a bottle of delicious wine, share news about his newest clients, her thorniest patients, their stellar children, their adorable grandchildren, and afterward, in every season, float together in the big pool until the moon appears, then make love. This solitary hour of reflection is when he considers the infinite, and the world at large, and this world of his that he thinks he created out of whole cloth.
Tonight, it’s not the infinite he wants to contemplate, but the specific. And specifically, his response to one of the many questions posed by the young Palm Times reporter for the profile piece that will be published in Sunday’s edition—highlighting, he was told, his installation as Man of the Decade.
When asked, “Do you think great things are ahead of you or behind you?” Harry had replied, “The past no longer exists, there is only the future, whatever it may hold,” and something about his answer to that consideration of mystical simplicity has continued to give him pause. He studies it anew now, from multiple angles, and recognizes that the equation that has fueled him all his life is slightly different, less coy and more apt:
“The past no longer exists, but great things are always ahead in my future.”
That’s what he should have said. That would have been entirely accurate.
Which leads him to reconsider another of his responses during that long interview conducted in his office. His answer hadn’t been at all inaccurate, but he might have fleshed it out, elaborated, said something more than, “Religious faith has nothing to do with my organization’s mission. I am a historical Jew.”
In the dense heat, Harry unpacks that brief explanatory offering he made to the reporter, with its pithy pearl of a phrase, a definitional near-truth, a mostly accurate shorthand to describe himself, that he thinks his brain magically deduced on its own—it didn’t, but no matter.
Yes, he should have explained to the reporter that while he aligns himself with the cultural and ethical lineage of his, the Chosen People, he draws the line at, absolutely doesn’t subscribe to, their belief in the power of prayer. He could have said, “Look, prayer failed all of my ancestors, everyone from whom I’m descended,” and evocatively illustrated what he meant with a few quick stories:
That his great-grandparents Abraham and Minishka Tabornikov were tiny people, stoic and reverent in their religiousness, with an enormous belief that God was with them, despite the awful men on horseback who rode into their shtetl waving scimitars and swords, eagerly firebombing the place once again, leaving behind a new stack of dead Jews mangled, burned, cut down, sliced straight through. Every Shabbat and on all the big and little holidays, they prayed in the ramshackle shul that was their second home, rebuilt with tzedakah and reconsecrated as many times as it was left smashed and smoldering. They had three healthy sons, not strapping, but smart—the youngest, a Talmudic scholar—all marrying devoted girls who bore lovely grandchildren. Their condensed happiness was like a fragile flower cracking through bone-dry dirt, beauty found if they shut their eyes to the rough world and forced their hearts open. Paltry, pitiful gifts, taken as proof that Adonai was watching out for them, watching over them, hearing their worshipful words.
That his grandparents Aleph and Sonia Tabornikov were a little more progressive than the prior generation. They married, and with their young sons, left the shtetl for the big city, though the big city was barely a town. But with that fifty-mile migration, they reduced, to Shabbat and the top three tiers of holidays, their attendance at their newer, finer shul, whose roof did not leak, looking sideways at those who held fast to the full complement. And when their sons were old enough to understand where they came from, and that because of who they were, they were not wanted—another round of pogroms making that abundantly clear—the family sold their only inheritances, a silver Kiddush cup and menorah, packed up their meager belongings, and hightailed it out of the old country, arriving at Ellis Island, where these Tabornikovs were reborn Americans, renaming themselves Tabor. Worship did not wholly consume the totality of his grandparents’ lives in their new country, but to Harry, it has seemed only by a matter of meaningless degrees. For although these new Tabors were free as they had never been before, prayer barely eased their lot in life.
That his parents, Mordechai and Lenore Tabor, were, like all the rest, dead, but after meeting at CCNY and marrying, they chose as their home a comfortable house in the Bronx within walking distance of a conservative synagogue they immediately joined. They did not attend on Shabbat or on the minor holidays, but were present at the ostensibly fun ones, like Purim and Sukkot and Hanukkah, and were always in their middle-of-the-house seats on the most holy of days, those deemed critical, young Harry seated firmly between them. And when the synagogue threw out the fusty old prayer books and adopted looser, more free-form services, with a musician to strum his guitar and a newfangled cantor who sang to the plucked notes, they went with the times. They maintained their minimized calendar of observance and their strong belief that prayer was an answer to so many things that remained, unfortunately, unanswered.
And that on Harry’s own Bar Mitzvah, as he ascended the bema, reached the Torah scroll unrolled on the lectern, accepted from the well-bearded rabbi the scepter to guide him along the reversed sentences of minuscule black-inked Hebrew words, he, like all those earlier Tabors and Tabornikovs, had prayed. His prayer hadn’t been for global peace, or to make Mordy and Lenore proud, or to be gifted with checks and Israeli Bonds in relatively substantial sums for 1961, but that Eve Flynn, the long-legged redhead in his homeroom, who every single Sunday attended church and sang in its youth choir under a massive crucified Christ, would finally notice him on the very day Jewish tradition declared him a man. Harry had looked out at the congregation and prayed that when everyone was at the after-party in the Tabors’ tidy, well-gardened backyard, Eve, dazzled by his new manhood, might, in an enthusiastic clasping of sweaty hands, be led around the side of the house, where, under the silky fronds of the weeping willow tree, Harry would bestow upon her his first-ever kiss. He had seen his pale gingery angel among his dark-haired erstwhile tribe and sang his Torah portion as if it were a love song for her. At the party, he was knock-kneed with love for Eve, who wore a short froth of a party dress in a peach that clashed with her red hair, but exposed her slim thighs, her rounded knees, her thin calves, all that opaline skin. Despite his fervent call to God, as fervent as once intoned by his ancestors, the prayed-for kiss was not to be. Big, blond Bobby O’Ryan, a churchgoer like Eve, had led her away, and in painful defeat, Harry could only imagine Eve Flynn being kissed under that weeping willow tree by a boy who, because he was no Jew, would never be a man at thirteen.
And he would have concluded by saying, “I consider myself a thoroughly modern man, standing at a vast distance from the millennia of bloodshed and obliteration and prayer, and that whatever links me to my ancestors is tenuous at best, a matter only of DNA, and not of outlook, or of temperament, or of faith. Big prayers did nothing for my ancestors, and a tiny prayer did not turn Eve Flynn’s head and heart in my direction. After that, I gave up prayer entirely.”
All these years, Harry has been certain that he prayed just the once and never again. Indeed, he would swear that’s true.
What is true is that he left Eve Flynn behind, and met other girls who welcomed his kisses, and he graduated from college, and from a decent business school, and landed, surprisingly, at a hoity-toity, top-tier, gentile-owned stock brokerage firm in Manhattan, where he was the token Jew for a few years, but moved up the ladder with alacrity anyway, fell madly in love with the dazzling Jewess who deigned to become his wife, and created a life far beyond his ancestors’ ken.
What is also true is that thirty-plus years ago, in what still strikes him as a miraculous decision, he moved his family to this desert and made it his mission to do good in the world.
Looking up at the moon and the stars, Harry thinks he ought to be done for the night. It’s late, but not too late, and anyway the brandy is finished, and he wants to be fresh for tomorrow.
He
