Festival of Deaths Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what I mean, something really out of the ordinary. I usually do this myself in advance but—”
    “Don’t apologize.”
    “I’m not apologizing,” Shelley said. “Get me Max. Get me Itzaak. Oh, and as soon as we set up, get me Lotte, if she’s in, because Itzaak’s got to light her and I’ve got to be sure—”
    “I know,” DeAnna said. “I know.”
    “Everybody knows everything around here,” Shelley said. “We sound like a couple of mynah birds. Go back to your office. If you could remember to give the messages I told you—”
    “I’ll remember. You going to need anything in the way of props?”
    Shelley looked the set over, seeing it in her mind the way it would be once it had been transformed, and shook her head.
    “No props. Some water because they have to have it or they choke. That’s all.”
    “I’ll make sure Sarah knows about the water.”
    Sarah. At the sound of Sarah’s name, Shelley shot a look of sympathy at DeAnna and caught DeAnna shooting one back. The two women smiled and looked away from each other. Sarah was the ultimate example of Lotte’s “not being fed up yet.” Everybody else on the show had been fed up with Sarah for years. At least, Shelley thought, she was better off than DeAnna. DeAnna had to put up with Sarah as an assistant.
    Shelley sat down on the edge of the stage and said, “Go. I’ve got everything under control. Send me the guys when they come in.”
    “You really think Itzaak was with Carmencita?” DeAnna asked.
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Shelley said.
    DeAnna sighed. “It’s my personal opinion that most women—Christian and Jew; fat and thin; white, black, and green—need their heads examined.”
    Shelley laughed, and DeAnna went striding across the studio and out the studio door. Shelley turned around and looked at the set, going over the changes in her mind one more time, making sure she had it all down pat. It wasn’t as easy to think on no sleep as it had been when Shelley was still at Rhode Island, but it was easier than she would have imagined. Middle age had turned out not to be such a boogeyman after all.
    Shelley had gotten to her feet and started across the studio to get her tote bag when she saw the dreidel, and then she couldn’t help herself. It was sitting in the middle of the set where it didn’t belong. Shelley couldn’t abide having things where they didn’t belong. It was an ordinary dreidel, a small top with four planed surfaces on its sides and the surfaces painted with Hebrew letters, a toy for family gambling games during Hanukkah. Hanukkah was late in December this year, but the dreidels had started showing up at delis and newsstands at the beginning of November, and now everybody on the show had at least one. Shelley supposed half of everybody in New York had at least one, since fifty cents, and not a connection to Judaism, was the only requirement for ownership.
    She picked this dreidel up and turned it over in her hand, murmuring the Hebrew letters to herself and the sentence they stood for. Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn, the letters went, meaning Nes gadol hayah sham —“A great miracle occurred there.” That meant the miracle of the one night of oil that had lasted eight nights and allowed the Maccabees to win a military victory over Antiochus, after Antiochus had tried to forbid the Jews to practice Judaism. Shelley had grown up in a decidedly secular family and married a decidedly secular man, but even she knew this much about the religion of her ancestors. Hanukkah, her grandmother used to say, is the one holiday even Communists are loath to give up. Shelley hadn’t known what that meant, because all the people in her family were advocates of Freud, not Marx, and wouldn’t have known a manifesto if it showed up for dinner.
    Shelley flipped the dreidel in her hand one more time, and then stopped. The dreidel was defective. Maybe that was why it was left on the floor. The nūn and gīmel and hē were all in