The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “Why?”

  “He’s had some difficulty in finding a congregation. Several months ago he married a young woman who is a convert from Christianity.”

  “A Catholic?”

  “I believe not.”

  “I don’t think the marriage would bother us any,” Schoenfeld mused. “We live very closely with our Christian neighbors. And as long as the man is in a tight spot, we should be able to get him for seven thousand, wouldn’t you say?”

  Something, Schoenfeld couldn’t tell just what, flitted quickly across the rabbi’s features and then was gone. “That will have to be between you and the young man,” Sher said politely.

  Schoenfeld took out a small leather-covered notebook and his pen. “What is his name?”

  “Rabbi Michael Kind.”

  26

  They bought a blue Plymouth convertible, two years old and with a set of almost-new tires, from a dealer in the Bronx. Then they drove back to the apartment on West 60th Street and made arrangements to have Leslie’s desk and their combined library of books sent to them Railway Express.

  There was a last, uncomfortable dinner with his parents, an evening which dragged with the weight of things past said and unsaid. (“You damn fool,” his father had cried when he had broken the news, “you don’t marry them!” And he had seen sudden lights in Abe Kind’s eyes behind the shadows of despair, the flickering of flame in coals of guilt that had been banked for years.) Throughout the evening Dorothy and Leslie chatted about recipes. When finally they kissed good-by, Dorothy was dry-eyed and preoccupied. Abe wept.

  Next morning they drove to Hartford.

  Inside the Hastings Congregational Church they sat in the gloom of a hallway on an old walnut bench until the Reverend Mr. Rawlins came out of his office, saying good-by to a young man and a young woman.

  “Small weddings are the best kind,” he was saying as he walked them to the door. “The warmest and the most sensible.”

  He looked at them, sitting there. “Well, Leslie,” he said, his tone unchanged.

  Michael and Leslie stood up. She introduced them.

  “Will you have tea?”

  He ushered them into his study and they sat and had tea and cookies served by a poker-faced middle-aged woman. They exchanged uncomfortable small talk.

  “Remember the spice cookies Aunt Sally used to make?” Leslie asked her father as the tea things were removed. “Sometimes I think of her and I can taste them.”

  “Spice cookies?” he said. He turned to Michael. “Sally was my sister-in-law. A good woman. Died two years ago.”

  “I know,” Michael said.

  “She left Leslie one thousand dollars. Do you still have that money, Leslie?”

  “Yes,” Leslie said. “Yes, I do.”

  The minister wore rimless glasses; behind them his pale blue eyes observed Michael.

  “Do you think you will like the South?”

  “I’ve spent several years in Florida and Arkansas,” Michael said. “I think that people are people, everywhere.”

  “As one grows older one begins to note significant differences.”

  They were silent. “Well,” Leslie said, “we must be going.” She kissed the smooth white cheek. “Take care of yourself, father.”

  “The Lord will take care of me,” he said, showing them to the door.

  “He will take care of us, too,” Michael said. His father-in-law appeared not to have been listening.

  Two days later Leslie and Michael drove into Cypress, Georgia, on a hot afternoon in early summer that foretold what the deep season in that town would be like. In the main square, the heat shimmered in visible waves from the bronze surface of the equestrian statue of General Thomas Mott Lainbridge. Michael idled the car next to the grassy rotary which bore the statue, and they squinted at it through the bright sunshine. They could make out only the name.

  “Ever hear of him?” he asked Leslie.

  She shook her head. He pulled over to the curb. Four teenaged boys lounged outside the drugstore in the shade of the awning.

  “Sir,” Michael said to one of them. He stuck his thumb at General Thomas Mott Lainbridge. “Who was he?”

  The boy looked at his friends and they grinned. “Lainbridge.”

  “Not his name,” Leslie said. “What did he do?”

  One of the boys left the shade and walked slowly to the statue. He pushed his face near the plaque at its base and paused, his lips moving soundlessly. Then he returned. “Commandin’ General, Second Georgia Fusiliers.”

  “Fusiliers were infantry,” Leslie said. “What’s he doing on a horse?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “We thank you,” Michael said. “Do you know where we can find Eighteen Piedmont Road?”

  It was a three-minute drive. It turned out to be a small green house with a sagging porch and a weedy lawn. The windows were unwashed.

  “It looks nice,” she said uncertainly.

  He kissed her cheek. “Welcome home.” He stood in the front seat of the convertible and searched the street ahead, looking on the odd-numbered side because the temple was number 45. He was unable to guess which of the buildings down the street might be his new responsibility.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She got out of the car and ran lightly up the steps. The front door was unlocked. “You go ahead,” she said. “See it for the first time by yourself. Then come right back to me.”

  “I love you,” he told her.

  The numerals had been removed when Sinai had been painted, and he drove past the temple without knowing. But 47 was plainly marked on the house next door and he turned the car around and parked in the temple driveway. There was no sign. There would have to be a sign, small and dignified.

  As he entered, he took a yarmulka from his back pocket and put it on.

  Inside, it was cooler. Interior walls had been ripped out to make a large room for the sanctuary. The kitchen and the bathroom had been retained, and there were two small rooms off the central hallway which would be suitable for a general office and a rabbi’s study. The floors were freshly varnished; he walked down a path of newspapers which led from room to room.

  There was no bema, but an ark stood against one wall. He opened it and saw that it contained a Torah. On the velvet cover was a thin silver tag which informed him that the Torah had been donated by Mr. and Mrs. Ronald G. Levitt in memory of Samuel and Sarah Levitt. He stroked the scroll and then kissed his fingertips the way his grandfather had taught him so long ago.

  “Thank you for this, my first temple,” he said aloud. “I will try to make it truly a house of the Lord.” The sound of his voice bounced back at him hollowly from the bare walls. Everything smelled of paint.

  Number 18 Piedmont Road was not painted. Nor had it been washed for a long time. Dust covered everything. Small red spiders moved on the ceilings overhead, and a long white smear of dried bird-droppings defaced the front window.

  Leslie had found a pail. She had filled it with water and placed it on the gas range, which she was trying in vain to ignite.

  “There’s no hot water,” she said. “We need a mop and a scrub brush and soap. I’d better make a list.”

  Her voice was too calm, tipping him off about what to expect as he moved through the house. The furniture was summer-cottage borax and needed more than paint. A rung was missing from one of the rickety chairs, and another chair lacked a section of its back. In the bedroom, the stained brown mattress was folded back, exposing rusty and sagging springs. The wallpaper appeared to be ante-bellum.

  When she returned to the kitchen he couldn’t meet her eyes. She had wasted her last match trying to light the gas jet.

  “Damn,” she said. “What’s the matter with this thing? The pilot light’s working.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Got a pin?’

  The only one she could find was on the fastener of a cameo brooch, but he used it to poke clear the little holes in the gas ring. Then he struck one of his matc
hes and the burner caught with a puff, giving a steady blue-white flame.

  “The water will be heated by the time you’re back with the soap,” she said.

  But he shut off the gas. “Tonight both of us will work. But first comes dinner.”

  When they got into the car, each knew that the other was relieved to be free of the shabby, dirty house.

  That night, while perspiration stung their eyes and dripped from their faces, they scrubbed furniture and walls. When finally they finished, after midnight, they stood in the bathtub and washed each other clean. There was a serviceable shower but no curtain; Leslie turned on the cold water at full pressure, not caring when the spray glanced off their bodies and wet the entire bathroom.

  “Let it dry,” she said wearily. She walked naked into the bedroom and groaned. “There are no sheets.” She pointed to the stained mattress and for the first time her mouth trembled. “I can’t sleep on that.”

  Michael pulled on his trousers and walked barefooted and shirtless to the car, the trunk of which contained two blue Navy blankets purchased at a surplus-goods store in Manhattan. He carried the blankets into the house and spread them on the mattress and Leslie turned off the light. They lay in the dark together and, dumbly seeking to comfort her, he knew of nothing else to do but to put his arms around her and draw her nakedness to him. But she made a small sound in the back of her throat, half groan, half sigh.

  “Hot,” she said.

  He kissed her head and flopped back. It was the first time she had denied herself to him. He forced himself to think of other things, the temple, his first sermon, plans for a Hebrew school. With the heat above them and the prickly wool blankets underneath, they somehow fell asleep.

  In the morning Michael awoke first. He lay and looked at his sleeping wife; at her hair, straight and stringy from last night’s shower and the humidity; at her nostrils, moving almost imperceptibly each time she exhaled, as if in afterthought; at the brown birthmark which surrounded a single golden hair beneath her right breast; at her flesh, pale and soft with the moist heat. Eventually she opened her eyes. For a long time they stared at one another. Then she tugged the hair on his chest and leaped from the bed.

  “Come on, Rabbi, we’ve got a busy day ahead. I want to make this dump into a home.”

  They repeated the shower routine and then, wet, discovered that the other clean towels were still in the trunk of the car. They put underwear on their dripping bodies and let the air dry their skin tight as they breakfasted on milk and corn flakes they had bought the night before.

  “The first thing you want to do is buy sheets,” Leslie said.

  “I’d like to get a decent bed. And a dinette set.”

  “Talk to the landlord first. After all, we’re renting the furniture, too. Maybe he’ll replace some of it.” She frowned. “How much do we have left in the bank? We’re going to have to pay ninety dollars a month for this palace, according to their letter.”

  “We’ve got enough,” he said. “I’m going to telephone Ronald Levitt, the congregation president, and find out some of the businesses in town that are owned by temple members. I might as well buy whatever we need from the people who are paying my salary.”

  He shaved as well as he could with cold water, then dressed and kissed her good-by.

  “Don’t worry about me today,” she said. “You buy what we need and keep it in the car while you get busy at the temple. I’ll walk over to the General’s square for lunch.”

  When he had gone she pulled her old jeans and a halter from the suitcase and put them on. She pulled her hair back with one hand and used an elastic band to make a ponytail. Then she heated water and, her feet bare, got down on her hands and knees and began to scrub the floors.

  She did the bathroom and the bedroom first, then the living room. She was one third through with the kitchen floor, her back to the door, when she felt that she was being watched and she looked over her shoulder.

  The man was standing on the back porch, smiling at her through the screen of the door. She dropped the scrub brush into the pail and clambered to her feet, wiping her palms on the front of the jeans.

  “Yes?” she said faintly. He wore seersucker slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie and a Panama hat, but no jacket. I’ll have to tell Michael, she thought, probably it’s perfectly all right not to wear a suit coat around here.

  “I’m David Schoenfeld,” he said. “Your landlord.”

  Schoenfeld. He was on the temple board, she remembered. “Come in,” she said. “I’m sorry, I was scrubbing so hard I didn’t hear you knock.”

  He smiled as he entered. “I didn’t knock. You looked so pretty, workin’ away like that, I thought I’d just look on for a while.” She glanced at him warily, her feminine antennae catching emanations, but his smile was friendly and his eyes were impersonal.

  They sat at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry I can’t offer refreshments,” she said. “We’re not at all settled.”

  He made a small protesting motion with the hat in his hand. “I just wanted to welcome you and the Rabbi to Cypress. Temple Sinai is new at this sort of thing. I suppose we should have had a committee to get things ready for you. Is there anything you need?”

  She laughed. “A vacation. This house certainly needed a going over.”

  “I guess it did,” he said. “I haven’t been in it since before the war. While I was in the Army an agent took care of it for me. I didn’t expect you this soon, or it would have been ready.” He looked at her perspiration-beaded neck. “Around here, we have colored girls to help people like you with this kind of work. I’ll send one over this afternoon.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said.

  “I insist. A free introductory service of the landlord.”

  “And I thank you. But I’m almost finished,” she said firmly.

  He looked away first, grinning. “Well,” he said, jiggling the chair in which he sat, “at least I can replace these matchsticks. I’ll see what else we can come up with in the way of furniture.”

  He rose and she saw him to the door. “There is one other thing, Mr. Schoenfeld,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I would appreciate it if you would replace the mattress.”

  His lips did not smile. But she was glad when his eyes left her face.

  “Happy to,” he said, tipping his hat.

  By the next day their future no longer seemed unbearable, even in their private thoughts.

  Michael had mentioned the lack of a bema to Ronnie Levitt, and the following day a carpenter came to the temple to build a low platform at one end of the room according to the Rabbi’s specifications. Folding chairs arrived for the sanctuary, and furniture for the office. He hung his framed diplomas on the wall and took a long time deciding how to arrange his study.

  A van came to the house and two Negro men took out most of the old furniture, replacing it with attractive new pieces. Even while Leslie was directing the placing of the new things, Sally Levitt came to call. Five minutes later, while Mrs. Levitt was still there, two other ladies of the congregation rang the doorbell. The three bore gifts: a pineapple cake, a bottle of California sherry, a bouquet of flowers.

  This time Leslie was ready for callers. She offered the sherry, she served iced tea, and she cut the cake.

  Sally Levitt was small and brunette, with a pouting mouth and a tight youthful body that was betrayed by the crow’s-feet wrinkles at her eyes. “I know a mill where you can get marvelous curtains,” she told Leslie, casting an appraising eye around the room. “This place has tremendous possibilities.”

  “I’m really beginning to think so,” Leslie said, smiling.

  That evening, as she cooked dinner, her desk and their books arrived from New York.

  “Michael, I hope we can stay here for the rest of our lives!” Leslie cried when they had unpacked the books and placed them on the shelves.

  That night, on the new mattress, the Kinds made
love for the first time in the new house.

  Temple Sinai was dedicated on the following Sunday morning. Judge Boswell was the dedication speaker. He orated long and eloquently about the Judaic-Christian heritage, about the common ancestry of Moses and Jesus, and about the spirit of democracy in Cypress, “like fine wine in the peaceful Georgia air, allowin’ men to live as brothers irregardless of choice of church,” while a small knot of colored children gathered across the street to point and giggle or to gaze in wide-eyed silent curiosity at the white people on the opposite sidewalk.

  “I am happy and honored,” the Judge concluded, “to have been invited by my Hebra neighbors to participate in the christenin’ of their new house of worship.” He paused, realizing that all was not well, then beamed as the applause began.

  Midway in the ceremonies Michael had begun to notice a stream of cars moving slowly and steadily past the temple. Courtesy had kept his eyes glued to the speakers’ faces. However, at the conclusion of the dedication he was called upon to recite the blessing. Finishing it, blinking his eyes against the strong sun, he looked over the heads of the disintegrating crowd.

  The line of cars still came.

  There were vehicles of all models and makes. Some of them had Alabama and Tennessee registration plates. There were pickups and flivvers, farm trucks and an occasional Cadillac or Buick.

  Ronnie Levitt bore down on him. “Rabbi,” he said. “The ladies are serving coffee inside. The Judge is going to join us. You two will have a chance to talk.”

  “These cars,” Michael said. “Where are they going?”

  Ronnie smiled. “To church. In a tent. There’s a minister who holds a prayer meetin’ about three miles out of town. Pulls people in from all over the countryside.”

  Michael watched the cars continue to appear at one end of the street and disappear down the other. “That must be quite a minister,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the envy out of his voice.

  Ronnie shrugged. “I think some of them just like to get their faces on the television,” he said.

  That Friday evening Temple Sinai was full, which pleased but did not surprise him. “They’ll come tonight because it’s a novelty,” he had told Leslie. “It’s the long haul that will count.”