The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Read online

  For my parents,

  who never once to my knowledge tried to kill me.

  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

  —DEUTERONOMY 6:5–9

  1

  The vision was like this: he was sitting in the temple and the light was coming through the bad stained glass and he was trying to find a comfortable position on the stupid pews. He’d suggested something better and softer and more ergonomic but they’d said it was a temple, not a movie theater. He couldn’t manage it without making noise, although, of course, you could never be sure if the noise that was audible to you was audible to anyone around you; maybe they couldn’t hear his shifting and the rustle of the fabric of his pants and the keys rearranging themselves slightly in his pocket and so forth over the sound of the praying and singing and all the other asses reorienting themselves and keys rattling and children whispering and giggling and older people muttering and coughing and Sarah’s mother crying and her father clearing his throat—acoustics, after all, were really less science than art; Abbie had dealt with plenty of acoustic consultants and materials specialists in his professional life, and it was pretty goddamn clear that they hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about. In any event each person’s sensitivity to sound, especially in a lively acoustic environment, was deeply personal and idiosyncratic, although Abbie, who liked to imagine that he defied convention in many ways, was in this regard deeply conventional. He was trying to be quiet so as to avoid distracting his wife from the task of dealing with her mother while simultaneously contemplating in a purely hypothetical but deeply personally pleasing way the prospect of a really excellent fire gutting the building that middlebrow bourgeois taste had utterly ruined while also thinking—still vaguely, but with an increasing sense of necessity—of somewhere to suggest for dinner, because after the service concluded and they’d all shuffled around shaking hands and murmuring, “Good Shabbos,” he knew he’d find himself on the front steps of the temple with his wife and his in-laws, and his father-in-law would suggest maybe they should all get something to eat. His mother-in-law would neither agree nor disagree even though it would be obvious that she was hungry—she’d say something like, “Oh, whatever you want,” or “I just don’t want to wait in a long line”—and Sarah would look at him helplessly, and for some reason it would be suddenly his problem. It really was a problem because there was nothing decent in the immediate vicinity, and none of them would want to walk very far or bother with a cab. The congregation was singing Adon Olam to a preposterous, lilting melody. The chazan had said that it was Calypso, but it didn’t sound Calypso to him; suggestively Caribbean, maybe. Then again, what did he know? The closest he knew to Calypso was that Vonnegut book. You know the one. “B’et ishan,” they sang. He closed his eyes.

  He found himself standing in a field. All around him there were stalks of corn. They were low yet, just at his waist. It must have been early summer. The field fell down a shallow hill to a highway where a few cars passed. Beyond the highway was a tangle of woods, what grows along a highway where land was at one time cleared but over which first weeds and then spindly, haunted trees grew back. Beyond these woods stood another low hill, and on that hill the weedy and unpleasant roadside gave over to a sturdier deciduous forest. Farther away, several miles probably, although it looked closer, a wide blue ridge swelled up a thousand feet. Just to his right, the ridge extruded a lower promontory, a thick knot of land covered in pines. To his left, winding up the face of the ridge, tucked into a sort of notch in its face, was a road; it must have been that same highway he was looking across, which wound around the lower hill and carved its way up the base of the ridge. It was a sunny day, but there were high, white cumuli, and wherever they drifted, they cast shadows on the face of the ridge, ink-dark blots as big as whole towns. It must have been late in the day, as the sun was beginning to go down behind him, which meant that he was facing east toward the westernmost escarpment of the Appalachians, near to Pittsburgh where his sister lived. He squinted. There was a small clearing on top of the mountain, just beyond the knot of land. He felt as if he was being lifted up; he felt as if he was rising toward it, although his feet were still planted in the dirt and the scratchy stalks were still around his hands, which were at his sides, and something in his heart was saying here here here here here here. He felt that he must look away and so he turned his head, wrenched it; it felt as if he’d torn a lung loose; it felt as if something rattled out of his chest. He looked to his right and there, standing in the field, was a deer. It was shockingly close to him. He had never been so close to a wild animal. It didn’t look like a dog or a house cat, soft and uniform and sewn like a stuffed toy. Its coat was mangy and matted, not the smoothly speckled brown of a deer glimpsed from the car as you sped down a country road, but a mottled, wild collision of every brown. There were ticks in its hide; his vision was such that he saw them clenched and ravenous against the gray-black skin under the animal’s coat. The wind was blowing toward him, and Abbie could smell it, the buck, a wild stink of leaves and digestion. Its small tail flicked a few times. It exhaled, horse-like and sudden and hot. Its shoulders must have been as high as his own shoulders. Its antlers were immense, prehistoric, before the old world shrank to a merely human scale, with eight points on each. They’d just begun to shed their velvet, which was bloody and loose upon them. He could smell the blood, also. The buck’s eyes were black and utterly inhuman and they reflected his face. He saw in his reflection, in the eyes of this animal that had no need or will to speak, another self that was his own self before language and beyond language; then, apprehending something without the need for language, he opened his eyes.

  “V’a’ira,” sang the congregation.

  “Is everything all right?” asked his wife.

  • • •

  This is how it happened.

  Abbot Mayer first spoke with God at a Mostly Musical Shabbat at Temple Beth-El on the Upper West Side. Abbie had been, until then, generally irreligious. He thought of himself rather as a deeply spiritual man in the broadest human tradition. He had flirted in his younger years with Buddhism and then a vague Vedanta that mostly involved an abortive dedication to the rigorous practice of Hatha yoga, a period he now looked back on with some embarrassment, not because there was anything wrong with Buddhism or yoga per se, but because there was something slightly suspect about a hippie kid from a prosperous family of New York Jews engaging in that kind of stoned Orientalism. He’d subsequently settled on a kind of ethnic, ethical Judaism that was not taxing for him and acceptable for his wife, who did believe. Her whole family believed, actually, which Abbie accepted even as he found it odd. He’d been raised in a Conservative home, observing many of the forms, even intermittently keeping kosher, depending on his mother’s moods and his father’s appetites. He remembered their rare trips to synagogue, usually only on High Holy Days, as hazy chains of uninterrupted and unintelligible Hebrew. Sarah’s family was Reform, but they went regularly to Friday-night services, sent their children to a Jewish summer camp near Pittsburgh, had traveled as a family to Israel, and believed thoroughly and entirely in Adonai—believed, in fact, with a melodic, tent-revival joyfulness that struck Abbie as oddly evangelical and un-Jewish. But, as he didn’t believe in God, he kept thes
e thoughts to himself, and he treated his wife’s religious interests with supportive disinterest that, unrecognized by him, bordered on disdain. It had never yet occurred to him that this attitude suggested to Sarah that her faith was some kind of charming feminine hobby. He assumed she was glad he left her to it and didn’t offer his opinions, which was, he’d be the first to admit, a habit of his and not, perhaps, his most pleasant.

  There were, however, occasions on which it was necessary to accompany her to services. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, of course, and then, once a year, in the spring, on the Friday night that coincided with her younger brother’s Yahrtzeit. Elliot had died at twenty-two, hit by a car in a rain-slicked intersection on 7th Avenue in Park Slope around eleven at night. It had been one of those frustrating accidents in which no real blame can be assigned—perhaps the driver had approached the red light a little too fast; perhaps Elliot had stepped out a few seconds too soon. The driver wasn’t drunk. Elliot wasn’t drunk or, at least, not very. The preceding week had been dry, the downpour sudden and intense. He’d been at dinner with friends, and when the rain passed, they’d headed for the subway, and then.

  They say, whoever they are, that the death of a child is never easy, but it was especially not so for the Liebermans, who were in that genus of family that stays, somehow, almost miraculously untouched by tragedy, each member of each generation, whether family by blood or by marriage, passing peacefully and surrounded by loved ones after nine robust decades on this earth. That, at least, was their self-reinforcing myth. One of Sarah’s aunts had in fact died in her sixties of breast cancer, and Sarah’s great-grandfather had committed suicide after the crash in ’29, a fact that she hadn’t learned until she was nearly thirty. Her own mother, drunk and a little maudlin at a cousin’s wedding, had revealed it in a lurching conversation overlain with the DJ’s exhortations to “the ladies.” Like any myth, its historicity was beside the point, and the family believed in it as surely as they believed in God, whether or not Genesis, say, was literally true. Liebermans did not just die.

  Like a lot of nonbelievers, Abbie, however much he flattered himself as a materialist and creature of a phenomenal world, secretly held a set of complex and interrelated superstitions, chief among them an abiding belief in a universal principle of synchronicity, a kind of cosmic irony in the inevitable alignment of certain things. If he had, at the time, believed in a god, it would have been less a cruel god or a harsh god or a judgmental god so much as a mordant one. (Later in his life, Abbie would tell people that he came to believe God’s evident nonexistence was positive proof that He was, in fact, the God of the Jews, His own nonexistence being the sort of joke that only a Jew would find funny.) One of these synchronicities, also a source of some dismay among the Liebermans, was the fact that Elliot’s Yahrtzeit seemed to arrive inexorably on the same weekend as Beth-El’s monthly Mostly Musical Shabbat service, a campfire affair transported into the sanctuary and overstocked with young children and guitars. It was also—these were, after all, well-to-do Reform Jews, well populated with academics and public-radio liberals—peppily distressing in its ethnomusicological ambitions; a typical service might involve the chazan’s recent discovery of a traditional Ethiopian version of Ador V’dor, say, and the temple’s core membership of enthusiasts would break out the qachels. Abbie found it both tacky and endearing—certainly the service flitted by more quickly with singing and dancing children, and these people really did seem to enjoy being Jewish, something he could never once recall from his own upbringing, whose religion had mushed in his mind into a lot of dour, unintelligible Ashkenazi mumbling punctuated by the percussive bronchial hacking of his own parents’ aging congregation. Nevertheless, all the happy-happy singing lent the whole service a kind of antic, circus atmosphere, and by the time the Mourners Kaddish rolled around at the end, Susan Lieberman would be beside herself with nervous agitation, and Sarah would be just as anxious and upset, ironically, from trying to keep her mother calm.

  It was ironic (or not; who could really tell as far as God is concerned?) that Abbie had actually designed the temple or, in any case, had been the head architect for the renovation of its current location; it had been in the commission of this project that he’d first met Sarah, who’d been the token younger woman on the temple board at the time. A crypto-biblical catastrophe involving burst pipes and flooding had ruined the old sanctuary and lobbies and the big dining facility in the basement. The building itself had previously been an Episcopalian church, before, as Elliott had—according to Sarah—put it, they had disappeared up the asshole of their own indecision, and then it was converted haphazardly into a synagogue in the late sixties. By the time of the flood, its combination of obliquely Christian architecture and truly regrettable later-addition fixtures and finishes (“Walden Pond meets the Brady Bunch,” Elliott had also called it) had begun to strike some of the congregation as retrograde and embarrassing and Not Very Jewish. Abbie would have told them that the architectural history of Jewish houses of worship was fascinating in its lack of actual historical sources and tradition; the vague hitching of Near Eastern decorative flourishes with stained glass and auditorium seating that seemed, to Beth-El’s leadership, as the real and authentic thing was pure invention. But in this case, Abbie was just a junior associate in his firm, and the job offered a nice piece of solo work; every architect’s portfolio required a few holy places, he reasoned, and the soggy volume of the ruined temple was an opportunity to put some of his own ideas about salvage and environmentally sound building into practice. Abbie was ahead of the vanguard in thinking about these things; it was what would make him eventually, albeit retrospectively, famous.

  “An architect does not design buildings; an architect solves problems.” Thomas Arah, who’d become his adviser at Yale, told him so—told a roomful of people, actually, during a convocation in—it must have been 1974 or 1975. It struck him at the time as the sort of self-satisfied banality that was better laughed at than ignored. Arah was nearly seventy and had already lost much of his close vision to macular degeneration. He’d become instead typically drunk—never very, but almost always just a bit—and philo-sophical. He referred to Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe as Frank and Mies. He was writing some immense book, which he never finished, on the relationships between national character, architectural vernacular, and political economy. During Abbie’s junior year, he’d accompanied the old man as some kind of assistant on a trip out West, a tour that was to include several early Spanish missions in California, Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings in Colorado, and a stop in Arizona to visit Taliesan West. He’d done very little assisting and came to believe that he was along just so that Arah would have a body present to prove to waiters and stewardesses that the old man wasn’t talking to himself. As the plane had descended into Phoenix—which was not yet the vast sprawl of suburbs and golf courses that it would become but which it was already quite visibly on its way to becoming—Arah told Abbie to look out the window, where the greenish edge of human habitation met the desert. “These people,” he told Abbie, “are going to destroy our civilization. Los Angeles is going to break off into the ocean. Florida is going to sink. New York is going to flood. And these poor ignorant idiots, they are going to suck every last drop of water out of the Colorado River, and then they’re all going to die.” Then he pressed the call button and harangued the stewardess into bringing him another vodka.

  Arah’s beliefs—that architects were servants and functionaries of the social organism; that architecture was about the practical, if hopefully aesthetically pleasing, solutions to a series of definable and identifiable practical problems; that one must resist the urge to look at the evolution of forms as a teleology of progress and understand it instead as an adaptive response to circumstances; that Frank and Mies, et al. were geniuses, yes, but were also reasons to be suspicious of the very category of genius (after all, Lloyd Wright couldn’t so much as design a proper gutter and downspout)—eventually converted Abbie
, even as he became known among distinctly smaller circles as something very much resembling a genius himself. But he’d resisted them at the time; like plenty of prosperous Jewish kids, Abbie had had no trouble syncretizing the vaguely communal stoner ethic with a derivative version of Objectivism—speaking of vanguards: when you believe all of your friends to be geniuses and revolutionaries, it isn’t even a difficult marriage. Reflecting on this period of his life in an interview years later, he said that every young architect imagines himself as Howard Roark at some point in his development, usually before he has to write his first door schedule. “Howard Roark would consider a door schedule unheroic,” Abbie had said, “but you can’t hang a thirty-inch door in a thirty-six-inch doorway.”

  No architect ever entirely eradicates that early self-image as some kind of Promethean superman, and none of them ever escapes the occasional desire to just dynamite the hell out of some work of theirs that’s been bowdlerized in the process of meeting someone else’s budget and taste. That was how Abbie felt about the Temple Beth-El. On the occasions when he was stuck there, if anyone had asked him about the building, which they did from time to time, then he’d have replied with the embarrassed pride that successful writers reserve for their early poetry. Secretly, though, he nursed a pleasing fantasy of sneaking into the place one night and burning it to the ground. His original designs had simplified the already self-effacing, if prosperous, simplicity of the Episcopalians into something of almost Shaker austerity, the only real ornamentation to have been railings and trim and windowpanes that made subtle reference to the Star of David. The congregation had insisted on stained glass; then on carpeting the aisles; then, at last, on replacing his elegant, Japanese wall panels with horrible accordion dividers—this last was a concession to cost, Abbie knew, but still.