The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates by Jacob Bacharach

Author:Jacob Bacharach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

8

It’s harder to say what Sarah thought about all this. She was opaque, and the gearworks of her inner life turned so silently that even God strained to hear them whir. This would have been true even if she hadn’t retreated into an inconsistent silence that her family interpreted as a sort of effective if not actual dementia. To Isabel, as she got to know them, it seemed just as likely a form of conscious protest. If Abbie were your husband, and Isaac your son, wouldn’t you start drinking early, too? Wouldn’t you do what you could to avoid their joint penchant for withering disdain? When Isaac was still just a kid, he and Sarah had formed an unusually (perhaps unhealthily) close and confidential bond, a conspiracy of semi-normalcy against Abbie’s more mercurial manner. Isaac, Isabel thought, was still a kid. But the bond slackened, like old elastic, as he approached puberty. Sarah drank less back then. “Frequently drinking but not yet a drunk,” Isaac said, which Isabel found fishy. Her own mother, Cathy, was in AA, and no one ever really escapes the faith of her youth.

Isaac always knew, at least suspected, that the real reason they left New York was an affair. For Isaac, it fulfilled a set of imperishable convictions about his father’s character. If he did believe that Abbie had had a vision—truthfully, he wasn’t sure, one way or the other, but thought not—then that still wouldn’t rule out a more mundane proximate cause. Isaac and Sarah both generally told themselves that artistry, temperament, and the inadequacy of secular language to convey the nature and feeling of creative inspiration were the reality underlying the dreamy claims in Abbie’s prophetic streak. In any case, who’s to say that any event has any singular cause?

Certainly the affair explained more convincingly how Sarah ended up agreeing to come to Pittsburgh. It’s a perverse but frequent trait of relationships that boredom wrecks them faster than betrayal; infidelity tightens the grasp more than faithfulness. If Abbie had been in love with someone else, it would have explained Sarah’s desire, or at least her willingness, to flee with him. Certainly it was unlikely, having weighed the evidence, to imagine that she really believed Abbie was talking to God, first, because she was a believing Jew who therefore believed that the age of that sort of miraculous dialogue had passed, and second, because even if that were not the case, Abbie was as supremely unlikely a candidate for a prophecy as any that existed on earth—although, there is a counterargument: is it not frequently the case that God chooses (on the infrequent occasions when He does so choose) to speak to the least likely among us?

Isabel talked about all this with Isaac one day in September. It was still summer. It had been terrifically hot for a week. She’d driven down to visit him at The Gamelands, and he’d made Eli take the Land Rover and drive them farther into the mountains to a state park called Ohiopyle.

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