Reading Online Novel

Festival of Deaths(11)



“Don’t be ridiculous,” Shelley said.

DeAnna sighed. “It’s my personal opinion that most women—Christian and Jew; fat and thin; white, black, and green—need their heads examined.”

Shelley laughed, and DeAnna went striding across the studio and out the studio door. Shelley turned around and looked at the set, going over the changes in her mind one more time, making sure she had it all down pat. It wasn’t as easy to think on no sleep as it had been when Shelley was still at Rhode Island, but it was easier than she would have imagined. Middle age had turned out not to be such a boogeyman after all.

Shelley had gotten to her feet and started across the studio to get her tote bag when she saw the dreidel, and then she couldn’t help herself. It was sitting in the middle of the set where it didn’t belong. Shelley couldn’t abide having things where they didn’t belong. It was an ordinary dreidel, a small top with four planed surfaces on its sides and the surfaces painted with Hebrew letters, a toy for family gambling games during Hanukkah. Hanukkah was late in December this year, but the dreidels had started showing up at delis and newsstands at the beginning of November, and now everybody on the show had at least one. Shelley supposed half of everybody in New York had at least one, since fifty cents, and not a connection to Judaism, was the only requirement for ownership.

She picked this dreidel up and turned it over in her hand, murmuring the Hebrew letters to herself and the sentence they stood for. Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn, the letters went, meaning Nes gadol hayah sham—“A great miracle occurred there.” That meant the miracle of the one night of oil that had lasted eight nights and allowed the Maccabees to win a military victory over Antiochus, after Antiochus had tried to forbid the Jews to practice Judaism. Shelley had grown up in a decidedly secular family and married a decidedly secular man, but even she knew this much about the religion of her ancestors. Hanukkah, her grandmother used to say, is the one holiday even Communists are loath to give up. Shelley hadn’t known what that meant, because all the people in her family were advocates of Freud, not Marx, and wouldn’t have known a manifesto if it showed up for dinner.

Shelley flipped the dreidel in her hand one more time, and then stopped. The dreidel was defective. Maybe that was why it was left on the floor. The nūn and gīmel and hē were all in their right places, but the shīn wasn’t. Where the shīn was supposed to be was a different letter entirely, the letter pē. Shelley had to wrack her brains to come up with the name—she had taken exactly six weeks of Hebrew lessons when she was thirteen and then decided the enterprise was going to make her crazy—but she was proud of herself for doing it. She wondered why nobody had noticed the mistake until the dreidel was bought and brought here. Maybe the mistake hadn’t been noticed even then. Maybe she was the first one to see.

She stood up and started back for the door, and then the lights above her head began to go on one by one. She squinted into the rafters and said, “Itzaak?”

“Ready to go,” Itzaak said, in his thick Russian accent overlaid with an Israeli lilt.

Shelley dropped the dreidel into her pocket.

“I’ve got to get the new set together,” she said. “Then I’m going to give you a lot of work to do.”





5


ALL HIS LIFE, MAXIMILLIAN Dey had wanted exactly two things, and now, at the ripe old age of eighteen, he had one of them. The one of them he had was his residence not only in the United States, but in New York. Back in the little seacoast town in Portugal where he had grown up, New York was like Atlantis, considered to be fabulous at the same time it was considered to be fake. Maximillian sent his mother and his sisters chips of New York City sidewalk, just to prove that it was real. He sent them pictures of himself sitting in espresso bars in Greenwich Village and standing in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. He did not send them detailed explanations of the geography of the city or the status of the five boroughs. Boroughs were something he hadn’t known about himself until he landed in the States. Besides, for the moment, there was nothing he could do about the fact that he lived in Queens. Maximillian was only surviving out there by rooming with three other young men like himself in a two-bedroom place that needed a coat of paint. He had checked out rents in Manhattan and they were appalling: fifteen hundred dollars for one room and a Pullman kitchen on West Ninety-fourth Street near Amsterdam Avenue; eight hundred dollars a month for a smaller room and a hot plate in a decaying brownstone on a seedy back street in the Village. It was insane. It was only a matter of time. Maximillian Dey was much too young to believe in his own mortality, physical or metaphorical. He was sure that he would have his apartment in Manhattan and his furniture from Conran’s and his season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera by the time he was twenty-two. In the meantime, he bought discount everything and fished copies of The New Yorker out of the office wastebaskets to read.