Free A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life by Dana Reinhardt Page A

study.
    He looked up from his papers and at my mother with a puzzled expression. Mordechai’s beard was thick and black, without a trace of gray even though he was not a particularly young man and had a house filled with seven children. He leaned back. He tugged at his beard.
    “They sent a woman,” he said.
    “I’m not sure who you think ‘they’ are, Mr. Levin,” Mom said. “But I am the one who decided to take your case. We spoke on the phone. Remember?”
    “Yes, I remember. But I believed that you were the receptionist or perhaps the legal secretary.”
    My mother fought off the urge to use a word from her deep reserves of profanity. “Well, I’m not, Mr. Levin. I’m your lawyer.”
    He looked at her for a long time and then motioned to the chair facing his desk. “Please have a seat. And please, it’s Rabbi Levin.”

    Over the six months that they worked together, the Rebbe and my mother came to have a civil but not friendly relationship. On the other hand, Mom and Hannah, in those brief moments before Hannah would deliver Mom to Mordechai’s study, discovered that they shared more in common than you would imagine. Hannah had an extremely analytical mind that was greatly underused in her role as the Rebbetzen, which is what they call the Rebbe’s wife. Not only was Hannah a homemaker and the primary caregiver for her brood of seven, but as the Rebbetzen she was expected to play hostess and advisor and confidante to all of the women in the community, and this was not a role that she particularly enjoyed. So Hannah looked forward to Mom’s visits because it gave her a chance to talk about things that she didn’t generally have the opportunity to talk about with anyone else.
    Mom also started to get to know some of the children in the Levin house. There was the eldest, a quiet and beautiful girl about sixteen years old with long straight dark hair and almond eyes. Then there were three boys, each separated by just one year, who were almost indistinguishable to Mom but who were equally loud and sweet and funny. Then there were two younger girls, neither as beautiful as their older sister, and a baby who never seemed to be out of Hannah’s arms.

    One afternoon, about four months after Mom had started regularly visiting the Levin house, she was surprised to find the eldest daughter at the front door.
    “Can we take a walk?” she asked my mother.
    Mom didn’t quite know what to say to this girl. So she asked for Hannah.
    “She’s not here this afternoon. She has an appointment. Please. I really need to talk to you.”
    Mom peeked behind her into the house and could see Mordechai’s closed study door at the end of the hallway.
    “Let me just—”
    “No,” the girl interrupted. “Please. I don’t want him to know.”
    So Mom went for a walk with this girl because she saw something desperate in her eyes, and at twenty-eight she didn’t feel too far away from her own years of teenage isolation and the times that she’d wished there were someone she could talk to.
    And on this walk through the neighborhood of this little suburb south of Boston, while paused under a large oak with almost no leaves left on it (because like it is here now, it was November then), Mordechai and Hannah Levin’s eldest child, their daughter Rivka, told my mother that she was pregnant.

NINE
    Mom won her case. It was her first big victory as a young lawyer; it got a lot of press and put her on the map in the legal community, and it helped shape her views on religion and freedom. This is what made it into my article for the
Oaks Gazette
. It made for a great story, and Zack took a really cool picture with Mom in front of a church holding a sword and a shield, which, in case you don’t get Zack’s brilliance, showed her as both an aggressor against and a protector of religion. That’s what I wrote about, even though for Mom, everything about her first big case was eclipsed by this young girl and her sidewalk confession