Good for the Jews

2. May 2006

Chapter Two May 2006 At the graveside, Rochelle Bernstein wept, the heart-rending sobs Ellen associated with newscasts from Iraq: a mother ‹nding her child blown apart, life newly unbearable. “Jeez,” Ellen whispered to Mose, a chilly gust twisting her black dress about her legs. “You’d think she’d get a grip.” Not that the irony was lost on any of the group clustered above the casket, late on a May afternoon. They were burying a Holocaust survivor , a Torah that had escaped Poland (thanks to a steamer trunk) only to burn in Madison, Wisconsin. Faulty wiring, everyone said. “Oh, please,” Mose responded, sure of foul play from the start. But the synagogue was old and poorly kept, a former church meeting hall—which accounted for the arched windows and stained glass—that had been transformed into a shul. No pictures of Jesus, but squares of purple, red and yellow. As if to acknowledge the inappropriateness of stained glass in a synagogue, the windows, all of them, went unattended. Never cleaned, the squares, heavy with dust, looked black, save for when the sun shone at a favorable angle, purpling the already dark-hued velvet chairs. White chips ›aked the sills; lead paint surely. The story was that the windows in the kitchen—where Brandi Carter had gone to drop off pastry for a Friday-evening service—were painted shut, impossible to open, even if they hadn’t expanded with the heat. No one knew she was 190 in there anyway. She was planning to surprise her boyfriend. “I baked this Jewish stuff,” she had told a friend earlier in the day. “I’m going to go to the service with him, and when he sees a honey cake by me, it’s going to rock his world.” She danced around her friend as she said this, pleased by her own unlikely domesticity and the trick of sneaking the evidence of it into a house of worship. A sudden wail from Rochelle Bernstein, as if someone had stabbed her. No one liked what had happened, but really. It wasn’t as if they were attending yesterday’s funeral for Brandi Carter, a citywide sobfest. Ellen had crowded with Mose, Alex and the others into the giant cathedral —no matter that she’d never met Brandi–then fallen apart along with all the high school kids. A clutch of them came to the service dressed as Brandi Carter had apparently dressed—shirt layered on shirt and tied at the midriff, wild colorful stockings and ›ared short skirts. “I’m going to have a lot of time,” Sam Meyers, her boyfriend, said in a disintegrating voice before the mourners, “to think about her death. I’ve got my whole life to think about her death. Right now, I want to think about her life.” After, a whole slew of people rose to tell stories about Brandi. Mostly it was kids, her classmates, but Alex stood to say something about how hard her early life had been, how she’d come into her own once she’d met her new family. Her foster father wrote something down, but two sentences into his speech, he dropped his head, pinched the bridge of his nose and started shaking with silent sobs. He couldn’t do it. A student—the one who’d seen ‹t to share a story about Brandi, drunk at a party, wondering whatever happened to the noble tradition of the wet t-shirt contest—rubbed the man’s back, and then his wife stepped forward to lead him to his seat. You buried a Torah, because God’s name, once written down, couldn’t be destroyed. Still, save for Rochelle, the gathered were dryeyed , waiting (it seemed) for the service to end, so they could return to the heat of their cars. It was unseasonably raw, the cold all the worse for the sharp wind, sending the pulverized remnants of last fall’s leaves scuttering like mice about the cemetery. At the base of a tree, just beyond the cof‹n, a few crocus tips poked through the crusty soil. They looked unhopeful. Less like a sign of spring than three ghastly green ‹ngers, clawing their way out of the earth. Every year since he’d become superintendent, Alex had to face a 191 student death—a car crash, a suicide, a fatal illness. Now this. If there was a...