Free The Beautiful Possible by Amy Gottlieb Page B

would not be everything—translation is an imperfect art and Sol would balk at the spices—but she will find a way to live with her husband’s touch. His small hands. His one deaf ear. His big heart. It will take a lifetime to teach him what she wants but she, Rosalie Wachs, soon to be Rosalie Kerem, will find a way.
    Walter lies on the floor of the upper geniza and listens to the faint laughter of the students gathering for their graduation party. Rosalie has told him about the progression of their remaining weeks here. Sol will be told where to report for his first pulpit.The wedding will take place at the end of the month but Rosalie will not disclose the exact date or location, even though she knows Walter will not show up. Sol and Rosalie will marry and drive away in their new car. The rest of the rabbinical students will pack their bags and Walter will remain. Someone on the faculty will notice him lingering in a room and ask what he learned during his stay, and it will become obvious that Paul Richardson’s arrangement was a sham. The rabbis housed him for a while; they lent shelter to a refugee whose sole contribution to the Seminary was offered in the upper geniza and the lower geniza, those holding places for discarded books and source sheets, unmailed letters and spoken words that would never be recorded into history.
    “Where are you now, Sonia?” Walter asks aloud. “Where are you going, Rosalie?”
    Rosalie wears her white satin wedding shoes to Sol’s graduation party so she can break them in. She totters on the spiked heels and leans on Sol’s arm for balance. Her face is smeared with a paste of makeup, and she holds her neck high. This is who I will be, she thinks. A first lady. A queen. A rebbetzin who is foolish beyond words. She enters the Seminary party room, her arm linked with Sol’s.
    The students and faculty erupt into the traditional wedding song: “ Od yishoma be’arei yehuda, uvechutzot yerushalayim : kol sasson v’kol simcha kol chatan v’kol kallah. Still will be heard in the cities of Judea and in the courtyards of Jerusalem: the voice of laughter and the voice of joy, the voice of a groom, and the voice of a bride.”
    Walter crosses the courtyard, following the sound of raucous singing. When he first met Rosalie, he was afraid to walk across this open space alone and would linger in the shadows of the arcade. But he no longer worries that he will be murdered by a Nazi, or exposed for being less than an authentic Jew. Rosalie’s love had made him feel safe; her affection felt like a canopy over his head. Let the rabbis wrap themselves in prayer shawls; if Walter were to ever become a man of prayer, Rosalie would be his tallit.
    He stands at the doorway of the party room and peeks. With her upswept hair and veneer of makeup, he can barely recognize her. They look perfect together, he thinks. They will have beautiful babies. Walter pictures Sol and Rosalie’s mothers sitting together at the wedding, admiring their grown children cascading across the dance floor, perfectly matched in each other’s arms.
    Walter turns and Rosalie calls to him.
    “Wait—”
    “It’s a lovely party,” he says. “You and Sol are a perfect fit.”
    “Don’t—”
    “Go back to your fiancé, darling.”
    Her voice quivers. “Find me when this is over. I’m so confused—”
    He takes her face in his hands and kisses her tears.
    “Better now,” he says.
    “Not better at all,” she whimpers.
    “Go to him, Rosalie. Sol is waiting for you.”
    After the party Sol is invited to the Radish’s apartment for drinks and final words of congratulations. Rosalie and Walter sit side byside in the upper geniza, and stare straight ahead at the unread Torah scroll resting under the suit jacket. Rosalie kicks off her party shoes.
    “I want to go back in time,” she says. “Our first kiss.”
    Walter shrugs.
    “Don’t you?” asks Rosalie.
    “My relationship to the past is very different from