And After the Fire Read online

  He’d been left with neither.

  I’m sorry, the pediatrician said after Martin died. The doctor was crying. The doctor, crying.

  We tried our best, said Julie’s oncologist. Our very best. He shook his head and shuffled out of the hospital room.

  One week after their son died, Julie died. Fifteen months ago. Like yesterday. It was God’s will—these words of comfort were offered to him again and again by family and friends. God had willed these terrible events. Was this supposed to make him feel better? Was it meant to give him a consoling perception of order in the midst of apparent chaos?

  Dan was finding no consolation in the notion of God’s will. During the fraught days after Martin and Julie died, his fellow parishioners—his friends—seemed to be jumping through hoops as they struggled to find meaning in their deaths. Dan came to wonder if maybe there was no meaning.

  He met several times with a pastoral counselor. She told him that he was entitled to feel angry at God, but time would bring him to understanding and acceptance. He must bow before the will of God.

  This reasoning seemed so facile that Dan stopped the sessions. He began to question whether God had a plan for his life, and to wonder whether all existence was in fact, as secularists maintained, nothing but a series of random events.

  Today, looking at the candles on the altar, at the minister preaching his fanatical convictions, Dan thought, if there really were a God looking after them, Julie would at least have died believing her son had survived. Martin would have lived one week, until Julie died. She wouldn’t have had to torment herself over whether parents can presume God’s salvation of children who die before baptism. She would have thought the sacrifice of her own life was worthwhile, to leave her child behind. This one act of mercy, God would not give: that Julie, His faithful servant, would die before her infant son. Seeing Martin dead . . . from that moment, she’d looked at everyone, even Becky, even Dan, with a vacancy in her eyes. Dan held her, he talked to her, but she was absent.

  “We must rescue this nation from the terrible sin of murder,” Mansholt thundered on.

  Right then and there on this October morning, in church no less, the edifice of faith that Dan had been raised with, that he’d remained loyal to throughout his adulthood, that had guided his life, collapsed around him. The clarity of his reverse epiphany—there is no God—left him shattered. He’d been a fool, all these years, coming here, praying, singing hymns, serving on church committees with their endless, often futile discussions. He felt an inverse of the faith message in the hymn “Amazing Grace”: for years, he’d been blind, but now he could see.

  The minister prepared for communion. He chanted, “The Lord be with you.” The congregation responded, “And with your spirit.” The minister then said the words of consecration over the bread and wine, by which they were transformed into a sacramental union where the body and the blood of Christ are truly and substantially present in, with, and under the forms of the communion elements. Or so the minister reminded the congregants.

  Dan felt ill.

  The minister said, “The gifts of God for the people of God.”

  Around him, Dan’s friends stood, walked toward the altar, and waited in line.

  Dan wouldn’t, couldn’t, take communion. A cataclysm had taken place within him. As he looked around, however, everything outside himself appeared normal. Friends nodded, some with a smile as they passed and saw Becky asleep, cradled against his arm. They didn’t expect him to disturb her by getting up for communion, not after all she’d been through.

  What were these people doing here, Dan wondered. Was Karl Marx right, and religion nothing but an opiate? Or was it just a habit: from childhood, you’ve attended church, so you keep going as an adult whether you believe in the teachings or not. Whether you even pay attention to the teachings. And then you have your children do it because you did it. If Dan took a poll, how many of those standing in line for communion would say that they truly believed that the bread and wine had also become the actual physical body and blood of Christ, as their Lutheranism taught?

  Dan felt as if he’d been living in a trance. For fifteen months, since Julie and Martin died, he’d been struggling to abide within a lifelong frame of reference. Today the framework had disintegrated. Why this particular day? The accumulation of Pastor Mansholt’s convictions, Luther’s writings, Susanna Kessler and her Bach cantata, Julie and Martin . . . today these reached a breaking point for the certainties of his life.

  Dan thought back to Julie’s funeral, held here fifteen months ago, ten days after Martin’s. Pastor Mansholt had said, our Julie is happy now. Her pain has ceased. Her soul is at peace.

  Yes, her physical pain had ceased, that much was true.

  For the funeral, Julie’s childhood friend George Graff had traveled from Wisconsin to sing the bass aria “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

  The aria’s music and text, a metaphor for the Sacrament of Communion, began to run through Dan’s mind . . . Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, Ich will Jesum selbst begraben. Denn er soll nunmehr in mir. “Make yourself pure, my heart, I wish to bury Jesus himself within me.” The aria consumed him with longing for Julie, and for the faith that had abandoned him.

  Mache dich, mein Herze, rein . . . The oboe lines, with their parallelisms and insistent appoggiaturas, expressed a desolate yearning, but also a comfort. After Julie died, Dan had listened to the aria over and over at home at night after Becky had fallen asleep. He had buried himself in the music just as the singer begged that Jesus be buried within his heart.

  The aria continued to sweep through him, as it had at Julie’s burial, her body in its box lowered into the earth, beside Martin’s grave, leaving Dan bereft. Make yourself pure, my heart, I wish to bury Jesus himself within me . . .

  Once, Dan had believed that the transcendence of Bach’s music proved the objective truth of Bach’s faith, which was also Dan’s faith. Faith had drawn Dan to Bach, and Bach had drawn Dan to faith, a perfect circle.

  He still felt the aria’s spiritual consolation, even though he’d lost its doctrinal meaning.

  When the service was finally over, Dan woke Becky. He helped her to her feet. As always after a nap, she was groggy, clinging to his jacket with one hand, rubbing her eyes with the other. They waited their turn to join the procession out of the church.

  Dan shook hands with Pastor Mansholt as if everything were the same as when he’d entered the sanctuary an hour or so before. With a mock bow, the pastor shook hands with Becky. Awake now, she giggled and curtsied. So sweet, she was. Again the music was in his mind, filling him, Mache dich, mein Herze, rein . . . assailing him with the tragedy of his and Julie’s life together. He no longer understood his place within the scheme of things.

  He and Becky walked into the autumn sunshine, into a grove of sugar maples exploding in red and orange, hurting his eyes. Dan was dazed. He didn’t know where to go next. He couldn’t summon the motivation to step forward.

  “Daddy,” Becky said, pulling on his hand to get his attention. “Wake up, Daddy.” She tugged at him. “I’m hungry. Let’s have lunch.”

  Chapter 11

  On Sunday afternoon, the day after Susanna received her divorce decree in the mail, she and her friend Miriam Krieger reclined on Adirondack chairs in the garden of the Peabody Episcopal Seminary in Chelsea. Susanna’s apartment building, a renovated Victorian mansion, was on the seminary grounds.

  “Susanna, I have to ask you: Why are you living here?”

  Miriam spoke bluntly to all her friends. She was a small woman, well toned from the gym, her hair cut short and turning prematurely gray. She was an attorney specializing in trusts and estates.

  “I just don’t get it,” Miriam continued. “There’s a church in your garden.”

  “I know. Isn’t it lovely?” St. Anselm’s was a Victorian Gothic chapel, a jewel in their midst.

  “I have to tell you the truth: it’s so . . . Chr
istian here.”

  “Of course it’s Christian. It’s a seminary close.”

  “Listen to you—you’ve learned phrases that don’t even make sense.”

  Most of Susanna’s friends, Jewish and Christian both, were mystified when Susanna moved here. While she was apartment hunting, she’d seen an advertisement for the building in a real-estate insert in The New York Times. In addition to the promises of EIK and WBF, the photos showed a historic community of gracious seclusion. After being shown a string of apartments that she couldn’t imagine living in because they were so much like the home she’d shared with Alan, she remembered the Victorian mansion.

  From the moment she moved in, she felt more like her old self. She rarely noticed the religious aspect of the setting. For her, St. Anselm’s simply added to the peaceful atmosphere. The seminary owned the entire block, and the inner garden, hidden from the street, was a parklike refuge. The tranquillity and safety were exactly what she needed after the attack. The seminary provided its faculty with accommodation in town houses that opened onto the close, and the children in the garden, the chapel bells, and the regular pattern of students going to classes created a steady rhythm to Susanna’s own days.

  On this sunny afternoon, families played hide-and-seek around the trees. Children chased dogs across the grass and vice versa. The sounds of laughter, barking, and mild parental admonishments drifted on the breeze.

  “You haven’t answered my question: Why are you living here?”

  “I like it. It’s a big city and a small village simultaneously.” She paused, feeling she owed Miriam more. “I feel safe here.”

  Miriam studied her with a frown of suspicion. “No place is safe. Not forever. Not completely.”

  “This is the best I can do right now. Besides, I like the people.” Among the dozen residents of her building, she’d become close to the gay architect who lived on the ground floor with his partner, raising the two disabled boys they’d adopted. She’d also befriended a long-married couple, both professors of church history, who lived on the second floor. Their grandchildren visited on holiday weekends, rushing up and down the stairs and piling into Susanna’s apartment for hot chocolate. “I’ve been elected head of the building’s tenants’ committee.” With light irony Susanna added, “So you see, I have the beginning of a power base.”

  “A power base is good, I do understand that.” Miriam was the director of the board at her co-op uptown. “But you’re not going to convert, are you?”

  “Convert to what?”

  “Don’t pretend to be dense. You’re not going to become a Christian?”

  Susanna couldn’t help but laugh. “Doubtful.”

  “You have doubts?”

  Miriam was being oddly serious today.

  “No, Miriam.” Susanna couldn’t imagine herself practicing any religion. “It’s just history and real estate, all of this.”

  “Okay, so what about the divorce decree? How are you feeling, now that you finally have the decree?”

  “What is this, gang-up-on-Susanna day?”

  “It’s my job as your friend to make sure you’re okay.”

  And Miriam was a good friend. She’d come to the emergency room after the attack and spoken to nurses and to Detective Lazetera when Susanna and Alan were too upset to think rationally. She’d accompanied Susanna to her therapy sessions when she was too frightened to go out of the house alone and Alan had to be at work. Susanna felt a responsibility to give Miriam an honest answer.

  “Put it this way: I’m not glad I was attacked, but I am glad not to be married to Alan anymore.” For Miriam, she tried to sound strong, even though part of her was still mourning for the life she’d once led, for the closeness she and Alan had shared, and the pleasure they’d experienced together each day. “Not after what he—” He was tortured, too, Susanna knew, because he’d told her this. Her anger toward him seemed, sometimes, ungenerous. “After what he decided he had to do.”

  “He was a complete jerk.”

  “Please don’t say anything bad about him.”

  “I don’t understand why you defend him.”

  Susanna knew exactly why: she’d loved him for years. They’d hoped to have a child together. Had he been a complete jerk the entire time? She tried to put herself into his shoes, to imagine the violation he felt. Her sympathy for him didn’t go very far but even so, she didn’t like her friends to criticize him. That was her prerogative. By judging him, they were judging her.

  “I have the decree, so it’s all in the past now.”

  “That’s a healthy attitude.”

  “Thank you. Good of you to approve.”

  She could see Miriam internally debating whether to continue pressing the issue. To deflect the conversation away from herself, Susanna asked, “How are the girls?” Miriam and her husband, Ben, had two daughters, Helen and Nicole.

  “Fine.” Miriam stopped.

  “And?”

  “The fact is.” Miriam stopped again. “You are not going to believe this.”

  Susanna sensed that Miriam was about to deliver a long and complicated story, most likely funny, and her own tension eased.

  “As you know—and you’d better be saving the date—Helen will make her bat mitzvah next September. Last week, completely out of nowhere, she announced that she’s going to give a speech about being a Jew who doesn’t believe in God. She’s calling her speech ‘How to Be a Good Atheist and a Good Jew.’”

  “Excellent title. I think a lot of people will be interested in that topic. I’m interested. The rabbi approved it?”

  “He said it was perfect, thought-provoking, the height of creativity and self-knowledge.”

  “I have to agree, it is perfect, thought-provoking, et cetera.”

  “Don’t tease.”

  “I’m not teasing.”

  “Helen’s creativity and self-knowledge aren’t the problem.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “It’s Gran: she should live so long to hear the speech. What will she think? We haven’t told her yet, but eventually we’ll have to.”

  Miriam’s grandmother Sofia was ninety-four, slow on her feet but mentally sharp. Somehow she’d survived the war, hidden in a neighbor’s barn. She was a tough-minded woman who shrewdly examined everything and everyone.

  Susanna said, “Atheism and Judaism aren’t mutually exclusive, as I can attest. Sofia might be an atheist. Have you asked her?”

  “She lights candles every Friday night. She covers her eyes and prays. Does that sound like an atheist?”

  “She might enjoy doing it because her own mother did it, and she doesn’t even think about whether it has broader meaning or not.”

  “I don’t think so. She actually murmurs the prayers. Anyway—” Miriam’s voice constricted, and she inhaled sharply. “I’m trying not to encourage Helen by discouraging her, if you see what I mean. She’s stubborn and says exactly what she thinks. She can be impossible when she thinks someone is trying to cross her.”

  Susanna refrained from saying that Helen was much like her mother.

  “Ben is livid and lets her know every day. They’re barely speaking. He thinks she’s being disrespectful.”

  “Instead of keeping it secret, Helen should talk to Sofia about the topic of the speech. Include her great-grandmother’s reaction, the opinion of a survivor.”

  “That might work,” Miriam conceded.

  “They can figure it out between the two of them.”

  Miriam thought this through. “Okay, I’ll try. Enough of that. I have another question for you: What’s the situation with the house in Buffalo?”

  Susanna brought Miriam up to date. Henry and Greta’s apartment was finally empty, and legal matters were on track for Jenna and Diane, the upstairs renters, to buy the house.

  “Find anything interesting when you cleaned out the apartment?”

  Susanna stiffened. “What do you mean?” She wasn’t ready to tell anyone about the ma
nuscript, beyond the scholars who could potentially help her.

  “When Gran dies—thirty or forty years from now and not a minute sooner, I wonder if we’ll find anything in her apartment.”

  “What sort of anything?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Miriam seemed to be making an effort to be nonchalant. “Letters, photos, documents. Anything. About Gran’s family. Which is our family, of course. We don’t know anything about her family from before the war. Her parents, her brothers and sisters. She won’t talk about them. I don’t even know where the family was from. Austro-Hungary, that’s all she says. Do you know how big Austro-Hungary was?”

  “Yes, I do know.” Susanna remembered standing outside doorways when she was young, listening to conversations. Susanna looks like her.

  “There are so many websites nowadays, where you can do research to try to find out what happened to people, but unless you have at least a few details, it’s useless. There are millions of entries. Sometimes I wonder if Gran’s trying to cover up some crime that her family committed. Incest or murder or an illicit love affair, God knows what. Maybe they were professional thieves. Or Gran’s father, my great-grandfather, was in prison.”

  Once Susanna had thought such things about her own relatives, speculating that a scandal stopped Henry and Evelyn from telling her the truth. Now she believed that the simplest explanation was also the most likely: they were murdered during the war. Did the exact details matter? Yes. But Susanna had never allowed herself to search for those details. The whispered secrets of her childhood had filled her with dread.

  “When Gran does answer my questions, her replies are meaningless, like those places don’t exist anymore, or the records were destroyed. Once she said, ‘What family are you talking about?’ As if I were a fool.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe Helen will be able to discover something.”

  “I hope so.” Signaling that she didn’t want to talk about this anymore, Miriam leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and let the sun bathe her face.