The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “Excuse me, Rabbi,” said the man from the Newark Star-Ledger, “are you saying she made it all up? That Connie doesn’t believe she saw those saints?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What about Holy Mother? Does she believe she saw the Virgin?”

  “She doesn’t even believe there is a Virgin.”

  They ran the story in their Saturday edition on the religion page under a picture of Connie and an even larger one of me. Mostly it was background information—which I’d supplied—about our life in Lud, accompanied by a rather sensationalized restatement of my daughter’s original claims, everything topped off with a cunningly placed, incredibly damaging “No comment!” taken out of context and attributed to me.

  I phoned John Charney.

  “Sure, the offer’s still open,” he said. “Nah,” he said, “why would I have to check it out with Artie? Artie’s already signed on. It was Artie’s idea, for goodness’ sake. Klein’s the one with the vision in this outfit. He’s our Columbus and our Queen Isabella too. Of course I’m sure,” he went on, continuing to supply answers to questions I hadn’t asked, insisting on conducting the conversation as if he were an actor on a telephone on a stage. “No,” he said, “no. It’s not of the least consequence to either of us that you’re in the doghouse just now. Shull’s and Tober’s loss is Lud Realty’s gain. Well, frankly,” he said, “because if anything, we stand to gain from the publicity. What do you mean how do we know? We know. That’s how we know. Certainly. Of course. Look,” he said, “burying people, making holy holy over them is one thing, and we’re the first to admit that, rabbi-wise, the two old frauds are entirely within their rights to put you on hold and send you to Coventry. It’s bad enough people have to die in the first place. That they should have to put up with the additional indignity of some compromised offshore yeshiva bucher getting in the last word for them is out of the question. At a time like that they got a right to expect the best and not have to worry whether they’re going to end up in some chop shop with some sad-ass, on-call chuchm that’s fighting for his life from a flakey kid to stand between death and New Jersey for them. They have this right. They have every right.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not holding you up to scorn. I’m not. I said we want you in, and I meant we want you in. What do you mean the real reasons? All right, okay. You’re nobody’s fool. That ought to be real reason enough right there, but all right, you want real reasons I’ll give you real reasons. I’ll spread the cards out on the table. A, you’re a rabbi. B, you’re famous. C, death, impending or otherwise, is at best a grim business and we happen to think that maybe that little extra aura of laughingstock you give off might just lend you a sort of cachet. At the very least it ought to get your foot inside death’s door for you.”

  Then Tober called. I was still under a contract that had fifteen more months to run on it, he reminded me. And since not many people would want me to bury their dead for them anymore, he and Shull had seen fit to sell my contract to Lud Realty. He understood, he said, that that probably wouldn’t be a problem for me since I’d already been in contact with Charney about a job anyway. He softened his tone. “Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry. Really. You think I’m trying to save a few bucks off your grief? Not off your grief,” he said. “Never off the grief that comes from children. I appreciate what you must be going through. Just thank God she’s healthy. Thank God she can see. Thank God she’s kept her sense of balance and that she don’t fall off chairs when she crosses her legs.” He lowered his voice still further. “The fact is,” he said, “I’m not getting any younger. In less than a year I’ll be sixty-five, an age most men see fit to retire. Sonia was sixty-two last week, and our daughter’s birthday is just around the corner. The family’s almost two hundred and twenty-four. We’re getting up there, Rabbi. How much longer can we hold on? Edward’s only thirty-eight. The cash has got to be there for him when we’re gone. Everyone knows it costs more to maintain a shitty, feckless life than the life of Riley.”

  Shull called to apologize.

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” he told me, “don’t think I bought into this pursuit-of-happiness thing because I value pleasure any more than the next guy. I’m just this overachiever. I can’t help it, Rabbi. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, you know? The fact is, I happen to be entering a particularly heavy cash-flow cycle just now. Something’s been missing from my life. There I was, the man that had everything, a glass of fashion, a mold of form. My shoes and suits, my shirts, coats and ties are on the cutting edge. I have furniture and tsatskes they ain’t even shown yet in the witty, high-budget films. I drive fast cars and run around like a fleet that just put in. I’ve everything money can buy. What else can my money buy? Then one night I wake up beside a woman she could be a world-class spy or the girl from Ipanema, and it comes to me like a bolt out of the blue: Schmuck! What are you, a spring chicken? You won’t see sixty again! You should be married, you should have a family, obligations. Jerry, it was so clear. When it’s that clear you don’t even think about it, you just do it. I know this widow, a lovely girl. I proposed and she accepted. She’s in her forties. Oh, her biological clock ran out on her years ago, but she married a little later than most and still has these five teenage kids, three still in high school, and twins, just entering college. It will be my privilege to support all of them. That’s what else my money can buy!

  “And a leopard can’t change its spots, you know. I don’t kid myself that I’ll be settling down. A leopard can’t change its spots, and you don’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’m under no illusions. This is the way in the animal kingdom. I’ll still hit on the ladies. You’re a spiritual, you may not have thought these matters through, but it costs a married man more to fool around than a single guy. The price of a hotel suite, tips to the doormen and bellhops, what they get from you for room service these days.

  “Anyway,” he said, “now you know why I need to scrape up more dough, and that it’s nothing personal we sold your contract right out from under you and traded you to Lud Realty in your darkest hour. Or that you’re going to have to earn back the cost of your contract before you ever see a nickel from the commissions on the grave plots you sell.”

  It must have given them a kick to chat me up. Over and above whatever business they may have legitimately had with me. I honestly think so. No matter what Tober told me about hanging back from a parent’s privileged grief, it’s exciting after all to have an opportunity to yell “What in hell’s wrong with that lunatic daughter of yours?” into her dad’s ear and ask if she’s fucking gone crazy. It lent spice to Charney’s day to put humbling questions into my mouth and then provide the devastating answers to them. Even Shull, who’d run through all the pricier pleasures, was not above the cheap ones. And those reporters, don’t tell me they were just doing their job. The Star-Ledger guy runs an innocent “No comment” out of context! I wish I had gotten through to the Archbishop of Newark. His refusal to take my calls made him seem classy.

  Understand, please. I’m not a cynical man. I haven’t turned sour. I repudiate no one. I honor God, I cheer His Creation. The world’s a swell place to be, and Humanity is a jolly good fellow. But don’t it give a person just that little something extra to hang around grief, to rub himself warm near its hearth?

  The town’s other funeral director, Billy Zimmerman, called. He was genuinely sorry, he told me, but he already had a real rabbi.

  “Who asked you?”

  “No, really, Mr. Goldkorn,” Zimmerman said, “I’d like to help you out but I run a strictly Orthodox show. You’d be lost. What could you know of the hesped? Washing the body, the chevra kadisha? Of the shomrim who guard our Orthodox dead? What would you make of the tachrichin, all death’s white-linen laundry, or the kittel like a kind of body bag? Would you cry out the kriah, would you remember that rending? In the cemetery, in the cemetery, would you make seven stops to recite seven psalms? Would you splinter your finger on a plain pine box? Cou
ld you take up the shovel with everyone else? Or remember to wash your hands with the mourners? What would you bring to the meal of consolation?”

  “The salt from my eyes, you bastard.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

  “Well,” I relented, “thank you, then.”

  “Tell me,” he said, and I could almost hear him bunch his shoulders, hunch forward, lean into the telephone, “you think the child may have a dybbuk?” Why, he was like the guy from the Star-Ledger.

  Sal Pamella called. He told me it was all off. Even the barber’s bogeyman wouldn’t let me near their dead now—all those Jimmy Hoffas of his fix-is-in imagination.

  Still, I bore no grudges. Connie I forgave outright. She had her father’s wholehearted, up-front blessing. If I’d roughed her up with my tongue after I saw her deposition, why, I was only having my say, as a dad will with his kid, a Jewish Judge Hardy.

  I couldn’t understand why Shelley wouldn’t allow me to sleep with her, why she had set up separate rooms for us, as if we were two fighters returned to our neutral corners.

  “What happened to us?” I asked.

  “Scissor cuts paper.”

  “Scissor cuts paper?”

  “Rock smashes scissor.”

  “What are you talking about, Shelley? What are you trying to say to me, sweetheart?”

  “Scissor cuts paper. Rock smashes scissor. Paper covers rock.”

  “Two out of three, Shell.”

  “Two out of three? Two out of three? ‘Husbands and wives cleave,’ you told Connie. Husbands and wives? Mothers and daughters. Scissor cuts paper, rock smashes scissor, paper covers rock. And mothers, mothers cleave to daughters! That’s who cleave! There’s your two out of three!”

  “This is all your fault,” she said another time.

  “My fault? My fault?”

  “It isn’t your fault? It isn’t? Why do I drive all the car pools? Why do we own a car that accommodates nine people? Why do we own a station wagon at all? What do we even need a family car? We could get by with some two-door subcompact with a little lever on the bucket seat so she could climb into the back! Why do I bring her to libraries or take advantage every chance I get to put more miles on the car? If I were a pilot I would have had thousands of hours in the sky by now. It isn’t your fault?”

  “How come you don’t talk Yiddish anymore?”

  “So that I might at least lend her the illusion we were a family. So we might pretend for as long as it took to get us from one destination to the next that she might even be on her way to lessons—swimming, piano, tumbling, dramatics. Locating her gifts—baton, figure skating, beginning ceramics, beginning ballet. On all the bespoke errands—weaving and tennis and aerobics and tap—of any ordinary childhood. (Yes! Chasing her gifts. We could have been on a scavenger hunt.) Turning up the volume on the FM and going the long ways, choosing the routes with the most traffic signals to them so that when were stopped on red Connie could scout out the cars with the real mothers and the real daughters, sometimes offering an actual nod of recognition or even just that shy, tangential, enigmatic, secret sidelong Mona Lisa glance of acknowledgment from one teenager to another in that mysterious freemasonry of girls.”

  “You’ve had thousands of hours in the sky.”

  “Or our shopping expeditions. As if it weren’t Connie herself we were dressing but some bright Connie avatar, some inconstant Connie of a thousand forms and faces—Connie as matron, Connie as bride. Enrolled for showers, registered for gifts. Handling the china, fingering the forks. Browsing in Maternity or picking baby’s clothes. In Women’s Wear indifferent to sizes but examining the racks of suits and sweaters and dresses and coats and choosing from them as one might first pick out and then return a novel to its shelf at the public library, out of pure random instinct, some deft, unprincipled inspection. Trying on a hat or holding, hanger and all, a blouse out before her in front of the three-way mirror, then bringing it next to her body, brushing it against her with her arm. Looking toward me for an opinion, as if we weren’t just mother and daughter but any two females, related or not, even acquainted or not, in any boutique, shop or department store in the world. ‘With brown accessories? You think so?’ ‘With such a high heel?’ Not House we were playing but Other People.”

  “Why hasn’t she? Why hasn’t she taken ballet? Why hasn’t she signed up for those classes?”

  “What friends would she have taken them with? We live too far out. She’d have had to have dropped the illusion of those seven playmates in the car pool.”

  “Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you buy her more clothes?”

  “Where would she have worn them?”

  Well, la de da, I thought, watching her closely, just look at her, just listen. In her own rabbi mode for once. Talk about your avatars. Shelley the rebbitzin, Shelley the vamp. Shelley the wronged and Shelley the miffed. Holy Shelley Mother dealing all her Shelley shell games like three-card monte in the street. (Sometimes, in old and, often, better days, I’d come upon her in the kitchen, pulling stuff out of the cabinets—plates, a glass—and drawers—knives, teaspoons—and darting from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter with food in her hands, talking to herself like one of those chefs on TV. “This afternoon,” she’d say into the wall telephone by the kitchen table, “we’re going to prepare a lox sandwich. For this we’ll need a bagel, some cream cheese, lox of course, and this lovely Bermuda onion for garnish-e-le.”)

  “If you should happen to hear anything,” she abruptly said, and turned and went to her room.

  Because she kept to herself these days, camping out in the spare bedroom like a self-conscious guest. Suddenly she wasn’t there anymore when I pulled my modified Shachris just before breakfast. Recalling other occasions, I pretended she didn’t want to disturb me at prayer, excite me, I mean. Stepped back, removed from the energy field of all that cumulate prayer like the politic, insistent-signaled clamor of traders, say, on some bourse of souls (as she might step around some just recently waxed floor), I told myself I guessed she didn’t want to stir stuff up. I guessed, or told myself I did, she meant to clear my air, help me get through, not break God’s radio silence.

  It had been a while since I believed Shelley believed I still lay t’phillim. So one morning I got all dolled up. I strapped on my phylacteries, attaching one to my forehead and binding the other about my left forearm, girding myself, a Jewish Crusader.

  “Get out,” Shelley said. “Don’t touch me.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m praying. Honest. I am. I’m going at it for all I’m worth.”

  The odd thing was that the talk about us had already begun to die down. We’d stopped hearing things even before that column appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger.

  I was following Klein’s and Charney’s leads now. Geniuses, those two, ahead of their time, with probably a couple of the greatest noses for death in the business. Bloodhounds of the terminal who could sniff out serum cholesterol, plaque, decay in urine, the dark spots on X rays, maybe even suicide—a thing for all the gamy pheromones of death.

  Maybe because I’d been a rabbi too long and not only hadn’t kept up but had bought into some picturesque little peddler myth of the Jewish people, some one-on-one, door-to-door notion of intimately pressed spiel, all the pulled-stop oratory of insistent last-stand need, was overextended, that is, in some outmoded sweatshop/piecework notion of economics and salesmanship. Progress caught me unawares, unprepared, I tell you, for life as it’s lived, civilization as we know it. I mean there I was, thinking they were actually going to send me door to door, have me make calls on sick folks in genuine hospital rooms, or, at the very least, on their relatives grieving in waiting rooms or hanging about ICUs biting their nails and preparing themselves for their five minutes at a loved one’s wired bedside. (And me, a rabbi too long, recall, actually ready to do it, having talked myself into it, having sold myself this bill of goods: “Well, why not? Ain’t you how many times alre
ady in your career been Johnny-on-the-spot with your professional ordained consolation, and faced down genuine article, fait accompli, real-thing death, and not just the—admittedly—high-risk, long—admittedly—odds actuarials of the merely terminally ill? So what could one more lousy time into the breach mean to a fella like you? Haven’t you, I mean, been there already, sent out on all those sorrow sorties where we stuck our noses in? And anyway, isn’t it true that where there’s life there’s hope? Or that old Holy Holy Holy could always change His mind at the last minute? And what if Connie’s right, or at least on the right track, and there are, if not saints, then angels, all sorts of them, cancer and coma angels, bum-ticker angels, angels of the broken spirit, maybe even murder angels? So, if you can find words for the already bereaved, it only stands to reason that you ought to be able to come up with a little snappy patter for the simply only just apprehensive, tenterhooked, on-call, bedside-vigil expectant.” And this bill of goods: “Well, why not? I could tell them that if worse—God forbid—came to worst and we were faced with a bona fide, signed, sealed and delivered death-certificated corpse, what would be so terrible if the family were prepared? If it didn’t have to concern itself with those literally last-minute details, if it already had a plot picked out, taken whatever small—admittedly—advantage it could of prospect, access, and the rare shade tree. No one must be in a hurry to die, but it’s a first-come, first-served world, and just plain good husbandry not to buy more grief than you have to. ‘Who’s,’ I’d have asked them, ‘more entitled, more deserving?’ ”) Or utzing at them in the dayrooms of old peoples’ homes, on their cases from somewhere in the gridlock of walkers and wheelchairs that was like a metaphor for the very plat of the cemetery I had set up on an easel for them as a visual aid. But what did I know?

  Because the world, it turns out, always takes you by surprise. It’s always one step ahead of you. If you look away for even a minute, and often even if you don’t, you have to be retrained.