The Blood Lie. Shirley Reva Vernick

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      The synagogue, a ten-minute walk from the Pools’ house, was a small red brick building with tinted windows and heavy double doors. Jack, Harry and Mr. Pool climbed the front steps and entered the sanctuary, a simple room with twelve benches—six on the left for men and boys and six on the right for women and girls. On the bima stood a lectern and, against the far wall, a wooden cabinet that housed the two Torah scrolls. The windows spilled chartreuse light into the room.

      “Where’s Rabbi Abrams?” asked Harry, impatient for the services to begin and end. He fell into his usual spot, nearest the window in the second row.

      “What difference does it make?” Jack asked, nodding to his friend Abe Goldberg. “We’re only five yet.” Ten men were required to hold a worship service, and they were only halfway there.

      “Rats,” Harry said. But by the time they put on their prayer shawls and yarmulkes, Rabbi Abrams was entering the sanctuary, flanked by a handful of other men. “Finally,” Harry whispered.

      Rabbi Louis Abrams was a compact man with a trim nut-brown beard and a scar on one cheek that turned into an S whenever he smiled, which was often. He nodded to the men and boys as he approached the bima, then took his place behind the lectern and began chanting the Hebrew prayers.

      Jack grew restless within minutes. He’d felt restless a lot lately, stuck in this remote little whistle-stop that didn’t even have a movie theater or a music store. Scarcely five miles from Ontario, Canada, Massena was locked between the St. Lawrence River on one side and the Adirondack Mountains on the other, a flat, bland expanse of nothingness. Most Massena men toiled as dairy farmers or laborers at the aluminum works, jobs they held all their lives and then passed on to their sons. People stayed on here—and so did their children—until no one seemed to notice the drudgery anymore.

      No one except Jack. Every day he felt this place trying to squeeze the music right out of him. No concert hall, no local quartet, no classical music on the radio. Jack didn’t know what he’d do without Mr. Morse, who taught the skimpy school orchestra, gave lunch-period lessons, and, most importantly, spent untold hours with him after school, talking about fingering, bowing, rhythm, and the inner workings of the music. But Mr. Morse would be retiring at the end of the year. What then? What would he do then if he didn’t get into the Bentley School?

      Harry nudged Jack out of his reverie. “I saw Sarah gawking at you yesterday,” he whispered.

      “Huh? Sarah who?”

      “Sarah Gelman, who else? Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed her looking.”

      “Well, I haven’t,” he said, and it was the truth. How could Jack think about other girls when there was Emaline, the girl he’d almost kissed? The only girl he wanted to kiss.

      “Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

      Jack didn’t hear him.

      “Don’t you?” Harry asked again.

      “Don’t I what?”

      “Think she’s pretty, genius.”

      “Yeah, she’s okay.”

      “Want me to tell her brother next week?”

      “No.”

      “Why not?”

      Jack had nothing to say, so he said nothing.

      “You think she’s a bug-eyed Betty, don’t you?” Harry said.

      “I told you she’s okay. I’m just not interested.”

      “How come?”

      Rabbi Abrams saved Jack from Harry’s inquisition by singing Adon Olam, the closing song. Harry had his shawl folded and put away before the hymn was over.

      “Come, the store,” Mr. Pool said to Jack. “Harry, your mother needs your help at home.”