The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  St. Margaret’s, the Catholic parish in which the Kinds lived, was building a new church. One morning, driving past the site, Michael double-parked for a few minutes to watch a steam shovel rip giant chunks of earth and rock from the foundation hole.

  The next day he came back. And the next. He began making a habit of dropping by to watch the steel-helmeted workers when he had a few spare moments. It was relaxing to lean against the makeshift fence of random lumber and stare at the noisy mechanical monoliths and the leather-skinned construction crew. Inevitably he met the pastor of St. Margaret’s, the Reverend Dominic Angelo Campanelli, a sleepy-eyed old priest with a huge strawberry mark like a sign of divinity on the right side of his face.

  “Temple Isaiah,” he said when Michael introduced himself. “That would be St. Jeremiah’s. I grew up in that parish.”

  “Did you really?” Michael said, adding ten years to his original estimate of the age of the temple building.

  “Served as choirboy for Father Gerald X. Minehan, who subsequently was associate bishop in San Diego,” Father Campanelli said. He shook his head. “St. Jeremiah’s. I carved my initials in the belfry of that church.” He looked into the distance. “Right under an old gas lamp that used to hang from one of the walls.” He colored and seemed to shake himself mentally. “Yes,” he said. “Nice to meet you,” and walked away, a black-cassocked figure whose fingers moved restlessly over the hundred and fifty beads on the cord around his waist.

  That afternoon Michael overturned an old shoebox on his desk and one by one went through the tagged keys it had contained, until he came upon one whose tag was marked belfry.

  The narrow door opened with a satisfying screeching. Inside there was gloom, and a short flight of wooden stairs, one of which cracked alarmingly as he set his weight upon it. How embarrassing it would be, he thought, to plunge through and break a leg—or worse. How would you explain it to the congregation?

  The wooden stairs led to a landing. A diffuse gray light which fell from high, grime-colored windows revealed small round trays of rat bait set on the floor against all four walls.

  A circular iron stairway spiraled to a trapdoor in the ceiling which opened noisily but with no difficulty. Birds exploded into the air as he climbed through. He held his breath against the stench. The walls were whitewashed with guano. Three droppings-encrusted stick nests contained incredibly ugly small birds. The baby pigeons were naked and fist-sized, with bulbous beaks.

  The bell still hung. It was a large bell. He flicked it with his middle finger, getting only a bruised nail and a dull click. When he leaned over the side, careful to keep his clothing well off the befouled railing, San Francisco fell away below, looking older and wiser than it had ever looked to him before. Two of the adult pigeons came back, fluttering anxiously just above the belfry and making alarmed-mother noises as they cooed.

  “Okay,” he told them, picking a path through the guck. He pulled the trapdoor shut above him as he descended, gratefully snorting in an attempt to clear the stench from his nostrils.

  In the belfry landing he paused for a closer look. The old gas lamp was still on the wall. He turned the tiny spigot and was alarmed at the resulting hiss and gas smell. “Something will have to be done about this,” he murmured, shutting it off.

  The light was too dim for him to see whether the priest’s initials were in fact there, but he took out some matches and after waving frantically to disperse any gas fumes, he struck one.

  There was a heart, he saw as he held the flickering match. It was a large heart. Carved in its center were indeed the initials D A C.

  “Dominic Angelo Campanelli,” he said aloud, pleased.

  Beneath the D A C there had been another set of initials. But they had been scrubbed out with a heavy black pencil which had remained heavy and black through the years. Instead of them, written in the heart with Dominic Campanelli’s initials, was the scrawled word:

  JESUS.

  The match burned his fingers and he dropped it with a little grunt. He placed his fingertips in his mouth until the pain went away and then he ran them over the obliterated initials. The carved indentations still remained. The first letter was unmistakably M. There was another letter, either a C or an O, he couldn’t tell which.

  What had her name been?

  Maria? Myra? Marguerite?

  He stood there wondering whether young Dominic Campanelli had cried as he scrubbed out her initials.

  And then he descended from the church tower and left his temple and went home to stare at his wife’s comic-strip balloon belly.

  In the slow peace of early morning Michael and the priest began to talk to one another as they leaned on the board fence letting the smoke from their pipes get lost in the fog and watching the giant steam shovel taking huge bites out of the hill. They steered their conversations away from religion. Sports was a good safe topic; they depended heavily on the status of the Seals and the team’s running series with Los Angeles. While they talked of averages and clutch hitters, of the animal grace of Williams and the gallantry of DiMaggio, they watched the hole in the ground take shape and then the forms being built.

  “Interesting,” said Michael, seeing the outline of the forms emerge: an oblong leading to a much larger circle.

  Father Campanelli would give no hints. “A departure from the stereotype,” he said, and his head turned involuntarily to look up the street to where the old St. Margaret’s, aged and too small but built of red brick along simple and beautiful lines, stood in ivy-covered dignity. His hand went up and his long thin fingers began to stroke the strawberry mark that stained his aquiline face. Michael had noticed the gesture before whenever they had discussed items that had cast ominous shadows: the Seals on a losing streak; Williams sullying his magnificence with a stiff finger for the fans; a slowing DiMaggio letting his light go dim with a hopeless love for Marilyn Monroe.

  One Sunday, driving with Leslie through the golden afternoon deep into the Monterey peninsula, he saw a temple that had been built on a rocky cliff overlooking the Pacific.

  The setting was magnificent. The building was all wrong. Redwood and glass, it looked like the offspring of a deck house that had been mated with an ice castle.

  “Isn’t that terrible?” he asked Leslie.

  “Mmmm.”

  “I wonder what that church in town is going to be like.”

  She shrugged drowsily.

  A little later she stretched and looked at him. “If you were asking an architect to design you a temple, what would you ask for?”

  This time he shrugged. But he thought about the question for a long time.

  Next morning, after he had studied the Talmud, he sat in his study and drank coffee and began to plan the ideal temple.

  It was more fun than reading, he discovered, but full of frustrations, like a game of self-chess. He worked with pencil and paper, drawing rough plans which he promptly threw away, making out lists to ponder and rewrite. He went to the library and withdrew books on architecture. He found himself constantly confronted by stalemates which caused him to revise his image of what the temple should be, so many revisions that he emptied an entire filing-case drawer in his study for the storage of notes, volumes, and the crude drawings he made over and over again, filling the empty hours easily now, but with a kind of personal parlor game, a rabbinical version of solitaire.

  There were occasional interruptions. A drunken merchant sailor, unshaven and with a cut under one eye, wandered through the doors one morning.

  “Like say confession, Father,” he said, slumping heavily into a chair, eyes closed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The sailor opened one eye.

  “I’m not a priest.”

  “Where is he?”

  “This isn’t a church.”

  “Snow me, pal. Said confession here lots durin’ the war. Distinc’ly remember.”

  “It used to be a church.” He started to explain the facts concerning the building’s
conversion, but the sailor cut him off.

  “Well Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He got up unsteadily and walked away. “If this isn’t church, what the hell you doin’ here?”

  Michael sat and stared at the door through which the man had lurched into the bright sunlight outside.

  “I won’t snow you, pal,” he whispered finally. “I’m not sure I know.”

  33

  He came home one evening to find Leslie’s eyes red. “What’s the matter?” he asked, his thoughts leaping to Ruthie’s family, his parents, her father.

  But she held out a small package. “I opened it for you.”

  He saw that it had been forwarded by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. It contained a Hebrew prayer book bound in black buckram that was limp with age. There was a note in spidery Spencerian script.

  My Dear Rabbi Kind:

  I am sorry that I must tell you of the death of Rabbi Max Gross. My beloved husband died of a stroke in the synagogue on July 17 while reciting Mincha.

  Rabbi Gross was not a talkative man, but he spoke to me of you. He told me once that if our son had lived he would have wanted him to be like you, only Orthodox.

  I am taking the liberty of forwarding to you the enclosed siddur. It was the one which he used in his daily devotions. I know he would have liked you to have it, and it will give me comfort to know that Max’s siddur will continue to be used.

  I hope you and Mrs. Kind are very well and prospering in a lovely place like California, with such a climate.

  Yours very truly,

  Mrs. Leah M. Gross

  She put her hand on his arm. “Michael,” she said.

  He shook his head, unwilling to talk about it. He was unable to weep like Leslie; he had never been able to cry at death. But he sat alone the entire evening going through the siddur, page by page, remembering Max.

  Finally he crawled into bed to lie unsleeping next to his wife, praying for Max Gross and for everybody who remained alive.

  After a long time, Leslie touched his shoulder apologetically. “Darling,” she said.

  It was 2:25 A.M. according to the alarm clock.

  “Go to sleep,” he said tenderly. “We can’t help him.”

  “Darling,” she said again, this time half-groan.

  He sat up. “Oh my God,” he said, a different sort of prayer.

  “Take it easy,” she said. “There’s no need to get excited.”

  “You’re having pains?”

  “I think it’s time to go.”

  “Are they bad?” he asked, by this time pulling on his pants.

  “They’re not even pains. Just . . . contractions.”

  “How often?”

  “Every forty minutes in the beginning. Now, every twenty minutes.”

  He called Dr. Lubowitz and then carried her bag outside and came back and helped her into the car. The fog was very thick and he realized that he was very nervous; he couldn’t take deep breaths and he drove extra-slowly, hunched up over the wheel with his head close to the glass of the windshield.

  “What are they like?” he asked. “The contractions.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Like an elevator going up very slowly. They hang on up there at the top for just a little while and then they start sliding down.”

  “Like an orgasm?”

  “No,” she said. “Jesus.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said involuntarily.

  “Oh, Moses?” she said. “Is that better?” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “For a bright guy you can be the biggest damn fool.”

  He said nothing, driving through the foggy streets, hoping he wasn’t lost.

  She reached out and touched his cheek lightly.

  “My darling. I’m sorry. Ah,” she said, “here’s another one.” She took his right hand from the wheel and placed it on her stomach. As she held it there the soft flesh grew hard and then rigid; then, gradually, soft again under his fingertips. “I can feel it inside like that, too,” she whispered. “Making a hard ball.”

  He found suddenly that he was trembling. A taxicab was parked on a corner curb under the light of a street lamp, and he pulled in behind it.

  “I’m lost, dammit,” he said. “Can you move from the car into the taxi?”

  “Of course.”

  The cab driver was a bald man in chinos and a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt. He had a red Irish face that was knotted in its need for sleep.

  “Lane Hospital,” Michael said.

  The man nodded, yawning gustily as he started the motor.

  “It’s on Webster between Clay and Sacramento,” Michael said.

  “I know where it is, buddy.”

  He was watching Leslie’s face and he saw her eyes widen. “You can’t tell me that was just a contraction,” he said.

  “No. Now they’re pains.”

  The driver turned his head and took a good look at her for the first time, suddenly fully awake. “Holy mackeral,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped down on the gas pedal, driving very carefully, but faster.

  In a few minutes Leslie groaned. She was the kind of girl who ordinarily refused to recognize pain; the sound that came from her lips was animal-like and strange, and it frightened him.

  “Are you timing the pains?” he asked. She made no sign that she had heard his voice. Her eyes were slightly glazed.

  “Ah. Jesus Christ,” she said softly. He kissed her cheek.

  She groaned again and he thought of barns and hay and the sound of suffering cows. He looked at his watch and in a little while another bovine groan sounded from his wife’s lips and he looked at his watch again.

  “Oh, God, that can’t be right,” he said. “Four minutes?”

  “Keep your legs together, lady,” the cab driver called, as though she were half a block away.

  “What if she has it in the car?” Michael asked. He looked down at the floor and repressed a shudder. A fat, wet cigar lay mashed in a corner of the rubber floormat like an evil dropping.

  “I hope not,” said the driver, shocked. “Her waters break in here, they tie up the cab for thirty-six hours while it’s being sterilized. Board o’ Health.” He slid the car around the corner. “Just a little while more, lady,” he called.

  Leslie had her feet against the front seat now. With each pain she slid lower and pushed, her shoulders against the back seat and her feet against the front seat, arching her pelvis toward the roof as she groaned. Each time she pushed she crowded the driver into the wheel as the seat jolted forward.

  “Leslie,” Michael said. “The man won’t be able to drive.”

  “It’s all right,” the driver said. “We’re here.” He killed the motor and left them in the still-quivering car as he ran into the red brick building. In a moment he came out with a nurse and an attendant and they put Leslie in a wheel chair and took her bag and wheeled her away, leaving him standing with the cab driver on the sidewalk. He ran after her and kissed her cheek.

  “Most women, they’re built like ripe fruit,” the driver said when he returned to the cab. “The doctor will give her a little squeeze and the baby will squirt right out, like a seed.”

  The meter said two dollars and ninety cents. The man had hurried, Michael thought, and he hadn’t made any lousy jokes about expectant fathers. He gave him six dollars.

  “Got sympathy pains?” the driver asked, stuffing the bills into his wallet.

  “No,” Michael said.

  “Never lost a father yet,” he said, grinning as he ran around to enter his cab.

  Inside the hospital, the lobby was deserted. A middle-aged Mexican man took him up to the maternity floor in the elevator.

  “That your wife they have just brought in?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “Won’t be long. She is almost there,” he said.

  In the maternity ward a crewcut resident pushed through the swinging doors. “Mr. Kind?” Michael nodded. “She seems to be
doing fine. We have her in the labor room.” He rubbed a palm across his fuzzy head. “You can go home and get some sleep, if you like. We’ll call you as soon as anything develops.”

  “I’d just as soon wait here,” Michael said.

  The resident frowned. “It could be a long time, but you’re welcome, of course.” He showed him the way to the waiting room.

  The room was small, with highly waxed brown linoleum floors that reminded him of the home in which his grandfather had died. There were two magazines on the rattan sofa, a three-year-old copy of Time and a year-old copy of Yachting. The only light came from a lamp with an inadequate bulb.

  Michael walked to the elevator and pushed the button. The Mexican operator was still smiling.

  “Is there someplace where I can buy you a drink?” Michael asked.

  “No, sir. I can’t drink on the job no-how. But you want cigarettes and magazines and such, there’s an all-night drugstore two blocks north.”

  On the ground floor he stopped Michael as he was about to leave the elevator. “Tell him I sent you, he’ll give me a free smoke next time I go in.”

  Michael grinned. “What’s your name?”

  “Johnny.”

  He walked slowly through the misty darkness, praying, to the drugstore, and bought three packs of Philip Morris, an Oh Henry and a Clark Bar, a newspaper, Life, The Reporter, and a paperback whodunit.

  “Johnny sent me,” he told the clerk as he waited for change. “From the hospital.” The man nodded.

  “What’s his cigarette?” Michael asked.

  “Johnny? I don’t think he smokes cigarettes. Cigarillos.”

  He bought three packs of cigarillos for Johnny. The fog was still thick but the first light was breaking as he walked back. Oh God, he said silently, let her be all right. The baby too but if only one of them then let her be all right, Please God Amen.

  Johnny was delighted with the cigarillos. “your doctor’s here. Her water went and broke,” he said. He looked dubiously at the load Michael carried. “You just ain’t gonna be here that long,” he said.

  “The young doctor said it would be a long time,” Michael said.