Good Harbor (6 page)

But this dry spell was starting to feel like the Sahara. Joyce was tapped out and
pissed off that it was up to her to make the effort, start the conversation, take
the initiative. Wasn’t it Frank’s turn yet?

Oh, well. At least she wasn’t as bad off as the women in her book group. Nina was
a pain in the ass, but soccer was going to get her daughter through the “Ophelia”
years. Frank was not stupid or hostile. Hell, she’d bought a house in Gloucester.

It’s all relative, right? Joyce thought. And things are relatively good.

Then she remembered the blank, almost frightened expressions on her friends’ faces
when she’d said “romance novel.” Not one of them had asked the name of her book. Not
even Alice.

Joyce brushed her teeth, swallowed two aspirin, and picked up
Anna Karenina
again. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way.” Joyce couldn’t remember if that sentence had seemed wise when she’d read it
in college.

She left the book on the couch and crawled into bed, careful not to wake Frank. She
tucked herself into the far side of the comforter and thought about her book group.
Compared to them, her family seemed rock solid. But Joyce wasn’t so sure she would
go as far as “happy.”

KATHLEEN COULDN’T
remember the last time she had used the Sabbath candlesticks. Buddy’s parents had
worked in the store seven days a week, so her husband had no childhood attachment
to the Friday-night rituals of wine and bread and candles. But Kathleen loved the
weekly celebration she’d studied in her conversion class, especially the candles.
As a little girl she’d looked after her grandmother’s votives, which burned in every
room, sending up prayers to the Blessed Mother, to Saint Jude, to Saint Teresa, the
Little Flower. At Christmas, there were red and green candles everywhere — even the
bathroom.

She welcomed the Jewish routine and made it her own. Every week when Hal and Jack
were growing up, she’d polished the candlesticks, warmed a challah bread in the oven,
and polished the sideboard with lemon oil. Her sons told her they still associated
those smells with Fridays.

Holding a match to the bottoms so they would stay in place, Kathleen wondered if her
candle lighting was for Jewish purposes or out of Catholic nostalgia, but decided
it made no difference. “Light is a symbol of the Divine,” she said, quoting a line
from a long-ago sisterhood Sabbath service.

Kathleen had cooked Buddy’s favorite dinner, the fat grams be damned: orange-glazed
chicken, pan-fried potatoes, green beans, and chocolate mousse. When he saw the container
of cream on the counter, he said, “Trying to get rid of me, eh?”

“Well, now that I’m going to live to be ninety, I thought I’d find myself a younger
fella,” she said from inside Buddy’s lingering hug. “I do have a favor to ask, though.”

“That mink coat you’ve been hinting at?”

“I won’t need that until November,” she said, teasing back. “But I would like to go
to temple tonight.”

Kathleen had converted to Judaism the week before they married, thirty-three years
earlier. It didn’t bother Buddy that Kathleen Mary Elizabeth McCormack wasn’t Jewish.
He had been one of a handful of Jewish kids growing up in Gloucester. The working-class
Italian and Portuguese boys in school never bothered him about being different, maybe
because he was a head taller than most of them. For Buddy, Judaism was a matter of
holiday foods and honoring his parents’ traditions. But Mae and Irv Levine both wept
for joy when Kathleen told them she was going to convert.

It hadn’t felt like a momentous decision to Kathleen at the time. Catholicism had
stopped making sense to her at the age of fourteen, and no one in her own family had
objected to her becoming Jewish. The grandmother who would certainly have objected,
and loudly, on the grounds of Kathleen’s immortal soul, was dead by the time she got
married. Kathleen had no memory of her father, who had walked out when she was three.
She didn’t recall her mother saying anything, but then, her poor mother seemed congenitally
unable to object to any awful thing life laid in her lap. As a teenager, Kathleen
had secretly prayed, “Please, God, make me be different from my mother.”

Pat heard her calling to religious life in college and was Sister Pat by the time
Kathleen met Buddy. Pat wrote a long letter wishing her sister “shalom in her new
spiritual home” and, on the day of Kathleen’s conversion, sent a dozen long-stemmed
roses, a huge extravagance back then.

Rabbi Flacks, the perpetually tired man who tried to teach her the Hebrew alphabet,
took her for a perfunctory ritual dunk in a tiny pool in the basement of a run-down
Boston synagogue. Afterward, in the parking lot, with her hair still wet, Buddy gave
her a simple, gold Star of David on a chain. She’d worn it at their wedding, at the
boys’ circumcisions and bar mitzvahs, during the Jewish holidays, and whenever she
went to temple — even if only for a committee meeting. She had worn it to her one
and only job interview, too.

They had joined Temple Beth Israel in Gloucester when the boys started kindergarten.
Kathleen drove them to religious school faithfully and even worked on a few fund-raisers,
but Buddy didn’t like going to services. He said he found the seashore more spiritual,
and he wasn’t interested in the social life of the congregation. He would have let
their membership lapse long ago, but Kathleen kept paying the dues.

She was attached to the place. Buddy’s folks had been there for the bar mitzvahs,
basking in the reflected glory of their grandsons’ performances. The organ played
the same melody when each of her boys carried the Torah scroll up and down the center
aisle in the sanctuary. Leading that joyful pageant, they clutched the blue velvet
covers with white knuckles. They were very different, her boys: Hal serious, Jack
sunny. But for their bar mitzvahs, they’d been identically proud and nervous in their
brand-new suits, identically self-conscious and fearless of their changing voices.

Patty had been there both times, too. She and Mae and Irv had blown their noses after
Hal’s speech, and the sound of their combined honk had brought down the house. Whenever
Kathleen walked into Beth Israel’s long, spare sanctuary, she remembered the three
of them sitting in the front pew, laughing and crying together.

Mae and Irv had been buried out of that sanctuary, too. And Danny. Had she worn the
star for Danny’s funeral? She couldn’t remember.

Buddy didn’t say anything about the reappearance of challah and candles. He stood
close to her, his arm pressed against hers, as she bowed her head. She closed her
eyes and remembered how Hal and Jack used to fight over who got to blow out the match.
“Knock it off, monsters,” she had said every Friday. “Time to kiss and make up.”

She turned to her husband. “Time to kiss and make up, eh, Bud?” He held on to her
until the kitchen timer went off.

On their way to the temple, Kathleen played with her necklace, running the star up
and down the chain absently. They hadn’t been to services there for well over a year;
they’d been visiting Hal in California last High Holidays, which was pretty much the
only time they went anymore, and they still hadn’t met the new rabbi.

According to the article in the local paper, she was just a few years out of rabbinical
school. Kathleen had meant to attend one of the get-acquainted coffees when she was
first hired, but somehow the dates had slipped her mind, as had the new rabbi’s name.

“Rabbi Michelle Hertz.” It was posted on the sign outside the building. “Let’s see
if she’s better than Avis,” Buddy said as they walked in. Kathleen didn’t even bother
to roll her eyes.

At least forty people were in the sanctuary. “Pretty good crowd,” Buddy whispered.
The congregation swelled in July and August, when the summer people showed up, but
in May it was still just the locals.

Kathleen and Buddy settled into what had always been Irv’s High Holiday pew, fourth
from the front on the left, and waited for the service to start. Kathleen folded her
hands, lowered her head, closed her eyes, and prayed, “Thank You.”

Buddy took her hand and kept his eyes on their interlaced fingers, so neither of them
noticed the rabbi walk to the lectern. They looked up when she started to sing. Her
unaccompanied voice, reedy but pleasant, delivered a tune familiar from the boys’
years in Sunday school. “Shalom Aleichem,” she sang.

After one stanza, the rabbi waved for the congregation to join in. After a second
solo verse, she stopped and shook her finger at them. “I’m warning you, I don’t start
the service until everyone is singing, and I don’t mind singing all night. There’s
a transliteration on page seventy-nine, and we can even do it without words.” She
was smiling, but it was clear she meant business.

Rabbi Michelle Hertz was in her late twenties, Kathleen decided; nice looking, with
a heart-shaped face, big brown eyes. No discernible makeup. Her yarmulke was a boxy,
multicolored third-world cap pinned onto dark curls pulled back into a low ponytail.
Her prayer shawl, though, was the kind worn by old men in Orthodox synagogues, black-and-white
and very big. How traditional, Kathleen thought, especially compared to the last rabbi’s
bare head, black robe, and skinny, little prayer shawl that had always reminded her
of a priest’s stole.

After four more stanzas that included a lot of “Yi-dee-di,” everyone was singing.
Even Ida Rubelsky, who wore a hat and gloves to services, though much of the crowd
was in sweaters and jeans.

Smiling approval, Rabbi Hertz slowed the tempo, ended the song, and asked the congregation
to turn to the prayer book and read with her.

The old
Union Prayer Book
was gone, replaced by a softcover book in which God had changed from
He
to
You.
As though God were sitting across the table, close enough to ask to please pass the
salt. There seemed to be more Hebrew in this book, a language that would always remain
an inaccessible mystery to Kathleen. Her only D in school had been in Spanish, an
everlasting shame. But the English translations were graceful, and the singing more
than made up for her distance from the Hebrew.

Kathleen smiled at the rabbi’s performance. Or maybe that wasn’t the right word for
it. It occurred to her that Michelle Hertz might be a good match for Hal, if Hal were
interested in women. She suspected that might be why he lived out in California. Thinking
about her son, Kathleen sighed. Buddy cast a concerned eye in her direction; she reassured
him with a pat on the arm and turned her attention to the readings.

The service was so unusual that even Buddy was still paying attention when they got
to the sermon, if you could call it that.

Rabbi Hertz hiked the prayer shawl over her shoulders and came down from the altar.
“This is one of everybody’s favorite Torah portions,” she said, walking up and down
the aisles, handing out copies of the weekly Bible reading, smiling as she made eye
contact.

“This is the part where God gives Miriam leprosy for yelling at her little brother,
who just happens to be Moses, who is — like it or not — God’s all-time favorite human
being.”

The rabbi made her way back to the pulpit and said, “This section has always bothered
me. I mean, Aaron does exactly the same thing as his sister, but he gets off without
so much as a mosquito bite! So who wants to read the first verse?”

Ida Rubelsky stood, adjusted her hat, and in a pungent North Shore accent rhymed
Hazeroth
with
Reheboth
and intoned the name of the “Laud.” She read on and on, ignoring the rabbi’s frequent
“Thank yous.”

Buddy whispered, “I haven’t had this much fun at temple since I was seven and my grandmother
nodded off and fell out of her seat.”

The rabbi finally got Ida to stop and returned to the top of the page, soliciting
comments about Moses’ relationship to God, Miriam’s “raw deal,” and the reason why
it took seven days for her to heal. After extracting a few tentative remarks, Rabbi
Hertz eased into her own interpretation of the story.

“Let’s assume for a moment that Aaron isn’t a bad guy,” she said. “He doesn’t run
off congratulating himself on his good luck while Miriam’s skin turns white and she
goes to solitary confinement for a week. Let’s imagine that Aaron is horrified by
what happened to his sister, and that he suffers for her.