The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  For twenty-five thousand dollars, the synagogue itself would be named for the individual specified.

  The chapel went for ten thousand dollars. So did the auditorium, while the religious school could be named for seventy-five hundred, along with the recreation room and the air conditioning system.

  The bema could be named for six thousand dollars. The Torah (Complete—Cover, Yad, Breastplate, Crown), at twenty-five hundred dollars was a bargain compared to the inscribed brass nameplate that would be placed on the door of the custodian’s quarters for thirty-five hundred dollars.

  The list was mimeographed on four pages, stapled. Kahners used the same list for every Jewish campaign. He had brought bundles of them with him in one of the crates, so that all that was necessary was for Temple Emeth’s name to be placed on the top of the first page and then the bundles could be run through the temple’s addressograph.

  Kahners came to Michael, groaning. “I’ve got both girls to work late tonight, addressing. But the lists. Go depend on rich volunteers. That Elkins woman took them home to cut stencils yesterday and now she says she can’t come in today. A summer cold.”

  “I’ll try to find somebody who can go out and get them this afternoon,” Michael said.

  “By seven o’clock we need them. Seven-thirty the latest,” Kahners said, leaving to answer a querulous secretarial summons.

  The constant ringing of the telephones, the thunk-thunk-thunk of the mimeograph and the steady clatter of the two typewriters blended into a claw of sound that raked him again and again, until by midmorning there was dull pain in his forehead and he began to search his mind for business that would take him out of the office. He fled at eleven-thirty, stopping at a sandwich shop for a light lunch and then making pastoral calls, one of which yielded tea and strudel for dessert. At two-thirty he stopped at the hospital and sat with a woman who had just surrendered three gallstones to a surgeon, remaining until two-forty-eight, four minutes after she showed him the stones like gems on a black velvet cloth, future family heirlooms.

  He was getting into his car in the hospital parking lot when he remembered the membership lists, and he took off his jacket and turned up his sleeves and rolled down the car windows and then drove through the town and into the country, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun.

  At the farmhouse he rang the front-door bell and waited, but nobody came to the door. Carrying his coat, he walked around the house to the barnyard. Mrs. Elkins was slumped on a chaise in the shade of a big oak, her long slender feet flat on the lounge and her knees spread so that through the brown V of her legs he could see the pan of corn on her bare belly. The ducks were all around her, quacking as she fed them corn with little flicks of her long fingers. Her short shorts revealed what clothing designers easily hid, the beginning of the age-dappling on the backs of her thighs. The shorts were white and her halter was blue and her shoulders were round but freckled. But it was her hair that surprised him; instead of straw blonde it was a soft shiny brown.

  “Rabbi,” she said. She took the pan off her stomach and stood, slipping her feet into loafers.

  “Hi. Mr. Kahners would like the membership lists,” he said.

  “I’m all finished with them. Can you wait a few moments while I feed these monsters?”

  “Go ahead. I have lots of time.” While she threw feed they moved together through the puddle of greedy ducks, to a large wire cage in the shade of the house. The door opened with a rending of rusty hinges and she reached through the opening and set down the pan with the corn that remained, slamming the gate in time to prevent the escape of a large drake that rushed toward them on swift red web feet and with a convulsive trembling of wings.

  “Why is this one penned?” Michael asked.

  “We just got him and his wings aren’t clipped. Harold will do it when he gets home. Please sit. I’ll only be a moment.” She went toward the house. Carefully not looking at her walk, he went to the lounge. There were a few gathering clouds in the sky and, as he sat down, the first mutter of thunder, answered foolishly by the ducks. In a little while she returned carrying not the lists but a large tray containing ice, glasses, and things in bottles.

  “Here. It’s heavy,” she called. “Put it on the lawn.”

  He took it and set it down. “This isn’t necessary,” he said. “I’m intruding, and you’re not feeling well today.”

  “Not feeling well?”

  “Your cold.”

  “Oh.” She laughed. “Rabbi, I don’t have a cold. I lied to Mr. Kahners so I could go to my hairdresser’s.” She looked at him. “Have you ever lied?”

  “I guess I have.”

  “I lie a lot.” She touched her brown hair. “Do you like it?”

  “Very much,” he said truthfully.

  “I saw you looking at it. Before, I mean, that first night when you were here and then later when I came to the temple. I could tell you didn’t like it the other color.”

  “Oh, it was pretty,” he said.

  “You’re lying now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling.

  “But this is better? You like this?” She touched his hand again.

  “Yes, it is. When is Mr. Elkins coming home?” he asked, realizing too late that as much as he wanted to change the subject, the question was not the best choice he could have made.

  “Not for several days. He may go to Chicago from New York.” She began to clink bottles. “What can I give you? Gin and tonic?”

  “No, thanks,” he said quickly. “Just something cool, if you will. Ginger ale, if you have it.”

  She had it and she gave it to him. There was no other chair on the lawn and she settled beside him on the lounge, bringing whiskey on the rocks for herself.

  They sipped the drinks and then she set her glass on the lawn and smiled at him. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for an appointment,” she said.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I have . . . something I wanted to tell you. Discuss with you. A problem.”

  “Would you like to discuss it now?”

  She finished her drink quickly and went to the tray to replenish it. This time she brought back the bottle and set it next to them. She slipped off the loafers and tucked her legs under her; a film of dust covered the red polish on her toes, inches from his knee. “Are you going to tell Mr. Kahners that I lied?” she asked. “Don’t tell him.”

  “You owe nobody any explanations.”

  “I’ve enjoyed working near you.” The tips of the toes touched his patella, contact but no pressure.

  “Mr. Kahners says you’re one of the best typists he’s ever seen.”

  “Not that he’s looked,” she said, crunching ice between her teeth and extending her glass toward the bottle, and he saw with a small inner signal of alarm that once again it was empty.

  He poured skimpily, adding the two largest ice cubes he could find to make it look like a generous shot. I must get out of here, he told himself, and he started to rise, but again she placed her hand on his arm. “This is the color it used to be,” she said.

  Her hair, he realized. He put his hand over hers to remove it from his arm and found that she had turned her wrist so that her palm snuggled into his and their fingers touched.

  “My husband is much older than I am,” she said. “A young girl when she marries an old man doesn’t realize. The years ahead. What they’re like.”

  “Mrs. Elkins,” he said, but she let go of his hand suddenly and ran to the wire-mesh cage. The door squealed as she opened it and the drake dashed up to the opening and then stopped, confused when he saw that the barrier had not been slammed into place to block his way.

  “Go ahead, you damn stupid thing,” the woman said.

  The drake sprang lightly, pushing with his big red feet, rainbow wings already whipping the air. He poised over their heads for a heartbeat in a gleam of white belly and long black tail and then the wing thrum sounded louder and he rose high in a proje
ctile arc that carried him, triumphantly calling, into the woods beyond the farm.

  “Why did you do that?” Michael asked.

  “I want everything in the world to be free.” She turned to him. “Him. You. Me.” Her arms came up and tightened around his neck and he felt her against him and her mouth was warm and moving, but tasting of refrigerator ice and whiskey. He pulled away and she continued to hold him as if she were drowning.

  “Mrs. Elkins,” he said.

  “Jean.”

  “Jean, that isn’t freedom.”

  She rubbed her cheek against his chest. “What am I going to do about you?”

  “As a starter, go easy on the booze.”

  For a moment she looked at him, and again sudden thunder rumbled over their heads.

  “You’re not interested, are you?”

  “Not that interested,” he said.

  “You’re not interested at all. Aren’t you a man?”

  “I’m a man,” he said gently, two steps ahead of her so that the gibe didn’t touch him.

  She turned and walked back into the house and this time he stood and watched her fine free walk, virtuously feeling he had earned the privilege. Then he picked up his jacket and walked around the house to the car. As he opened the door something whistled by his head, so close he could feel it pass, and thumped against the top of the car, denting it. The box flew open when it hit the ground and some of the contents spilled, but luckily most of the file cards were sorted and held in bunches by elastic bands. For a moment he squinted into the sun, looking up at her standing at the open second-floor window.

  “Are you all right? Do you want me to send somebody out here to stay with you?”

  “I want you to go to hell,” she said very clearly.

  When she turned away he knelt and picked up the membership lists and placed them back in the wooden box, which was cracked on one side. Then he got into the car and started it and drove away.

  He drove for a little while and then without knowing why he pulled the car off the road and lit a cigarette and sat there, trying not to think how easy it would be to turn the car around and go back. In a few minutes he killed the cigarette in the ashtray and got out of the car and walked into the woods. Smelling blueberry spice made him feel better. He walked hard until the perspiration started to flow and he was no longer thinking of Jean Elkins or of Leslie or of the temple. Presently he came to a stream, shallow and crystalline and about eight feet wide. The bottom was sand and drowned leaves and he took off his shoes and, carrying them, waded into the cold water. In the center it came to just above his knees. He saw no fish but on the far side he saw water-striders and under a rock he found a crawdad that he tracked downstream for twenty feet before it disappeared beneath another rock. In some rushes over a miniature rapids a large spider with yellow markings sat in a great web, and he thought suddenly of the spider in the bunkhouse the summer before college when he had worked on Cape Cod, the spider to whom he had talked. He considered briefly the possibility of talking to this spider, but the truth of the matter was that now he felt too old, or perhaps it was simply that he and this spider had nothing to say to each other.

  “Hey,” a voice said.

  A man stood on the bluff looking at him. Michael didn’t know how long he had been standing there watching. “Hello,” he said.

  The man wore the uniform of a farmer, faded blue overalls, milk-stained workshoes and a blue workshirt stained with sweat. The stubble on his face was the same gray as the battered and bandless hat he wore, a little too large so that the brim rested almost on his ears.

  “This is posted land,” he said.

  “Oh? I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I didn’t see any signs.”

  “Too goddam bad. The signs are there. There’s no huntin’ or fishin’ allowed on this land.”

  “I wasn’t hunting or fishing,” Michael said.

  “Get your filthy feet the hell out of my brook before I get the dogs,” the farmer said. “I know your kind. No respect for property. What the hell you doin’ here anyhow with your damn pants rolled up like a four-year-old?”

  “I went into the woods,” Michael said, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” He waded across the brook and stopped near the farmer to dry his feet very deliberately with his handkerchief, which fortunately was clean. Then he put his socks and shoes back on and rolled down his trousers, which were quite wrinkled. He walked through the woods thinking about Thoreau and what he would have told the farmer, and when he was about halfway to the road the rain began to fall. For a very little while he continued to walk, and then as the trees thinned and the rain fell more heavily he began to run. He hadn’t run for a long time and although his wind was bad and it soon became hard to breathe he kept it up until he ran out of the woods and swerved to avoid hitting a large sign which told the world that the land was owned by Joseph A. Wentworth, and that trespassers would be prosecuted by law. He was breathless and soaked through when he got into the car, with a stitch in his side and a small trembling in the pit of his stomach and the feeling that somehow he had survived a narrow escape.

  Three evenings later he and Leslie attended a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. The colloquium was entitled “Religion in the Nuclear Age” and it brought together theologians, scientists, and philosophers in an atmosphere of guarded interdisciplinary good fellowship out of which were engendered few answers to the moral questions posed by nuclear fission. Max was being cared for by a Wyndham co-ed who had agreed to sleep over, and they felt no need to hurry home; following the meeting they accepted the invitation of a Philadelphia rabbi to stop at his home for coffee.

  By the time they approached Wyndham in the car it was 2 A.M.

  He had thought that Leslie was dozing, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, but suddenly she spoke. “It’s as though everyone in the world has been turned Jewish,” she said. “Only instead of ovens, now we all face the bomb.”

  He thought about it but didn’t answer, driving slowly and then not thinking about it, trying to forget the problem of whether God would be there if the world should suddenly dissolve into atomic mist. The night was soft and an August moon like a slice of carrot had dropped low in the sky. They shared the silence and in a little while she began to hum. He didn’t feel like going home.

  “Want to see the temple site?”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting up eagerly.

  The tar road wound up the hill, narrowing and turning to rocky dirt halfway up and then petering out just before it reached the temple property. He drove the car as far as he could, past a house in which a bedroom light popped on and then was extinguished as their car bumped by.

  She laughed, with bitterness around the edges. “They must think we’re lovers,” she said.

  He parked at the end of the road and they walked past a fence and the looming shadow of a stacked woodpile, and then they were on temple land. The moon shed a lovely light but the ground was slick with the leaves of past seasons and uneven and she had to stop and take off her shoes. He stuck one in each of his jacket pockets and took her hand. They could see a path and they followed it slowly, and in a little while they were at the very top of the hill. He lifted her onto a rock and she stood there with her hand on his shoulder, looking down on a black landscape dappled in great patches by light from the sky, like the setting for a good dream. She said nothing, but her hand on his shoulder tightened until it hurt, and he wanted her as a woman for the first time in months.

  He lifted her off the rock and he kissed her, feeling young, and she kissed him back until she saw what he was doing and then she pushed him back, half striking him.

  “You fool,” she said, “were not juveniles who need to run off into the woods in the middle of the night. I’m your wife, we have a big brass bed at home and enough room to wrestle nude, if that’s what
you want. Take me home.”

  But that was not what he wanted. He fought her striking hands, laughing and then suddenly serious, until she stopped all struggling and took his face in her palms and kissed him like a bride, stopping only to whisper about the people in the house, with her husband past caring.

  At first she started to do what Dr. Reisman had instructed, but he stopped her roughly. “This isn’t for a baby. For a change for you and for me,” he said, and they made love in the shadow of the rock on the rustling dry leaves, sweetly but like two wild things, like a duck and a drake, like lions, and afterward she was once more his darling, his bubeleh, his baby, his bride, the golden girl for whom he had caught the big fish.

  They walked back to the car guiltily, Michael searching the dark windows of the house for sleepless peepers, and on the way home she sat very close to him. When they got to the house Michael insisted that they brush each other off thoroughly before going in, and he was pulling bits of leaf and twig off his darling’s behind, with her shoes still sticking out of his pockets, when the front-door light flashed on and the babysitter told them shakily that she had thought it was burglars.

  Ten days later Leslie came to him and held the back of his neck in her hand. “My period is lost,” she said. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “So you’re a few days late. It happens.”

  “Mine comes with Yankee punctuality. And I feel like the Before girl in the vitamin ads.”

  “You’re coming down with a cold,” he said tenderly, praying.

  Two days later nausea sent her into the bathroom to vomit away the early hours.