Just then, a redheaded boy straight off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post clobbered my backside with a Louisville Slugger. He must have taken me for a feckless father. He was aiming at my head in full fury when Ohnstad shoved me aboard the Cooperstown trolley and we rumbled back to the Otesaga. I was fully conscious and grateful to be alive.
— Chapter Three —
THE HORSES OF FIRE
That evening on the veranda of the Blue Mingo Grill we looked across Otsego Lake to Kingfisher Tower, a miniature gothic castle known as “Clark’s Folly” after the nineteenth-century financier who felt the lake was deficient in antiquity.
“It’s just for show. Nobody lives there except bats and muskrats,” said Thor Ohnstad, sipping Campari and soda. “And a ghost or two. Some folks say they’ve been seeing light from lanterns there lately, through apertures in the turret. I put no stock in it. There’s no direct access.”
“I’m here to check out all such rumors. The Discovery Channel likes ghosts.”
We were joined by Esther Federman, a psychoanalyst in her midthirties on extended leave from the city. Ohnstad informed me that she was seeking her roots in the nearby defunct Jewish resort town, Sharon Springs, and spending some time with her half-sister, a costumer and set designer at the Glimmerglass Opera.
“Good to meet you, Jack,” she said, reaching for her cell phone. “Excuse me a minute, I must take this call . . . No, Val, that won’t resolve any issues . . . It’s not a healthy way to express feelings about your mother . . . No, not mine, it’s your mother’s desertion, Valerie . . . But I’m up here for the sake of my patients! This is a working vacation . . . No, don’t listen, they don’t really want you to jump, just climb back in, watch out for debris on the ledge . . . That’s it, careful . . . Good going! . . . No, no extra charge for this, Val. Now take a Klonopin and call me late tomorrow morning. Shalom!” She groaned as someone put upon. “Sorry, Jack, what were you saying?”
“How do you do?” I replied.
“Poorly,” she sighed. “You see I take my practice with me. I’m sure Val wasn’t really out on a ledge. Every week she thinks up a new way of getting my attention. Lacan had the right idea about treating narcissists—you terminate a session after only five minutes.”
“Your treatment goes a step further,” I said. “You leave town and it isn’t even August. But what do I know? I’m unanalyzed.”
“As you know, Esther, Jack is here to cover the disappearance of our giant.” Ohnstad grinned and looked under the table to make sure it wasn’t there.
“What’s your theory?” I asked.
“Thor scoffs, but I’ve got one. Do you know anything about the Kabbalah?”
“Sounds like a conspiracy,” I replied, again feigning ignorance.
“No, the teachings of Jewish mysticism. I’ve been a student for five years. Fits right into psychoanalysis—there are whole books on Freud and the Kabbalah. I’m writing a book, The Kabbalah of Everyday Life. That giant is a golem—Stop snickering, Thor—Do you know anything about the golem, Jack?”
“I’m here to listen and to learn. Shoot.”
“Think back to sixteenth-century Prague. Jews were being accused of murdering Christian babies to grace their Passover dinner plates. Rabbi Yehuda Levi ben Bezalel—”
“Rabbi Loew for short, right, Es?” interjected Ohnstad.
“Right, Thor. At least you’ve listened. The rabbi read the Sefer Yetzirah—”
“Es alludes to the kabbalistic sacred book of formation,” put in Ohnstad.
“—and heard a mysterious voice telling him how to create a creature out of clay.”
“Gypsum is a kind of clay before it hardens, you know, Jack,” said Ohnstad.
Esther waved her hands impatiently. “Let me get on with my story. So the Rabbi got his son-in-law and a pupil to fashion a huge human body out of clay on the River Moldavka. They walked around him seven times, chanting a kabbalistic formula, and the clay came to life. He was somewhere in his late thirties, red hot and smiling.”
“What’d they do with him?” I asked, though I already knew the story.
“He was protector of Jews against the murderous plots of Christian priests, and he doubled as household servant. He’d perform any task—the rabbi would stick written instructions in his mouth every night. But the golem couldn’t speak.”
“And he took offense that he was always working and not having fun like the teenagers,” added Ohnstad. “Exploited labor! And he didn’t like not having a soul and not being fully human.”
“Yes, Thor, he got out of hand and got drunk and belligerent. The rabbi decided to put him down and forced his son-in-law to chant the secret formula walking around the golem in the opposite direction. This reduced him to lifeless clay again. But I prefer to think of the golem in his role as preserver and protector—”
“And dishwasher, floor scrubber, cook, personal secretary, and chauffeur.”
“We could all use a golem,” she replied. “Okay, it’s just my hunch. There are some things I simply enjoy believing—no harm done. What I believe is that the Cardiff Giant has been reanimated as a golem and is here to protect Jews. Take it or leave it.”
“No evidence against it, must admit,” said Ohnstad.
“And I’d like to believe it,” I said. “But I wasn’t aware that Cooperstown has a large Jewish population.”
“Not Cooperstown—Sharon Springs, right next door,” she said. “I’m doing some family history there. The legend is that my grandfather left an ancient copy of the Zohar in the synagogue of one of those ruined hotels. Zohar—that’s another sacred text of the Kabbalah.”
“Jews came up from the city to drink the waters and bathe,” said Ohnstad. “Whole town reeks of sulfur. Eighty hotels at its peak, turn of the century. Only one open now. Many are still standing but ruined and empty.”
“Sounds spooky,” I said.
“It is. They filmed I Drink Your Blood at the Hotel Roosevelt.”
“And sad,” said Esther. “All that history is just a bunch of faded photographs now. Jack, would you please pass the lekhem—I mean bread. Look, there’s a tuxedo cat! This is where Kabbalah comes in handy. We feed her before we feed ourselves—then we perform the tikkun olam, passing bread and repairing the broken vessels.”
“But we haven’t broken any vessels,” I noted.
Esther put butter on her fingers, inviting the cat to lick. Not satisfied with fingers, the cat sprang onto the table, clawing and pulling the tablecloth and, sure enough, breaking vessels.
The three of us mopped up Campari and brushed aside glass shards while the cat bolted to the top of an adjacent table, breaking more vessels.
“Oh, not again. Stop that, Reuben!” said the waitress, chasing him away.
“Did she say Reuben?” asked Esther. “The cat has a gematria of 259—that’s a sacred number.”
“Gematria?”
“You know, the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters.”
“Oh. Of what use?” I asked.
“Lots of uses. You learn how to apply these numbers to everyday life. There are 613 commandments to go with the 613 parts of the soul. It sounds far-fetched, I know, but all of this is explained by Rabbi Isaac Luria.”
“He’d better explain his explanation,” said Ohnstad.
“Six hundred and thirteen commandments! I have trouble keeping track of ten,” I said.
Esther laughed. “It’s not so hard once you get the hang of it. The idea is rather lovely. The sacred vessels of the world have been broken ever since Adam’s expulsion from Eden. It’s the goal of Kabbalah to repair the vessels. That much is simple enough.”
“I agree, the world is broken. But where to start?”
“With your own name, Jack. In Hebrew that’s yud aleph gimmel kaf—or ten plus one plus three plus twenty equals thirty-four. That’s a sacred number too, I seem to remember. How old are you?”
“Forty-five.”
“Now I’m sure
that’s a sacred number! It’s the numerical value of the Hebrew for man—adam.” She laughed. “You must be Jewish.” As Esther began to take an interest in me, her eyes slightly crossed.
“No, I’m nothing at all. Mongrel mutt from the Midwest.”
Ohnstad seemed to be monitoring Esther while she gave me a half-hour kabbalistic primer. He looked by turns amused and quizzical as she spoke on with the enthusiasm of an initiate. Mere hours after arriving in town, I flattered myself to think this might be some weird kind of fix-up. For my part, I was finding Esther unusually appealing for a psychoanalyst, with her black hair done in a louche retro bob, skinny high-waisted torso, and warm, well-tuned voice—like an announcer’s for a classical-music station.
Finally I interrupted her. “Do you work Kabbalah into your practice?”
“All along, even before I read Rabbi Luria. I was treating neurosis by restoring all the exiled kellipots. My clients were escaping Galut and achieving Geulah. I was doing this all along without knowing it. Tikkun is what Freud meant by bringing repressed desires into full consciousness.”
“Oh.”
Her cell went off again. “Sorry, must take this call . . . Now Howie, that’s not what Freud meant by transference . . . please, Howie! . . . Oh go ahead, but I’m holding the cell at arm’s length . . .”
We could hear digital wheezes while Esther rolled her eyes. “Okay, Howie, I hope you feel better. But now you must explore what I was telling you about noten and mekabel and the tetragrammaton . . . No, I don’t consider this a phone session, no charge—but please, I’m having dinner. Take a Klonopin and turn in early. Shalom!”
“Your sister’s working at the opera?”
“Half-sister, Sheila—Sheila Drake. Set designer and costumer.”
“Great set designer!” Ohnstad said. “But Sheila Drake is a lousy name for an Indian.”
Esther explained. “We shared a terrible father, a Christian Science furrier. Sheila’s mother’s half-Huron—my mother’s totally Jewish. I took her name, Federman, and dumped Drake.” I silently pondered how many Christian Scientists were furriers. “We both hated our father,” she continued. “Every reason to. He tried to keep doctors at bay when I was almost dead from whooping cough, three years old. My mother intervened and I lived. They had a fight over that—seems he was angry I recovered. Then he persuaded her not to check out a lump. He left her and married Sheila’s mother a few weeks later, just after my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.”
“You know, Jack,” said Ohnstad, “a Christian Scientist doesn’t believe in sickness, sin, or death, especially when he’s the occasion of them.”
“You’re clever for a businessman,” I said.
“Blame it on Wharton.”
“Thor is really smart, take it from Sheila and me, but you may have noticed he’s nosy. Watch out!”
“Back to your father,” I said, with the sense I was playing therapist to an analyst. “That’s an awfully sad story, no joking matter. But may I ask whether you now hate all men?”
She looked me crookedly in the eyes. “I can make exceptions.”
Ohnstad pitched forward, and it was hard to tell if he was chortling or choking. I hit him hard on the back and tried to remember the Heimlich maneuver. Reuben must have thought I was attacking an old friend. He hissed as he leapt from an adjoining table, digging claws into my right arm.
Esther raised her voice. “Khet yud yud mem vav shin mem yud shin!”
She explained that this was what you say to ward off afflictions caused by pets. It seemed to work, for Reuben withdrew his claws. The waitress gave me a paper towel to staunch the flow, and Ohnstad caught his breath.
While Esther took a call from another suicidal client, Ohnstad proposed dropping in on a rehearsal at Glimmerglass Opera to meet Sheila.
An hour later he drove us to the Otesaga. “See you kids later.”
“What room are you in?” asked Esther.
“227.”
“Jack, that’s the kabbalistic number for male. And I’m in 157, the number for female.”
She squeezed my hand as we walked through the lobby and up the staircase.
“My room or yours?” I asked.
“We must have sex in both rooms for balance, the middle column of Sefirot, we horses of fire. Three times, if you are able.”
— Chapter Four —
BACKSTAGE
Having sex according to a kabbalistic script required such a mishmash of sacred postures, rituals, numerology, and Hebraic alphabetical chants that all I could manage was the sacred number of one. Happily, Esther didn’t insist on more, and we parted on friendly terms in the morning. I agreed to accompany her to Sharon Springs the following week.
That afternoon Ohnstad picked me up in his BMW. He had bought the old Busch Mansion and stayed at the Hotel Otesaga only when he passed out. We began the drive along Otsego Lake, eight miles to the Glimmerglass Opera, where the world premiere of The Last of the Mohicans was in rehearsal. When we passed Three-Mile Point, Ohnstad began a not-so-subtle interrogation.
“You and Esther seemed to hit it off last night.”
“She’s quite the enthusiast. Thanks for the intro. But I should have been taking notes. For the life of me I can’t remember which gematria is which.”
“You had the right number, sport. Guess I should tell you that’s how she’s been screening men.”
“Oh?”
“Afraid so. She was here three years ago visiting her sister. To tell you the truth, I took a fancy for a brief spell. But the gematria for Thor Ohnstad didn’t add up. And I was staying in the wrong room.”
“Too bad. Booking the right room should have been easy—you own the hotel.”
He didn’t seem to find this funny. “Esther’s quite a dish. But—well, you’ll see. There’s no one like Sheila.”
We passed the Busch Mansion on our left. “That’s my house,” he said. “Not bad for a working-class kid from St. Paul. Built in 1901 by a hops czar. Colonial Revival and Queen Anne & Shingle. Used to be called Uncas Lodge. Owned by the Busch family till I bought them out last year. I’ll be giving a party—you can meet the top crust of Cooperstown.”
“You sound more and more like Jay Gatsby,” I said. “I thought I was walking into a novel by James Fenimore Cooper.”
“Never read Gatsby, never even read Last of the Mohicans. No time for novels.”
We passed the Mohican Sunken Wreck to our right and then Sunken Island, where they shot a scene for the 1911 film adaptation of The Deerslayer. It was visited daily by the Chief Uncas, a sturdy mahogany excursion boat built in 1912 by August Busch. Even the steam whistle still worked. Then to the Glimmerglass opera house, a flimsy, non-insulated concoction with gray aluminum siding, once likened to an overachieving Quonset hut. Here, every summer, some of the world’s best operatic performances took place. The audience came from the world over, but locals stayed away, preferring auto demolition derbies at the Otsego County Fair.
Backstage we found Sheila engaged in an altercation with Hazel Bouche, the famed mezzo singing the role of Cora, the wise but doomed mulatto of Cooper’s tragic tale.
“Sorry, Miss what’s-your-name, but I cannot wear black this month,” said Hazel Bouche. “Pluto is out of alignment with Mercury, and Venus is in retrograde. I’m informing the orchestra that the rehearsal must be postponed until four o’clock, when Venus and the moon are no longer at right angles. Today I’m advised to have my own way in all matters. Are you listening? It’s for the good of the production.”
I already knew lots about this diva through feature articles in the Times Sunday Magazine and elsewhere, but had never eyeballed her. The role of Cora was appropriate. Of mixed race from the nation’s capital, Hazel Bouche identified with her Haitian roots. She got her big break in her early twenties by successfully sticking voodoo pins into an effigy of the diva for whom she was bench-warming in a production of Carmen at the Kennedy Center. Nancy Reagan turned her on to horoscopes and
psychics, to which she herself added palmistry, the tarot, and born-again Christianity. Well-divorced three times and now forty, she had residences in Milan, Manhattan, and Port-au-Prince.
She looked the part of Cora, of whom Cooper wrote, “The tresses of this lady were shining and black, like the plumage of the raven. Her complexion was not brown, but it appeared charged with the color of rich blood that seemed ready to burst its bounds.” Hazel Bouche burst bounds mostly by venting spleen on subordinates.
Sheila stood her ground. “But Miss Bouche, you must wear the black-beaded sash. You are the tragic figure, and it’s part of the plot line. Everybody alludes to your black apparel.”
“Silence, child. I cannot and will not wear black! Royal purple is the only color for an Aries when Mars is in the orbit of Venus.”
“But Miss Bouche, Cora is hardly royalty,” said Sheila. “She’s just an army brat!”
“Army brat? Where’s the production manager? I’ll have you dismissed out of hand.”
Ohnstad intervened. “Miss Bouche, I’m not the production manager but, as you must know, I am this company’s principal benefactor. Sheila Drake is a preeminent designer. Might I suggest a compromise?”
“What about blackish purple?” I put in. “Or purplish black?”
“Okay by me,” said Sheila, relenting.
The diva’s heaving bosom calmed somewhat at our diplomatic proposal. When she marched off to the makeup room, Sheila, Thor, and I conversed. We were surrounded by Sheila’s scenic flats that projected powerfully the great forest of the Mohicans.
“Esther says you are part Huron.”
“One-quarter. But in a prior life I was one hundred percent. Working on this opera is like coming home. I have déjà vu moments every day.” She stared at her flats like an old stamping ground. “You’re here because of the Cardiff Giant?”
“Yes. Do you have a theory?”
“Well, since you asked, yes. I believe the giant was carved thousands of years ago by Druids. Like the menhirs and dolmens of Stonehenge. The Druids have simply returned to claim their own.”
The Cardiff Giant Page 2
