CHAPTER 7
The Spofford family joked that they had lived in poverty in this country for three generations. The first three. The succeeding five fluctuated between comfortable and wealthy.
Marrying a Jew was not quite the social suicide it would have been two or even one generation previously, especially since Sally Spofford had inherited a Bohemian reputation from Grandmother Bo Peep, a name earned at prep school when her girlfriends followed her like sheep. And Ben Shapiro wasn’t too Jewish. He looked almost British sometimes, dressed the right way. And he was a Boston lawyer. Not an ambulance chaser or divorce lawyer. Most of Sally’s family wasn’t quite sure what he did except get his name in the Boston Globe once in a while for representing a criminal. It was assumed those were charity cases he took to please a judge.
Sally was not especially charmed when she’d first met Ben. President H. W. Bush was gearing up to invade Iraq. Ben was against the war. They met when Sally almost stepped on him lying on the ground, blocking the entrance to the student union building at Wesleyan University. Sally was late for an interview for a summer position with publisher Houghton Mifflin and gingerly stepped on Shapiro’s chest to get by.
Raytheon Corp. was interviewing for summer interns too, prompting the anti-war student protest. When Sally emerged from the interview, Ben was being dragged away by campus police. Their next encounter was some days later. Sally was sitting by herself reading when Shapiro sat next to her.
“Are you going to apologize to the babies your new employer bombs?” he asked. “Or didn’t you get the job?”
“What in the world are you talking about? And who the hell are you?” Sally was used to boys trying to pick her up. Her long, straight blonde hair and athletic build burdened her through adolescence with the problem of which boys to go out with and which to turn down. “A book publisher burning babies?”
They’d spent the rest of the evening arguing, he trying to condense a complete history of America’s foreign policy toward developing nations, she defending this country as the freest and finest place on earth and why didn’t he leave if he felt America was so awful. They continued the argument over pizza at midnight and scrambled eggs in the morning.
They were married the September following graduation. She proofread historical novels at Houghton Mifflin in Boston while he attended Boston University Law School. He worked for a small general practice firm after graduation. It was two years before he earned as much as his secretary. He grabbed the opportunity to work for the district attorney’s office when a new, surprisingly liberal district attorney was elected. For the first time, he would be earning a salary at least at the bleacher level of the ballpark of what a lawyer was expected to earn.
It was four years before Sally’s Adventures of Ish the Fish series was published. Six books later, her income did not quite match his, but it was enough so that she was satisfied with herself and content with her life, except for one thing. Despite years of writing for children, it was not until she was forty-two years old herself, and long after she’d given up hope of having a child, that miraculously, or so it seemed, Adam was born.
They sold their city condo and bought a small house in a seaside town north of Boston, tucked at the end of a dead-end street, their backyard abutting a salt marsh divided by a tidal creek winding out to a beach and the sea. They agreed Adam would go to Hebrew school when he was older, that he would celebrate Christmas and Easter now and that they would worry about the problem later. Sally ate buttered bagels religiously on Sunday mornings, although she could never get used to the concept of having smoked fish for breakfast.
To her, Ben’s being Jewish was one more odd fact about their relationship. It didn’t hurt anything and it didn’t really make much difference. That was why she was so surprised to see him consumed by the tragic events in Israel. He was aroused by America’s initial openhearted reaction, and without even asking her he wrote a check in an amount far greater than she would have approved the night of the All-Star Fundraiser for Israel. After the Damascus bombing, she listened to him scream at the television as American hearts hardened and the tide of public opinion turned against Israel.
Is being Jewish keeping him from seeing the burned Syrian babies? she wondered.
Sitting on the floor in their living room, with Adam coloring dinosaurs nearby, she saw the fire from his college days rising again in her husband and knew she had long ago outgrown that kind of passion in herself.
“Turn off the TV,” she said hopefully.
“No, you go ahead,” Shapiro replied, without looking away from the television. “I want to watch CNN a bit more. Can you believe we aren’t sending troops? We invade every two-bit country on the planet. Why don’t we send troops when millions of Jews are dying? Where are the Marines when we need them? And those ships in Boston harbor. I’m going to lose that case. Why don’t we let those poor people come ashore?”
She carried a drowsy Adam up to his bedroom, smiling to herself at her husband calling for the Marines, remembering the man she’d walked over to get to a job interview, a man who would sooner have called for help from a magician than the United States Marines. Has he changed that much, she wondered. Or is it me? Being married to a Jew had been a quirk, she realized, with very little downside to it. She feared that was about to change, and she did not know how she would react.
She put her son to bed, then went to bed herself, ducking her head under the pillow to cover the sound of CNN.
CHAPTER 8
Chaim Levi’s plans to return to Israel were cut short when he saw more Egyptian naval ships in Israeli waters than he thought were floating on all the world’s oceans. Instead, he came up with a new plan to sail Swift west “into the sunset.” Or “to America and freedom.” Maybe the Caribbean, maybe New York, maybe Miami Beach—mystical places he’d heard about from American tourists.
He knew his time in Marbella, on the southern Spanish coast, was limited. Eventually an inquisitive police officer would wonder about the American boat tied to the pier and would realize that it had not always been there and that he should look into it. Levi’s paranoia notched upward when he’d returned to the boat from a grocery expedition and found the cabin subtly rearranged, as if somebody had been on board.
The sail from Greece to Spain was easy enough, stocked with cans of Greek provisions and the water tanks topped off. The boat had charts covering the entire Mediterranean and, while Levi’s navigation was rudimentary, he knew that if he sailed far enough west he would reach Spain, and he was not too particular as to where in Spain he wound up. Besides, with the global positioning system on the boat, navigating did not involve much more than moving a cursor across the screen to set his course.
Tied to the pier in Marbella, sitting in the boat’s cockpit, sipping a vodka and orange juice and studying a World Book Atlas he’d found in a secondhand book store, Levi suddenly looked up when he became aware of a woman standing on the pier, blocking the sunlight.
The sun behind her turned her red hair into a blazing halo and obscured her face completely.
Levi smiled tentatively.
“Shalom,” she said.
“Shalom,” he answered automatically, then realized what he’d said. Heart beating rapidly, he considered diving overboard and swimming for his life, or leaping to the pier and running.
She was alone, he observed, or at least he did not see anybody with her. Play it cool, he thought. Lifting his glass, Levi said, “Would you like to come aboard? For a drink? Or a chat? Or whatever?”