The Cookbook Collector Read online

  Now Jess saw what Emily wanted. She wanted Jess to talk sweetly to her father, after which he would help her, and they would get along again. Emily was a firm believer in getting along, no matter what, and seemed to think if you behaved considerately, real feeling followed. But how could affection bloom in rocky soil? What were words without love? Only dust. Jess could not live in such a xeriscape.

  “You did call him,” Emily said.

  “Of course.”

  “And did you ask him?”

  “Well … not yet.”

  If only George had written her a check. He was so rich; he must be to own a store like Yorick’s. And he had heard of Veritech. He understood about technology and knew she’d pay him back immediately. But he had to say no. He loved saying no.

  He was strange and self-absorbed. He asked questions and then wandered away before he heard the answers. Then when Jess asked a question of her own or tried to start a conversation, he interrupted.

  “I’ve read some Trollope—” she would begin.

  “And you were offended by the foxhunting?” George broke in.

  “I see no reason,” she mused, “that books are more expensive because of who owned them. It’s—”

  “The way things work,” George cut her off.

  He was attractive and he knew it, but he pretended he had no idea. Therefore he was both vain and disingenuous. Tall, or so he seemed to Jess, he looked Italian with his dark skin and dark eyes. Very old—again, from Jess’s point of view—where anyone past thirty harked back to another era altogether. Despite his years, George had a powerful body, a broad chest, a face of light and shade, a glint of humor even in his frown. When he wasn’t lobbing his sarcastic comments, he seemed scholarly and peaceful, like a Renaissance St. Jerome at work in his cave of books. All he needed was a skull on his desk and a lion at his sandaled feet. He wore T-shirts, jeans, rimless reading glasses, sometimes tweed jackets. He had the deep didactic voice of a man who had smoked for years and then suddenly quit and now hated smokers everywhere. He never watched television, and he never tired of telling people so. But the most pretentious thing about him was his long hair. With his chestnut locks threaded gray, he was a fly caught in amber, the product and exemplar of a lost world.

  “I’m working on the money,” Jess told her sister. “Could I just explain?”

  “There’s nothing to explain.” Emily’s voice was tense. “You know what you have to do. Take care of it.”

  Later, waiting for her laundry in the basement, Jess weighed her choices: angering Emily, or asking Richard. Take care of it. Easy for Emily to say. Financially independent Emily got along beautifully with Richard. Ah, Marx was right about so many things—especially the moral superiority money afforded.

  Perched atop a churning washing machine, she heard the clank of metal. Had she left her keys in her jeans pocket? A handful of coins? She wished her grandfather were still alive and she could call him. She had been close to her father’s father.

  Mrs. Gibbs wheeled in her laundry. She pushed it in a little cart with her detergent on top.

  “Good evening.” Mrs. Gibbs produced a change purse segmented with compartments for each kind of coin. Extracting quarters, she began lining them up in the slots of the machine opposite Jess. “How are you?” Mrs. Gibbs inquired as she loaded her whites.

  “I’m okay,” said Jess.

  Mrs. Gibbs shot Jess a penetrating look.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fine sitting down here all alone?”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “Fine isn’t good,” said Mrs. Gibbs. “Fine isn’t right.”

  “I’m okay. My sister is annoyed with me. I said I’d do something and I can’t.”

  “Breaking a promise,” Mrs. Gibbs intoned.

  “No!”

  “Mmm,” said Mrs. Gibbs and suddenly all the machines around Jess seemed to hum with disapproval.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I’m not depressed or anything,” Jess reassured her neighbor.

  “Have you tried prayer?” Mrs. Gibbs reached up to clasp Jess’s hands in her own.

  “Mrs. Gibbs,” said Jess.

  “Put your hands together.”

  “This is just a small thing,” said Jess. “It’s not a matter of life and death. I’m okay.”

  “Dear Lord,” Mrs. Gibbs prayed, “help Jessamine Bach to keep her promise. Help her and guide her to honesty and truth. Keep her in righteousness and do not allow her to fall. And let us say, ‘Amen.’”

  “Amen,” said Jess. “But I’m not about to fall.”

  “We could all fall at any moment,” Mrs. Gibbs said. “Remember that.”

  “It’s just a little money thing….”

  “There are no little money things,” Mrs. Gibbs said darkly.

  “No, no, let me explain.” Jess told the story of Emily’s IPO and the Friends and Family deadline. Mrs. Gibbs listened in silence. At one point she closed her eyes, and Jess wondered if her neighbor was praying again silently, or simply appalled at how trivial Jess’s conundrum was.

  “I have no money to lend you,” said Mrs. Gibbs at last.

  “Oh, I wasn’t hinting!”

  “But I will speak to my rabbi and see if he knows what to do.”

  Jess hopped off her washer in surprise. “Your rabbi?”

  Mrs. Gibbs gazed at Jess calmly. “Don’t you know, honey, that I am a Jew?”

  “You’re kidding,” Jess blurted out.

  “It’s not the color of your skin, but the feeling in your heart,” Mrs. Gibbs said.

  “You’re right.” Abashed, Jess leaned against a washer. “I’m half Jewish,” she volunteered. “My mother was Jewish.”

  Mrs. Gibbs nodded. “I’m a Jew by choice.”

  “How did you choose?”

  “I didn’t,” said Mrs. Gibbs, “the good Lord chose me.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “But how did you … how did He …?”

  “Many years ago when I first moved to this town, I was at my Bible study reading Deuteronomy 7:6: For thou art an holy people … the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people…. Just as we read that verse, the good Lord spoke to me and said, Who is the chosen? Who are the ones going to the Promised Land?

  “That would be the Jews, I answered.

  “Correct, He said. Why then are you not among them, if they are the holy people?

  “I told my Bible study about this conversation, and they prayed for me. However, they could not point to the text and deny that the chosen are the Jews. After many weeks and arguments, I took my Bible with me to the Berkeley Bialystok Center.”

  Reentering her apartment with her clean clothes piled high in her laundry basket, Jess found Theresa studying for orals at the table.

  “Mrs. Gibbs is a Jew,” said Jess.

  “Yeah, right,” said Theresa, scarcely looking up from her Kristeva.

  “Seriously.”

  “Has she offered to debate the merits of Jesus Christ with you?” Theresa asked.

  “No.”

  “Has she asked you to come with her to Bible study?”

  “No. She wants me to meet her rabbi.”

  Now Theresa shut her book. “Do not go anywhere with that woman.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, I grew up with evangelicals,” said Theresa. “I understand them. Mrs. Gibbs wants to steal your soul. I’m serious. Stay the hell away from her. You’ll end up dropping out of school, marrying some holy roller, and becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in the Philippines.”

  “I think you might be a little prejudiced,” said Jess, and she began telling Mrs. Gibbs’s story.

  “Where have you been?” Theresa interrupted. “That is a standard conversion narrative. Listen to me. I grew up with these people. I wasn’t allowed to date ’til I was sixteen. Then I only dated Christians. Then I took a vow of abstinence. I had to spend my weekends s
aving souls door-to-door. You have no idea.”

  “But you escaped,” Jess pointed out. “You aren’t evangelical now.”

  “Ha. You never really escape,” Theresa shot back. “You’re naïve if you think you can.” And she spoke from long experience growing up in Honolulu where her strong-willed father had not allowed her to get a driver’s license. She spoke remembering her mother’s thousand prayers, offered up on every occasion, even for the family dog, a toy terrier who sat up front in the car and panted in the tropical heat. But Jess had never seen the little dog with its pink tongue, and she had never met Theresa’s parents.

  “I’m not naïve,” Jess said.

  “Didn’t I see you give money to Crazy Al on Telegraph? Didn’t you say you got your cards read, quote unquote, for fun?”

  “Not for fun. As a thought experiment, and by the way, the guy knows his ‘Prufrock.’”

  “You have something about you that attracts fanatics,” said Theresa. “You have this way of letting them in. It’s dangerous. It’s like you’re blowing some kind of high-pitched dog whistle: Take me, take me….”

  4

  The Bialystok rabbi of Berkeley, known affectionately as the Berkinstoker, had come west from Brooklyn fifteen years before with his wife and baby. The family had grown, as had Rabbi Helfgott. He’d gained a few pounds with each of his wife’s pregnancies, and after the birth of their tenth child, he was a substantial man indeed. He wore the traditional garb of the Bialystoker sect: black frock coat and black gabardine trousers, a white dress shirt, and, when he went out, a broad-brimmed black hat. Burly, bearded, and gregarious, he was a familiar sight near campus, and Jess remembered him well from Sproul Plaza where she leafleted for Save the Trees. She had often seen the rabbi marching through the crowds with leaflets of his own for anyone who looked Jewish. He’d even approached Jess once and suggested, “Why don’t we trade? I’ll take yours, and you take mine.” She had offered him a leaflet titled “Arcata Arboricide” and he’d handed her a glossy brochure titled “Do a Mitzvah Today.” Then the rabbi had gestured broadly toward the bare white London plane trees lining the plaza. “You light Shabbes candles, and I will save a tree….” Jess remembered all this as she walked with Mrs. Gibbs to Dana Street, and she wondered if the rabbi would remember too.

  The morning was sunny but cool. Mrs. Gibbs wore a white cardigan over her white clothes. Jess pulled up her jacket hood and gazed at a message chalked on the pavement in front of I. B.’s Hoagies & Cheesesteaks:

  HASTE MAKES WASTE

  IT IS ILLEGAL

  TO LOITER, REST, OR BE

  POOR AND HOMELESS

  IN BERKELEY

  THANK YOU CITY COUNCIL

  Jess wondered about the author of this message, with its internal rhyme and sorrowful enjambment. She imagined a poet of the streets, chalking up his anger and despair with untaught eloquence, tracing lines of exclusion, sorrowing at telephone poles with a thousand silver staples where police had ripped off and discarded notices and poetry under the rubric “Post no bills.” Why not post? Jess thought indignantly. Why was freedom of speech limited to sanctioned bulletin boards? She imagined chalk covering the pavement from Durant to Telegraph. It is illegal to loiter, rest, or be poor….

  Mrs. Gibbs stopped at the door of a brown Victorian garlanded with rambling roses, ramshackle porches, and metal fire escapes. As soon as Mrs. Gibbs rang the bell, Jess felt a prickle of unease.

  The door opened wide, revealing Rabbi Nachum Helfgott. He didn’t just smile. He beamed. His eyes crinkled up so that they looked like the tiny black seeds of his round bearded face. “I remember you!” he exclaimed in exactly the tone of a Jehovah’s Witness who’d spotted Jess years before in San Francisco Airport and cried out to her, There you are!

  “I remember you too,” Jess replied.

  “Really?” Rabbi Helfgott looked genuinely surprised and modest, as though there were many rotund rabbis in black suits and hats walking through Berkeley. “Did you by any chance light candles?”

  Jess shook her head. “Did you save a tree?”

  “I planted one! My wife and I planted one. Do you see this tree here?” He pointed to a bushy silver-barked tree near the corner of the house. “This is an apricot tree! This is what they tell us.”

  “Oh, now I feel bad about the candles!” Jess exclaimed.

  “It’s okay. It’s all right. Every Shabbes is a new opportunity. Every week the world begins again. Come in, come in.” Rabbi Helfgott seemed to enjoy doubling phrases. He was such an expansive man he spoke in twins. “Tell me your name once again.”

  “Rabbi, this is Jessamine Bach,” said Mrs. Gibbs.

  “Ah, Bach like the musician,” said the rabbi. “Very nice. Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in Newton,” said Jess, “but now my father lives in Canaan, Mass.”

  “Canaan! My brother-in-law lives there! My wife’s sister and her family. Who is your father?”

  Jess pictured a Bialystoker rabbi in full regalia descending on her father and his Korean wife. “He’s not Jewish,” she answered instead of answering.

  The front and back parlors of the house had been converted into a synagogue with EXIT signs over the doors to satisfy the fire code. A warren of hallways and little rooms and creaky carpeted stairs surrounded these parlors. Through one door, Jess saw a restaurant-style kitchen with banks of cabinets, freezers, and refrigerators. “The house was once an ashram before we came here,” Rabbi Helfgott explained when he saw Jess staring. “Baruch Hashem, we were already equipped to feed a hundred.”

  The rabbi ushered Jess into an office piled high with papers and computer equipment. Jess looked back, expecting Mrs. Gibbs to join them, but her neighbor had taken the little book she always carried in her purse and stood by the window praying silently.

  “My mother was the Jewish one,” Jess volunteered.

  The rabbi nodded. He was a true evangelist, although he only sought out Jewish souls. His goal was to return Jews to themselves. “Where is she from?”

  “She’s dead,” said Jess.

  The rabbi bowed his head, and recast the question gently. “Where was she from?”

  “London,” Jess said.

  “Really! My wife is from London! What was her name?”

  “Gillian Bach,” said Jess.

  “Sit, sit,” the rabbi said, even as he mused. “Gillian Bach. I don’t know the family.”

  Jess sat on an old swivel chair, and the rabbi heaved himself into a larger version behind his desk. There were at least two other swivel chairs of different sizes in the office, and Jess wondered for a moment whether the rabbi kept outgrowing them.

  “Mrs. Gibbs tells us you’re a student. What do you study?”

  “Philosophy,” said Jess.

  “Philosophy! Very interesting. I myself have a personal interest in philosophy, particularly Jewish philosophy. You have perhaps heard of our Tashma?”

  She shook her head.

  “This is a very great work, covering everything.”

  “Everything!”

  “God. Evil, but especially Humanity, the Soul. The Messiah. In other words, the big philosophical questions, the biggest questions, including the biggest one of all.”

  “And what’s that?” Jess asked.

  The Messianic rabbi didn’t hesitate. “Ah, the biggest question in Jewish philosophy is very simple: When?”

  Jess couldn’t help smiling at this summation, and seizing the opportunity, the rabbi swiveled in his chair and reached behind him for a thick black book with page edges marbled in striking pink and purple. “This Tashma is translated into English with a commentary. Would you like to borrow it for a while?”

  “Sure,” said Jess, but that felt disingenuous, so she added, “I might not get to it right away. I’m kind of swamped reading for class.”

  “And what reading is that?”

  “Hume,” said Jess. “David Hume.”

  “David Hume. This is the kind of name t
hat in my own field I wonder whether such a David was possibly Jewish.”

  “Scottish,” said Jess.

  The rabbi lifted a finger. “The Jewish community in Scotland is very nice.”

  Jess hesitated. Then she said, “I don’t think he believed in God.”

  “There’s the proof!” exclaimed Rabbi Helfgott. “It is a very interesting fact that many of the most famous goys, particularly philosophers, when you scratch the surface turn out to be Jews. Hume in the past could be Hamish. Hyman. Even Halberstam. There are many possibilities. Names are very important, very mystical in their significance. Your name, Jessamine, is very unique, very interesting. Do you have a Hebrew name?”

  Jess shook her head.

  “Many, many people who come to see us enjoy a Hebrew name, which we can find for them. It’s a simple matter that for many people is profound.”

  On the wall behind the rabbi, a bulletin board displayed snapshots of babies, boys and girls, children of all ages. Above the bulletin board hung a large portrait of a white-bearded man.

  “The Bialystoker Rebbe,” said Rabbi Helfgott. “You know what a tsadek is? A tsadek is a saint. However, the Rebbe is not only a saint. He is also a genius. He has spirituality and intellect in equal measures. How many of us can say that? When he saw this thing, the Internet, did he say, ‘I am now eighty-six years old; I have no interest in computers’? No. He said, ‘With technology the whole wide world is now interconnected. Baruch Hashem, this is a miracle. A network of computers makes it possible for souls to transmit Torah everywhere.’ He also said: ‘There are no coincidences.’ It is not by chance that you and I live in such a time as this. People ask every day, ‘Why was I put on earth?’ As if there is perhaps one reason. The truth is there are too many reasons to count, and each reason and each soul connects to every other. I see in my own life that this is true. Is it an accident that Mrs. Gibbs came here to us, even though she was not a Jew? Is it by chance that she lives in the same building as you? And that you yourself are involved in the Internet?”

  “I’m not involved at all,” Jess corrected him. “My sister is the one who—”

  Rabbi Helfgott was unconcerned. “Everybody is a link. Do you understand?”