Washing the Dead (20 page)

I read the obituary again and then let my eyes linger on the word “polio.” The owners had built the pool so the sick boy could soak his legs, my mother had told me. Norman. My
grandfather
had built the mikveh for Norman. The inside of my mouth turned dry as parchment as I pictured my mother smoking, sucking in her grief and letting it out, the air finding its way back into the cracks of my skin. Norman had been with us that morning, I’d felt him. And somehow the Shabbos goy was involved with my mother and Uncle Norman too. But how?

I found Andy Noffsinger’s address more quickly than I had Uncle Norman’s obituary. There were two listings for A. Noffsinger, business and home, both on the west side of town, maybe near Mr. Isen. Lili had taken piano lessons only a few blocks away when she was in fourth grade. I might even have driven past the Shabbos goy on my way to drop her off. I was glad when her piano teacher retired. The west side was only twenty-five minutes from us, but it felt like a different world, and that was before I knew that the Shabbos goy inhabited it.

I wrote Sam and Lili a note, “Went out to clear my head.” I
thought about calling Neil to ask him what he knew about our uncle, but he would be overwhelmed with a grieving Jenny and my mother, and I was ashamed that I couldn’t handle her presence for a few more days.

The sky was magnificently clear. I listened to classical music to soothe my nerves as I drove to see the Shabbos goy. I was again the young woman who’d marched over to his carriage house and kicked his duffel bag across the room. How had the Schines come to own my mother’s mansion? None of it made any sense.

The Shabbos goy lived in a modest rambler, but the lot was large and nicely landscaped. I didn’t know what I’d say or how I’d greet him, but something propelled me from the car to the walkway to his doorbell. My fingers trembled as I pressed the button. No answer. I poked my head around the side entrance to see if I could spot any movement, but the house was still. I rang the bell again. Still, no answer.

I returned to my car and punched his business address into my GPS. It only took me a few minutes to drive to his nursery, which was attached to a quaint building that looked like it had once been a house. I sat in my car and watched my mother’s ex-lover arrange pumpkins on the front lawn. He no longer wore a ponytail, but he was still lithe and moved with the grace of a younger man. I got out of the car and walked toward him quickly, before I lost my nerve.

He spotted me right away. He set down a large pumpkin and gaped at me. As I drew closer, he greeted me with his eyes, grayish brown and wide-set; he must have popped a blood vessel in his left eye, because red veins spidered out from the corner to his iris. Gray stubble grew in the cleft of his Kirk Douglas chin. The bones of his face were still chiseled and lovely, but his skin was craggy from years of working outdoors.

“You look just like your mother,” he said softly. “Same walk, same hair.”

A man with a bushy beard came over and handed him a cup of coffee. “Here you go, boss.” The Shabbos goy thanked him politely
and returned his attention to me. I was grateful to have had a second to collect my thoughts. I took in a deep breath, heavy with the smell of mulch. He looked at me as he had so many years earlier, when I stormed into his apartment, or when Tzippy and I ran into the kitchen while he was putting kugels in the oven.

“How are you?” I asked. The words sounded silly, but I didn’t know where to start.

“Pretty good, I suppose. You?” He was going to take his cues from me.

I smiled weakly.

“Why did you track me down?” he asked. His voice was still youthful.

“I’m not here to cause trouble for you. I have questions.” The steady infusion of adrenaline over the past few days had made me reckless.

“Your mom should be the one to answer them.”

“My mother has Alzheimer’s,” I said in a “so there” tone that made me sound like a child. A part of me still blamed him for everything that had gone wrong with our family.

His expression barely changed. Then he took a sip of his coffee. “How bad?”

“She wanders back and forth between the past and the present, but she definitely prefers the past.” The air carried an autumn chill, and I wrapped my sweater around me.

He looked right into my eyes with an intimacy that came from sharing a common understanding of a loved one. We both knew that my mother had always wandered.

I pulled out the copy I’d made of the photo and handed it to him. “I want to know why she keeps this picture in the bottom of her suitcase, under….” I almost said “dirty underwear,” but I could never hate her enough to offer up this tidbit about her declining personal hygiene to anyone.

The man with the beard beckoned him, and I wondered if he’d walk away and never come back. “Be just a minute, Kip.”

“Why did you have this photo?” I demanded.

He lowered his voice. “I can’t get into your mother’s business with you.”

“Do you mean that she grew up in the mansion? All these years of her damn secrets, and all I had to do was check the
Journal Sentinel
archive? Isn’t that a kick?” I could taste the bitterness in my mouth.

“She never told you that her family lived in the mansion?”

“She never told me about the mansion. She never used to talk about my uncle or anyone else in her family, but now she can’t stop calling my brother Norman.”

He winced at the mention of Norman’s name. “She never got over losing him.”

Finally I was getting somewhere.

He rattled the change in his pockets. “I want to help you.”

“Then please talk to me.” I was practically begging.

“Go to her again. She’ll tell you what she can.” His lips tightened into a thin line.

“Her brain is a piece of soggy French toast.”

He stroked his chin, and I waited as patiently as I could while men in green polo shirts and jeans unloaded a truckful of pumpkins.

“What do you want to know, Barbara?”

“For starters, I want to know who you are.”

He looked at me carefully, as if he were considering opening up to me.

I hated that he knew my family history. I felt like smashing one of his pumpkins. “See, here’s the thing. If you hadn’t messed up her head, she would have been normal, and I could have gone to Mrs. Kessler’s funeral. But the two of you wrecked all that.”

“Go easy on your mother,” he pleaded. “She’s been through hell.”

I stepped closer to him. “Do you think I’m not painfully aware of that? Who do you think took care of her after you took off?”

“I better get back to work.” He turned toward the pumpkins.

I grabbed his sleeve. “Can you just tell me how the Schines
came to own the mansion?”

Kip walked over to us. “Everything okay here?”

“Fine, I’m just seeing the lady to her car.” The Shabbos goy took my elbow.

“How do you think your mother met the Schines?”

The pressure on my elbow felt oddly reassuring. “I’ve heard the whole appendicitis story.”

“It wasn’t appendicitis.”

“Oh, please. She told that story a million times.”

“She was….” He paused. “Very sick.”

“What do you mean, very sick?”

“Depressed.”

I stopped walking. “How depressed?”

“Enough to be hospitalized.”

We stood side by side for a few seconds, staring at my car.

“That’s when the Schines found her.”

“Why was she so depressed?” I asked hoarsely.

“She lost Norman and then her dad.”

“So the Schines took care of her, and in return she gave them her mansion.” The truth came out of my mouth, bypassing my brain.

A vein pulsed in his neck. “Barbara,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Be gentle.” Again his voice was pleading. What had my mother meant to him? Not once in all these years had I considered his feelings. He’d merely existed as the person who had ruined our lives. He was done talking. I could see it in his lips, tight and locked. I opened the car door, my head whirling. He was protecting her, and like Neil, he was now shielding her from me. Everyone was forgetting that I’d been the one damaged by her affair, the one the rebbetzin had cast from the shul, from the mansion, from my home. And I was the one who’d lost my best friend.

THE SECOND WASHING

It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play.

Or rather, I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place.

– Ian McEwan,
Atonement

10

June 1974 – May 1975

R
abbi Levenstein picked me up at the San Diego airport wearing a long black coat and matching hat, his cheeks pasty white against his dark beard. He was only a couple of inches taller than me, and he had hazel eyes that changed color depending on the light. Rabbi Schine’s eyes were dark brown, nearly black, and full of fire.

“Barbara.” His voice was deep but almost apologetic, while Rabbi Schine’s was high pitched but assertive.

“Hello, Rabbi Levenstein.”

He strained to heave my two suitcases from the baggage carousel, and by the time we reached his Pontiac, his temples glistened with sweat. I’d never been to the West Coast, and I felt like I was stepping into a colorized postcard. Had I not been so homesick, it would have been thrilling. The cloudless sky was reflected in the bright blue harbor, where sailboats clanked against long white docks. Unlike Milwaukee’s maples and elms, with their enormous trunks firmly planted in the earth, lanky palm trees swayed around us, their big leaves shimmying in the breeze.

Rabbi Levenstein slammed the car door shut and pointed to the sky. “Until today, it’s been dark and cloudy. June gloom, the natives call it.”

I wondered what native would engage in conversation with a man dressed like this. His car smelled like the men’s section of the Schines’ sanctuary, the kind of body odor that burrows deep into
polyester. I wanted him to turn the car around so I could catch a flight back to Milwaukee and return to my shul, smelly men’s section and all. I concentrated on the water stretching out into the horizon, trying not to worry whether my mother had gotten out of bed today.

The Levensteins had placed a large decorative menorah on a strip of grass in front of their townhouse, which looked exactly like every other home in the complex. A picture of the Rebbe hung on the wall in the foyer, and a few remaining moving boxes, along with toy trucks and building blocks, littered a beige carpet that smelled new.

A woman, thin and tall like the rebbetzin, sat on a worn couch with her arm around a little boy with strands of hair hanging down each side of his face like drapery cords. She smiled, revealing an overbite that my father would have wanted to fix.

“I’m Sari, and this is Benny,” she said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. The rebbetzin must have been a young wife like Sari when she met my mother so many years ago, and soon Tzippy would become the wife of a young rabbi, cast out to some strange city to build an Orthodox community. In a few weeks, Tzippy would be home for her last summer before she got married, and I’d be here taking care of her cousin’s child. A riptide of longing threatened to drown me.

Sari moved her hand from her belly, not yet swollen, and motioned to a loveseat stacked with children’s books, but I sat down on the floor next to the little boy. “So you’re Benny?” I stuck my hand into my bag and pulled out two Matchbox cars I’d wrapped in bright blue paper. Benny was small for a four-year-old, and his skin looked as if he rarely played outside. On his cheek he had a light brown birthmark shaped like the state of Illinois that disappeared into a deep dimple when he smiled.

He looked at Sari, and she shook her head yes. He opened the gift deliberately, his eyes widening when he saw the cars. “Thank you,” he said without looking up.

“Aunt Rivkah was right, you’re good with four-year-olds.” I
flinched at the mention of the rebbetzin. Sari’s thick Brooklyn accent sounded just like hers, although Sari’s voice was softer.

I nodded, confirming myself as the expert. My gift with children was the one thing I never doubted, thanks to Mrs. Kessler.

Sari’s skin took on a grayish tint, and she belched into her fist and bolted toward the bathroom. Benny and I raced his new cars. I pretended to cry when mine lost, knowing this would tickle him.

When Sari recovered, she walked me down to my room in the basement, and I made up my bed, a pullout couch with a thin mattress and a blanket that smelled like mothballs. I waited until the house was quiet before I phoned home.

“Hi, Dad,” I said after he accepted my collect call. “I’m here.”

“I’ve been waiting for this very call. How was the plane ride?”

“Good. Fine, I guess.”

“California! What an adventure!” he said, trying to sound upbeat.

“I suppose. Can I talk to Mom?”

He sighed. “She turned in early.”

I pictured her sitting in bed smoking, her eyes bloodshot and barely open. I started to feel panicky; she’d been my responsibility for months, and I needed to hear her voice.