“What is this nonsense?” she said. “Sit down.”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Shpilman,” said the Brukh woman, resuming her seat, perched on the edge as if to show that she did not plan to stay.

“Have you seen Mendel?”

“Yes.”

“And where is he?”

“He’s staying with a friend. He won’t be there for long.”

“He’s coming back.”

“No. No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Shpilman. But you will be able to reach Mendel through this person. Whenever you need to. Wherever he goes.”

“What person, tell me? Who is this friend?”

“If I tell you, you have to promise to keep the information to yourself. Otherwise, Mendel says” — she glanced at her friend as if hoping for some moral support to get past the next seven words — “you will never hear from him again.”

“But my dear, I never want to hear from him again,” Mrs. Shpilman said. “So there’s really no point in telling me where he is, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“Only that if you don’t tell me where he is, and no nonsense, I will have you sent over to Rudashevsky’s Garage and let them get the information out of you the way they like to do it.”

“Oh, now, I’m not afraid of you,” said the Brukh woman with an astonishing hint of a smile in her voice.

“No? And why is that?”

“Because Mendel told me not to be.”

She could feel the reassurance, catch the echo of it in the Brukh woman’s voice and manner. An air of teasing, of the playfulness that Mendel imposed on all of his dealings with his mother, and with his dread father, too. Mrs. Shpilman had always thought of it as a devil inside of him, but now she saw that it might be simply a means of survival, protection. Feathers for the little bird.

“He’s a fine one to talk about not being afraid. Running away from his duty and his family like this. Why doesn’t he work some of that magic of his on himself? Tell me that. Drag his pitiful, cowardly self back here and spare his family a world of disgrace and embarrassment, not to mention a beautiful, innocent girl.”

“He would if he could,” the Brukh woman said, and the widow beside her, who had said nothing, heaved a sigh. “I really do believe that, Mrs. Shpilman.”

“And why can’t he? Tell me that.”

“You know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

But she did know. Apparently, so did these two strange women who had come to watch her cry, Mrs. Shpilman dropped into a white-painted Louis XIV chair with a needlepoint cushion, heedless of creases that this sudden plunge made in the silk of her dress. She covered her face with her hands and cried. For the shame and the indignity. For the ruination of months, and years, of planning and hopes and discussion, the endless embassies and back-and-forth between the courts of Verbov and Shtrakenz. But mostly, she confesses, she cried for herself. Because she had determined with her customary resolve that she would never see her only, beloved, rotten son again.

What a selfish woman! It was only later that she thought to spare a moment’s regret for the world that Mendel would never redeem.

After Mrs. Shpilman had been crying for a minute or two, the frumpy widow rose from the other wing chair and came to stand beside her.

“Please,” she said in a heavy voice, and put a plump hand on Mrs. Shpilman’s arm, a hand whose knuckles were covered in fine golden hair. It was hard to believe that only twenty years ago, Mrs. Shpilman had been able to fit the entire thing into her mouth.

“You’re playing games,” Mrs. Shpilman said, once she had regained the power of rational thought. In the wake of the initial shock, which stopped her heart, she felt a strange sense of relief. If Mendel was nine layers deep, then eight of those layers were pure goodness. Goodness far better than she and her husband, hard people who had survived and prospered in a hard world, could have engendered from their own flesh without some kind of divine intercession. But the innermost layer, the ninth layer of Mendel Shpilman, was and always had been a devil, a shkotz that liked to give heart attacks to his mother. “You’re playing games!”

“No.”

He lifted the veil and let her see the pain, the uncertainty. She saw that he feared he was making a grave mistake. She recognized as her own the determination with which he was willing to make it.

“No, Mama,” Mendel said. “I came to say goodbye.”

Then, reading the expression on her face, with a shaky smile: “And no, I’m not a transvestite.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No!”

“You look like a transvestite to me.”

“A noted expert.”

“I want you out of this house.” But she only wanted him to stay, hidden on her side of the house, dressed in that frumpy rag, her baby, her princeling, her devilish boy.

“I’m going.”

“I never want to see you again. I don’t want to call you, I don’t want you to call me. I don’t want to know where you are.”

She had only to summon her husband, and Mendel would stay. In some way that was no more unthinkable than the underlying facts of her comfortable life, they would make him stay.

“All right, Mama,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“All right, Mrs. Shpilman,” he said, and in his mouth it sounded affectionate, familiar. She started to cry again. “But just so you know. I’m staying with a friend.”

Was there a lover? Was it possible for him to have led a life so secret?

“A ‘friend’?” she said.

“An old friend. He’s just helping me. Mrs. Brukh here is helping me, too.”

“Mendel saved my life,” said Mrs. Brukh. “Once upon a time.”

“Big deal,” said Mrs. Shpilman. “So he saved your life. A lot of good it did him.”

“Mrs. Shpilman,” said Mendel. He took her hands and clasped them tightly between his own warm palms. His skin burned two degrees hotter than everyone else’s. When you took his temperature, the thermom eter read 100.6.

“Get your hands off me,” she managed to say. “Now.”

He kissed her on the top of the head, and even through the layer of alien hair, the imprint of that kiss seemed to linger. Then he let go of her hands, lowered his veil, and lumbered out of the room, hose sagging, with the Brukh woman hurrying out behind him.

Mrs. Shpilman sat in the Louis XIV chair for a long time, hours, years. A coldness filled her, an icy disgust for Creation, for God and His misbegotten works. At first the horror she felt seemed to bear upon her son and the sin that he was refusing to surrender, but then it turned into a horror for herself. She considered the crimes and hurts that had been committed to her benefit, and all of that evil only a drop of water in a great black sea. An awful place, this sea, this gulf between the Intention and the Act that people called “the world.” Mendel’s flight was not a refusal to surrender; it was a surrender. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor was tendering his resignation. He could not be what that world and its Jews, in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas, wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him to be. He could not even be what he wanted himself to be. She hoped — sitting there, she prayed — that one day, at least, he might find a way to be what he was.

As soon as the prayer flew upward from her heart, she missed her son. She longed for her son. She reproached herself bitterly for having sent Mendel away without first finding out where he was staying, where he would go, how she could see him or hear his voice from time to time. Then she opened the hands he had enfolded a last time in his, and found, curled in her right palm, a tiny length of string.