The Immortalists(37)

Now, as she stood with what was left of her family and Gertie recited Kel Maleh Rachamim in Hebrew, something changed. A lock popped off; air rushed in, and with it a colossal tide of grief – or was it relief? – for the words she had heard since childhood. She could not recall each of their meanings, but she knew they connected the dead, Simon and Saul, to the living: Klara and Varya, Gertie and Daniel. In the words of the prayer, no one was missing. In the words of the prayer, the Golds gathered together.

Three months later, she returned to New York for the High Holy Days. It was agonizing to be with anyone at all, like rubbing sandpaper on a burn, but she still scrounged the money for a plane ticket: it was least agonizing to be with people who loved Simon, too. At first, they were gentle with one another. By midweek, though, that softness wiped off like dust. Daniel chopped apples at a fierce clip.

‘I feel like I didn’t even know him,’ he said.

Klara dropped the spoon she was using to scoop honey. ‘Why? Because he was a fag? Is that what you think of him – that he was just some fag?’

Her words ran together. Varya eyed her with distaste. Klara had filled a water bottle with clear liquor and hidden it beneath the bathroom sink, in a basket cluttered with body wash and old shampoo.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Varya said. Gertie was in bed, where she stayed whenever they weren’t at services.

‘No,’ said Daniel, to Klara. ‘Because he cut us out. He didn’t tell us shit. Do you know how many times we called, Klara? How many messages we left, begging him to talk to us, asking him why he just left? And you going along with it, keeping his secrets, not even calling us’ – his voice breaking – ‘not even calling us when he got sick?’

‘It wasn’t my right,’ Klara said, but it came out feebly, for she burned constantly with guilt. She saw it now: her brother’s departure was the bomb that blew them apart, even more than Saul’s death. Varya and Daniel were sidelined by resentment, Gertie by suffering. And if Klara hadn’t urged Simon to go, would he still be alive? She was the one who believed in the prophecies; she was the one who managed his trajectory, nudging until it canted and turned left. And no matter how many times she recalled Simon’s words in the hospital – how he squeezed her hand, how he thanked her – she couldn’t help but feel that things would have been different if they’d gone to Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia, if she’d kept her goddamn beliefs to herself.

‘I was trying to be loyal to him,’ she whispered.

‘Yeah? And where was your loyalty to us?’ Daniel looked at Varya. ‘V put her whole life on hold. You think she wants to be here? Twenty-five years old, still living with Ma?’

‘Yeah, sometimes I do. Sometimes I think she likes to play it safe. Sometimes,’ Klara said, looking at Varya, ‘I think you’re more comfortable that way.’

‘Screw you,’ Varya said. ‘You know nothing about what the past four years have been like. You know nothing about responsibility, or duty. And you probably never will.’

If Daniel had filled out, Varya seemed to have shrunk. She was working as an administrative assistant at a pharmaceutical company, having put off graduate school to live with Gertie. One evening, Klara saw Varya bent over Gertie’s bed at the waist. Gertie had her arms around Varya, and she was shuddering. Klara receded, ashamed. The privilege of their mother’s touch, her confidence, was something Varya had earned.

Gertie spent the Days of Repentance in a fog of misery. After Saul’s death, she had said: not again. She could not, once more, bear the consequences of love – so she bid Simon goodbye before he could do it to her. I don’t want you coming back.

He hadn’t. And now, he never would.

‘Three books are opened in heaven on Rosh Hashanah,’ Rabbi Chaim said, on the first night of the High Holy Days. ‘One for the wicked, one for the virtuous, and one for those in-between. The wicked are inscribed in the book of death, the virtuous in the book of life, but the fate of the in-between is suspended until Yom Kippur – and let’s be honest,’ he added, to smiles from the audience, ‘that’s most of us.’

Gertie could not smile. She knew she was wicked. All the prayer in the world would make no difference. But she must try, said Rabbi Chaim, when she went to see him privately. His eyes were kindly through his spectacles, his beard bobbing peaceably. She thought of his family – his dutiful wife, who rarely spoke, and his three healthy boys – and for seconds, she had hated him.

Another sin.

Rabbi Chaim put a hand on her shoulder. ‘None of us is free from sin, Gertie. But God turns no one away.’

Then where was He? Since Saul’s death, Gertie had committed anew to the temple and its promises, she had thrown herself at it like a lover – she had even enrolled in Hebrew lessons. And though she had cried enough tears to fill the Hudson, she felt no forgiveness, no change. God remained as distant as the sun.

On Yom Kippur, Gertie dreamed of visiting Greece. It was no place she’d ever been, though she had seen photos of it in a magazine at the dentist’s office. In the dream, she stood on a cliff and clutched two ceramic pots, each of which held one set of ashes: those of her husband, and those of her son. From the cliff, Gertie could see the blue-capped churches and white houses that withdrew into the mountain, like a rescinded offer. When she tipped the pots toward the water, she felt dreadful freedom – an unbounded aloneness so dizzying she felt the pull of the water herself.