The Shammes

They called him Zaidy, although he was as unlikely to be a grandfather as a father. But the children flocked to him, when there were children. He had a way about him, a simplicity, that made him a bit childlike himself. He spoke clearly, with loud spaces between each word, as though he were always selecting the next one with care and deliberation. By the time he was permitted to leave the assisted-care facility and live on his own, his face had grown wisdom folds and his hair had salt-and-peppered—he was the shining star of the program, and everyone was so proud of him; the director, in bidding him farewell, used the word valedictorian. Upon hearing it, he nodded severely and received the compliment with his characteristic modesty; one of the aides helped him look up the word later. He’d learned how to cover up so people didn’t realize he was slow, not until they knew him well. Most of the time, they thought he was a sage.

He moved to Manhattan Beach, near a set of cousins. They owned a block of apartments in a brownstone building with a kosher bakery on the first floor. He was adamant about living alone—now that he could, he would—and the cousins took mercy on him, gave him a small apartment for next to nothing, and made a match with a job in that downstairs bakery so he could pay for it. He worked there nine years, learning from the baker and the cashiers and the customers, and most of all from the children. He sneaked them broken cookies for free and tied bracelets on their wrists with candy-cane-striped ribbon.

And people liked him. The community cared for him like a family. Not a Shabbos went by when he wasn’t invited to a dinner table after prayers on Friday evening, and somebody else for Saturday lunch, and a weekday visit from some mother or another—he addressed them all as ma’am—just to make sure his pantry was stocked and the milk in his refrigerator was unspoiled. At synagogue he was the candy man, the arbiter of suckers and lollies and chews.

When the bakery closed its doors (business wasn’t what it used to be, and it was sold to the gentiles and reopened as a store for exotic cakes), the community found him another job, at the butcher shop. And when the butcher shop closed (there were no longer enough people living in the neighborhood to sustain it), he was hired by the synagogue.

In terms of a place of employment, the synagogue was both safe and steady. As long as there were people to keep attending, it would continue to exist. And as long as it existed, it would require someone to replace the books on their faltering shelves, to sweep and mop the floor, to unlock the door for the congregants in the morning, to field maintenance requests and take blame for the natural failures that will inevitably occur in any building without an owner.

He was a shammes. It was his job. It became his life.

He never tried to pretend he was important. A shammes is a glorified janitor, a good, solid, soldiering-forth job with a proper name in Yiddish, but the English translation, he knows, is sexton, which barely amounts to anything. A sexton is the helper candle on the menorah for Chanukah, the one that does not even require a blessing. He was a helper there, a guest. If they didn’t need him to count in the quorum for prayer, who knew if they’d even pay him?

He never tried to pretend he was important. He knew he first received this position as a gesture of charity, a moment several years ago, back when he could have been full of possibility. He was soft-witted, perhaps, with a cloudy countenance, not as adroit as others, perhaps, but capable, at least at first glance, of many things—a business! a wife!—but instead he was entrusted with this synagogue.

And now, the ravages of—what? life? toil? just the act of staying on Earth, sticking around and not taking the easy way out?—had extracted its price on him, elongated his forehead into wrinkles, raisined his cheeks and eyes, and sandpapered his skin. He still didn’t have much to show for his life, not if you ranked him against the other members of the minyan. No wife (though once, there was a woman), no children (although he gets along with them nearly always), no money to his name, not to speak of. But there was something else, something insubstantial but no less valuable, a marked change to the universe, a distinction between the before you were here and the after you die that would—he hoped, he prayed—somehow establish his own journey as a distinctive one.

The synagogue was a place that everyone passed through. No matter who you were, sooner or later you had to pray. But prayer was his livelihood. He arrived earlier than anyone else, and he was the last man to leave. If this were a battlefield, he’d be their secret weapon, their ace in the hole. In peacetime, he was caught in the thrall of the tide of early-morning responsibility, the voice of authority whose throbbing constant light shone as a beacon of moral superiority for the 6:45 morning minyan; he was the one who rose from his bed five minutes earlier than everyone else to have the synagogue unlocked, warmed up, the four Torahs arranged in their ark like a perfect family of doves, just to have it ready for the unappreciative masses; he was a mother.

His routine was a religion within itself. Every opening step, from the first scruff of his shoes on the welcome mat to scrubbing the doorpost mezuzah (inside were holy words, and the men kissed it when they walked past; it should be cleaned with disinfectant each day, the rabbi had instructed him, so people would not be afraid to keep kissing) to the draping of the synagogue tallises, the position of the crushed velvet curtain that hid the Torahs.

He was good at his job. He did not consider himself great at it—every action he took, mental or physical, Zaidy knew, was no great feat; he knew he expended the same amount of effort for simple thoughts that it took others to think of great, grand things—but if there were ever to be a Brotherhood of Meritorious Shammeses established, selected by some angel flying from synagogue to synagogue across the world, he would hope his services would, at least, be considered. He did his job thoroughly, and well, and he was trusted by the congregation to keep doing it. He was dependable and invisible; they expected no less. No more, but no less.

So it was with no small amount of irritation that he showed up one Monday morning shortly before sunrise—the clocks had been recently turned to daylight savings time, but nature had yet to catch up—to find Velvel Bieber perched on the stone front stairs, looking peckish and impatient and fiddling with the locked doors all on his own, as if he expected the handle to pop open of its own accord or in recognition of his seniority. His sloped face was even jowlier than usual. He had long sticklike arms and legs, and he moved as if he had just learned how, swallowed up by his black-brimmed hat and ill-fitting black suit. Velvel had lived in this area since he was a child—his grandparents were some of the first Jews to move to this neighborhood, and his parents were among the last to move away. Velvel Bieber tended to behave with other people’s property as if it were his own, both respectful and egotistical, lifting up and fiddling with phones, computers, wallets even, with the utmost reverence and mindlessly investigating all of their inner depths. This morning, however, he was occupied entirely with the two handles of the two doors—left and right—which it was Zaidy’s province, exclusively, to unlock.

He knew it was possible. The doorknobs and locks were last replaced eight years ago, cheap front-of-the-store tin things, and they were loose, untightened, liable to pop open, but not by Velvel Bieber’s hand. Zaidy knew that if you gripped the left knob with your thumb at the very bottom of the flattened sphere, and all four fingers squeezed very tightly on the upper half, the knob would rattle in its socket. Yank hard enough, and it would pop.

But Velvel Bieber did not squeeze. Most people, Zaidy thought, had no idea—they came and went like the weather. Velvel didn’t look grateful to him for showing up early. He didn’t look much of anything at all. “Did you get cold waiting?” Zaidy offered, springing as much friendliness out of the question as he could possibly muster.

“Long enough,” said Velvel, so low it was almost a thought. He brushed past Zaidy and through the doors. The synagogue was still a chamber of ice. Zaidy adjusted the thermostat manually. If he didn’t get in so early, it wouldn’t be worth doing. Prayers were thirty-five, forty minutes long, quicker if Wrinkle led, and by the time the synagogue warmed up, it was almost time to leave. They’d gotten these two space heaters in October, the kind that ran up the electric bill pretty high, and the rabbi didn’t want to say anything, but Rosencranz, who knew about these things, said the electricity would be a strain on the synagogue’s budget, and they were already stretching. Any time someone mentioned the budget, it killed whatever discussion they were having entirely.

Bais Matana was the synagogue. Literally the name meant the House of Matana, although it was, to be exact, a house without Matana. When construction went up in the ’50s, Rabbi Walsh himself decided to name the building after Matana Goldman, the owner and president of Goldman’s, the successful department store, and still very much involved in its day-to-day operations. Matana Goldman was a generous benefactor to the community. Because of him, children were sent to summer camp and their parents enjoyed evenings of blissful quietude, and poor families were provided with hot challah and sweet wine on their Shabbos tables every week. He donated gymnasiums, playgrounds, school buses. So what was a mere synagogue in the mix?

“It was the straw that broke the ass’s back, that’s what it was,” Mr. Rosencranz told Zaidy one day. His eyes perpetually bulged out like an accusation, and his stiff white beard stuck out nearly horizontally, jabbing like an accusatory finger. “These filthy rich people who can’t keep their money to themselves. They’ll do basically anything. Only one thing you have to remember: You never tell them who’s boss.”

“I won’t tell them who’s boss,” Zaidy replied, wise as ever.

Rabbi Walsh meant to tell Goldman about his namesake earlier. He picked out the date and time with care and caution, one Sunday morning after praying. However, he clammed up due to nerves, and Matana Goldman first heard of the plan by reading about it in the local Yiddish newspaper. So incensed was he by the assumption of his patronage that he authored an angry letter to the paper, vowing not to pay for one penny of the synagogue’s construction, and to never set foot inside its doors—not even if it was the last synagogue in Brooklyn. This vow he maintained for nearly forty years, breaking it only when Bais Matana (in spite of his efforts, the name stuck) really was the only synagogue left—at which point he would enter one day a year, recite the prayer for mourners, and depart as soon as services ended, never saying a word.

During that day, Zaidy knew enough to stay clear of him. Certain things about the building’s operation he left to those more skilled in such areas. The finances, the voting, anything to do with electricity. In other ways—among them, corralling this loose assortment into a collective single cohesive minyan—he was nothing short of an emperor.

Velvel Bieber withdrew to his pew near the center of the sanctuary and immersed himself in a book. Meanwhile, Zaidy performed his rituals. In his mind, every gesture worked to summon one of his congregants. Whether this was true, or whether this was a game he played with himself, was an unanswerable question. He had no clue whether straightening Rosencranz’s chair actually caused the man to leave his house (and then to arrive here exactly four and a half minutes later), but he straightened it anyway; somewhere in G-d’s infinitely complicated universe, there must be some conjoining link. After Rosencranz’s chair, then the rabbi’s. He readjusted the armrests, plumped the lopsided pancake pillows. The pews on the right, from back to front, and then the left ones. They squealed when he moved them, but that was the only way he could. With each squeak, Velvel Bieber gave a swift, caustic inhalation of breath through a bountiful forest of rustling nose hair.

“Do you have to?”

“Mr. Bieber, I have to. I can’t lift it myself, each bench.”

“Try to keep it down, then. I’m meditating.”

“Oh, you’re meditating.” Zaidy knew he’d heard the word before but wasn’t sure how. Repeating a word you didn’t know back to the speaker, he’d found, was often a helpful way of mitigating his lack of knowledge.

“I’m getting my mind, y’know, accustomed. Getting it all ready to pray.”

“I understand. I’ll be quiet.”

“Thank you.”

Velvel Bieber went back to doing nothing. Zaidy let out a breath.

“Only one thing, Mr. Bieber—”

“Zaidy, I told you.”

“I need to roll the Torah. Today is the new month. Can you help?”

“Zaidy, I just started with my tallis—”

Velvel Bieber’s tallis had been sitting on his shoulder for five minutes. Usually he swept his fingers through its tassel, checking for broken fibers, then swifted it over his head and around his shoulders and chest, but today he wasn’t doing much of anything.

“It’s fine,” Zaidy said. “I’ll bring it out myself. The rabbi will do it when he comes.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Velvel tossed aside his tallis to the pew and rose. “I’ll help.”

The congregation’s Torahs were sealed in a fireproof safe. Zaidy dialed the combination lock with deliberate prudence, balancing the wheel between the fingers of both hands. He aimed each number on the combination wheel carefully against the arrow. The Torah they were using today was the heaviest one, thin and tall, its handles still displaying a glint of the new year’s polish. He struggled to remove it alone. Velvel Bieber’s arms reached past his, lifting out the Torah like a baby, depositing it in the cradle of Zaidy’s grasp. He carried it to the podium. They wound the scroll back to the day’s reading, Zaidy winding and Velvel catching, rolling the two wood columns like the axles of a car. The columns of calligraphed letters swirled by in fast motion, like watching a television show. Velvel’s lips moved silently, measuring the verses until they reached the spot. Their eyes fluttered over the letters. Zaidy watched Velvel. He could see traces of a smile forming on Velvel’s face, the grin of knowing he was needed, G-d needed you to be in this exact spot at this exact moment, there was no one else who could do this task except you—Zaidy recognized this feeling. He knew it well.

“Now stop,” Velvel commanded, and Zaidy stopped winding. They wrapped the Torah back up, dressed it, and put it in the safe. A gravelly, high voice warbled a tune from the back of the sanctuary: the song that was sung during the prayer service while returning the Torah to its Ark. That, he knew without looking, would be Wrinkle Posen. Short, with tinted wraparound glasses (for his hyper-sensitive eyes, though Wrinkle insisted they made him look like a movie star) and multiple layers of sweatshirts, Wrinkle was always at synagogue early for no other reason than he had nowhere else to be. When middle-aged men turned into old men, their normal-people bodies either ballooned out or shriveled up, and Wrinkle was a prime example of the latter case. He’d never been big,but now he was a downright miniature version of his old self. He barked out a warm, hearty belch of a laugh—he was laughing at himself—and settled himself in the back row.

It was nearing their usual starting time now, and Rosencranz had also arrived. Wrinkle started reading Psalms, and Rosencranz was wrapping tefillin around his arm, which was crunched into an L-shape, exposing a well-developed muscle, the kind of muscle suitable for a man thirty or forty years Rosencranz’s junior. The small black box sat atop his muscle like a dare.

Zaidy checked the time. 6:40. Four of them—no, six, since Getzel was coming through the door now, mopping his wet neck in a towel, and he’d probably gotten a ride from Dr. Gordon. They would definitely be seven; the rabbi would enter in five minutes exactly, as was his custom.

They still needed three more. Zaidy ran through his list of tasks for the morning, the daily machinations that kept the world in orbit. What had he forgotten? The seat pillows? The mezuzah?

He paced the room. Rosencranz had started praying now, and his buzz sent a charge of urgency through the room. The others were wrapping themselves in their ghostly tallises, binding themselves in the leather straps of their tefillin. Velvel Bieber drummed the pew in front of him with the fingers of one hand, impatient to launch into the call-and-response of kaddish already. Dr. Gordon’s nose exploded radiantly into a tissue.

The tissue box! Zaidy felt the electric shock of a sudden remembering. Dr. Gordon was a surfer—that explained that—but Knaidel Krauss always had the sniffles, and the tissue box was the magic charm that would deliver him there. Zaidy ran to replace it, and as soon as he deposited the empty box in the rubbish bin, the old man waddled in.

“Mr. Krauss!” said Zaidy. “Your prayer book,” offering up Knaidel’s preferred sort of prayer book (Ashkenazic edition, Hebrew-only, blue cover). As he proffered it, Zaidy glanced at the clock. Five minutes! Right according to schedule, the door popped open again.

“Nu?” said a voice that cracked into the morning like a whip into flesh.

Zaidy could tell, without turning around, that the rabbi had arrived.

“Two to go,” Rabbi Walsh said uselessly. Saying it didn’t make them come. Of course they were two men short. Zaidy was the shepherd.

Zaidy went to the phone. The synagogue kept an old rotary phone in the rear, tucked away in a peeling cabinet behind the Purim decorations—for emergencies, the rabbi reminded them constantly. Out came the list of telephone numbers, almost as old as the synagogue itself. Most of them had been crossed out.

“Try Gavin,” Wrinkle said. “Give him a break from the kids.”

Zaidy’s thumb ran down the handwritten scrawls of names. Rubin, Cohen, Broflovski—all had moved away. A dozen other names, all scratched out, some violently enough to be rendered illegible, some determinedly enough to wear holes in the paper. You find a new house, a better house, in a nicer part of the city, or somewhere away from the city, somewhere more appropriate to raise your family. This neighborhood is changing, Rosner, the plumber, told him one day. You’re lucky. You’re big enough so they don’t mess with you. That was shortly before he packed up his seven kids—the ones still living at home—and moved to Monsey.

Rosner had been one of his favorites. His children, so polite and restrained when they came to him for their Saturday morning lollipop. Zaidy wished one day he could return the favor.

“Gavin won’t be able to,” said Knaidel. “His wife’s got the flu, and he has to take care of the kids. She was up half the night, hacking away.”

Knaidel lived in the same building as Gavin and his family, in the apartment directly below them. Wrinkle gave a birdlike scowl. “You were listening for half the night, is that right, Knaidel?” he said. “What were you listening for?”

Wrinkle could say things like that, things no one else could. He noticed things that nobody else did too. Zaidy had to be careful of him. Of all the weekday morning regulars, Wrinkle would probably be the first to notice Zaidy’s secret.

“Aw, shove it! It ain’t like that.” Knaidel threw up his hands. “Zaidy, why don’t you give a call to Brubaker? He hasn’t been here in weeks.”

“Brubaker moved away last month,” said Wrinkle. “That’s why you haven’t seen him.”

“Less and less of us left,” murmured Rosencranz.

“We’ll get someone,” Zaidy said firmly.

He dialed Brubaker’s number anyway. He knew it had been disconnected, but it bought him time, his somber dialing, listening to that soft and certain voice in his ear, informing him. Then he called Gavin. As he expected, it went straight to voicemail.

They were getting itchy. The clock was churning ever forward; time was on nobody’s side. It was close to seven now, and still no minyan.

“Do you want me to help with that, Zaidy?” The rabbi pressed close, too close. He might catch a glimpse of the paper with the phone list. Zaidy snatched it up, pressed it into his chest, face down. “Relax,” the rabbi continued, uninterrupted, a constant drone, no surprises in anything he said, ever. “We’re only trying to help.”

“I’ll try one more number,” Zaidy said, his voice modulated, his soul screaming for help from above. Attendance was lackadaisical, people had been running late all month, but it was never as bad as this.

“But we need two more men,” said Rosencranz humorlessly.

The door slammed open, then slammed shut. A flurry of outside air snatched all their attention. “How many more are we?” said Matt breathlessly, hands against the door, slithering out of his incredibly long scarf. Matt, who’d just moved into their neighborhood with his wife, both of them equally young. Childless. Nobody was sure what they were doing here. They postdated everyone by decades. Their motives in wanting to live here were uncertain, unfathomable.

“We’re nine,” barked Rosencranz, a little too eager to pull the trigger. “We need one more man to start prayers.”

“Did anyone call Gavin?” Matt said. His scarf was still coming off—this was ridiculous, several yards long, completely impractical. Matt was a young man trying to look like an old man, but the clothes he wore were clothes that no old man had ever worn in Manhattan Beach. Several-hundred-dollar retro spectacles, jackets that clung to his body in such a way as Wrinkle or Knaidel would never permit. Zaidy was breathing heavier now, sweating a cold and nervous sweat. They were on to him. Rosencranz, at least. He had to know.

“Gavin’s wife is sick,” said Knaidel, then chuckled. “No fun for him last night.”

Matt pulled away from him, as if Knaidel’s distastefulness were contagious.

“Then who’s left?” asked Matt.

“Bieber, Getzel, Rosencranz,” the rabbi ran through his inventory, listing names that should have already been plain to him, the people who were already watching him. “Knaidel, Dr. Gordon, and Mr. Posen.” He ticked off his fingers. “And me . . . and you, Zaidy . . . and this young man . . .” He didn’t know Matt’s name; he was too new, or too strange, to stick long in Rabbi Walsh’s memory.

“That’s it,” said Velvel Bieber. “You’re going to have to get Goldman.”

“Now, hold on,” the rabbi said. “Let’s be reasonable.”

Dr. Gordon gave one of those loud tkks that was supposed to be in his head, but so the rest of them could hear. “I’m sorry, Rabbi, I have to get to work.”

“It doesn’t have to be Goldman,” said the rabbi. “Someone else might be coming—”

“Who else?” said Dr. Gordon. “Who else is there?”

The minyan fell silent. It seemed that the room itself was breathing now: the measured labor of the heating system, a grinding, prolonged, ill, and whiny wheeze. Zaidy’s skin burned ferociously, not from the radiators but from the weight of the secret about to implode.

“There’s no one,” said the rabbi, his voice the voice of the synagogue itself, of all those bottled-up years of construction and crumbling, a deep and rumbling thing, so that when he spoke it was the voice of authority, of prophecy, it was G-d’s own voice. Even when he spoke a question, or an opinion, there was a single caustic moment when he fell silent where no one dared disagree, both because of his words and the air around them, a realization that hit them all at once, a wave to bowl them all over equally. There were strangers who made their way to the synagogue, certainly—Shabbos guests, visitors, family, the old Russians who traveled from a mile down the boardwalk to stand mutely as the others prayed and then to receive a bowl of Wrinkle’s saucy cholent after services, but no one else lived here any longer, no one else ever came; nobody could remember the last time a soul had shown up, a soul who was not one of them. The men inside these walls—them, and Gavin, and no one else—were the surviving minyan of Bais Matana.

“So, it’s Gavin or Goldman,” mused Velvel Bieber. “No one else.”

“Not Goldman,” said Dr. Gordon. “He’s never wanted to be a part of this place. He’s always wished us ill.”

“But a mitzvah is a mitzvah,” said Getzel in a singsong.

“He’s come here before,” Zaidy added, trying to be helpful. “To say kaddish for his wife.”

They all looked to the rabbi for an answer.

“We can’t force Gavin,” he said. “His wife is incapacitated, and he has children. A kindness is a kindness.”

“So, it’s Goldman, then,” said Zaidy softly, disbelieving the moment.

No one was willing to speak. Finally, it was Rosencranz who stoked the fire, who set it all in motion. He turned to Zaidy, laid a warm and gnarled paw on his shoulder.

“Go get Goldman,” he said.

Zaidy layered on his coat and hat and scarf. It was early March, barely winter in most parts of the city, but here the winds burned with a fury that was collected out over the cold, cruel openness of ocean, summoning up force and fury as they traveled inland. In the places where the blocks broke, there were no buildings to stop the torrent, and the winds slammed pedestrians at every street crossing with all the full force of winter’s last call.

It was payback, he told himself. Payback for letting Velvel Bieber wait in the cold.

He once thought he could have a wife. At one point it was a possibility, and then more than a possibility: “You have what everyone else has,” said Cousin Yossel, the rabbi, the patriarch of his brownstone family, shaking him so hard he heard his skin slap against his bones. “What more could a girl want?”

He was dispatched to a matchmaker, a woman in her fifties, not unattractive herself, seated at a desk and flanked by stacks of sheets. A wisp of her dark exotic wig fell tantalizingly over one eye.

“Siddown!” she growled. One word, one syllable. Without even thinking of doing otherwise, he sat.

Over the course of hours, she quizzed him on his entire life—what he did at the synagogue, what jobs he’d done before that, his relationship with the people he worked with, his life growing up in the sanatorium, how old was he when his parents passed and how he felt about it. He did not normally think of such things—in fact, it had been several years since he’d seriously thought of the accident—but he did not collapse into tears. He did not smash his head against the desk until it bled. He answered with the same slow, precise, wise tongue with which he always spoke. He was a prophet. He was a sage.

After that, all she had was one last question. “But what do you want?” she asked him. “From a wife? From your life?”

Zaidy abandoned the taut, restrained, complacent tone with which he addressed everything. This was one answer he didn’t even have to pretend to think about. He’d known it his whole life.

“Kids,” he said. “I want to have kids.”

As soon as he left the matchmaker’s office, the despair hit. There was no way. There was no one. He didn’t even have friends outside the synagogue; he could never keep someone’s attention through a conversation, let alone through meeting and dating and 120 years of marriage. But then he asked himself, how much worse off was he than before he’d gone to meet the matchmaker? He wasn’t, not at all. So, it was one thing to cross off his list. He’d officially tried to get married. Now he could remain in his cozy solitary nook of an apartment forever.

That was when he really started to embrace the kids—not potential children inside his mind but the ones who already did exist. At Bais Matana, there were still dozens, back then, whole underage armies of them, swarming the pews. He stopped yelling heated retorts in response to the recurring taunts of the older ones. When the younger ones asked why he looked so big, was he an ogre, why wasn’t his face the same on both sides—instead of losing it, he started to flash a goofy smile, as though they were telling a joke. If he couldn’t make his own children, then at least he could be like a father to the rest of them. For Sabbath he bought a monstrous bag of candy, carried it to synagogue, lavished its contents on the children who came to him. Had it been anybody else, people might have regarded it as a slap in the face to Dr. Gordon, the existing candy man, a successful dentist who doled out a measly single Tootsie Roll per child. But Dr. Gordon crumpled up his bag and beamed. “He deserves it,” Dr. Gordon told the other men at kiddush, over matjes herring and a thimble of scotch. “He’s like the zaidy they never had.”

She called back. She gave him a name—a single name. “Her name is Neshama,” said the matchmaker. “Can you remember that? Can you say it to me?”

“Neshama,” he said.

“Keep on saying it. That was okay, but lumpy. You need to practice. A girl wants to hear her name roll off your tongue like a song. Repeat it to yourself every day, at home, over and over. You live alone, don’t you?”

“I live alone,” said Zaidy.

“Good. No girlfriends ever come over, do they? You got a nurse or something, any caregivers?”

“My cousins,” he said. “I have them once a week for tea. I bring them cakes from the shop. I get juice for the kids.”

“Good, good. Now this girl you’re seeing, this Neshama. She has a lady who comes with her, who takes care of her sometimes. If anything happens, G-d willing, she’ll come to visit you two every day; you won’t have to take special care of her, you just let the other lady do it. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” he said.

“Neshama is very important. You’re not an easy person to set up, you understand. And Neshama Goldman, she is a catch. A one in a million. You won’t get another chance like this.”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Zaidy.

They met at her father’s house. The matchmaker had instructed him to come on time—not early and not late—and not to gawk or appear surprised. She said this knowing it would not work, but she said it anyway. When Zaidy showed up, his jaw hung slack, flapping up and down with the pace of his slowing legs and the rustle of the beach breeze. Neshama’s house bordered the water, the last house before the sand began. Twin rows of Roman columns led him up the stairs. A pagoda porch’s roof was set just high enough to avoid the neighbors’ second-story windows, rimmed by the open night, so its inhabitants, whoever they were—the building was big enough to hold hundreds—could drink or dine at leisure, away from scrying eyes. Beyond it was a row of hatched prismatic doors. Beyond that was Neshama.

She had thick black hair to keep her warm from the wind tunnels, and the whites of her eyes were big as silver dollars. She introduced herself solely by speaking her name, once, although that was the lone thing about her that Zaidy already knew. Her hands clutched the protective rails as she guided herself to the table. He pulled the seat back, as a gentleman should, and let her sit down before seating himself.

She listened to Zaidy with an intensity he’d never before received. They sat on that porch for hours into the night, and the fire in the hearth must have burned through half a tree—her nurse appeared to stoke it; in her speckless white frock and hat, she would unlock the twin protective gates that kept them from tending to the fire themselves. She changed the records on the phonograph, massaging their conversation with a light, airy jazz—not the new jazz that was coming out of Harlem but a jaunty, easy jelly-roll jazz that kept them feeling happy and innocent. And when the matchmaker called the next day, asking how it had gone, Zaidy had no choice but to confess the truth: he was, he thought, in love.

Her tone was positive but practical. “So, you’d like to proceed, then?” she said. “You aren’t bothered by her disability?”

Oh, he knew what she was talking about, he wasn’t immune to noticing these things: the limp she walked with, the void between her eyebrows and her hairline; her delay in finishing sentences, which was more pronounced than his own—Neshama hadn’t been practicing for years to cover it up like Zaidy had; most times when she spoke, she forgot the end before she reached it. But those things weren’t what was important to him. She was important to him.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, yes.”

“Very well, then. I’ll telephone Neshama’s father and say we’d like the go-ahead to proceed.”

He took her on walks, along the boardwalk and through the checkerboard streets. He showed her his favorite places, the stores where he shopped and his favorite windows: the pet shop, the watchmaker, the mannequin store. They went to the magic shop and tried the wood and the plastic puzzles. She took whole minutes deliberating each turn, but she was surprisingly good at solving them.

Neshama walked with a slowness that could be suffocating—she was very well cared for; except with him, she rarely left the house—but he had patience and kept pace with her and always turned back as soon as she tired. He showed her every kindness; he, after all, had once been in her very same position. He used his salary from the bake shop to buy her cakes and hot dogs and small stuffed animals. Once, he bought her a porcelain doll that looked just like her—dark velvety hair, pale skin untouched by the sun, huge and perfectly round marble eyes that never closed. She clutched it to her chest and carried it with her whenever they met, an omnipresent extra party to their peregrinations.

They walked down the boardwalk, and held hands before marriage; even though it was not their custom, people from the community smiled at them, bestowing upon them an implicit permission. It was more than just permission. It was their blessing. She spoke to him in her father’s native Hungarian, luminous, flowing, threaded syllables that to him had no meaning but soon became his favorite sound in the world. He took her to Coney Island on the bus. Together there they marveled at the freak show, gazed in mutual adoration at the sword-swallowers and contortionists and tattooed ladies, happy to finally be normal.

The nurse trailed behind them like a shadow, always lunging forward when Neshama would trip or stumble, but she was affable and as charmed by them as the rest of the world. When they bade her to, she would go off to purchase them sodas or to telephone home and ask what was for dinner or to fall asleep, hat sloping down her tied-taut hair, her button nose lodged between the pages of a ladies’ magazine, as Zaidy and Neshama whispered to each other secrets.

The first time they made love, in his apartment, they finally stumbled upon something they shared an equal ineptness at. They fumbled; they taught each other how each other’s respective clothes came off, the mystery of what unfastened where, how different garments broke apart. He showed her how he preserved his ties, hanging, too complicated to retie but easily loosened and tightened around his neck. They laughed at each other. They laughed at themselves. They stared at each other’s bodies in the dusky curtain-filtered light. They made each other feel extraordinary; each was accustomed to asking for what they needed, frank and unabashed, and each cared about nothing so much as doing exactly what the other requested.

Matana Goldman himself was the biggest supporter of their union. She was his only daughter; after his wife died, his only family; his empire was singularly devoted to making her happy. He almost always greeted Zaidy at the door himself, always with a smile and a piece of advice. Other than for Zaidy, he would never answer the door on his own. He was a private man, with little desire to communicate with other members of the human race; just seeing Zaidy come to the door, carrying his box of bakery cookies and brightening his daughter, made Matana Goldman come alive. And watching them depart together, off on another of their promenade walks, made him miss his own departed wife so profoundly that he could cry from a perfect happiness.

She called him late at night, after she was sure her father was asleep. “I miss you,” he said. Those words, through the dull mouthpiece of the phone. He heard his own echo. It sounded insufficient.

“I miss you too,” she told him. “I think I’m going to have a baby.”

“How do you know?”

She struggled. Her limited vocabulary, the boundaries of modest talk. She could think of nothing appropriate to say.

“I can tell it,” she said. “I know I’m going to be a mommy.”

“I am so happy.”

He was so happy. He could think of no more significant way to tell her—“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” she told him.

They hung up. Each of them in their respective bedroom, elated. They couldn’t wait to see each other again.

He didn’t know what’d happened to her. Not at first. At first everything was going so well. Love letters, messages, gifts from her father on his doorstep—new shirts, a leatherbound book of Psalms, a case of cigars. And then it wasn’t.

It happened one night. For the first hours, he was unaware anything was wrong. The first notice came from the matchmaker, in the morning.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t going to be a wedding.”

He remembered being called to Neshama’s house. It was the first time he’d been inside for more than a few minutes. A pair of cousins accompanied him. They hung back by the door, looking harried and out of place and ready to run away. Zaidy, alone, approached Mr. Goldman on the couch. His bulbous shining head—thin hedges of hair on both sides like a crown—hung between his legs. He had sitting to each side an attendant, business partners maybe, two men in nearly identical suits. They were supposed to be comforting him, but they both looked out of place, uncomfortable, like they wanted to be invisible and couldn’t get it right. They stared at Zaidy like an unwelcome intruder.

When Mr. Goldman saw Zaidy, he got up. His eyes were red and tiny. They pulled back far into that gargantuan turtle head of his. He hugged Zaidy. No one else had ever gotten that close to him, hugged him so fully of their own volition, had let that much of their body touch Zaidy’s. He felt like it was Neshama.

He didn’t see Mr. Goldman much after that. On the street, at the kosher supermarket. He never said anything to him. The last time they spoke was at the funeral, when Zaidy waited in the receiving line with the other well-wishers, shuffling forward at intervals to bid his respects. Mr. Goldman rose when he saw him. He leaned across the table, and Zaidy wondered if they were going to hug again. Instead, Mr. Goldman leaned tight into his ear and spoke through gritted teeth. “She was always so close to being broken,” he said. “What made you think she could withstand a baby?” He snarled the last word like a curse. That was the end.

He released Zaidy, and Zaidy had the distinct impression that he was being dismissed. It didn’t much matter—the gravesite part of the service was occurring in Montefiore Cemetery, in Queens, and Zaidy had neither car nor driver. Outside on the boulevard, the sun cruelly bright in his eyes and the sky like a beach, he told himself it was probably for the best. It was winter, the sun would be fading soon, and he had to prepare the synagogue for the sunset prayer.

Sometimes he thought of the synagogue as his own child. It constantly required his attention, needed cleanings and changings, never did what you wanted it to. The old men whined constantly, until he made everything right with the world, and then, a new miracle every time, they quieted up like falling asleep.

It was years ago that he’d last stood in this pagoda. He hadn’t been young then; neither of them had—cases such as theirs took more time than other couples to find the perfect match—but he was much older now. How many times had they sat there, watched the fire being stoked, talking in whispers about a future neither of them could fully fathom? He rang the bell. He knew quite well no one would come to the door. Mr. Goldman never answered the door himself, and the housekeeper wouldn’t be in this early. Early for the rest of the world, but late for them: the minyan was impatient for him; the rabbi was probably twitching; Mr. Goldman better agree to come right away.

He felt a clock ticking in his head. With every click, a new anxiety.

Except that Mr. Goldman wouldn’t be asleep. He had the same commitments as the rest of them. Goldman’s own synagogue, the one that he sup-ported, the other synagogue in town—Congregation Ahavas Chumras was its name—had long ago stopped holding its daily prayers and finally shut its doors for good last year; Zaidy had heard talk that the building was in negotiations to be purchased by an Indian church. But Mr. Goldman still had to pray. He was probably awake right now, already wrapped in his own tallis and tefillin, possibly engaged in one of the parts of prayer that you couldn’t interrupt with speech.

“Mr. Goldman?” Zaidy rang the chime. He heard its dim echo through the front door. He touched the handle. Then he squeezed and turned.

The door swung open. Its hinges were well-oiled; neither the synagogue doors nor the door to his apartment opened with that cushy-feeling automaticness. The carpet was thick. Each step felt both luxurious and intrusive. A part of his brain was warning Zaidy not to be here, to run back to the synagogue, to retreat with his excuse: he called out and no one responded. Another part of his brain was telling him he had every right to be here. In another time, another reality, he might have been here instead of the synagogue.

He passed through the vestibule, the drawing room, the kitchen. There were several rooms that looked like living rooms or lounge rooms, more than anyone could ever conceivably lounge in. On a side table in a narrow hallway sat a prayer book. Zaidy noted the page it was open to, right at the very beginning. The blessings that thanked G-d for opening your eyes, for giving you sight and speech and everything you needed. Then he realized the chair next to the prayer book was occupied. The man was draped in a tallis, wrapped so completely you could barely notice his head.

“Mr. Goldman!” Zaidy was astounded. Relief swept through him, relief and surprise and reward. Entering the house hadn’t been a vain effort at all; his actions had purpose, and motive, and he had succeeded in his goal. It wasn’t until all these feelings had zigzagged through him like charges of static electricity, discharging painlessly into the floor, that Zaidy felt as though perhaps he had not followed the most prudent course of action. Thoughts of trespassing—and interrupting, and invading—sprang into his head. Zaidy bent down to address him face to face. He looked into those unforgiving eyes.

He might have stood there ten seconds or an hour. He didn’t fully understand until he touched the man’s wrist and felt the deep cold.

In Jewish law it is forbidden to leave a corpse alone. A shomer, or watchman, is necessary to stand over the body from the moment of death until burial: to protect it, to guard whatever bits of soul are left inside, and to fend off whatever loneliness might hit before it is consecrated into the packed embrace of earth.

Zaidy didn’t always remember these laws, the ones you didn’t follow every day, but right now he remembered this one. After venturing briefly into the next rooms in both directions, finding a nearby phone and calling the synagogue, Zaidy returned to that narrow hallway side table at which Matana Goldman’s stiffened body sat. He pulled around the other chair so that they faced each other, and he settled in for what could be a while. He had so much to tell Mr. Goldman, now that he had a moment; so many answers to the questions that they had probably both wrestled with, answers that he thought Mr. Goldman might want to hear.

But before he could share them, there was something he had to do. Zaidy shut the prayer book and carried it back to the bookshelf. He located the vacancy at once. Tenderly, not disturbing the books on either side of the gap, he slid the prayer book in, corner first, then straightening it, releasing the spine only once it stood shoulder to shoulder with the books to its left and right. That was what he was good at. That was what he did.

Read more from Issue 20.1.