One of the twins—I can’t tell them apart at all; they are both fair and pudgy—kept a beady eye on me while her grandfather was saying grace, and when the hubbub about the new baby has calmed down, she looks over.
“Doctor…will you come to church with us next Sunday?”
She is old enough to know that this is a charged question, but it is not a rhetorical one.
“I’m afraid not, no.”
She gets a nudge from her sister, whose face is a study in curiosity and mischief.
“Do you go to another church? Are you a Catholic?”
“Dolly…” Karen makes a half-hearted attempt.
Since deflection fails, I go for the full frontal.
“No, I’m not a Christian at all. I’m Jewish.”
This information shuts them up for about half a minute.
“What, like—in the Bible, like the Jews who—” Dolly blushes up to the roots of her wheaten hair at what she doesn’t have the courage to say.
“The Lord Jesus was a Jew.” Pop Walsh speaks, and no prophet addressing the Children of Israel ever had as shtum an audience. “And so were his mother Mary, and Joseph, and all the disciples.”
“But—”
A glance from those steely eyes quells Dolly as effectively as it would have quelled me, but Grandma Shirley seems to rate the twins’ spiritual enlightenment higher than the adults’ embarrassment.
“Howard, if they have questions about the Bible, I think they should be allowed to ask.”
He considers his wife’s mild but firm intervention.
“Well—what’s your question, Dolly?”
The twins have been feverishly exchanging views under their breaths and Dolly rises to the occasion.
“If Jesus and Joseph and Mary were Jews, why are we Christians?”
Go on, Solomon, I think grimly. Do your shtick.
“You should know the answer to that one,” he replies without hesitation. “You know that your Grandma’s father brought his family to this part of the world from the west of Germany?”
They nod.
“My great-grandfather came from County Antrim in Ireland. So why are we Americans, even though our families used to be German, in Grandma’s case, and Irish and Scottish, in my case?”
While the girls are trying to negotiate this masterly bluff, I wait to see whether the blue eyes will glance over at me. They do, and I have to grin. Well done, Pop.
“Lieberman is a German name?” Grandma Shirley makes her statement sound like a question.
“Well, sort of. My father’s family came from Warsaw, about a century ago.”
“Ah, so that was…before…”
“Yes, in nineteen oh-six. But my grandmother’s family escaped from Hamburg in thirty-five.”
“Why did she have to escape?” Jenny has picked up the shift in the atmosphere and it makes her uncomfortable. Her question releases a chorus of sighs in the room, and Jules roughly elbows her in the ribs.
“Dumbass!” she hisses under her breath. “Hitler!”
“Oww! Who is Hettler? Dad, Jules hit me!”
In a concerted effort, Karen and Shirley start planning their trip to Georgia, where they are going to spend Thanksgiving week with Howie’s sister and her family. The girls quietly spoon their blueberry pie and occasionally glance up with a mixture of speculation and rancor that has, I think, much to do with my withholding the story of my adventurous grandmother, who made a dare-devil escape from Germany pursued by a villain called Hettler.
“I hope you didn’t hate it!” Karen whispers urgently when she sees me off an hour later amidst a flood of apologies. Of course I didn’t. What’s to hate? The food was delicious, the Walshes were civil, if not exactly friendly to me, and I found them fascinating to watch. My heart is at peace as I walk from the main house toward my cottage, which is a dark shape against the gray backdrop of the forest.
Oddly enough, I, too, am dealing with pregnancy. Academically. Not like Karen, who is breeding a child in her belly and will have to endure, for the next seven or eight months, her family’s fervent hope it may be a boy. What if it’s another girl? Here she is, her first daughter a beautiful teenager of mixed race, clearly even more confused about her identity than other fifteen-year-olds, and those blonde, rather unattractive twins. It would be better for all concerned if her next child was a boy.
I have never been pregnant, except possibly once for about eight hours, when Ciaran was too stoned to use the condom properly and I rushed off for a morning-after pill. I still feel about pregnancy and motherhood the way I felt about them when