“Nobody know, missus. Nobody see him since last night.”

“Last night.”

“This morning.”

Last night she had presided at a forshpiel for the daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe. A brilliant match. A bride of talent and accomplishment, beautiful, with a fiery streak that Mendel’s sisters lacked but which his mother knew her son admired in her. Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shpilman had known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall “the world.” Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light.

That was how she had planned, at least, to put it to Mendel, should he ever seek her counsel on the matter of his betrothal to the daughter of the Shtrakenzer rebbe.

“Your husband pretty angry,” said the girl, Betty, a Filipina, like all the girls.

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything, missus. That how I know he’s angry. Sending out lot of people looking every place. Calling the mayor.”

Mrs. Shpilman turned from the window, the phrase They were obliged to call off the wedding metastasizing in her abdomen. Betty was gathering up wads of tissue paper from the Turkey carpet.

“What ladies?” Mrs. Shpilman said. “Who are they? Are they Verbovers?”

“One maybe. Other not. Only say they hoping to talk to you.”

“Where are they?”

“Downstairs in your office. One lady all in black clothes, veil on her face. Look like maybe her husband just die.”

Mrs. Shpilman can’t remember anymore when the first hopeless men and terminal cases started to come around looking for Mendel. Possibly they came in secret at first, to the back door, encouraged by reports from one or the other of the housemaids. There was a maid whose womb had been made barren by a botched operation in Cebu when she was a girl. Mendel took one of those dolls he made his sisters from felt and a clothespin, pinned a crayoned blessing between its wooden legs, and slipped it into her pocket. Ten months after that, Remedios gave birth to a son. There was Dov-Ber Gursky, their driver, secretly ten thousand dollars in the wrong with a Russian finger-breaker. Mendel handed Gursky a five-dollar bill, unbidden, and said he hoped it might help. Two days later, a lawyer in St. Louis wrote to inform Gursky that he had just inherited half a million from an uncle he never knew. By the time of Mendel’s bar mitzvah, the sick and dying, the bereft, the parents of damned children, they were getting to be a real pain in the neck. Coming around at any hour of the day or night. Wailing and begging. Mrs. Shpilman had taken steps to protect Mendel, setting hours and conditions. But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.

“I can’t see them now,” Mrs. Shpilman said, sitting down on her narrow bed, with its white candlewick bedspread and the pillows she had embroidered before Mendel was born. “These ladies of yours.” Sometimes when they could not get to Mendel, the women would come to her, to the rebbetzin, and she would bless them as well as she could, with the little wherewithal she brought to the task. “I have to finish dressing. The wedding is in one hour, Betty. One hour! They’ll find him.”

She had been waiting for him to betray her for years, ever since she had first understood that he was what he was. Such a frightening word to a mother, with its implication of fragile bones, vulnerability to predators, nothing to protect the bird but its feathers. And flight. Of course flight. She had understood this about him long before he understood it himself. Breathed it in from the soft nape of his infant neck. Read it like a hidden text in the fuzzy knobs of his knees in short pants. A touch of girlishness in the way he lowered his eyes when others praised him. And then, as he got older, she could not fail to note, though he tried to conceal it, the way he grew uncomfortable, tongue-tied, seeming to bank his fire when a Rudashevsky or certain of his male cousins came into the room.

All through the making of the match, the betrothal, the planning for the wedding, she had been studying Mendele for signs of apprehension or unwillingness. But he remained true to his duty and her plans. Sarcastic at times, yes, even irreverent, mocking her for her steadfast belief that the Holy Name, blessed be He, spends His time like an old housewife making matches among the souls of the not-yet-born. Once he had snatched up a scrap of white tulle her daughters had left in the parlor, covered his head with it, and offered in a voice that was an uncanny imitation of his betrothed’s an inventory of the physical shortcomings of Mendel Shpilman. Everyone laughed, but in her heart was a little bird flutter of dread. Apart from that moment, he appeared to remain as he had been, unstinting in his devotion to the 613 commandments, to the study of Torah and Talmud, to his parents, to the faithful for whom he was their star. Surely, even now, Mendel would be found.

She rolled up her stockings, put on her dress, straightened her slip. She put on the wig that she’d had made especially for the wedding at a cost of three thousand dollars. It was a masterpiece, ash blond with hints of red and gold, done up in braids like her own hair when she was a young woman. It was not until she had settled that shining snood of money onto her cropped pate that she began to panic.

On a deal table sat a black telephone with no dial If she picked it up, an identical phone would ring in her husband’s office. In ten years of living in this house, she had used it only three times, once in pain and twice in anger. Over the phone hung a framed photograph of her grandfather, the eighth rebbe, her grandmother, and her mother at the age of five or six, posed under a pasteboard willow, along the banks of a painted stream. Black clothes, the dreamy cloud of her grandfather’s beard, over all the radiant ash of time that settled on the dead in old photos. Missing from the group was her mother’s brother, whose name was a kind of curse so potent it must never be spoken. His apostasy, though notorious, remained unknown to her. All she understood was that it had begun with a hidden hook called The Mysterious Island, discovered in a drawer, and culminated with a report of her uncle having been spotted on a street in Warsaw, beardless and wearing a straw boater more scandalous than any French novel.

She placed her hand on the receiver of the phone with no dial. Panic in her organs, panic in her teeth.

“I wouldn’t answer if I could,” her husband said from right behind her. “If you have to break the Sabbath, at least don’t waste the sin.”

Though he was not then so lunar as he became in later years, the sight of her husband standing in her bedroom was a cause for wonder, the advent of a second moon in the sky. He took a look around at the needle point chairs, the green valance, the white-satin blank of her bed, her bottles and jars. She saw him struggle to keep a mocking smile on his lips. But the expression he managed was something at once avid and repelled. It reminded her of the smile with which her husband had once received an embassy from some far-off court in Ethiopia or Yemen, a sloe-eyed rabbi in a gaudy kaftan. That impossible black rabbi with his outlandish Torah, the realm of women: They were divine whims, convolutions of God’s thought, that it was almost a heresy to imagine or try to understand.