The Sacrifice of Tamar (13 page)

“And your mother, is she there?”

“My mother’s at work and I’m not allowed to open the door to anyone.”

“It’s all right, child. We can leave it on the doorstep,” Aaron Gottlieb said, the shame in the child’s voice awakening within him ghostly memories of unwanted knocks on the door, of powerlessness and undeserved disgrace.

The two little girls, well fed, well dressed, with doting parents, had no such ghosts.

“Jenny, it’s us. Open the door!” Hadassah banged imperiously.

“Yes, you don’t have to be afraid,” Tamar chimed in. “It’s just us.”

“Sha, girls, we go now,” Aaron Gottlieb said firmly, taking both of them by the hand.

Slowly the door opened.

“A
frelicht
Purim, Yehudit!” Tamar and Hadassah sang in chorus, handing her two baskets of sweets.

She took them in wonderment.

The two little girls walked in easily, looking around. Tamar took in everything with simple curiosity and without judgment, feeling strangely comfortable amid the worn and simple furnishings, while Hadassah made a mental list of everything that needed to be fixed or replaced.

“Where’s your room?” Tamar asked with a big smile.

“My bed, my little brother’s bed…” Jenny guided them.

“Ooh, little brothers,” Tamar said, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

“He’s not so bad. He’s the father when we play house, and sometimes we play dates and I even get him to take me dancing,” Jenny confided.

“Does he wear a hat? Does he take your arm like for real?” Hadassah questioned breathlessly, her mind suddenly flooded with the pleasurable possibilities of enslaving a helpless male sibling.

Jenny nodded. “And sometimes we make believe his tricycle is a taxi, and he picks me up and takes me to the ballroom in it!”

The girls sighed in satisfaction over such a lovely idea as a house where you could ride a tricycle from room to room.

“Open the baskets. My
mameh
makes the best hamantaschen. Just taste one. Go on!” Tamar pleaded, getting a little hungry. She was always a little hungry.

Jenny tore open the basket and took out the cookies. The sweet prune filling, still warm, ran down her fingers. She licked it off, smiling.

With just a tiny bit more effort, Aaron Gottlieb thought, watching her, the corners of her mouth really will touch her ears. His eyes misted, thinking of this little orphan girl—for in the Bible a child without a father was always called an orphan—alone in this dingy house with no hint of the holiday festivities taking place all over the neighborhood. G-d bless Tamar’s generous little soul, he thought, moved by the simple evidence that a child of his had absorbed so naturally and so well the values he held dearest. That she was capable at such a young age of running after a good deed, the way she had pursued this one.

“And what about the
seudah
? Are you invited, or is your
mameh
making one?” Tamar asked.

“
Seudah
?” Jenny said doubtfully.

“You know, the big party with all the food and soda…”

“And the big people drinking and drinking and going nuts…” Hadassah stuck her tongue out sideways and crossed her eyes, her fingers making fast little circles by her temples.

Aaron Gottlieb looked at her oddly, amused and appalled to hear such a description of
seudas Purim
at the great Rebbe’s illustrious table by such a reliable and intimate a source as his daughter. But he didn’t find it difficult to believe. If Hasidim were joyful and fond of drinking, singing and dancing on ordinary days, then on Purim, when ordinary Jews behaved that way, Hasidim could certainly be imagined without prejudice to fit Hadassah’s blunt but probably accurate description.

Jenny looked at her shoes.

“Perhaps you’d like to join us, at our house?” Aaron said with quick compassion.

“Oh,
Tateh!
Could she?!” Tamar hugged him and beamed at Jenny.

Jenny shook her head. “I have to pick up my brother at three…”

“You could bring him, too!” Tamar hugged her. “Please come!”

“I don’t know where you live!”

“You could also come to my house,” Hadassah said suddenly. “The car could come to get you and your little brother. Pretty please! Tamar won’t mind, would you, Tamar? You have a sister. All I have are big brothers. It’s so boring…”

“I don’t…” Aaron began. This was all getting very complicated. But there was a reason for it, he trusted. G-d never let anything happen by accident. Maybe it was all
beshert
, divine providence, after all, that the little princess and the little pauper should give each other joy this Purim. And maybe Tamar wasn’t an overweight little witch after all, but simply a
zaftig
fairy godmother. “Why don’t you and Hadassah call your mothers and ask permission? How does that sound?”

“But whose house?” Tamar piped up. “Ours or Hadassah’s?”

“I think I’ll let Jenny decide that.”

Jenny, who had expected to spend the holiday alone doing homework and counting the cars passing beneath the el, looked joyfully at the two anxious faces vying desperately for her company. Tamar had this hopeful smile on her face she hated to disappoint. But there was something mysteriously lonely about the beautiful Hadassah that touched her.

“Could Tamar come over to your house, too, Hadassah, after her own
seudah
? Then we could all play together,” Jenny suggested.

Aaron looked at her, impressed at the Solomonic compromise and utterly relieved the choice wasn’t going to be thrown into his lap. Hadassah nodded eagerly. “Then it’s all settled.” He rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. “Fine. All settled. So go downstairs to the car, girls,” he said, shooing them. When they were out of sight he hastily put some bills into an envelope and sealed it.

“Here, take. For your mother,” he told Jenny.

“Is this also part of Purim?” she asked with a fatherless child’s delicate, quivering suspicious pride.

“Yes, of course. Of course. All part of the holiday,” he assured her, tucking the envelope into her small hand.

It was no lie. Gifts for the poor. That too was Purim.

Chapter nine

On every polished surface of the Mandlebrights’ elegant home, elaborate straw and gold foil baskets rested temptingly, a cornucopia of abundant sweets, cakes, and fine wines.

“Take anything you want from the baskets,” Hadassah told Jenny and Tamar magnanimously.

“Does your
mameh
let?” asked Tamar, who knew how these things worked.

“What will we do with them? Pesach is just around the corner, and it’s all
hametz
anyway and will have to be thrown out,” she said maturely, in a perfect imitation of the rebbetzin of Kovnitz.

This sounded reasonable to both girls. Tamar dug in first and came up with a box of strictly kosher Barton’s chocolate-covered candies. Her first one was a sticky confection of caramel, chocolate, and pecans, which held her teeth together like cement. It was the most scrumptious thing she had ever tasted. She hunted greedily for more, filling her hands and the pockets of her new dress with them.

“Taste it. It’s fantabulous,” she told the others. “You’re so lucky, Hadassah.” Tamar sighed, her jaws aching in blissful agony from all that candy chewing.

Hadassah gave her an odd smile of acknowledgment and contempt. “This,” she said with queenly authority, “is no fun at all!”

Tamar, busy digging through the next basket, looked up at her in amazement. “No fun? This is no fun?”

“Don’t
you
think it’s noisy and boring?” Hadassah asked, as anxious and apologetic as only children who are very lonely can be when showing their home to potential new playmates.

“It’s like a fairy story,” Jenny said quietly with frank admiration. “Just like something you read about.”

Hadassah cocked her head and considered.

“Well, so you wanna see it all?” she asked with secret pleasure, surprised and mollified.

Jenny, Davy, and Tamar followed her through the rooms like Dorothy down the yellow brick road: wide-eyed and smiling. Jenny felt her feet sinking into the deep, soft pile of the green velvet carpeting, like nothing she had ever felt before. Other things, like paintings or furniture, a poor child can experience in places like museums and department stores. But that kind of carpeting… It was impossible to imagine such a thing unless your feet touched it in the home of someone who could afford it.

The house was filled with people. Men in satiny black
bekeshers
and fur-trimmed
shtreimels
, women in elegant long-sleeved designer discounts from local shops and new hats or wigs fresh from the
shaytlmacher
. Children roamed the house wearing costumes that ranged from store-bought Halloween clowns and cowboys to exquisite hand-sewn linen high priest’s robes, complete with fake jeweled breastplates.

Jenny stood in front of the great china closet. She held Davy’s hand, her eyes mesmerized by the sparkling riches dancing
before her eyes. There were great silver seder plates engraved with Hebrew letters and dozens of beautifully wrought silver wine cups almost encrusted with elaborate designs, a dazzling silver Chanukah menorah the size of a small tricycle, gold spice boxes in the shape of castles and flowers and small boats, and silver Sabbath candlesticks so thick she felt sure even a grown man would need both hands to lift each one. But her favorite piece was a little silver matchbox-cover to hold the matches used to light the Sabbath candles. The idea of it thrilled her. Even an ordinary box of matches could become something holy, she thought, enchanted.

“Just old junk.” Hadassah tugged at her. “Come upstairs to my room.” She ran up the steps, opened her door and threw herself facedown on her bed.

Tamar and Jenny raced after her but stopped, standing still at the threshold, just staring. The bed was a confection of pink-and-white lace, canopied and immaculate. Long shelves the full length of the wall held dolls with delicately painted porcelain heads dressed in ruffly old-fashioned long dresses and hats, the kind of dolls any little girl would sell her soul for. White wicker bookcases held row after row of books, perfectly arranged according to size.

“Oh, can I hold one?” Tamar pleaded, her eyes covetous and delighted as they devoured the dolls.

“Who cares?” Hadassah said nonchalantly. “Sure.”

It was the books that mesmerized Jenny. “What stories are they?”

“Don’t know.
Mameh
reads them to me. How the rebbetzin went to Israel and kept all the mitzvos. How the rebbe’s daughter stayed in Russia and kept all the mitzvos. How the rebbe lived in Brooklyn and kept all the mitz—”

“Don’t they have any fairies in them?” Jenny interrupted her, disappointed.

“Not fairies. Maybe a
malach
. I don’t know. I don’t like to read much,” she admitted.

“
Malachs
are angels. That’s good too. Do they have wings and golden yellow hair?”

“Wings, maybe, but I don’t remember any hair,” Hadassah said, sucking meditatively on a lock of hair.

“Oh,” Jenny sighed, crestfallen. A book without fairies with golden hair wasn’t worth much.

Still, to own a whole shelf of books, any books! She fingered them longingly. She hated the constant tension of library due dates, the threat of expensive fines, which would end her precious weekly visits. The idea of owning your own shelf of books was simply magical.

“I love fairies,” she sighed. “Books with castles and enchanted forests. But I guess if I lived here”—she looked longingly around the room—“I guess I wouldn’t read so much either.”

Hadassah pondered that uncertainly.

“Why would you want to live anyplace else but your own house?” Tamar asked, puzzled.

“Nothing ever happens at your own house!” Hadassah flounced down petulantly, carelessly creasing her beautiful bedspread, pulling all the lace-covered pillows into her lap.

“Lots of things happen!” Tamar protested.

“Like what?”

“Like… like… like Ed Sullivan!”

“Who’s he?” Hadassah asked.

“You don’t watch Ed Sullivan on TV?”

“We don’t have a TV.”

“We don’t either,” admitted Jenny. “But my ma says she might get one on time and pay out for it…”

“We’ll never get one, my father says. He says it’s
toeva
,” Haddassah informed them.

“What’s that mean?” Jenny asked.

“It means disgusting, like bowing down to idols. Anything really fun is
toeva
,” Hadassah said morosely.

“My father says the TV is silly,
narishkeit
, but it makes him laugh,” Tamar contributed.

“Your father watches TV?” Hadassah asked incredulously. The very thought of a father doing something so frivolous and relaxing was beyond her experience. She never saw her father do anything she remotely considered fun, oddly discounting his participation in the daily joyous singing and dancing of his Hasidim. That, she considered, was simply part of his job.

“Sure. Sid Caesar.
The Sixty-four-Thousand-Dollar Question. I Love Lucy
. . .”

“But what else? What else isn’t boring?” Hadassah persisted.

“My sister, Rivkie. Playing house and jumping rope, and playing queen and servant…” Tamar went on, oblivious of Hadassah’s eyes narrowing into envious little slits.

“You’re so lucky. I wish I had a sister. I wish I did,” Jenny said.

“Well, Rivkie isn’t…” Tamar’s face reddened with the effort of telling unpleasant truths. “She doesn’t always play. She goes out a lot. And sometimes she hits me…”

“Do you hit her back?” Hadassah asked, her eyes losing their malevolent shine.

Tamar, who had tried to hit Rivkie back a number of times and had come out much the worse for it and now usually hid or ran to her mother, began feeling inadequate and defensive. “Just sometimes,” she said slowly.

“I wouldn’t let anybody boss me.” Hadassah bristled, suddenly wishing she had an older sister who would try. Her brothers were in the yeshiva most of the day, and when she did see them they were adoring or, at worst, mildly teasing. They would never have dreamed of laying a hand on her. This, at the moment, seemed to her a terrible injustice, part of what made life so boring.