Not only does she understand me better than I can ever describe myself, but we’ve developed a rapport over the years that comes with knowing each other from our childhood days. We talk daily, and she’s seen me through my life as much as I’ve walked her through hers. Lately, Sluvie* had been going through hard times. She lost a child suddenly and traumatically. I was there for her throughout. I laughed with her when she wanted to deny the pain, I cried with her when it was too overwhelming. I sat with her when she wanted to reminisce, and I helped her clean out her closets, getting rid of little red pants when she could no longer deal with the constant reminders. Before the tragedy, Sluvie had been in the process of building a home. Slowly, it was taking shape. First it was a skeleton and then a real home, complete with windows, tiles and radiators. It was almost ready to house her big, albeit broken, family. Then Sluvie’s financial situation took a massive nosedive. The financial burden of building the house, coupled with the fact that both she and her husband, Dov, slacked off in their respective work when the tragedy struck, caused their debt to reach staggering proportions. Sluvie tightened her belt considerably, but it wasn’t enough to do the trick. Daily, I heard her sigh about her lack of money. There was not even enough money to complete the Yom Tov shopping, the contractor was pressuring for payment, and the closing on the house was delayed because of finances. I listened to Sluvie. That’s what I was good at doing. Nevertheless, when she told me that she couldn’t afford any cleaning help, I felt that listening was wholly insufficient. I knew Sluvie, knew how much she needed her creature comforts.
After all she’d been through, she at least needed the assurance that her basic needs would be met. She would often fret and ask, “If only we can get a loan to tide us over.”“A loan would really help you,” I agreed. Both Sluvie and her husband were working, and I knew that once life settled down again, they’d be able to rehabilitate their finances. I even had an idea where to get a loan. I knew that loans for financially strapped families were hard to come by; Sluvie’s daily reports of her efforts to find one left no doubt. But I knew of a cache she could have access to—my own. Over the years, we had saved a nice amount of money to buy our own house, money that was just sitting there. We had recently signed a contract on a project in our neighborhood that was being built. Our money was therefore sitting in the bank, waiting for closing which was scheduled in a year’s time. I wasn’t sure that it was the best idea to withdraw the money now. What if we needed it in the next few months? Nevertheless, I felt compelled to help Sluvie. What good was any of the friendship and compassion I offered her if my money was lying fallow while she sank in a swamp of debt? I doubted that my husband would agree to lend the money. Pinny is as careful with his money as a pigeon is with her egg. Maybe it’s just our very different backgrounds, but I think my husband is extreme in his money habits. When I’m impatient, I call him a miser. As I see it, my husband has a craving to save as much as he can. It’s a pleasure that overrides his interest in any other worldly delight. He hasn’t bought himself a pair of shoes even once since we got married. I’ve often urged him to buy himself a pair because his shoes, even after daily polishing, look like they belong to a beggar. He tells me, “I’d rather save $130. These shoes feel fine to me.” When the shoes were ripping at the seams, he took two used pairs from his brother, who was getting married and had bought new footwear. Those two pairs have lasted him ever since. When I insisted on a new cordless phone, he picked one up from his mother. It had to be held together with Scotch tape and a spoon, but in his words, “Why spend when this works? Think of the money we saved.”
I can go on and on about my husband’s money habits, an attitude that shocked me when I first experienced it. But the bottom line is that we have the security of knowing we can buy a big-ticket item, like our house. We won’t have to go through what Sluvie was going through. And for that I’m grateful. I carefully broached the subject with Pinny. Would he be willing to lend the money to Sluvie and her husband until when we needed it? My husband said no. This was really important to me, though. Sluvie’s predicament kept creeping up in our conversations, until I felt I couldn’t tolerate her distress anymore. We were blessed, she was struggling, and we had a way to help her. The roadblock was my husband’s reluctance. I did what wives do best. I cajoled, putting on the charm and vulnerability. I explained what her friendship meant to me, how much Sluvie had gone through. I promised my husband that this would mean the world to me, that he’d be doing me a personal favor. In the end, my husband acquiesced. He approached Sluvie’s husband, Dov, in shul one day. He invited him to a meeting where they laid out the terms of the loan and signed on the deal. With a heter iska, Dov would repay my husband the entire sum within 12 months, along with a certain amount of interest he would have gotten had he invested the money. Dov emerged from the meeting with $50,000 of debt removed from his shoulders, for the time being. Sluvie sounded calmer during our phone calls. Money no longer took center stage in our conversations, and we had time to tackle other topics. Sluvie began talking about her children again, the ones who were part of her day and the one whose memory haunted her at night. My husband was just pensive. I told him that I appreciated how difficult this had been for him and how much I valued it. I repeated, mostly to reassure myself, that Sluvie and her husband were honest, hardworking people who would repay everything. My husband just said, “Money is something you have to protect carefully,” and that was it for the next couple of months. In that time, Dov repaid the interest in small monthly installments.
The capital remained unpaid. The agreed-upon due date arrived, and Dov didn’t have the money. He humbly spread his hands apart when Pinny approached him, demanding his loan back. I could have saved Pinny the trip. I knew that Sluvie’s bank account was not yet straightened out; because I was privy to her daily life, I had a window into her situation, which was still tight. My husband was annoyed. “We don’t need the money yet,” I pointed out. As things sometimes go in building developments, our house was still a raw mound of dirt at the edge of town. “I need it now,” my husband said. “I can’t sleep at night knowing that the money I worked hard for is walking around in the pocket of someone who hasn’t proven himself.” “He was on time for some of the payments,” I said weakly. “The due date has come and gone. I need to know I have my money,” he said, his voice hard. We left it at that, and several more months passed. I knew Dov was running around, pulling a blanket that was too small over whichever corner needed to be covered first. I heard it all from Sluvie, who recounted it in a tired, resigned voice. I wondered if Sluvie knew about the loan. I never discussed it with her; I felt that if she wanted to, she could broach the subject. Money often stole into our conversation; she would talk about her debt, and I would talk about how my husband reused plastic cups, picked up his mother’s broken treadmill, and put in hours of overtime at work. She could have broached the subject, but she didn’t. When our contractor informed us that he was starting to dig, I felt anticipation mixed with dread.
We would need the money within the next two months. My husband started cornering Dov. Dov scraped together $1,000 and handed it to my husband but said he didn’t have the rest. “The liar, the thief,” my husband fumed that night over dinner. “I should never, ever have lent my money. I knew I shouldn’t have done it.” He was kind enough not to state the obvious—that this was my mistake. Nobody else had been willing to take a gamble on that struggling couple, and I had forced my husband to do it. I felt guilty and silly. Had I, in my quest to ease my friend’s predicament, thrown away thousands of dollars that my husband had earned with his sweat? As the days passed and it was almost time to put down our money for the house, my husband grew more agitated. No longer content at leaving the obvious unsaid, he expressed his anger. “I gave him that money nearly two years ago,” he fumed. “You made me do it. What were you thinking? Didn’t you know that if they were irresponsible enough to land in this situation, they’d remain impoverished? What did I work for all these years—to give the money to Dov?” He raved while I cringed, unable to soothe him, unable to defend myself. The damage had created a gaping hole in our bank account and a rift in our relationship. “What is this friendship all about?” my husband asked me more than once. “Is it more important than our relationship? Is she more deserving of my money than I am? Why couldn’t you see my hard work, how I needed the security of having my money in my own account? Why did her needs come first?” I couldn’t answer.
On Thursday, four days before we had to put down the money on our house, my husband called Dov almost every hour. Dov answered evasively. I saw Pinny pacing the house. From time to time he called his brothers to vent. He didn’t know what to do with himself. I didn’t know what to do with myself either. I was worried about our house. I wanted to offer compassion to my husband, but I was afraid of coming within shooting range of his distress. I tried to lie low and found myself pacing the kitchen, wondering what would happen. Morning was no better. My husband leaped out of bed as if he were going to be audited by the IRS. When he left for Shacharis I sat alone in the wake of his agitation, nursing a cup of coffee and doodling dollar signs on a stray telephone bill. Just then, Sluvie called. She asked me if I had braided my challos already. We usually spend time chatting while we bake our family’s specialties. I wasn’t going to bake this week because the stress had caught up with me. Didn’t she know what was going on? I excused myself and hung up. Holding the cordless phone in my hands, I had a brainstorm. I’d call Dov myself! I reached him on his cell phone. “Pinny,” he said as soon as he picked up. He didn’t let me get a word in, wanting to preempt the request. “You can calmly make Kiddush tonight. By Motzaei Shabbos the money is in your hands.” “It’s not Pinny,” I said. “It’s me, Blima.” There was stunned silence on his side. I plunged in. “I just need to tell you that I know it’s hard for you to scrape the money together. But you need to understand how hard this is for me. The situation is burning a hole in my home. I’m asking you to please find another loan to cover ours. I really can’t do this anymore.”
“I assure you you’ll have it,” he said. I wasn’t assured. I was about to end the conversation when Dov quickly added, “Your husband’s a tzaddik, a savlan. You’ve been unusually kind.” “Right,” I said, remembering the vile words my husband had used to describe him the other day. I called a family member who could discreetly advise me. She told me she knew of a certain deal that was coming through for Dov. She assured me that he was an honest person who would do everything to cover his debt, if not right away, then eventually. I needed it now, though. My husband made Kiddush calmly enough. It was Shabbos and there was nothing to do. The stars spread across the sky on Motzaei Shabbos. No money. On Sunday, Pinny made phone calls to his brothers, uncles and friends, and borrowed the sum he needed to pay the contractor. “I’ve worked all my life so that I wouldn’t need to do this,” he hissed between phone calls. On Monday, we handed the loans over to our contractor. Another week passed and then another. We had weathered this and were still here to tell the tale. Two weeks later, Dov repaid us in full. Weak with relief, I wondered vaguely how he had gotten his hands on such a large amount, but I couldn’t dwell on it. My husband’s shoulders straightened up. He went right away to repay his creditors. He regained his sense of humor, especially about the whole episode. When Sluvie called, I sighed deeply. “Ah, now we can become friends again,” I said. She didn’t know what I was referring to. She hadn’t known the entire time. Her husband had spared her the details of his struggles. Now that it was behind us, I wondered if I should share the story with her. But I decided against it. Let the unsaid remain unsaid. But apparently, she wasn’t satisfied with my evasiveness and investigated further. That night I was already in bed when my doorbell rang. I opened it to find a chocolate arrangement accompanied with a beautiful card which read. “The secret of real friends is having a friend like you.” I knew then that keeping this secret out of our friendship had been worth it.