Jacob's Folly by Rebecca Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

seventeen. My betrothed had been selected for me out of the meager handful of Jewish girls in Paris by the local matchmaker in collusion with my parents; the marriage contract was hammered out through a marriage broker. Hodel Mendel was just fourteen. As my parents saw it, Hodel was a catch: her father, Mayer Mendel, was the only ritual slaughterer on the Right Bank. The ritual slaughterer was an important man in our community. On top of that, the Mendels offered a substantial dowry, plus room and board for three years. Who could resist? As for me, I was dying to sleep with a woman, and Hodel was not a bad-looking girl.
    I thought of marriage as a sort of Eden where you could pluck sensual—and sanctified—delight from every
fruitier
in the garden. I couldn’t wait. The day before my wedding, my scholarly uncle Yitzak sat with me, breathing thickly through the dense hairs in his nose, and explained that what I was about to do had been done by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and there was nothing to be nervous about. He gave me a brief layout of the geography of my future wife, and myself in relation to her, causing me to nearly faint with embarrassment, but teaching me nothing I didn’t already know from having once witnessed two stray dogs humping, and my habit of idling inside bookshops where
livres philosophiques
, with their carefully illustrated descriptions of persons in flagrante delicto, were clandestinely sold. Having fulfilled his duty, Uncle Yitzak stood up stiffly, kissed my head, and walked out of the room. My mother, to my surprise, stormed in the minute he left, weeping, and clasped me violently against her breast.
    When I saw little Hodel on the evening of our wedding, she was hanging by her elbows between her tall mother and her squat father,being guided through the courtyard of her family building like a blind person. Her face was entirely whited out by an opaque veil that fell to her waist, giving me the curious impression that her head was on backward. I stood with my parents beneath the wedding canopy, trembling in my white coat, waistcoat, and britches, over which I wore a kittel—a white linen robe, white for mourning, to remind me of my own death. Yet in truth my kittel could have been my own burial shroud, given what my marriage would turn out to be.
    Hodel looked very small and rigid beside her pantherlike, black-browed mother, who was maneuvering her toward me with a firm grip. Her little badger of a father had to raise the girl’s elbow in order to keep her level. It looked as if they were heaving a draped statue across the courtyard. Hodel seemed to be making no effort to walk; in fact, she was quite stiff. I wondered if her feet were being dragged along the ground beneath her wedding gown. The four candle-bearing matrons walking before this coercive procession lent the ceremony an eerie air of sacrifice. At last Hodel was beside me, perfectly hidden behind the thick white silk. After my father pronounced the seven blessings, when Hodel’s veil was raised, a corner lifted by each parent, I saw that her eyes were inflamed and swollen from weeping. Her round cheeks had tear tracks on them. Her breath shuddered and caught like that of a tiny child who has been bawling. I crushed the glass beneath my heel with a sudden rush of anger.

7
    I awoke from my nap and crawled out from under my cotton tent. I was in a sterile chamber buzzing with greenish light. Mr. Tolan, the old man whom Leslie had saved in the fire, was sitting up in bed, his skinny, shriveled arm connected to a shiny tube. Rheumy, helpless eyes glistened in the dry landscape of his face like shallow ponds. With striking vanity, he wore a ratty brown toupée that seemed to hover over his scalp. Leslie couldn’t reconcile this pathetic figure with the powerhouse he had known as a child. Mr. Tolan’s rages were legend in the neighborhood; you could hear him halfway down the block, screaming at his kid, wife,