Sputterpub's Blog

That’s where I come in. It was 1979 and Bethany and I were 29. Trying to make a go of India Inc., our occult-bookstore-with-art-supplies. We didn’t (make a go), but Bethany and Tom made lots of sparks and then a pretty amazing relationship.

They were so into each other then that Bethany and I had some rough spots between us. It took me awhile to make room for Tom, and it took Bethany some time to learn how to share her attention between us. But we were settling into it by late 1980, when Bethany and I faced the facts and closed the store. Even knowing her as well as I did, I was surprised that she turned Tom down when he tried to marry her and give her that gemstone.

She brought the diamond to me right after that. Although she had told him no, Tom asked her to consider for awhile and hold onto the velvet-covered box while she did so. I remember when she showed up at my place that bright December day; she was wrapped in her pigskin-suede belted jacket with the fur collar and cuffs, an un-Bethany jacket that she could only wear in the few chill weeks each winter when it didn’t rain. She came into the room pink-cheeked, shining-eyed, and she only shrugged out of her jacket after she sat on the couch. She was wearing dark colors underneath, probably jeans and a black turtleneck like now, and I remember after she pulled the box out of her pocket and took the ring out of the box, how bright the stone looked against the dark colors and beneath her winter-chilled chin.

“Look at it,” she breathed on the diamond as she spoke. “It has twelve sides. One for each sign.” That was just like Bethany. She’d been into astrology and Tarot for as long as I’d known her, and she does love diamonds. Personally, I can leave them alone; I admit they’re great for drilling and polishing, but as a gem I find them cold. Called ice for a reason. In fact, they conduct heat so well that they are colder than glass or surrounding air…

I took the ring into my palm when she handed it to me. It was faceted and colorless, the way I don’t like stones, but I had to admit it was fine. When I looked into it I could find every color I’ve ever seen or even imagined. I wasn’t crazy about the ring it was set in, but that could be changed.

“You look pale. Like the stone,” she said to me then. I remember looking up at her and thinking something about how maybe she should marry Tom. I don’t know what I said. “I’m not into marriage,” she stated firmly. She was looking straight at me. “I don’t need to be married for economic reasons,” she said. “And you know I don’t want kids. I love Tom, sure, but what’s the hurry? And anyway, as great as our relationship is, sometimes I know he’s not seeing me. There are times when he relates to me like I’m some sort of representative of women, or of women his age, or of women-who-like-to-read-and-tend-to-render-opinions-readily. Like I’m not really present. Like he’s thinking out loud and making it appear to be dialogue – that’ll fool everyone but the person who’s supposed to be on the other end of the dialogue, you know?

“I’m not interested in that. We can take our time. If that means I refuse this beauty, well… it’s kind of cursed anyway. I sense it’s been wrapped in guilt for most of its refined existence. It can wait too.”

The thing about my friend Bethany is, she meant it. Nearly 20 years have passed since that day, and she has held the marriage line. Till now. When she told me last week that she can’t live without the diamond any more, I knew enough to not believe her, of course. But when she said she wanted to marry Tom I didn’t know what to think.

She had the diamond again. She pulled the box out of the pocket of her lined black coat, opened it, placed the old ring into her other gloved palm, breathed on it, and said, “I’ve decided to marry Tom now. After all this time I am committed to him. I knew it would happen this way. You see,” she said as she sat back on my couch and looked around for a second, “it never could have worked for me to say some words and hear him say them and have that be enough. I had to live it and come to trust that we really can respect each other and pay attention. Of course we could go on the way we have. But it would mean a lot to him for us to marry. There’s room for that. The relationship will bear up under the form.”

She tossed the ring at me then and I caught it with both hands, almost in my lap. “We want you to have this stone.” I gaped at her. She laughed. “Really. Tom and I agree. It’s done more than enough for us. It’s been our light at the end of the tunnel, and we don’t need it any more. And we like to think we’ve worn off its guilt by now. Maybe repaired its karma. Besides,” she said as she got up to find wine or something to drink. “You’ll be its lucky twelfth owner. It’ll be interesting to see what you do with it.”

“Only if you count owners creatively,” I said as I walked to my refrigerator for the open wine. “Like if, say, Herschel and Gus were just middlemen.” I looked once more at the brilliant gem before I closed the box and put it in my pocket.

Most marriages were still arranged back then. Esther was determined to pair one of her sons with Millie, the daughter of her own best friend. According to Hersch’s comments, this was a practical as well as loving consideration on the part of Esther; Millie was an only child and her father was wealthy.

Tom’s grandfather Isaac refused. It sounds like he was a romantic, holding out for love. Esther must have hounded him about it for years, because she didn’t start working on her younger sons until 1919. Anyway, second son Gus married Millie in 1920. Esther celebrated the union by giving her diamond to the bride. Meanwhile, Isaac continued on his romantic gentile-attracted ways, while youngest son Sid appears to have pursued a Talmudic and somewhat homosexual approach to life.

Millie owned the diamond from 1920 to her death (influenza) in 1941. She had it set into a platinum ring in 1936. Herschel commented that her hands were skinny and prematurely aged; he said the diamond only drew attention to a feature best left unnoticed. Herschel died in 1937; without his diaries it’s harder to glean details about the stone’s subsequent history, but I know that Millie and Gus had no children, and that for some reason Gus gave the ring to his younger brother Sid in 1941.

Sid owned the diamond from then until his death in 1948. It was first set into a large tie tack during that time, and then into the elegant head of an ebony walking stick. There are photographs of well-dressed Sid sauntering on a nice sidewalk, punctuating his footsteps with that walking stick. Based on the family rumors about his young Talmudic proteges, based on the fact of Sid’s death by violence (he was fatally stabbed by one Jonathan Kane, who resented the months of attention (and ebony walking stick) that Sid gave to Jonathan’s dear friend Jacob), there is every indication that the diamond’s tendency to turbulence continued.

After the walking stick was recovered the diamond went to Tom’s grandfather, Isaac, who had achieved his romantic/erotic dream and found it wanting. By then Isaac had been married to his non-Jewish wife Grace for 26 years, 23 of which had been quietly, desperately boring. They were an ecstatically happy couple in 1922 when they married, in 1923 when they got pregnant, and in 1924 when they were enjoying their first-born David (Tom’s father), and working on what would be the twins. By 1925 they were experiencing significant irreconcilable differences in their opinions about how to raise their young family, and in 1928 Isaac found and settled in with his first of several Jewish mistresses. When he acquired the diamond in 1948 he had it set in a gold choker. By then he had been seeing Miriam for years, and even his son David knew it. David wasn’t present when his father first put the necklace around Miriam’s neck – he didn’t hear Isaac’s words as he attempted to compensate Miriam for his inability to marry her – but he knew his father and the situation enough by then that he might as well have been a fly on that wall.

Miriam left Isaac in 1954. She couldn’t handle being the other woman any more. She was in her early 60s and she emigrated to Israel with her sister’s family. Her neck was too old for a choker anyway. She returned the diamond necklace before she embarked. Eight months later Isaac killed himself.

He left a note and the necklace for David. Grace inherited enough by law to do all right (in fact as we all know, she hired a companion and began to travel, in a short time her companion became her lover, and Grace and Barbara were together until Grace’s death in 1977). Meanwhile, David married Ruth (1947), sired Tom (1948) and Sarah (1950), and then fell in love with Sandy (1952 or 1953).

When David inherited the diamond he promptly presented it to Sandy. He was madly in love with her but unwilling to leave Ruth; he wanted to give Sandy anything else he could. They had it reset into the ring it is today. But Ruth caught David and Sandy in 1964, when the kids were 16 and 14; she blackmailed him and the diamond away from Sandy and wore the ring until David couldn’t stand the sight of it, until 1979.

By then Ruth hated the ring too. She and David were mired in habits of bitter mutual contempt. Tom had met and declared his intention to marry Bethany. His mother didn’t disapprove. She gave him the ring.

You don’t see many twelve-sided diamonds around. They’re hard to cut, which is why the cut requires a hard stone, which is why the only twelve-sided gems are diamonds. A twelve needs a big stone or a really good cutter, and both of those are limited commodities. The fact is that an eight will get almost as much money, so the twelves just aren’t done any more.

I’ve looked into this. I’m not a gemologist or artisan, but I’ve been considering the Bethany diamond for almost 20 years. That’s what I call it. Because Bethany was the first woman to refuse the stone in its 93-year history.

Bethany is my best friend. We met in college, 31 years ago, and we haven’t stopped talking since. She fell in love with Tom in 1979 when we were 29 and trying to manage a failing bookstore. He proposed marriage a year later, but she resisted. They’re still together. He tried to give her the diamond when he first proposed. He’s offered it regularly since.

The diamond is only 2.7 carats but it’s a beauty. I mean, 2.7 carats is a good size, but it’s a small stone for the amount of attention it’s gotten, from Tom and Bethany and me, not to mention its previous owners. It’s a guilt diamond, but it has just about been reformed now.

I know quite a bit about its history. It was found in a Brazilian river gravel mine shortly after the turn of the century. Most diamonds are octahedral; the rare rhombic dodecahedrons almost all came from Brazil instead of Africa or India. Fyvush Lubunsky, the cutter, was also the original seller; he told Tom’s great-grandfather Herschel.

According to Herschel’s notes, the stone was cut in 1905. He says Lubunsky didn’t know how best to treat the diamond until the cleaving of the 971-carat Excelsior in Amsterdam in 1904. And the cut Bethany diamond’s size wasn’t officially determined until 1913, when the U.S. adopted the metric carat (200 milligrams) as its standard; by then the diamond was on the breast of its second owner.

Herschel Goldman bought the stone in 1906, had it set in a gold necklace, and draped it around the swan-like neck of his mistress Sylvie. He was then 40 and she was 25; from the way he wrote about her it’s clear he was smitten and would do just about anything to keep her. Except leave his wife Esther. She was a good Jewish woman who had given him three sons; in 1906 divorce simply wasn’t an option. So Herschel bought the diamond for Sylvie.

She left him anyway, five years later. She broke his horny heart. She gave him back the diamond. But hurt Hersch wore his broken heart on his sleeve and Esther became suspicious. In a token of guilty placation, on their 25th wedding anniversary, Herschel presented the diamond to his wife.

Esther wore the stone from 1911 to 1920. She had it reset into a brooch in 1913, and she fastened the gem on her prow-like bodice for all important occasions. Herschel commented in his notes about growing to hate the look of the diamond staring at him like an unblinking eye from that momentous bosom.