Jephte's Daughter (4 page)

When she was thirteen years old, she looked through the grillwork partition in the synagogue and discovered boys. Actually,
the boy
. Despite her very sheltered life, and her ignorance about the mechanics of love, when she found him, she felt the thrills, the budding sexual joy, as deeply as any girl who ever screamed for Elvis. She sat back, glad for the first time for the partition that kept her face suffused in shadows, allowing herself to study him the same way she had noticed women like her mother studying his father, the rabbi: with serious pleasure.

The rabbi had three sons. The youngest was the best looking—with black hair and blue eyes and flashing white teeth. Looking back on it later, she could not understand why she hadn’t paid more attention to him. Perhaps it was the genuine friendliness of his manner, which seemed callow, even brotherly. Ah, but it was not a brother she wanted. Although she did not attend coed synagogue youth groups, her friends who did described with despair the jolly platonic kidding with boys that was their meager substitute for romance. All the girls she knew were besieged, enfolded, asphyxiated by brotherly love.

The middle son had no looks at all. But his imperfections—the long, pale face, the rounded shoulders, the weak body, and especially, the prominent, black-framed glasses—were just those things that made men attractive to many Orthodox girls, the way leather jackets and college-letter sweaters attracted other girls. They were proof of long, relentless hours spent hunched over, studying the Talmud in sunless yeshivah halls.

For religious girls, whose final status was to be determined solely by their husbands’ achievements, marrying such a scholar, who might himself rise to head a yeshivah, meant reaching the highest rung of all. And although the girls in Batsheva’s world might in a pinch have considered a doctor, lawyer, or CPA who learned Talmud on evenings and weekends, they would do so only after a recognition of failure.

The way other girls trained to be nurses, Batsheva and her friends endured minor fast days, praying with parched lips to raise their spiritual level to be worthy of such men. They endured hardships to be worthy of receiving a life of even greater hardship. For they knew that if they succeeded, it would mean years of supporting a husband as he slaved through long days of explicating endless Talmudical minutiae. They imagined working at two jobs to earn a living, happily taking the burden of earning a living off his shoulders.

Their reward, as they saw it, would be to sit by him in the evening, after the six or seven little ones were in bed, to be regaled with brilliant discussions on intricate points of law. Their home would become a meeting place for the wise, and with his help and inspiration, they too would scale new spiritual heights.

However, although his clear blue eyes and deep tan were a silent reproach, Batsheva never wavered in her love for the rabbi’s eldest son. For aside from his elegant tall body, his black wavy hair and confident manner, that which set him apart, lending him a glamour and renown that reached far beyond their little community, was that he sang. He had, in fact, composed several songs incorporating the words of Hebrew liturgical poetry. The tunes were slow, mournful ditties that picked up speed by the second chorus and ended on a note of rousing hysteria. A few even had echoes of Baez and Dylan.

At one point, it was rumored, he had formed his own band, a group that combined biblical verses with a bazouki beat. Some even said they had seen him and his band on a late-night talk show on a local television station. They called themselves The Singing Scholars. But the rabbi soon put an end to that: He forbade him to appear on television again and severely limited his live appearances. Batsheva understood the reasoning: Anything unrelated to Torah learning was a waste, a sin. But it made her wonder, for the first time, in her heart of hearts, if the rabbi knew what he was doing.

She wanted him to be a star. She longed for it, feeling his success would leaven her days, which were heavy with memorizing the constitutional amendments and long passages from the Book of Kings.

More and more, she felt the onus of proving her worthiness weigh on her. Would he want a college girl? Or would he shun one who had ventured so far into secular knowledge, endangering her purity? But then, would he look down upon a mere Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary graduate as an unsuitable partner to his own brilliance? The ideas went around and around in her head, giving her no peace. It was, she decided finally, bright intellect he sought. A woman who could quote effortlessly from the Bible and Code of Jewish Law. Someone who could pitch a heavy conflict between Rashi and Maimonides with the best of them. And so she slaved through the short bitter winter, allowing her unfounded convictions on his beliefs, desires, and preferences to shape her future, convinced she was molding herself for him in the end.

Walking out of the synagogue when he was near, she didn’t even dare to glance in his direction, her heart beating so loud she held her palms over it to lessen the sound. But when she was safely home, she kicked herself for being a coward and searched for any excuse to walk past the rabbi’s house, terrified yet aching with desire to catch a glimpse of him through the windows or on the porch. She practiced for hours in front of mirrors just how to faintly turn her head, allowing just a ghost of a smile, should he actually notice her. And when she did see him, how she floated on his image, agonizing over how she had looked to him, until she began to hate her imperfections, to loathe the poor material she had to work with to form (oh, hopeless dream!) a package able to tempt him who was perfection.

Sometimes her reward was not actually seeing him, but hearing the music of his guitar drift out from the living room into the street. He had a high voice, a disappointment, although she would never admit it to herself. His face and his body demanded his father’s sonorous alto, yet he had inherited his mother’s rather nasal whine.

And then, one Sabbath morning, as she sat in worshipful concentration, she looked up and noticed the faces of other girls pressed into the partition, their gaze rapt, their heads turned in the same unmistakable direction as her own. Looking at them, some of them high-school girls with lipstick, and others even younger than herself, all their youthful hope and desperate longing so clearly and pathetically revealed, she began to see herself more clearly. The ache did not go away, nor did the longing. But its sharpness dulled. Soon after, her parents moved her to California. By the time she returned to New York to enter the Bais Sarah High School, he was already engaged. The girl, she had it on the best of word, was a beautiful redhead, barely seventeen, who hadn’t even graduated from high school.

Her last week in high school passed like a dream—the hugs from her friends and the people she boarded with; the giggles and promises to write reminiscent of a send-off to home from summer camp. Only when she said good-bye to her old teacher did she feel some door pitifully and joyfully clang shut. She had learned all he could teach her, but there was still that ocean out there she wanted to know. But when the plane lifted off, taking her home to California, she felt the heavy sadness, the seriousness of Brooklyn and Bais Sarah lift from her shoulders. Like a bird fleeing the winter and winging its way south, she already felt the warmth of the sun dispelling all unpleasant thoughts. I will sleep and swim in the pool, she told herself, and read and read and read…

Batsheva leaned back into the hot fragrant grass and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Anna, Anna,” she cried. “Why?” But she knew why. Life with Karenin, his cold hands all over her body. She shuddered. And to be severed from one’s child forever. But still, to throw oneself under a train? Heavy metal tearing one’s flesh apart, crushing one’s skull? But after death there was heaven, peace. Still, it was a mortal sin to take one’s life. Perhaps Anna knew this but felt she had lived enough. What was life really, without Vronsky, without passion? Of course she only knew about passion from books:
Marjorie Morningstar, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(no one must ever find that book, hidden between her atlas and a heavy history text).

She slipped her hands up the long sleeves of her silk nightgown, rubbing her smooth young flesh sensuously. She knew no men other than her father and the rabbis in school who had taught her Torah, Prophets, Talmud, and Mishnah. She enjoyed studying, but for a long time she had not been able to concentrate on such things. She had persevered because she was unable to confess to her father that she was no scholar, but simply a teenage girl who needed a man’s arms around her, his lips on hers. Yet she was revolted by the thought of any man touching her.

How shocked her father would be if he could look inside his neat, obedient little girl and see the bubbling turmoil of confusion. How strange it was. One day she had been playing with dolls, and the next…She was ashamed and stimulated by her feelings, and tired of denying them. How would it be, she wondered, to have a man’s body on hers? Would it hurt? None of the books said that it did, except Marjorie Morningstar admitted, “Shock shock, then terrible humiliation.” But she couldn’t quite believe that could be true.

The coming together of a man and woman was a holy thing, after all. God had chosen this way of replenishing the earth. God did everything so elegantly, with such an exquisite attention to detail. She knew this from studying the flowers in the garden and watching the morning sky, all mauve and pink and orange. So beautiful. But God had looked at all this, His ideas, His wonderful sense of color and design put into action, and had said merely that it was good. Not great. Not fantastic. Just good. But when He had looked at man and woman together, He had said it was “very good.” So you could just imagine.

But that was her problem—she couldn’t imagine, and the Bible—source of all truth, to be relied upon where other books were not—was very vague on details. “He came in unto her.” Ruth uncovered Boaz’s feet on the threshing floor. Between the lines, though, hadn’t Leah and Rachel fought over their time with Jacob, trading things to get an extra night? So it must be very…Would he crush you with his weight—ugh, fat men were awful! Even if one shouldn’t judge by outside appearances, if souls were unconnected to the appearance of the body, still, one wouldn’t ever want to get into bed with a fat man. You’d have to be on a very high spiritual level to do that.

As she thought, the wind picked up strands of her black silken hair and blew them across her face. Someone standing above her looking down would have stopped breathing for a moment, she was so very young and lovely. The light dappling her head turned her hair a bluish black, like a raven’s. It was her one great, evil vanity, she thought. It was down to her waist and it took her hours to comb it and to pin it up primly every morning. But now, alone in the house except for the servants, she let it hang down in a thick silken scarf, caressing her back and hips.

She was sure about her hair, but not her face. It bothered her that she did not have the picture-perfect features of a cheerleader. Her nose was nicely pointed and small. But her eyes were odd, remarkable, such a strange color—so light blue they were almost white. A magical color, Elizabeth had assured her, that people stared at and got lost in. But maybe she was just being kind. Elizabeth was awfully kind.

Elizabeth was really beautiful. Shining strawberry-blond curls, large googly green eyes. Very womanly. Sexy. Like Marilyn Monroe. She was her idol, her mentor.

She lifted her hand to her cheek and felt the heat of the California sun turning the skin a soft glowing pink. She pointed and stretched her long slim legs and toes so that her nightgown fell down around her hips, exposing her legs. They were so pretty, she thought, the slim ankles, the slightly rounded calves. Her waist was sweet too.

She sat up, hugging herself. She was so pretty, any man would surely love her. An ache began inside her, a familiar unquenchable longing. She jumped up and ran toward the grotto and the kidney-shaped pool with its Greek columns and fountains, ran as if she were being chased by demons, and jumped headfirst into the water.

When she came up, subdued and ashamed, she looked around carefully. Ima would have a fit. She would get a lecture on maidenly modesty, “
kavod bas melech penima
—the honor of a king’s daughter is within.” Whatever you wanted to do—that’s what they told you—parents, teachers. Don’t go out into the street yourself. Don’t expose yourself through revealing clothes. Don’t dance, don’t sing, don’t…bring attention to yourself. But she wanted everyone to look at her, didn’t they understand! She was eighteen, and ravishing, and without a lover! Oh, Vronsky, Vronksy, she whispered passionately, then giggled, rushing to the pool dressing room. The wet silk clung to her like a second skin.

“A wet T-shirt contest at the holy Ha-Levis’! My dear child, you have made my day. In fact, you’ve made my life!”

“Elizabeth!” A blush spread to Batsheva’s face and she crossed her arms to cover her breasts. Then, seeing the other girl’s face break into a wide grin, she giggled. “I forgot about our lesson.”

“You break my heart, dear infant.” Twenty-two years of age, Elizabeth loved to play the role of wise older woman. She couldn’t help it with Batsheva. Even though there was only a few years’ difference between them, the girl was such an innocent she seemed like a little kid. Bubble boy, she called her privately, brought up in a golden cocoon, wrapped in cotton wool.

“I’m so glad you’re here. I need to talk to you desperately.”

Always melodrama, Elizabeth thought. And for a kid who wasn’t allowed to watch soap operas. “Anna Karenina. Why, why did she do it?”

“Russians are given to dramatic gestures of vodka-soaked intelligence,” she said mildly, leaning back the full length of the lounge chair and sliding her open notebook over her eyes to shield them from the sun. I’m even beginning to sound like him, she thought. A Graham MacLeish clone. A tan, that was what she needed. An all-over, no-suit-marks tan by 9
P.M
.