Mount Terminus: A Novel

  There was her sister, dressed in her clothes, her hair mussed, her face flushed. All Rachel could say was that she didn’t understand. To which, Leah said, Look at me. Look at me and tell me you don’t know my reasons. Jacob set Leah down and, as the two sisters stood before each other in a frozen moment in time, he looked from Leah to Rachel and back again to Leah, and for the life of him, he couldn’t tell them apart. All he could do was look away as Rachel listened to her sister unburden herself of the great unhappiness and hardship she had endured since she was driven out of Alexandra’s home. There was no great success. She had no suite by the park. She was, more or less, kept by Samuel Freed in a small room inside the music hall, where he took from her whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. For years, this had been their arrangement. For years, she had been his favored girl. This was the sacrifice she had made to escape the cruel woman who raised them. Now do you understand? she asked Rachel. Do you not understand why I want you to endure the lasting discomfort of this moment? Rachel was too hurt and dumbfounded to speak. Leah removed a slim paper tube from her pocket, marked Jacob’s cheek with a streak of red lipstick, and made her exit. When Rachel found her voice, all she could say to Jacob was, How could you not know it wasn’t me? How could you not know it was her? Jacob had no answer and, as he rubbed away the stain on his face, he was left to wonder if, perhaps, he had known. But how could he?… Yet how could he not?

  * * *

  For many months, Jacob and Rachel lived as if they were in mourning. Rachel covered all the mirrors in black cloth so she wouldn’t be reminded of Leah. She ordered Jacob to the springs near their home, where she insisted he be ritually cleansed in the presence of a rabbi. She fasted and prayed, and, in the company of the rabbi’s wife, she, too, visited the springs to immerse her body and cleanse her spirit in the living waters. Only after these rituals and further months of reflection was she prepared to once again accept her husband. Not long after she had managed to achieve some semblance of inner harmony, however, Rachel received from Leah a birth announcement and a photograph of Simon Abraham Reuben, a child whose face resembled Jacob’s, and all she had worked to forget was now undone. She fell into a dark state of melancholy, refused to eat or get out of bed. For weeks she barely uttered a word. One morning Jacob awoke, in the room to which his wife had long since banished him, to find Rachel wasn’t in the house. He searched for her everywhere, and eventually discovered at the train station that she had departed for the city early that morning. Jacob, instinctively knowing where to go, went directly to the music hall, where he learned from a stagehand that Rachel had been there and moved on. The stagehand had sent her to Samuel Freed’s residence, and there, too, Jacob went, and when he arrived, he walked into the entryway, where, to his horror, he saw Samuel Freed sitting at the bottom of a stairwell, weeping over an unmoving Leah, whose dead body was still thick from pregnancy. Samuel Freed looked at Jacob and described to him in what raving manner Rachel had barged in. She ran upstairs, lifted Leah’s child out of its crib, and, claiming the boy was rightfully hers, started walking out with it. Leah chased after her. When she reached for the baby, Rachel stepped out of the way and Leah tumbled down the stairs. She has the child, Samuel told Jacob. You’ll find her, and the boy, and you’ll bring him back to me. Do this, and I’ll show you mercy. Don’t do it, and I swear to you, Rosenbloom, I will see you and your wife destroyed.

  All Jacob could think to do was return home to Woodhaven and wait. When three days passed, he began to think the worst. The evening of the third night, however, a carriage pulled into the drive, and out of it Rachel emerged with the bundled infant. His wife’s demeanor wasn’t her own. She glowed with the pride of a new mother, made faces at the babe in her arms, acted as if she, herself, had given birth to it. Jacob went outside and asked the driver to wait a moment. Without disturbing Rachel’s fragile state of mind, he escorted her inside and laid her and his son down to rest. When he returned to the cabbie he asked if he would take a message to the telegraph office. He scribbled a note addressed to Mr. Freed, telling him if he wanted the boy he would have to come and collect him. And back inside he went and sat with his wife and Simon until morning. Mr. Freed arrived with his men and a nurse at dawn, and while Rachel slept, Jacob pulled Simon from her arms, walked him outside, and handed him to the woman.

  When you next see him, said Freed, he will be a man. He will know who you are. He will know what you’ve done. He will know what she has done. And he will come to claim what’s his. Until then, you and she will not go near him. Is that understood?

  Jacob understood.

  Until then, your wife will not be safe from me.

  Jacob understood.

  Freed motioned his arm at the men who had traveled with him to Jacob and Rachel’s home. You’ll be visited by these men from time to time, and when they come to you, you will give them whatever they ask for. Anything.

  Yes, said Jacob. Anything.

  If you become disagreeable, said Freed, you see the nurse? I will send her to the police. She will tell them, in no uncertain terms, that your lovely wife is a murderess. Say you understand.

  I understand, said Jacob.

  I have never been an ideal man for any woman, Rosenbloom. I might not have always treated Leah as I should have, but, whatever my faults, whatever passed between us, I adored that woman more than you can possibly imagine. I was prepared to give her whatever her heart desired.

  I am sorry for you, said Jacob. I’m sorry for it all.

  Well, Freed said, I am glad we have an understanding.

  When Rachel awoke, Jacob told her what he had done. More important, he told her what she had done. Leah is dead, he said. A statement Rachel refused to believe. Leah is dead, he said. Again and again he said it, for him to hear as much as for her. He must have said it to her a hundred times, and not even then would she believe him. He could hardly believe it himself. Not until she read in the paper that Leah Reuben, who played Eloise at the Freed Music Hall, had died under suspicious circumstances, did Rachel accept Leah was gone, at which point she fell into an inconsolable bereavement.

  * * *

  The triumvirate sometimes appeared in the distance. In dark gaps on the road. In shadows across the canyons. As phantasms standing atop vistas high up on the trails. They were there. And then they were gone. Never present long enough for Bloom to see their forms clarified. When the days began to shorten, the young Rosenbloom longed to feel the harvest chill break the summer heat. He yearned to feel the mornings’ moisture soak into his shoes, to smell the redolence of decaying wood, to see beds of moss thicken over hardened earth. But the autumnal heat intensified instead of diminished, and the more the moisture evaporated from the soil and radiated in waves across the basin, the more he pined for Woodhaven. Soon, desert gales arrived to further petrify the brush blanketing the vistas, and not long after, somewhere on the uninhabited range, plumes of amber smoke breasted the sky; the air filled with a sulfurous stink, and down snowed stinging flakes of ash. It would be many months after the winds arrived and the fires had exhausted themselves before they would feel the relief of winter rains. Torrential bursts washed away precipices and turned Mount Terminus’s canyons into muddy rivers. When spring arrived, and then summer, Bloom wouldn’t have been able to differentiate one season from the other were it not for the fact that as the Earth’s vernal orbit concluded, the spindling limbs of the eucalyptus trees appeared too tired to hold up the clusters of their leathery leaves. It would be many years before he would grow accustomed to the bright skies circumscribing the passage of time; to the eruption of wildfires and flash floods, the violent quakes of the Earth; but he would never feel at ease with the effect their new surroundings had on his father. Jacob’s spirit had discernibly dusted over, not unlike the preponderance of terrain about their new home. Only on the rarest occasions, when, perhaps, a stellar phenomenon presented itself in the sky, or if, by chance, the elder Rosenbloom was stirred by a passage of poetry or philosophy, di
d Bloom perceive the enthusiasm Jacob once enjoyed when discussing a small scientific truth or a metaphysical curiosity. He had never been a demonstrative man, but neither had his eyes ever appeared as dull and inert as they did now. Jacob regularly muddled away the diurnal hours inside the labyrinths of the front gardens, where, shortly after their arrival, he cut back the heliotrope blooms and the clinging appendages of the bougainvillea, edged hedgerows, planted beds of geraniums, crowns of thorn. When he had tidied the gardens’ extremities, he began sculpting topiary from shrubs long unattended. With a stubborn devotion, he pruned from verdant protozoa, legs and torsos, arms and heads, and when, over the period of their first year on Mount Terminus, he had refined their curves and given shape to their faces, their hair, their hips, the figures transformed into women; into the same woman; in variegated poses, they stood mirroring one another in their respective corners and corridors, each figure expressing in her own distinct manner a profound disenchantment. Through the tall hedges Jacob cut ovals slightly wider in dimension than the faces, so each set of leafy eyes looked off in the direction of the villa, onto the mountain’s range, out to the haze blanketing the sea, to the canyon’s crags, to the promontory on which Bloom and his father continued to meet at day’s end. The elder Rosenbloom constantly and fastidiously trimmed back his anthropomorphic shrubs, and, as he did so, he talked with them lovingly and intimately, in conspiratorial whispers about a past he would keep secret from his son for some years to come.

  * * *

  Left to his own devices, the innocent Bloom walked the trails to Mount Terminus’s peak, where, facing the eastward expanse of the valley, he read and sketched and carried on lengthy conversations with himself. In the evenings, while the elder Rosenbloom sat in his study, reading ledgers and writing correspondence to an associate he’d charged with the responsibility of attending to the business he had abandoned, Bloom went from room to room, lighting sconces, illuminating the villa’s coffered ceilings, the colorful mosaics of its floor tile, the spiderwebs of fissures expanding through its walls. Their furnishings had been shipped from Woodhaven and set in place by his father throughout the villa’s corresponding chambers. Bloom took comfort living among the many familiar items. The piano in the parlor. The armchair in which the elder Rosenbloom reclined in the later evening with a bottle of schnapps, with his fellow lens grinder Baruch Spinoza, with his beloved scryer, John Dee. Their dining room table and brocade chairs, the Georgian sideboard, the floral-rimmed china. Upstairs in a library even more spacious than the one in Woodhaven, his father’s collection of books and optical devices—his Indonesian shadow puppets, his magic lanterns and zoetropes, the synchronized disks of a phenakistoscope, the mandalas of a Wheel of Life—filled cupboards and shelves climbing to the heights of a telescopic ceiling. The elder Rosenbloom’s drafting table, at which he once sketched his optical designs, was present; present, too, were the leather sofas on which Bloom’s growing body left its impressions. In a room overlooking a courtyard bordered by two cottages were Bloom’s bed and night tables, a rolltop desk, Turkish rugs with opalescent borders, a wingback chair and a threadbare footstool erupting with fluff. Most comforting of all to him was the gallery in which Aphrodite reclined in relief above the mantelshelf of the fireplace. In this room, at the level of the goddess’s eyes, his father had hung the Woodhaven landscapes Bloom’s mother had painted, and under them arranged a chaise longue and two wooden chairs with clawed arms and clawed feet. One chair was slightly smaller than the other, and etched in Hebrew into the backside of the smaller one was the name of the boy’s mother, and into the larger one, the name of his father. Whenever Bloom asked about the sadness he had observed in his mother’s face in the days before her death, Jacob said to him, There is no need for you to dwell in darkness, my dear Bloom. When he asked about the fog consuming his mother’s paintings, he said the same. My dear Bloom, there is no need for you to dwell in darkness. It was this room Bloom often visited in the middle of the night when he had difficulty sleeping. He wrapped himself in his mother’s shawl and looked at her heavy brushwork, at Woodhaven as perceived through her studio window, its view of the lake, the placid cobalt water reflecting the slopes of the valley, the summits of its fern green hills bridged by gray mists. On the glare of the window’s glass shimmered a ghostly portrait of his mother’s profile, the elegant slope of her brow, her bold, aquiline nose, one of her otherworldly eyes whose gaze appeared to simultaneously stare onto the landscape below, and at him, her observer. While listening to the hum and groan of vapors expanding through the pipes behind the walls, while looking at the iridescent image of his mother, and breathing in what remained of her dying scent, Bloom was able to recall the days he spent in her company, copying images from her collection of lithographs. She would set before him the paintings of Tiepolo, The Prophet Isaiah, Rachel Hiding the Idols, Jacob’s Dream; Rembrandt’s Joseph Tells His Dream to Jacob; Gelder’s Judah and Joseph, and she would say, One day the sun and the moon will bow to you, my dear Bloom. Like his mother, she would tell him, he possessed a steady hand and enjoyed a strange talent for seeing shapes within shapes. Like her, she said, he needed only to look at an object once before he could retain all its aspects in his mind. On several occasions, Bloom overheard her say to his father, In his eyes, I can see the face of God; in the lines he draws, I can hear His voice; when I watch his hand move, I can sense His presence. To these assertions, Jacob said to her, Please, my love, please don’t. Please settle your mind. And he would take her by the hand and escort her to bed, or sit her before the fire in the parlor, where, wrapped in paisley, she stared into the blaze with a daemonic gaze. This memory of her still and quiet eyes filled with flames, and this memory alone, delivered Bloom into unshakable slumbers.

  * * *

  On the sixth day of Yamim Noraim, in the month of Tishri, on the third day before the sun descended onto Yom Kippur, one year and two months after their arrival, Bloom, now a boy of ten, gathered at Jacob’s request a collection of trimmings pruned from the garden topiary and bound them in twine. When he completed this task, he helped his father unearth two fledgling juniper trees. That morning Bloom gathered candles and lanterns, filled several jugs of water, packed loaves of bread and jam, dried fruit, salted meat, a sack of oats, a bunch of carrots. He rolled up blankets and pillows into a tarp, and retrieved from the library a miniature book titled Death, Forlorn, which he tucked into the pocket of his father’s jacket. When Jacob finished harnessing their mare to the buckboard, Bloom loaded the cargo he’d collected throughout the day. In the kitchen that evening, they ate a heavy stew, and when they were through, they set out into the darkest hour, the only lights the lanterns hanging from hooks on either side of their seats, a sliver of moon, the gauzy haze of the firmament. At sunrise, when the great valley brightened, Bloom noticed far behind them a dark fleck on the horizon; as they rode northeast in the direction of Mojave, he watched it trail after them, but just as every time he felt the presence of the men he had seen at the station, he wasn’t certain they were, in fact, there.

  At the pace of a funeral march, they traveled the valley’s entire expanse, and when they reached the range beyond Mount Terminus, they entered a canyon pass. It deposited them onto a desolate plain, onto a hard, grooved road that delivered them to a region of cultivated earth abutting the desert’s edge. For two days Jacob had gone without sleep or food, and each time Bloom insisted he stop and take some nourishment and close his eyes, his father refused. He would only break for an hour every now and again to rest the mare, during which time he looked through a spyglass in the direction from which they had ridden. Bloom asked him what he saw, and his father said, Men on horseback. Riding this way. Bloom asked who they were, and his father said, They are men. On horseback. Nothing more.

  They soon met the embankment of a river and turned in the direction of the current. For several hours they followed it to the shores of a lake taking on the shape of the rift valley in which the river’s water had settled,
and when they arrived there, father and son made camp. Bloom gathered brush to build a fire while Jacob arranged, before the lapping water of the shore, the candles and the lanterns, the trimmings and the trees. When the boy returned, Jacob told him to stand beside him, and after a few moments of silence, the elder Rosenbloom lit the yahrzeit candle with a match and slipped it under the fogged glass of a lantern, and recited, God full of mercy who dwells on high, grant perfect rest on the wings of your divine presence among the holy and the pure who shine in the brightness of the heavens to the soul of who has gone to her eternal rest as all her family pray for the elevation of her soul. Her resting place shall be in the Garden of Eden. The master of mercy will care for her under the protection of His wings for all time and bind her soul in the bond of everlasting life. God is her inheritance and she will rest in peace. When the elder Rosenbloom finished the kaddish, Bloom watched his father untie the bundles of trimmings, and with the clippings piled on either side of his feet, he bent down and picked one up, rose, and cast it onto the water. He bent, he rose, davening, and with each offering, said, Forgive me. Please, my love, please forgive me. Forgive me, please forgive me. Forgive me, he said, please, my love, forgive me.