The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “I don’t have any pain,” Dick said.

  “I know,” the old doc said. “But they’re good to have in the house, just in case something comes up.”

  He had missed six days of classes and he had a lot of work to make up. For four days he crammed. Then he ran out of steam. That afternoon he telephoned Betty Ann Schwartz, but she had a date.

  “How about tomorrow night?”

  “I’m dated tomorrow, too, Dick. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “Dick, it’s not a brushoff. I want to go out with you, awfully. I’m not doing anything Friday night. What do you say? We can do anything you like.”

  “Anything?”

  She laughed. “Almost anything.”

  “I heard you the first time. It’s a date.”

  By the next afternoon he was too restless to study. Although he knew he couldn’t afford it after missing school all the previous week, he cut two classes and drove out to the rod and gun club. There was a skeet shoot. Using the over-and-under for the first time in competition he hit forty-eight clay pigeons out of fifty, standing in the warm sun and knocking them off one after another, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, to take first prize. Driving home, he felt that something was missing, and with puzzlement he searched for whatever it was. Then with a small laugh he realized that it was the sense of elation that usually accompanied winning. For some reason he felt down, not up. In his right groin there was a faint throbbing.

  By two o’clock in the morning it had grown into a pain. He went to his bureau drawer and took out the bottle with the pink capsules. He shook a Darvon into his palm and looked at it.

  “Screw you,” he said.

  He put it back into the bottle and put the bottle away in the drawer, under his jockey shorts. He took two aspirin tablets, and the pain went away.

  Two days later it returned.

  That afternoon he took the Redhead into the woods after birds but came home because his hand grew so numb he couldn’t load the shotgun.

  That night he took a Darvon.

  Friday morning he went to the hospital. Betty Ann Schwartz visited him that evening. But she couldn’t stay very long.

  The old doc explained it to him, very gently.

  “Will you operate,” Dick said, “the way they did before?”

  “It’s a different kind of case,” the doctor said. “There’s something new that they’ve been having some success with. It’s nitrogen mustard, the stuff they once used for war gas. Only this kills cancer, not soldiers.”

  “When do you want to start the treatments?”

  “Right away.”

  “Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  The old doc hesitated and then smiled. “Sure. Take the day off.”

  Dick left the hospital before lunch and drove the sixty miles into Athens. He stopped at a lunchroom but he wasn’t hungry, and instead of ordering he stepped into the telephone booth and called Betty Ann Schwartz at the sorority house. He had to wait while they called her out of the dining room. She was free that evening, she said, and she would love it.

  He didn’t want to run into any of the boys from the House and he had all afternoon to kill. So he went to a movie. There were three motion-picture theaters in Athens, not counting the colored one, and two of them had horror pictures. The remaining one offered The Lost Weekend, which he had seen before. He sat through it again, eating cold buttered popcorn and scrounching down in the dark in the stale-smelling plush chair. The first time he had enjoyed the picture, but the second time around the dramatic parts seemed full of bathos, and he despised Ray Milland for wasting all that time searching for hidden bottles of booze when he could have been banging Jane Wyman and writing stories for The New Yorker.

  After the movie, it was still too early and he bought a pint of bourbon, feeling like Milland, and drove out of town into the country. He looked carefully and found an ideal parking spot in the woods overlooking the Oconee River, and he simply sat there for a long time. The pain was very bad now, and he felt faint. That was because he hadn’t had lunch, he told himself, only the lousy popcorn, and he felt disgusted that sometimes he was such a goddam fool.

  When he picked up Betty Ann he took her to a good restaurant, a place called Max’s, and they each had a brace of drinks and a beautiful sirloin for two. After dinner they had brandy. When they left the restaurant he drove straight to the parking lot overlooking the river. He took out the bourbon and she accepted the bottle when he opened it and she took a long swig and then gave it to him and he did, too. He turned the radio on softly and got some music and they had another drink and then he began to kiss her, and there was no resistance, only encouragement on her part, and soft nibblings all over his face and neck, and he felt a wild disbelieving realization that this was it, that it was finally going to happen, but when the time came he didn’t react the way he should have, nothing happened, and finally they stopped trying.

  “I think you’d better take me home,” she said. She lit a cigarette.

  He started the motor but he didn’t drive off. “I want to explain,” he said.

  “You don’t have to explain anything,” she said.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” he said.

  “I can see that.”

  “No, something really wrong. I’ve got cancer.”

  She sat in silence, smoking. Then she said, “Are you kidding me? Is this some new kind of line?”

  “This would have been important to me. If I die, you might have been the only one.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said softly.

  His hand moved to the shift, but she touched him with her fingertips. “Do you want to try again?”

  “I don’t think it would do any good,” he said. But he switched off the motor. “I’d like to really know how a girl is made,” he said. “Can I look at you?”

  “It’s dark,” she whispered, and he turned on the dashboard lights.

  She lifted her heels to the edge of the seat and leaned back with her eyes shut tight. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  After a little while he started the motor again and when she felt the car begin to move she put her feet down. She kept her eyes closed until they were halfway home, and she turned her body away from him as she finished dressing.

  “Would you like some coffee?” he asked as they neared a diner.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  When they got to the sorority house he started to say something to her but she wouldn’t listen. “Good-by,” she said. “Good luck, Dick.” She opened the car door and slid out, and he sat and watched her run, up the front path and the stone steps and across the wide verandah, until the door slammed behind her.

  He didn’t want to go to the House and it seemed foolish to go to a hotel, so he drove back to the hospital.

  He was in the hospital for the next ten days.

  A pretty little nurse with wild-looking Italian-cut brown hair gave him the drug intravenously. The first day he joked with her and looked at her sweet body and hoped that the failing of the night before had been a mistake, a passing psychological thing, something that was not a by-product of his illness. By the third day he didn’t even know that she was in the room. The nitrogen mustard gave him the runs and made him wretchedly nauseated. The old man came and corrected the dosage, but it still made him ill.

  His Uncle Myron drove to Atlanta three evenings a week and came and sat and just looked at him, saying little.

  Sheldon came once. He kept staring at Dick and finally he went away, muttering that he had exams. He didn’t come again.

  At the end of the tenth day he was released. “You’ll have to come back to the hospital twice a week on an out-patient basis,” the old man said.

  “He’ll stay at my house,” his Uncle Myron said.

  “No, I won’t,” he said. “I’m going to stay in school.”

  “School is out, I’m afraid,” the doctor said.

  “So is your house,” he told My
ron. “I’m going to Cypress. I’m not an invalid.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Who do you think you are?” Myron demanded. “Why do you have to be so stubborn?”

  But the doctor understood. “Let him alone. He’ll be all right by himself for a little while yet,” the old doc told Myron.

  He packed his things late in the morning, when the House was almost deserted. He didn’t even say good-by to Sheldon. He put his bags in the car and the Redhead on top of the bags, and he set the shotgun on a blanket on the floor behind the driver’s seat, then he drove around the campus for a little while. The leaves were beginning to turn color. At one of the sororities an army of girls had turned out with brushes and pails to paint their house, and they had drawn a crowd of shouting, catcalling males.

  He drove to the highway. Within minutes he had raised the speedometer needle to eighty miles per hour, screeching the little blue sports car around curves and rifling down the straightaways, while behind him the Redhead whined softly and he kept waiting for the car to miss a curve, to hit a tree or a wall or a telephone pole. But nothing interfered, not death or even a cop with a ticket for speeding, and like a man riding a rocket he flashed halfway across the state of Georgia.

  He reopened his father’s house and to clean and cook he hired a colored woman, the wife of one of the truck drivers who delivered dining-room sets for the business. He went to the plant on his second afternoon home and two of the men told him how terrible he looked and another man stared. After that, he stayed away from the furniture factory. Sometimes he walked in the woods with the Redhead and the dog whined and danced when he saw quail or mourning doves, but Dick made no attempt to hunt. There were days when he could have, when the numbness and the pain didn’t show up on schedule. But he no longer felt like killing things. For the first time it occurred to him that he had been canceling life in the birds he had gunned from the sky, and he no longer shot, not even at clay pigeons.

  Twice a week he made the long trip back to Atlanta and the hospital, but he drove slowly, almost listlessly, no longer seeking to hasten anything.

  It grew colder. The mole crickets in the field behind the house disappeared. Were they really gone, he wondered, or did they burrow somewhere, to live again in the spring?

  He began to think about God.

  He began to read. He read all night long, when he couldn’t sleep, and most of the day, finally falling asleep over a book in the late afternoon. In the Cypress News he read that a Jewish service would be held, and he attended it. When they began to hold services every Friday he became one of the regulars. He knew most of the people and everybody there knew that he was home from school because he was ill. They were tactful and the women flirted with him bravely and mothered him, pressing him with refreshments at the oneg shabbat.

  But he got no answers from the services. Perhaps if they had a religious leader, he thought, a rabbi who might be able to help him work out some of the answers. At least a rabbi could tell him what as a Jew he could expect from death.

  But when the rabbi came to Cypress, Dick saw that Michael Kind was young and a bit uncertain-looking himself. Although he attended each temple service faithfully, he knew that he could not expect from so ordinary a man the kind of miracle he needed.

  One Sunday, sitting before his television screen and waiting for the start of the sports spectacular, Dick saw the final ten minutes of the videotaped Billy Joe Raye show. Following it he saw fishermen at Lake Michigan, catching whitefish through the ice, and then bronzed men and golden girls surfing at Catalina, and he didn’t allow his mind to dwell on the earlier religious program. But the following Sunday without thinking about it he shaved and dressed carefully and instead of watching television he drove his car into the line of vehicles wending their way toward the healer’s tent.

  He sat still when Billy Joe asked for those who had come to terms with Jesus, but he accepted and signed a card requesting a personal interview with the healer, and as he stood in line and inched toward the stage he noticed the people who left the platform. A man and then a woman threw away their crutches to a cacophony of triumphant cries, the woman actually dancing up the aisle. Others went up the stairs maimed, wasted, or raving and were apparently unchanged when they came down the seven wooden steps at the far end of the platform. A woman took two hesitant steps and then, eyes alight, hurled her crutches away. Two minutes later, her face ruined by grief, she crawled toward the crutches from the spot where she had fallen. But it was not she, nor any of the other failures, who remained in Dick’s mind. He had seen the miracle of Billy Joe’s hands, and now there was further evidence.

  Directly in front of Dick in the line was a girl about ten years old. She was deaf, and after Billy Joe had prayed over her he turned her around until she faced the crowd and could not see the healer’s lips.

  “Say, ‘I love You, God,’” he said to the back of her head.

  “I love You, God,” the girl said.

  Billy Joe grabbed her head in both his hands. “See what God hath brought about,” he solemnly told the cheering crowd.

  Now it was Dick’s turn. “What’s wrong with you, son?” the healer asked, and Dick was aware of the lens like an accusing eye pointed at his face and a little handle on one side of the camera going round and round as it whirred.

  “Cancer.”

  “Kneel, son.”

  He saw the man’s shoes, brown, fine-grained pigskin, brown silk socks stretched tight the way only garters will do, and beige linen trouser cuffs that looked tailored. Then the man’s huge hand covered his face and eyes. The fingertips dug into his cheekbones and scalp, and the palm, smelling of the sweat of other faces so that Dick gagged slightly, pushed into his nose and mouth, bending his head back.

  “Lord,” Billy Joe said, clenching shut his eyes, “this man is being eaten by the demons of corruption. Cell by cell they are devouring him.

  “Lord, show this man that You love him. Save his life that he may help me to do Thy work. Stem the advance of the foul corrosion within his body. Erase the disease with a sweep of Thy love, and prevent further damage by cancer, tumor, or other devilish decay.

  “Lord.” The fingers, big as sausages and full of strength, tightened painfully into a claw over Dick’s face.

  “HEAL!” Billy Joe commanded.

  Strangely, there was no pain that evening or the next day. This sometimes happened, and he didn’t dare hope until another day passed, and another night, and then two more days and nights, a vacation from suffering.

  That week he drove to Atlanta twice and went to the hospital on schedule and allowed a resident to insert a canula into his veins and waited while the nitrogen mustard dripped-dripped-dripped into his bloodstream. The following Sunday he returned to the tent and he saw Billy Joe Raye again, and that Tuesday he didn’t go to the hospital, nor did he go on Thursday. He got no nitrogen mustard but the pain stayed away, and he began to feel strong again. He prayed a lot. Lying in front of the fire, scratching the Redhead between the ears, he promised God that if he were spared he would become a disciple of Billy Joe Raye’s, and he spent hours imagining himself conducting prayer meetings with the help of the Trumpeter of God and a girl. The face of the girl changed from dream to dream, and so did the color of her hair. But she was always well-built and beautiful, a girl whom Billy Joe had also saved and with whom Dick would experience the joy of living for God.

  That Sunday after the meeting Dick went to an usher. “I want to do something to help,” he said. “Contribute, perhaps.”

  The man led him to a little office behind a partition, where he was third in line, and when it was his turn a plump man with a kindly face showed him where to sign in order to become a Friend of Health Through Faith and pledge six hundred dollars over the next twelve months.

  By the next Tuesday the doctor had telephoned several times and had notified his Uncle Myron that Dick had discontinued treatment, and Myron drove out to the house and there was an ugly scene. Dick came
through it unmoved, telling himself that after all it was he who was being saved.

  On Saturday afternoon he fainted. When he revived the pain was there, worse than before.

  On Sunday it grew. Something within his chest seemed to press outward, perhaps against his lungs, making it difficult for him to draw a full breath, and he often felt faint.

  He went to the tent meeting and he sat on the hard wooden folding chair and he prayed.

  When he stood to await his turn to see Billy Joe he realized that seated in the row behind him was the Rabbi.

  To hell with him, he thought, but even before he stopped thinking it he was running out of the tent and across the huge parking lot, his elbows pulled in clumsily by the pain under his ribs, his arms and his legs heavy and hard to lift. He was aware that there was really no place to run to.

  When Michael got to the boy’s house, nobody was home. It was a nice house, old-fashioned but built to last. It was not neglected, but it looked unfulfilled; it was the kind of house that should have been occupied by a large family.

  He sat down on the front steps and in a little while a rangy Irish setter that walked like a sulky lion came around the corner of the house and moved to within a few feet of him.

  “Hello,” Michael said.

  The dog looked at him without moving a hair. Then, apparently satisfied, he walked closer and lay across one of the stairs, resting his auburn muzzle on Michael’s knee. They were like that, with the Rabbi scratching the dog’s ears, when the blue sports car rolled into the driveway.

  For a few minutes, Dick Kramer sat in the car and watched them. Then he got out and walked across the lawn to the porch.

  “The old bastard loves that,” he said. He took a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the front door, and without waiting for an invitation the Rabbi and the dog followed him inside.