Convene The Kingdom

By Jerome Mandel

Revisiting an old friend in Israel, Nona, Charyn, and their families confront the emotional poverty of their lives back in Ohio. With financially successful but dismissive husbands, the women recognize the need for change and the desire for something more.

Tragedy strikes when an apparent assassination attempt forces their friend David and his family back to the States. As they adjust to life in the suburbs, they are confronted with the stress and delights of life in America.

Amidst the chaos, a long-brewing love story emerges. Three friends who have loved each other for years must navigate entangling alliances and commitments to others, all while trying to create a better world for themselves. But redesigning their lives won't be easy, and they must remove impediments and make tough choices to achieve true happiness.

In Jerome Mandel's 'Convene The Kingdom', the characters learn that love and happiness are worth fighting for, even when it means challenging the status quo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Mar 29, 2023

Book preview

Chapter One

Tel Aviv, Israel. 1978

I know, said David enthusiastically, "let’s go see the souk." They sat beneath the pergola in the back garden of David’s rented house, the Mediterranean actually twinkling on the horizon.

David said everything enthusiastically. It was his job. As the Assistant Cultural Attaché to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, he had to generate enthusiasm for the most arcane and irrelevant native oddities to amuse the pampered wives and children of wandering American congressmen, governors, mayors, Fulbright scholars, and conventioneers. The American Association of Ombudsmen was winding up four days of intensive talks in Jerusalem and the Brotherhood of Firefighters was due in next week. They all wanted to know what their precious tax dollars were doing to spread the American way of life to the colorful people of the Middle East and to see as much as they could in the limited time allowed to them by the public organization that funded their trip.

David loved his job, though he was not uniformly successful with all the people he was supposed to amuse. The men brushed past him after a perfunctory handshake, preferring to speak to the Cultural Attaché herself rather than a junior or assistant anything. They knew where the power lay.

He was always more successful with women, who caught their breath in surprise to see such a darkly handsome man in such an unexpected place. At thirty-eight D[avid] O[rville] Degliorti was physically gorgeous – straight and slim with a crown of deep black hair and startling blue eyes, so intensely electric blue they seemed unearthly. Though he was sixth generation American, the Mediterranean sun had brought back the color of antique gold, of sultanas and rich white wine to his skin. He smelled of sea-wind and sun-lit beaches. He had the manners of a count. Women flustered. They blushed. They smiled from ear to ear. They were overwhelmed by his presence and delighted by his attention. They knew he was really a spy.

The older women with teased and lacquered hair, pink powdered faces, and the constant air of a fecund and overly fertilized flower garden, always referred to him as that nice young man at the embassy who took them here or took them there. They couldn’t tell their husbands exactly where they had been, but they had had a good time.

The sleek younger women, the gently cutthroat wives of aggressive, upwardly mobile, politically energetic husbands, always offered to shake his hand when introduced and held it slightly longer than necessary as if to say with the slip of skin over warm skin that they, too, knew where the power lay.

With the children of the Wandering Americans, he was invariably embarrassed. There had been a time, before he was thirty, when he still spoke their language, but now he realized that if they couldn’t pop it, drink it, smoke it, shoot it, or screw it, they weren’t interested. They approached museums with the enthusiasm of a sloth. They viewed the remnants of a Paleolithic village with the interest usually reserved for green cat puke. They began the day with polite indifference and ended with antagonistic surliness. The boys especially washed their hands of the entire hopelessly backward country when they realized that hardly anyone in Israel knew or cared that Dallas won the Super Bowl in February and the Yankees were on the road to the World Series. Again.

He was more comfortable with the younger children because he had a boy (Sean, 14) and a girl (Ingrid, 12) at home. They, too, were not interested in museums, churches, monuments, archeological digs, castles, grottos, caves, vistas, memorials, Bedouin camps, kibbutzim, crusader forts, or any of the detritus left by the ancient Hebrew, Phoenician, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian, Nabataean, Syrian, Hellenic, Roman, Moslem, Byzantine, Turkish, British, or modern Jewish cultures and civilization. Sean and Ingrid could be encouraged to go shopping for toys and records (but not for clothes or food) and they were mildly addicted to television and film. Otherwise, they were content to play on the beach with children of other embassy personnel and gripe about the weather and the beastly Jews (or wogs or slants or squints or slopes), in spite of the fact that living abroad, especially for Americans, was thought to be educational and to generate tolerance for inferior cultures.

But David did not rise to his present position in the Foreign Service to be easily daunted by children. He was, after all, a professional. He simply had to find the connection between the people he was dealing with and what they were looking at to make it interesting to them. A Dakota congressman once aggravated everyone with his boredom until David showed him the water-storage system and irrigation troughs the Nabataeans built at En Avdat to solve a water shortfall problem similar to what the congressman’s constituents endured in western Dakota. Then the congressman had to see every ancient and modern irrigation system in the country. David prided himself on making connections. And the same was true for the children. He had to find the connection.

Look at this, Sean, he said to his son.

What is it?

It’s a Byzantine winepress.

Who cares?

Remember when you were three and we lived in Lima?

No.

Sure you do. We went to a little zoo on the outskirts of the city, a petting zoo, for children.

Is that where that goddamn llama stepped on my foot? He was in what his Aunt Cindy called the cute profane stage of adolescence.

That’s right.

God! I remember that. I was three?

Yes, now listen—

Goddamn big fucking hairy llama stepped right on my foot. I screamed.

You didn’t like it.

Was I only three?

Yes, now you see, you do remember Peru.

Goddamn. You would remember it too if you were only three and this big, hairy animal that smelled like garbage stepped its pointy goddamn hoof on your foot.

And do you remember the troughs that ran around the side of the petting zoo?

No.

Sure you do. You said they looked like ‘macaroni bited in half the long way’.

What are you talking about? screamed Sean. What does that have to do with a Byzantine winepress in Israel? He was easily irritated.

Look. Look at this. Here is where the grapes were placed and crushed and the wine ran down these hollow stone troughs— just like ‘macaroni bited in half the long way’—and fell into buckets here, which were then dumped into casks or vats over there. But see! The troughs are the same: blocks of stone with a hollow groove set end on end to make the trough. Just like the Inca in Peru, he said triumphantly.

After such a victory, it was easy to feel proud, and while David did not always know what the wandering American children were interested in, he would cast about until he found some connection for them, too. If they wore earrings, chains, bracelets, brooches, pins, and seven rings, he took them to the Jewelry Museum. If they talked sports, he tried to find pick-up basketball or soccer games. If they were at that age when they discovered their bodies—length and curve and color and power—he unleashed them on the sea. And if they wanted to be doctors and lawyers when they grew up, he took them to the Numismatics Museum. The country, unlike most in which he had served, was so rich in possibilities that he was sure to find some connection for everyone somewhere.

David was having trouble finding that connection for the people sitting in the little garden outside his rented house in Herzliya Pituach, the leafy suburb of Tel Aviv favored by diplomatic personnel, not because they were quintessentially American, but because they were friends. He had known most of them for the past twenty-five years. Charyn Siemen (she was Charyn Hart before she married Walken) and Nona Semple (now Mrs. Nona Hunter) were friends of his sister, Cindy, from their junior high school days.

Charyn was a fixer, a saver of old, broken things—clocks and lamps and lawn mowers both manual and electric—someone who returned things to the way they were before. Anything that needed regluing, rewiring, repainting, taking apart and putting back together. The status quo ante. Along the same lines, she kept a record of the major events of the previous day as if to preserve the way things were. She saved all her memorabilia from childhood until she was fourteen, when her mother, just before being institutionalized, hauled everything into the backyard and set it afire.

Charyn began again and seemed to save every scrap of paper that came her way. At first, she did it for herself, to hold her own life together, give it definition and history: what she had done, where she had been, who she had been with. She was never bullied in high school for her obsession once it became known that she was a girl rich in older brothers, four of them, burly boys who worked in the family business. They taught her more than any young girl needed to know about how engines worked and cars ran. Hart Automotive Parts and Repairs had seven outlets scattered throughout northern Ohio.

And then, perhaps because of something David said about Proust’s mother, who had also been a saver, she saw that what she was doing was collecting the material for some future historian who would define the life of an American woman in the second half of the twentieth century. It seemed to give purpose and respectability to her obsession and justified hauling trunk loads of material to college, to the apartment she lived in afterwards, and finally to the old, stone, Siemen family home she now shared with Walken.

Once settled there, Charyn became a gardener, a preserver of things beautiful. She filled the windows with hanging plants, the side tables and corners with ferns, big leaf plants, and other greenery. She did it naturally, without thinking. In the colorful gardens beside and behind the house, Charyn was a ruthless gardener. She put salt on the slugs and stepped on the snails until she heard the shell snick. Rabbits and deer were disappointed.

She sat in the garden now at David’s house, in a chair on the gravel path so as not to crush the grass and held a baby spider plant whose stalk was split. The baby dangled at the end of the browning stalk, receiving no nourishment, slowly starving to death. She snipped it off with her thumbnail and would put it in a glass of water to root.

The most obvious thing about Nona, on the other hand, was that she was a theoretician, a careful, often elegant thinker. It was apparent in her schoolwork, of course, but even more so in her mania for games. She was adept at chess, quite superior even to David. Sometimes she attacked with surgical precision and elegant economy of move; sometimes she concentrated the attack in one area and, while he attempted to preserve the kingdom there, she would slip a piece away from the action and capture a piece he neglected to protect. She had no compunction about sacrificing anyone for position and advantage. She rarely lost. Because she liked to trade queens, he accused her of having no respect for women, but the ease with which she abandoned knights and bishops suggested her lack of involvement with any of the people in the game.

She was equally good at checkers, poker, dominoes, Monopoly, Clue. As she grew older, she mastered the more sophisticated adult games: tactics, strategy, power, manipulation. She was so much brighter than the men she dated. They all bored her until, at the proper time and perhaps because she was last to marry and had nothing better to do, she met Alex Hunter who insisted she marry him and then, since his money was newer than Walken’s, insisted she quit work.

When they were twelve, Nona and Charyn regularly came to Cindy’s house to do homework. David, drawn to the center of giggles, would drift into Cindy’s sweet room to help them with their confounding math (Why do we have to know how to solve quadratic equations?), teach them how to bisect an angle with a compass, or explain the connection between slavery, States’ rights, and the Civil War.

As they grew up, they grew more serious together. All the subtle problems of boy-girl relationships were played out, analyzed, discussed, probed, dissected. David’s authority and experience were a prime source of information, and the girls tapped it first to solve abstract and theoretical problems, later to solve more pressing problems of back-seat etiquette that they were constantly called upon to handle.

Buttons down the front of a blouse or sweater are an invitation, David said from his vast experience, and buttons down the back offer easy access to important hooks and things.

They were friends in other ways as well. They walked to school together. When David got his license, they drove to Baskin-Robbins in the evening. They went to basketball and football games together, especially to watch David play.

The first time they went to the quarry at night, Nona said, What would it be like to go swimming in moonlight?

Let’s see, said Charyn, stripping out of her clothes.

They laughed a lot. Other friends would drift in and out of their experience, but these were the stable, central figures in each other’s lives. They preferred to be with each other more than with anyone else, had pet names for each other, and familiar jokes. They were friends, buddies, pals through high school and the long, warm summer vacations from college.

David went to college first and two years later the girls followed, Cindy kicking and screaming because she didn’t want to always follow in her big brother’s footsteps, Nona and Charyn more complacently and, at that point in their lives, more expectantly. They both looked upon David as theirs in a splendid way that was neither possessive nor jealous. Each felt that he slightly favored the other, that if the boat were sinking, he would save the other first, and that that was all right.

But the David they found at college was not the David who left them in high school. He took his work seriously, and he took his play seriously, too. There were more than enough girls for him to date in college, and he seemed to date them all. In any event, Nona and Charyn were taboo. It would have been incest to date them the way he dated other girls and besides, one didn’t do that to friends. And they—no matter how high their hormone levels were at eighteen, no matter how much estrogen pumped through their systems, no matter how much adrenalin coursed through their bodies to flush their cheeks and shorten their breath and keep them warm in open coats on the coldest winter days—they found no release for their sexual energies in David. Still, there were more than enough college boys for them, and they seemed to date them all.

David stayed on to do a master’s degree in International Relations, so they all graduated together. The only remnant of their former intimacy was the Sunday mornings in David’s graduate school apartment with The New York Times. No matter how late they had been up the night before, no matter how dissolute their behavior, they always gathered with religious devotion at 10:30, washed, clean, combed, crisply dressed for breakfast which began at the coffee table and spread to the floor. It was their quiet time together. They were happy. Sometimes Cindy came, but no one else was welcome. Years later, their happiest memories of college were those long languid Sunday mornings, coffee pot steaming in the slanted sunlight, warm rolls, apples dipped in honey, curling on the couch, dozing under the afghan. They never talked about their lives outside. They didn’t talk much about politics or the other chronicled horrors of the world. They stored up words from the week behind and gathered strength from their silence together for the week to come.

Cindy married first, the day after graduation. David married Sylvia three years later in San Francisco to the surprise of everyone and then, a few months after that, in what seemed to be a chain reaction, Charyn married Walken Siemen and Nona married Alex Hunter.

Though David was posted to Peru, Pakistan, and New Guinea before arriving at the prestigious post in Israel, he always kept in touch, sent presents at Christmas and on their children’s birthdays, and spent his leave time and vacations in the same Midwestern town where they all grew up. They were the only best friends they had.

The Hunters and the Siemens were rich enough in their middle and late thirties to do what they wanted to do. While their children were young, they took two weeks in the winter at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach and two weeks in the summer in Aspen. Now that their children were almost teenagers, they decided to visit David in his natural habitat, something they had not done since he had been posted out of their comfort zone. They had exhausted the beauties and native attractions of Israel in less than a week and spent the rest of the time longing for the more familiar amusements of home.

And now, with only two days left, they were dead-tired, exhausted, washed out, limp. Israel had more to give, but they did not. The sun punished them. It beat upon them mercilessly. It whitened the world. It made them squint. The hot wind dried their skin, and the sun showed the truth: every delicate trace of crow’s foot at the corner of the