Mount Terminus (12 page)

*   *   *

Jacob didn't return to the house at the wane of day. As he did every year on this sixth day of Yamim Noraim, he collected the trimmings he had cut from his topiary and bundled them in twine; he unearthed the juniper saplings he had planted the year before, gathered his candles and his lanterns, the jug of water and sack of oats, and carried his cargo to the stables. On this third twilight before the Day of Atonement, however, he remained in the gardens after the sun set, and continued to stay there into the night. He refused Meralda's overtures to come in for the dinner that would fortify him for his fast, and he refused her again later when she begged him to take shelter from the winds. Bloom watched over Jacob from the tower's pavilion until a dry electrical storm cracked the black glass of the sky. He descended the tower stairs and walked out into the flashing light, to where Jacob knelt at the feet of the sculpted shrub staring out over the promontory. Please, Father, he said, the storm. He took his father by the hand and tugged at the weight of his arm. The elder Rosenbloom wouldn't lift his head to look at his son, but with his eyes turned away, he rose to his feet and allowed himself to be led away. Bloom sat him down in the drawing room and poured him a drink, which he placed into his father's hand. He then ran upstairs to the gallery and retrieved his pipe and pouch of tobacco. When he returned to the parlor, he emptied the bowl the way he had observed his father do it so many times before, with three gentle taps to the side of the silver tray. He dipped his fingers into the pouch and pinched enough of the moist leaves to fill the pipe; he struck a match and puffed at the lip—three small kisses—then sucked in his cheeks in the same manner his father did when he breathed the smoke into his body. When the burning smoke hit the back of his throat, he wanted to cough it out, but he suppressed the urge—no more than a hiccup sounded from him—and he blew out a steady stream, did it again, this time allowing the smoke to enter into him without so much as a sniffle.

This performance of Bloom's amused his father. With the most melancholy of eyes and the most joyful of smiles, he said, You have been watching me, I see.

Yes, said Bloom as he placed the pipe into his father's palm.

Joseph Rosenbloom, said his father, look at you. You've become a man.

Yes, Father.

Yes, my dear. Yes, indeed.

Bloom removed his father's shoes and tucked a blanket around his legs. A loud clap of thunder rattled the windows, and when it quieted, Bloom knelt beside the elder Rosenbloom and said, Father, I worry about you.

His father tried to hold Bloom's gaze, but he couldn't. He tried to find the courage to say what Bloom needed to hear, but he could only say with his son's face so near to his, My dear Joseph. My gift from God. And the elder Rosenbloom could say no more.

Please, said Bloom, don't leave until morning. If you leave in the morning, I will go with you, as always.

Jacob smiled at his son and drank down his brandy, and with his sunken eyes, he looked up at Bloom, and Bloom without saying another word stood up, took the tumbler from his father's hand, and poured him another drink, thinking if he could get him drunk enough, he would fall asleep in his chair and be safe until the storm passed. And then it occurred to him how he might do just this. Don't move, said Bloom. I have a gift for you. And Bloom ran off again, this time to the library, where he retrieved the magic lantern and the box of slides on which he had been laboring. He unpacked the magic lantern and set it up on the table behind his father's chair. He then lit the lantern's lamp and extinguished the lights of the drawing room. You recall, said Bloom, you asked me some time ago to illustrate
Death, Forlorn
?

I do, yes.

I'd like to share it with you now, if I may.

Please do.

Bloom opened the wooden box and removed the first slide, that of the couple standing under a wedding chuppah, gazing into each other's eyes. He slipped it into the slot before the flame and removed the lens cap to reveal his mother and his father.

Look how beautiful you've made us. Jacob turned his face to the light, and there Bloom saw the pride in his eyes. I have never seen such lines, he said. Never. He blinked, and blinked again, then returned his gaze to the image, and on Bloom went through the entire box, and when he was through and had brightened the lights, his father wept openly in front of him for the first time since his mother died.

*   *   *

That night the desert winds mixed with storm clouds from the sea. They gathered over the great basin and pressed their combined forces onto Mount Terminus. Bloom sat beside his father, filled his glass several more times, and together, in silence, they listened to the intemperate mood of the world. A hard driving rain began to lash at the villa, and when it did, the lines that had etched themselves onto his father's brow and around the corners of his eyes appeared to soften, and Bloom was able to see in him an image of the much younger, more vibrant man they had just observed in his slides, an image in which his father's features were still fine, in which he wore a suit and tie, his hair slicked back, his fingernails buffed, his shoes shined. His father soon dozed off, and when he did, a calm came over Bloom, and in that calm, he felt weary. He dimmed the lights of the parlor to a blue glow and, for the first time in a long time, he retired to his bed, where he counted the passing seconds between the lightning flashes that brightened his room and the thunderclaps that followed them. And as the storm began to subside, he drifted off to sleep.

*   *   *

The sun had long since risen when Bloom was startled awake by an explosion of shattering glass. A paroxysm of wind had blown one of his bedroom windows around the axis of its hinges to crash against the wall. The young man dressed and put on his shoes. He walked over the glimmering shards to discover the latch had snapped. The rain had ceased and the skies had cleared. The fiery desert heat, it appeared, had overpowered the moisture from the sea. Bloom looked out over the courtyard and down the path of paving stones under which their water now flowed, and there he saw an odd sight. He saw their mare attempting to shake off a long rope lassoed to its neck. With the rope dragging under her, the mare galloped up the path and through the pergola and came to a halt at the reflecting pool. She looked up at Bloom and for a long time stared at him with obsidian eyes, then as quickly as she approached, she turned and galloped off in the direction from which she came. When Bloom saw her turn toward the front of the estate, he ran down the landing, calling out to his father. He ran downstairs and into the parlor, where he had left him. Jacob's blanket had been pushed aside, the tumbler from which he drank, with which Bloom had plied him with drink, the pipe, were just where the young Rosenbloom had left them, but no father. Meralda called out from the kitchen, asking what had happened, but Bloom ignored her and ran out onto the drive and into the maze of the garden, calling out at every turn, Father! and when he reached the plots in the garden where the elder Rosenbloom had appointed his topiary, Bloom discovered, with a deepening sense of dread, that each figure his father had spent perfecting all these years, each and every figure he had communed with in his irreparable state of grief, had been irreparably damaged. Their limbs torn from their torsos. Their torsos torn at the waist. Their heads severed at the neck. When he exited the maze of the first garden, he entered the maze of the second and found the same devastation. Father! he called out. And when he exited this garden, he noticed the mare standing on the promontory. She no longer was trying to shake herself free from her rope. She just stood there, her long neck tipping into the ravine. Bloom approached the mare with some caution, and when he had reached her, he saw the outer edge of the headland had fallen away. He advanced toward the precipice and looked down, and there he saw some twenty yards into the chasm a deposit of mud mixed with brush and rock, and rising up out of this, a shoulder and an outstretched arm, both of which remained perfectly still. As soon as he comprehended what he was looking at and what had happened, Bloom averted his eyes, and when he did, he noticed, standing beside a motorcar at a turn on the road, the three men in dark long coats holding against their chests their bowler hats.

He should have wanted to scream out at them, to curse them, shame them, chase them down, but he couldn't, he simply couldn't, and not because he was afraid, rather, because contrary to what he was supposed to have felt at this moment in which his worst fear had been made real, he was overtaken by a profound feeling of release. He could feel the intensity of his father's torment lift. He could sense it being swept out to sea by the desert winds. Vaporized by the heat. It was wrong, it was all wrong, but Bloom, who was, indeed, doing his best to struggle against this deviant emotion, couldn't help himself.

The euphoria outweighed him.

 

PART II

LIFE

 

 

 

Meralda wept. And wept. And wept. She sat vigil at the promontory's edge for a day and a half until the sheriff arrived with two deputies and a mule. They dragged the elder Rosenbloom out of the ravine and set his broken body on the dining room table. There she continued to weep at his side until the gravediggers, along with the rabbi and three members of the
chevra kadisha—
tailors all—entered through Mount Terminus's blackened gate. Roya led the men carrying picks and shovels to the burial site. The rabbi, who was forbidden by religious law to sit in the same dwelling as the dead, consoled Meralda in the courtyard. The tailors, meanwhile, performed the
tahara
. They lifted Jacob into a metal basin and lit candles all around. They covered the remains with a shroud and disposed of the dirty clothes, all the time careful not to breach the space over his body where the soul was believed to make its departure. They carried in pails of water and washed him clean; they wrapped him in a tallith and cocooned him in knotted linen, recited at the end
Tahara he Tahara he Tahara he
. He is pure. He is pure. He is pure.
Jacob, orphaned child, we ask forgiveness from you if we did not treat you respectfully, but we did as is our custom. May you be a messenger for all of Israel. Go in peace, rest in peace, and arise in your turn at the end of days.
Bloom, all this time, sat with Roya in the rose garden, watching the two bearded gravediggers labor into the earth. The young Rosenbloom couldn't fathom the idea of burying his father's remains inside the garden labyrinths among his dismembered creatures. He chose instead to walk about the estate until he was drawn to the right burial place. For the day and a half he waited for the sheriff to arrive, for that one day more he waited for the rabbi and his cohort, he walked and went without sleep, until he heard in his delirium through the rushes of wind the faintest whisper of his name, so faint, he disregarded it as a figment and began to move on. But he then heard it again, again as if his name had been spoken by the currents of air, and this time he turned around, and found nothing, only roses, clustered and swaying, red upon yellow upon white upon red, roses set against strata of veined rock and blue sky. The garden radiated outward in concentric circles at the center of which rose up Cupid and Psyche fixed in marble embrace. The desert wind again swept over Mount Terminus, but this time Joseph didn't hear his name; rather, this time, a short burst of sunlight reflected into his eyes. He now wandered into the garden, to the source of the light, followed one of the gravel paths that joined the circles at each quarter turn, and when he reached the innermost ring—the one whose circumference enclosed the naked angel holding in his arms his love sleeping the Sleep of Death—he stepped onto a bed of red petals disseminated from their buds, and walked onto nests of thorny stalks uprooted in the storm, and there at Psyche's lifeless feet, he decided, was where he would bury his lifeless father. Here, on the last day of Yamim Noraim, on the morning before the sun would set onto Yom Kippur, on the day he and his father would have atoned at the lakeshore, they all gathered. Here, the rabbi sent his father on his way with a few prayers and a few kind words about a man he didn't know. And beginning with Bloom, they each emptied a fistful of dry earth over the linen shroud, and left the gravediggers to their chore.

*   *   *

As the small processional wound its way out of the rose garden on the day of Jacob's funeral, Roya handed Bloom a note.
It is time for you to lead the way
. Every day for seven weeks, Roya followed him to the headland overlooking the ravine that had swallowed Jacob Rosenbloom, and every day for seven weeks, Bloom recited the mourner's prayer he had heard his father recite for his mother; and every day for seven weeks, Roya followed him back to the villa, to his bedroom, where she sat with him and fed him his meals. At night, she remained at his bedside. She reclined in an armchair set under a shrouded mirror, and watched him sleep, and if he stirred, she moved to the edge of his mattress to stroke his hair until he settled back to rest. And if he became restless from a disturbing dream, she pursed her lips and blew on his neck until his body was once again still.

One night when Bloom felt this pleasant sensation, he extended his arm until his hand had reached the source of the breeze, and felt in his grasp a soft fabric, beneath which his fingers discovered the weight and warmth of some tender and unfamiliar thing. He was neither awake nor asleep when he opened his eyes, but when he saw his hand had become acquainted with the rise of Roya's chest, he grew more alert in all the ways one expects a young man to do so. His silent companion sat at the edge of the bed, and he could make out, in the glow of gaslight, her eyes shut and her hand hidden under the pleats of her skirt. She occasionally drew in a sharp breath through her nose and arched her back, not pulling away from Joseph, as he expected she would, but, rather, the more the bed shuddered with the small motions of her concealed hand, the harder she pressed herself into his palm. Bloom thought he saw her mouth frown a rictus of disapproval at his unconscious act, but he soon became aware of the spirited pulse in her chest. The bed continued to tremble and the more vibrant the movement, the more shallow Roya's breaths. The motion and the excitement he saw flare on her nose, in the shape of her lips, he could sense, was building to something; to precisely what, he didn't know, but in that instance she appeared as if she were going to speak. For the first time, he believed he would hear Roya's voice bellow an animalistic howl or screech. It was for this, with great anticipation, he waited, wondered with some excitement as to what the sound would be. But when the moment arrived, other than the respiration from her lungs and the rhythmic creak of the chair, Roya produced no sound at all. Instead, a silent tremor radiated over her entire musculature. Her body contracted in on itself. Her lips quivered. The tendons in her neck attenuated. Her free hand clenched into a fist. And then, an aftershock, and then one more, each new tremor diminished in strength from the one preceding it. And then, a deep inhalation, expressed in one last audible breath. And then, calm. And then, silence. Her eyes now opened, awakening the darkness with their light, and when her sight adjusted to the dim luster of the burning gas lamps, and she saw Bloom had borne witness to her pleasure, she reacted with the same composure she reacted to the most joyful and most tragic of events. With placid temper, she reached for his wrist and gently pulled his hand away so the tips of his fingers relaxed and skimmed over the nub of her breast. And with this, she did what she did with any other nocturnal disturbance: she stroked away the hair from the young Rosenbloom's eyes and brushed her fingers over his cheek, to say, in her way, he had done nothing for which he needed to be forgiven. And neither had she.