A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell Page B

almost see it (his heart, I mean) pounding like a fox against the bars of his rib cage whenever Mother walked into a room. The excitement was taking its toll. He could hardly sleep. He exhausted himself each night staring at the ceiling in anticipation of the dawn. In the morning, a day nearer to claiming his beloved, he was too excited to eat. He sat at the table and allowed Grandmother Sammelsohn to serve him, though he couldn’t touch a bite.
    How long could he burn like a Havdalah candle with all his wicks in flame?
    “She’ll be a widow longer than a bride,” the townspeople whispered. “If she doesn’t smother him with affection, she might just smother him,” they didn’t even bother to whisper. “Alter Nosn, eat, rest, consider your health!” my grandmother Sammelsohn pleaded with him, but all in vain.
    Lovesick and simply sick, Father abandoned himself to the wedding preparations, studying through the long night, his body bent likea question mark over his Gemara, memorizing every word our Sages had uttered on the subject of spousal duty, so depleting himself in the process that eventually he could barely speak. His voice sounded like a piece of crumbled rice paper, all crackles and pops and sibilant hisses, and to everyone’s surprise, when the morning of the wedding arrived, he was alive to see it, although how well was the question: his vision had begun to fail.
    WHAT NO ONE understood, of course, was what my mother saw in him, and yet she seemed as smitten as he, and as eager to have the wedding contract signed. What no one knew, indeed what no one could have possibly known, is that for many weeks before they met, Father had appeared to Mother each night in a series of dreams. In one, he offered her an iridescent fish; in another, a basket of ripe fruit; in a third, a tin box filled with cookies shaped like the letters of the alef-bais. These, he hurled high into the air and, as they fell, they flashed out cryptic sentences in rapidly changing constellations. Upon awakening, Mother scribbled down what she could remember of them in a diary she kept near her bed. Realizing, too late, that in rushing to document this dream on a Saturday morning, she had unintentionally violated the Sabbath, she threw down the pen, and when she peered at the words again later, they made no sense to her at all:
    Using Almoli’s famous dreambook, she took all sorts of arcane stabs at what this emaciated apparition might mean, never for a moment thinking his nightly appearances might contain the slightest bit of prophecy. Still, there is no dream without its interpretation, and in her prayers she begged her great-great-great-grandfather, the Seer of Lublin, to intervene on her behalf, to petition the archangel Gabriel to unlock the secret meaning of these visitations. The seer proved unable to move Heaven in this regard, however. Appearing to her one night in a luminous white robe, he counseled patience: “Wait, my daughter,” he said. “The best is yet to be.”
    And so when she strode so purposefully into the Sammelsohn parlor, following her uncle and her father, and saw the wretched invalid sittingthere like a waterlogged scarecrow, she couldn’t help giving out a happy gasp of recognition. Here was the boy with the fish, the boy with the fruit, the boy with the cookies and the dozen and one other things he’d presented to her each night. The excitement she felt in having at last solved a puzzle and the dizzying sense of transformation it foretold stayed with her throughout their short engagement and did much to compensate her for the repulsion she felt at the sight of my father’s physical person.
    “Obviously God has intended me to marry him,” she told her worried parents.
    THE WEDDING DAY was sparkling, immaculate, the sunlight seeming to illuminate everything from within. The pink cherry blossoms trembled in the wind. The windows of the buildings along the main road, scrubbed clean for the occasion, dazzled the