A Town of Empty Rooms Page 7

  Tom sat up, visibly brightening to have been singled out by the rabbi. His face assumed a blank expression that concealed something infinitely more complicated. The board members lowered their heads.

  “Dear God,” Tom said, lifting his hands. His eyes were closed. “Watch over us tonight as we perform our duty of leading our congregants. Inhabit us with wisdom and the vision to care for all of us, young and old, sick and healthy, those who attend and those who do not. Let the Torah guide us in its wisdom. Amen.”

  Everyone looked up. Norman reached to snag the last piece of pastry.

  “First item on the agenda,” said Norman. “We have a new board member. Serena Hirsch. She’s been a member of the Temple for five weeks. I say that’s long enough!” He paused and looked up, grinning. “Georgia says she does a great job in the office. I say she can represent the youth.”

  There was quite a bit of business to discuss. Marty Schulman, sixties, board treasurer, a former auto mechanic from Morristown, New Jersey, told them that the organ had come of age and that they needed to choose a birthday for it, as it was turning one hundred this year.

  “I put down two thousand dollars as seed money to celebrate the organ’s birthday!” announced Norman. “I will research the organ’s history and choose the day of its birth.”

  There was a silence.

  “Two thousand?” asked Marty, making a note of this. “No offense, Norman, but why do we need two thousand? The religious school needs money — not to mention financial aid for members — ”

  “It is rumored that this is the oldest organ in any religious institution of North Carolina,” said Norman. “This will bring fame and renown to our Temple. I have even begun organ lessons — ”

  “Is it your birthday, Norman?” asked Betty.

  “If you want to donate two thousand dollars,” said Marty, “we could get all new books for the religious school, plus actually pay the teachers — ”

  Norman was annoyed by Marty’s attempt to distract him. The organ was what he wanted to fund. The organ people could hear. They could see. They would think of him. “My birthday is November ninth. I will be seventy-nine,” said Norman, smiling. “Betty, I can hire you to cater my organ bash, if you’re nice to me — ”

  “Schedule’s full up,” said Betty. “But thank you.”

  Serena noticed a tense cheeriness in Betty’s voice. They established a task force to create the birthday celebration for the organ. “Our next item,” said Tom, “is the new Jewish cemetery.”

  Serena noticed Rabbi Golden standing slightly apart from the board. His job, he explained, was not to serve on the board, for that was the job of the Temple congregants. He would be available for advice. He was pretending to ignore the workings of the group, but she noticed his reaction to everything that was said. It was almost as though he was having a personal conversation with each member of the board. He rolled his eyes, he smiled briefly, but he mostly wore a floating expression she could not place for a moment, then recognized as disdain.

  “The cemetery,” said Tom. “I am head of a committee entrusted with creating a new Jewish cemetery for the Jewish residents of Waring. The land was a donation from the Selzer family. We are happy to say that it contains 152 plots, which we will put on sale when we have the area measured and cleared.”

  The group applauded, which seemed both the right response and not.

  “Someone has got to call the mortuary to stop doing what they do to the bodies,” said Saul.

  “What do they do?” asked Serena.

  “Put makeup on them!” said Saul. “They started an embalming process on Myron Steinway — without asking.”

  “Why did they do that?” asked Serena.

  Tom tapped his fingers together as though he were trying to be patient. “Because they didn’t know the rules for cleaning the body,” he said. “Saul, you call them. Our other point of order is the status of non-Jewish spouses in the cemetery. We have, at last count, forty-three families in the Temple who are intermarriages.”

  Tiffany looked up. “Some of us have converted,” she said softly.

  “This is about the Christian spouses, Tiffany. Do we want to reserve spots beside their Jewish spouses? Or,” he cleared his throat, “should they be buried in a spousal section of the cemetery, specially designated for non-Jews?”

  There was a silence as everyone considered the implications of this statement. “You mean segregate them?” asked Tiffany.

  “They could have converted,” said Norman. “They had every chance to do that. Up to their moment of death. They made that decision not to. I don’t want the non-Jewish spouses taking up the hard-won spaces reserved for Jews.”

  Serena was a little too familiar with the idea of burial to contemplate forcing anyone to bury their beloved anyplace other than where they wanted; she suddenly wondered why she had believed that joining the board was a good idea.

  “Plus, we don’t have a lot of room in the cemetery,” said Norman. “What are the dimensions, Tom?”

  “About an acre and a half,” said Tom. “It is adjoining the Walmart parking lot.”

  “Is that where the non-Jewish spouses will go?” asked Tiffany, her voice hardening. “In the Walmart parking lot?”

  Serena had had enough. She began to stand up.

  “Where are you going?” asked Betty.

  “I have to go,” said Serena.

  “We need your vote,” whispered Betty. “Stay.”

  The general resemblance of the Temple members to her own family, to people she had known, was like looking into a funhouse mirror. Serena’s neck was getting warm.

  “Why can’t it be for anyone who wants to be buried there?” burst Serena.

  She stopped, startled by herself. Betty was beaming at her. Norman’s face stiffened in alarm.

  “Rabbi,” said Norman. “Get over here.”

  Rabbi Golden clicked off his cell phone and walked over, slowly.

  “What are the rules for burial in a Jewish cemetery, Rabbi?” Norman asked. “Wouldn’t it make sense that the buried would have to be — Jewish?”

  “Rabbi, thirty percent of our congregants are intermarried,” said Betty. “Isn’t the true spirit of religion to be inclusive? To make everyone feel welcome who wants to belong — ”

  “All I’m asking is a little room for me,” Norman said. “All I’m asking — ”

  “And why wouldn’t there be room for you, Norman,” said the rabbi, clapping Norman on the back. “You! Norman Weiss! You don’t just need a cemetery, you need a statue.”

  She was surprised by his tone, its light, almost merry quality. He seemed to sense the tension in the room, and he was skating over it, somewhat joyfully.

  “Set up a task force,” said the rabbi, lightly. “Jewish cemeteries. How to design it for everyone’s, um, needs. Norman, Betty, you head it. Vote.”

  They all voted to establish a task force. The rabbi smiled and stretched, as though he had just come in from a refreshing jog. Serena was impressed with his ability to change the tone of the room; the air had been simmering a moment before and now was calm.

  “Thank you, Rabbi,” said Norman.

  “Meeting adjourned,” said Tom.

  As they headed out, Betty caught up with her. “See, we need you,” she said. “A voice of reason.”

  THE NEXT DAY, SHE HAD a discussion with Zeb about the concept of BC, and he was eager to try it out on Ryan.

  Later in the week, she was driving the two of them home in the car.

  “Do you know what BC is?” Zeb asked.

  “No,” said Ryan.

  “The time of earth before Christ was born,” said Zeb, sounding pleased to have claimed this era.

  “Well, that would be a very short time,” said Ryan, “because Christ was here first. He invented the world.”

  Zeb was quiet. “No, he didn’t,” he said.

  “Yes, he did!” said Ryan. “He was here before anything! He was here before the sun!”
<
br />   “He was not,” Zeb said. “God was. Sorry to say. It started with Let there be light.”

  “But who said it?” asked Ryan.

  “We’re made of a star,” Serena said, quickly. “All of us. The Big Bang theory. A big star exploded, and here we are.”

  “I am not,” said Ryan. “I’m skin.”

  “I’m made of star,” said Zeb wistfully, holding out his hands and examining them, and then they were home.

  Chapter Six

  DAN BELIEVED HE HAD THE solution to helping Zeb become part of this community. He walked into the bedroom one night and held up a manual.

  “We’re doing this,” he announced.

  The book was titled Boy Scouts of America: A Guide to Pack Leaders.

  “Zeb can learn to make anything out of anything. He can make a burner out of a tin can. On Eskimo Day, he can make a blubber mitten. He can make a knight helmet out of an ice cream carton.”

  Serena wanted to join his enthusiasm, but she thought this sounded ill-advised.

  “How is that going to help?” she asked.

  “I never learned to do any of this. I never belonged to any group. Most people belong to groups.”

  “That’s why we should join the Temple,” she said.

  Dan flinched. She was intent on this. Her father. It was some tribute to him. It made him jealous, he had to admit, this endless tribute to the great Aaron Hirsch. He had liked Aaron, liked particularly the way his father-in-law grabbed Dan and hugged him, fiercely, when he saw him. Aaron had escaped the worst calamity the Jews had faced, which meant, according to Serena, that they had to honor the religion in some endless celebration of him. Although in Dan’s opinion, it seemed the smarter strategy would be to avoid Judaism altogether. It was the one area in which he agreed with his parents. His own parents had been Jewish in name only. They stayed away from the temple with a sense of entitlement — his mother, before the divorce, said they were too successful to need such magic.

  And here they were, where people proudly flew Confederate flags on their front porches, where Forrest’s first question was about his “affiliation,” where he walked into the office and suddenly everyone saw the dark curl of his hair, the olive tone of his skin, and thought he was from Morocco. Forget it. He had always felt separate enough from other people; now it made him shudder, this idea that they would look at him without his saying a word and decide what he was.

  “Boy Scouts. It’s easy. He fits in. They all do. See? He’ll be a Cub, a Tiger, all will be fine.”

  “I think he’s crying because he’s afraid,” she said.

  “He’s crying because he wants to be one of them,” he said, softly. “How can he be one of them?”

  “He is one of them,” she said. “He can just be this other thing, too. I mean, there’s his heritage,” she said. She could not believe she was saying this word, heritage, but she was.

  “Screw the heritage,” he said. “Why do we need it?”

  He flinched; he wished he had not said this. But he also wanted Zeb to walk into school proudly, not to be this other thing.

  She sat down. She felt as though he were telling her to vanish. It was not that his goals were not noble — he wanted to believe in ease, in the beauty of shared motion, of a group of boys marching down a shiny street all wearing the same uniform. It was a lovely little dream, but it was one that did not sit well for obvious reasons.

  “I keep thinking about how my father took Harold to Scouts,” said Dan, suddenly. “You should have seen him in his uniform. Age nine. Harold couldn’t wait for Boy Scout night. He said maybe I could come when I was older. I watched them walk out the door. I wanted to go.”

  She was still, listening; it was the first time he had talked about his brother since his death.

  “Sometimes, after they left, I went upstairs and put on his old uniforms. They were too big, but I walked around, pant legs dragging, determined to wear them.” He paused. “Zeb’s not going to have to do that.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder; a sorrow of being married was that you could not dive through time and comfort the child your spouse had been or, perhaps less noble, fix his troubles before they reached you. Dan’s muscle twitched under her hand. He looked at her as though he sensed this desire in her and stepped away.

  “I just want to try,” he said.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, DAN WALKED into the kitchen. He had purchased the beige uniform. It was crisp and fresh with an embroidered badge that said “Troop Leader” on the right side of the chest. The children were delighted with the costume; they applauded.

  “I have been approved!” He picked up Zeb and swung him around, as though they had just met after a long separation. “I’m going to help lead your troop. We’re going to be part of the Cub Scouts! You’re a Tiger Cub!”

  Dan put his hands on his hips. Zeb gazed at him with an expression as open as a cup; Serena saw in his face the absolute force of parental authority.

  He looked at their son with a hope that went beyond mere parenting and went to the idea of the child as something else: a solution. It was the secret that lurked inside many of these homes. There were the mothers who slunk out of their marital beds to sleep with their toddlers, who dressed identically to their daughters, the fathers who stood in their Boy Scout uniforms, desperate to teach their sons the survival skills that they had never learned. There was a fragile line between giving to a child and appropriating one. That night, Serena saw her husband and son model their new uniforms.

  They rehearsed the promise. “I promise to — ”

  Her son looked at him, hesitant.

  “Do my best.”

  “And obey the laws of the pack.”

  “Obey laws of the pack.”

  “Remember the wolf call,” Dan said.

  They howled.

  THE NEXT MORNING, SERENA PICKED up the phone.

  “Serena. It’s the rabbi,” he said. “It’s your lucky day.” His voice sounded strangely distant and tinny, as though he was shouting, from a great distance, from inside a cave. “We’re looking for a new building. Betty and me. The place where all the generations can come together. Unprecedented in Southeast North Carolina. It is your — ” he paused, “sacred duty to help us. Plus, don’t leave me alone with Betty.” He let out a hollow laugh. “I can pick you up in half an hour. Say yes.”

  Yes. She said yes. This was what she would do.

  Serena had never willingly dropped by the Jewish community centers in the cities where she had previously lived — after her Bat Mitzvah, she had had enough — but now she liked the idea of this: creating a castle. It didn’t even have to do with Jews, particularly, but with this most ineffable yearning: having a place to belong. The Southeast North Carolina Jewish Community Center would be a three-story building fashioned entirely out of glass. It would contain a baseball field, a swimming pool, a library, a basketball court, a conference room, a ballroom. She imagined the glass windows (bulletproof) stretching floor to ceiling, the building a pure, glowing cube of light. Now the Jews of Waring wouldn’t have to drive by the elaborate compounds set up by the churches in town, wondering what went on inside.

  The rabbi drove up in a large, dented orange Buick of indeterminate age. “Forgive this,” he said. “I’ll upgrade when you all give me a raise.”

  She sat in the back; Betty was in the front. The backseat of his car was not particularly clean. There was a variety of sandwich wrappers on the floor. He seemed to have a democratic and inclusive taste for fast food: McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A , Bojangles’, Hardee’s. The backseat also functioned as a sort of travelling library, with magazines strewn all over it: Time, Reform Judaism, Tikkun, Muscle and Fitness, Marines.

  They were going to look at three properties. The rabbi drove with a flexible interpretation of stop signs, with a tendency to brake hard for speed bumps and then clatter painfully over them.

  “In Atlanta, Jews ask you, ‘Where are your people from?’ In Charlotte, they ask, ‘What ba
nk do you work for?’” said the rabbi.

  “Here, they ask, ‘Do you attend?’” said Betty.

  “Twenty-five last night,” said the rabbi. “Up from sixteen the week before.”

  “Could have been thirty,” said Betty. “If you had let me be in charge of the food.”

  “That’s not all that draws people.”

  “A few dry carrots, stale Chips Ahoy! They don’t feel taken care of, Rabbi.” She paused. “Bring in some decent rugelach, they will come.”

  “You can feed them other ways,” Rabbi Golden said. “It’s not all about food, Betty. Once I went to a service led by a rabbi on a base in Sarajevo, and he was so good, so uplifting, I didn’t need to eat. Twelve hours later, I still felt full.”

  This was an intriguing statement, but he did not elaborate on it.

  There were only a few properties within the current budget. They stopped to investigate a plot of pine forest off the interstate, a crumbling mansion with eight bedrooms, an abandoned elementary school dark with mold. The three of them wandered through one building that the rabbi had chattered about excitedly; it was a private school that had recently been foreclosed. It had been damaged in a storm, and there were brown clouds of water damage on the walls. There were ten, fifteen large rooms, and they all smelled as though they were sinking into the earth.

  Betty walked through each room, slowly, marking down each bit of damage. The rabbi flew through the rooms like a deer.

  “Look at it,” he said. “Room to grow. It’s perfect!”

  “Rabbi,” Betty said, looking concerned, “it’s a dump.”

  “Great! We get it cheap!” he said. “Come on! We’re this close to signing the Rosens. The father owns the biggest toy store in town. They have five cars!”

  “Rabbi,” said Betty, softly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There are too many rooms,” said Betty.

  “We’ll fill it up,” he said.

  “With what?” asked Betty.

  “With people fat on your rugelach,” he said. She stepped back. “Act now. Put down an offer. We can always withdraw.”