Jamaican Gold

When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with gold cross necklaces. I was about 8, and Jewish, so naturally this caused a bit of a stir in our house. We had a nanny who lived with us back then, she was from Jamaica and wore a light blue nurse's uniform. Her skin smelled like gardenias and cocoa butter and she did bible studies in her room at night, when I was supposed to be in bed. Sneaking glimpses of her bible and notebooks, I zeroed in on the crosses emblazoned on them. Bingo, I thought. This is my chance.

While Soul Train played on her small TV with the sound turned down, Mary would read bible stories to me, eventually giving me colorful, illustrated versions from her churches Sunday school archives.

If I'm honest, I will admit that my motivation for participating in these secretive studies was the glittery cross that teased me from the throat of my classmate, Allison Scully. Allison was also allowed to wear ripped jeans, had blonde hair and a tan-all-year-round complexion. She was not Jewish. And I wanted to be like her.

Our studies were secretive because Mary knew, much better than I did, that my Jewish father would likely object to his only daughter being evangelized under his roof. In retrospect, he might not have cared much. It was my lapsed Catholic mother that eventually put the kabosh on the late night Soul Train sessions.

Mary told me that she would get me a gold cross necklace if I finished all my lessons with her. She told me that the gold that came from her country is more beautiful than from anywhere else. She proudly showed me her own cross, tucked discreetly behind her powder blue collar. Good for her. She knew that visions of jewelry danced in my head and wanted to be sure I knew the meaning of that pendant I so desperately wanted.

When the day came that I'd correctly filled in all the blank, underlined spaces in my notebooks (and believe me, I labored over them) I casually approached my mother in the kitchen after she'd gotten home from work.

Poor Mom. Working her tail off. Sitting in traffic on the George Washington bridge. Likely worrying about my nutjob younger brother and how he was compulsively punching his Kindergarden classmates. The last thing she was expecting was a religious grenade, lobbed from her daughter's 4th grade hand.

Ironically, this is still how I approach my mother, 20, er, ahem, plus years later, with my biggest news. "Want something from Starbucks? By the way, I'm getting married and moving to Texas." That sort of thing.

Before the words had even fully left my mouth, she was hushing me and pulling me to the dark of the front stairwell. "Whatever you do," she said, "don't tell your father." That was it. End of story. The saga of the gold cross necklace had come to an end, at least temporarily.

Looking back, I am profoundly moved by this act of love from my mother toward my father. Maybe there was some genuine fear there, but my mother is not one to scare easily. Though my father has always, and still does at 82, cut an intimidating figure. Their marriage was a shell, propped up on holidays (Jewish ones) for us kids, and their friends. There was literally no love between them, though I didn't really know that yet. Though her own needs, and even dignity were often disregarded by my father, my mother took great care in protecting his Jewish-ness. Something that he himself cared little about.

Recently on the telephone he told me, "You know, when you were a kid, you begged me to send you to Hebrew school." I waited breathless for some additional revelation of my childhood self. "Why didn't you?" I asked. "I don't know" he said. Silence.

"Well," I retorted, tongue planted firmly in cheek, "blame yourself I'm not a Jew."

I kept prodding. "Well, your mother was not interested and..." "Dad," I said, "she was more interested in Judaism than you ever were."

A note of tenderness entered his gravelly voice, "I never knew that", he said " I never knew that."