The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “Yours,” he said. He went out the door without saying good-by.

  The bunkhouse was built of bare lumber planks nailed to two-by-fours and covered with tarpaper. Michael’s cot was in a corner. The corner was also inhabited by a huge spiderweb containing, like an iridescent jewel in its very center, a large hairy-legged black spider with blue and orange markings.

  His skin crawled. He looked around for something with which to slay the monster, but nothing he saw seemed to lend itself to the task.

  The spider didn’t move. “All right,” he told it. “You stay off my back and I’ll stay off yours.”

  “Who you talkin’ to, man?”

  Michael whirled and then grinned sheepishly. The other boy stood in the doorway and regarded him with suspicion. He was a blond, crewcut youth with a tan almost as deep as Abe Kind’s. He was dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a tee shirt that had YALE printed across the front in large blue letters.

  “The spider,” Michael said.

  He was puzzled but Michael decided that the more he explained the more ridiculous it would sound. The other boy stuck out his hand and introduced himself. He was a hand-pumper. “Al Jenkins,” he said. “You got anything to eat?”

  Michael had a candy bar he had been saving, but he handed it to him in a burst of community spirit. He lay on Michael’s mattress and bit off half the bar after throwing the wrapper under Michael’s cot.

  “You go to school?” he asked.

  “I’m starting Columbia in the fall. How long have you been at Yale?”

  He threw back his head and hawed. “Hell, I don’t go to Yale. I go to Northeastern. That’s in Boston.”

  “Why do you wear the Yale shirt?”

  “That’s Ivy League cover, man. For the quiff.”

  “The quiff?”

  “The quail, the cunt, the poon tang, the broads. This your first season working a summer place?”

  Michael confessed that it was.

  “You’ve got an awful lot to learn, fella.” He finished the candy bar. Then remembering, he sat up suddenly in Michael’s bed.

  “Were you really talking to this goddam spider?”

  They got up at 5:30 A.M. There were twenty of them in the bunkhouse. The busboys and beachboys groaned and cursed the kitchen help for waking them hours before they had to go to work, and after the first few mornings the kitchen help didn’t bother to curse back.

  The chef was a tall, spare man named Mister Bousquet. Michael never heard his first name, nor did it ever occur to him to ask what it was. Mister Bousquet had a long face with veiled eyes and immobile features, and he spent his time tasting and giving infrequent orders in an unemotional monotone.

  On the first morning they were taken into the kitchen by the hotel personnel manager. Michael was handed over to a Korean of indeterminate age who was introduced as Bobby Lee.

  “I am pantry man,” he said. “You are pantry boy.”

  There were three crates of oranges stacked on a table. Bobby Lee handed him a crowbar and a knife. He opened the crates and cut oranges in half until he had filled three large earthenware tubs.

  To his relief he found that the juicer was automatic. He held half an orange against the whirling core until there was nothing left inside the orange but white skin, then he threw it into a basket and picked up another half. An hour later he was still pressing oranges against the juicer. The muscles in his arm were knotted and his fingers were so stiff he was sure he would go through life looking as if his right hand were poised to grasp the chest of any female foolish enough to stray within range. When the orange juice was done there were melons to be cut and grape-fruits to be sectioned, cans of kadota figs to be opened, and serving stands to be filled with crushed ice and juice and fruits. By the time the cooks came in at seven-thirty Bobby and he were cutting vegetables for the luncheon salad.

  “We have breakfast pretty soon,” Bobby said.

  By facing the pantry door as he worked he was able to see the waitresses when they bustled back and forth through the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen. They ranged from plain to flashily beautiful. He enjoyed watching one girl in particular. She had a good, strong body that moved under her uniform when she walked, and thick yellow hair worn in a coil that made her look as though her picture belonged in an ad for Swedish beer.

  Bobby saw him watching her and grinned.

  “Do we eat with the waitresses?” Michael asked.

  “They eat in zoo.”

  “In the zoo?”

  “What we call dining room for the help. We eat right here in pantry.”

  He saw Michael’s disappointment and his grin widened. “Be happy. Food in zoo not fit for animals. We eat same as guests.”

  He proved his words a few minutes later. Michael breakfasted on kadota figs and clotted cream, fluffy scrambled eggs and link sausages, sugared strawberries the size of pingpong balls, and two cups of strong hot coffee. He went back to work in a haze of dreamy contentment.

  Bobby watched approvingly as he sliced cucumbers. “You work good. You eat good. You fine young sonabitch.”

  He agreed modestly.

  That evening he sat on a rain-warped piano stool outside the bunkhouse door. He was tired and very lonesome. Inside, someone played haltingly on a banjo, alternating between “On Top of Old Smoky” and “All I Do the Whole Night Through Is Dream of You.” He played each of them four times.

  Michael watched the merging of the male help and the female help. They had been warned against socializing with the guests, but he observed immediately that the management need have no fears. Most of the hired hands seemed to be veterans of previous summers who had come back to Cape Cod to pick up amorous connections where they had been broken off by the previous Labor Day. He was an envious witness to reunion after reunion.

  The bunkhouse was separated from the female quarters by a deep pine grove. The grove was veined with paths leading into the woods. The pattern inevitably was the same. Boy and girl would meet at the grove, chat for a few minutes and then stroll down one of the paths together. He didn’t see the girl with the Swedish braids. There must be somebody, he thought, who isn’t half of a couple.

  Just as it was growing dark a girl came up the path toward him. She was a tall, assured brunette wearing a Wellesley sweatshirt. The first and the last Is in WELLESLEY were at least a foot closer to him than the rest of the letters.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Peggy Maxwell. You’re new this season, aren’t you?”

  He introduced himself.

  “I saw you in the pantry today,” she said. She leaned forward. She was very impressive when she leaned.

  “Would you do me a favor? The food in the zoo is awful. Could you bring me something from the pantry tomorrow night?”

  He was about to pledge his foraging services for the entire summer when the banjo inside the bunkhouse fell silent and Al Jenkins stood in the doorway. He was wearing a sweatshirt with Princeton markings.

  “PEG-LEGS!” he shouted exultantly.

  “ALLIE POOPOO!”

  They fell into one another’s arms, laughing and swaying, with much laying-on of the hands. Within seconds, palms clasped, they had disappeared down one of the wooded paths. Michael watched them turn a leafy corner, wondering if Peggy Maxwell really went to Wellesley or if the sweatshirt was Ivy League cover for the studs. She could starve, for all he cared.

  He sat on the piano stool until it was dark and then he went into the bunkhouse and turned on the naked bulb. He had a book in his bag: The Writings of Aristotle. He pulled it out and flopped down on his bed. Two flies buzzed over a piece of chocolate that that slob Al Jenkins had dropped on his mattress when he ate the only candy bar. Michael swatted them with the book and dropped the carcasses into his friend’s web. A small moth had flown into the web and lay in stiff, imprisoned death near the spider. “Listen:

  People who fall short with regard to pleasures and delight in them less than they should are hardly found; f
or such insensibility is not human. Even the other animals distinguish different kinds of food and enjoy some and not others; and if there is any one who finds nothing pleasant and nothing more attractive than anything else, he must be something quite different from a man; this sort of person has not received a name because he hardly occurs.”

  By the time he finished the paragraph the two flies had disappeared and the spider was motionless again. The moth was still untouched. “You listen good. You eat good. You fine young sonabitch,” he said. The spider didn’t deny it.

  He snapped out the light, stripped down to his underwear, and got into bed. They fell asleep, the spider and he.

  For three weeks he worked in the pantry, he ate, he slept, and he was lonely. After Al Jenkins saw him reading Aristotle he couldn’t withhold the news that Michael also talked to spiders, and within five days he was branded as the hotel queer. He didn’t give a damn. There wasn’t one of those cretins he wanted to engage in a five-minute conversation.

  The name of the girl with the braids was Ellen Trowbridge. He found out by swallowing his pride and asking Jenkins.

  “She’s not your lollipop, Sonny boy,” Jenkins said. “She’s a frigid Radcliffe bitch who’s strictly no-score. Ask the man who knows.”

  She had Tuesday afternoons off. He bribed the information from Peggy Maxwell with a lamb chop. He had Thursdays, but Bobby Lee agreed without hesitation to let him switch.

  That evening he went to the girls’ bunkhouse, knocked at the door and asked for her. When she came out she looked at him with a little frown that furrowed two wrinkles in her forehead.

  “I’m Mike Kind. We both have tomorrow afternoon off, so I wondered if you might like to join me in a picnic.”

  “No, thank you,” she said clearly. Somebody inside the bunkhouse giggled.

  “At the town beach,” he said. “It’s a little crowded, but it’s not bad.”

  “I’m not dating this summer.”

  “Oh. You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Thank you for asking me.”

  She went inside. As he started to walk away Peg Maxwell and a little redhead who was sort of cute came out.

  “Would you like some other company tomorrow afternoon?” Peggy asked.

  The other girl giggled, but his guard was up anyhow. She had asked much too sweetly.

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  “I was going to suggest Aristotle. Or your spider. Is it a female spider, or is your relationship homosexual?” They both doubled over with laughter.

  “Go to hell,” he said. He turned on his heel and started up the path.

  “Mr. Kind!” It was Ellen Trowbridge’s voice. He stopped and waited for her, but he didn’t say anything when she reached him.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said.

  He knew she had overheard his exchange with Peggy. “Look, don’t do me any favors.”

  “I’d like to go with you tomorrow. I really would.”

  “Well, then—sure, fine.”

  “Shall I meet you in the grove? At three o’clock?”

  “I’ll pick you up at your bunkhouse.”

  She nodded and smiled, and they both walked down the path in different directions.

  Bobby Lee had packed him a generous picnic basket and he watched with awe as she ate her way through it.

  “Is the food in the zoo that bad?”

  “Worse.” She stopped gnawing at a chicken leg. “Am I making such a pig of myself?”

  “No, no. You’re just so—hungry.”

  She smiled and resumed her gnawing. He was glad that she kept herself involved with the food. It gave him a chance to study her. She was generously made, her body trim and firm-looking in a white one-piece bathing suit. As she finished the last crumb of lunch he looked at her thick blonde braids and made himself a bet.

  “Svenska?” he asked, touching one of the braids lightly. “Right?”

  She looked puzzled, then she understood and she laughed.

  “Wrong. Scotch-German on my mother’s side and English-Yankee on my father’s.” She studied him. “You’re Jewish.”

  “According to sociologists, you’re not supposed to be able to tell that by looking. How did you know? My nose? My face? The way I talk?”

  She shrugged. “I just knew.”

  She had very white skin. “You’re going to burn,” he said anxiously.

  “My skin isn’t used to the sun. By the time I finish work the sun’s gone down.” She took a bottle of lotion from her bag.

  “Would you like me to put that on for you?”

  “No, thank you,” she said politely. Her fingernails were short and she used colorless polish. When she put the lotion on the inside of her thighs he couldn’t breathe.

  “Why did you tell me yesterday that you weren’t dating this summer? Do you go steady? With a Harvard boy?”

  “No. I’m just a freshman. I haven’t even begun at Radcllife yet. I mean, no; there isn’t anybody.”

  “Then why?”

  “I accepted four dates with four different boys my very first week here. Do you know what happened each time we took a dozen steps into those damn woods? With four boys I hadn’t known for five minutes?”

  She had stopped rubbing lotion but she sat with her right palm suspended a few inches above her left calf, her body frozen, her eyes staring straight into his. Her irises were actually green. He wanted to look away but there was no where else to look.

  She looked away and poured more lotion into her palm. She kept her face down, but he could see the blood rising pink on the back of her white neck. The sun was very hot. The beach was crowded and noisy with children, and not far offshore a motor launch whined; but they sat on an island of silence. She must have poured too much lotion into her hand. When she went back to rubbing it on her calf it made an intimate, liquid sound against her flesh. He ached to put his hand on her, anywhere, just to make contact. She had legs that were long and slender but very muscular.

  “Are you a dancer?” he asked.

  “Ballet. Very amateur.” She placed a palm beneath each calf. “Aren’t they awful. It’s the price you pay.”

  “You know they’re not. Why did you change your mind and go out with me?”

  “I could tell you were different.”

  His knees trembled with desire. “I’m not,” he said fiercely.

  Startled, she looked up, and then she began to roar with laughter. For a moment he was ashamed and angry, but her amusement was infectious. Despite himself, he grinned. Soon he laughed with her and the tension drained away, carrying with it, regrettably, the voluptuousness.

  “Let’s just say,” she said, fighting for breath, “that you looked nice but lonely like me and I figured it was safe to come to this deserted stretch of beach with you.”

  She got up and held out her hand and he grabbed it as he got to his feet. Her fingers were strong but soft and warm. They picked their way through the beach blankets and the sprawled clumps of humanity.

  At the water’s edge out of the corners of their eyes they watched a fat brown-skinned woman enter the sea. She walked into the water until it touched the bottom of her pendulous breasts. With her hands she scooped small chunks of ocean and let them dribble and splash into the top of her bathing suit. When her chest was wet she rose and fell, now stretching high, now submerging slightly, going deeper each time, until the vastness was gone and nothing was left above the water but her round head.

  “Come on down the beach,” he said. “We’ve got to do that.”

  They walked far enough to be hidden from the fat lady’s sight and then imitated her performance. The girl even splashed water into the bra of her suit. He was careful not to smile. It was a serious business and, they found, very enjoyable. When nothing remained above the ocean but her head and his, they moved together until their mouths were a foot apart on the surface of the sea.

  She had grown up on a turkey farm in Clinton, Massachusetts.
/>   She hated turkey and any other kind of fowl.

  And eggs.

  She loved red meat.

  And Utrillo.

  And Gershwin.

  And Paul Whiteman.

  And Sibelius.

  She hated all Scotch.

  She loved good sherry.

  And ballet, but she wasn’t enough of an artist to be professional.

  She wanted to go to Radcliffe and then become a social worker and a wife and a mother, in that order.

  The water was warm but finally their lips turned blue. People started to leave the beach but they sat in the water, letting waves moving toward the beach pull them in and those washing back pull them out. Every so often they had to move a little to stay at the depth they wanted. She began to ask him questions.

  Where was he going to school? Columbia.

  What was he going to major in? Physics.

  What did his father do for a living? Supports bosoms.

  Did he like New York? I suppose so.

  Was he a religious Jew? I don’t know.

  What was a synagogue service like? Like a church service performed in Hebrew, perhaps. But he couldn’t really tell because he never had seen a church service.

  What did it mean when something was Kosher?

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You don’t have to study to become a social worker. You already work up an efficient ethnic case history.”

  Her eyes became cold. “I told you. Anything you asked. I would have answered any of your questions. You fool, you’ve ruined everything.” She started out of the water but he put his hand on her arm and apologized.

  “Ask me anything you want,” he said. They hunkered down in the water again. Her lips were almost white. Her face was sunburned.

  Did he have any brothers or sisters? An older sister. Ruthie.

  What was Ruthie like? A pain in the ass. She was spending the summer in Palestine.

  Did he have to be vulgar? Sometimes it feels good.

  Didn’t he love Ruthie though, deep down? He didn’t really think so.

  Where did they live? Queens.

  Did the apartment have a dumbwaiter? Yes.