The Family Tabor Page 11

  “Cocaine and drug wars, but I’ll look it up,” Elena says, and pulls her phone from her purse and types away.

  “Okay. Medellín, once the home of the now-defunct Medellín cartel, was known as the most violent city in the world. But now it’s considered safer than Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans.”

  She looks over at him. “Is that saying much?”

  Simon shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, this is encouraging. It’s been named one of the best cities to live in South America. And one of the most innovative cities in the world for its advances in politics, education, social development, and sustainable urban development. So I guess we won’t die there.”

  “I’m pretty sure we won’t.”

  “It’d be a real pain in the ass if we did,” she says, then lets out a real laugh. And he laughs, too, relieved. He thought she was going to say if there was danger there, she wouldn’t go, and perhaps he shouldn’t go either. But when Elena laughs again, the tone is acerbic and triggers one of his insomniac thoughts—that she’s pulling away. That tone says to him she wouldn’t mind if he found himself in danger.

  “Also, there are fifty-one Catholic churches within the city limits. Other denominations, too, with churches of their own, including a Mormon mission.”

  The country is devout, he knows that, and yet the ILA selected it, when recent conferences were held in Sweden, Iceland, and Australia, none of which he considers particularly religious. With life spiraling drastically into a hellish existence of terrorism and wars, all with religious fundamentalism at their core, was the ILA’s intent to send some kind of message by choosing a place steeped in religion?

  Religion has no place in the legal arena, except when it’s the actual crux of a case. But lately, in his own practice, he’s seeing otherwise stoic motions and briefs filled with religious attacks on the beliefs of his plaintiff clients, attacks that feel triggered when he reads them, and armed when reiterated on the stand by the museum and gallery representatives, and the registrars of missing and looted art, and the governmental bureaucrats of those defendant countries, responding as if the horrific rationales on which any particular genocide was based are still alive and well. A concomitant degradation in legal civility is occurring in other areas of international law as well: courtroom combatants lashing each other with religious slurs at The Hague, judges and lawyers powerless at reining in the hate speech, no matter how hard they try. When you’ve been complicit in legitimized murder, contempt of court lacks any kind of punch. He and his colleagues often lunch together in the firm’s conference room, discussing these events they are witnessing, and he thinks now how curious that they all speak passionately about man’s intolerance of his fellow man, but never about the concept of God. Bombings and killings in the name of God. The pope promising, with the full import of his position, that the murderers will have to answer to God. God, the cause and effect of everything. God, unseen and unheard, possibly man’s deluded creation or a creation devised by some to control others. Simon doesn’t know which of his colleagues are believers, which are not, where he himself falls on the spectrum, but shouldn’t they at least talk about it? The crazies raise God in every hate-filled proclamation before annihilating lives they deem worthless, while the sane and balanced quash their own voices.

  “Are there any synagogues?” he finds himself asking.

  Elena scrolls down on her phone.

  “None are listed, but I would think there must be one. On the other hand, it is a very Catholic country.”

  They hit a traffic snarl, a long line waiting to merge from the 405 to the 10 heading east, and she clicks her phone off, places it in her lap, her right hand on top, as if prepared to swear on a bible.

  Given Simon’s work, the cases he takes on, the art and everything else he recovers, often for the descendants of Jews wrongfully, forcibly, illegally dispossessed, and then sent to their deaths, it’s odd how rarely he thinks about his own Jewishness. Usually he only considers it on this very drive, to Palm Springs for the High Holidays. He wonders if the same is true for Elena, if she rarely considers her former stringent adherence to the Catholicism of her youth and young womanhood. A few months ago, he read about how more people than ever were making pilgrimages—to Buddhist temples in Japan, to Lourdes in France, to Tirupati in India, to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, following the footsteps of prophets in Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem, trekking to Mecca—but he and Elena observe none of their own holidays, not by themselves, have not done so since coming together. A skirmish-free way of binding their diverse inherited religions, or really, of avoiding everything entirely.

  Has that affected them? Is it affecting them? As people? As a married couple? Will it affect their children, never seeing their parents involved at home on any spiritual level? This is a new, previously unarticulated worry.

  And he realizes he was thinking about those pilgrimages just this morning while trying to get a grip on his tears.

  “Do you think,” he says, “that the tenets with which we were raised are attached to us permanently?”

  “Are you talking about religion?”

  Simon nods.

  “Then, yes,” she immediately says.

  The rapidity of Elena’s response startles him, but he’s shocked when she says, “These days, I make it to church maybe four times a month.”

  “You do? Since when?”

  “Since always.”

  “Since always? I remember when you told me you were turning into a quasi-Catholic, sinning with me on Friday and Saturday nights, and taking yourself to church to repent on Sundays. And then I thought you stopped going.” And what had his reaction been to this beautiful girl who stopped attending on major Catholic holidays, on saints’ days that had meaning to her? Pride? Probably. Definitely. Pride that nothing in her past would get in the way of their potential future. He’d seen a future with her from the first moment they met, and then they’d bonded so quickly.

  “No, I only stopped going as frequently. And when we got married, I didn’t see any reason to mention it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was something I did for myself. And it’s become something that doesn’t revolve around you.”

  That stings, and is unfair, and the litigator in Simon kicks in.

  “First, I think I’m the definition of a man not at the center of his own world. I’m a husband, and a father, and a busy lawyer. My life revolves around all of you and all of that. Not around me. And, second, we share things, don’t we? So why would you have kept this from me?”

  “I’m entitled to have a private place for myself, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You have one, with your physical fitness stuff.”

  “But you know about that.”

  “It’s not a big deal, Simon.”

  Isn’t it? It’s a secret she’s kept the whole of their marriage.

  “Really, Simon, it’s not like I’m tippling in the afternoons or gambling or shopping until the credit cards are maxed out.”

  With those as the comparisons, of course, she’s right. But they’ve always agreed that secrets are anathema to a healthy marriage, and going to church doesn’t imbue her secret with holiness.

  “You’re right,” he says.

  “I know I am. So you understand?”

  He nods and smiles, but he doesn’t understand, not really.

  “And, of course, it’s different for me now than when I was a kid. Now, it’s a place where I go to think. Back then, I loved reading about the saints and collecting the Holy Cards with their faces on them, that we traded like baseball cards. I loved their histories, the idea of mysteries and miracles and great acts of courage, but I didn’t believe they were actual saints. I knew they were tools to guide us kids into understanding what constituted appropriate behavior, an aspirational notion of how to live our lives.

  “I’ve told you this, how when I was young, I used to imagine mar
rying Jesus, who I thought was very handsome. I wanted to become a nun, live a sanctified life. I never imagined falling in love with a man who did not believe in the tapestry of my religion, in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in confession, and the saving grace of heaven.”

  She’s shocked him again. Simon looks over to see if she’s smiling, if this is a joke. But she’s staring out the windshield, her eyes aimed at that very heaven she’s just mentioned. She’s absolutely never told him any of this before. If she had … If she had, he would have backed away early in their relationship, would not have messed around with a girl’s desires for her life, would not have been comfortable falling in love with a woman who dreamt of Jesus as the perfect man.

  Have they ever really talked about any of this?

  How have they not?

  How did they bond so quickly without a forthright exchange about what might dissolve them with the same speed?

  There’s that question he’s asked himself a few times when deep inside of her—if she ever imagines him as one of the killers of her Christ? It was the Romans, not the Jews, who committed that deicide, the historical truth ignored by too many people, and in the midst of this conversation, it unnerves and disturbs him, tightly knots his intestines, thinking how very far apart they might actually be because of their upbringings. Have always been, in their oblivion.

  Elena tilts her head toward the side window. Her ears are tiny scalloped shells, the lobes bare today, as they have been for a long time. He doesn’t know when she stopped wearing all the dangly earrings she used to never be without, but she has. Many were gifts from him.

  She turns back to him and there is amusement in her voice when she says, “Here’s another confession. When you’re actually at home and watch the girls on a weekend afternoon, and I’m at that blow-dry bar down the hill, that can be a near-religious experience. Thirty minutes of someone washing my hair, massaging my scalp, handing me glasses of complimentary champagne, making me look pretty. Also, I feel some sense of the spiritual when Ashley comes to babysit when you’re out of town or working late and I get to go to a Pilates class.”

  Elena’s throwing him salves, but underneath that hint of amusement, he can’t tell if she’s actually being serious or ironic. This morning, listening to her breathing in her sleep, he had considered again when his ability to read her tonal inflections had altered, and when his astute and symbiotic knowledge of her had lapsed, and if something fundamental had changed between them, that she had changed something fundamental between them, and he’s wondering about it anew.

  And then that earlier, previously unarticulated worry circles back into his mind, along with another first-time consideration: whether he and Elena are creating a defective family structure by strictly observing nonobservance. Their little girls are living—will live—a secular life within the environs of home; religion happens elsewhere, belongs to others, is not yet anything that resonates in the slightest. Christmas spent with Elena’s family, the huge tree the girls help decorate the night before, and all the presents underneath in the morning, and the Easter dinner with the gift baskets bigger than they are, filled up with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks. And the few Jewish holidays, which only mean time with their savah and their sabba. Hanukkah latkes; Passover, with its yearly explanation about the exit of the Jews from the desert after forty long years of trudging through sand, the extra wineglass filled for what Lucy calls “the ghost.” Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are dinners for which they get to dress up, then a babysitter they shyly meet, then night-night kisses from everyone, while the rest of the Tabors, including him and Elena—“la familia Tabor religiosa,” Elena says on those nights—go off to temple.

  “Do you feel you and the girls are missing out? Not painting hard-boiled Easter eggs we’d hide outside around the house. That we never have a Christmas tree. We don’t attend midnight masses. We don’t light our own menorah for the eight nights of Hanukkah, don’t pack away all the hametz and eat only matzoh during Passover?”

  “No. I have what I need.”

  He expects her to ask if he feels he’s missing out, but she doesn’t. She says, “Palm trees in the distance.”

  The palm trees of home.

  How will his daughters make sense of the world if they have no idea who they are, or where they come from, the traditions they would otherwise keep, if the past is lost because it is not deliberately carried forward into the present and future? His daughters won’t have any spiritual gird, because their parents have made their marriage a religion-free zone to eliminate scuffling over that which cannot easily be melded.

  There is a rustling behind them and Elena checks on the girls. “Isabel’s pulling the tutu up to her cheek. They’re both still asleep.”

  Elena is smiling at him now, a happy smile, and when she says, “Everything okay?” Simon wants to say no, but stashes away his rumbling, colliding concerns. Time for all of that at some distant point in the future. He’ll focus now on speeding down the freeway with the tires making that white noise he loves, on his girls peacefully asleep in the backseat, on his wife next to him, on the two of them maneuvering—at least decently, he thinks, he hopes—through time and space.

  ELEVEN

  LEVITT IS AHEAD FOUR games to two in the second set because Harry’s preoccupied with the meaning of CST. It feels like a key to everything he doesn’t recall, but even trying to think of a word that begins with C, other than the name of his daughter, leaves him beleaguered, an image only of black zigzaggy lines, and then of Owen Kaufmann standing next to him while they waited for the elevator’s slow arrival, saying, “You sure have a great origin story, Mr. Tabor, thank you for your time and your candor.”

  A ball whizzes by him. Levitt yells, “Yes!” And Harry looks up to find Levitt banging his palm on his racquet. Somehow, without being aware of playing any more points, Harry’s given away two games and the set.

  Levitt gushes water into his mouth and spits it out instantly, “Hot as hell. I’ve got cold in the car,” and heads again to the parking lot.

  The metal fence twangs against Harry’s spine, shivers his heated skin, when he sits on the bench and leans back. He likes this park, with its unfussy nature, its lack of pretension. The palm trees are tall, the grass torched brown, a teenager on the pull-up bars is failing at chin-ups. Poor kid, he’s a bean, count the ribs, arms and legs like twigs. Harry was never like that—he matured early, had Bronxmade biceps and triceps and quads and calves, from stickball, stoopball, punchball, and kick-the-can in his youth, the muscles slackening a hint now, but the form still mostly retained. A couple of young mothers are pushing their toddlers on the swings. A young man is jogging past the courts singing out loud to whatever’s plugged into his ears. His warbling isn’t half bad.

  Harry checks the chin-up kid’s progress, but the kid is gone. When he hears a whistling in his ears, he looks around, but there is no one nearby, no one close enough to him that if they were whistling he could hear it. No, it’s not a whistling, it’s more like the sound of leaves rustling hard in a heavy wind, but there’s no wind this morning, not even the faintest of breezes.

  Then a strange pain in his eyes and Harry throws up his hands and presses hard. When it disappears, he opens his eyes to the world, which includes, at a slight distance, a man standing on a stage in a white robe, a tallit around his neck, and a kippah atop his untamed hair.

  Harry closes down his sight, but opening his eyes once more changes nothing—the man in the white robe and tallit and kippah is still there.

  And now the white-robed man is moving.

  He is alive and moving around on the stage.

  And the stage is at the front of a room crowded with people.

  Harry slams his eyes shut again, and it is echoey in his head, as if his well-organized thoughts and knowledge and memories have cleared out. He grasps the word memories, holds on to it for dear life.

  Is this an old memory he’s conjured up, something he ought to re
call? Something that means something to him?

  No, he doesn’t think so.

  No, he’s sure not.

  Harry hears, Try again, and his eyes flip open, hoping Levitt has returned, has said, inexplicably, “Try again,” but there is no Levitt, only the white-robed man who has not disappeared, who is looking out over that crowd standing shoulder to shoulder.

  Harry squints.

  The stage isn’t a stage; it’s a bema.

  The room is not merely a small room; it’s a shul.

  And the audience is not any audience, but a congregation, a congregation of Jews.

  Where is he, seeing this? Is he inside? Outside? Dematerialized in the air and looking down? He doesn’t know.

  Then the white-robed man opens his mouth and releases the most spectacular voice Harry has ever heard, transporting him utterly, and lifting, it seems, the shul’s low-ceilinged rafters.

  The man, he’s a cantor.

  A Jewish cantor singing a prayer Harry recognizes.

  He hears Yom Kippur in his head. The cantor is singing the Kol Nidre, the first prayer—a thrice-uttered statement—that ushers in the holy Day of Atonement, when the essence of the soul is fully revealed, while the Book of Life is open, until slammed shut until the next year. In the top drawer of his desk in his study at home are his family’s tickets for the holidays that bookend the Ten Days of Awe; this year, Rosh Hashanah begins on the ninth of September, the twenty-four hours of Yom Kippur atonement on the eighteenth. All of that is coming, but is not here yet, and yet, here it is, in front of him, a vision in August.

  Should he veil his eyes once more? Shutter them completely? Seal them up? No. No, nothing will change, he understands that now, and he gives in, gives himself over to the cantor’s singing, his final phrases, watches as the cantor steps back. And then young boys and elderly men are rushing onto the bema, lifting rams’ horns to their lips, letting loose the shofars’ curlicuing wild cries of triumph, and joy, and pain, and suffering, and it goes on and on until the out-of-tune symphony fades, leaving a hollowness the cantor fills by singing a note so sweet that the congregation stills. The cantor’s note trills and circles, and rises up and up and up, and Harry feels what the congregation is feeling, their hearts wrenched open, longing for that which sustains the community during the worst of times, encouraging them to reclaim their faith for another year, and then that perfect golden note is flying into the night sky above the shul, joining the blanket of brazen, brilliant stars twinkling above the wooden building. Harry can see all of that despite the blue sky overhead on this sunny summer morning in Palm Springs.