A Town of Empty Rooms (37 page)

“I think so,” said Serena.

“I started crying, and he didn't know why I was crying, and I wasn't even crying for Mo or what I did but just thought that we are all just disappearing, that we would all, to be honest, pretty soon be dead.” She stopped. “I just wanted to fall into something, Serena . . . do you ever feel that?”

There was no way to protect anyone, thought Serena. She thought of her sister sitting a continent away in her house in California, holding onto the phone in the dark.

“I think so,” Serena said, cautiously. “Dawn, tell me — how is Mom?”

“She's good,” said Dawn, her tone brightening. “Guess what she did? She started taking classes at the community college. She did! She said, ‘I don't care if I fail a test. I will just take it.' She's taking beginning psychology. She talks about her professors, using their first names.”

Serena absorbed this picture, her mother unafraid. Her mother
sitting in the professor's office hours was a splendid turn of the imagination, but it was real, not a trick — Sophie had found in herself something new.

“What happened?” she asked, softly.

“Those widows. They love her. They think she knows what to do. I think she likes them thinking that. She loves telling me what she tells them.”

Serena pictured her mother sitting, hands clasped, with her peer client. She loved this vision of her mother, the unexpected quality of it. “I'm glad,” said Serena.

“Serena. I want to ask you something else.” Her sister's voice was soft now, almost pleading; Serena bent closer to the phone. “I was thinking about something . . . ”

“Go ahead.”

“My leg. Why was Dad always so embarrassed about it?”

Serena gripped the phone; something pressed against her throat.

“He wasn't embarrassed,” said Serena. “I think he was ashamed.”

“Why?”

“He tried,” said Serena, softly. “He wanted to do everything to help you and he couldn't.”

Her sister began to weep. “Dawn, please,” she said, frightened. She had rarely heard her sister weeping. It was an awful sound; it was as though her family had been organized to prevent that sound from happening, and Dawn, in some silent barter, had agreed not to cry if they would indulge her in anyway she asked. Serena tried to remember that morning when her father had tried to drive through the thick traffic, how he had paced, trembling, in the waiting room, how he could not bear being this . . . human.

“He tried,” said Serena. “But he couldn't do everything.”

Dawn's voice sounded exhausted but clear, somehow. It was a strange sound, that clarity, and it felt like an offering.

“I wish he hadn't been embarrassed of me,” said Dawn.

Serena stood, holding the phone, listening to her sister. The colors in the kitchen seemed to brighten, as though the room had filled with sun.

“Dawn,” said Serena, “he wasn't. He was proud of you. It was him.
It wasn't you.” She wanted to reach out and touch her sister's hand. Her breath shuddered in her throat. “I love you.”

“You don't have to say that,” said Dawn.

“I want to,” said Serena.

“Well, I love you, too,” her sister said, and they both held onto the phone for a minute, two, before they said goodbye.

 

 

 

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, THE BOARD held an emergency meeting to vote whether to dismiss the rabbi. The board arranged themselves around the long foldout tables, the fluorescent lights flickering. Their faces looked like hard candy in the light. They had — most of them — been condemned by the congregation, and that made them feel both grateful to see each other and somewhat uneasy. No one had brought snacks, and everyone looked hungry. Tom sat, determinedly stirring a Styrofoam cup of tea.

Her ankle wrapped, maneuvering with crutches, Betty took her seat at the table.

“Dear God,” said Betty. She closed her eyes and could not speak for a moment. “We find ourselves at a crossroads. Our community is divided. Our leader is in crisis. Give us, one and all, the fortitude and wisdom to make the best decision to lead our congregation into the twenty-first century. Amen.”

There was something in Betty 's voice that held them.

“Good job,” said Marty. “Thank you.”

“We all know what business we have to discuss,” said Tom, wearily, “so let's get to it.”

“How, may I ask, are we going to function without a rabbi?” asked Norman. “Are we all going to drift apart?”

“For me, it depends on whether he could change or not,” said Marty. “He said he likes to push back.”

“I don't see that changing,” said Tiffany. “He didn't say he would.”

“Has anyone heard him say anything ever about changing?” asked Tom. “One thing? Anyone?”

There was a disquieting silence.

Norman sighed deeply. “It's not Jewish to fire him,” he said. “It's not . . . forgiving.”

“I would like to read a quote,” said Betty, holding out a sheet of paper. “If we are going to go on about what is Jewish. From Maimonides.” She cleared her throat. “What is complete teshuvah, repentance? A person who confronts the same situation in which he has sinned when he has the potential to commit the sin, yet he abstains and does not commit it.” She put down the paper. “He has to abstain because of his teshuvah alone and
not
because of fear or lack of strength.”

There was quiet.

“He needs to understand what he is doing,” said Betty. “After bullying our congregants, he maligned them on the bima. And he broke the lectern. Enough said.”

Everyone refilled their cups of tea. The table was littered with empty sugar and Splenda packets. Serena wondered what the rabbi would think if he could see them, engaged in vigorous debate about him, all of them, in some way, in love with him; perhaps that had been the main point, ultimately, that they were spending all their time not on each other, not exactly on the congregation, but fully, devotedly, on him.

“I will personally allow him to live in my house,” said Norman. “He can have a congregation. Starting with me.”

Serena was grateful to Norman for this offer.

“Will he even want that?” asked Tom, sounding like he wished he had thought of that.

“I don't care if he wants it.
I
do,” said Norman.

“So, who is going to make the motion?” said Tom.

The room was still. No one looked at one another.

“Is someone going to make the motion?” said Tom, raising his eyebrows.

There was the promise of action, and there was the actuality of it; there was the cold certainty of grief.

But then, slowly, across the room, a hand lifted.

Tiffany's.

Her hand was trembling. Tiffany decided to do it. She could see that the others couldn't. They could not remove the rabbi, despite the fact
that she saw him as a volatile man and not the leader they needed. She had not grown up Jewish; she could see that this made her freer in this than the others. This gesture would be her gift to them.

“Yes, Tiffany?” asked Tom.

“I move that we end the rabbi's contract,” she said, softly.

They all sat and listened to that.

“I second,” said Betty.

“All in favor,” said Tom. “Raise hands.”

Everyone but Tom and Norman slowly raised their hands. Serena felt her hand rising, and it was in the air. There were ten hands in the air.

They had decided.

“The board has voted to end Temple Shalom's contract with Rabbi Golden,” said Tom. The room was stale, devoid of air.

“Now what?” asked Marty.

“This is not a day we feel like celebrating,” said Tom. He rubbed his eyes with his hand.

They made plans to meet again to assign service duties and write an advertisement for a new rabbi. Tom adjourned the meeting, and they all slowly made their way outside. The air was cold, and the thick, heavy branches of the magnolia trees moved slowly in the wind, which had the low roar of an engine. The tin-colored clouds fled quickly across the black sky.

“Do you think we'll have a Temple?” asked Tiffany, her voice shaky. “Is everyone going to leave?”

They stood on the chilly corner, looking at the large, white walls of the churches across the street. They all wanted the same thing — they wanted a place to go to, a place that would welcome them as they tried to maneuver across their own crooked passages.

“We will be fine,” said Betty, clapping hands on their shoulders.

“How?” Serena asked Betty. “And what about him?”

Betty paused. She didn't answer. They stood on the corner, and the cars streamed by them, metal and rubber rattling.

Chapter Twenty-One

ON DECEMBER 13, NORMAN SENT the word to the congregation about the firing of the rabbi through an email, to be followed by an official letter. He did not, in the group email, describe the details of the meeting. But word had leaked out. Almost instantly, the responses began:

That night, she dreamed of her father for the first time since he died. He was running down the street, wearing a gray suit. He was running from something, and then he was floating over the sidewalk as though he were swimming, using his arms to move himself through the air. She was chasing him, and he turned a corner each moment that she could reach forward, touch his shoe, and she felt herself running too, a familiar action, as though this was all she had ever done, running for something just ahead of her, and then she felt his presence in front of
her, his smell, the smell of craft glue and hospital sanitizer and cigars, and she could sense him so fully that she felt a great pain diminish in her. She leapt forward, but he was not there.

When she woke up and understood again his absence, the disappointment was so immense she briefly could not breathe.

 

 

 

FORREST SEEMED TO HAVE VANISHED after his visit to their house. He was spending a great deal of time in his shed. Serena heard a great, determined hammering there, the piercing cry of the electric saw; it was like he was building several dining room sets or constructing shelves for a home library. Two days later, he brought out a large, five- by six-foot wooden sign and planted it on his front lawn. It said, in letters made with blue paint,
“Behold my servant whom I have chosen.” Matthew: 12:18.
There were yellow rays radiating from the letters.

Through all of this, there was still the daily routine of elementary school. She did not want to drop Zeb off at school after Forrest's meeting, even though it had not been sanctioned by the school; there had been many parental faces that had been familiar there. She looked for them. She walked beside her son, who was cheerfully muttering about YuGiOh cards and raising a small hand to wave at the children in his class, and some of them waved back, all of them marching ahead to their own particular ideologies. Who would the children become? The other parents walked in, polite, dropping off their children, but they were all, in some way, wary. The smiling cutout snowflakes and mittens and the jolly exclamation “Why We Love Winter!” on the corkboards lining the hallways seemed to hold an even deeper significance — to find some sort of common ground among the population here, to somehow help everyone realize that on some level, they were able to feel the same things.

Some of the parents who had attended the Christmas meeting looked at her and then quickly looked away. The mother who had expressed outrage at the idea that she had ever been related to a monkey was now tenderly untangling a knot in her daughter's Hello Kitty
shoelaces. The mother looked up at Serena and squinted as though she was trying to recognize her. Apparently, she couldn't remember.

“How y'all doing,” said the mother absently; she struggled with her daughter's knotted shoelace.

The teacher's assistant, Miss LaChawn, a young woman with a fountain of brown braids and fingernails decorated with tiny, elaborate gold roses, had the charming tendency of stopping parents with an effusive bulletin about some small accomplishment their child made that day. Serena also noticed that she always wore a delicate cross around her neck. Miss LaChawn touched her arm. “Did you see them?” she said, in a hushed voice.

“What?”

“His R's. In his notebook last night. Works of art. I tell you.”

“Yes,” she said, trying to remember. His R's. As civilization crumbled. “Yes,” she said, grateful to Miss LaChawn, her enthusiasm for this, for literacy.

“All of the students. You should see. The mastery of the R's. It makes my heart sing to see them.”

“Thank you,” she said. Miss LaChawn was now looking at her with a bit more interest.

“I saw you,” she said.

“Where?”

“At that meeting,” she said. “The Christmas one.”

“Oh,” said Serena.

“It was an interesting presentation,” she said. “I'll say, enlightening. I'll admit, I for one am for more Christmas. I'm for as much joy as we can bring these children.” She looked nervous. “But I wanted to ask you,” she said, “if you could bring some of those dreidels in for the class. I've never seen one.” She smiled shyly. “It's heartbreak — I mean, heartwarming to see children talk about . . . their home lives.” She smiled. “I've never known anyone who celebrated anything else.”