That sounds like a terrible way to grow up. “Did she believe good of you?”
“Oh yes,” he says. “She was very different toward her sons. We could do no wrong. I married when I was nineteen years old and we moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, for a time before coming back to Brooklyn. I did not see your mother again until about ten years later.”
“Did she remember you from before?”
Saul nods. “We met again at the house in Coney Island. I was separating from my wife and helping Menachem Goldberg renovate. Menachem was in his fifties and a widower. He and his late wife had emigrated from Ukraine through Israel in the 1950s. When his wife died of cancer, he renounced his faith, and his children shunned him. He bought a rundown house to live in and he invited people to stay because he did not like to be alone. There was a woman from the community named Tova Horowitz who had been holding meetings in apartments around the city for people to come and question. She asked if she could have the meetings at the house and Menachem said yes. Aviva came for a meeting.
“I remember she didn’t seem fearful that night. Most of the people who came were paranoid. They were certain their brother or father had followed them there, or that someone else in the group was a spy sent by their family. But not Aviva. She stayed all night. She had a notepad with her and she had written pages and pages of questions. Menachem and Tova and I had different perspectives, but they all validated what had been dawning on her, which was that much of what was deemed sacred in her life meant nothing to her.”
I have been to the Coney Island house, and as Saul speaks I picture my mother in the same small living room-kitchen-dining room I’d stood in in January. It was full of people then, but seemed a lonely place.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Soon after she came back from Florida,” he says. “Again, at the Coney Island house.”
“And?”
“She was not there long. I was hoping we would talk but…” Saul clears his throat. He looks out the window and shifts in his seat. “Her mother had died while she was away and her family was very angry.”
“Did she say anything about me?”
“We really didn’t get much of a chance to talk,” says Saul. “She came and left very quickly. And then she went to Israel. I heard from someone that she was back in New York, but that was probably ten years ago. Apparently, she was at the Coney Island house, but not for long.”
And there it is. A rough sketch of twenty-three years in the life of Aviva Kagan. Coming and going. Was she always running from something? Or to it?
“When did you start communicating with my dad?”
“He made a trip to Brooklyn looking for your mother a few months after I’d seen her.”
“Did you tell him she’d gone to Israel?”
“Your father always seemed like a nice man, and he clearly loved your mother, but I felt that if she left him, she must have had a good reason. I didn’t think it was my place to tell him where she had gone.”
“Did he tell you about me?”
“Yes.”
“And that didn’t make a difference?”
Saul hesitates. “At the time, it did not,” he says. “I’m sorry. I would make a different decision now.”
“But you kept in touch.”
“Your father sent me a card every year on Pesach, and I sent him one on Easter.”
“That’s cute,” I say.
Saul looks at me disapprovingly. My dad doesn’t like sarcasm either. “I don’t have any other religious friends who are not Jewish,” he says. “And I don’t think he had friends who were not Christian.”
“And when you heard she’d come back to New York you didn’t reach out.”
Saul confirms my statement with silence. My eyes start to burn and I look up, sniffing back the tears that are gathering. If Saul had just told my dad what he knew… what? At least we would have known she wasn’t dead. My dad actually went to Israel once when I was in elementary school. He took his youth group to Bethlehem and the Galilee and brought back a bottle of water from the Jordan River that his church has been using to baptize people with ever since. A day trip to search for his baby mama wouldn’t have been on the official itinerary, but might he have made an attempt? It almost makes me laugh, thinking of my dad hunting Aviva in the Holy Land. How poetic.
“Did he keep asking you?”
“No,” says Saul. “He never asked me after the first time.”
“Because he assumed you’d tell him if you knew.”
Again, Saul’s silence is a yes. I blink and blink but there is no holding back the tears now. And why should I hold them back? I haven’t cried about my mother in years. I thought I’d outlived the sadness, but really I’ve just learned to live with it sitting quietly inside me, tainting everything. Gotta get it out, I think. Gotta get it out.
“I’m sorry, Rebekah,” Saul says finally.
“It’s okay,” I say, wiping my nose. “You didn’t owe us anything.”
CHAPTER NINE
I got back to the house in Coney Island before the sun broke the horizon. The front door was open and I smelled brewing coffee inside. I walked toward the back of the house and there was Saul Katz in the kitchen, wearing a blue police uniform and reading a newspaper spread across the counter. His black belt and boots shined. He’d cut his hair short and lost weight since I’d seen him last, and he seemed to stand up straighter. He didn’t hear me come in, and I stood in the doorway watching him for a few seconds. He was probably thirty or thirty-one years old then. Ten years older than me. The girl I borrowed the skirt from had told me that Saul recently left his wife and child and been shunned by his family and hers. But he was a success. He was up early, preparing to go to work protecting the city. Why was I incapable of such a thing? Was it because I was a woman? Or was it because I was weak?
“Saul,” I said finally.
He looked up, and when our eyes met we both smiled. I couldn’t help it. I was so happy to see a man who knew me and did not hate me.
“Aviva!” he exclaimed, leaning forward, looking me up and down.
“It’s nice to see you,” I said. And I remember that I meant it. I’ll never forget how his eyes shone. They twinkled just like your father’s did when I told him I would come live with him in Florida. I had been so powerful then. The way Saul looked at me in that pre-daylight kitchen made me feel powerful again. But by then, I sensed it wouldn’t last.
“And you!” he said. “Where have you been?”
“Florida,” I said.
He shook his head, amused. “You went with Brian.”
I nodded. “And after a while I stayed with my cousin Gitty,” I said. “In Maryland.”
“You are well? Where is Brian?”
“Brian is in Florida,” I said, leaving out the information he was really asking for. “You are a policeman now?”
Saul smiled again and patted the NYPD patch on his shoulder. “I am. I work in Crown Heights.”
“Do you like it?”
“I love it,” he said. “I meet so many people.”
“You look very happy,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. But he could not say the same thing about me. “I am so sorry about your mother, Aviva. Is that why you returned?”
I shook my head. “I only just learned that she died,” I said. “If I had known I would have come back sooner.” What I did not say, but what he probably knew, was that it was my fault. I left no way for them to contact me. No one knew I planned to leave because at the time it had seemed very important to keep our “Florida adventure” a secret. To speak of it, I foolishly imagined, might bring bad luck.
“Do you need a place to stay?” he asked. “There is room.”