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FORTY-TWO

Sunday, 6.02pm, Brooklyn

Will could say nothing. He sat pressed against the back of the sofa, as if pinned there by a fierce wind. He listened hard, his mind trying to absorb everything TC was saying. But it was also racing, rewinding wildly through the events of the last forty-eight hours, seeing each moment in a new light. And not just the last forty-eight hours, but the last five or six years. Every experience he and TC had shared now looked utterly, entirely different.

‘You saw those families with a dozen children. That’s what my family was like. I was number three and there were six more after me. Me and my older sister, we were like mini-moms: cleaning and preparing meals for the babies from the day we were old enough to do it.’

‘And did you, you know, look like that?’

‘Oh yes. The whole business: long dresses brushing the floor, mousy hair, glasses. And my mother wore a wig.’

‘A wig?’

‘I never explained that to you, did I? Remember, the women with “unnaturally straight” hair you saw, and how they all seemed to wear their hair in the same style? Those were sheitls, wigs worn by married women as an act of modesty: they’re only meant to show their real hair to their husbands.’

‘Right.’

‘I know you think it’s weird, Will, but what you’ve got to realize is, I loved it. I lapped it all up. I would read these folk tales in the Tzena Arenna, old legends of the Baal Shem Tov—’

Will turned his face into a question mark.

‘The founder of Hassidism. All these stories of wise men journeying through the forest, paupers revealed as men of great piety and honoured by God. I loved it.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I must have been about twelve. I would doodle in my exercise books a lot. But at that age I started surprising myself with what I could do. Even I could see the drawings were becoming more elaborate and, you know, quite good. But there were so few pictures to look at. You see, ultra-orthodox Jews are not that big on graven images. There were hardly any around. And then, one day at sem – sorry, seminary; kind of the girls’ school – I found one of those “Introduction to the Great Painters” books. On Vermeer. I stole it and hid it under my pillow. I’m not kidding, for months I would wait till my sisters were asleep and then, under the covers, I’d stare at these beautiful pictures. Just staring at them. I knew then that’s what I wanted to do.’

‘You started painting.’

‘No. There was never any time. At sem, it was just study, study, study. Holy texts. At home I had to clean, cook, change diapers, play with the baby, help the younger ones with their homework. I shared my room with two sisters. I had no time and no space.’

‘You must have gone out of your mind.’

‘I did. I’d dream every day how I could get out. I wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum. To see the Vermeer. But it wasn’t just the painting.’

‘Go on.’

‘I know this sounds funny, given what I’m like now, but I was really good at religious studies.’

‘No, sorry, I don’t find that surprising at all.’

‘I was top of my class. I found it easy. The texts, all those multiple meanings and cross-references, they just seemed to open up to me. Once a rabbi told me I was as good as any boy.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘I was furious. It was like, girls are only meant to go so far. Once you’re seventeen or eighteen you become a woman – and that means getting married, having babies, keeping house. Men could carry on at the yeshiva forever, but girls were only allowed to acquire the basics. Then we had to stop. Those were the rules. Five Books of Moses, a bit of Gemara maybe. That’s a kind of rabbinic commentary. But that was it.’

‘So all this kabbalah, you never studied that.’

‘Wasn’t allowed. Only men over forty can even look at it, remember.’

‘Christ.’

‘Exactly. You know me, if there’s a forbidden zone, I want to go there. I found the odd book among my father’s things, but I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. I needed a guide. So I asked Rabbi Mandelbaum.’

‘Who?’

‘The one who told me I was as good as a boy. I told him I wanted to study. I came to him with all the relevant texts that proved I had the right, as a woman, to know what was in those books.’

‘And did he agree? Did he teach you?’

‘Every Tuesday evening, a secret class at his house. The only other person who knew about it was his wife. She would bring a glass of lemon tea for him, a glass of milk for me – and rugelach, little pastry cakes, for both of us. We did that for five years.’ She was smiling.

‘What happened?’

‘He got worried. Not for his sake – he was too old to care what people thought – but for me. I was approaching “the age of marriage”. He told me, “Tova Chaya, it would take a very strong man not to feel threatened by so learned a wife”. I think he was worried that he had ruined me: that, thanks to him, I would not be happy keeping house. I wouldn’t be a good wife like Mrs Mandelbaum. He had lifted my sights. In a way he was right.

‘But he needn’t have worried; by then I had planned my escape. I applied to Columbia; I gave a PO Box address so that no one would see the correspondence. I applied for tons of scholarships, so that I could afford a room. I presented myself as an independent adult; as far as the college were concerned, I had no parents.

‘So when the day came, I gave the kids breakfast, as always, called out goodbye to my mother, as always, and I walked to the subway station.’

‘And you never went back.’

‘Never.’

Will’s mind was speeding, spilling with questions. But he was also overrun with answers. Suddenly, he saw so much that had been hidden. ‘TC’ was no toddler nickname, its origins forgotten. It was a vestige of Tova Chaya’s former life. And no wonder TC’s parents were such a mystery: they were from a past she had abandoned. Of course there were no pictures: that would have betrayed her secret.

‘Do they even know you’re alive?’

‘I speak to them by phone, before the major festivals. But I haven’t seen them since I was seventeen.’

In an instant, TC made sense. Of course she was brilliant but knew nothing of pop music and junk TV: she had grown up without them. Of course she spoke no French or Spanish: she had devoted her time to Yiddish and Hebrew instead.

Will suddenly thought of TC’s eating habits – the fondness for Chinese food, studded with jumbo prawns, the fry-up breakfasts, with generous rations of bacon. She loved all that stuff. How come? ‘The zeal of a convert,’ she said wryly.

Now that he had been to Crown Heights himself, Will realized the scale of TC’s rupture from her upbringing. He looked at her now: the tight top revealing the shape of her breasts; the exposed midriff; the navel stud. He thought back to the notice he had seen in Crown Heights.

Girls and women who wear immodest garments, and thereby call attention to their physical appearance, disgrace themselves . . .

Her break from Hassidism could not have been more complete. And he was forgetting the biggest rebellion of all: him.

People from her world did not have sex outside marriage. They rarely married people from outside their own sect of Hassidism, let alone non-Jews. Yet she had had a long, physical relationship with him – not her husband and not a Jew. For him it had been a wonderful romance. He now understood that for her it had been a revolution.

He suddenly saw TC differently. He imagined her as she would have been: a bright, studious girl of Crown Heights groomed for a life of modesty, child-rearing and dutiful observance. What a journey she had made, crossing this city and centuries of tradition and taboo. He stood up, walked over to her and gave her a long, warm hug.

‘It’s a privilege to meet you, Tova Chaya.’