“I see no reason,” she mused, “that books are more expensive because of who owned them. It’s—”
“The way things work,” George cut her off.
He was attractive and he knew it, but he pretended he had no idea. Therefore he was both vain and disingenuous. Tall, or so he seemed to Jess, he looked Italian with his dark skin and dark eyes. Very old—again, from Jess’s point of view—where anyone past thirty harked back to another era altogether. Despite his years, George had a powerful body, a broad chest, a face of light and shade, a glint of humor even in his frown. When he wasn’t lobbing his sarcastic comments, he seemed scholarly and peaceful, like a Renaissance St. Jerome at work in his cave of books. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his sandaled feet. He wore T-shirts, jeans, rimless reading glasses, sometimes tweed jackets. He had the deep didactic voice of a man who had smoked for years and then suddenly quit and now hated smokers everywhere. He never watched television, and he never tired of telling people so. But the most pretentious thing about him was his long hair. With his chestnut locks threaded gray, he was a fly caught in amber, the product and exemplar of a lost world.
“I’m working on the money,” Jess told her sister. “Could I just explain?”
“There’s nothing to explain.” Emily’s voice was tense. “You know what you have to do. Take care of it.”
Later, waiting for her laundry in the basement, Jess weighed her choices: angering Emily, or asking Richard. Take care of it. Easy for Emily to say. Financially independent Emily got along beautifully with Richard. Ah, Marx was right about so many things—especially the moral superiority money afforded.
Perched atop a churning washing machine, she heard the clank of metal. Had she left her keys in her jeans pocket? A handful of coins? She wished her grandfather were still alive and she could call him. She had been close to her father’s father.
Mrs. Gibbs wheeled in her laundry. She pushed it in a little cart with her detergent on top.
“Good evening.” Mrs. Gibbs produced a change purse segmented with compartments for each kind of coin. Extracting quarters, she began lining them up in the slots of the machine opposite Jess. “How are you?” Mrs. Gibbs inquired as she loaded her whites.
“I’m okay,” said Jess.
Mrs. Gibbs shot Jess a penetrating look.
“I’m fine.”
“Fine sitting down here all alone?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Fine isn’t good,” said Mrs. Gibbs. “Fine isn’t right.”
“I’m okay. My sister is annoyed with me. I said I’d do something and I can’t.”
“Breaking a promise,” Mrs. Gibbs intoned.
“No!”
“Mmm,” said Mrs. Gibbs and suddenly all the machines around Jess seemed to hum with disapproval.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m not depressed or anything,” Jess reassured her neighbor.
“Have you tried prayer?” Mrs. Gibbs reached up to clasp Jess’s hands in her own.
“Mrs. Gibbs,” said Jess.
“Put your hands together.”
“This is just a small thing,” said Jess. “It’s not a matter of life and death. I’m okay.”
“Dear Lord,” Mrs. Gibbs prayed, “help Jessamine Bach to keep her promise. Help her and guide her to honesty and truth. Keep her in righteousness and do not allow her to fall. And let us say, ‘Amen.’”
“Amen,” said Jess. “But I’m not about to fall.”
“We could all fall at any moment,” Mrs. Gibbs said. “Remember that.”
“It’s just a little money thing….”
“There are no little money things,” Mrs. Gibbs said darkly.
“No, no, let me explain.” Jess told the story of Emily’s IPO and the Friends and Family deadline. Mrs. Gibbs listened in silence. At one point she closed her eyes, and Jess wondered if her neighbor was praying again silently, or simply appalled at how trivial Jess’s conundrum was.
“I have no money to lend you,” said Mrs. Gibbs at last.
“Oh, I wasn’t hinting!”
“But I will speak to my rabbi and see if he knows what to do.”
Jess hopped off her washer in surprise. “Your rabbi?”
Mrs. Gibbs gazed at Jess calmly. “Don’t you know, honey, that I am a Jew?”
“You’re kidding,” Jess blurted out.
“It’s not the color of your skin, but the feeling in your heart,” Mrs. Gibbs said.
“You’re right.” Abashed, Jess leaned against a washer. “I’m half Jewish,” she volunteered. “My mother was Jewish.”
Mrs. Gibbs nodded. “I’m a Jew by choice.”
“How did you choose?”
“I didn’t,” said Mrs. Gibbs, “the good Lord chose me.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But how did you … how did He …?”
“Many years ago when I first moved to this town, I was at my Bible study reading Deuteronomy 7:6: For thou art an holy people … the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people…. Just as we read that verse, the good Lord spoke to me and said, Who is the chosen? Who are the ones going to the Promised Land?
“That would be the Jews, I answered.
“Correct, He said. Why then are you not among them, if they are the holy people?
“I told my Bible study about this conversation, and they prayed for me. However, they could not point to the text and deny that the chosen are the Jews. After many weeks and arguments, I took my Bible with me to the Berkeley Bialystok Center.”
Reentering her apartment with her clean clothes piled high in her laundry basket, Jess found Theresa studying for orals at the table.
“Mrs. Gibbs is a Jew,” said Jess.
“Yeah, right,” said Theresa, scarcely looking up from her Kristeva.
“Seriously.”
“Has she offered to debate the merits of Jesus Christ with you?” Theresa asked.
“No.”
“Has she asked you to come with her to Bible study?”
“No. She wants me to meet her rabbi.”
Now Theresa shut her book. “Do not go anywhere with that woman.”
“Why?”
“Look, I grew up with evangelicals,” said Theresa. “I understand them. Mrs. Gibbs wants to steal your soul. I’m serious. Stay the hell away from her. You’ll end up dropping out of school, marrying some holy roller, and becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in the Philippines.”
“I think you might be a little prejudiced,” said Jess, and she began telling Mrs. Gibbs’s story.
“Where have you been?” Theresa interrupted. “That is a standard conversion narrative. Listen to me. I grew up with these people. I wasn’t allowed to date ’til I was sixteen. Then I only dated Christians. Then I took a vow of abstinence. I had to spend my weekends saving souls door-to-door. You have no idea.”
“But you escaped,” Jess pointed out. “You aren’t evangelical now.”
“Ha. You never really escape,” Theresa shot back. “You’re naïve if you think you can.” And she spoke from long experience growing up in Honolulu where her strong-willed father had not allowed her to get a driver’s license. She spoke remembering her mother’s thousand prayers, offered up on every occasion, even for the family dog, a toy terrier who sat up front in the car and panted in the tropical heat. But Jess had never seen the little dog with its pink tongue, and she had never met Theresa’s parents.
“I’m not naïve,” Jess said.
“Didn’t I see you give money to Crazy Al on Telegraph? Didn’t you say you got your cards read, quote unquote, for fun?”
“Not for fun. As a thought experiment, and by the way, the guy knows his ‘Prufrock.’”
“You have something about you that attracts fanatics,” said Theresa. “You have this way of letting them in. It’s dangerous. It’s like you’re blowing some kind of high-pitched dog whistle: Take me, take me….”
4
The Bialystok rabbi of Berkeley, known affectionately as the Berkinstoker, had come west from Brooklyn fifteen years before with his wife and baby. The family had grown, as had Rabbi Helfgott. He’d gained a few pounds with each of his wife’s pregnancies, and after the birth of their tenth child, he was a substantial man indeed. He wore the traditional garb of the Bialystoker sect: black frock coat and black gabardine trousers, a white dress shirt, and, when he went out, a broad-brimmed black hat. Burly, bearded, and gregarious, he was a familiar sight near campus, and Jess remembered him well from Sproul Plaza where she leafleted for Save the Trees. She had often seen the rabbi marching through the crowds with leaflets of his own for anyone who looked Jewish. He’d even approached Jess once and suggested, “Why don’t we trade? I’ll take yours, and you take mine.” She had offered him a leaflet titled “Arcata Arboricide” and he’d handed her a glossy brochure titled “Do a Mitzvah Today.” Then the rabbi had gestured broadly toward the bare white London plane trees lining the plaza. “You light Shabbes candles, and I will save a tree….” Jess remembered all this as she walked with Mrs. Gibbs to Dana Street, and she wondered if the rabbi would remember too.