The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “It’s not one of mine either really. Though I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell that from last night. I was pretty pissed. Oh,” she said, “excuse me.”

  “I say ‘piss,’ ” I objected. “I say ‘piss.’ I say ‘shit.’ ”

  “You do?”

  “Hey,” I told her, blushing, looking down, “I watch the X-rated movie channel.” And try to explain to them the sense I had of her hand above my head, feeling some hypnotic, unheard tonsorial snick-snick in my hair, some tingled attraction, the energy of her fingers, of her rings perhaps, doing tentative passes. I don’t know, a gravity, an electric pleasure, some gentle force field of flesh. “Well, that one time anyway,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “me too.”

  “You think people do that stuff?”

  “I suppose some people do,” Joan Cohen said. “I suppose some people do everything.”

  “Others don’t do anything at all,” I said. “I guess most of us go our whole lives without ever getting a blow job,” I said.

  “Or giving one,” Joan Cohen said.

  I could put this into my eulogy, how Joan Cohen and I talked about blow jobs, how it came up naturally. In the course of the conversation.

  “Did you see all those things he shoved up her behind?”

  “Yes, I did,” she said.

  “That was probably trick photography,” I pronounced in the rabbi mode. “Don’t you think?”

  “I should certainly hope so.”

  “It sure wasn’t responsible sex.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Not when there’s AIDS.”

  “Certainly not,” Joan Cohen said.

  “I think I will have a drink,” I said, and signaled the girl where she stood in the bar’s broad, open entranceway. “There’s something about the sharp smell of a highball in these places.”

  “So what is?” she asked me.

  “What is what?”

  “If drinking’s not one of your vices.”

  Her curiosity. I could put in about her curiosity. How we discussed sin, vice, good and evil in the lobby of that Philadelphia hotel while we waited for Shelley to come down with the floral arrangement she’d taken from our table the night before. Just a rabbi talking shop with an interested, dead, lone congregant untimely taken, prematurely plucked out of season.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t one of the commentators tell us that the last thing a man knows is himself?”

  “I love it when you talk religious,” she said. “But really,” she said, “if you had to guess.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “No, of course,” she said. “You don’t have to, but tell me,” she teased, “what? That you haven’t any will power? That you don’t exercise regularly? That you can’t stick to a diet?”

  “Do I look out of shape? You think I’m too fat?”

  “No,” she said, “they’re examples. I’m poking around.”

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that I try to lie low.”

  “Oh,” she said, “what a good one.”

  And pick this moment to bring in something of the stunning mystery of death. This was just two years ago. Two lousy years! The day before yesterday, for God’s sake! And I’m rounding it off. What would that be in terms of seasons? Two or three wardrobes? Six or seven shopping sprees? How much hose, how many leather accessories? What naps and wools, what hides and knits and fine finished fabrics? All that chic, organic cloth, all those hues like altitude tinted on maps, pale as sea level, amber as mountain range. Her blood-sport wraps and fashionables, her swift kinetic tweeds.

  Of death more mysterious than life. Because death is harder, I’d tell them, or what are we grieving for here? (Though life’s pretty mysterious too. Come on, two people chatting each other up in a hotel lobby, and one’s got the hots, and chances are the other has too? All this while the one’s wife of twenty years is upstairs, possibly humming a tune or sniffing stolen flowers?) Bringing in God. The mystic extrasensories and supernaturals. Because ain’t it just at this point that the heart did its tap dance while the head figured all the possibilities like a good gambler counting cards? And the body, don’t forget. What’s all this terrible new energy, these sweet swoopswoons and tickles, these pit-of-the-stomach accelerations and acrobatics like a belly lifted in an elevator? Come on, two people side by side in a hotel lobby. Sharing a couch but not even touching. Heart rates up. Palms moistening. (I mean, it was all I could do to hold on to my highball!) What, this isn’t mysterious? This isn’t a sort of mind-reading, this isn’t some kind of out-of-the-body travel, or bending nails without touching them? This ain’t God loose in the lobby? Tell it to the Marines.

  “So what about you?” I asked. “How is it a girl like you never got married?”

  “You sound like my parents.”

  “How is it?”

  “Maybe I’m just waiting for the right man to come along.”

  And stick in here about her character, her qualities and virtues. Her righteous probity and defense against temptation as if she were protected by fire retardant, or Scotch-Gard, say. Her loyalty, for example. What she said next. “Not you,” she flashed. “Shelley’s my friend. She’s only your wife.”

  I could tell them I underestimated her, and go on, pushing the landmarks and saliencies, the highlights and points of interest, putting her together, too like a police-artist’s sketch.

  “Did you misunderstand me? Oh, you misunderstood me,” I objected. “No, I’m just curious. A nice Jewish girl. Intelligent, attractive. It just seems to me that someone like you would have no difficulty meeting fellows. Perhaps at your temple. In your job where you work. I’m told that sometimes, if you take your wash to the laundromat …”

  “Oh, I meet plenty of men,” she said. “That’s not the problem. Last night.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Last night. After the ceremony. After the dinner. During the dancing.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It was so stuffy. I was all overheated.”

  “Yes?”

  “I needed some air.”

  “Some air. Yes?”

  “So I came down here.”

  “Down here.”

  “Well, I was on my way out.”

  “Outside you mean.”

  “Yes, out. Outside for fresh air.”

  “I see.”

  “I was crossing the lobby and got as far as that bar, and suddenly there was this Japanese man. He was quite good-looking. And, well, he hit on me.”

  “He hit on you?”

  “Well, it was no big deal. He asked if I wanted to have a drink with him.”

  “You’d gone into the bar?”

  “No,” she said, “I was crossing the lobby, I was going out for some air. He saw me crossing the lobby. He was in town on business, I guess. He was alone. I mean, he wasn’t with anyone. Colleagues or customers, a woman, a friend.”

  “He just asked if you wanted to have a drink with him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “I said, ‘How come the sport coats you guys wear always have all those lines and bars and look like blowups of a computer chip?’ ”

  “Goodness,” I said, “that was a little rude. It was sort of a racial slur, wasn’t it? What did he say then?”

  “He was hurt, but I made it up to him,” she said. “I bought him a drink. Then, afterward, I took him up to the room.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Yes?”

  “I didn’t go outside after all.”

  “So you never did get your fresh air.”

  “We opened the windows.”

  I would tell them … And just then remembered. Her parents. She’d mentioned her parents. They would be there. T
hat’s it, I decided. And destroyed my notes. Just ripped them up. Just threw them away. All my notes. Toward my eulogy for Joan Cohen.

  And decided to play it straight.

  The place was packed. Joan Cohen’s bewildered parents sat in the front by themselves, rent strips of grosgrain pinned to their clothing like black campaign ribbons. The Chaverot were there, their Chaverot husbands and children. Musicians I recognized from bands that had played at their affairs. People I’d never seen in my life.

  I read selected passages. I read “O woman of valor who can find?” from Proverbs. I read the twenty-third psalm. I did other selected passages while Shull’s and Tober’s people set up additional chairs for the latecomers. I did “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills” and “Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet; praise Him with the psaltery and harp.”

  Then, scanning the faces of the mourners—Shelley glared; Connie, seated beside Hershorn, was openly snarling—I waited until the last seat was taken, and began.

  “Joan Cohen never married,” I said. “Raised in the values of the traditional Jewish family, she never chose to indulge herself as a ‘single parent,’ and so remained childless. Save for her beloved parents, of course—and it’s typical of Joan how, as a good daughter, she was ever conscious of her mother’s and father’s worries for her (incidentally, one of my fondest memories of Joan is how once, in Philadelphia, she confided in me as her rabbi and spoke of exactly this subject—their concern that she meet Mr. Right, settle down, and make a good Jewish home)—she may be said to have left no survivors.

  “Yet there are so many here. How crowded it is! Additional chairs have been set up to accommodate the overflow. And still people stand at the back of the chapel and along its walls. So many, so very many, heedless of ordinance, in defiance of the safety codes, willing to put themselves at risk! Why? In order to pay Joan our last respects? A childless, single woman who never married and left as survivors only her grieving mother and heartbroken father? So many? So much respect?”

  Shull was weeping. (What this must do to his pleasure, I thought absently. How it must play hell with it. How many thousands it will cost him just to break even again.)

  “As you know, Joan was a talented musician. Her group was called ‘Chaverot,’ Hebrew for ‘fellowship,’ and what a jolly good fellowship it was! I see her fellows in the fellowship here. I see other musicians, bandsmen whose privilege it may once have been to accompany Joan.

  “But can you all be musicians? And who are we talking about here anyway? A Beverly Sills? A Barbra Streisand? An Eydie Gorme?

  “Of course not.

  “We’re talking about someone barely and scantly professional, who made, in the psalmist’s inspired words, her ‘joyful noise unto the Lord,’ and who praised Him not ‘with the sound of the trumpet,’ nor ‘with the psaltery and harp,’ nor ‘with the timbrel.’ Well, maybe with the timbrel, that’s like a tambourine. But not ‘stringed instruments and organs.’ Nor ‘upon the loud cymbals,’ either. So, with the possible exception of the timbrel, what was Joan’s instrument? Her person that she went to so much trouble to keep kempt and was always such a pleasure to look upon, if only to watch the fall fashions that she preferred and never seemed to tire of wearing, as if autumn were her season of choice, like a winter snow scene, say, kept in a crystal? Was it her style, then, that was her instrument? Her elegant outdoor ways? Which led her into the very fields and unfenced vastnesses where the deer stalker and fox hunter and cony catcher wait for their prey?

  “Or was it some cheerful, heady exuberance we caught from her when she raised up her voice in song? That powerful clapping I can almost hear now? Was it some sense we had of her bounding ’round a campfire, leading the singing from the bottom of her generous kibbutz heart? Because she had the energy of a counselor in summer camp and could have been this echt Sabra, a maiden worthy of having been there in the days of Moses, pitching in, helping out, this slim, dark au pair of the wilderness.

  “But so many?”

  I’ve never been particularly proud of what I do. I do it well, I think, and give fair measure. But, as I say, I’m this professional comforter, like one of those who tried to talk Job out of his grievances and, as on occasions like this, often too much in the rabbi mode. Practically speaking, I’m an unmoved mover. Today, though, even I was a little moved. (What the hell, I knew her, Horatio.)

  Most of them were weeping now. Tober’s son, dapper behind opaque glasses, wept blind tears. (Sure, I thought, she taught him to dress.) Anyway, most of them were weeping. It was no time to let up.

  “So many?” I demanded. “A woman without children? An unmarried woman who, except for her parents, leaves no survivors? No sisters or brothers? Not an uncle, not an aunt? A distant cousin even? With no mishpocheh to speak of save the general, at-large, human family we all of us are?

  “ ‘Ah, then, Rabbi,’ you say, ‘then we’re her survivors.’

  “Well, yes, but so many? Lud’s not such an easy place to reach if you’ve never been here before and don’t know the way. What’s today, Tuesday? An ordinary day of business. But think, think. Rosh Hashanah wasn’t a week ago even. Yom Kippur’s four days off. Two days you closed the store. Four more and you lose another day. Is business so good then? So many? Why? You know, tell me why.

  “ ‘Well, but Rabbi,’ you say, ‘she was in her prime.’ ”

  All of them were crying. I swear it. All of them were. (Not old stony-face Connie. Not my wife, not Shelley, even if she was one of the Chaverot! Oh, no, not Connie and Shelley, who seemed, in their bubble of smugness, distanced as Hershorn. But the rest of them, yes.)

  “Of course she was. And it’s a terrible thing when you’re cut down in your prime. Well, it is. It happens, but it’s terrible.

  “Think,” I coaxed, “what is it we say when we hear of the death of someone we did not ourselves know? What do we ask? After we question the circumstances? What do we say? ‘How old was this person?’ And, if we’re told sixty-eight, sixty-nine, anything within shooting distance of the biblical threescore-and-ten, we say, ‘Well, at least they lived a full life.’ Shaving a year or so here, there, up, down, plus or minus, but still in the ballpark. And it’s true. Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, is within the parameters. Low-normal perhaps, but God is kept honest. This is the acceptable numerology of death.

  “Joan Cohen, cut down in her prime, did not live a full life.

  “Or was it the manner of her death, then? That she was shot? Not in the course of things, not, I mean, violently. Not in a rape or holdup, not in a serial killing or to keep her from testifying, but in a straight path on an ordinary day in a green pasture beside still waters in a valley of the shadow of death—taken out out of season in a grotesque hunting accident.

  “But tell me, what death, shaved point here, there, up, down, plus or minus, isn’t grotesque? Is there a doctor in the house? Tell me, Doctor, what death isn’t? You tell me.

  “Still, so many?

  “Or doesn’t it matter how she died? Isn’t it rather when she died? Isn’t that what it comes down to? When all is said and done?”

  There wasn’t as much crying as before. Here and there a few were still inconsolable. Joan’s parents, of course. Fanny Tupperman, Elaine Iglauer. (And Shull was still sobbing at a pretty good clip.) But most of them were quiet now, interested. Behind their sharp looks and open glowers, Shelley was, Connie.

  “Because what’s today, Tuesday? Because Rosh Hashanah wasn’t a week ago even, and Yom Kippur’s four days off.

  “Because she wasn’t inscribed in the Book of Life, and that scares us. It sure scares me.

  “Because Rosh Hashanah was Thursday. Because Sunday’s the Day of Atonement. Because she had ten days. All the ten days of Teshuvah. Because she had ten days of repentance before it was sealed. The Book of Life she prayed and petitioned a loving and forgiving God to inscribe her in. Who wouldn’t do it. Who heard what He heard and still wouldn’t do it. Who must have heard her. Who heard her, all
right. You recall what yesterday was like, the crisp weather, Monday’s fine, clean, clear, open air. You could have heard her yourself.

  “Here’s the picture:

  “All Teshuvah she had, but this was the first good day, and even if the pastures weren’t all that green now—you know what the weather’s been like—still, the foliage was fine, and the still waters. And she must have been feeling pretty good—what was there to fear? it was a clear day; you could see forever—and may even have brought a bit of picnic to nosh—say an apple, a hunk of cheese, say, say a heel of bread—to restore her soul, to dull her appetite if she became peckish.

  “So she put forth her argument, laid out her reasons, her bill of particulars, covering the ground like a Philadelphia lawyer, pulling out the stops, actually appealing to His sense, if He had one, of shame:

  “ ‘But I’m not even married, O Lord our God. I want to settle down, I do. I want to settle down and make a good Jewish home. I’m still waiting for Mr. Right. Too many marriages end in divorce nowadays, O Baruch-Ataw-Adonoi. I want mine to work. And I’d make a swell mom. As I’ve tried to be a good daughter.

  “ ‘And what about my parents? It would kill my pop, and that would kill my mom. They’re great people, they never hurt anybody. Why drag two innocent people into this? For what? What for, O Blessed-Art-Thou? What could possibly be in it for You? What would You be getting? A woman without children? An unmarried woman who, except for her parents, leaves no survivors? No sisters or brothers? Not an uncle, not an aunt? A distant cousin even? With no mishpocheh to speak of save the general, at-large, human family we all of us are? What do you need it?

  “ ‘Oh, and I have a nice voice, Thou-Art-God, and know many songs, and this year resolve to learn more.

  “ ‘Oh, oh, and I keep myself kempt, and am still in my prime, so how about it, Holy-Holy-Holy, inscribe me in the Book of Life for another year. How about it, what do You say, Lord-Is-My-Shepherd?’

  “He said ‘BOOM!’ And ‘BOOM!’ And ‘BOOM!’ again, and Joan Cohen dropped where she stood like a load too heavy to bear any longer.

  “We spoke of keeping God honest? Honest? Because don’t think this is like your car breaking down the minute the warranty runs out. This isn’t like that. This was yesterday she died. New Year’s was Thursday. Today’s Tuesday. The Book of Life isn’t sealed until Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is Sunday. So what did she have? Until Sunday. Counting from Rosh Hashanah, He’d already given her five days. He’d split the difference. She was midway. In a sort of time warp. The warranty hadn’t even started yet. She hadn’t even driven it off the lot!