63 – North of Boston
“I won’t be here when you get back. Neither Adam nor I will be here when you get back,” Sally stood in the bedroom doorway, her arms crossed in front of her chest, her eyes red from crying, her throat sore from screaming at her husband. “I feel as if I’m living in a dream, or a nightmare, somebody else’s nightmare actually.
“I don’t care how many times you try to convince me, I know you are wrong, so wrong. How can you abandon me this way. Not just me, but your son. Can you really abandon Adam? I don’t think you can do that. The Ben Shapiro I married couldn’t abandon his son.”
That was her trump card. But she’d played it before, day after day that week she’d played one variation or another of that card. And each time she’d lost, inexplicably but without any question, she’d lost.
Shapiro interrupted his packing, throwing casual clothes and clean socks and underwear into a blue nylon backpack. He spoke softly, evenly, patiently.
“I’m not abandoning anybody,” he said to Sally. “I’m not abandoning my son. Apparently, however, either I am abandoning my wife or she is abandoning me, I haven’t figured that one out yet. Sally, I’ve told you over and over. What I am not going to abandon is who I am. Not now. Not when it matters who I am.
“Sally, I am a Jew. You knew that when we fell in love. You knew that when we got married. And Sally, my son is a Jew. If that is going to have any meaning, then being a Jew has to remain something that he can be proud of.”
“You know,” she replied, speaking quickly. “Technically he isn’t Jewish. You told me that. You can’t change that. He has to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew and he most certainly doesn’t have a Jew for a mother.”
Shapiro smiled, licked the tip of a finger and drew it downward in front of his face, scoring one hypothetical point for his wife.
“Yes, yes. You are so well versed on Jewish law, Sally. OK, I agree that, technically, Adam isn’t Jewish.”
She smiled at that concession.
“But no matter what an Orthodox rabbi might say about Adam, though, the Nazis would have considered him to be a Jew. That’s what matters,” Shapiro said. He was startled by the angry expression in his wife’s face.
“Don’t you start again on the Nazis, the God damn fucking Nazis. They’re long ago and far away, like Star Wars, right. I’m sick and tired of your talk about Nazis. This is America, not Germany.”
“The Nazis considered anybody a Jew if he had three Jewish grandparents,” Shapiro continued, undeterred. “That would be my father’s parents and my mother’s parents. Four Jewish grandparents for Adam. There’s no way my son isn’t a Jew.
“And Sally, you know that anybody who goes through life with a name like Adam Shapiro is not going to be confused for an Irish Catholic.”
His attempt at humor was met with a stone face from his wife.
“I kept my last name,” she said. “Maybe my son should start using my name rather than yours, if your name is going to be such a burden for him. After all, he’s going to be living with me. You understand that much, don’t you?”
“I won’t discuss that now, Sally,” Shapiro said. “I have to leave.” He closed the zipper on the bag and lifted it from the bed.
“I’ve told you this time after time,” he continued, placing his hands on his wife’s shoulders. She shook herself, causing his hands to drop from her. “I’ve told you. What is happening now is the most important civil rights event of my lifetime. This country is going down a wrong path. This country is not my America. Sally, it isn’t your America either.
“My whole career has been working for civil rights. How in the world can I turn my back on this struggle, now, here? I wasn’t around when the Indians were massacred. I wasn’t born when Japanese were locked up in concentration camps. I was a child during the civil rights marches in the South.
“But I’m an adult now, for this struggle. More than just any adult, Sally. I’m in the center of things, in a position to change things for the better, to stand up to this asinine government and turn it around. I can’t say no now. It isn’t in me. You wouldn’t respect me if I did. Adam wouldn’t respect me. Sally, I wouldn’t respect myself.”
“I don’t respect you now,” she said. “I don’t respect a man who abandons his family, a man who chooses to expose his family to shame, to humiliation, to beatings. You know what’s been happening to Adam at school, the way they’re teasing him and bullying him for being a Jew, because his father is some big time Jew.
“I don’t respect a man who puts his child through that. Maybe you should think some more about those Nazis you keep talking about. Would you respect a father who sent his son to the concentration camps because he was too proud to let his son call himself anything but a Jew? I don’t think so. Better a live Christian son than a dead Jewish one. I’m right on that and you know it.”
“Well, it hasn’t come to that,” Shapiro said.
“Not yet,” Sally replied. “But Jews killed Americans right here in Boston and, it seems, have gotten away with it. Other Jews sheltered them and got away with it. More Jews dropped a goddamn atomic bomb on innocent Arabs and they haven’t been caught yet either.
“People aren’t too pleased with you Jews these days. Heaven forbid if something more should happen. But I tell you, you may feel you don’t have any choice, that you have to hold yourself out as the big public Jew. Well, I do have a choice, and so does Adam. I’m not a Jew. He’s not a Jew. And I don’t have to be married to a Jew if I don’t want to be.
“I’m telling you, Ben. You walk out that door and drive to Washington and by the time you come back here, I’ll be living with my parents and Adam will be with me.”
Shapiro had never hit his wife, never been physical with her. For the first time in their marriage, he put his hand on her shoulder and shoved her aside, pushing her from the bedroom doorway with so much force that she fell to the floor. She lay there, stunned more than hurt, making no effort to get up as he turned his back and walked through the door.
Shapiro left without a word. He did not feel like a hero going off to do battle. It was not the argument with Sally that made him feel a twinge of guilt, however. That last argument was a replay of what they’d been going through for more than a week.
He had not told Sally about Judy Katz, had not told his wife that he would be driving to Washington with an extremely attractive thirty-one year old woman and probably spending the next few days, and nights, with her. For that, not for leaving his wife, hardly at all for leaving his son, not even for shoving his wife aside, for that he felt guilty.
But guilt was soon replaced with excitement, at both the prospect of the huge demonstration and at whom he was about to share that excitement with.