There was reason to hope that the drugs would take hold. Richard’s dizziness and nausea had passed quickly. And even now, the daily climb seemed less steep to the late afternoon and evening hours when he felt most alive. But there was a way to go, and Eleanor’s immediate job was cover up: To make sure that this bout of depression, so deep and so long in the making, would pass without notice. That her husband’s image, and with it, large portions of his self-respect, remained intact.
Their return to public view that summer had been spectacular. The party of the year in the estimation of a crowd that didn’t tend to the superlative. Richard had deliberately planned a splash to announce themselves as a married couple: Dinner and dancing at the lakeside house, with fireworks exploding over the water to a live Motown medley. The problem now was that splashes create a percolation. The lazy days of summer were coming to an end. The social calendar of autumn was bearing down with a crisp, quickening pace. She and Richard would be expected.
If Eleanor understood anything, it was how to use convention in her favor. This year, the High Holidays came early. Laborious, prayer-laden, and over-attended, the holiest services of the Jewish calendar provided the perfect opportunity to appear without speaking.
It would be easy for her to show up alone. Even on the holiest days, many men did not appear in synagogue. Unlike Europe, their absence from religious observation was proof of their keeping the larger faith. They worked and worked and worked, lifting a whole community upwards on their backs. Eleanor’s first husband never showed up at shul. He was a doctor, after all, with office hours to keep, hospital rounds to attend, and diagnoses to render.
In Richard’s case, the last time anybody in Detroit had seen him in a sanctuary was the bar mitzvah year of 1963. Even then, his lean, athletic body bristled under the drape of his prayer shawl, and he placed his skull cap at a jaunty, slightly derisive angle, like a man tipping his hat before dancing out the door. Which is exactly what he did. Gone for 25 years to the glory of Wall Street and the society pages of “Vogue” and “The New York Times.”
Richard’s appearance at worship after all that would be freakish, even pretentious. If anything, Eleanor told herself, people needed him to stay away, to remain what he had become, a glamorous hero basking in the aura of distant victories.
Eleanor was another matter. The congregation had been her mountain, her field of battle, her task. She would come back to it for Kol Nidre in her suit and her pearls and her hat and her gloves. As if nothing had changed. As if two years hadn’t passed. As if time could stand still, or at least run on multiple tracks, each without consequence for the others. Which in a way she believed. Why else would she have run back the lover of her youth to live her life all over again.
Eleanor’s heart jumped as she approached the grand synagogue. The sanctuary soared above the road like a concrete Sinai, an arc for the storm-lashed, a tent for the desert weary. The clouds of autumn raced around the pinnacle. The sun was strong and the shifting shadows dark.
It is one thing to spy this modern holy mountain while speeding down a divided highway. Quite another to approach.
Up close, the structure is ingathering. Its sprawling wings gently usher the exile. The great stone entrance canopy beckons like the outstretched hand. Eleanor was so happy to be moving towards it over the deep green lawn that held the gleaming cars of the holiday spillover.
Beneath the canopy, flanking fountains danced silver and gold above their dark reflecting pools. Eleanor paused to take her breath in this shadowed place. At the far side of this passage was a realm that was both other worldly and entirely her own.
Both chapels were in full operation, the small one named for Richard’s grandmother reserved just for children. Even on this most solemn night, the hall that linked the two sanctuaries was busy with footsteps and humming with sound. Parents walked between the consecrated spaces. Little ones ran. Teenagers played religious hooky in the corners. Friends gossiped near the tables before they crossed the gates of righteousness.
Eleanor’s heels clicked on the familiar marble, then sank into the carpet of the main sanctuary. The sidewalls of both social halls had been thrown open to contain the faithful. The four-story marble ark rose from its platform as stark as history, and the old-world murmurings of some 3,500 souls washed over her.
It was a crazy shul, if you thought about it, which Eleanor had done quite a bit for a good 20 years. A flagship of Conservatism, that doomed American creation that split the difference between past and future, precedence and change. The seating was modern. The worshippers filled the parking lots with pride in their automobiles, rather than apology. But they came for services that were long, traditional, and, for most, linguistically incomprehensible. Theirs was not a rational faith, but still the faith of mystery, connected to the life that runs beneath the surface of our days.
Within their lush, modernist refuge, the well-heeled congregants steadfastly behaved like shtetl Jews, so intimate with G-d (a G-d that many did not at all believe in, but so what?), they need not follow transitory rules. They came. They went. They prayed more or less together. But mostly less, each in their own time and their own rhythm. The services started on time. The membership was so vast, it was easy to assemble the requisite 10 men even on the least attended days. But the bulk of the congregation resisted arriving n a timely fashion, enjoying to full measure the heady combination of new freedoms and old assurances.
Eleanor searched for Shauna Deutsch’s bright red hair against the blue of the stained-glass windows. Shauna was near the center aisle. Not a surprise. Shauna always came on time and liked to be at the heart of things. Eleanor would have preferred to slither along a side, to look without being greatly seen. To drink in the old familiar faces: The Fishmans, the Stakowskis, and the Browns. The Conservative branches of the Franks, the Suchers, and the Gershensons. A smattering of Keywells and their cousins the Wolfs. Several iterations of Posners, Weiners, Berrys, and Goldsteins.
Perhaps, this was the better way. To wade right in. To get it over with. She proceeded as quietly as a bride, and then by necessity, like a politician nodding this way and that, mouthing well wishes in Hebrew.
She sank into the seat Shauna had saved for her. “I feel like Anna Karenina.”
“Did Anna Karenina get to go anywhere? Wasn’t that part of the problem?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Neither can I. Not that it matters. Everybody gets divorced these days.” Shauna said kindly.
“Not you.”
“I can’t, I’m Catholic.”
“Very funny.”
“Do you know how much trouble it was to convert and get married to Charlie in the first place?”
“It matters where you start, I guess.” Eleanor quipped.
“Not as much as where you end up.”
Eleanor blew off the silent question that Shauna as far too polite to ask. She knew, probably, about Richard’s history of depression, and the depth of his current bout. Charlie was Richard’s best friend, but he was not one to keep secrets from his wife. Intimate knowledge, however, comes with obligations. All four of them would agree on that. The last thing Richard would want was for his dark streak, as he liked to call it, to become talked about. “What page do you have?” Eleanor asked.
Eleanor read from a small, white prayer book that the congregation gave 15-year-old girls for their consecrations. The print was small, the papers yellow, and the page numbers were actually different than the big black Siddurs set in racks behind the pews. But she knew how to get her bearings. She’d brought this book into this sanctuary, week after week, month after month, year after year for most of her adult life, and carried it wrapped in flowers for both her first and second weddings. She liked its smell, the crinkling of its fragile pages, and the way it fit so comfortably in her hands, as if she was reading the inside of her palms.
Not that the page numbers mattered that much to Eleanor. She worked primarily from aural memory. Meaning hardly mattered compared to the slow dance of piety. Ancient tunes, ancient cries, ancient supplications. Older than memory. It was never the Almighty she sought in this way. That pursuit stopped at the insurmountable fiery wall of the 1940s. It was the Jews. The generations of them. Frenzied Eastern European mystics and fierce believers. Ancient warriors smiting this way and that. Frightened desert wanderers. Would-be Americans huddling in their ships. The tattered, tortured multitudes seeking mercies that never came. Modern Russians with tight-pressed lips and bewildered eyes. Tough, fractious Israelis willing to take on it all. All sitting among a mass of well-heeled suburbanites outside of Detroit.
From the small thrones on the bimah, the new president of the congregation, a lawyer with whom she had sat on so many committees, nodded. The young rabbi, whom Eleanor helped hire, smiled in his mild, liturgical way. The old senior cantor with the still all-powerful voice showed actual emotion and did a quick double take.
“If they knew you were coming, they’d have given you an Aliyah. If they gave them to woman, which, of course, they don’t,” said Shauna.
Eleanor eyed the platform that sat between two sweeping flights of stairs. “I’m fine right where I am,” she said. More than fine. She let herself wonder, just for the moment, what she had given up for Richard and why. Being lost in the universe with your one true love is not always all it is cracked up to be.
When Kol Nidre began, Eleanor began to feel unsettled. The scene was so austere. The congregation standing. The ark held open and emptied of Torahs. Each of the scrolls raised high. Like imperatives. Like judges. Then there was the song so mournful, so longing. No need to understand Aramaic to know what that is about. It is song of all the ages. The heartfelt admission of failure and false promises. Of regret for acts taken and actions avoided. Of ache over the Absence beyond naming.
As the song grew louder and more urgent with each of its three repetitions, the reckoning moves beyond failure, beyond loss, beyond G-d in exile, to the great lonely human task: To rise above. To create a life worth living. The old cantor’s voice hit notes of heartbreaking pitch and intensity. That tiny, wizened man beseeched the Unseen with every fiber of his fragile being, answering eternal woe with the implacable fact of human persistence.
Eleanor became ashamed to have used this time, this place, for petty social theater. How does saving her husband’s pride and her own compare to the pursuit of all the ages.
The song became an echo in the air. The scrolls returned to their enclosure. Outside the sun was setting. In the still-bright space of the sanctuary, the ark was closed. The traditional evening service began by blessing the darkness.
She owed. She owed history. She owed creation. She owed the people in this room. The debt was not of her choosing. It did not begin with whom she loved and how she loved him. The debt could never be fully discharged. There was too much flawed in this sad and imperfect world for that. But she would do everything in her power to be worthy of her obligations.
Eleanor lingered after the final prayer. She did not want to move out from the consecrated moment. She reached across the aisles and over the benches to once more mutter well-wishes in ancient phrases, to feel the maternal tenderness of fingers that grasped her own, to gaze onto faces that met her own with lovingkindness. She was once more part of this Tribe of Michigan as it released in great rivers into the common world.
A long-time journalist, Marcia Stamell’s magazine publications include “Ms.” “New York,” “Harper’s Bazaar,” “Mademoiselle,” and “Parade.” She has taught journalism and writing at Boston University, U-Mass/Amherst, Montclair State College, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock. “The Golden Tent” is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress about race, religion, and her hometown of Detroit.