Jacob's Folly (10 page)

I watched as Gimpel made a bundle of his few possessions in the room where I once slept.

“I should be getting back to the rebbe soon anyway,” he said. “It's
so difficult being away from him. Paris is impossible for the Hasidim. The Besht's work will never take root here. It is too late.”

“What did you mean when you said, ‘This too is
beshert
'?” I asked him.

“Destiny unfolding,” he stated, tying the bundle fast.

“I just don't see how we can have free will, as the Torah says we do, if God knows everything beforehand.”

“That's the mystery,” said Gimpel, sitting down on my old bed and leaning back on the wall, his belly shivering like a bowl of pudding beneath his stained caftan. He smiled, looking relaxed, satisfied. “For example, I came to Paris to make money for the Hasidim in Poland, but I didn't make any money. I came to see if we could bring the work of the Ba'al Shem Tov. But they're all waiting to become Frenchmen. So why did I come to Paris?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I came to Paris to meet you,” he said. “That's what I'm guessing. Come with me to Mezritch, Jacob. For a time. You must meet my rebbe. Eat at his table. If your wife is too sick to come, return to her when you have learned something. I'm worried that if I leave you, you will be lost. You are still so soft, everything you lean against makes an impression. I don't want your soul tossed back and forth in Gehenna for all eternity.”

Clearly, I should have gone with him.

D
eirdre Senzatimore strode over to the “parent trap,” as she called the smaller house beside her own, to be sure everything was in order for her appointment with Mrs. Drexler. She used part of the house—the living room and foyer, to be exact—as a showroom for her decorating business. Everything in that area of the house was for sale, right down to the candy dishes. Her parents, Don and Libby Jenkins, had the run of the rest of the place. This deal seemed pretty sweet to Deirdre. Her father, Don Jenkins, was appalled by the vulgarity of living in a showroom, but, as his wife Libby reminded him frequently, he didn't have much to say about it, seeing as he was between jobs and had been for the past seventeen years, having lost his position at First National Bank at the age of forty-nine for being intolerably discouraging to loan applicants. He couldn't help himself; he just had to be honest, and most of the ideas these people wanted loans for were asinine. Don would open the conversation by saying, “Let's just go over this,” and proceed to eviscerate the applicant's business plan, even as he approved their loan, often as an afterthought. People left his desk feeling they had lost the battle already, that, though they had the money they needed to accomplish their goals, they were doomed to failure. Don didn't mind lending them the bank's money—he just hated to
see them weave such idiotic dreams. There was even a physical attack by one Jeff Wyant, who, though normally a patient man, simply couldn't stand listening to Don Jenkins's condescending theory on why a fish farm could never succeed in eastern Connecticut. Wyant punched him in the face, broke his nose. The police were called, but the culprit walked free the next day cleared of aggravated assault, maybe because the particular policeman who answered the call had fantasized about smacking Don Jenkins over the head for years, having endured one of his lectures about the stupidity of opening a cat kennel. Don was a dream masher.

Deirdre walked into the foyer and was pleased to see that everything was still in place: silk orchids in a Chinese ceramic vase, a large photograph of a lily pond on the wall, peach silk-upholstered bamboo couch beneath it. She lit a vanilla-scented candle on the hall table and stopped, hearing the ominous, high tinkling of ice landing in a glass. She walked into the kitchen. There was her father, Don Jenkins, bent over the freezer drawer, a bottle of vodka on the counter.

“Dad,” Deirdre said, packing as much patience, exasperation, disappointment, and love into that one word as any daughter possibly could.

“Don't ask me if I know what time it is, lovely,” Don said, unfolding himself to an impressive height. His fingers were wet from refreshing the ice tray, the one domestic chore he always undertook without being asked, and he flicked his hands to dispel droplets of water from his elegant fingers with an impatient gesture. Don had a long, squared-off head, and his face was a mass of wrinkles. His once-aquiline nose, diverted by the Wyant attack, listed to one side. Don wore a cherry-red cashmere sweater, a gray silk cravat tied in a loose knot at the base of his thin neck, and hadn't shaved for several days.

“I assume your mother has let you in on her latest fiasco-in-the making,” he said, pouring an inch of vodka into the tall glass and rooting around in the chaotic fridge, removing a half-eaten container of yogurt, some mold-furred strawberries in dented plastic, a glass jar
with a smear of Marshmallow Fluff left in it. “This refrigerator is exactly like her mind, by the way. Filled with sweet, rotting substances of no use to anyone, least of all herself.”

“I have someone coming in half an hour, Dad,” Deirdre pleaded. “I'm going to need you to stay upstairs for a little while.”

“Stay upstairs?” he asked her with a show of magnanimous agreement. “Of course I'll stay upstairs! I'll stay in the closet. She wants a divorce.”

Deirdre's seventy-year-old mother, Libby, slipped in at that moment wearing a diaphanous pouf of a turquoise nightgown that just covered her matching panties. Her short blond hair was tousled. Mascara seemed to have been applied with feathery brushmarks all around her eyes. She was very tanned.

“That's right, you old shit,” she snarled, leaning back against the wall. “I've had it.”

Don, having cleared the first tier of the fridge, found a bottle of tomato juice in the very back, then theatrically checked the expiration date, squinting, a vaudevillian expression of disgust on his face.

“He can't even see,” said Libby in a voice hoarse from shouting. “You can't read that without glasses,” she called out to him. “Stop showing off!”

“I'll clean out the fridge later, Dad,” said Deirdre.

Breathing heavily through his nose, Don filled the tumbler with tomato juice, seasoning it without haste.

“Guys,” said Deirdre. “This woman is coming in twenty minutes. Can you please stay married that long?”

“Sweetheart,” whimpered Libby, tiptoeing up to Deirdre. She only came up to her daughter's chin. “He's killing me. I mean literally. I am dying. I am suffocating. He is so fucking pretentious. I have to save myself.”

“Mom,” said Deirdre, “look. You come to the house. Okay? Just walk over there. Put a coat on. You can take a shower over there. Or I'll treat you to the beauty parlor. How's that? And Dad, you go to your
den and read, and when the woman leaves, we'll talk it through. Okay?”

Deirdre rushed her mother over to the big house, holding a yellow slicker around her narrow shoulders. Libby, still in her aqua-blue cloud of a shortie and rain boots, veiny legs kicking out through the open jacket and revealing a streaky orange fake tan, was uncharacteristically silent; Deirdre wondered if this time her parents really would split up. They had only started drinking heavily in the past five years, since they had moved into the parent trap. At first getting sloshed together had bonded them, but it had gotten rapidly ugly.

Deirdre called the beauty parlor in town, made an appointment for her mother, ran back to the parent trap to find her something to wear, then drove her downtown, trying to ignore the tears that were running down Libby's cheeks and staining her fuchsia velour sweat suit. She made it back to the parent trap just as Mrs. Drexler, her client, drove up.

“Call me Mimi,” said Mrs. Drexler, craning her short neck, standing on tiptoe, and giving Deirdre an awkward hug. They had only met once before. Mrs. Drexler was pinched and petite. She made Deirdre feel enormous. In the living room, Deirdre opened the book of samples she had prepared for the Drexler home, casting a critical eye on her own large hand.

“I just love this beige for the sofa,” said Mrs. Drexler, fingering a swatch with slender digits.

“It's linen,” said Deirdre.

When she picked Libby up from the beauty parlor, Deirdre found her mother's spirits had been lifted, along with her hair color. She was chatty on the way home, twice mentioning the possibility of getting breast implants. “Why not?” Libby said breezily, looking out the window, her snub nose in the air, wrinkled little hands with their bitten-down nails limp in her velour lap. As often happened to Deirdre, she found herself wondering how this could possibly be her mother. She
seemed more like a girl. It had always been this way. A typical school day in Deirdre's childhood would start with her mother harrumphing into the kitchen, red pillow lines stamped into her cheek like a road map. Furious that she had to get up early, she'd slam the door open and start frying food: bacon, sausage, eggs. Nothing could keep Libby from her frying pan in the morning. She woke up and reached for the pan. Deirdre always watched her mother's performance with quiet interest each morning as she ate her cornflakes. This was a kind of statement she was making to her husband and child. She was saying,
I'm cooking you a real breakfast, how many mothers do that anymore? Now leave me alone
. But once she'd had her coffee, put on her face, and found a cute outfit, maybe a pair of high-heeled boots, she could be kittenish and loving, embracing her daughter and flirting with her husband. Libby's moods shifted fast. Not that she was an ignorant woman. She had gone to Connecticut College, majoring in American literature. Deirdre used to pore over scrapbooks of her mother's college days, when she was sloppily sexy, with oversized sweaters, no bra, tousled brown hair, and the same petulant little pout of a mouth she had now. Her eyes were small, downturned, intelligent, and suspicious. Even now, at seventy, she had a kind of puffy charm. Yet over the years—probably because she was married to Don, the most pretentious man on the planet—Libby had come to hate intellectual ambition of any kind. She watched crap TV, read books she bought in the drugstore, and derided anyone who even tried to hold a scrap of an elevated conversation. Yet Libby had, Deirdre knew, a far subtler mind than Don, the Yale man. Don had gone to college on scholarship to study economics. The fact that he had gotten nowhere in life was almost entirely due to his pathological negativity—that and the fact that his parents weren't socially connected. If she parsed it out, Deirdre could see how her mother had come to be the way she was, and in a way she even respected her for choosing a way to be, rather than blindly becoming. Yet Libby's childishness riled her, and she found herself getting
more and more dour in her mother's presence, as if to discipline her, or water down her tastelessness. The more time she spent around Libby, the older Deirdre felt.

For Deirdre, there had never been any question of not going to college. Don wouldn't hear of it. In the end, she chose Duke. She liked the pace of the South, she liked the way the men talked, and she loved being away from her parents. After college, she stayed in Chapel Hill and got pregnant by a nervy business major two years her junior by the name of Armand. Once he graduated, the two of them came back to the Northeast armed with a baby and very little else; they were running out of money—and interest in each other. Armand was a Long Island native and had ambitions to open a restaurant in Westhampton. Within a month of their arrival, however, they were separated. Deirdre was on her own with little Bud.

Having grown up in Connecticut, Deirdre didn't know people in Long Island. Yet she didn't want to move back home. The idea of living near her parents, who had driven her nearly crazy before she left for college, was depressing. She couldn't afford to move to Manhattan, or even Brooklyn, where a couple of her college friends had ended up. So she found an apartment above a dry-cleaning store on Patchogue, Long Island, Main Street, and decided to enjoy it. She relished her weird, disconnected existence shared only with her serious little baby. Deirdre and Bud slept in the same bed every night, curled up like lost puppies. She worked on her short stories whenever he took a nap, got a job eventually, and went out recreationally with the occasional fellow, but the dates were futureless. Bud and Deirdre had twinned, and moved through their days in unspoken complicity. It was as if Deirdre had extended the skin of her self, stretched it over her head like a thin membrane to include her child. As Bud grew up, the two of them
coexisted inside that invisible fiber, unreachable, peaceful, until Leslie rescued them back into the world.

Leslie came home from work early to do some paperwork. He had forgotten about Ms. Parr bringing Stevie home. Yet there she was in the living room, leaning over his willowy son. Shivering, leaf-shadowed afternoon sunshine blasted through the plate-glass window, silhouetting the two of them. Leslie watched the boy in profile. His pale irises, suffused with light, shone translucent as two drops of water. Neck bent like a drooping stalk, he was poised, immobile, over a pristine page of paper. Abruptly, his arm flared out, causing an unbroken line to arc from one end of the paper to the other, his hand one with the pencil. The child's mark was pure, unhurried, confident. Drawing was his solace. Ms. Parr noticed Leslie and smiled.

“Ms. Parr. I forgot you were coming,” he said.

“That's okay, Jenny let us in,” she said. Leslie walked into the kitchen.

Jenny, his daughter-in-law, was making a cheese sandwich in the kitchen, her baby on her hip.

“Where's Deirdre?” he asked.

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “She just called and asked me to let Stevie and his teacher in.” Jenny's hair was in braids. She was wearing a gingham dress. The old spaniel was licking up crumbs at her feet, like Toto's understudy.

Leslie walked back to the living room. He stood at the doorway and watched his son drawing, the tendrils of Ms. Parr's hair floating above the paper. He could smell the woodsmoke wafting off her from where he was standing. He saw the hint of a bleached mustache on her upper lip, glinting in the sun.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked her softly. She looked up at
him, straightened, smoothing her long cotton dress over those prodigious hips.

“Yes?” she said. He backed up a few steps from the room, nearly to the front door. She followed him, an expectant look on her face.

“Mentally,” he said, barely audibly, though the boy was deaf, in the other room, and engrossed in his drawing, “do you think there's something?”

“In what way?” said Ms. Parr in a small voice.

“At home, he … he's unpredictable. You never know. He gets real angry sometimes. Or … sad. Screaming. He hits. I'm not sure how he is at school …”

Ms. Parr looked up at him with a solemn, level gaze. Her humorless honesty had a shriveling effect on him. “I think it would be prudent to have him assessed,” she whispered. “All the behavior you describe is normal, to a point, for a deaf child. They get frustrated. But see? How he is when he draws. Maybe that's the key.”

Deirdre decided to bring her mother to the main house rather than leave her at the parent trap and risk a big blowout with Don. She was surprised, then, to see her father, shaved and showered, playing with Stevie in the living room. When Don turned and saw his wife, he grabbed his heart. “Who is this glorious woman?” he exclaimed. Libby giggled and sashayed over to the bar. “Mom,” said Deirdre, “it's three o'clock.”