“Yes,” she said, trying not to smile at the idea of asking for Yom Kippur off at the Variety. “This is what I want to do.”
“Why do you wish to become a Jew?”
“I’m in love,” she said. “The man I love cannot marry me if I don’t convert.”
“Has he said he will marry you if you do convert?”
Julie had anticipated that question. “We are not officially engaged, no. I’m not the type of person to give ultimatums. And I don’t want my conversion to appear to be a condition, or even a ploy. Religion must be deeply felt. My conversion guarantees nothing when it comes to the love of this man. He doesn’t even know I’m pursuing it.”
“Really?” asked the third rabbi.
“I thought I should want this, for myself, and that would be the proof that I was making the right choice. It doesn’t hinge on anything, any man. It’s for me.”
But, of course, it would make a difference, she thought. How could it not? Felix had entrusted her with a secret, one he had shared with no one. He cared about Judaism, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. So she must care, too.
“So you would want to be a Jew even without this man in your life?”
“Yes,” Julie said. “It feels right to me.”
“You were raised-?”
“Protestant. Baptist.”
“Was your family religious?”
She had to stop and think about this. “My mother went to church and insisted that the kids go, too, but my father didn’t. I think my… dissatisfaction with religion started there-how could it be meaningful if my father didn’t take part?” She was making things up now, trying to say the right things, but suddenly her fibs felt true. There had been a little worm of discontent. Her father had refused to attend church. But then, so had her mother. Also that was good, saying she had been dissatisfied. Made her sound deep.
“What do you do, Miss Saxony?” asked Rabbi Tasmin, the closest thing she had to a friend here.
“I’m a hostess.”
“A hostess?”
“In the Coffee Pot Shoppe. I tell people where to go. Where to sit.”
“Ah.” The second rabbi now. “Like a hostess.”
“Yes.” Hadn’t she said that?
“Have you thought about Christmas?”
She had, in fact. It had occurred to her to keep the secret from Felix until then and present it as a gift, but-oh, no. They were asking her something very different.
“It will no longer be part of my life.”
“Are your parents alive?”
They were, but she preferred to close any line of inquiry she could. “No.”
“There are siblings?”
“We’re not close.” They had been once. Two giggling girls, on their own. But Felix didn’t want a girl who lived with her sister, so Julie had moved out. She had told Andrea about what she planned today and they had quarreled. They were always quarreling, though, especially about Felix. It wasn’t a big deal.
The rabbis did not trust her, she could tell. They did not want her. But she had put in the time, done what was required. She continued to answer all their questions in a calm, thoughtful manner. Eventually they led her downstairs to a room that smelled, disappointingly, like the indoor pool at the Y where she had worked at the front desk one summer.
“Make sure every inch is covered,” one rabbi advised, and Julie had a strange flashback, her first time dancing, the lecture about the pasties, what the law allowed. A lecture delivered by Felix, who pretended to be all gruff indifference, but she understood that the mere fact that he was tutoring her was indicative of his interest. There had been no jealousy among the other girls. They assumed she would fade, as they all had. Felix had a wife and two daughters, and he claimed he wanted a son, although it seemed to Julie that ship must have sailed. Surely his wife was too old to have more children? “I can’t name him Felix Junior because of the Jewish tradition,” Felix told Julie the second time they slept together. “But see if I don’t. Not that I would do that to a kid, but I don’t like rules. Just because my father was a cantor doesn’t mean I have to do everything by the book.”
“Your father was Eddie Cantor?”
“Oh, my sweet little shiksa, the things I have to teach you. That’s a secret, between us, by the way. No one knows about my dad, not even my wife.”
That had been two years ago. Two years.
She took a deep breath and submerged. She wasn’t scared of water, but she had never learned to swim properly, just knew a paddling kind of motion, the better to keep her hair above the water.
When she came up, she was surprised at how beautiful the singing was, how it really did make her feel holy and changed. The rabbis’ eyes were on the ceiling, as if they didn’t want to catch a glimpse of her in her bathing suit, modest as it was. I’m a Jew, she thought in the locker room, as she combed her hair back into its ponytail, changed into her clothes, and went to collect Susie. “Drinks on me,” she said. “Gampy’s.” It was a place all the dancers favored because it stayed open late. Felix came here a lot. She had a cheeseburger, which was pretty funny, not that Susie picked up on the joke. Felix didn’t come in, but she didn’t really expect him to. She and Susie went to the Hippo and danced until 2:00 A.M. Then she went back to her apartment, which, like the pool, also overlooked the prison, and stared at her phone until 4:00 A.M., wishing she dared to call him at home. She knew the number, of course. Knew the number, knew the house. Back when she was living with Andrea, she would take the VW in the middle of the night and drive by it, risking so much-Andrea’s wrath, Felix’s discovery. It was a lovely house. Felix had such good taste. That’s why he would choose her, eventually.
She had hoped to make a ceremony out of telling him about her conversion, turn it into something special. But it happened that several days went by without her seeing him, and when he stopped by the club in the early evening, the news had been too pent up and she blurted out: “Hey, I’m a Jew!”
He laughed. “You’re not a Jew. You order the lean corned beef at Jack’s.”
“No, seriously,” she said, lowering her voice. “I converted. Susie was there and everything. She was, like, a witness.”
Not exactly true, but she knew Susie would cheerfully lie for her. Susie believed women had to stick together. Another way in which she was naïve.
“Really,” he said, as if she had commented on the weather. A few minutes later, he had gone upstairs to his office. She didn’t see him for a week. Oh, she saw him, but there were no late-night coffees at the Coffee Pot Shoppe, no visits to her apartment. Well, it was Passover now. He had to be with his family. After the holidays, they started up again, as if there had never been a break at all.
A few weeks later, she was window-shopping at an antiques store on Howard Street when she saw an interesting plate. She was pretty sure she knew what it was, but she asked the owner to be sure.
“It’s an old seder plate, very rare. There’s a place for all the things that matter during the ritual-the lamb shank, the bitter herbs.”
“I know,” she said, although she had not yet sat at anyone’s seder table.
“It’s made in France,” he said, showing her the unmarked back, as if that proved it was made in France.
She knew she was being sold, but that was okay. She was in sales herself, helping to move the weak drinks at the Variety. The plate was $65, no small sum, but she bought it and put it in an old trunk at the foot of her bed. There, the plate joined china and silverware she had begun to assemble, piece by piece. There was a large serving dish that dated to Revolutionary War times, the kind of item one would expect to find in a house such as the Brewer home in Sudbrook Park, although, of course, Julie would never live there. Mount Washington, maybe. Guilford if the divorce didn’t leave Felix too strapped. But not that house, that neighborhood, through which she had driven far too many times. At any rate her things kept accumulating in this small wooden trunk, eighteenth-century English, also discovered on Howard Street. Julie never called this trunk a hope chest, but that didn’t keep it from being one.