The Matchmaker's Gift(19)
On Thursday, the synagogue was decorated with lilies and roses and a brilliant velvet canopy, called the chuppah. Under this entered from one side the bridegroom, and from the other, the blushing bride and her family. The marriage service was recited in Hebrew and concluded with the groom smashing a glass beneath his feet to serve as a symbol of sorrow amid celebration and a reminder of the fall of Jerusalem.
After the wedding ceremony, two thousand guests attended the banquet at Palm Garden, 150 East Fifty-Eighth Street. Among the invited guests were friends, relatives, east side neighbors, the bride’s classmates from Barnard, and the groom’s classmates from Columbia and the New York University College of Dentistry.
A circle was drawn in smudged black ink around the entire third paragraph of the story. What had possessed the reporter to include such an awkward disavowal of the matchmaking process?
The rest of the notes were filled with details about Ida’s older brothers and Herman’s relatives. When Abby reached the bottom of the page, the final line made her laugh out loud. In the seventy-eight years since the article was printed, her grandmother’s beliefs had not changed.
Don’t believe everything you read.
FIVE
SARA
1916
Sweet and Bitter and Gone Too Soon
Ever since Sara made the promise to her father, she’d been careful to avoid arranging matches. Or, rather, to be more accurate, she’d been careful to avoid the appearance of making them. With Jacob and Miryam, her influence had been obvious. Everyone knew the part she had played. But in order to avoid the shadchanim’s wrath, Sara knew she would have to be more cunning. She would have to be sure that if she paired two people, no one could trace it back to her. She would coordinate from the shadows. She would be invisible, Cupid’s ghost.
The first time Sara made a match this way, it was for her favorite teacher, Miss Perelman. At the advanced age of twenty-seven years old, Sophie Perelman was already considered an alteh moid—an old maid. Sara spotted her one day, after school, staring at a young mother with a baby in her arms. The teacher’s willow-thin frame seemed frailer than usual. The pile of curls on her head flopped to one side, and a thick cloud of longing blanketed her features. Sara walked home with a renewed sense of purpose: she would help Miss Perelman find her bashert—the soulmate who was meant to be hers.
As Sara pondered a selection of suitable men, she recalled a friend of Jacob’s she had met a few times—the son of a grocer living on Grand Street. After a day of snooping at his father’s store, Sara learned that Jacob’s friend was married. His younger brother, however, was free from any romantic entanglements.
Sara visited the grocery every day for two weeks, learning more about the young man each afternoon. He kept a book on the counter to read at odd moments. He put out bowls of milk for the neighborhood cats. He told Sara that peaches were his favorite fruit, and he showed her how to test them gently for ripeness. His given name was Shmuel, but his friends called him Sam.
At night, after reading her library books, Sara stared out the window of her family’s apartment and imagined the faces of Miss Perelman and Sam. She imagined the faces of other people as well—her neighbor’s nephew from Brooklyn who visited every Shabbos, the cobbler’s assistant who’d fixed a hole in her shoe, the daughter of the midwife who helped to deliver Miryam’s baby, the waitress at the coffee parlor on Second Avenue. The faces hung suspended in Sara’s mind like stars dangling in a nighttime sky. When Sara shut her eyes, she tried to connect them into tiny constellations—two points of light apiece. The star-faces dimmed and brightened in turn, but when she hit upon a pair that shimmered in her mind’s eye, she knew that she had found a match.
It took months of imagining before she figured out the manner in which the combinations revealed themselves. When at last she understood, she was certain that Miss Perelman should be paired with Sam. But how could she manage an introduction without letting either of them know?
She began by bringing Miss Perelman a peach. It was one Sam had helped her to pick—sweet and fragrant, deliciously soft. Sara did not mention Sam at all—only the peaches and the apples he sold.
“It’s from the grocer on Grand Street,” Sara offered, when Miss Perelman expressed her appreciation.
“I don’t think I’ve been to that market before.”
“It isn’t far, and it’s worth the walk. My mother says the produce is the freshest and the prices are better than all the other grocers.”
“Thank you, Sara. Perhaps I’ll go. I’ve been looking for strawberries everywhere and I can’t find any at the usual markets.”
“The grocer’s wife said she’ll have strawberries in a few days. She said they would be the first of the season.”
“That settles it then,” the teacher said.
The next day, Sara politely suggested that Sam trade his soiled apron for a clean one.
Sam looked surprised. “What’s wrong with my apron? What do you think aprons are for, anyway? You get them dirty, so your clothes stay clean.”
“I know,” Sara said. “But yours is filthy.” Sam looked down at the messy spots of tomato, the splashes of beet juice, and the smudges of dirt. He rubbed his finger over a dried yellow circle of something Sara couldn’t identify. “Is that egg?” she asked, but Sam merely shrugged.