A Town of Empty Rooms Read online

  She passed a building, a plain, concrete box with deep blue stained glass windows and golden doors. The name Temple Shalom was written over the doors.

  The royal blue of the stained glass windows and the gleaming gold door lent the simple building the exaggerated, grand aura particular to all religious institutions, as though its structure could somehow contain the varied, raw longings of its congregants. It was the only synagogue she had seen in the city, surrounded by the vast, modern church compounds — Baptist, Catholic, A.M.E. Zion.

  She drove past the building once, paused, turned around. She did not feel Jewish, or interested in God at all, really, and in New York she would have walked by this building without another thought. But this was the only building here that seemed at all familiar to her. She stopped the car, unbuckled the car seats, and coaxed Zeb and Rachel out. Stepping into the converted basement, she said, “Hello?” to the air.

  A man wearing a yarmulke walked in. He was a tall, taut man, and his hair was a lush, glossy brown. His skin was the color of caramel. The room was dim and quiet; he looked surprised that anyone was coming inside.

  “Rabbi Josh Golden!” he said, as though he had just decided this. He looked to be about forty-five, though there was something in his face that looked younger; his arms appeared stiff and muscular under his blazer, as though he was preparing to combat his congregants’ myriad spiritual doubts. “Who are we welcoming here?”

  “Serena Hirsch. This is Zeb and Rachel. I just need directions to Old Oak Street,” Serena said. “The kids are hungry and — ”

  “Hi, hungry kids,” he said, kneeling beside them. He rose and stepped into a closet and brought out some chocolate coins. “Leftover gelt. Can they have some?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  The children grabbed the gold coins and began eating them, ravenous.

  The rabbi stood and smiled at her. He regarded her in a peculiar way, as though she were both right in front of him and a window, and through her was a place unexpected and beautiful, a pristine outline of a lake. She turned around to see what he was looking at, but she saw only a slightly peeling wall.

  “Where are you from, Serena?” he asked.

  “We just moved from New York,” she said. “I’m trying to find Old Oak.”

  “You’re almost there,” he said. With a pencil, he drew a little map on the back of a Temple Bulletin. “You just have to turn back onto Sycamore and make that left on Haynes. That’s a left that a lot of people miss.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and meant it.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. His eyes were dark and blue and so intent she looked away from them briefly. He smiled. It was as though he contained something, not sunlight, but an essence just as illuminating. “You should come and join the festivities!”

  They all stared at the dim, silent room.

  “Where?” asked Zeb, squinting.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Thank you again.”

  He shook her hand. His grip encased her hand completely for a moment, and then he released it.

  THEY KNEW NO ONE IN Waring, and now she and Dan did not know each other. Once the children were asleep and the house had settled into a sort of quiet save the shudders of the dishwasher and dryer and the children’s mournful calls for juice, she and Dan assumed the grim, silent chore of avoiding each other. That night, after she had sent out another resume, she stood by the kitchen door, watching Dan read his files. She wanted to go to him, to touch his shoulder, his hair, but there was a warning, a stiffness in his shoulders that had become more pronounced, a wall against her, in the last year. He had had a loss of his own eight months before; he had learned of the death of his older brother. Harold had not been in contact with the family for years. He had been wandering the globe and was in a car accident, and after Dan found out, he, a publicist, a tall, talkative, optimistic man, seemed encased in ice. Serena had tried to figure out what might comfort him, tried to help him talk or not talk, remember Harold or not, but he did not want to engage with anyone at all. She tried to hold him at night, and sometimes they clutched each other, silent, but the sun rose and they stumbled forward, separate, into their days.

  And then she had walked into Saks. She had tried to explain that she had thought perhaps that the gathering of diamonds and silver might actually help them when the country fell apart, that she had been nobly preparing to take all of them as they resettled in some new country, but now this plan did not sound practical as much as insane. He had no idea why she had done this, and neither did she. She had not been able to stop herself those few days with the credit cards; she had not been able to think about the regular rules of commerce because the death seemed to break every rule she knew. But Dan seemed to be waiting for something to answer his outrage, and, unfortunately, it was this. He became silent after the credit cards, the move, as though with this action, she had betrayed him.

  She stood, by the door, waiting for him to look up; he stared at his files, determined. “Dan,” she said, feeling his name, familiar, but flat, just a word, on her lips. “Would you like to go to services Friday? There’s a temple here. I thought we could go.”

  She heard herself and was embarrassed; it sounded ridiculous, as though she were asking him on a date. It occurred to her that marriage was, in its distinctive currents, almost like dating, but with the same person, over and over; they had each shifted over the years, in ways both hopeful and otherwise, and now this person sat in their kitchen, in this house where they both lived, and it was almost as though she was introducing herself to him for the first time.

  He glanced up. The yellow kitchen light shaded his face. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “It’s somewhere to go,” she said. “Maybe we’ll like it.” She was oddly shy saying we.

  “You can go.”

  “You don’t want to?” she asked.

  “Why would I want to?” he said. All right — that was clear. There was a deflation in her chest, the fading of hope that he would say something that would remind her that he harbored some sort of love for her — but he did not, and she crossed the room in the silence that made it seem that there was no one there.

  SHE WALKED IN, ALONE, TO the Temple that Friday. In the front room there was a silk shawl with a Chagall print spread over a section of water damage — an attached note said that the damage was from Hurricane Fran and they had not yet been able to repair it; she looked at the framed glass pictures of the tiny Bar/Bat Mitzvah classes — sometimes with just one child a year. The room had an elaborate feeling of cleanliness, as though what the room lacked in grandeur would be made up for in soap. An ancient hunched man with a nametag was handing out mimeographed services. “Welcome,” he said, handing her a blank sticker, marked VISITOR. “Write your name.”

  She was not a religious person, but now she needed to be here. There were fourteen other people scattered among the pews. The sight of a dozen or so Jews dressed formally for the Southern evening, waiting for services to begin, startled her. This synagogue was a simple, beige, boxy room, much smaller than the sanctuary where she had sat as a child, a temple in the San Fernando Valley that in its vastness and girth resembled a spaceship; there was a thoughtlessness, a brash optimism, to that temple, with its membership of six thousand and the sparkling black lake that was its parking lot. Her father, who grew up, after Berlin, in a small town near Sacramento, had never gotten over the expanse of their Los Angeles temple; he walked through its parking lot slowly, taking pleasure in methodically counting the cars. Once he walked through it, turned to her, and smiled. “Three hundred and twenty-seven,” he said, with a kind of awe. “They all came.”

  Stepping into this room was different; it was a declaration.

  She stood in the back, wondering where to sit; there was no lack of available seats here, but she wanted to find a good spot. She stepped forward, not too close to the front, hovering near the middle, and then she sat down, quickly.

  “What’s your name, dar
ling?” asked a woman in front of her with a nametag that read BETTY B, notable for a silk hat with an eerily realistic azalea branch on the front.

  “Uh. Serena,” she said, briefly, ridiculously, forgetting. “We’ve been here a month.”

  “Welcome,” said Betty. “We need y’all. We need new blood.” She laughed. “How many are you? You married?”

  “Yes,” she said, carefully. “Four of us.”

  “Well, where are they? How many families do you think we have?”

  Serena tried to come up with a number that would not be insulting. “Two hundred?”

  “Ninety-five!” said Betty. Her face became almost maniacally hopeful. “But growing.”

  “There are 5,045 families in that cruise ship across the street,” said a squarish man in a silk navy suit; his voice sounded as though he were speaking through a microphone. “That’s just First Baptist.”

  “According to the international Jewish mailing list,” said Betty.

  “You may ask, compiled by who?” said the man in the navy suit.

  “Norman. Please. We have about 263 Jews here. We have a county of one hundred thousand people.”

  Rabbi Golden ascended the stairs to the maroon-carpeted bima. An organist began to play softly on the second level of the synagogue. The congregants settled quickly into their seats.

  The rabbi began the service. Serena did not listen to the prayers exactly but was moved by the straggly red velvet cushions on the pews, the clear jingle of the silver crowns of the Torah. She was in the one place in this city that reminded her of her youth. Or — three decades removed from it, a nostalgic youth, not one that she had actually lived. Her family’s attendance at services was erratic — her mother never went, and her father attended only when he needed to drive her for services required for her Bat Mitzvah. Her father would grab a yarmulke and bolt into the synagogue, slumping shyly in a seat near the back, like a student unprepared for class. He stammered through the prayers, lost his spot on the page, cleared his throat; Serena sat, reciting each prayer slowly so he could copy her. He sat, leg jiggling, and she tried, with her concentration, to keep him still. She was ten years old. Suddenly, she had a purpose.

  Now she found herself glad for the moments in the service during which she could stand up and see the rabbi more clearly; she wanted to watch him. She noticed this about the rabbi: how tightly his hands gripped the sides of the lectern where he gave his sermon, and the hard, bright confidence of his gaze as he looked out at the congregants, as though he were taunting all of them.

  THE RABBI CAME STRAIGHT TO her during the oneg, the ode to lemon squares and dry brownies that followed the service. The other congregants gathered around a foldout table, arranging desserts on paper plates. “So, you’ve enlisted,” he said, leaning toward her. “New York. I was an army chaplain. I’m here from Fort Myers. Five years before that, Brussels. Akron. Sarajevo. San Diego. Iraq. Camp Lejeune.” His words tumbled out as though he was trying to catch his breath. “Now I’m here.” He grinned — that sunlight again — and held out his arms. “Forty years old and I’ve made it to my first pulpit!”

  “You’ve traveled a lot,” said Serena.

  “Always traveled,” said the rabbi. “Hobo as a child. A kind word for what I was. Then life in the military. I’ve seen everything. Jews in India! Morocco! Alaska! You wouldn’t believe how glad they were to see me. They wanted to see what I brought with me. Matzos. Dreidels. Hamantaschen. These were things that reminded them of home.” He paused. “What do you think of the Jewish community here?”

  “Is this it?” asked Serena.

  He laughed. “My point exactly. I want two hundred families here in the next five years.” He punched his hand into his fist. “Watch me! Two hundred!”

  His voice had the tininess of a game show host’s, a controlling cheeriness — it was as though he could not quite perceive his own volume. But Serena heard something in his voice that got her attention; his words were expansive. “Where are you going to find them?” Serena asked.

  “I have plans,” the rabbi said. He bounced on the balls of his feet so he seemed to be half-floating in the air. “The Southeastern North Carolina Jewish Community Center. Five thousand square feet, with classrooms and lounges, and outside, baseball diamonds. The Baptists have it, the Catholics have it. We should have it. The elderly in one room, reading to the little kids. The teenagers playing basketball outside. Everyone steps in and is welcomed. Everyone has a place to go.”

  They stood, clutching their tiny plastic cups of wine. The rabbi’s breath smelled like a child’s, cherry-sweet.

  The rabbi cleared his throat. He looked at her with the strained desperation of a suitor. “Serena Hirsch. Join. I can tell you are board material. You are going to help lead us.”

  He knew nothing about her. Serena was grateful to him, his ignorance, his assumption of her goodness; she was also glad that no one was there to contradict him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Shabbat shalom,” he said, and stepped back. “And don’t try to get away from us.”

  At another moment in her life, she would have found that statement a little cloying and false; but at this particular moment, she wanted him to go on. After she had been fired from Pepsi, after she had said she was guilty, after she paid the fine, after they landed here, in this strange city — perhaps this person could help her. She stood amid the small, talkative group and found herself following the rabbi’s orbit around the table, positioning herself so she could hear his conversations with the other congregants.

  “Jackie,” he said. “Is your brother out of the ICU?”

  “Not yet,” said a woman whose bright blue eyeliner matched her purse. “Maybe Thursday. Still on the ventilator.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “That is hard,” he said.

  Jackie’s eyes were teary. “I don’t know what to do, Rabbi.”

  “He’s in all our prayers, Jackie. Day by day. We’ll keep him on Mi Sheberach.”

  He stood beside his congregant in his crisp suit, looking down, hands clasped. It was a posture he had clearly refined through the years. His arms made a triangle in front of his body, one hand gripped the other, his head was lowered; if he was not a rabbi offering comfort to a congregant, he could be a movie executive considering an enormous deal. He was listening. It seemed to require a large effort on his part to remain this still. Serena noticed he was, very softly, deliberately, tapping his foot. It was as though he was allowing Jackie to borrow him for a moment, accessing some supreme power that rose from him.

  She watched the rabbi move around the table. He knew everything. His mind contained information about the sick, the wayward or ungrateful grown children, the hip surgeries, the upcoming trips to Israel, the divorces, the new grandchildren, the children’s marriages to spouses the parents did or did not approve of, the SAT scores, the jobs gained or lost, the untimely deaths. His navy rayon suit shone bleakly in the overhead light; it needed to be ironed. She watched the expressions of the people as he barreled around the table toward them, everyone affixed with nametags, clutching cups of soda or coffee; they were all, in one way or another, waiting for him.

  After a while, she said good night. On the way to the car, she looked back at the small building on the corner. The stained glass windows burned amber and blue in the darkness. It was impossible to see who was inside; the building simply stood there. Above the city, the deep sky stretched, the clouds floated overhead, great gray ships lit through with the moonlight, gleaming — throughout the day, the clouds had shuddered with light and thunder. Her soles floated on the sidewalk as though on ice. She looked back at the Temple, the pure golden light in the windows. She wanted to go back inside.

  Chapter Two

  THE CHILDREN DID NOT KNOW why they were here. They had moved to Waring in July, as soon as Dan received word about the job, and Zeb woke up each morning asking if they were going back to New York, or if they were going on to Alabama, or En
gland, or any place he had heard about; he and Rachel jumped out of bed, going about their days finding ways to dismantle the house. They reached into a corner and found the spot where the floors detached from the walls, knocked against a door and watched it fall off its hinges, stuck a finger into a hole and came out with a fingernail streaked with mold. They moved through the house with stealth and relentless fortitude, on a mission to locate the nail or spring that would either make their parents move back to a place they knew or bring the whole house down altogether.

  The task of moving had absorbed Serena and Dan, their conversation those days brisk and utilitarian. But the night they had moved into the new house, when the boxes were all inside and when the children had passed out, he had reached for her under the blanket. It felt like it had been weeks since they had made love; his hand was urgent, slipping her nightgown off, and, without a word, they had wound into each other quickly, as though here, in their bodies, in the quick rise of desire, they would find a place to hide from the world. In the morning, when she awoke, she had hoped that he would mention it, that the silence between them would subside, that they could talk as they always had, but he had retreated back into himself. He whisked forward to the morning. She felt, after eight years of marriage, strangely, a little cheap.