by Noah Gordon
When hormone from her urine made a two-inch laboratory frog virile as a bull in the spring, Dr. Reisman jubilantly took full credit for the pregnancy. They didn’t care.
42
Seven weeks after Kahners came into town like a paladin borne by black Buick instead of white stallion, the fund-raiser packed up his crates, conned three strangers into carrying them out of the building, accepted a check for ninety-two hundred and thirty-eight dollars and disappeared from their lives.
The red line had risen to the top of the thermometer sign outside the temple.
Twelve families had resigned from temple membership.
Three hundred and fifty-one members had signed pledges to contribute sums ranging from five hundred dollars to Harold Elkins’ fifty thousand.
Paolo Di Napoli returned from Rome with handsome pastel sketches that showed the influence of both Nervi and Frank Lloyd Wright. The committee approved them at once.
In October, ponderous machines lumbered up the hill on which the temple would be built. They bit open the red earth in great chunks, felled trees that were two centuries old, pulled up ancient stumps from their deep root sockets, and removed boulders that had not budged or trembled since the last great glacier had dropped them into place.
By Thanksgiving Day the ground had become hard down to the frost line and it had snowed for the first time. The machines were driven down the hill. The great gash of the foundation hole was softened by a thin white skim of new snow.
One day the Rabbi came up the hill carrying an attractive black-and-white sign that informed the reader that this was the site of the new Temple Emeth. Michael had nailed together and painted the sign himself. But the ground was frozen so hard he could not hammer the sign into the earth, and he decided to wait until spring and carried it down again.
He returned often, however.
He kept his trout waders in the trunk of the car and sometimes when he needed to be absolutely alone with God he would drive to the foot of the hill and pull on the rubber boots and climb until he reached the crest, to sit under the rock where he and his wife had made love. He watched the frozen excavation and swayed with the wind. There were many rabbit tracks in the snow, and others that he didn’t recognize. He hoped that the construction of the temple wouldn’t frighten the animals away. He always wanted to remember to bring food for them next time he came, but he never did. He envisioned a secret congregation of furred and feathered things that sat and looked at him with eyes that glowed in the dark as he preached the word, a sort of Jewish Francis of Assissi in Pennsylvania.
On the big rock there was a hump of snow that grew all through the winter. As spring approached it began to dwindle in inverse proportion to the growth of his wife’s belly, until the snow of the rock was almost gone and her belly was full and humplike, their private miracle.
Seven days after the snow on the rock completely disappeared, the machines and the men returned to the hilltop to work on the temple. At first for Michael, watching the slow, laborious foundation-pouring was an agony of waiting, and remembering Father Campanelli’s disappointment when the priest’s new church had been completed in San Francisco. But from the beginning it was obvious that the temple would be a beautiful building and that he would not be disappointed.
Di Napoli had utilized the rough power of concrete to evoke the rugged splendor of the earliest temples. Inside, the sanctuary walls were of open-pored red brick, curved at the bema to aid the acoustics. “Encourage your people to rub their hands along these walls to see what they feel like,” the architect told Michael. “This kind of brick needs to be touched to live.”
He had designed gold-covered copper replicas of the Ten Commandments tablets to rise high above the ark, starkly illuminated against the dark brick by the eternal flame.
In the upper story, the classrooms of the Hebrew school were done in warm Israeli pastels, with splashes of soft color everywhere. The outside walls of each classroom were of sliding glass for light and air, with an exterior grid of thin concrete blocks to keep the children in and the sun glare out.
A nearby tall stand of old pines became a meditation grove, and Di Napoli had designed a permanent sukkah that was built behind the temple building not far from the large rock.
Harold Elkins, preparing to leave for a second honeymoon in the Mediterranean with his brown-haired wife, announced that he had acquired a Chagall which he would give to the temple.
The woman of the Sisterhood began making plans for an independent fund-raising drive of their own. To raise money for a Lipchitz bronze for the new lawn.
After a minimum of polite bargaining on both sides, the old temple building was sold to the Knights of Columbus for seventy-five thousand dollars, with both purchaser and seller departing from the negotiations highly pleased. The sale should have brought a surplus to the Building Fund, but the Committee was forced to face the fact that although Archibald S. Kahners had gathered pledges, receiving payment in honor of those pledges was something else again. Repeated mailings drew little response from those who had not paid at once.
Finally Sommers turned to the Rabbi. He gave Michael a list of families who had not paid their pledges or who had not pledged at all.
“If you would visit them,” he suggested delicately.
Michael stared at the list as if it puzzled him. It was quite long. “I’m a rabbi, not a bill collector,” he said.
“Of course. Of course. But you could work these names into your schedule of pastoral calls, just to remind them that the temple knows they exist. A discreet hint . . .”
Sommers hinted on his own. It was, after all, because Michael had written a paper indicating that he was a “building rabbi” that he had been called to Emeth in the first place. Now they needed his help in making the building a reality.
He kept the list.
The first name on it was Samuel A. Abelson. When he called at the Abelson apartment he found four small children, two with bad colds, living in a furnitureless apartment with a dull-eyed twenty-two-year-old mother who had been deserted by her husband three weeks before. There was very little food in the house, which smelled badly.
He reported the name and address to the director of the Jewish Family Agency, who promised to send a caseworker that afternoon.
The next name was that of Melvin Burack, a wholesale clothing salesman who was on the road at the time of Michael’s visit, in one of the family’s three cars. Sipping tea with the Rabbi in her Spanish living room, Moira Burack promised not to forget again to send the check to the temple.
It was never quite so bad as he feared. Not even the seventh name on his list: Berman, Sanford. June served coffee and marble cake and Sandy Berman listened and then politely asked for an appointment with the hardship committee, in order to work out a settlement that would allow him to register his children in the Hebrew school.
What tipped the balance for Michael was that a few days later June and Sandy Berman crossed the street to avoid him when they saw him coming.
It wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. If some of the others didn’t cross the street when their rabbi came into sight, neither did they fill the air with joyous cries as they rushed to greet him.
He noticed that he was receiving fewer and fewer calls from his congregation for spiritual help in times of personal crisis.
In the late afternoons he began to sit in the still-unfinished sanctuary and ask God what he could do, praying while the smell of wet lime and new cement filled his nostrils and overhead the workmen dropped bricks, broke wine bottles, cursed one another out, and told dirty stories, thinking themselves alone in the temple.
Two days after the dedication of Temple Emeth on May eighteenth, Felix Sommers suggested that Michael prepare a speech for delivery at a champagne party to be held before the summer vacation period began. The goal would be to secure early pledges for the annual Kol Nidre donations which would be collected in the fall. The temple needed all the Kol Nidre money it could get in order to
meet its mortgage payments to the bank, Felix explained.
While he was thinking about this the telephone rang.
“Michael?” Leslie said, “I’ve begun.”
He threw a muttered good-by at Felix and drove home and picked her up. There was some traffic at the campus exits but the roads to the hospital were moderately traveled at midafternoon, and she was pale but smiling when they got there.
The little girl was born almost as fast as her brother had been, eight years before, arriving less than three hours after the first violent pain. The waiting room was too near the labor room, so that from time to time when a nurse pushed through the swinging doors at the end of the hall Michael could hear the moans and screams of the women, certain that he recognized Leslie’s cries among them.
At twenty-eight minutes past five the obstetrician came into the waiting room and told him she had given birth to a little girl, six pounds, two ounces. The doctor asked him to come into the hospital cafeteria and they sat and had coffee and the physician explained to him that the baby’s head had plunged through the wall of the cervix exactly when it was stretched thinnest by the dynamics of labor. The tear had included arterial ripping, and they had been forced to perform a hysterectomy as soon as the baby was out of her body and hemorrhaging had been controlled.
In a little while he went up and sat by the foot of Leslie’s bed. Her eyes were closed, the lids blue and bruised-looking, but soon she opened them.
“Is she pretty?” she asked him faintly.
“Yes,” he said, although in his worry he hadn’t looked, taking the doctors word that the child was all right.
“We won’t have any others.”
“We don’t need any others. We have a son and daughter and each other.” He kissed her fingers and then held her hand, and when she fell asleep comforted, he went and looked at his daughter for the first time. She was much prettier than Max had been at birth. She had a great deal of hair.
He went home with a box of bakery pastries for the babysitter and he kissed Max good night and drove through a spring rain to the temple and sat in the sanctuary until morning, in one of the comfortable new foam-rubber upholstered chairs in the third row. He thought of the things he had once wanted to do and the things he had done with his life, and he thought a great deal about Leslie and himself and Max and now the new little girl. In between conversations with God he discovered that although the temple was only a few weeks old a mouse played on the bema at night when the building was absolutely still.
At five-thirty-five he left the temple and went home and showered and shaved and changed his clothes. He got to Felix Sommers’ house while Sommers was having breakfast, and he accepted a Mazel Tov and a cup of coffee, then he was aware that he was famished and he accepted an entire meal. Over the scrambled eggs he told Felix he was going to resign.
“Have you thought this out? You’re absolutely sure?” Felix asked, pouring the coffee; and although he was, his ego bled a few drops when he saw that Sommers would not pretend to try to argue about his decision to leave.
He said he would stay until a replacement had been secured. “You should get two people,” he advised. “A rabbi. And somebody else, probably a layman, perhaps a volunteer. With a business administration background. Let the rabbi be a rabbi.”
He said it sincerely, and that was the way Sommers took it. Felix thanked him.
He waited several days before telling Leslie one afternoon as she sat feeding the baby. She didn’t appear to be surprised. “Come here,” she said. He sat gingerly on the bed and she kissed him and took his hand and touched it to the sucking baby’s cheek, a softness so singular he had forgotten how it felt.
Next day he brought them home from the hospital. Leslie and the baby and half a dozen bottles of formula because her milk had dried up, and a large bottle of sea-green capsules the doctor thought would allow her to sleep. The capsules helped for a few nights and then lost the bout with insomnia, which returned to plague the mother although the child slept through the night.
On the day Rachel was three weeks old he took a morning train to New York.
Rabbi Sher had died two years before. He had been replaced by Milt Greenfield, Michael’s classmate at the Institute.
“I know of an opening that’s a real challenge,” Rabbi Greenfield said.
Michael grinned. “Your predecessor, alev hasholom, once said the same thing to me, Milt,” he said. “Only the way Sher put it was, ‘I’ve got a lousy job for you.’” They both laughed.
“It’s a congregation that has just voted itself Reform,” Rabbi Greenfield said. “After a kind of civil war.”
“Is there anything left of it?”
“Almost one third of its members are Orthodox. In addition to your regular duties you would probably have to officiate at Shaharit, Mincha, and Maariv every day. You’d have to serve as rabbi to the pious as well as the liberal.”
“I think I’d like that,” Michael said.
On the following week end he flew to Massachusetts and two weeks after that he and Leslie drove to Woodborough with Rachel in a car bed and Max in the back seat. They found the big old Victorian house that looked as though it were haunted by the ghost of Hawthorne, with windows like wise eyes and an apple tree outside the back door. The tree had dead boughs that needed pruning, and there was a swing for Max made of a threadbare tire hung with heavy rope from a high branch.
Best of all, he liked the temple. Beth Sholom was old and small. There were no Chagalls or Lipschitzes, but it smelled of floor wax and tattered prayer books and dry woodwork and twenty-five years of people seeking God.
BOOK IV:
The Promised Land
43
Woodborough, Massachusetts
December 1964
Columbia College Alumni Association
116th Street and Broadway
New York, New York 10027
Gentlemen:
The following is my autobiographical contribution to the Quarter-Century Book of the class of ’41:
It is incredible to think that almost twenty-five years have vanished since we all left Morningside Heights.
I am a rabbi. I have filled Reform pulpits in Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where I now live in Woodborough with my wife, the former Leslie Rawlins (Wellesley, ’46) of Hartford, Connecticut, and our son Max, 16, and our daughter Rachel, 8.
I find myself looking with surprising anticipation toward the twenty-fifth reunion. The present is so busy, we don’t often enough have the opportunity to look back at the past. Yet it is the past which guides us into the future. As a clergyman in a religion almost six thousand years old, I am increasingly aware of this fact.
It has been my experience that faith, far from being an anachronism, is more important than ever in enabling modern man to grope his way into tomorrow.
As for me, I am thankful that God gives me the opportunity to grope. I have kept a fearful eye for the flash in the sky, even as you; I have given up smoking of late and have developed a paunch; recently I have noticed that a great many grown men have taken to using the expression Sir.
But deep down I am confident that the bomb will never go off. I do not feel that I will be stricken by cancer, at least until I am very old; today, forty-five is a toddling age. And who wants a flat stomach? Are we a society of beach boys?
Enough of sermons; on to soda water; I promise not to open my mouth at Reunion, except of course to have another drink and to join in the singing of “Who Owns New York?”
Your classmate,
Rabbi Michael Kind
Temple Beth Sholom
Woodborough, Massachusetts
He had fallen asleep, finally, sitting fully clothed and slumped over on his desk, his head in his arms.
All night long, the telephone was silent
At 6:36 A.M. it rang.
“We haven’t seen her,” Dr. Bernstein said.
“Neither have I.” It was a cold
morning, with the radiators gasping and clanking under a full head of steam, and it occurred to him to ask Dan how she had been dressed, whether she had been protected against the elements.
Her heavy blue coat and gloves and boots and kerchief were missing with her, Dan said. Somehow the information made him feel better: someone so sensibly bundled was hardly a Desdemona in the snow.
“I’ll keep in touch,” Dr. Bernstein said.
“Please.”
Sleeping in the chair had made him stiff and uncomfortable and he spent a long time under the hot shower and then he dressed and woke the children and made certain they were ready for school.
“Will you come to PTA tonight?” Rachel asked him. “Each room gets two points for fathers. I take part. My name is on the program.”
“What do you do?”
“If you want to know, you have to come and see.”
“All right,” he promised.
He drove to the temple in time to lead the minyan through the kaddish. Then he shut himself in his study and worked on a sermon. He kept busy.
Just before eleven o’clock Dan called him again. “According to the State Police she spent the night at the YWCA. She signed the register with her own name.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. The detective said she left the Y early this morning.”
She may have gone home, he thought; she may be there now. The children were at school and Anna was not due to come in until it was time for her to prepare the evening meal.
He thanked Dan and hung up, then he told his secretary that he would be working at home for the rest of the day.
But as he left the office the telephone rang and a moment later she ran out after him.
“It’s Western Union, Rabbi,” she said.
MICHAEL DARLING I’M GOING OFF BY MYSELF FOR A FEW DAYS. PLEASE DON’T WORRY. I LOVE YOU. LESLIE
He went home anyway and sat in the silent kitchen drinking hot coffee and thinking.
Where would she get the money to go away with, and to live on? He had their bank book in his pocket. So far as he knew, she had only a few dollars in her purse.
