Night Owls: Chapters 1-3

The point of her gift was not to chase her cravings; it was to finish the work that she had started, to build a great and resilient theater on the avenue where she had made her home against all odds.

“Look, I know I’m late,” he said quickly at her appraisal, needlessly adjusting the collar of his shirt and making a futile attempt at raking his hair back into place.

He probably thought he could charm and lie his way into a reprieve, the way he had done a dozen other times.

After all, to the ordinary eye, Clara and Molly were the young and talented stewards of one of the great landmarks of the neighborhood, an independent cinema that honored its roots as a Yiddish stage.

The patronage of East Village bubbes kept the theater lights on.

Boaz furrowed his brow, as if she, Clara, was the one who was talking nonsense.

In another age, this hall had been dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces for the Yiddish theater troupes who made their home on Second Avenue.

Her footsteps were swallowed up by the thick carpet as she emerged into the dim lobby, where fake gas lamps flickered in sconces against the wall.

Clara and her sister had saved the theater from an ignoble death at the hands of time and developers...with a bit of help.

They had restored the great chandelier, the gilt columns, the finely patterned wallpapers, installing screens where there had been stages.

The costume had been for Di Shturem: The Yiddish Tempest, when Molly had played the villain, the vengeful sheyd, Chenya, her frankly inspired take on Shakespeare’s Caliban.

It had been her favorite costume, the best she’d ever worn, and Anat was objectively beautiful in it, the kind of beautiful that made Molly want to rip the dress off her for reasons that had nothing to do with its past and everything to do with now.

“Is the Yiddish Hamlet some yeshiva student?”

Molly had even expressed interest in finally getting around to digitizing their film collection as a pretext to learning how to edit video content for the internet, an interest that Clara had thankfully not questioned.

Clara had finally relented and let Molly get social media a couple of years ago, with the caveat that it was exclusively professional accounts for the theater.

Boaz could feign interest during his waking hours, but at one in the morning he did not need to hear about the treachery of the Dutch West India Company or how Anthony would never have done something so dishonorable as pay his debts with a dead goat, that if a perfectly healthy goat simply expired on the spot after taking one whiff of the unwashed scoundrel, then that was hardly his fault.

“If you would only send a missive through the proper channels...I’d be happy to dictate the letters to you, if we could maybe begin this evening.”

Because the answer was always a resounding no.

She would at least look interested when he brought him up, instead of glazing over like she did when he spouted off facts about obscure silent films.

She was still staring into the mirror, her eyes trained on it, concentrating so intently that Boaz would not have been surprised if she burned a hole right through the glass with her gaze.

That faucet was very temperamental, had been for years, and no amount of pleading with the super had gotten him to come and fix it.

She wandered away from the stifling house to the cowshed, where the butcher’s cows had already been led for the night.

“I disagree. I think she is just insolent. I think that she has some funny ideas in her head, and has forgotten what she is and why we bought her.”

For all the terrible things that had befallen them in other seasons that they had endured, this was hardly such a great ask.

The word that came to mind was sheydim, the demons that old yentas in the village feared and blamed for all their ordinary woes, the things that new mothers feared most of all when birth was done.