The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  He was worrying the question like a dog with a bone when the telephone rang, and when he heard the Long Distance operator he started to pray. But then he recognized his father’s voice on the line through a crackle and sputter of electronic noise.

  “Michael?” Abe said.

  “Hello, Pop? I can’t hear you.”

  “I hear you,” Abe said accusingly. “You want me to ask the operator?”

  “No, now I can hear. How are things in Atlantic City?”

  “I’ll speak louder,” Abe shouted. “I’m not in Atlantic City. I’m—” There was a burst of static.

  “Hello?”

  “Miami. I decided at the last minute. I’m calling to let you know, you shouldn’t worry. I’m at 12 Lucerne Drive.” He spelled Lucerne. “Care of Aisner,” spelling that, too.

  Michael wrote it down. “What is it, Pop, a boardinghouse? A motel?”

  “A private home. I’m visiting a friend.” Abe hesitated for a moment. “How are the kids? And Leslie?”

  “Just fine.”

  “And you? How are you?”

  “Fine, Pop. We’re all fine. How are you?”

  “Michael. I’m going to get married.”

  “What did you say?” he said, although there had been no static and he had heard his father. “Married, you said?”

  “You’re angry?” his father said. “You think it’s a mishugineh thing to do, an old man like me?”

  “I think it’s wonderful, marvelous! Who is she?” He felt as much relief as delight and he realized guiltily that it might not be wonderful at all, that Abe might be mixed up with who knew what kind of woman. “What’s her name?”

  “Like I said, Aisner. Her first name is Lillian. She’s a widow, same as me. Get this, she’s the woman I rent the apartment from in Atlantic City. How’s that for a move?”

  “Shrewd. Very shrewd.” He grinned into the phone. Ah, Pop.

  “Her husband was Ted Aisner. Maybe the name is familiar? He had a dozen Jewish bakeries in Jersey. A baker’s dozen.”

  “No,” Michael said.

  “It wasn’t to me, either. He passed away in fifty-nine. She’s a sweet person, Michael. I think you’ll like her.”

  “If you do, that’s enough for me. When will you be married?”

  “We figured in March. There’s no hurry, both of us are well past the age of impetuosity.” From the way Abe said this, Michael guessed he was repeating something he had heard Lillian Aisner say, perhaps to her own children.

  “Does she have a family?”

  “Hey, you’ll never guess,” Abe said. “She’s got a son who’s a rabbi. Only Orthodox. He’s got a shul in Albany, New York. Melvin, Rabbi Melvin Aisner.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Well, he’s Orthodox, you probably wouldn’t cross paths. Lillian says he’s very well thought of. A nice guy. She’s got another son, Phil, I can’t wait to avoid him. Even she says he’s a shnook. He had me investigated. The damn fool, I hope it cost him a fortune.”

  Suddenly Michael was sad, remembering the double stone of hewn granite his father had had placed on his mother’s grave, with Abe’s name engraved next to hers and the last date left blank. “You can’t blame him for protecting his mother,” he said. “Say, is she there? I’d like to tell her about the gigolo she’s getting.”

  “No, she’s out shopping for dinner,” Abe said. “I figure well take a little honeymoon in Israel. See Ruthie and her family.”

  “Would you like to have the wedding here?” Michael asked, forgetting for the moment his own complicating problems.

  “She’s strictly kosher. She wouldn’t eat in your house.”

  “Hey. Tell her I’m going to have her investigated.”

  Abe chuckled; it occurred to Michael that he sounded younger, more buoyant than he had sounded in years. “You know what I wish for you,” Michael said.

  “I know.” He cleared his throat. “I better hang up, Michael, that shnook Phil shouldn’t think I’m running up his mother’s phone bill on purpose.”

  “Take care of yourself, Pop.”

  “You, too. Leslie isn’t there to wish me mazel tov?”

  “No. She’s out, too.”

  “Give her my love. And the kids, give them a kiss from the zaydeh. I sent them each a check, Chanukah money.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” he said, but the line was dead.

  He replaced the telephone in its cradle and simply sat. Abe Kind, survivor. That was the lesson of the day, the heritage passed from father to son: how to keep going, how to crash from today into tomorrow. It was a proud lesson. He knew men of Abe Kind’s age and circumstance who chose to become permanent sleepwalkers, sinking into torpor as secure as death. His father had chosen life’s pain, the double bed instead of the double grave. He poured another cup of coffee while he wondered what Lillian looked like; and as he drank it he pondered such matters as whether a double stone had been erected over Ted Aisner.

  At seven-thirty he drove Rachel to the Woodrow Wilson School and she abandoned him in the corridor. He accepted a mimeographed program from a serious boy in long trousers and walked into the auditorium. Sitting alone in the center of the middle row was Jean Mendelsohn.

  “Hello,” he said, joining her.

  “Why, Rabbi! What are you doing here?”

  “Same thing you are, I imagine. How’s Jerry?”

  “Not as bad as I was afraid he would be. He misses the leg. But it’s not like stories I’ve heard about how they still feel the missing parts, how the toes cramp even though they’re not there any more. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “It isn’t like that. At least not with Jerry.”

  “That’s good. How are his spirits?”

  “Could be worse, could be better. I spend a lot of time with him. My kid sister Lois came in from New York. She’s sixteen, wonderful with the kids.”

  “One of your children is on the program?”

  “My Toby, the devil.” She appeared to be flustered at the admission, and when he looked down at the program in his hand, he understood. The school was holding its annual Christmas pageant, an event he had expected to be able to skip when he had first seen the PTA schedule. The last line of the program listed Rachel as a property girl. “My Toby is going to be a Wise Man,” Thelma said in a glum rush, getting it over with. “These children. They drive you crazy. She asked us if she could. We told her she knew how we felt, to make up her own mind.”

  “So she’s a Wise Man,” Michael said, smiling.

  She nodded. “In Rome they tell us we don’t have to feel guilty, and in Woodborough my daughter is a Wise Man.”

  The hall had filled. Miss McTiernan, the school principal, all bosom and steel-colored hair, stood at the front of the room. “On behalf of the pupils and teachers of the Woodrow Wilson School, I am happy to welcome you to our annual Christmas pageant. For weeks your children have been preparing costumes and rehearsing. The Christmas pageant is a tradition of long standing at this school, and all the pupils take great pride in it. I’m sure when you see the program, you will, too.” She sat to loud applause, and the children marched down the aisles in costumes, nervous Shepherds with tall crooks, self-conscious Wise Men in wispy beards, giggling Angels bearing on their shoulders marvelous papier-mâché wings. After the costumed players trooped the pupils of the fifth and sixth grades, each boy wearing dark slacks and white shirt and tie and each girl in skirt and sweater. Rachel carried sheet music which she passed out to the rest of the children when they reached their seats, then she walked to the piano and stood there.

  A small boy whose hair was still wet from the brush stood and began to speak in an incredibly sweet voice. “Now it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed . . .”

  The Nativity was acted out by the players, Jean Mendelsohn squirming when the Wise Men came bearing gifts. When the small drama was over, dissolving into “
Silent Night, Holy Night,” the children sang other carols, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “The First Noel,” “The Drummer Boy,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “O Holy Night.” Rachel, he noticed, did not sing. She stood by the piano gazing at the audience while all around her the voices of her classmates were raised in song.

  When it was over he said good-by to Jean and went to meet his daughter.

  “They were good, weren’t they?” she said.

  “Yes, they were,” he said. They filed out of the overheated school building and got into the car and he drove home, but when they got there he didn’t want to lose her company right away. “Do you have homework?” he asked.

  “Miss Emmons didn’t give us any, on account of the pageant.”

  “Tell you what, let’s take a walk and get real tired. Then we’ll go in and have some hot chocolate and go to sleep. That sound all right?”

  “Mmmm.”

  They got out of the car and she put her mittened hand in his. No stars shone through the overcast. A raw wind blew, but without force. “Tell me if you grow cold,” he said.

  “We’re going to have a New Year’s program. Not for parents, just for the children,” she said. “I can sing in that, can’t I?”

  “Sure you can, honey.” He pulled her to him as they walked. “You minded about not singing tonight, didn’t you?”

  “Yup.” She looked up at him hesitantly.

  “Because you were the only one not singing, standing in front of so many people?”

  “Not only that. The songs and the story. . . . They’re so beautiful.”

  “They are,” he agreed.

  “Old Testament stories are beautiful, too,” she said staunchly, and he hugged her close again. “If Max buys hockey skates can I buy figure skates with the Chanukah check from Grampa Abe?” she asked, sensing an advantage.

  He laughed. “How do you know you’re going to get a Chanukah check from Grampa Abe?”

  “We always do.”

  “Well, if you do this year perhaps you should take the money and open a bank account of your own with it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s good to have money of your own. For college. Or money that the bank can keep safely just for you, in case you want it some day—”

  He stopped short and she laughed and tugged at his hand, thinking he was playing a game, but he was remembering the thousand dollars Leslie’s Aunt Sally had left her before they were married. The money he had never allowed her to put into a joint account, so that some nebulous day she could use it in whatever way she saw fit.

  “Daddy!” Rachel shouted in delight, tugging, and he became a tree that sank new roots every three steps all the way home.

  In the morning after services he left the temple and walked over to the Woodborough Savings and Loan, where he and Leslie did their banking. The plate on the window said the teller’s name was Peter Hamilton. He was a young man, tall and thin with a Saltonstall jaw and a little pinched furrow between his eyes. His black hair was sprinkled with gray and clipped close and high over his ears so that he looked like a Marine second lieutenant in a brown flannel Ivy League suit. Michael remembered Leslie asking him once if he had ever seen a fat bank teller.

  Two people, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, had gotten into line behind him, so when it was his turn in front of the cage he was a little self-conscious. He explained to Peter Hamilton that he wanted some information about a possible withdrawal made by his wife that morning, and as he talked he could feel the two people behind him lean forward.

  Peter Hamilton looked at him and gave him a little smile with no teeth showing. “Is that a joint account, sir?”

  “No,” he said. “No, it isn’t It’s her account.”

  “Then there is no question of . . . ah . . . dower rights, sir?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The money in the account is all hers legally?”

  “Oh, of course. Yes.”

  “Is it impossible for you simply to . . . ah . . . ask her? I’m afraid we’re morally obligated not to . . .”

  Vey.

  “Where can I find the president?” he asked.

  He was a man named Arthur J. Simpson in a large walnut-paneled office with high-pile rust-colored carpeting, a very daring shade for a banker. He listened to Michael with uncommitted courtesy, and when Michael had finished he pressed a button in the intercom and asked that Mrs. Kind’s bank records be brought to his office.

  “It was a one-thousand-dollar account to begin with,” Michael said. “It would be more now with the interest.”

  “Oh, yes,” the banker said. “Indeed it would.” He picked out a card and held it up. “The account has fifteen hundred in it.”

  “Then she didn’t get any money today?”

  “Ah, she certainly did, Rabbi. This morning the account held two thousand and ninety-nine dollars and forty-four cents.” Mr. Simpson smiled. “Interest mounts up. Figured every year, you know, with rates going higher all the time.”

  “The rich get richer,” Michael said.

  “That’s exactly right, sir.”

  How far away could she get on six hundred dollars? But even as he asked himself the question, he told himself the answer.

  Far enough.

  When the telephone rang that night and he heard her name he felt his legs start to tremble, but it turned out to be another false alarm, a call for her instead of from her.

  “She’s not at home,” he told the operator. “Who is calling, please?”

  This is Long Distance, the operator repeated. When is Mrs. Leslie Kind expected?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that Mr. Kind,” the caller, a strange voice, said.

  “Yes. Rabbi Kind.”

  “I will talk to him, Operator?”

  Yes, ma’am, thank you for waiting. Go ahead, please. She clicked off.

  “Hello?” Michael said.

  “My name is Potter, Mrs. Marilyn Potter?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Michael said.

  “I live just three doors down from the Hastings Church? In Hartford?”

  Good Lord, of course, he told himself, she’s gone to her father’s for a couple of days. Then he remembered again that the call was for her from there, and he knew that it couldn’t be that. But what the hell was this woman saying, he asked himself numbly, suddenly aware.

  “So I was the one who found him. It was a stroke.”

  Ah.

  “Calling hours from one to three and seven to nine tomorrow and Thursday. With the funeral at the church Friday at two. Burial in Grace Cemetery, according to his written instructions?”

  He thanked her. He listened to her sounds of condolence and he thanked her. He promised to extend her condolences to his wife and he thanked her and said good-by, and then without knowing why he reached up and switched off the lamp and sat in the dark until Max’s harmonica pulled him upstairs, a lifeline of sound.

  44

  By Thursday she still had not come home. He had heard nothing more from her, and he was caught in indecision. The children should be taken to their grandfather’s funeral, he told himself.

  But they would ask why their mother was not there.

  Perhaps she would be there, perhaps she had read the obituary, or had somehow heard that her father had died.

  He decided not to tell Max and Rachel. Thursday after Shaharit he got into the car and drove to Hartford alone.

  Two uniformed police officers directed the parking. Inside the church the organ vibrated soft hymns and almost all the white pews were filled.

  He walked slowly up and down the aisles, but if Leslie was there he didn’t see her. Finally he took a seat—one of the few remaining—in the rear of the church, on the aisle two rows from the back, where he would be able to see her if she came in late.

  The flower-banked casket was closed, he saw with relief.

  In the two seats next to him a middle-aged woman was discussing his late fat
her-in-law with a younger woman who bore her a remarkable resemblance. Mother and daughter, he knew at once.

  “Goodness knows, he wasn’t perfect. Nevertheless, for more than forty years he served here. It would have been only proper for you to have gone to the funeral home. You can allow that Frank to do for himself for one evening, for goodness sake.”

  “I don’t like to look at dead people,” the daughter said.

  “Dead, you wouldn’t have known he was dead. He looked distinguished. Handsome. His face didn’t look made up or anything. You’d never have known.”

  “I’d have known,” the daughter said.

  The clergymen appeared. One was young, one was old, one was somewhere in between.

  “Three,” the daughter whispered hoarsely as they rose for the invocation. “Mr. Wilson, the retired one. And Mr. Lovejoy, from First Church. But who’s the young one?”

  “They said from Pilgrim Church in New Haven. I forgot the name.”

  The middle-aged minister said the invocation. His voice was mellow and practiced, a voice accustomed to floating out over bowed heads.

  A hymn: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” The voices rose around him. The mother sang only a few lines in a tired croak. The daughter had a sweet, soaring soprano, just a little off key.

  One thing have I asked the Lord that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. . . .

  Psalm Twenty-Seven. Ours, Michael thought, recognizing that his pride was senseless.

  As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. . . .

  I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. . . .

  Psalm One Hundred Three and Psalm One Hundred Twenty-One. He had offered them himself at how many funerals?

  But some will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. . . .