Solomon's Wisdom and Other Stories

by Roberta Kalechofsky, micah@micahbooks.com, www.micahbooks.com

This is the full text of the book, in one file. The print version "Stephen's Passion" is available from Micah Publications, 255 Humphrey St., Marblehead, MA 01945, www.micahbooks.com  Roberta's other fiction includes: Orestes in Progress, Justice My Brother, A View of Toledo, The Martyrdom of Stephen Werner, Autobiography of a Revolutionary: Essays on Animal and Human Rights, and Bodmin 1349.

All of the above books are now available on CD, in a "context" of 270 related classic books,  for just $29:
Works of Roberta Kalechofsky in Context contains five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of essays by Roberta, together with 270 related classic books that provide a context for better appreciating and enjoying her work. The "context" books deal with Jewish Religion, Christian Religion, Medieval Europe (including works of Dante, Boccacio, and Chaucer), Greek classics (including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles), Latin American History, Animals, Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery, along with works of novelists Conrad, Melville, and Hawthorne. Table of Contents

Micah Publications also publishes Jewish vegetarian and animal rightsbooks, such as: The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook, Vegetarian Judaism--A Guide for Everyone, and Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb. For a full list with descriptions, see www.micahbooks.com

• Solomon's Wisdom
• Abraham and Isaac
• Beruriah
• Epiphany
• His Day Out
• Strauss and Son
• Epitaph for an Age
• American Female Gothic
• Sarai and Atahualpa
• Reflections from a Park Bench

About the Author
Roberta Kalechofsky is the author of seven works of fiction, a monograph on George Orwell, poetry and two collections of essays. She has been published in quarterlies, reviews and anthologies, and was the recipient of Literary Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts.

Several of her stories, and two novellas, La Hoya and Stephen's Passion, have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. La Hoya received excellent reviews in major publications, such as Corriere Della Sera., and was included in a college curriculum in Italy under the title, Veduta di Toledo.. Stephen's Passion has also been included in a college curriculum in courses in American Fiction in the University of Florence, under the title, La Passione Di Stephen. Her novel, Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years, was included twice in a college curriculum in the United States.

She began Micah Publications in 1975 and has received publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, in addition to her literary fellowships. As a publisher, she created The Echad Series, which includes five anthologies of Jewish writing from around the world, and has published 40 different titles in poetry, fiction, scholarship, vegetarianism and animal rights. She is active in the animal rights and vegetarian movements and began the organization, Jews for Animal Rights, in 1985, and coordinates publishing projects with this organization.

She has also been a contributing editor to various magazines, such as Margins, and On The Issues, and taught at Brooklyn College for four years.

She was a participant in a round-table discussion, "Please Use Other Door: Literary Creativity and the Publishing Industry," with Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Sifton and Robert Boyers, which was published in RSA Journal, #3 (March, 1992).

She graduated from Brooklyn College and received a doctorate in English literature in 1970 from New York University.

A critical essay on her work can be found in the Dictionary of Literary Biographies, Volume 28: Jewish Fiction Writers. A list of her published work and/or extended resume is available upon request.

Dedication
To Kal, who's always there.

Back cover text
Ten stories which deal with religious or revelatory experiences as they originate out of an historical or psychological background.

"Your mind is filled -- crowded -- with remarkable images, histories, data, visions, scenes, colors, scents! .... I have been dazzled by your story-telling."  Cynthia Ozick

"Stories so convincing we share the anguish." Booklist

"...haunting, memorable works... Kalechofsky's gifts are highly recommended and should force their way to recognition." Isaac Mozeson

Acknowledgments:
"Abraham and Isaac," Confrontation, Winter, 1970-71. The Enduring Legacy, ed by Douglas Brown (Scribners), 1976.
"Epiphany," Works, vol I, no.3, Spring, 1968.
"His Day Out," Western Humanities Review, vol. XXV, no.3, Summer, 1977;The Best American Short Stories of 1972 (Houghton Mifflin);The Writer's Digest Anthology.
"Strauss and Son," Confrontation,
Fall, 1973. "Epitaph for an Age," Works, vol. III, no.3/4, Winter, 1972-73.
"American Female Gothic,"(Original title: "Realities),"Ball State University
Forum, vol XV, no.1, Winter, 1974. "Sarai and Atahualpa," Rocky Mountain
Review, vol.31, no.4, Fall, 1977. "Reflections from a Park Bench," Ball
State University Forum, vol XVII, no.1, Winter, 1976.
Carol Berlanger Grafton, Treasury of Illuminated Borders, Dover
Publications, 1988.
Carol Berlanger Grafton, Old Time Bird Vignettes in Full Color, Dover
Publications, 1998.

Solomon's Wisdom

Haggith's eyes hardened into slits. She saw nothing in the dark street, but she knew who made that noise. She tossed her head and continued walking. The sound followed her like a snake. "Ssssss." Haggith knew she should keep her haughty attitude, but she was irritated. "Go away," she hissed back. Her hand lashed out in the direction of the voice. She could not see a thing,
but she felt the other woman near her. She turned cautiously in the dark. Like a cat putting out a paw, she stretched out her hand to feel for Ohalah. The air stirred. The voice moved behind her  and breathed on her neck. Haggith pretended to stub her toe on a rock and began to whimper. She moved alongside the wall with a hobbling air of caution.

Actually, a native of Jerusalem, she knew her way through the streets with formidable precision. A sometime spy, messenger, whore, a picker-up of tag ends of information with a lust for intrigue, her toes stretched with brazen instinct into the darkness. With confident duplicity she went down an alley and up a narrow flight of stairs. Pigeons cooed in the dark and the air was filled with the odor of apes. Haggith's eyes searched for a hiding place. She could lead Ohalah around and around the city until Ohalah wept with exhaustion, but Haggith preferred combat. She found a place where the stairs turned and broadened out in the corner of the turn, and she crouched down in the dark space.

Within seconds she heard Ohalah's foot stroke a step, pause, deliberate, and stroke another step. Haggith was thrilled. She pressed her hand into her mouth to stifle a cry of triumph, and waited. Ohalah turned in the darkness with unsteadiness. She crouched and peered. Her breath was as audible to Haggith's ears as a pluck on the harp. If she leaped now she could push her down the stairs and cripple her. But if she failed to make contact, she would fall herself. There was sweat on Haggith's brow, but she was not afraid. She prayed that Ohalah would take one more step. She herself was as still as a sleeping snake. She exulted in her stealth.

Ohalah raised her foot over the step. The night was like a cobweb on her eyes. In the dark, the stone streets were grimy and loathsome to her bare feet. Reptiles scattered over her toes. She strained to single out Haggith's breath from the sounds of the pigeons and distant voices, the shrieks of the apes, the lowing of the sheep on the hills. The night was always too quiet until one tried to hear one particular sound, then it was filled with a warble of dark nothing. Ohalah kept one foot raised over the next step. She knew Haggith was close by. She could smell her hair. She forced a smile and fancied that Haggith could see her smile, and that it crippled her spirits. A sense of having been grievously wronged made her incautious. She made a
mocking sound in her throat, clucking as if to a chicken. In a building close by a chimpanzee knocked himself against a wall and let out a frenzy of sounds. Ohalah placed her foot on the step in front of her. She felt the crunch of a beetle. Steeling herself, she hissed into the dark and took another step. "Tck, tck, tck." she clucked, defying prudence. She wanted justice. She could not bear Haggith's lowbred city arrogance. She quickly went up the next few steps.

Fingers closed around her ankles. Ohalah fell forward against the steps. Haggith's eyes gleamed for a second before she took her revenge. Then she pulled Ohalah down two steps. Ohalah's chin hit the ground. A tooth fell out. Blood swam in her mouth. Haggith grinned and waited. Then she pulled Ohalah down another step. Ohalah screamed. The skin on her belly ripped
open. Haggith clucked with mock sympathy. Ohalah kicked to get her feet free. Haggith dug her nails into Ohalah's ankles and pulled her down the steps. The chimpanzee babbled a monologue, deep in his throat a cry of homesickness.

Bucking like an ass, Ohalah kicked at Haggith's chest and pushed her off. Then she came down the steps after her. "Dung, whore," she wept. Her belly burned. Haggith wasted no energy on words. She set her teeth into Ohalah's earlobe and hung on. Ohalah's screams split the air. The chimpanzee shrieked with gleeful recognition of pain.  Soldiers ran. Doors opened cautiously. Eyes peered out.

"What is the trouble?"

"Those two again."

Haggith and Ohalah! Already a legend. All Jerusalem told their story, laughed or solemnized over it. The amoral placed bets on the outcome. Either way no good would come of it, one a northern girl and the other a Judean. Both whores, still any decision would be regarded as political, concession to the northern party or betrayal of the southern or, given the reverse decision, concession to the Judeans, betrayal of the northerners.

The soldiers could not loosen Haggith's teeth. Experience told her that victory was a matter of hanging on.

"Come, come," a soldier said, "be a nice lady and unpin this woman's ear." Haggith could not be flattered. Another soldier whacked her on the behind with a sword. Haggith could not be terrorized.

"Leave her to me," a third said, and he thrust his hand up her tunic between her legs. Haggith shrieked venomously.

The soldiers laughed. "There is only one way to loosen the hold of a whore."

The soldiers pinned Haggith's arms behind her back. Ohalah's head swam with pain. She did not have to be held down with force. "How many times have we told you two to leave your quarrels inside your house," the soldier said. "Now the king will settle the matter."

"Let him," Haggith said. She raised an arrogant shoulder. "Heaven is my witness that justice is on my side." Ohalah started to hiss. "Ssssss. Snake, snake, snake," she wept. Haggith laughed hysterically. "This idiot of a woman thinks my spirit unbends if she hisses like a snake. Tell her only blood counts." She tossed her head and walked off between the soldiers. Her body smirked with victory.

Ohalah could not manage a triumphal exit. Her body sagged between two soldiers, her back felt as if it were broken, her spine felt unhinged. She could not stand upright in front of these strangers. The space in her mouth where her tooth had been made her feel morbidly sorry for herself, as if her position had no dignity at all.

No one would have told Solomon until the morning, but he heard the fracas in the harem and knew what the trouble was. It was another pinch of salt on his soul that night. Thoughts of Tamar had distracted him all day, but at night he had gone to the bed of the Hittite, Shisha. It is not satisfactory to long for one woman and to go to another, even for a king. Solomon fidgeted. He accused Shisha of smelling like a goat and left. Shisha did not mind the insult. It came from a king.

Solomon went back to his rooms. He heard the soldiers making nasty jokes at Haggith as they dragged her along. It was a mystery why some women could give their bodies to everyone, and other women couldn't give their bodies even to a king.

Tamar had kept his brain simmering for a month. Born in the northern mountains beyond Chinnereth, she had an intelligent, bold look that struck him as even more sophisticated and pleasantly daring than a city bred expression. She had looked him in the face, eyeball to eyeball, before bowing, and he had the feeling that her bow was affected, a gesture toward survival. O.K., you're the king, it said. Solomon had a sharp instinct for political meanings and immediately suspected disaffection. What is going on up there? he thought. However, Tamar's expression, combined with slender legs, slender wrists, firm breasts, and‹his favorite word‹a comely back, made her irresistible. He decided that her expression was a form of flirting, and he could hardly wait to get to her room that night. All day his mind doodled with thoughts of her thighs while the most prodigious persons, Nathan and Bathsheba, messengers from Hiram of Tyre and the Pharaoh of Egypt passed back and forth, and he mused on life's irreconcilable claims and the fact that even a king may not harmonize them.

A few years back in Gibeon, given the choice of anything in the world, he had asked God for wisdom. Being fifteen and having just arrived to kingship, pubescent awe of the universe, including his ability to communicate with God, filled his soul. Assuming one could achieve such a communication, what a waste of an opportunity to ask for anything less. Even God was impressed. "How wise of you," He said, and decided that Solomon's request for wisdom was no reason why he should lose out on the usual kingly rewards of power, fame, and glory. Solomon must have felt like the pupil who guesses the answer in his teacher's mind. His empire flourished unprecedently. He sat on its throne and was intrigued by the look on the girl's face, and went to her room that night with the knowledge that he was Solomon, the navel of the body politic, struggling against the realization
that she was sizing him up, and not just physically.

She sat on a lion's skin, her legs crossed, her elbows on her knees, her head cupped in her hands, her hair hanging disorderly, looking as if she had been waiting for such a long time that interest and curiosity and even fear had evaporated into monotony. Waiting is waiting! Dejected, Solomon thought with disgust. They're either dejected or hysterically flattered.

"Are you homesick?" he asked civilly. He was bored with the question. But if they were dejected, he always asked that.

She looked up for a moment, interested that he was concerned.  But she checked the indulgence. She knew what she was there for. Her expression flattened out. Solomon had a gross impulse to ask her why she wasn't flattered. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "I'm ready." His inclinations were pinched like a nerve cut in half. "Rest," he said. He meant the word to sound magnanimous, a gift from a king, but his throat fogged up and he had to cough. Annoyed at the figure he cut, he let down the flap to her doorway and went back to his rooms.

Tamar's legs kicked his brain the whole next day. That and the thought of how he looked as he retreated. Not to forget the thought of Tamar on a lion's skin. Three hundred times he had her stretched out. But when he came to her room at night she had the same look on her face as the night before. Not a glimmer of emotion in her dark eyes. She sat cross-legged, her thin
wrists dangling on her knees, looking as if they'd break if he grabbed them. Yet the expression on her face was not afraid. It was sassily empty.

He circled the room and tried to cope with the problem. He was not used to having his emotions stunted. She started to speak, but he cut her off. "I know," he said, "you're ready." Her invitation was calculatingly pedestrian. She was deliberately deflationary. The malice of the humble, he thought. Still, a king cannot afford lack of confidence. He ordered a hundred lions'
skins to be hung in her rooms, and did not come back for a week.

The route from Joppa to Jerusalem was filled with caravans carrying timber that had come down from Lebanon. Horses, crazy with fear, stood rigid in boats that floated down the Mediterranean from Kue. Monkeys and parrots that had never seen a grain of sand sailed breezily up the Red Sea from Africa, from jungle to desert, and joined the caravans headed for Jerusalem.
Asses trudged south carrying gold, ivory, and apes. Traders sat on the animals and watched the activity with wizened eyes. There was nothing so good for commerce as an ambitious king.

At the end of a week Solomon invited Tamar out to see the activity. It might light a fire to her imagination and break down that peasant habit of seeing only the practical requirements for every task. The autocratic instinct warred in him with romantic demands, the recognition of the soul in the flesh. To be able to take was a freedom, to be given was release from loneliness. He wanted to woo her.

Luckily, she didn't insist upon the peasant trait of stolidness. Solomon knew that she had the intelligence to understand that what she saw augured something extraordinary, a change in the historical climate.  She was impressed by what she saw: Traders carrying baskets of fruit jostled each other in the streets. Underfoot, mangoes gushed ripe. Camels dripped saliva and trudged up alleys with bamboo cages strapped to their backs carrying apes with morose eyes and monkeys with satiric grins. The new
screeching birds that had just arrived from Africa attracted crowds everywhere, and any merchant who could get hold of one and train him to sit on his shoulder didn't waste the opportunity. The parrots sat on their human perches and eyed the frenzy. Children gasped at their colors and learned very soon that the birds imitated sounds. They ran after the traders shrieking epithets,  the traders threw sticks at them and the little boys threw sticks at the monkeys to make them screech.

Solomon watched it through Tamar's eyes. She had never seen anything like it. Her reaction enflamed him. He knew that the assessment of what she saw was sinking into her soul. He hoped  it would distract her from homesickness and parochial loyalties.

They walked along the northern section of the wall of Ophel toward the Sion Hill where the temple was, and came to the bridge between Sion and the upper city. "Look west," he said, "there will be another city there very soon. Already the people are pushing against the walls, the merchants beleaguer me daily to set up market areas there."

Tamar looked down at the pigeons nibbling after her toes. Solomon stamped his foot at them. "Pests," he said. She permitted the expression on her face to tell him that he was belittling her naivete. He fell in love with her. A peacock hopped on to the wall, spread its tail and screamed with color. Tamar backed away in awe. Solomon was delighted with her astonishment. Her eyes were a mirror of the world he was building. He beheld in them the  iridescent wonder of his power.

The first day a trader had brought him a peacock and had set it down in front of his throne he had fallen in love with the bird for its careless, arrogant, mindless, dazzling strutting. He could order a hundred and did. It delighted him to be cavalier with the creations of God, to spend fortunes to have these crazy creatures from Africa defecate in his streets, to domesticate power and glory. I want to eat the universe like an apple, he thought, and feel the juices run in my mouth. If I, a king, cannot, who can?
Glory was the madness of being in love with the world. He could walk in his palace courtyard and observe: I have brought the marvels of nations here.

He never said that. Being wise might allow you to communicate with God; it in no way allowed you to communicate with humans.

"That's the temple," he said, pointing north up the hill at a newly finished building.

She looked at it with interest and good manners, but not the way she looked at the peacock. "I've heard about it," she said.

Solomon felt the flatness creep into her voice. It pinched him again, but he would not be put down. He had too much taste for the glamour of history. Although, God knew, thoughts of future judgment depressed him often enough. A king carries the future as well as the past on his shoulders. "What will the future make of me?" buzzed in his brain constantly. It would have cheered him  had he known that later generations would breathe a sigh of relief when they discovered his chariot stables. "Exactly," he might have said to them, "if you don't build monuments, you've got nothing to show for it." That he knew instinctively, even though he sometimes felt the future hiding in ambush for him. But then too he sometimes felt a force blowing his kingdom across time and space. As usual there was a bad wind and a good wind, and when the good wind blew, every decision was right, and he knew he was going to be great and replace fate with destiny. One could not be the son of a legend and settle for less, or be born to that household in that time, hanging on the brink of political consolidation, and not have the itch to consolidate. The problem was what it would always be, metaphorically and politically: whether the whole was greater than its parts, whether the
future would bless him or curse him. Glory was the conviction that he would be blessed, that what he was (and therefore could indulge himself in being) was consonant with what the world required of him.

But the conviction came and went. Abiding certainty was never there. To be that certain his wisdom would have had to have been God's. Solomon had only autocracy, lay powers, personal needs, intellect, an appetite for luxury and revenge, Nathan, Benaiah, luck, good genes, and ambition. But it amounted to the feeling that anything less than greatness was too nerve-wracking to think about, dissolution of his personality and the cultural nexus.

The sky was cloudless to the horizon. The bronze columns, Jachin and Boaz, flanked the main entrance to the temple and reflected the sun. Around the base of the temple a thousand oxen and sheep waited to be sacrificed. To the right of the temple, construction on the new palace was under way. The sun beat on the stripped backs of the laborers rolling logs up the hill.
Solomon made his way across them as if they were pebbles in the road. The overseers, whips tucked into their armpits, winked to each other as he went by with Tamar. Gossip for the night.

 "What do they say abut the temple?" he asked Tamar, and added, "up there," to humble her.
 
 

Unexpectedly, she answered him soberly, as if the matter had been on her mind for some time. "They say it costs too much."

The occupational disease of kings is to shout down self doubt and to be impatient with refusal. A wind bit his neck. He smacked his thigh with disgust. "They are barbarians," he said. "Glory has no price."

That sounded bombastic to her. She thought perhaps she wasn't used to the way kings speak. She looked up at him to see if he meant it seriously. He did. "Whose glory?" she asked, "yours or ours?"

In an instant, by the look in her eyes, his accomplishments shrank to an outburst of egomania, personal willfulness divorced from prophetic history. "That's the problem," he hissed, "isn't it? You don't approve of my policies."

She  found his conjunction of ideas sordid and funny. Actually, she found Solomon attractive. Her hesitation, since he had given her the freedom to express it, was normal. But for Solomon, anything that could have political implications, did. The fate of kings is never to breathe pure air and to count each breath. Tamar laughed with flirtatious disgust, "Don't mistake my unwillingness for treason."

"It is treason," he said, feeling ridiculous and unmasculine as he said it. He was in one of those willful moods that ran away with itself, where every impediment was a mountain and he stubbed his toes on rocks because he wanted to send them flying. Nevertheless, he crushed his doubts and had a guard put a peacock in her room that night. She was flattered, but she was
determined to hold out as long as he allowed her to for the thrill of her feminine strength, aside from the question of virtue.

He did not visit her again for three weeks, but he thought of nothing and no one else. Her slender wrists inspired his masculine instincts to protect her, but the look in her eyes put him off with the knowledge that she was making judgments. He might take her by force, but he knew that she knew the secret of resistance through the spirit. She would offer no conflict. Obeisance would be refusal. Her body would go limp. The problem was  political. He had a disgust of seeing the thing through, of finding her "ready," complaisant, steadily negating.

At night he dreamed that he parted her thighs, over and over again he parted her thighs. He mounted her and parted her thighs and nothing came of it. He entered her and departed with the same feeling: seeking. Then he dreamed that he was torn apart, that he wandered through dark streets while at the same time he crouched in corners and watched himself. He was here and
he was there. He was pursuing and he was pursued. He would wake in the morning ill with the sensation that he had been torn apart.

Sometimes during the day the memory of Tamar in his dream would bubble into his mind with an erotic explosion. At other times he felt inert as if he were confronted with an immovable force.

He knew what that force was: it was the future compounded of so many unknowables that one must disregard it or risk being flattened out by introspection. A king cannot afford nightmares. He went from concubine to concubine in search of a dreamless sleep, but it did not matter whom he slept with. He dreamed of Tamar even when he did not want her. In the daytime he thought voluptuously of Tamar even when he was convinced the problem was political.

He left Shisha and went back to his rooms, only to stand, as it were, on one foot when he got there, wondering what to do with himself. He walked out into the courtyard where the soldiers were dragging Ohalah and Haggith. "So," he said to them impatiently, suggesting that whatever the matter was they should have solved it by now.

"These are the two women who claim the same child," the captain said.

Solomon took the torch from his hands and waved the light over them.

"A neat trick," a soldier laughed.

"Why not?" another laughed too, "they claim the same husband."

Solomon did not join in the camaraderie. He brought the light in front of Ohalah's face and saw that she was a homely woman whose appearance had not been helped by the loss of a tooth and two swollen eyes. "You are a stranger in Jerusalem," he said. "What brings you here?"

Ohalah's tongue felt the empty slot where her tooth had been. She tasted dry blood. A soldier prodded her in her back to answer. She made a show of defiance, but immediately crumpled into weeping. "My brother was brought here to work in the palace. I have no family but him. I came to be near him." She picked up her head to look intelligent, but could scarcely see
through her swollen eyes. A guard kept her arms crossed behind her back. She was humiliated, being held down like a child. "I came to see Jerusalem," she mumbled.

Solomon searched her battered face. Repulsion and sympathy fought in him. "And now that you've seen it?" he asked.

She had an itch on her nose but could not reach it. She shrugged her shoulder up to it as well as she could. "I want to take my baby and go home. Now that I have a family," she whispered.

Haggith shrieked, "The child is mine. There is no doubt about that."

Solomon moved the torch to her side. "There must be some doubt, since you both claim the same child."

Haggith put her hands on her hips like a woman about to give her husband a  drubbing. "My lord, it is very simple. This one came to live with me a year ago. We were both brought to bed with child the same night. During the third night her child died. She fell asleep next to it and smothered it with her body. During the night when this happened she rose up and put her dead
child in my arms and took my live child from me. In the morning she said see how well my child sucks and your child's head is drooping."

Haggith's face was dramatic, but her argument had loopholes. "Well, what do you say," Solomon said to the soldiers, curious to know how her defense affected them.

"My lord, the captain said, "they are both whores. Dismiss the matter."

Solomon held the torch higher to see better. Beyond the ring of light everything was in darkness. The soldiers cared neither one way or the other. They trusted whatever decision he would make. Solomon was disappointed, but not surprised. It was clear that their contempt for the women was decision enough for them. "It's plain to see," one of them said, "the father had the
best of it."

"Where is the father?" Solomon asked.

"He is working in Elath," Haggith said.

"A seasonal laborer," the soldiers laughed.

"Dismiss the case," the captain said.

"Would that be justice then?" Solomon asked. "True, they are whores, but they are not yet murderers. If we dismiss the case, they will kill one another.

"Well, then, decide and be done with it. This is the third night Jerusalem has been awakened."

"True," Solomon said, "it is time to end the matter." He waved the soldiers away with Ohalah and Haggith, but he kept a torch for himself and motioned to the captain to walk with him. "Do you have an opinion?" he asked him. "I mean only as a kind of intellectual exercise on what seems to be an inexhaustible conundrum."

"Not I," the captain said, undisturbed, "and you?"

"And I?" Solomon said. "Yes, I have an opinion. That is why I am a king," he laughed. "My opinion is that only God and the thief can know for certain who the mother is. If the mother is Haggith and she was sleeping as she claims, how can she know at all what happened. If she was awake and knew what happened, why didn't she prevent it?"

The captain was duly impressed. "She is clearly a liar."

"Not clearly, only presumably. Haggith is a woman who will say anything to make her case look good and she is not very intelligent. She is bound to stumble into contradictions."

"But she has force," the captain said.

"Yes, force," Solomon said. "And the other one says nothing, which is wisdom." He parted from the captain and took the path back to the harem. The torch gave him a pool of light. It played over his feet as he watched his steps. Beyond the light the darkness was a wall, and from behind the wall came the bleating of the sheep, fitful cries heard in the dark space.

"Well?" he said, pushing the curtains apart to Tamar's room.

She was sitting cross-legged and upright, her head thrust forward as if she was listening to something. The peacock strutted around the room with an air of confusion, pecking in corners for a friendly scent among the lion skins.

"Why aren't you asleep?" he asked.

"Why aren't you asleep?" she said.

Mimicking, mocking, he registered it all right. "A king never sleeps," he said affably, "even when he seems to sleep, and especially then."

"You must be very tired," she said. "What was all that noise about?"

"Two whores fighting over a child."

"You mean Ohalah and Haggith."

"How do you know them?"

"There is nothing to do all day. We gossip."

"If you were kept busier at night you would not have time to gossip in the day.

"Then think how ignorant I should be."

He sat down in a chair. "I am tempted to send you back. Would you like that?"

Tamar glanced quickly up at him, and then down. She had meant to hold out, not to be thrown away. Solomon saw the glimmer of confusion. His heart leaped, but he subdued his feelings and kept a steady course, content for the moment to contemplate Tamar in confusion. She kept her eyes lowered and said, "I wasn't talking about me, but about the two women."

"I will send them both away," he said.

The answer was suspicious. Tamar was wary. Receive me, Solomon thought. "One is a countrywoman of yours," he said.

"How do you know that?"

"I saw her in the street. I know the village she comes from."

Like cat's whiskers, his sensibilities were alerted. How he would have liked to have shed his kingship and taken her with a quick thrust instead of with this lopsided seduction. But his compulsion to kingship was equal to, if not stronger than his need to copulate. He leaned forward and licked his lips with calculation. "And you sympathize with her?"

"She was an honest woman in her own home."

"Yes, and we are great corrupters here in Jerusalem. In her own home she was honest, homely, and miserable."

"Now she is dishonest, homely, and miserable."

"All of life is suffering. It is better to suffer in love than in loneliness."

Tamar was shocked. "You cannot approve of what she's done. The woman has become a whore."

"I disapprove strongly as a king, but as soon as I held the light to her face I sympathized and said to myself, actually she is lucky."
 

Tamar did not cope with moral issues in this way. She was not sentimental about human frailty. "Your family always took such things lightly," she hissed. Of course, she immediately regretted her impudence, but Solomon was restrained because it was a political requirement to organize his command over confusion, whether of family or state. It was a king's duty to listen to gossip, particularly where the king's mother alienated the people. Concubines formed a not insubstantial network of spies and reporters, and side by side in any bed he lay down in, Edomite or Hittite, Hebrew or Perizzite, king and man lay together, ear and organ, one playing, the other listening.

"Yes," he said, "we do a great deal of whoring, we kings. It's one of the rewards of the office." He took Tamar by her wrist and easily lifted her up, registering her lissomeness. "Come here," he said, "sit on my lap." But his tone was ambiguous. The request, if amorous, was also edgy. Tamar decided to ignore what she could not fathom. She said matter-of-factly, "The matter of Ohalah and Haggith is not settled."

"Indeed, you settle it."

"I?"

"Yes, you.  Sit on my lap and settle it."

She searched his face for trickery. It was steadfastly blank. She took heart. "Send Ohalah home. She is out of place here."

"And the child?"

"It is only one word against the other, as matters stand."

"As usual," Solomon said.

"Only God knows who the mother is."

"True," Solomon said and put his hand on her head with affection. She felt precarious on his lap and sat gingerly. He stroked her hair in a fatherly fashion. "There is an ancient tale," he said, "I've heard men from the East tell it. One day two women came before the emperor and both declared that they were the mother of the same child. Said one that during the night after they had given birth, the other rose up and took her live child from her and put her child, born dead, next to her. 'A remarkable feat, ' the emperor said. He asked for a sword and threatened to cut the child in half. 'It is the only way to render justice,' the emperor said."

"Do you believe this?" Tamar asked.

"Such was the wisdom of the emperor, which is why we advise," he whispered low in her ear, "that we pursue love and not justice."

She blushed, but maintained her point. "It seems that only God and the thief can know who the true mother is."

"True," he repeated, "but it is honest men who must decide, and we must decide without God's help."

"In that case, we must give the child to the most deserving."

Solomon closed his eyes, tired lids over tired eyeballs. The peacock pecked its way over the lions' skins. Solomon smiled. "I shall not ask you whom you think is the most deserving." He pressed her toward him and whispered again in her ear, "What is there in this world more true, or what loyalty more fierce than the blood between mother and child?"

Tamar understood a political innuendo when she heard one, testing her for Bathseba's acceptability. She moved to get off his lap, but he held her and watched her through drowsing eyes. "Speak freely," he said. "You are the indigenous Hebrew. Tell your king what is on your mind."

She grimaced at the word, king. The expression on her face was not lost on him. He watched her through voluptuous, vigilant eyes, finally letting go of her wrist. "I am disappointed," he said, standing up. "I expected Tamar to be frank and courageous."

"To what end?"

"Because Tamar loves virtue. Tamar resists corruption. You cannot corrupt her even if you corrupt her. Spread her out on a lion's skin and she becomes mist in your hands. She prefers virtue to seduction by a king, but she prefers life to honesty." He rolled disappointed eyes at her.

Tamar thought out her answer and smiled precociously. "You have mistaken my virtues. I am not a lamb for your temple."

Solomon held the reins to his emotions. He even spoke with a humble voice. "It appears to be my fate to leave your room unsatisfied. I hope Tamar will not go crying in the night when other animals prowl outside her door."

The emotional life of kings is very unsteady. Sometimes they are given great latitude for emotional expression and can order decapitation for an unlucky messenger without a fidget of conscience, but they must never complain of lassitude or languor. They may be extravagant, luxurious, uxorious, and vengeful, lustful, boastful, wise, and cruel, but they may not be lethargic, indifferent, worn out, or shy, polite meek, pleasant, or placid. Kings dwell in the extremes of emotional states, bearing the burdens of race and history, time and dynasty, being three-fourths symbol and one-fourth man. Thus, Solomon's mood as he left Tamar's room, was one of outrage. Of the traits permitted to kings, he was extravagant, luxurious, uxorious, vengeful, lustful, wise, and cruel, and he felt all these towards her at the moment. He wanted to dress her in peacock feathers, make a crown of pigeons for her hair, and destroy her. He could not possess her and he could not let her go. Ambivalence is dangerous for kings. He decided to destroy her.

His mood the next morning was unkingly, nasty and unkempt. He felt, in a very pedestrian way, as if he had slept in the bottom of a pit. Like other mortals, all day he had the restless feeling that he had forgotten something, that he had left part of himself somewhere else or something unfinished. But unlike other mortals, he had a cure for the sensation: he went down to the site of the temple and the new palace he was building for himself. A worker who was loafing put him in a state of fury. Feelings of
urgency rose in him, fears that he might not see the building completed or live to occupy it. The knowledge that it could all be erased with an earthquake gave him shudders. In short, he stood in front of his palace with the vanity of kings and said: "My handiwork." It  dispelled a little the gloom of the amorphousness of life and the thought of how meaningless mere
personality was, even his, if crushed out of history.

After lunch he went to the throne room to judge the matter between Ohalah and Haggith. Bathseba was there, and anyone else who had an interest in the subject, like Tamar, whom he spotted hiding behind a palm plant. Traders were in the room. One had brought a rare curiosity from Africa, an albino monkey. It sat on the trader's shoulder and stared around the room
with frightened, pink eyes. Solomon stopped to pat it. The monkey flicked out its tongue. "A rare animal," the trader said.

"And yet after all a monkey," Solomon said.

"True," the trader said,"but not another like it."

Solomon looked into the monkey's eyes. "Are you then so alone?" he asked.

Shisha sat on a stool, indolently fanning herself with a palm leaf. Parrots shrieked. Solomon clapped his hands for order. The traders retired, bowing deferentially to higher matters. Ohalah and Haggith were brought in. Ohalah's face was more bloated than the day before. Her upper lip was swollen and twisted to a side, one of her eyes was closed, its lashes matted
with mucous. Solomon called her by name, but she had to be prodded by a soldier to respond. Haggith's eyes snapped at her. "She is pretending to be sick to gain your sympathy. Do not be taken in by her act."

There was a flash of anger in Ohalah's eyes, but it subsided immediately. Solomon waved them both down. "Are you the mother?" he asked Haggith.

"Indeed," she said.

Ohalah moaned.

"Can that woman answer?" Solomon asked. A soldier prodded her again. She started to cry and wiped her swollen face with a dirty hand, feeling herself a stranger and the lack of sympathy in the audience.

"Do you persist in the same answer?" Solomon asked. There was an incoherent murmur. She nodded her head. There was a humming about her, which she tried to brazen out. Solomon caught Tamar's eyes watching him. Judge if you can, it said. Now, how can I? he responded silently.  He lingered, waiting too for sympathy and considered the matter, unaware that of his many
decisions this one would give him fame for three thousand years. That might have been either a jovial or a perplexing thought to him, depending upon how he wanted to strike the future. At the moment he dramatically called for the baby and a sword to be brought in. "Blood calls to blood," he said. "We will do what is just. Since you both claim the child, we will divide it in half
and give half to each of you."

He grabbed the infant by an ankle with his oriental intelligence and swung it in the air. It rolled open two distressed eyes and began to cry. Haggith howled and almost ran at Solomon. "Do not disturb the child," she shrieked.

Solomon lowered the sword. "Are you then the mother?" he asked. For answer, she tore the baby out of his hands.

The spectators looked at Ohalah with contempt. "Dung," they said, "send her back. Let her breed maggots and flies in the hills where she comes from."

Ohalah was led from the room as she was brought in, swinging like a dead branch between two soldiers, her swollen eyes matted with mucous.

Tamar caught Solomon's eyes. The expression on her face said, "Trickery." He felt abused and, worse, put into a mean humor to be judged by an unprepossessing concubine who didn't have enough sense to desire him and merge her future with his. No one could have judged better, his expression responded to hers. It was a barren truth, and he  assessed it as such.

She approached his throne in view of everyone, her body weaving towards him like a stalk in the wind. She knelt supinely and said, "Is this Solomon's famous wisdom?" Her nearness pierced him with the odor of open fields and unanxious summers, with brown eyes and brown arms moving smoothly, luxuriously secure. Her breathing flesh held the acceptance he
wanted.

His eyes narrowed to slits that said, "Just about, and you better hang on to what there is." The traders moved back through the room and crowded the throne. Solomon tried to keep track of Tamar in the crowd, for all kinds of reasons, but she  disappeared.
 
 

He knew he shouldn't sleep alone that night. He usually did avoid that,  but he also knew he would not go to Tamar, and he had no desire to go to Shisha or to anyone else for specious satisfaction. Thus, he was caught by his nightmare that night, with nothing to distract him. In his dream he held the baby by its skull in one hand and a sword in the other. Two women flanked the entrance to the throne room. One was called Jachin, the other Boaz, one was called Establish, the other Power. Yes, yes, yes, Solomon said, but how? The women wept. They went weak in the knees. They pleaded with him for the child. Yes, yes, yes, but which one of you? he said. You, you must find the answer, they cried. He held up the sword. The baby shrieked. He struggled to save it, and fell back into darkness, clutching its head.

He rose from his bed and paced his room. The night was dark. The moon was out, but clouds sailed over it. He went down to the harem. He paused at Tamar's room, but did not go in. He went to the Hittite's room. "Are you awake?" he said.

"Always," she said.

He sat down on her bed. "Part your thighs, Shisha," he said, "and take me home." Shisha stretched out, but Solomon did not stay. Shisha was surprised, but not disappointed. To be that close to the nerve center of power was anyhow a sexy feeling.

Solomon moved out of her room like a cat. The wind was blowing. He wrapped his robe around himself and took the path to the temple. In the distance an ape bellowed and a drunken soldier laughed. Otherwise Jerusalem was quiet this night. The moon sailed out and lit up the city. Over the wall, up the hillside, the sheep stood in the darkness with their sad patience. He mounted the steps to the temple courtyard. The moon cleared of clouds and lit up the pillars of Jachin and Boaz. He felt relief at the
sight of their bronze corporeality. She is wrong and I am right, he said to himself about Tamar. Time is dust. A kingdom without monuments can be blown away. But a terrible rushing wind blew through him. It froze him with a sense of failure. He could not penetrate the feeling that he had failed, but how?

God whispered in his ear: This house cannot contain me. It is vanity in my eyes.

He recognized the voice. It was as familiar to him as the buzz of anxiety inside his brain.

You have aged, God said. The last time we spoke together you were young. Come, God, you said to me, let me solve the problem of good and evil. How have you solved it? I have seen you in the night with your arms around Ashtoreth. I am the Lord, thy God, Solomon, that God which brought you out of the house of bondage. You have made bondsmen of my people, you have wasted my mission and squandered your inheritance. Now I shall rend the kingdom from you, and the people of Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people.

Solomon fell on his knees. His ambition and pride bled on the temple steps. Still, a stubborn feeling that he was right lingered on. He swept the ground with his hands as if he were making a clearing in the sand. Lord, he said, life is darkness. Only things reflect light. Spirit is ineffable, flesh rots. How can man enter into the spirit of destiny? What protection is there against time? What wall can be built to hold out emptiness? We bleed the people for empire and make meaning out of monuments and our monuments destroy us. Nothing mortal can be just. Ours is the darkness, Yours the  glory.

Crafty Solomon. God considered his answer, but God was craftier. He said to Solomon: "I too judge and look for justice. If I did not, I would be less than man. But despair not, between me and thee the spirit of destiny flows back and forth.

The consolation was as hard as a rock. The future in all its devious invisibility attacked Solomon. A corrosive sense of failure that cut to the heart of his historical mission took hold of him: The terrible thought that his policies had been wrong. But how  judge the conduits of history.

Even Hitler, years later, was attacked by a doubt that God had in mind a destiny of survival for the Jews that didn't coincide with his plans. And Solomon had no such deadly ambitions as Hitler. Solomon had had in mind only empire-building which, on a clear and lovely morning when the temple gleamed white and the sun blinked off its columns, seemed right, but at other times,
as on a night filled with hatred and desire for Tamar, he knew to be political cruelty.

The moon was bitterly bright. It filled the courtyard with armfuls of light, but Solomon lay crushed on the temple steps, besieged with visions of God's judgment, the earthly failure, the failure of the grand gesture, the failure of magnificence, the failure of power, of personality, of willpower, of kingship, of empire, of intelligence, failure, failure, and failure.

He lay crushed beneath The Eternal, while his form cast its shadow over history for three thousand years. Beyond the temple he had built for God and the wall of the city was wilderness and sheep crying in the night.
 

Abraham and Isaac

How dreadful is this suffering, Abraham thought. He said this to himself not for pity's sake, but to clarify the obstacles to his will power, for his suffering was a contender whose strength awed him. Isaac, it breathed in the dark, Isaac, my son.

The preparations for the journey were finished. The servants had collected the provisions and had put them near the door to the tent. Sheep had been milked after sundown, and the milk was stored in water bottles and buried in the cool sand. It was expected that the day would be hot. Reports had already come in that many of the outlying streams and wells were dry. They could not depend upon finding water until they reached higher ground. It behooved them to leave early and to travel fast.

Abraham woke with a start, thinking he heard a footfall outside the tent, animal or man disarraying the provisions. He rose from his mat and went to the doorway where he felt with his hands the tidily wrapped bundles. Everything was in place, but he was no longer tired. He opened the flap to the tent and looked out. There was a vein of light across the horizon, but except for that everything was dark. Dawn was only a suggestion.

In the distance beyond the tents he heard the muffled movement of the flock. They were restless to find grass, for everything was drying. A lamb bleat complainfully. Its voice barely had volume, sounding surpriseful, sustaining itself with mournful fragility on a note of terror. Its mother moved in closely. There was a scuffling of sounds, then the young cry rose again, harsh with fear. The lamb was hungry and the comfort of its mother was useless. Abraham heard her own offended cry.

He peered out toward the flock. Their fretfulness was contagious. He felt it himself, an irritable apprehension. The herd moved like a wave and its cries were carried off to his distant right. There was silence then and in the silence he heard his own cry, the creaking of an old and straining will power. When he turned back into his tent to get ready, his teeth were chattering.

The dew was still heavy as they mounted their asses. No one was in favor of the journey. The herdsmen grumbled that it would delay the flocks for seven days, and Sarah bristled because Abraham insisted that Isaac go too.

"God will protect," he mumbled stiffly.  Sarah threw up her hands.

As they mounted their asses she looked at him with entreaty, annoyance, and worry. She stood in the tent way, the morning air blowing her grey hair in a frowzy circle, and eyed him with the settled irritation of a wife married half a century to a stubborn man. He would not look back at her. But as the asses started to move, he felt her eyes linger on him and on Isaac. In the final half second Abraham wavered on her behalf. He knew when he returned he would be parted from her forever.

Isaac followed promptly, as it behooved him, though he too felt that the journey was impractical in  view of the season, but no judgment passed his lips. He was not of an age to take a critical stand against his father. Next year, he told himself. Already he was allowed to go on such a journey, and for the past year Abraham had been giving him instruction in the details of the camp, for he meant him to be prepared to take command when he died. Isaac was conscious of his position. He rode beside Abraham and chatted about things, about the servants, about a new tent, with an edge of equality in his voice.

Abraham rode in silence.

At first the asses left tracks in the bedewed sand, but soon the sun rose, the sand dried, and the tracks were covered up. The heat was far from its height, but already Abraham felt irritated by it. The glare hurt his eyes, and from time to time there were soft explosions of heatlight against his retina. Isaac heard the low gossip of the servants behind him. Occasionally he heard Eliezer whistle a tune and he joined him. A dune rose up and disappeared. The sand turned white and powdery. The sun climbed high over their right shoulders. For almost half a day Abraham rode without talking. By midday the monotony of the desert was crushing, and Isaac resented Abraham's silence.

When the sun passed overhead, Eliezer drew in his breath, Ishmael coughed, a low grumble. Isaac looked back at them and shrugged his shoulders, but Abraham seemed unaware. "Can we not stop now?" Isaac said. He wiped his forehead with his hand to emphasize his discomfort.

Abraham turned to him as if his presence surprised him. Isaac felt that he had been presumptuous. "I am tired," he said peevishly. Abraham saw that the sun had passed overhead. He was annoyed with himself for his distractedness and stopped his ass abruptly. Isaac turned and smiled to Eliezer and Ishmael.  They smiled back with gratitude.

They sat down in the shadow of the asses and unwrapped the breadloaves, the figcakes, and the cheese. All drank milk that day, to consume it before it soured. When they had finished eating, Abraham motioned that they mount again. Isaac saw that Eliezer and Ishmael were irritated. He looked down at his toes. "The servants are tired," he said in a low voice. Abraham looked at Isaac in perplexity as if he heard a new note in his son's voice, but he nodded agreement that they nap.

Eliezer and Ishmael immediately lay down and covered their heads with their robes. Isaac stood uncertainly and played with the ear of his ass. Abraham watched him. The air was milky, filled with a fine dust that irritated his eyes. His eyes were watery and his gaze was unsteady, but he fixed it on Isaac.

"What concerns you for my servants?" he asked.

Isaac reddened. He shifted his feet and leaned in towards his ass's head. He felt that Abraham should understand that it behooved him to keep favor with the servants when one day he would have to rule them. He looked across the neck of the ass and said, "Ought not the son of Abraham show concern for his father's servants?"

Abraham felt the future brush him with a feeling of  non-existence, a foretaste of ghostliness. He looked away too, at the sun, at the sand, at his knees crossed on the ground. "I am still here," he said.

Isaac pressed his lips. He avoided looking at his father and stroked the sloping nose of the ass. "Chi, chi," he murmured to the animal. He dug his hand into a pouch and brought out a bell, which he tinkled in front of the animal. "Chi," he shouted, trying to arouse him.

Abraham stretched himself out and covered his face with his robe. He felt discomfort with his son because he had violated his discipline. But underneath his robe his suffering leaped to his side and whispered, But thou art Isaac, doomed. Remorsefully Abraham wished he could undo the reprimand, undo himself as father to this child. Falling asleep he heard Isaac screaming at his ass like a mad chieftain. The sounds dunned his sleep like small shocks of life that would not let him shut off the world and rest.

When they took up their journey in the afternoon, the sun was low on their left. The air was swollen with heat, which struck the back of their throats and burned the lids of their eyes. On their right was a dune that stretched for a distance. They bent eastward until the dune was on their left, then in single file they rode along the margin of shadow that it cast. They did not reach the mountains that night, and settled on an oasis that they found by chance. They ate their evening meal in silence, for Abraham's manner made them feel strained. Isaac was disappointed that the trip was dull.

The sun crept down the palm trees and disappeared. With few words to each other, Eliezer and Ishmael lay down and went to sleep. Isaac stayed up. He waited for his father to talk to him, but Abraham only sat cross-legged and stared out to where the sun had incomprehensibly disappeared, swallowing one day with it. "Goodnight," Isaac coughed gently.

Abraham turned around, "Isaac?" he asked.

He went to him and Isaac hoped for words of reconciliation. But Abraham only bent down  and pressed the boy's shoulders, indicating that he should lay down and sleep.

He lay himself down too, but he could not bear that Isaac was unhappy. He thought of his irritability during the day with panic. The situation was more than his emotions could deal with; they grew abnormal all by themselves. Two more days, he thought,  grief-stricken, falling into sleep.

But, again, he woke with a start at an unfamiliar sound. Within seconds he registered its source. Isaac had risen and was stealing towards the edge of the oasis. Abraham watched him. Isaac crept between the palm trees, the moonlight slanted down his legs. The branches moved. The morning breeze blew, though it was still dark.

Abraham had not risen during moonlight for many years, and the thick yellowness startled him with forgotten sensuality. One by one his senses strained to catch it as he watched Isaac, bare legged, make his way to the edge of the oasis. His nostrils dilated with the cold night air. He had forgotten how the earth cools itself, enjoying its chilly body in sumptuous darkness. The breeze blew through his robe. It touched his neck and chest with sensation. The full tide of remembering broke upon him as if the breeze tore aside his aging skin and exposed the youth who had lived in Ur, wrapped in stars and wind. Isaac passed through the edge of the oasis. He walked on to the sand and looked up into the moon, momentously. The world hung in luxury like a jewel waiting for its inheritor. Isaac was immobile, lost in an ancient rapture. Abraham watched him. His body quivered with homesickness for his own youth, and wept for its loss.

"Isaac," he said to himself, and for a moment he thought his body had broken apart.

"Isaac," he groaned.

Eliezer stirred. "He is there," he called out, pointing to the edge of the oasis. Then dumbfoundedly he saw that Abraham saw him perfectly. He grumbled to himself that it was too early to rise, but being up he woke Ishmael.

They started out while it was  dark. Abraham rode first, and Isaac straddled between his father and the servants. Sometimes he hung back to hear their gossip, sometimes he pushed away from them. Half a day they advanced towards the sun. The ground became firmer. The sand did not shift so freely, and the footfalls of the asses could be heard. The animals now left tracks in the sand. They were coming to the end of the desert.

By mid afternoon they passed out from the monotony of the sand into the mountains.

They climbed only for a short time before they camped inside a cave. Eliezer uncorked the wine bottles and passed them around. Abraham sat apart, against the trunk of a tree, and Isaac ate with the servants. Sulkily Isaac regarded Abraham's separateness.

"He was ever thus," Eliezer said, noting the boy's uneasiness.

"Nay. It is because I intervened for you yesterday," Isaac said.

Eliezer shrugged his shoulders as if to say that was an issue for which there was no remedy.

As soon as they had finished eating, Abraham gave the order to continue. Eliezer and Ishmael started forth grudgingly. The asses now had to be led, and the party wound its way in single file. The trail was narrow, often hanging over steep canyons that swung greyly beneath them. The rocks were whitened and chalky. A white powder floated everywhere. They came to a dried
stream where the waterbed was ribbed with cracks and lizards. Eliezer looked at it with troubled eyes, with a shade of dismal and self-righteous confirmation. "Pass it over," Abraham said in a mechanical voice.

Eliezer pursed his lips, and they crossed the stream in silence. Isaac's heart fluttered.

"What ails thee?" Abraham asked him sharply, and Isaac was caught by his incisive perceptiveness.

"I am tired of journeying," he mumbled under his breath.

Abraham's eyes flickered. He was sorry he had spoken harshly. He said in a softer voice, "Eliezer and Ishmael are good servants. They are right that the drought is bad. We will lose many sheep by this delay."

Isaac was embarrassed. But he said, "Then why do you contend with them?"

"Because," Abraham said in a metallic voice, "they do not have my errand to do."

"Could it not have waited until after the removal?" Isaac asked boldly.

Abraham's eyes flickered again. The time is unpropitious he had said himself to God.

Now, God answered.

A month, Abraham had pleaded, stay me a month to move my flocks.

Now.

Isaac saw the shade of a surreptitious struggle pass over Abraham's face. He paused. Then prodded by the intelligence of the thing, he asked again, "Could it not have waited?"

"No," Abraham said with a ring of dismissal.

This night Abraham slept too, overcome with strain. His agony found a partial release in the thought that there was only one day left. They had gone too far now to return, and he felt that the next day might carry him on its own tide. He had only to endure. But the day did not pass that way. They woke facing a malignant sun. Before them stretched the plains, as level and as hot as the desert, where every blade of grass cracked beneath their feet. Abraham felt the skin on his face dry perceptibly. His hair and eyebrows grew stiff. They rode for hours, and there was not the slightest diminution of heat. It blistered the top of his head through his robe. The power of the sun seemed like a betrayal. All day as they rode his heart knocked violently. There was no thought he could bring to bear upon himself that would calm him.

When they came to a stretch of land that was covered with dwarfed trees and dense bushes, he let them nap. He himself lay down on his back. Isaac lay on his stomach close by him, his head on his arms, his legs parted, bent at the knees. Abraham stared at the sky until his eyes watered and burned, then with a groan he sat up. The blue sky stretched illimitably. Underneath,
the ground was dense with life, and next to him the three slept soundly. Only he sat in a hollow of loneliness, his head thrust above the high grass, compacted of agonies that revolved slowly in him like a kaleidoscope, first showing one pattern of pain, then another. He looked at Isaac sleeping next to him and felt unbearable pain.

If Isaac could wake and comfort him! Somebody should, he thought with a bitterness that brought tears to his eyes. He was startled by his weakness. I am indeed old, he thought, and suddenly it seemed to him that he was the victim, doomed to suffer before, to suffer at the deed, and to suffer after. Doomed to weep and weep and weep for Isaac, while Isaac slept and dreamed of tomorrow. Of what? Of his coming leadership, of how he would govern servants and lead the camp. I am still here, Abraham said aloud. He blinked his eyes. But this is Isaac, he thought. What had happened to the remorseless sanctity
that surrounded him? This is Isaac, he said as if the statement could restore the mere boy undressed of complexity. This is Isaac, he gasped to himself, and with a push of all his energies he reclaimed the original idea. "Up! Up!" he shouted at the others.

They rose and looked at him with confusion. Eliezer blinked at the sky. Abraham thought he smiled ironically. He brushed the thought away, breathless at his weakness, and mounted his ass. "Up! Up!" he shouted and started down the trail across the plains before the others were even mounted.

They went through a forest. Abraham could hear Isaac whistling in the distance behind him. He nudged his ass on as fast as the animal could go, and came out of the forest much before the others. The sun was setting, but its descent was blocked out by the mountains in front of him. The top of the mountain in the east was leveled to a rocky plateau from which two craggy
promontories plunged southward, and on top of this plateau, although it was lost to view in the fusion of sunset and night, was a huge outcropping of rock: dense, broad, level, mute, momentous, recipient of the sacrifices of centuries; ancient, absolute stone.

Abraham veered his course easterly, and by nightfall they were at the base of the mountain, in the shadow of the plateau. He saw it above him like a thing he had never seen, before, although he had been staring into it for three days.

Eliezer, Ishmael, and Isaac were in a comfortable mood now that half the journey was over. They ate their evening meal with relish. They drank wine, and Ishmael sang to them. Isaac hummed in the background. Abraham listened to them desperately, for distraction's sake. But soon they went to sleep, Isaac too, still humming to himself, and Abraham was left with the mountain
hovering above them. All night he held Isaac's head in his arm and tried to sleep, but his eyes never closed. He heard Ishmael wake in the morning, then Eliezer and Isaac. They called to him to rise and eat, but he had no appetite. The day had dawned. They ate. He made his preparations.

When they were finished eating, he unloaded the wood from the ass and strapped it to Isaac's back. "Abide here with the asses," he said to Eliezer and Ishmael. "I and the lad will go yonder to worship." He raised his eyes surreptitiously to the plateau above him. Then he put his knife in the girdle of his robe, made a torch, and indicated to Isaac to follow him up the mountain.

But Isaac stopped him. "Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" he said, looking about him. "Here is the wood and the fire and the knife, but where is the lamb?"

Abraham's cheeks were pouchy and grey. His eyes were swollen. "God will provide the lamb for the offering," he said. His voice struck the air like frozen mist. Isaac was bewildered and hesitated. Then he followed his father.

The morning was bright. They took a trail that led between the two promontories, the only trail they could discover. Isaac climbed vigorously. The cool air struck the back of his throat. Abraham walked with his back bent; he kept well ahead of Isaac, and all Isaac could see of him was the smoky trail of his torch. Though Isaac climbed rapidly, he could not catch up with him, and Abraham did not stop to wait for him. Once Isaac turned, and far below saw Eliezer and Ishmael throwing a rock to each other. Then the trail bent, and they were lost to sight, and Isaac was alone in the mountains.

Finally they reached the plateau. Abraham motioned to Isaac to put down the wood. Then he planted his torch in the ground so that his hands would be free. He turned to Isaac, and Isaac waited. Abraham's eyes were puffy, embedded in rings of sunburn. Water floated on his lower rims, and he gazed at Isaac through a mist.

"Are you not well?" Isaac asked with alarm.

Abraham did not respond. He turned and walked to the edge of a thicket and stared into it.

"Are you never to forgive me?" Isaac said under his breath.

Abraham did not hear him. He stood at the edge of the thicket and stared into it. Isaac guessed that he meant to wait for the appearance of a lamb. Irritably he reckoned that if they depended on chance they might wait all day. He sat down on a rock and sulkily picked up some pebbles and played with them. The sun was directly overhead. The flies buzzed in the silence.
Isaac sighed restlessly. The perspiration flowed on his forehead, and the flies buzzed around it. The silence was vast. It seemed to flow from the sun, it penetrated the earth, it swelled with the heat, it spread over the rock and the mountain, it saturated the air, and hung on Isaac's shoulders. He struck at the flies. He looked about him and felt the loneliness of the place. Immensity existed. It was all about him, and he was a contradictory element in it. His loneliness frightened him. He felt that his father should see his discomfort and was bewildered that he did not. He wanted to cry and felt dismally that he was too old for that. The silence crushed him until he felt inessential. He had wanted to come, and now he could not leave. The silence drew its net tighter and, voiceless, told him that he would never forget this day. Some childish pride in being alive passed out of his life
forever. He gave up waiting and dozed.

Then, suddenly, Abraham was before him. He heard his father's voice call him. "Isaac," Abraham called, like all the times he had come to wake him in the morning. But there was something terrible in the voice. There was something terrible in his name, and something terrible in his father saying it as if it was not he who was saying it but some dreadful suffering that said it for him; there was an illimitable sadness in the sound.

Isaac struggled sluggishly against the sound of his name, but a world of dread yawned before him in the dark.  Fearing to be caught in a vision of life that was unendurable, he opened his eyes and was caught.

"Isaac," Abraham said, and his hand was upon his shoulder, the knife was at his throat.

Isaac sprang to his feet. "Where is the lamb?" he squeaked.

"Isaac," Abraham whispered hoarsely.

"Where is the lamb?" Isaac cried out.

"You are the lamb," Abraham screamed.

Isaac blinked his eyes. He took a step backwards and fell against the rock. Abraham saw his terror. "God wills it," he cried.

Isaac's mind dropped into emptiness. His brain shifted round with hysterical haste to make sense of this thing. The pattern of his offense rose, the pattern of himself as an offending being. "God?" he asked. He turned his head and looked at Abraham out of the side of his eyes, shamefaced and confused.

Abraham's heart fluttered. "Isaac," he screamed, as if he were clutching at his dying child. The sweat ran on his face. "I will pay for your death with my own."

But Isaac looked at him blankly, sidewise, uncomprehendingly. He looked at him with uncanny and desperate intelligence.

Abraham put down his arm and trembled. "Art thou Isaac?" he cried.

Isaac sobbed. His chin dropped on his chest. It was unbearable to answer him, unbearable to look at him, unbearable to accept reproach, unjust to be innocent. All he could do was cry. He heard the sound in his ears, full of animal terror.

An afternoon wind stirred the grass near the rock. It passed over him, and his heart stopped. It passed over him again with a terrible sweetness. Cries tore his chest. He opened his eyes, and the blueness of the air broke him with love and terror. "Yes, I am Isaac," he wept.

His voice tore at Abraham. He reeled under the impact of the sound of its youth and innocence. "My God," he screamed, "do not struggle with me," and before Isaac could move he threw him against the rock and held him. With desperation he tore aside the wrapping of throat and sought to plunge his hands on the  child that was covered beneath it. But Isaac screamed and
something eluded him. The wind rustled: "Do not lay thy hand upon the child." Mingled in Isaac's screams, louder than the commotion of their breaths, Abraham heard the rustle in the thicket behind him. He turned to look, and in that moment Isaac threw his father from him and ran into the woods. The ram, frightened by the intruder, ran out into the open. The wide
pale sky stretched with simplicity.

Abraham's legs crumpled willessly like dry leaves in a wind. He fell to his knees. Understanding upon understanding crashed upon his ears. The sky opened forever, beyond and beyond and beyond. Thou art the Lord, he cried, and fell prone upon the ground and wept.

The ram, close by, looked at him curiously. Isaac stayed hidden behind a clump of bushes and stared at his father. His breath was short, and the taste of terror was still in it. His face was red,  his ears rang and burned.

When Abraham recovered himself and stood up, he looked about him, but Isaac did not move.

"Isaac," he called out, "help me prepare the ram."

Isaac hesitated. Abraham heard him breathing in the thicket.

"Isaac," he said softly, but with familiar authority, "help me prepare the ram."

Isaac looked behind him through the thicket, but it was dense and he could discover no trail on that side. The sun was dangerous. Already the grass in the clearing was parched. Behind him the bushes closed in darkness. Isaac hesitated,  then  cautiously crept out.

"Isaac," Abraham called to him again, "come see how the Lord has saved us." He called in such a voice that Isaac felt aged.

Abraham caught the ram with a quivering tenderness and held him in his arms. He brought the ram over for Isaac to look at it. Isaac looked into its small, agitated face and felt a terror for everything that existed. Abraham carried the ram to the rock and swiftly bent over him. Isaac turned his back, and when he heard the last wild squeak, his head fell forward.

When the sacrifice was over, they started down the mountain. The sun was low. Isaac walked behind his father, keeping a measured distance. Once he slipped, and Abraham turned to help him, but Isaac shied a step backward. Abraham looked at him with curiosity. But it was not then that he knew. The sun fell behind the highest peak, and the mountain stood out in blackness. Isaac waited until his father should be well ahead of him again. Abraham descended. Then not hearing Isaac's step, he paused and looked back. Isaac sat on his haunches and watched him. Abraham could not see his face  in the twilight. He peered, but he could not make it out. Isaac faded into the dark of the mountain. Abraham turned and thought he saw his suffering stand up before him again. The dusk gathered together and whispered. Abraham's heart started to knock, as if he had it all to look forward to. He could not see the trail in front of him. He turned again.

"Isaac," he called.

There was no answer for a moment. Then out of the darkness he heard a tremulous, "Yea?"

But Abraham did not know what to say to that. Again he turned and went down, and again he heard Isaac's steps far behind him, and in that measured tread he heard the infinite perplexity of everything that ever was.

It was already dark when Eliezer and Ishmael spotted them on a steep, rocky descent. They had to climb backwards over  the sharp rocks. In the misty distance, as they groped and bent and let themselves down on their hands and knees, they looked like two desperate figures, goats or peasants, suspicious of their footing.

Beruriah

Imposing in height and in manner and in lineage, famous for wisdom, beauty, and chastity, Beruriah had become a legend. It was known and well know that even her decisions had been set down in the Talmud alongside those of the rabbis, and domestic gossip had it that "if the truth were known, Rabbi Meir did not make a decision without consulting her first." She was
seen as the heir to Deborah and Miriam and as a sister spirit to Akiva's wife. "Every day a bat kol, a voice of the daughter, goes forth from Mt. Sinai," the people liked to quote, and whether they mentioned Beruriah's name in connection with this saying or not, everyone knew they meant her.

Of course, Beruriah was plainly human, a wife and a mother with bad and happy memories. Two memories in particular filled her soul: the sight of her father's burnt body and the thoughts of her children as babies. Always she carried with her a ferocious appetite for their safety, for the sight of them, their hands, their legs, their wet bodies in the rain, carried an unappeasable appetite for their welfare and their presence, no matter where she was. Her passion for their survival seemed  fed by her love and passion for the world, and her fears for the world fed her passion for her children.

She lived by co-extensions, not only with them but with everything else that lived. It seemed as if the ocean had infused her veins with salt and spray and dark formed fishes, so that her nerves and intuitions were over-stimulated. She could watch an ant, entranced by its intelligence and piqued by its failures, and her responsiveness was razor sharp, giving back to the world a continuous disappointment or lament. The truth was that study quieted her revolving world. It was the line drawn between order and disorder. It was, along with children, also a spiritual fecundity and a way of victory for a defeated people. Love of country with her was one with love of her own children and love of study, so that if she walked along the road and looked at the harassed landscape she could think, "As long as God gives children," and think it with the resoluteness of a modern woman. The thought for her was personal and social, political and pious, for only those who have experienced death can know how all encompassing is the idea of birth.

"Flowers," she would say if she saw her children standing on a hillside. "Pearls," she would think when they learned their letters. "The Lord bless thee and keep thee," and, in fact, after that there was nothing more that could be said or wrung from the world and its future for their safety. With Bar Kochba's defeat had come the quietus that follows shock.

"We are between the ages," Beruriah had said. "Time will start again when we are healed."

One day while  Rabbi Meir was in the synagogue, the subject of his wife came up for conversation. Since it was difficult to say anything against her, the conversation was in praise of her, and Rabbi Meir was flattered. Beruriah alone, of all the women of her generation, knew Torah.

"Who taught her?" one asked.

"Everything taught her," Rabbi Meir said. "Her father taught her, and I taught her, and she taught herself, and she learned with the children, and she learned from the world." Of course, he also had to defend her intellectual freedom, not because anyone could say anything against it, but because it was unusual. And he would defend it in the way that it was natural for a rabbi to do, with a quotation from Torah. "The prophet has said it shall come to pass that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy."

"But," asked Yitzhaq, a brilliant young scholar, "do you think in woman love of learning is as strong as love of love?"

They disputed the issue in various dimensions: all living matter was infused with the erotic impulse, for how else explain the generations, but all living matter was not likewise infused with the intellectual impulse, for clearly ants did not write books or pronounce laws. Therefore, the erotic impulse, being general and original, was primitive. The intellectual impulse was individualized and could not depend upon communal or racial strengths. It had only its lonely self. It was concluded that the erotic impulse was everywhere stronger than the intellectual impulse, for it had the whole force of the world to draw upon, but as to whether it was stronger or weaker in woman than in man was difficult to say.

Rabbi ben Ezra said that the two impulses were unnaturally yoked in battle, for such a battle could only be an issue for man since it could not be said that the cosmos had an intellectual impulse and, said Rabbi ben Ezra, "The Most High, blessed be His Name, would not choose the frail breast of man as a battlefield for an unnatural struggle." Therefore, he concluded, there was something wrong in the presentation of the argument.

"But where else could the struggle take place?" the scholar Yitzhaq asked.

Rabbi Eliezer said that since woman was made of Adam's rib she was inferior. He pointed out that it was Adam who had named the animals, and not Eve. Intellect originated with man, and while woman could achieve some learning, she was undisciplined and, he said, "Learning without discipline is an unguarded jewel. It is doubtful if woman born of a rib can be as
disciplined as man."

Rabbi Meir argued it this way: Born as she is, of the rib of man, she is of one spirit with him. Thus did the Lord, blessed be His Name forever, show us that woman, taken from the side of man, is of flesh and soul with him and is therefore of equal value with him."

"Yes, but Rabbi," said another," if the Lord, blessed be His Name, had meant to show that woman is equal with man in understanding, He should have created her from Adam's head, as the Greeks say that Athena was born from the head of Zeus."

Rabbi Meir smiled. "Have you not considered what Adam was made from? Who then, Adam or Eve, was made from better substance?"

Still they continued to dispute, for the question touched on many subjects and seemed to go to the limits of understanding: what was the nature of intelligence, did it inhibit the erotic impulse, what was the disposition of a gnat or an ant on this matter, was the proclivity felt in the same way in all living matter?  What was the meaning of "generation" if one counted eight stones on a hillside on one afternoon,  and then found fourteen stones on the hillside the next afternoon?

Rabbi ben Ezra said, "The Most High, blessed be His Name forever, has given us the means of survival. Let us honor Him by husbanding it wisely."

"Amen," said Rabbi Meir, "blessed be the marriage bed and a chaste woman."

"But," said Yitzhaq, "I will wager that a woman's learning will not protect her chastity."

There seemed a personal element in the statement, and Rabbi Meir laughed, "Does it protect yours?"

Yitzhaq slid his eyes away and said, "It is a fact that in man the flesh is never at rest but in a woman, a woman of great learning, can the mind prevail over the body?"

"But where," asked another, "would you find a woman equal to this task?"

The question was a blunder. The answer was fatal. The scholar who asked it bit his tongue. Rabbi Meir saw the danger, yet, like God before the adversary, could not but throw the mantle of his reputation over his beloved. The others fell back and said, "What kind of silliness is this?" And "It is time for dinner. We will continue this foolishness tomorrow."

But Rabbi Meir was caught in a delirium of conviction that he must accept the contest. "Go, go," he said, "go." And when Yitzhaq responded with a glittering eye, the rabbi felt himself privy to a sudden wisdom. "It is yourself you would prove," he said.

Yitzhaq could not answer. He could not explore. He could only wait.

Rabbi ben Ezra cried out in wrath, "I forbid it. Whoever heard in all of Israel for a rabbi to wager his wife."

When he heard this direct declaration of what he was about to do, Rabbi Meir felt drained and lightheaded as if he had already taken the road to tragedy, and dream-like followed one step after another while Yitzhaq's eyes gleamed at him. Rabbi Meir tore himself away from the dream of catastrophe and from the beguilement of those eyes and said haughtily, "You have already
lost the wager. Now go and make a fool of yourself," and he left.

"Was it yes or no?" the scholars whispered.

"No," Rabbi ben Ezra thundered.

"It was yes, " Yitzhaq said.

He was a brilliant man. Everyone said of him that he would soon be a distinguished rabbi, and in the manner of that day of intellectual inheritance, Rabbi Meir regarded him as a spiritual son. He was very learned, but still part boy with slim hips and light brown eyes, possessed of a multitude of inclinations. His hands and ankles were tender, his head was small, but when he appeared in Beruriah's garden the next morning after Rabbi Meir had left for the synagogue, Beruriah had the impression of
greater agedness about him than she remembered. His intensity was troubling and evoked in her sympathy and caution.

"The rabbi has left for the synagogue," she said.

"I did not come to see him," he said simply, and said nothing else.

She could not ask this man, familiar in her household, to go, but she sensed immediately that he ought not to stay. The air became ambiguous, suspenseful, her senses alert. She felt a pressure in her temples and the heaviness of air saturated with flowers and sunlight.

He sat down on a bench, and his head was surrounded by sun, so that she saw his features in new lineaments, the dark, unshaven cheeks, the light eyes, the unsettling and yet intensely rigid composure of his body. She stood under a fig tree, troubled by his response and the emptiness of the house, and picked the fruits carefully, studying each one for particular
virtues.

So they continued this way for a while. Yitzhaq sat in silence while Beruriah picked the figs and waited and thought out her response to an imminent conversation.

The garden was spacious, covered with fig and olive trees and ripe flowers. The air was warm with their odors and sultry with the hum of bees. Beruriah watched Yitzhaq from the side of her eyes. He continued to sit, still and intense, watchful, thoughtful. His silence gave her time to take command of herself. Still she was startled, as if a pin had pricked her, when he suddenly leaned forward, a warm glimmer of saliva on his lip, and said softly, "Good health to thy navel and to the garden of thy body."

She wheeled around and said to him, "Whoever gazes at a woman intently it is as though he lay with her."

He chuckled in his throat and feigned surprise. He cocked his head like a bird about to pick up a seed, and said, "I come to deliver your husband's shawl," and drew it from a package he carried.

She felt her comment had been hasty but that it did not warrant an apology, and she gave none. She thanked him for the shawl and bid him good day, but he did not go. She decided on levity. "Who will pity a snake charmer bitten by a serpent?" she smiled.

He chuckled happily. The sun melted in his eyes and put warm drops on his forehead. He crossed one leg on top of the other and said, "They say you eat learning like a fruit, that you have taken the Torah like a lover."

She laughed snidely. "I have four children, and not by Torah. I have a husband."

He ignored the inference. "You are famous for your learning. They say you speak, and learning sits like drops of pomegranate juice upon your tongue. They say there are seven kinds of fruit for which the land is famous, and that you are the eighth. They say you are a jewel among our people."

She thought for a moment. The language of his seduction was strange. "Like a decoy partridge is the mind of a brilliant man."

Yitzhaq looked offended. He let his eyes droop around the garden. "Not so," he said, "wisdom in woman should be praised, and to a learned woman we sing such hymns of praise. Tell me which is stronger in woman, love of learning or love of love?"

Beruriah put her basket down and looked at him with scorn. "Do you know who I am?" she asked. "May your thigh rot."

His eyes wavered for a second. Then they caressed the trunk of a tree, the sky, the sun, and then her face. He sprang from his seat and was next to her in a step. "Beruriah, your face is a mirror. There is no book like the book of man." No sooner did he touch her than her flesh exploded with urgency. Juices ran down the caverns of her body. The milk rose to her breasts as in former days when she offered it deliriously to her children and pleaded with the world to take her entirely, mind and soul and womb which the Lord, blessed be His Name throughout eternity, had placed in woman for His creation. She moved away, but he held her, and the flood overwhelmed her. The garden burst with the odors of fecundity. She felt his heart pounding and searched his eyes for the look of love. Yitzhaq uncovered her thigh and laid his loin beside her.

Rabbi Meir was attacked with diseases after the event, and aged. Yitzhaq disappeared from Sepphoris. There were endless rumors about these events that followed one another in sequence. Beruriah was found hanging from a tree outside her garden. All of Sepphoris quarreled about where to bury her, but in the end she was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, and Rabbi Eliezer
and Rabbi ben Ezra and the other scholars of the synagogue were changed, and became inscrutable and cautious and refused to say anything about Beruriah. No one would say why she had taken her life, and in the confusing mystery, in their fury and disappointment, the people began to say that it was her learning that had driven her to it, and what they once had prized in her
they now scorned. Little by little her wondrous reputation sank likewise into an unmarked grave.

Yitzhaq, the most promising scholar of them all, disappeared, and Rabbi Meir aged visibly each day so that by the end of the first year of mourning, he had become an old man. Sometimes, in his bitterness, he said to himself that Rabbi Hanina ben Teradjon's martyrdom had been repaid by a whore. At other times he sat in the garden at night and called out his wife's name to the stars. Though her grave was unmarked, he knew where it was , and as the first year of mourning drew to an end, he more and more made his way there at night, wrapped in his prayer shawl. Like the spider circling its nest, he would circle her grave with grief and amazement and call her name as if he expected her to emerge at the sound of his voice, as she used to come to the doorway of their house. Her death came to seem brutally moral to him, her self-destruction a form of self judgment beyond the reach of other mortals, a victory over Yitzhaq. Her suicide grew in his mind until it seemed an act of redemption, and he became intensely anxious because the rest of the world did not see it in the same way. His mind became a clutter of reactions. Under a Judean moon he told his thoughts to God, and in confusion over how unstable the mind is, at one and the same time asked for forgiveness for such thoughts and pronounced them unyielding.

One day someone brought him news of Yitzhaq, that he had been seen in Tyre, fleshless, with the look of the living dead, of one cut loose from his moorings, the shifty demeanor of one who had wasted his talents. The centers of his eyes were dead. Rabbi Meir wrapped himself in his prayer shawl and went out to the tree from which his wife had hung herself and said to the
night, "There is neither victory nor defeat for man. There is only being."

Epiphany

Lena tried to think of St. Rupert in pain. Nothing came to mind, and how could it, she thought, pulling the grey sweater tighter about her body against the cold of the leather seats and the mud soaked snow the wheels kicked up against her window. What should he know of pain? Diseases, worms, purple growths might settle on his body, and he would sing out glorias and pluck his own wart between his fingers, an arthritic, dying, smelling wrist with the earth mound already upon it, that could twist a doctor's hand. To the very last minute he would die eating or toilet-making, Antonia helping him, staggering under his weight, his pretense that he needed help, he who could twist a doctor's hand. But he would not die just then. He would wait
to flush the toilet and sing out glorias.

Heaven will punish, Lena thought, uncurling her fisted fingers. Had not the Father told her so? She had had his promise now for many years, on an afternoon when St. Rupert had come in from the fields, past sixty, past his manhood, she had thought, drunk on the wine of the grass and the air, fat off his own living, and the dinner smelled good steaming from the pots, the ironcast covers jiggling up and down. He had sat in the  armchair he kept at the kitchen table and cut large lumps of bread with the knife he had brought from the old world. He crossed his legs in his brown trousers. Go up, he had said, the crumbs spilling between his teeth. She had raised the flame under the pots and had measured the strength of his fists that would beat her for denying him. No, she said, it will never be again. He put the bread down and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Then he burst out laughing. "All right," he said, "I will never touch you again." Then he shrugged his shoulders and left.

That evening dinner steamed and hummed. The youngest, Angelo and Maria, were bathed, powdered, and dressed for sleep. They smelled good, and their smells mingled with his laughing, with the shaggy, hairy debauchery he brought back from his naked women. Against this, Antonia, a maid, sat in a corner crying and crossing herself. Watch the children, Lena had said, and
went to the Father. There in familiar despair, crouching on the church floor, she permitted anger to bloom, to grow so that the Father could see not one night or one act but St. Rupert coming in through the doorway fat with his living, eating black corruption with his bread. The Father, in his clean black robes, knelt and made the sign of the cross over her twitching back. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord, he said. The words burst in Lena's ears with conviction, and she lived with Rupert for five years more until his very sickness drove the naked women of the town from him, and everywhere she gathered the looks of compassion from the faces around her like roses plucked from a bush.

He in hell, she thought, but nothing came to mind again. She looked through the snow-starred window, at the white farm fields crossed and stitched with ice and mud. The Burning Lake and the Father's rack. Rupert would be shut out from heaven forever. No, she closed her eyes, that must not be. She would plead for him. Because he was her husband, a father, a son. Because we must all beg for mercy for others. For yourself, he would say, plead Lena, plead God be merciful and drop the scales from your eyes, plead, plead for your life, plead in your fiftieth year, he would find strength to raise himself and twist the chain on her neck, plead in your stinking mass of breasts and belly that have grown fat robbing me of pleasure, plead in your black hair, coarse and grey robbing me of beauty, plead Lena that God be merciful and drop the scales. She would put her hand across his mouth to stop his tongue, and his eyes would say it. But against this she would plead for him because he was her husband; she would cry, beg. She would offer herself in his place and be mortified in eternal damnation, not for her sins, but for his. She would undertake it. Her fingers tightened and rolled into fists in her lap. He would dismiss priests, doctors. He
would wait for her, dead already, except to wait, to see if she would offer. He would demand this last sacrifice from her, and she would give it. Her head rolled back on the pillow. The train was carried along through the dark woods, across the poor villages and half-aspiring towns. It left its tracks in the white fields where the children played, whose faces flashed past her
window with the same look of pain her own children had had. Look, they cried up at her. What is this? Lena is coming.

She opened her eyes. The village of Rosedown, home, St. Rupert for a husband and Antonia for a maid, six children for a lifetime, fifty thousand cups of coffee and eighty thousand glasses of cognac at night for a marriage, linen, silver, crystal, and carpeting, and five hundred head of cattle for his ambition, home and he dying in the midst of his making and his eating, and she for his wife. It all flew past the window and sent up a fresh spray of mud out of the sparkling wheels. The train came to a halt in
the station.

Antonia was there in the brown room, carrying her letter in her gloved hands, following the instructions line by line, item by item. A hired taxi, the luggage, tips, hot tea that was not in the letter but is the tiny deviation by which a lifetime maid states her claim as one of the family. Lena looked into her face to know at once whether Rupert still lived. Antonia snapped open the lock to her pocketbook and neatly folded the letter away. Come, Lena ordered, and over the smoking cups of tea and the moist
jelly rolls, Lena raised her veil and looked again. Then she settled back, undid the ragged fur collar from her coat, and drank her tea leisurely.

He is sick, Antonia said, her head rolling loosely from side to side on her neck. She spoke of his sickness minutely, medically, of kidneys, liver, thrombosis, obscure terms, obscure organs. He leaves no debts, of course not. She spoke of lawyers, accountants, more cows he had bought, and the farm he had bought next door for the more cows, and men she had never seen
from banks in New York. They had come, listened to him carefully, sitting with crossed legs in grave suits and serious ties, had drunk his wine, and he had drunk too, and they had spoken of him honorably. Lena drank her tea, adding more lemon. Then Antonia ventured, lowering her voice, he will not get well, I fear he will not get well. Lena looked up. No, he will not get
well, Antonia, she said. And then, because Antonia was looking at the white tablecloth as she spoke and had not yet drunk her tea, Lena looked at her more fully. Antonia raised her eyes, her lashes fluttered  like dark wigs, and then lowered to the tablecloth again. He is very rich, she said.

Lena lowered her veil. Come, she said, the taximan waits. She would not reproach Antonia who had almost always been good. But such a thought! Brushing up against such a thought after thirty years of such a marriage! That was to run from his madness straight into the heart of it. No, Antonia was still, after so many years, Antonia was still a maid. Lena smiled to herself against the cold leather of the car, smiled to think of his prosperity hung from her neck like the jewels he had tried to buy her. She
who had passed the point of feeling in her hatred of his widow-driving, orphan-making, land-collecting thievery, his cutting huge lumps of bread with his knife like cutting wheat with a sickle. Ah, she sat up straight in her seat, that would be his vengeance. It was most probably that it would work thus, that he would leave her everything, his curse written out legally and deposited for safety in a lawyer's vault. He would seek to propagate himself in her heart, clinging like an incubus to live in her eyes as she
looked in store windows, shopped and bought. Desire would incarnate him, and he would come in through the door of his house in his heavy brown shoes glowing and singing from his deep throat.

But it would not be so. She smoothed out her tense fingers. Choice was always with her and she might undo the chain from her throat as she had undone the jewels. There was much good that might be done with wealth, much good it would surprise it to do, many reinstatements, reimbursements, old friends to be rewon who had in anger and tradition mistaken husband and wife
as a union and foresworn the one with the other. Yes, she turned to Antonia as the car went up the gravel driveway through a light, unhurried snowfall, he is rich she said, alarming the good Antonia with her smile. The white wings of the wooden framehouse soared out like an eagle in the glare of the headlights. Lena clasped her fur collar around her neck and left the car. There was a light in the front hallway shining through the curtains, through the glass in the door, bending its light upon her like an
eye. It would be like Rupert, she thought, dying, struggling with death, to crawl from the bed to the window at the sound of the car on the driveway to watch for her. Knowing she was coming, having been prepared two weeks ago by Antonia, he was waiting to accept the rightful legacy of death that his beloved wife be with him in his last moments.

Antonia opened the door. The taximan helped with the luggage, took his money, tipped his cap, coats were shaken free of the snow and hung away, and Lena stood in the foyer, looking up the staircase that led to the upper rooms. Eat first, Antonia said, hesitantly taking the unaccustomed right of command. Come, Signora, I have some things prepared.

Antonia displayed her sandwiches: fish and cold chicken in the linoleum-tiled kitchen, but Lena barely touched the food; fish, chicken, and clean tile had nothing to do with her; yet Christ, in despair of his God, had asked for water. She wiped her lips and pushed away the barely-touched plate, the disappointment of Antonia and her occasion. Lena patted her hand. You are a good friend, she said, and went upstairs.

The hallway was dark. Her footsteps were dark falling on the soft carpeting. She listened at the bedroom door and could hear the breath she had lain beside as a bride when a flood of dark hair had spilt out on the case. That breath had been full of grass and sun, inundating her and had blown, fanning, full of wine and cigarettes and harsh laughter, on the light of her contempt. Now, here it was, through a thick door, dry, wracked with wheezing, yet dripping away at the corners into a smile. She went in
quietly and sat by his bedside for many minutes, watching the air flow in and out of his nostrils as he slept.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. She bent her head and prayed, fervently against the anticipation of his reproof. But he allowed her. As the minutes of praying passed she became aware of his allowance, of an  acknowledged permission that curved across the room like a new atmosphere, an arc of enigmatic charity. Now, she thought, now, as it must be, death has
retrieved his evil and has flown through the window with it. Joy should be her portion. Now, after forty years, of nights of lonely birth-giving with such an ancient claim to a husband, after his breath and his bread, what? He has seen the light, death has opened his eyes, the dark angel with the scaly wings has fanned them open, and joy should be her portion. She looked down
at her hands, uncurled her fingers one by one and found them empty. Prayer came to an end, dwindling away like the tail of an animal. She examined the room, the poorly ironed curtains, the sick's bedpan, the drugs on the night table, his arm resting on the pillow and behind it the papers, the documents slipping from behind the pillow, kept always near him in his old world
defiance of modern banks which would not let a man keep his worth about himself where it belonged, lying there under his head and declaring in strict terms his future wishes, his dispensations, an estimate of his being. She felt his eyes upon her eyes and thought that now if she looked down and saw in those eyes an alien kindness, the sickly white softness that death
brings, she must leave the room before he takes the papers and shakes them in her face and tells her in his death-cracked voice that it was for her, it was always for her, because of her.

He moved, and his eyes caught a glint from the lamp on the night table. He patted the pillow behind his head and smiled, the blue-brown-flecked eyes glinting at her. She bowed her head again and prayed.

"The devil wears wings on his shoulders," he said. She crossed herself and lowered her head still further. "Yes, yes," he laughed, "and the angel grows horns upon her head."

"There is nothing to say," Lena said. "Let us not talk now, after so many years." She inclined her head towards him with a gesture of affection and tucked the blanket under his chin. "You are dying, St. Rupert. Do not take refuge in abuse."

"If you will sit here, you praying over me," he pushed the blanket from him, "what is left to me?"

"You knew I was coming," she said, looking down at her hands and laying the flat of one palm against the flat of the other.

"How could I stop you?" he sat up with a start.

"You must not exert yourself," she cried, her hands fluttering down upon him, the blankets, the upset pillows, to set everything to rights.

"Sanctos mios," he cried out, "what a stench of faith. You have come to keep me from dying."

"Your soul, yes," she said, and placed her fingers evenly together, palm to palm, tip to tip.

"My soul!" He pushed himself up further against the headboard. "I will not let you," he said. "I will pray against you. I do not want to be saved. I do not want your piety." He waved his hand frantically and the ends of his fingers caught the night table. It tipped slightly. He raised himself on his elbows and between his spasms of coughing looked at her with his light brown
eyes. "I do not want to be saved," he said coughing heavily. "Come, death, come, death, quick, before Lena cheats me of it." She piled the blankets back around his body from where they had slipped. She opened the windows a trifle to bring in  fresh air and drive out the odors of medicinal help and the yellow air of dying. She helped him back on to the pillow. He coughed
deeply, the sounds rolled through his body. Her lips were drawn  as she waited for him to finish coughing. A fresh spasm, a flush of red brought on by his exertions, and his eyes swam with tears as he struggled to catch his breath.

"Do not speak," she warned him.

"I must." He sank back on the pillows and appeared more peaceful. "Now, above all else, I must, for I have had a revelation. Yes, Lena," he looked at her and smiled through his dried lips as she bent towards him with interest. "I have had a revelation. Religion, God, salvation," he sighed as she settled him against the pillows. "I believe in it all now, I believe in you, Lena," he laughed. "I have a deep faith in you."

She gave him an old, hard look and stooped under the bed to pick up the fallen bottles. She straightened out the night table, fixed the doily, the paper cup, arranged the bottles, and lowered the light shade. "But one good turn deserves another," he said.

"Do not talk, Rupert," she cautioned, bending over him, whispering low and beneficially.

He waved his hand at her. "One good turn deserves another, Lena. So you have come to save my soul," he laughed. She sat down in the chair next to the bed and bore with him. "I am mad and you right, Lena," he rasped. "I am evil and you are good, but still I will save your soul. I have ever had you in mind." He drew out the papers from behind the pillow.

"You are profane, Rupert," she said.

"That is true," he answered. "Nevertheless, I will still save your soul. I will die soon. Maybe in an hour, maybe in a day," he shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe now with you watching so carefully to keep it from happening it will happen. It does not matter. Death must come in spite of you. Yes, I will do you a service." He slipped the papers back behind the pillow. "I know that even if I die now, right as you stare at me and you are left alone, no one, not Antonia to know, no doctors, no priests, only me and you and me dead, you will not look at the papers. You will not look because there," he pointed at the far wall, "there is a mirror that will catch your actions, stooping over a dead body and pushing it aside like a rag to pilfer a helpless corpse. It will catch you when you put the papers together again and smile, straighten your back and turn to go. And then walking the small
space between here and the door you must pass the mirror, maybe stop to look in and fix your hair. Then you will not see Lena with her arm raised fixing a grey curl, you will see a furry animal with the spit hanging loose from its mouth bending over a corpse, and you will know what I know. No," he smiled tranquilly, "all this you will not do because you must pass the
mirror, and I have gotten this small piece of wisdom for my pains of evil."

Lena sat quietly, her lips drawn to a hard, wrinkled nut. Sometimes at the end of thirty years of hatred dying dismisses hatred. Had it not always been so, that dying released the soul, released the torment of having to live, of having daily to eat, to wash clothes, to go to town for purchases, to make love and to give birth, and to hate. Now, he was dying. She had come
against all his malignancy to comfort him, and at the end of his forty years of hatred it was all gathered together. Her chest rose and fell heavily with her breathing. She prayed silently under her breath. By stealth, she thought, she had had to pray, by stealth she had had to believe.

"Now," he was still talking, "now I will tell you how I will save your soul. When I am dead," he waved his hand, "lawyers will come and they will read a will, and then you will know. There will be no escape. I will build mansions for you, palaces of gold."

Her lips curled in derision despite her desire to bring him peace. "Your feet were always in clay, Rupert," she said. Her chest fluttered at his easy payment for her tortures. A harlot's wages defines her station, and this was Rupert's measurement, his bag of gold flung at her. "No more," she said, feeling the antagonism rise in her at his cheap perusal of her being.

"Yes, he laughed, "there will be couches of velvet where you can sink down as on a wave," and he waved his hand with a motion of voluptuous fluidity, "roads paved with pearls and you will walk over them and stoop," he raised himself up on his elbows, "and weep that you cannot pluck them from the pavement."

"No," she cried, her hands clasped together. "There is much that can be done with wealth. Evil, evil," she jumped from her chair. "Evil," she shouted again, "as always," and spit at him in her anger.

"So?" he leaned back again on his pillow, "I did not know you could."

She grabbed the corner of the quilt to wipe his face. "Peace, Rupert," she cried for the sake of God and your dying."

He pushed her arm away. "Let it be. I do not want you to wipe my face. Do you hear?" He raised his voice. "I do not want you to wipe my face." He sank down in the bed again. "Let it be," he said, "I wish to die with this mark here."

He lapsed into silence and there was no more speech. She sat all night. The spit remained on his cheek and he set his open eyes upon her as if to protect it. Soon death stared from them, blinking rhythmically with the incorruptible life reflex. Almost his breathing was gone and still his eyes blinked, the smallest, incontrovertible movement of the still living. The snow stopped falling and the skies,  resisting the pressure of night, turned a dull opaque grey. His eyes became heavy, sluggish, only a rim of brown
pierced the lower lashes, sinking and rising, and sinking. Lena moved in her chair and looked at him. She caught at his hand. "Stay, Rupert," she cried. His eyes shut and he was dead. "No, no," and there was no more. She bent her head and prayed for his soul. The words escaped her tight lips in whispers of passionate pain. There was no wild cry. In the dark room the words were muted despair. She kept her head bent and did not look up until the inert sky rolled away like a heavy cloud and a lighter transparency covered the sky. Antonia cautiously gave two small knocks on the door.

Lena raised her head warily. Several seconds later she understood that it was a knock that she had heard. She covered Rupert's face and went to the door. Almost within grasp of the knob, her elbow was already partially unbent, she stopped.

"Antonia?" she called out.

"Yes, yes, it is me."

"A minute. A minute, please," and she looked about the room trying to remember. A sense that something was amiss fluttered in the familiarity of the bed, the night table, the linen chest that she herself had bought. She looked back towards the bed. Yes, surely, St. Rupert had never lain so bereft of life. Nevertheless, she went back to the bed and uncovered his face. His eyes were open. Deceit as always. There, with the hand of death upon his throat when all that had been left of life was a thin arc of
brown-blue floating upon the lower lashes he had heard her call and had opened his eyes to catch for the last time her bowed head. Lena pulled shut the lids that were rolled toward heaven. Impatient Antonia, a little less cautiously, knocked again.

"A minute, please, Antonia." Lena wiped his cheek with the corner of the quilt and covered his face again. "I am coming," she called out and hurried across the room, only stopping at the mirror for a moment's composure.

"There is no more," she said to Antonia and put a restraining hand on her shoulder. They went down the stairs, Antonia following behind. "It is not difficult to think of Rupert dead," Lena said, "while he is still upstairs in his house, in his own bed. It is  difficult to think of him buried, with the earth above him."

They went into the kitchen and drank strong coffee. It began to snow again. The dull  grey light lay in the inert sky all day. "You must call the bank," Lena said after a while. "His lawyers. Those who must see to his business. He had all his papers about him under his head."  Lena looked boldly into Antonia's questioning stare, forewarned by her appraisal of human nature. "I know nothing," she said, finishing her coffee. "You are not to touch anything. The lawyers will do everything."

"Oh, " Antonia laughed and nodded her head, "I will not even go near his bed, you may be sure of that."

But had he not said anything? Many hours must have passed while he was still alive. Words must have been spoken.  Antonia's mild eyes gazed at Lena with such questions. Lena pushed her cup and saucer back and stood up from the table. "He promised much," she assented to Antonia's curiosity. Then with the door to the kitchen open, she added, "but he said nothing," and she
left the room.

How with grief, such as it could be here, decorum, a tradition of etiquette older than the both of them which rigidly circumscribed one's mental activity with respect to the dead, could such a question shine in Antonia's eyes? Lena walked slowly to the front parlor. Her feet were heavy and tired. The gleam in Antonia's eyes danced before her, sprite-like, half
shy, peeping from the generous face of the servant girl, yet tenacious in its lusts. There was the lion always crouching in the middle of the graceful flora, her yellow eyes peering from beneath the fern leaves. In the midst of his debacle man creeps with hacked limbs and crippled swinging arms to the garbage can to seek out some usable, edible specks, some piece of banana
still clinging to the skin, a drop of fruit left about the core of an apple. The corporeal always dragged up its filthy smell, even along the edge of eternity.

Lena sat down in the rocking chair. Yet within her power, she thought and rocked slowly, Antonia would be left comfortably. There would be no begging for her in spite of the gleam in Antonia's eyes that found its way down the tunnel of her own mind. She settled her head against the back of the rocking chair, the carved, ivory inlaid back that swept up high behind her head like a crown or a peacock's tail: the jewel among his jewels. She dozed, her arms resting on the carved armrests. Then Antonia was suddenly standing in the doorway, under the old fashioned  arch with its heavy moulding.

"I have spoken with the lawyers," she said.

"The lawyers?" Lena opened her eyes slowly. It was late afternoon. Oh, yes, she had been waiting.

"They will be here soon." Antonia came in and pulled up the pillows on the sofa. "I called also the priest," she said, knocking the pillows this way and that, "and the doctor."

Lena smiled. "What did the Father say?"

"He said he would come. It is time for dinner. I killed a fresh chicken yesterday, so plump and healthy it was a pity. Come, we must eat."

"I am not hungry," Lena said and began to rock herself.

"It is well to say you are not hungry," Antonia stood up, "But it is not well not to eat. Come."

Lena waved a dismissal.

It was still grey outside, snow still falling. Lena went to the window when she heard the first car arrive. Upstairs, Rupert should jump from his bed, go to the window too to acknowledge the source of the noise and return, sniffing the air with satisfaction. Did the last thoughts of men always run in a pattern of revenge. She was prepared for any fresh outburst that the papers might reveal. She had life and he did not, she had choice and could dispose of the burden he would place upon her. Yet against her will, against all human will as she knew it, she would pray for his soul that his last act would not catch him disgracing himself. The lawyers entered. They passed the parlor, her thoughts, her prayers, and went up the steps to his bedroom.

She could hear them walking about upstairs, raising Rupert up so that they could take out the papers from under his head. They removed their glasses from their breast pockets while she, downstairs, could read his notes with them. Repentance, they would say. His last act would send a spray of gold blanketing his past corruptions. He would suffuse the skies with a dazzling light behind which one could not see her marriage, the children driven from their home, the townspeople shaking their heads when they passed the farm. He would hang a sign in the skies for all to see, a sign of gold with her name studded upon it in diamonds, surrounded with a marble bas-relief of maids, carpets, chandeliers, the quick receptivity of service people, deferential smiles and best hotel rooms and men who swore upon the cross how she belied her age, if she would tell it. The doctor passed her,
went upstairs and joined the lawyers.

Antonia showed in the priest.

"I am glad you do not grieve," he said, coming into the parlor quietly, "but I would not expect hypocrisy in you." He remembered her well.

"Yet he was my husband," she said and rose from the chair so suddenly that it rocked violently. "I fear for him. I fear for his soul."

"Sssshhh," he consoled, "we must not be hasty in our judgments. The mercy of God is infinite."

She looked at him. "In such damnation?"

He sat her down again and pulled in a chair for himself. "That you must lessen little by little with prayers and forgiveness."

"Little by little," she said scornfully. "I may not live long enough to do it little by little. I am prepared to do it all at once. I will pray for myself that I will be accepted in his place."

It was a moment, maybe two, before, gazing at her through rimless spectacles, he burrowed into her meaning. "Lena," he said, "you cannot bargain with eternal judgment. Such glory was permitted only once so that it could be such glory. You may not tamper with your soul."

She sat there, one hand holding his, the other his words. They weighed equally to her, for all their viceroyship, of a sad mortality. Yet before, between them, there had been a fuller understanding. She had distinguished herself before him, from the people who rhythmically confessed their crimes of venery and hatred, of greed and bigotry, who sought consolation for a
lost parent or a straying child. He had married them, she and Rupert, holding their hands together, and he had prayed for forgiveness for that marriage. He had baptized their children, his hands quivering and spilling the water.

Antonia turned on the lights in the room and shook her head sadly from side to side. "She has not eaten all day," she said to the priest, "and now the lawyers are here. They wish to speak with you."  She halted in the middle of the room and turned to address her formally.

 "Yes, send them in," Lena said and disengarged her hands. Her soul was prepared. She would petition God directly now and show Him her soul, whatever storm Rupert might unleash.

"Mr. Mackinley, Mr. Whitehall, and Dr. Nevis," Antonia said carefully and self consciously. She turned on the tall torch lamp, but Lena waved it down. They found seats in the black carved arm chair, the hassock, the piano stool, between briefcases and pencils.

"Dr. Nevis has the death certificate.  Do you wish to see it?" Mr. Mackinley asked. Lena shook her head no. She would take the doctor's word for it, she laughed.

Mr. Whitehall drew the brown hassock in a little closer. "You will have to forgive what seems like undue haste in reading the will." Lena deprecated. A day sooner or later made no difference. She rocked gently. "But it was a stipulation in your husband's will," the lawyer continued, "that it be read the day of his decease." He pulled at the knot in his tie and brought the paper close to his face so that his lips breathed upon the paper and the words were muffled. "He gives as his reasons: In order that I may have a burial befitting my stature and in order that my wife, Lena, might lose no time in expiating herself." The sudden use of the first person, so alive and so immediate, caused Lena to stop rocking and to bend her head forward. Mr. Whitehall only looked about the room, hinting the need for more light. None was offered and he read on in the greying air, the paper close to his face. "Your husband's estate including his house, his farm, his trucks, and his stock total nearly eight hundred thousand dollars
to be divided in the following manner." Lena resumed rocking. "He leaves fifteen thousand each to each of the following, to the Children's Foundling Home at Twelve West Maple Street in Rosedown, to the Cancer Research Foundation, to the Eighth Street Salvation Army Depot, to the Wee Willie Winkle Workshop, to the Young Ladies Arts and Paints League, and to the Old Arrow Street Church for the repair of a new entrance and for a  candle to be burned nightly for his humble memory."

Lena stopped rocking again. Her feet rested on the floor. Mr. Whitehall brought the paper closer to his face and read, "One hundred thousand dollars to Antonia Maria Alvarez to release her from bondage, and the rest to be equally divided among my children so that they may continue to love each other in harmony, except for an annuity of  eighty dollars a week to be given to my wife for the remainder of her years so that she may live them in comfort and serenity without distress, and in addition I leave her my house and all my possessions in it."

They looked at her and waited, but the chair was still. Mr. Whitehall put his papers together, stood up, halted, looked around at the others. "If we can be of any service to you in the way of legal advice, do not hesitate to call on either my partner or myself." Then they rose, he pushed his hassock back into place and they left.

Antonia rose too and saw them to the door. She crossed the path of Lena's sight. But Lena's eyes did not move. She sat weightless in her chair, as if the high carved back with the antique flourishes of gold and ivory inlaid were a painted scene behind her, like those odd Renaissance Madonnas who have little to do with the massive thrones they occupy and are always
just suspended above them, floating off their gold cushions. Antonia came back and turned on another lamp. It was dark outside and the car drove off.

"Lena" the priest bent towards her as one would to listen for the heartbeat in a prone body. She looked towards the door. If there were truth  in the world Rupert was not dead but  there, on the other side of the room, crouching against the wall and listening.

"Yes?" she turned to the priest.

He stood up from the chair and grabbed both her arms. "Lena," he said, almost with tears, "our prayers have been answered. Is this not a miracle?"

She pulled her arms free from his fingers. "Give me room," she cried, and pushed her chair back.

But he reached after her. "Not my prayers, but yours," he said. "This is a miracle. You have put the devil to rout, Lena."
    "Let be," she shouted and jumped from the chair. "I am tired," she said.

She looked towards the door again. "Do not carry on so," she said in a softer voice. "I am tired."

Of course," he answered, wiping his glasses. "I am sorry. But," he smiled to Antonia and to her, "the funeral will be very different from what we thought. There will be many thankful hearts. Just yesterday in town," he hesitated, "in the drugstore I heard Mr. Branch saying how no one would be surprised if he left all his money to a brothel." He looked down at his shoes. "Shame on such thoughts," he said, experiencing with the fresh evidence of repentance. "Who can know the heart?"  He looked up at Lena. "You will be an example. I will make you one, though everyone knows it does not need me."

She put her hands in her pockets and waited with stubborn patience.

He picked up his coat from the sofa and came back to her.  "Sleep well tonight, Lena. Sleep well. You have saved a soul from certain damnation."

After he left, she sat down again in the rocking chair. "Lower the lights, Antonia,"

Antonia put out the lamps in the far corners and came back to her. "Come to bed," she pleaded.

Lena rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. "No," she said, "I will stay here."

"I will not sleep either," Antonia said.

"Oh, leave me alone. Do as you please. You are your own mistress now." She looked a