Jonathan? Wasn’t he talking about Vietnam? Even in Cambridge, this was almost embarrassing. The poem was almost—well, it was sort of on the nose for a memorial service, wasn’t it? And it went on and on. Such was the case with Lou’s antiwar poetry, predating his late, great pared-down lyrics, the new minimalism which charmed before it stung.
Even as Lou recited, Emily rose from her seat and hurried down the aisle. Whispers rustled under Lou’s clarion voice.
Jess and Richard looked at each other past Heidi who sat between them, and their eyes said: Should I go after her? No, let me. I will.
Had Emily overheard Chaya Zylberfenig talking? What had Emily heard? Jess rushed to the lobby, where she found her sister standing still and pale.
“What happened?” Jess pleaded.
“Nothing.”
“Do you want to go? Was it something Lou said?”
“No.” Emily pushed open the glass lobby doors. “I just want to be alone, okay?”
“You were right, you shouldn’t have come,” Jess fretted.
“I’m glad I came,” Emily said grimly.
Then for the first time, Jess was afraid Emily would wander off and hurt herself. “Where are you going? Don’t go out there by yourself.”
Close-lipped, Emily smiled at the idea that Jess could come along, that anyone could travel with her to this new hell. The pain was entirely new, when she reconsidered all that went before. Where there had been no body, she’d held fast to Jonathan’s spirit. And now?
He had given her an enormously expensive ring, but she had given him information worth more than any diamond. She remembered his silence as they lay together in the dark and she told him about fingerprinting. He’d tried to stop her. He was overwhelmed, moved, shocked that she would say so much. Was that because he knew he could not resist making electronic fingerprinting his? Did he already know he would steal her idea?
But the idea had not been hers to tell. If she was accusing Jonathan, she should indict herself as well. Fingerprinting had belonged to Alex. Indeed, it belonged to Alex now. Even now, at Veritech, Alex continued to research fingerprinting for a project his team was developing to check for spyware: a project Emily herself had named Verify. What would Alex do when he heard what Jonathan had done? You were right, Jonathan, she told herself. You were right all along. You win. I’m just like you. You betrayed me, but I betrayed Alex first. She stood on the plaza in front of Kresge, and these ideas spread like poison through her body, numbing her fingers and toes, darkening her vision, blackening the sun.
29
That night, Richard sat with Jess at the kitchen table and he said, “Your sister’s been through enough.”
“She has to find out sometime,” Jess said, and unconsciously Richard glanced up at the ceiling, thinking of Emily upstairs. “Were you really planning to keep us in the dark forever?”
“You treat this as some life-changing revelation,” Richard said. “It’s not. It doesn’t change anything about you.”
“Yes, it does! This means that I have Jewish aunts! Chaya Zylberfenig and Freyda Helfgott. And Rabbi Helfgott is my uncle! Why didn’t you tell us?”
Heidi poured three mugs of herbal tea.
“You shouldn’t have kept a secret like that,” Jess accused her father.
Richard met her angry gaze. “It wasn’t my secret. Your mother didn’t want you or your sister to have any contact with those people.”
“Those people are our family,” said Jess. “Even if they’re religious mystics and they look different and act different from you and me.”
Then Richard struggled a little with himself. He tried to speak and stopped. Heidi stood behind his chair and kneaded his shoulders with her small hands until he put his hands up onto hers. “When they found out your mother had married a non-Jew, they sat in mourning for seven days. When she chose to marry me, they declared her dead.”
“And Mom took that name—Gillian? And she went by Gold instead of Gould?”
“She wanted a free life,” said Richard. “She wanted to choose her own husband. She wanted a musical career.”
“Yes, but—”
“She associated those people with pain.”
“But you could have told
“I did what she asked,” Richard said. “She felt that they were dangerous, and I agreed with her.”
Upstairs, Emily stirred in her twin bed in the guest room. She heard the voices below and opened her eyes in the half-light shining through the open door.
She heard her father’s voice: “Your mother and I …” and … “Yes, these Bialystokers are open and welcoming to everyone outside, but they have another attitude toward those within the fold, and that attitude is repressive to the—”
“Dad.”
“I would not violate your mother’s last wish—”
“Her last wish!” Jess raised her voice. “Her last wish was, ‘Don’t tell my daughters who I really am’?”
“No, you don’t understand. She knew exactly who she was. All she asked was that I conceal who she’d been.”
“But who you were fits inside of who you are. Can’t you see that?” Jess cried out.
Then Heidi said, “You’ll wake the children.”
But the little girls slept on upstairs. Only Emily lay awake, heart pounding in the dark.
Catharsis was for strangers. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel least went to sleep that night chastened, but cleansed, blessed to come home to their own families and lie down in their own beds. Those who knew Jonathan and Mel best left the memorial service uncomforted. The memorial was something they suffered for the sake of others. They themselves felt queasy at Sorel’s “Hallelujah.” A service in October was too soon. A service next October might be too soon.
Barbara slept. Whenever possible, she slept upstairs, escaping her relatives from Philly, her divorced younger sister with her autistic foster child, a sweet ten-year-old named Dominique who whooped more often than she spoke, and wouldn’t sit in chairs. Barbara outslept her dearest friends, the ones who brought My Grandma’s of New England Coffee Cakes and wept in her kitchen, declaring that Mel never hurt anyone, realizing that the world was unfair.
She appreciated Rabbi Zylberfenig’s approach, proactive from his first visit in September, when he had arrived with a roll of blue duct tape. All that morning he had taped sheets over the numerous mirrors in Barbara’s bathrooms. “This is traditional in a Jewish home of mourning,” he had explained.
After the memorial service, even as Barbara was finishing breakfast, the rabbi drove over to study sacred texts with Barbara and whichever relatives and friends showed up.
“Mom,” Annie whispered when she spied Zylberfenig through the kitchen window. “Does he have to come here every day?”
