The longer he stood there, the less amused and the more lost he seemed to become. Finally, she was moved to pity. He did not belong here. It was a measure of the spreading stain of wrongness on this day that he had traveled so far on his embassy to this land of tasseled cushions and rosewater.

“Sit,” she said. “Please.”

Grateful, slow, he endangered a chair. “He will be found,” he said, his voice soft and threatening.

She didn’t like the look of him. Knowing that otherwise he might strike people as gross, he was ordinarily a man of tidy habits. But his hose were crooked now, his shirt misbuttoned. His cheeks were mottled with fatigue, and his whiskers strayed like he had been yanking at them.

“Excuse me, darling,” she said. She opened the door to her dressing room and went inside. She despised the dark colors favored by Verbover women of her generation. The room into which she retreated was hung with indigo, deep purple, heliotrope. At a small vanity chair with a fringed skirt, she sat down. She reached out with a stockinged toe and closed the door, leaving a one-inch gap. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s better this way.”

“He will be found,” her husband repeated, more matter-of-fact now, trying to reassure her and not himself.

“He’d better be,” she said. “So I can kill him.”

“Calm yourself.”

“I say that very calmly. Is he drunk? Was there drinking?”

“He was fasting. He was fine. Such a teaching he made us last night on Parshat Chayei Sarah. It was electric. A stopped heart would have begun beating again. But when he finished, there were tears on his face. He said he needed air. No one has seen him since.”

“I’ll kill him,” she said.

There was no reply from the bedroom, only the rasp of breath, steady, implacable. She regretted the threat. It was rhetoric on her lips, but in his mind, that library in a bonepit, it took on a dangerous color of agency.

“Do you know, by any chance, where he is?” her husband said after a pause, and there was danger in the lightness of his tone.

“How would I know that?”

“He talks to you. He comes to see you here.”

“Never.”

“I know he does.”

“How could you know that? Unless you have turned the maids into spies.”

His silence confirmed the scope of her household’s corruption. She felt a glorious seizure of resolve never to leave her dressing room again.

“I didn’t come here to find an argument or to reproach you. On the contrary, I hoped that I might borrow a cup of your usual calm prudence. Now that I am here, I feel compelled, against my judgment as a rabbi and as a man, but with the full support of my understanding as a father, to reproach you.”

“For what?”

“His aberration. The freakish streak. The twist in his soul. That is your fault. A son like that is the fruit of his mother’s tree.”

“Go to the window,” she told him. “Look through the drape. See those poor suitors and fools and broken yids come to receive a blessing that you, you would never, in your power, in your learning, would never be able to bestow, honestly. Not that such an inability has ever hampered you, in the past, from offering it.”

“I can bless in other ways.”

“Look at them!”

“You look at them. Come out of that closet and look.”

“I’ve seen them,” she said through her teeth. “And they all have a twist in the soul.”

“But they hide it. Out of modesty and humility and the fear of God, they clothe it. God commands us to cover our heads in His presence. Not to stand bare headed.”

She heard the scrape and creak or his chair leg and the shuffle of his feet in their slippers. She heard the wrecked joint of his left hip crack and snap. He grunted in pain.

“That is all I ask of Mendel,” he continued. “What a man may think, what he feels, these have no interest, no relevance to me, or to God. It doesn’t matter to the wind whether a flag is red or it’s blue.”

“Or pink.”

There was another silence. This one carried a lighter charge somehow, as if he was coming to a conclusion or remembering how it might have felt at one time to find amusement in her little joke.

“I will find him,” he said. “I will sit him down and tell him what I know. Explain to him that as long as he obeys God and His commandments and gives righteously, there is a place for him here. That I will not turn my back to him first. That the choice lies with him to abandon us.”

“Can a man be a Tzaddik Ha-Dor but live hidden from himself and everyone around him?”

“A Tzaddik Ha-Dor is always hidden. That’s a mark of his nature. Maybe I should explain that to him. Tell him that these — feelings — he experiences and struggles against are, in a way, the proof of his fitness to rule.”

“Maybe he isn’t running away from marriage to this girl,” she said. “Maybe that isn’t what frightens him. What he can’t live with.” The sentence she had never spoken to her husband took up its usual station at the tip of her tongue. She had been composing and refining and abandoning elements of it in her mind for the past forty years, like the stanzas of a poem written by a prisoner denied the use of paper and pen. “Maybe there is another kind of self-deception he can’t reconcile himself to living with.”

“He has no choice,” her husband said. “Even if he has fallen into unbelief. Even if in staying here, he risks hypocrisy or cant. A man with his talents, his gifts, cannot be allowed to move and work and hazard his fortune out there in that unclean world. He would be a danger to everyone. In particular to himself.”

“That wasn’t the self-deception I meant. I meant the kind that — that Verbovers all engage in.”

Silence then, ominous, neither heavy nor light, the vast silence of a dirigible before the static spark.

“I’m not aware,” he said, “of any others that confront him.”

She let her sentence drop; she had been running in the air for too long by then to look down for more than a second.

“So he must be held here, then,” she said. “With or without his consent.”

“Believe me, my dear. And do not mistake me. The alternative would be something far worse.”

She reeled a moment, then rushed from her dressing room to see what was in his eyes when he threatened the life of his own son, as she construed it, for the sin of being what God had pleased to make him. But, silent as a dirigible, he had sailed. Instead, she found only Betty, back to renew the visitors’ appeal. Betty was a good servant, but she had the Filipino knack for taking intense pleasure in scandal. She had a hard time concealing her delight in the news she brought.

“One lady, missus, say she bringing a message from Mendel,” Betty said. “Say, sorry, he’s not coming home. No wedding today!”

“He’s coming home,” Mrs. Shpilman said, fighting the wish to slap Betty’s face. “Mendel would never . . .” She stopped herself before she could say the words: Mendel would never leave without saying goodbye.

The woman bearing a message from her son was not a Verbover. She was a modern Jewess, dressed modestly out of respect for the neighborhood in a long patterned skirt and a stylish dark cloak. Ten or fifteen years older than Mrs. Shpilman. A dark-eyed, dark-haired woman who at one time must have been very beautiful. She jumped up from the wing chair by the window when Mrs. Shpilman came in, and gave her name as Brukh. Her friend was a plump thing, pious by the look of her, perhaps Satmar, in a long black dress with black stockings and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down over an inferior shaydl. Her stockings bagged, and the rhine stone buckle on her hatband, poor thing, was coming unglued. The veil bunched at the upper left in a way that struck Mrs. Shpilman as piteous. Looking at this bereft creature, she forgot for a moment the awful news that had brought the two women to her house. A blessing welled up inside of her with a force so urgent she could barely contain it. She wanted to take the shabby woman in her arms and kiss her in a way that lasted, that burned sadness away. She wondered if that was how it felt to be Mendel all the time.