IF YOU HAVE LIVED in Godolphin all of your seventy-seven years except the four in Cambridge, you can find out anything; you know who to ask.
“He’s married to a dentist from Worcester,” Carol Glickman told Jay. It was June; Jay had lain in wait for her at the library; he knew she went to the senior movies there. “One of those young women who can do it all.”
Jay thought of Mika, pregnant again, continuing her career from her home computer, which no doubt converted itself into a changing table after the market closed. “Mrs. Yamamoto … Dr. Yamamoto … she’s Jewish?”
“Yes, whatever we mean by that these days. Some of her family have baal-teshuvaed, become sort-o-dox.” Carol laughed. Jay would have laughed in return, but he knew his breath stank from the noxious pills he was now obliged to swallow. Carol paused, went on. “Some of them are probably Quakers or Zennists or whatever. Did you know that Feivel Ostroff ’s daughter is an Episcopal priest?”
“Feivel wasn’t at my reunion,” Jay belatedly remembered.
“He died last year. Best-loved teacher at Dartmouth, or was it Williams. Made Latin popular, and Greek too.” She paused again. Was he supposed to express condolences?
“How are you, Jay?” she said at last, in a light voice. Her husband, a judge, had served on the Anti-Defamation League with Jay. She was widowed now, like Mika’s grandmother. Her hair was dyed, again like Mika’s grandmother: the same shade of bark … How was he? She could see how he was: yellow and shrunken. She could probably figure the likelihood of his living another year. Jay the actuary had already figured it: zero.
“I’m not long for this world,” he said, unmischievously, turning his head to exhale. She opened her mouth, ready to give comfort. “Another time,” he begged, and fled.
IN SEPTEMBER HE WENT to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. His grandfather’s tallith lent a semblance of flesh to his frame. He sat at the end of the pew, contemplating a quick getaway. The rabbi wore dramatic white robes. She carried the Torah down the aisle, followed by some shuffling elders: his contemporaries, he supposed. She paused at Jay’s row, and he managed one of his old playful smiles. His teeth were still good. She waited with her burden, half smiling herself, and he remembered to touch the scroll with his prayer book and bring the book back to his lips, though it grew heavy on the return journey, as if it had acquired the weight of Numbers.
In October he went across the river to a boring lecture on the Japanese economy. In November he went to the Game in the rain, and left at the half. The following week he visited Widener Library on his alumnus pass, fifty dollars a year. The library stacks had recently been strengthened but not reconfigured. Between steel shelves the aisles were as narrow as ever. Standing on Level 3, his feet on the old stone floor, his body brushed by books as gentle as Kyoto schoolchildren, he felt like a boy again. But there was not one volume he cared to read.
He hadn’t cared to enroll in Japanese IV, either. He was too weary. But what he’d accomplished gladdened him. He could make his way through children’s picture books. He could speak to the shaineh maideleh at the Japanese tchotchke shop. He could recognize several hundred kanji; and at night, floating in his bath, he could still draw a few of them on his wasted thigh. At his favorite sushi bar he listened to words flying from one sashimi master to another. Occasionally he fearlessly asked the meaning of an expression. His hematologist, a tiny Indian, urged him to eat and drink anything that agreed with him. Not much agreed with him, but Japanese beer and raw salmon were no worse than oatmeal and applesauce.
Chicken soup did lie lightly on his stomach — Jews were right about that. Wulf ’s, the only kosher market left in town (there had been half a dozen during his childhood), cooked up a batch every few days and put it in jars. Jay bought a jar on Sunday, ate what he could during the week, threw out the rest. Sunday after Sunday the bearded man at the cash register looked at Jay without recognition. His mind was on higher things, maybe his inventory.
Jay’s clothes had grown roomy. On one of his rare good days he bought two pairs of chinos, apparently back in style, at the local Gap. And a navy blazer, size what? — small, God help him. His daughter dropped in every day to say hello and straighten the apartment. They were both silently waiting for the doctor to mention hospice. Meanwhile he could still make his weekly trek to Wulf ’s.
And it was at Wulf ’s, on a Sunday morning, that he saw Yamamoto again, and the Yamamoto family, four children in total. Jay stepped behind a rack of spices. From this hiding place he inspected the dentist-wife. She was surprisingly pretty, and slender despite many pregnancies. She was wearing a felt hat with an upturned brim. Fetching. He recognized it as the substitution made by modern Orthodox for the matron’s wig. Rich brown hair curled below the hat. She was pushing a cart in which a two-year-old lorded over groceries. Yamamoto walked behind her, wearing an infant in a sling. Two little boys marched in the space between their mother and father, and talked in light voices — English, he noted. The children, even the infant, had the straight black hair of Woody’s little son; they had similar dark eyes, too, angled more gently than if their blood were pure. The boys wore yarmulkes. Likewise Yamamotosan, their Yiddische chichi.
So this was the current trajectory of an immigrant’s career — this leap from one ill-favored group into another. What had happened to those necessary decades — generations, even — spent dissembling among the Yankees? Jay the commissioner, Glickman the judge, Fessel the surgeon — how delicately they’d mingled with the favored. And bold Feivel Ostroff, applying himself to pagan texts, had managed a complete metamorphosis. Somewhere a bishopric was no doubt waiting for his daughter the priest … And here, where shelves of canned mackerel faced shelves of boxed kasha, the Yamamoto children, crossbred progeny of two outcast clans, confidently trotted. Assimilation had become as passé as the jitterbug.
Forgetting to conceal himself behind the spices, Jay stood up as straight as his pain allowed. He was still what he was born to be — an Anti-Defamation Jew; a citizen of Godolphin, Mass; a loyal Harvard man. Papa Yamamoto was perhaps immune to the lure of the Houses across the river. But in this new world of interchangeable gods, and of females dressed up in priestly robes like drag queens … in this world where nations who’d tried to obliterate each other ended up in the same bed, and where your offspring hurled themselves across the planet and forgot to return … in such a world the enduring things, really, were bricks and bell towers, a library and a stadium. They remained, they steadied you until the end — flow’rs in your wilderness, stars in your night. He’d reveal this truth to the rabbi when she made her dutiful visit to the almost dead.
A nearby church bell chimed. With his jacket floating around what was left of him, Jay moved from spice rack to register. “Chicken soup,” he said, in a voice just audible above the call to the faithful. He received the jar and put money into the impassive hand. “I’ll see you next week,” Jay promised, or maybe pleaded. It was all the same to the man with the beard.
LINEAGE
“GOOD MORNING, Mrs. Lubin.”
Silence.
“Professor Lubin,” the doctor corrected, consulting his clipboard.
Silence.
“How are you feeling?”
Contemptuous silence.
“Do you know why you are here?”
Strenuous silence.
“You have suffered a neurological event, a transient ischemic attack …”