‘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.’
Sunday, 6.46pm, Brooklyn
He wanted to interrogate TC for hours, about her life, about the secret she had kept for so long. Lots of Jewish people became orthodox; they were known as chozer b’tshuva, literally ‘one who returns to repentance’. She had gone the other way: chozer b’she’ela. She had returned to question.
But they had no time for that conversation, no matter how much they wanted it. They had to get to Crown Heights. Yosef Yitzhok had been murdered, though neither of them had any idea why. The last messages Will had received – directing him to Atlas at the Rockefeller Center – had been sent after YY’s death, proof that he had not been the informer after all. So why would anyone want him dead? Will was baffled. All he knew was that things were turning steadily more vicious. The rabbi had not been exaggerating: time was running out.
Just as pressing was TC’s promise. All would become clear, she had said, once they were in Crown Heights. She could not tell Will herself what was going on. But the explanation lay there. They just had to find it.
‘I’m going to need to use your bathroom. And I’m going to need to borrow some of Beth’s clothes.’
‘Sure,’ Will said, trying hard to shrug off the potential symbolism of that request. He led TC to Beth’s closet and, steeling himself, pulled back the sliding door. Instantly his nostrils filled with the scent of her. He was sure he could smell her hair; he could think himself into the aroma of that patch of skin below her ear. He breathed in deeply, through his nose.
TC pulled out a plain white blouse, one Beth wore for formal work meetings, usually under a dark trouser-suit. It was cut high, Will noticed. We request that all women and girls, whether living here or visiting, adhere at all times to the laws of modesty . . .
She turned to Will. ‘Does Beth have any really long skirts?’
Will thought hard. There were a couple of long dresses, including a particularly beautiful one he had bought for his wife on their first anniversary. But they were evening wear.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Let me look at the back here.’ He wondered if Beth had gotten around to throwing it out; he knew she planned to. It was a long, drab dark velvet skirt that Will had mocked mercilessly. He called it Beth’s ‘spinster cellist number’. She put up a mock-defence, but she could see his point: it did make her look like one of those silver-haired lady players spotted in every orchestra. But she felt attached to it. To Will’s great relief at this moment, she had never got rid of it.
‘OK,’ said TC, moving towards the bathroom. ‘These will have to go.’ She cocked her head to one side to take off her earrings. Then she pressed her face closer to the mirror and began the complex manoeuvre of removing her nose-stud. Finally she gazed down at her middle and unscrewed the ring that pierced her belly button. She now had a small pile of metal in her hand, which she placed by the basin.
‘Now for the toughest job of all.’ She reached into her bag to produce a newly purchased bottle of shampoo, one specially designed for the task at hand. She started running the tap, grabbed a towel and slung it around her shoulders. As if bracing herself for a nasty ordeal, she bent down and lowered her head towards the water.
As Will watched she began to lather up and rinse. She had to scrub hard, but soon her effort was paying off. The water in the sink began to turn a blueish purple. The dye was coming out, a stream of it swirling around the white porcelain and away. Will was fascinated by the coloured water. It was not only removing a chemical from TC’s hair; it seemed to be washing away the last decade of her life.
He left to collect a few things of his own. What had the rabbi said? ‘All will become clear in a few days’ time.’ That was two days ago. Perhaps he was about to close in on the truth, at long last. What would it be? What was this ‘ancient story’ into which he and his wife had somehow fallen? Once he knew, would he be back with her? Would he hold her again? Would that be tonight?
‘So, what