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

made on that November afternoon.
    Rivka didn’t know who else to turn to, and she figured that my mother, this liberal lawyer from the city, could help her find a place to get an abortion.
    Of course, Mom was a firm believer in a woman’s right to choose, but she had never come face to face with this belief. And here was Rivka’s face, not the face of a woman but that of a girl—young, frightened, and confused. Before this moment, choice was an abstract concept to Mom. It was an idea to believe in. It was something to fight for. But now here it stood, right in front of her, asking for help, asking what to do, asking that Mom be the lawyer, judge, and jury.
    She said she would do whatever she could to get Rivka through this, but that Rivka needed to talk to her parents first. At this suggestion Rivka sat down, right there in the middle of the sidewalk under the oak tree, and wept. She said her parents would disown her; she said that she would bring shame upon the Rebbe’s house. She said it would be the end of her life. Mom had spent enough time by now with Mordechai to know that Rivka was probably right about how he would react, but Mom had also caught glimpses of a Hannah who might be able to see things differently.
    Mom was right. Hannah, before being a Hasidic Jew, before being the Rebbetzen, before being anything else, was a mother who loved her daughter. She didn’t want Rivka, at the age of sixteen, to have a baby. But she also didn’t want Rivka to have an abortion.
    Hannah asked Mom to help them find a home for the baby, a good home with a good family. Her contact with the world beyond the Hasids in their little community was limited. She didn’t know where to go or who to call or what to do.
    Hannah wanted this done quietly. No one was to know, especially not the Rebbe. It was to their advantage that he never took a careful look at his daughter and that the Hasidic uniform of long skirts and ill-fitting tops was naturally forgiving to someone in Rivka’s condition. She would need only a few larger, baggier outfits in the final months. As it turned out, Rivka was already four and a half months pregnant and was hardly showing. Hannah fully expected that Rivka would carry this baby neatly and close to her slender frame, just as Hannah had done with all seven of her pregnancies.
    On some days the dual role Mom played in the Levin house would be too much for her. She would come home to the little apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Vince Bloom, only twenty-five and a student at the art institute, exhausted, teary, depressed, and filled with anxiety. Her sleeplessness kept him up at night. They talked of almost nothing else.
     
    One night, about five weeks after Rivka’s sidewalk confession, Mom got off the T, briefcase in hand, and walked up the snow-covered cobblestone street in Beacon Hill where she and Vince lived. She could see into the second-floor window of their apartment. The living room was illuminated by an unusual light, soft and full of movement, as if there were a fire in the fireplace she always wished they had. She left her boots in the entryway and unlocked the front door. Vince was sitting on the couch clutching a bouquet of white tulips. The flames from hundreds of tiny votive candles flickered everywhere.
    “What’s going on in here?” was all my mother could say, and it occurred to her right then that she sounded just like her own mother did when she discovered her children doing something they shouldn’t.
    “Come here,” Vince said, and patted the couch next to him. He took away her briefcase and took my mother’s hands. He put the tulips down on the coffee table. Their stems had been crushed by his nervous grip.
    “I know this sounds crazy, Elsie, but I think we should do this. I think we should take this baby. We may be young and stupid and have absolutely no experience with babies, but nobody knows what they’re doing when they first have a baby, and I think we’ll be just