellow, his renunciative character concealed an emotional disposition — and return to his wedding plans with vindictive furor. Without another word, he canceled the meeting with my fiancée. She was no longer permitted to attend the gathering at our parlor. I alone would be exhibited to her family. They had a right to meet me, after all. In exchange for their generous dowry, they had more or less purchased me.

WE WAITED FOR
the arrival of my future in-laws. Father had insisted I sit, as he had when meeting our mother, in a chair in the parlor with a folio of the Talmud spread across my lap. We heard the rumbling of a coach stopping outside our door. I pretended to concentrate on my Gemara, listening to the trill of my mother’s voice as she welcomed in our guests. Father, pretending to hear nothing, busied himself with papers at his desk. Hands behind his back, he stared at a map of the empire framed upon the wall, and when Mother entered the room with the pantry of visitors behind her — my future father-in-law, my future uncle-in-law, my future brother-in-law — he waited before turning to greet them, pretending to be lost in thought over one of his many business deals, strategizing over his own empire, a miniature Franz Josef, with a look of pleasant surprise on his face.

“Ah!” he said at last. “I’d lost all track of the time.”

I unfolded myself from my chair and stood, waiting for the introductions to be made.

“An industrious boy,” my future father-in-law said, seeing me struggle to get out from under the folio of Talmud. He extended his hand and I offered him my own, a cold dead fish weighing approximately nothing, which is, of course, the appropriate warmth and weight of a scholar’s
hand. Then, et cetera, et cetera, the scene plays itself out exactly as you might imagine. While the fathers and uncles chat over cigars, the brother is dispatched to query me, as casually as possible and in such a way that I should be unaware of what he is doing, on the extent of my learning. They’re marrying off their daughter to a budding scholar and want to make sure they’ve gotten their money’s worth. Four years older than I, this brother is something of a dunce and knows a fraction of what I, even with all my heretical afternoons, know, and I make him pay for it, grilling him on this obscure point or that obscure point (many of which I make up out of whole cloth; and so patchy is his knowledge, he fails to detect the ruse), until, humiliated, he excuses himself from my company and, nodding to his father, gives me the familial stamp of approval.

“Very good, very good,” my future father-in-law intones over elderberry wine. “Everything looks in order. On to the synagogue then, to check on the preparations there.”

“Is everything satisfactory with your rooms at the inn?” my mother inquires.

I’ll skip to the wedding itself, already the second in what I’m afraid will be a chronicle choked with weddings. It no doubt frustrated my father that the bride he’d chosen for me as a rebuke was acceptable to me in every way. Perhaps because my heresies had been conducted more or less in secret — I’d felt no need to broadcast my intellectual enlightenment to the world, nor even to our little Szibotya — my reputation was not yet in tatters, and I could attract a decent match, a bright, attractive girl, a healthy girl and one from a good family.

Hindele was all these things.

Not yet twelve when I saw her for the first time beneath the wedding canopy, her face behind a lace veil, she possessed, or rather was possessed by, the gawky beauty of a gamboling foal. Wide-shouldered, long of thigh, her head lowered demurely upon her slender neck, she had an awkward, charming grace, and though she only peeked at me, I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

Her maple-colored hair, in a thick circuit of braids, formed a halo about her head. Her hands were whiter than the lilies she carried. Above a high collar, her chin trembled, and beneath the intricate lace of her
shirtfront, her emergent bosom heaved with what I hoped was a nervous delight. What a sight we must have made, I not yet five feet tall, she a head taller, circling me the seven requisite times. In my Saturday best, a round fur hat upon my head, my peyos oiled and gleaming, I was intoxicated by her perfumes.