The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (4 page)

Ever since she could remember, the Bible had filled her with feelings of deep confusion. On the one hand, it was one of those heirlooms that infuse memories with a particular form and substance, without which the past becomes as amorphous and characterless as smoke. She could not imagine the family without the Bible. Just its dark, tooled-leather cover was enough to evoke reminders of a real, solid world shrouded in mysticism, attuned to an older, wiser order of things. A world rough with physical deprivation and harsh discomfort, yet suffused with meaning.

Yet, on the other hand, its very preciousness made it a burden. One was afraid to touch it, to look at it or show it. Not only because of its physical fragility, which was understandable, but because of the potent, yet indistinct power it held over the present. She had never been able to quite define that power—what it was
supposed
to mean to her, other than its simply existing. She existed, and it existed, and they were inextricably intertwined; this she had always accepted and understood. But what she was supposed to do with that connection had always eluded her. More—it had been frightening and guilt-producing. It had been burdensome.

She lifted out the Bible carefully. Published in 1475 in the tiny Aragonese city of Hijar by Eliezer ben Abraham ibn Alantasi, physician, scholar, and businessman, it was one of the first Hebrew Bibles ever printed, one of only ten copies. When Ferdinand and Isabella banished the Jews from Spain, printer and press had disappeared, along with thousands of other refugees and their belongings. As far as she knew, this was the only one of Alantasi’s Bibles to have survived.

She gently caressed the brown-leather binding with its rectangular central panel and rosettes. Then, with extreme care, she opened it. Around the printed Hebrew letters, the loving craftsmanship of illumination still glowed: acanthus leaves painted in blue, green, and magenta curled around peacocks, dragons, and royal lions. On other pages, green scrolls with blue and green flowers opened to show their pistils of gold on backgrounds of wine red or Prussian blue. She feasted her eyes on the skilled handiwork, turning the pages until she reached the shimmering gold tree that held the family’s long history.

Sketched in tempera and gold leaf, it had always seemed to her, even as a small child, to be a remnant of some enchanted forest, leaves thick on its golden boughs, where Midas and Danae walked arm in arm. At the top of the tree was Rabbi Yuda el Nasi (b. 1398), and his son, Dr. Samuel el Nasi (b. 1427), and daughter-in-law, Doña Hannah de Lyon el Nasi (b. 1432). They in turn had had Isaac (b. 1452), who also became a physician. Isaac and his wife, Rachel (b. 1456), who died on the day of the expulsion from Spain, had had two daughters, Esther (b. 1477) and Malca (b. 1492). Esther had one son, Miguel (b. 1500), and two daughters, Gracia (b. 1510) and Brianda (b. 1514). And so it went, on and on, uninterrupted for hundreds of years. Until now.

She sat quietly, turning page after page holding the rich history of her family—births, deaths, and marriages, the golden boughs growing barer and barer with time. She stared at Suzanne and Francesca’s names. Two golden leaves left, she thought, and then—the dead, bare branch.

She felt a chill, like a cold piece of steel, tap across her forehead.

They were both in their twenties—beautiful girls—with a trail of broken relationships behind them. Suzanne considered herself a widow, even though she’d never been married. And Francesca had some mathematical formula for deciding exactly which kind of man she’d even deign to go out with. She suspected the right numbers did not often come up for Francesca. Catherine had no idea if there were any men in their lives now at all….

In this obscene age, when middle-aged men cast off the wives of their youth because their breasts sagged; when men considered marriage only in their late thirties, and then to high-school seniors; when women began to consider marriage and children only after finishing graduate school, working, and taking a trip around the world…what were the chances of her granddaughters marrying at all? And even if they did, what were the chances of their staying married?

And what could she do about any of it?

Why was it old people weren’t respected in our society? she thought peevishly, remembering the hateful face of the cabbie. It was a surprising thing, wasn’t it? The wrinkles and the white hair were, after all, signs of having accumulated knowledge and experience distilled into precious wisdom and insights that should be sought after and valued. Some cultures did. She thought vaguely of the Chinese and Japanese…. But somehow the picture of a Japanese boy in a punk haircut and earrings she’d seen near Bloomingdale’s came to mind.

The Japanese had their problems, too.

What had Janice once told her and Carl soon after starting college? “Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experiences have been so partial and their lives have been such miserable failures…Old deeds for old people, new deeds for new.” It was from Thoreau, a text assigned to Janice in an enormously expensive college class at an enormously expensive university.

Thoreau. She imagined with distaste the bearded, disheveled young philosopher in his dirty clothes as he sat writing those lines in his unheated shed by some stagnant pond full of dreadful mosquitoes. You handed over thousands and thousands of trust-fund dollars for tuition, room and board, clothes, books, travel—and then they quoted you Thoreau.

She shook her head, thinking of Kenny Barren, second husband of her only daughter, driving his blue Porsche wearing English tweeds. He was a tall, blond Californian who’d grown up climbing pear trees in a little farming town in northern California where the biggest cultural event of the year had been the annual Pear Festival. His parents had once been farmers, good Methodists, who counted the Vikings among their forebears. After a brief fling in the theater, Kenny had finished his master’s in business at the University of California. He was now a bank vice-president in charge of personal finance.

He was the kind of person who never missed an opening night at Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Opera, but at home never listened to music and in his car had John Denver tapes. He was the kind of person who attended SoHo gallery openings whenever possible, but in Paris or Florence skipped the Musée D’Orsay and the Uffizi, preferring to shop for clothes or antiques instead. He was the kind of person for whom a family Bible would be as meaningful as a crèche in a department store window.

Janice had met him right after her divorce from Craig Abraham, at one of those art-appreciation courses at N.Y.U. She’d run off with him to the Caribbean for three weeks, leaving Suzanne and Francesca with Catherine.

There had been stormy, tearful, long-distance arguments that had ended with enormous phone bills and Janice’s threats to get married in Las Vegas. Finally, someone had found a Reform rabbi willing to perform the ceremony even if Kenny didn’t convert—which he had no intention of doing, and which Janice thought was stupid anyway, since both of them had no interest at all in (as Janice liked to call it) “mumbo-jumbo.”

They’d been married—happily, as far as Catherine knew—for nearly fifteen years now.

Mixed marriages, diminishing births, broken families…It wasn’t just her family. It was everyone’s.

She thought of Carl and his three brothers, descendants of one of the most respected rabbis of the Sephardic Jewish community in Iraq, Rabbi Obadiah da Costa. One brother had died in World War II. A second had emigrated to South America and become fabulously wealthy in diamond mining. He’d married late—to a South American woman of Portuguese ancestry—and converted to Catholicism. They’d had one child, a daughter, who’d been killed in a freak waterskiing accident when she was only twenty-three. A third brother had wound up making films in Hollywood and never married. He was sixty-nine and living with a twenty-four-year-old starlet.

She felt her heart contract as she closed the Bible, replacing it carefully. There was one other book kept in the safe. It, too, was a rare, old manuscript handed down through the generations. She picked up the pages, winey with age.

Memorias de Doña Gracia Mendes

Caminando de vìa en vìa

Penando esta alma mìa

esperando alguna alegrìa

que el Dio me la de a mi

She remembered her father’s finger tracing the words as she sat on his warm lap, his arms touching her shoulders as he translated: “‘From town to town I wandered, my soul suffering within. Yet I hope still for the joy that G-d will give me.’”

“Who was she?” she’d asked him. Why had she suffered and where had she wandered? “It was the same Gracia as in the family Bible,” he’d said. “Your ancestor. Very beautiful and very brave. A heroine, in fact, who’d risked her life to save the lives of hundreds during the Inquisition. She’d lived like a queen in beautiful palaces in Lisbon, Antwerp, Venice, and Istanbul.”

“Then why did she suffer?” she’d asked impatiently, looking into his smiling face. But he’d only continued smiling, shaking his head.

“All we have are the first few pages. The rest of the story is lost.”

“But what do they say, these pages?” she’d persisted, tugging at his tie and undoing the knot. “Do they say G-d granted her joy?”

“They say that she has a secret, a secret weapon to protect her family.”

“What’s the secret,
Padre?
”

“I would love to know,” he’d told her, smoothing down her hair.

She’d touched the manuscript, her childish finger tracing the flowery script, thinking, My hand touching her hand.

Often, she’d dreamed of finding the rest of the manuscript hidden somewhere in the archives of some medieval library or on the shelves of a rare bookseller’s. She’d dreamed of learning the answers to her questions. And Carl had actually made several unsuccessful attempts to track down the missing pages. But then both of them had somehow lost interest.

One thing was clear—Gracia’s weapon must have been potent. Despite the wars, the expulsions, the pogroms, the family had survived for hundreds of years, the tree flourishing, its branches thick with leaves. They’d managed to pass down the precious Bible, spice boxes, menorahs,
etrog
holders, silver candlesticks.

She had never forgiven Janice for marrying out. Probably never would. But now, looking down at the precious, fragile parchment, she somehow felt she had no right to nurse any anger toward her daughter.

After all, I raised her.

And what has my family’s long history ever meant to me? How many arguments did I have with my own mother over outlandish, empty rituals?

She remembered the bitter family fights just before her wedding, culminating in her refusal to immerse in the
mikvah
or to attend her mother-in-law’s traditional
bogo de baño
party that preceded immersion, or her mother’s
cafe de baño
party afterward, scandalizing them both.

Carl had been more cooperative, enduring the
salidura de boda
, making wearying rounds with his friends from house to house, in deference to the tradition that insisted the groom was never to be left alone before the wedding, lest the demons from the north, jealous of his happiness, spring upon him unawares.

Yet, I’ve always known who I was, where I came from, and to whom I owed my loyalty, she bristled, as if in an argument with a nasty and unreasonable foe. I’ve taken good care of every single one of the family’s precious heirlooms! Look, just look at what wonderful condition they’re in! I had the silver polished; I kept the books in climate-controlled cabinets, I kept the embroidered linens fresh and immaculate….

The anger suddenly left her, replaced by a terrible emptiness as she thought of Janice and Kenny and her granddaughters ransacking her things after she was safely buried. Janice might behave herself at first, but eventually that husband of hers, with his bespoke suits and custom-made shirts, would simply unload the silver and the books at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. He’d no doubt use the spoils to buy more bright red canvases with handwriting and bits of old china or plastic bottles pasted all over them.

She felt her whole body rise up in revulsion.

I could leave them to a museum, she considered. She looked at the Renaissance display cabinet of rare, carved walnut that held the silver and gold heirlooms. For hundreds of years these items had been carefully used by some blood relative to sanctify the Sabbath, holidays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and circumcision ceremonies. She imagined them in her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s hands. And then she tried to imagine them mummified and lifeless inside glass cases surrounded by little typed-up informative notes, tended by indifferent guards in gray uniforms. With horror, she envisioned the dusty, long museum corridors filled with bored adults and rowdy children.

For the first time since hearing the results of her tests, hot tears stung her eyes.