The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “All right, Connie, that’s all right. Calm down. You can calm down now. Here’s a Kleenex. All right, you’ve got your own hankie. That’s fine.”

  She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.

  I told her in that case I thought she might have the wrong party.

  “Aren’t you Jerry Goldkorn’s daughter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have the right party.”

  Her father was an executive in Coca-Cola Bottling’s corporate headquarters down in Atlanta, Georgia. St. Myra was born there. “I was a Georgia peach,” she told me, smiling, looking down. “It’s true, I was. A Georgia peach. Oh, I loved Atlanta, loved my friends, our life there. Loved our club. You know my parents had to bribe me to get me to agree to go off with them to Europe in the summers? They promised that after I graduated high school I wouldn’t have to go East to college, or any further away from Atlanta than Agnes Scott College for Women in Decatur.

  “I was as happy with my lot as any sixteen-year-old girl in America. Because I was best friends with nineteen dozen other kids just like me. Who were as happy with theirs. Who had the same credit cards for the same malls and department stores, who got the same clothing allowances and took their lessons from the same piano and ballet and figure-skating teachers and worked out at the same fitness centers and had children-of-paid-up members’ privileges at the same country clubs. Who went to the same humongous open parties on weekends in each others’ houses when our parents were out of town and then went on to meet at the same fast-food drive-ins when the parties got busted at midnight. Who got our learner’s permits at the same time, and our licenses, and, by default, the same second or third or fourth family car, till we’d get, for graduation, or some special birthday, the same cute red or yellow convertible of our very own and who couldn’t wait to be yuppies!”

  “But you said you—”

  “I am. I’m telling you. The patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city. It’s just that I was always such a good sport.

  “Daddy called me in in the summer of my seventeenth year when I was on the cusp of my junior year in high school.

  “ ‘Coca-Cola’s just bought out this blockbuster diet soft drink company in the Midwest, sweetheart, and they want your dad to head it up. Now I know, I know, the only home you’ve ever known has been right here in Atlanta, and that you’re very happy here, and that it’s a little unfair to ask you to leave your friends, and normally, well, normally, darn it, I wouldn’t think of asking you to make that sort of sacrifice, but the soft-drink business is entering a new phase. It’s expanding and changing right before our eyes, and if we don’t expand and stretch and change right along with it, well, sir, we’re going to be left at the starting gate and there won’t be any money for balls and country clubs and Junior League revels. I’m not asking now. I have too much respect for you for that. I’m requesting. If you say no then it’s no, and you and Mummy and Bubba and me will just have to stay put right where we are. If it were your senior year rather than the junior year you’re entering I wouldn’t even be requesting, or inquiring either for that matter, but as I see it you’ll have two whole years to settle in and put your life together and get yourself a gang as close to the one you have here in Atlanta as, given the demographics, you can get in Milwaukee.’

  “It was the most disagreeable decision I ever had to make. I assented at once, of course, and even made out that I was getting a little tired of Atlanta anyway and actually looked forward to the move.”

  “But you loved Atlanta.”

  “A patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and relocate in a different city must be as devoted to her father as she is to that generation of children for whom she is the earnest, supplicatory object of appeal.”

  “I see.”

  “Milwaukee was a disaster.”

  “You couldn’t duplicate—?”

  “Kids our age are a demographics unto ourselves. Of course there was to be had in Milwaukee what was to be had in Atlanta. Doesn’t Milwaukee have malls and country clubs, doesn’t it have roadsters and fitness centers, the children of the CEO classes, credit cards, cotillions, open-invitationed weekend bashes by the pool when the folks leave town for a few days? Doesn’t it have fast-food hangouts and not only those places you can go to for a fake ID, but those other places you can go to where they will be honored? Of course there is to be duplicated in Milwaukee anything that had already been imprinted upon you in Atlanta.”

  “Then what’s the big deal?”

  “Because I was a Georgia peach. Because when I opened my mouth to speak they laughed and called me names and said, ‘Hey, get her, she talks like a nigger.’

  “Because they always think they have to draw a line somewhere, so they draw it around you, or around themselves in some tight-knit, gerrymandered circle. Because there’s always this eleventh-hour, last-ditch, last-minute exclusivity among any given nineteen dozen best friends, Atlanta, Milwaukee, New Orleans or Paris, France, either.”

  “Tell how they martyred you, dear.”

  “They martyred me by pretending to capitulate, Holy Mother.”

  “They betrayed you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was invited to one of those Friday or Saturday night parties that they didn’t have to bother to invite anyone else to because no one else ever even had to be invited. One of them called out to me after our ten o’clock French class.

  “ ‘Myra. Myra Weiss. Myra, hold up.’

  “ ‘Chapters eleven and twelve,’ I told her. ‘Mademoiselle says we’re responsible for the subjunctive and all the idioms with “coup” in them.’

  “ ‘No,’ she said, ‘not that.’

  “ ‘Monday. The quiz is Monday.’

  “ ‘Not that either, silly. I know when the quiz is. Clyde Carlin’s folks are going out of town this weekend. He’s throwing a party. Around nineish.’

  “ ‘I know that.’

  “ ‘He wants you to come.’

  “ ‘He does?’

  “ ‘He asked me to invite you, didn’t he?’ ”

  But when she showed up at Clyde Carlin’s house that Friday at around nine she didn’t see any cars in the driveway, though all the lights seemed to be on on the first floor. St. Myra could have kicked herself for coming so early. In Atlanta, too, these things never started on time. “Well,” she told herself, “somebody’s got to be first,” parked her car, and went up to the door and pulled on the bell.

  Clyde Carlin’s little brother, Ben, opened the door.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m Myra. Your brother asked me to come to his party.”

  “Myra Weiss?” Ben said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Ben,” Ben said, “Clyde’s brother. Clyde told me to tell you that our parents changed their plans and didn’t go out of town this weekend after all, and that our party’s called off but Suzy Locke-Miller is having one at her house instead.”

  He gave her Susan’s address and precise instructions how to get there. She knew something was wrong, but it was already the middle of the spring semester, nine months since they’d moved up from Atlanta, and this was the first time they’d ever even seemed to open their ranks for her. She couldn’t take the chance. So she took the carefully drawn map Clyde had left with Ben to give to her and started out for Suzy Locke-Miller’s.

  Where the same thing happened. Only this time it was an older sister who came to the door.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “Does Suzy Locke-Miller live here?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Myra Weiss.”

  “Sooz went off to a par—Weiss? Hold on a minute, she left a note.”

  And left the girl in the hall and went off to find it. It was so apparently hurried and scribbled it might almost have been what it purported to be, a hastily written apology, an expl
anation Myra couldn’t quite follow saying there’d been a change in plans, that the party had been moved again and that Myra must come to Franklin Bradbury’s house. She gave the address, and directions how to get there, and even put down a number Myra could call should she get lost.

  She knew what was what now. What they were doing to her. But she kept on going anyway. She had to. Because she was into her martyrdom now, she said. She was on this scavenger hunt for her martyrdom. At one house it was the parents themselves who sent her on to the next place where the putative party was supposedly being held.

  She drove from house to house, really seeing Milwaukee for the first time, reminded, in those pricey suburbs, how much like Atlanta it was after all.

  It was when she was on her way to the seventh or eighth house that she became momentarily blinded by her own tears and missed the curve and swerved off the winding street and ran into a tree on the lawn of the very house where, ironically, the party they had been hiding from her actually was going on. It was Clyde Carlin himself who heard the crash and was the first on the scene. When he saw what had happened and who it was it had happened to, it took his breath away. The girl from French class came running up to him.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she said.

  “Don’t look,” Clyde said.

  “No,” she said, “what?”

  “Great goddamn,” Clyde said, “it’s the nigger. It’s that Myra. She’s gone and crashed the damned party!”

  “But that’s not my problem,” I told St. Myra. “My father wasn’t transferred, he hasn’t relocated in a different city.”

  “It’s still a question of being lost where one is,” St. Myra Weiss said; “Of becoming separated, locked from some Palestine of the heart’s desiring. You’re already relocated. I’m your man.”

  So she sold me a candle.

  “She sold you a candle? She did?”

  “It’s how they live. You take money for depositions, don’t you? It’s how you live.”

  “Go on.”

  There’s not a whole lot more to tell. More saints came marching in. Holy Mother thought we should become better acquainted. So both sides would know what they were dealing with. It’s pretty specialized. More than a Jewish girl raised on the notion of Moses and monotheism would have guessed. I told Holy Mother.

  “Land sakes, child, is that what you think? That God doesn’t have helpers, that He’s this Workaholic Who thinks He has to do everything Himself or nothing would ever get done? No, hon, that’s not what He’s like at all. He don’t only love us, He trusts us.”

  She must have brought on more than a dozen. They just kept coming. Before I knew it I’d run out of money to buy their candles from them, but they kept coming anyway. Saints of shopping for a birthday present when you’ve been invited to a party at the last minute and the stores are all closed. Saints for throwing an outfit together when either they’ve seen everything you have, or what they haven’t seen is at the cleaner’s and you’ve got nothing to wear. Acne saints. Saints for your period. Saints of the S.A.T.’s and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests. Saints for split ends, for limp or oily hair. Brittle nails saints. Saints for putting in your contact lenses, or finding them again when they pop out in the grass.

  “What’s that? What’s that smell?”

  “It’s all right, Counselor, he’s had an accident. Mr. Hershorn? Mr. Hershorn, it’s Connie. That’s all right, no harm done, you’ve had a little accident, Mr. Hershorn. I’ll have you cleaned up in a jiffy.”

  Then I interrupted my deposition and asked Counselor Rockers where the rest room was. I excused myself and led Mr. Hershorn off to make him more comfortable.

  While Mr. Hershorn and I were in the washroom, Holy Mother appeared to me one more time. She watched what I was doing without saying anything. Then she said I would probably be a saint myself one day. When I asked of what, she just shrugged and said she didn’t really know but possibly of incontinent old men, and when I told her that didn’t sound like such a hot job to me, she allowed as how that might be so but that somebody had to do it.

  This is the sworn deposition of Constance Ruth Goldkorn of 336 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642. Present in attendance were Elizabeth Packer, 1143 Hapthorn St., East Orange, New Jersey 07019, Certified Court Reporter and Notary Public within and for the Township of Lud, New Jersey; Christopher Rockers, lawyer of 4 Rosewood Ct., Passaic Park, New Jersey 07055, and Robert Hershorn of the Hershorn Monument Company, 105 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642.

  This deposition is for immediate release to all northern New Jersey newspapers, TV and radio stations, school districts, synagogues, churches, hospitals, funeral directors and to the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Newark.

  eight

  Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on!” I shouted at her. “I know what’s going on! Oh, boy, do I know what’s going on! I know what’s going on better than you do!

  “You’re looking to discredit me. You’re looking to get me fired. Always the short view. Always the short view, hey, Connie? Go, run to the bishops, run to the papers. Go run right up to Elaine Iglauer herself, looking in Fairlawn, looking in Ridgewood for a house for us while you’re out there playing in the street with Holy Mother! Ha!

  “Well, my friend, you ought to know just a leetle bit more about your religion before you go barking up that tree! We’re this Sins of the Fathers people visited even unto the third and fourth generations. Where is it written, you tell me, where does it speak anywhere in Torah about the Sins of the Daughters? Can you answer me that, Buster Brown? No! Because it doesn’t work that way. It ain’t any two-way street we ride past each other with the windows rolled and the top down flipping hexes and trading calumnies.

  “So I know what you’re doing, little missy.

  “You’re not afraid of any ghosts. You’re looking to drive a wedge. Why don’t you own up? You think you can trade your meshuggina mishegoss for your old mother’s. Bingo bango! Moishe Kapoyr! Moses reversed! But what you don’t understand, my fine-feathered friend, is that husbands and wives cleave. I’m a cleaver, kiddo. So’s Mummy. We’re the whither-thou-thither-me chosen people, your mother and I. The Bible tells us so. Go,” I told her, “you can look it up!”

  nine

  I TELL YOU, it was like a siege those first few days. We couldn’t leave the house to buy groceries without having some reporter jump out from behind the bushes, or paparazzi we couldn’t even see take our picture through a telescopic lens a mile and a half off. Once a guy waited for us in the driveway, sitting in our own car. They were after us. We were scoops and exclusives waiting to happen. All I ever gave them, however, was my silence, never even the brisk “No comment”—that sounds so defensive—they’d have been all too pleased to run.

  The phone rang off the hook with people not so much requesting interviews as demanding them. And not just major papers but the free community papers too, sunny neighborhood weeklies up on the lawn with their ads and deep coverage of girls’ public league basketball. There were calls from a couple of national tabloids that wanted to buy our story. And not just the papers, radio stations too, TV stations Connie’d alerted, and the networks it hadn’t even occurred to her might be interested. Everyone itching to bounce us off his satellite and offering to wring our images through his fiber optics. The rabbi, they promised, wouldn’t even have to leave the comfort of his study. They’d come turn it into this hi-tech mini-TV studio and he could just sit there hugging a couple of Torahs or maybe poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls with a jeweler’s loupe hanging out one eye like a long black tear. If we switched to an unpublished number, inside an hour they would crack the code and the phone was ringing off the hook again.

  Shelley, God bless her, was a little soldier. She didn’t give them any more satisfaction than I did. She’d step outside to put out the garbage and they’d pop up, materialized all over her with all the breezy clarity and force of Holy Mother herself, poking their tape recorders and microphones
under her nose and shouting questions into her face as if she were a candidate for high office or someone under indictment. “No comment,” she’d tell them, smiling, holding her humor. “No comment, thank you, gentlemen,” she’d say, slyly, as if it was a joke they shared. I think she liked it. Her “no comment’s” spoke volumes.

  But I’ll tell you the truth, it wasn’t my wife they were interested in, or even our daughter. It was me, my rabbi’s opinions they sought. Looking, the momzers, to stir a little trouble between the Judaeos and the Christians. Though I have to admit, not all the phone calls were for me. Some were for Connie from incontinent old men. “Connie’s not here,” I told them. “She’s still alive,” I said, “call back when she’s dead.”

  I tried to contact the Archbishop of Newark. He wouldn’t take my calls. Neither would Shull, neither did Tober. School was supposed to open in a few weeks and Shelley started to phone up some of the mothers in the car pool. They thanked her and said other arrangements had been made.

  And suddenly I’m thinking: This is bad, this is just compounding the problem. Our silence hasn’t done us any more good than Connie going public in the first place. And it occurred to me that while I still had their attention (which was beginning, I’d noticed, to slack off), I ought to agree to an interview, or at least try to get a statement together which, without airing all our daughter’s problems in public, might, one, put forward the notion that a lot of this was just kids-will-be-kids, or, two, at least put Connie’s extravagant bobbe myseh into perspective. It was a problem of dignity, it was a question of taste. I threw out any idea of appearing on television or going on one of those radio phone-in talk shows. No, I thought, we were the people of the Book. The Word was precious to us. I would go to the papers.

  Dismissing the idea of a hoax—I didn’t want it to seem that Connie had played a joke on the Christians—I rehearsed a carefully worded, balanced, entirely neutral account of what might be any teenage girl’s motivations for inventing the events my daughter described in her deposition.