The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  New Testament, now. If he had to guess, he would say—First Corinthians. Next to him the middle-aged woman eased her weight from her right to her left buttock.

  In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go and prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going. . . .

  The middle-aged minister spoke in praise of the dead man and thanked God for the promise of eternal life and for the fact that the late Reverend Rawlins had labored in his behalf and in behalf of the entire community of souls.

  Then they stood again and sang another hymn, “For All the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest,” and the voices around Michael rose and fell, and he knew what Rachel had felt in school at Christmas-carol time.

  The elderly minister gave the benediction, and the organ began to play and the crowd melted from the pews into the aisles and toward the exits. Michael stood there looking for her but not seeing her, until everyone had gone out and only the pallbearers remained, gathered around the box; then he went outside, blinking against the winter sunlight. He didn’t know where Grace Cemetery was, but he got into his car and waited and then moved it into the line of vehicles well behind the hearse, which was a new black Packard, highly polished but speckled with a spattering of slush.

  There were hillrows of soiled snow in the gutters on both sides of the street. The funeral cortege moved slowly across the city, snarling traffic all along its route.

  Two cars behind Michael a driver gave up and moved out of line. It was a blue-and-white Chevrolet hardtop; as it passed him he caught a glimpse of her in the front seat, half-turned and talking to the young man at the wheel: the small hat was unfamiliar to him, but not the bronze-blonde hair or the blue coat or the way she held her head.

  “Leslie,” he shouted.

  He rolled down the window and called again.

  The car made a left turn at the next corner. By the time he had pulled his own car out of line and had negotiated the turn himself, it was nowhere to be seen. He left a huge moving-van behind, passing on the right with millimeters between his wheels and the curb, then shot by a bus and was held up by a red light at a broad avenue.

  But the blue-and-white car had made a right turn here. He saw it two short blocks away, just beginning to move as a red light turned to green.

  He didn’t dare jump his own red light; the traffic was heavy.

  When the light changed he slid the car around the corner with wheels spinning, like a teen-ager in a hotrod. There was a small hill and he didn’t see the other car until he topped the rise, and then he saw it just making a left turn, and when he got to the corner he made the turn and then drove very fast, faster than he had ever driven in the city, weaving in and out of traffic.

  Four or five blocks down he was lucky; they were stopped for another light and he pulled up short three cars behind them.

  “Leslie!” he shouted as he got out. He ran to their car and hammered on her window.

  But when she turned around, it was the wrong face. It was even the wrong coat, cut differently, a slightly different shade, with big gilt buttons where Leslie’s were smaller and black. She rolled down the window. She and the man stared at him. They didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  He went back to his car and got in just as the light changed. The blue-and-white Chevrolet went straight ahead and Michael whipped his car into a U-turn. He slowly drove back the way he had come, trying to retrace the exact route, but when he had made all the turns there was no sign of the funeral procession.

  But pretty soon he came to a cemetery and he swung the car through the gates.

  It was a large cemetery, laid out in blocks formed by grids of road, and he drove in one direction on some of the roads and in the other direction on some of the others, trying to catch sight of the funeral. The roads were ploughed and well-sanded.

  But all he could see were gravestones, no people.

  Then he noticed a Mogen Doved. And another, and he slowed the car and read some of the inscriptions.

  Israel Salitsky, Feb. 2, 1895–June 23, 1947.

  Jacob Epstein, Sept. 3, 1901–Sept. 7, 1962.

  Bessie Kahn, Aug. 17, 1897–Feb. 12, 1960, A Good Mother.

  Oy, have you got the wrong cemetery!

  He sat there, wanting to give up and go home. But if she were there, at the graveside?

  He drove down one more block of graves and then there was an old man sitting there in a long brown coat and with a black stocking cap over his ears, on a metal folding chair next to one of the graves. Michael stopped the car near him.

  “Ah guten tag.”

  The man nodded, peering over horn-rimmed glasses that rode low on his nose.

  “Grace Cemetery. How would I get there?”

  “The one for skotzim, that’s right next door. This is B’nai B’rith.”

  “Is there a gate connecting the two?”

  He shrugged, pointing forward. “Maybe at the end.” He blew on his hands, which were bare.

  Michael hesitated. Why was the old man sitting here, next to the grave? He couldn’t bring himself to ask. His gloves were next to him on the seat of the car. Not at all intending to, he picked them up and held them out the window.

  The old man looked at them suspiciously. Finally he took them and put them on.

  “It’s going to be warmer tomorrow,” Michael said, furious at himself.

  “Gott tsedahnken.”

  He started the car and drove. There were graves on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see; it was a limitless world of graves, he felt like some kind of motor-age molach ah mohviss, the angel of death.

  Then finally he was approaching the cemetery’s end. There was a roadway and a cyclone fence and fifty feet on the other side of the fence he saw the funeral party standing with bowed heads, preparing to bury his father-in-law.

  He stopped the car. There didn’t appear to be a gate. Did they need an unclimbable fence to keep the dust and the souls from mingling? he asked himself furiously.

  He was certain that if he turned the car around and sought to go all the way back out the front gate of B’nai B’rith Cemetery and then in through the front gate of Grace Cemetery, the funeral would be over before he found it again.

  He drove the car along the road that ran alongside the fence. On the other side were graves and an occasional mausoleum. He stopped the car as close to the fence as possible next to a very impressive granite crypt and got out. The funeral was hidden by monuments and a small rise. He clambered uncertainly onto the hood of the car and then onto the roof, from which it was possible for him to pull himself onto and over the top of the fence, feeling the dull metal points of the heavy wire bruising his body through his clothing.

  He had torn nothing, he noted with satisfaction. There was snow on the roof of the crypt. He walked through it to the far side and looked over the edge thoughtfully. The ground fell away and the drop was at least eight feet. But there seemed to be no other way to get down.

  Geronimo!

  He landed clumsily, like a dropped log, his heels sliding out from under him on the soft snow and sending him sprawling on his back. When he opened his eyes he saw behind him and overhead the stone-chiseled inscription on the large tomb.

  Nothing appeared to be broken. He stood and tried to dust the snow from his clothing. There were wet lumps of cold down his neck.

  I beg your pardon, he told the Buffingtons.

  There was no path through the deep snow to the ploughed lane within the cemetery; he collected more snow in his shoes and in his pants cuffs, then he was able to walk down the lane to where the funeral was being held.

  He stood at the fringe of the crowd. There were a lot of people. She would be standing at the grave, he realized. He shoved his way forward.

  “Sorry . .
. Excuse me . . .”

  A woman glared at him.

  “Member of the family,” he whispered.

  But the people were standing too close together, he couldn’t get through.

  He could hear the minister reciting the benediction, The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you, and remain with you always. Amen. But he could not see which of the three ministers it was, or anyone else near the grave, and he realized that he might as well have stayed in the B’nai B’rith Cemetery.

  He had a sudden mental picture of himself standing with his nose poking through the wire of the fence watching the funeral, a separate but equal mourner, and in spite of himself and to his horror he felt it as if it were a gathering gas bubble: a desire to laugh, an uncontrollable urge to laugh, a necessity to shake with mirth while only few feet away his father-in-law was about to be placed in the ground. He dug his fingernails into the skinned flesh of his palm, but then heads in front of him began to move and he could see that the minister was the young one. There was nobody standing near him whom Michael knew.

  Oh God, he shouted silently.

  Leslie, where are you?

  45

  When she got off the train at Grand Central Station she walked directly to the hotel and got a room that was smaller than the room she had had at the Woodborough YWCA and not nearly as clean, with half-filled set-ups and glasses all over the place and dirty towels on the bathroom floor. The bellboy said he would have somebody take care of it right away. But nearly an hour went by and nobody came and she grew tired of the mess, so she called the manager and told him that at fourteen dollars and seventy cents a day she felt entitled to a clean room. A maid came right up.

  She had dinner alone at Hector’s Cafeteria, across from Radio City. It was still a decent place to eat a lonely meal. A man tried to pick her up while she was eating her dessert. He was a polite man, not at all repulsive-looking although probably a bit younger than she, but she ignored him until she had finished the last of her chocolate pudding, and then she walked away. He began to follow her and she lost her patience. There was a policeman sitting at a table near the door dunking a cruller into his coffee and she stopped and quietly asked him for the correct time, looking over at the man. He turned around and walked quickly up the stairs to the second floor of the restaurant.

  She went back to the hotel, still angry but consciously flattered, and went to bed early. The walls were very thin and in the room next door she heard a couple making love. They made love for a long time and the woman was very noisy. She kept making shrill little cries. The man made no sound at all, but there was the noise from the woman and the bed and she found it very hard to go to sleep. When she finally slept toward morning it was for a very little while; the noises woke her again at about five o’clock and there was nothing to do but listen.

  But it grew light outside; the sun came up over the city and she felt better. She opened the window and leaned on the sill and watched the New Yorkers begin to crowd the sidewalks far below. She had forgotten how exciting Manhattan could be, and it made her want to get out and see it. She got dressed and went downstairs and had breakfast in a Child’s and read The New York Times, pretending she had a job in an office to go to. After breakfast she walked down Forty-Second Street to the old building but the magazine wasn’t there any more. She looked it up in the telephone book inside the Times Tower and she saw that it was on Madison Avenue, and then remembered reading some time back that it had moved. There was nobody still working there whom she knew well enough to look up, anyway.

  She walked, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth and seeing things. It was just as it had been on the campus; buildings that she remembered were missing and new buildings had been built in their places.

  When she came to 60th Street she turned west automatically. Long before she came to the roominghouse she was looking for it, wondering whether she would recognize it, and she did right away; the brick was freshly painted but it was the same shade of red. There was a Rooms for Rent sign on the door and she went up the stairs and knocked on the super’s door and he sent her to Apartment 1-B, where the landlord lived. He turned out to be a skinny middle-aged man with a freckled bald head and a scraggly, dirty-looking gray mustache, the ends of which he chewed in the corners of his mouth.

  “May I see an efficiency?” she asked.

  He led her up the stairs. When they reached the second story she asked if 2-C might be vacant, but he said it was not. “Why are you interested in 2-C?” he asked, looking straight at her for the first time.

  “I lived in it, a long time ago,” she said.

  “Oh.” He continued to climb stairs and she followed him. “I can give you a room on Three. Just the same as 2-C.”

  “Whatever happened to the woman who used to be my landlady?” she asked.

  “What might her name have been?”

  But she couldn’t remember.

  “I don’t know,” he said indifferently. “I bought this property four years back from a fellow named Prentiss. Owns a print shop down in the Village somewhere.” He led her down the hall; its walls still were painted that incredibly ugly dark brown.

  She had made up her mind that she would spend the rest of the week living here and thinking about how it was when she had lived here previously, but when he opened the door and she saw the drabness and the discomfort, it overwhelmed her. She made a show of looking the place over, wondering how she ever had endured such ugliness.

  “I’ll think it over and let you know,” she said finally. But it was a mistake; she should have asked what the rent was before telling him that.

  “You’re a fussy woman,” he said, chewing his mustache. She said good-by and, without waiting for him, went quickly down the stairs and out of the building.

  She went to a clam bar for lunch and had shrimp and dark beer, then she spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, thinking with happy scorn of the man on the Wellesley campus. She had dinner in a small French restaurant and then went to a bright and brassy musical. That night the couple she had come to think of as The Honeymooners were at it again. This time the man spoke quick, low words while the woman sounded her cries, but Leslie couldn’t hear what the words were.

  The next day she spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. The day after that she wandered in and out of galleries. She paid sixty dollars for a painting by a man named Leonard Gorletz. She had never heard the name before but she wanted the painting for Michael. It was a portrait of a girl with a kitten. The girl had black hair and didn’t look like Rachel, but you could feel Rachel’s brand of vulnerable happiness when you looked at the way she was looking at the cat, and Leslie knew that Michael would like the picture.

  The following morning she got to see the Honeymooners. She was giving her hair a final touch with the comb before going down to breakfast and she heard their door open and then close, and the sound of their voices, and she dropped her comb and grabbed her handbag and went out after them. She was very disappointed when she saw them. She had imagined them to be beautiful animals. The man was pudgy and soft-looking, with dandruff on the collar of his blue suit, and the woman was thin and nervous with a sharp little beak like a sparrow. Nevertheless, in the elevator all the way down to the lobby Leslie took admiring little peeks, remembering her remarkable range and versatility of soprano expression.

  For the next two days she went shopping by herself and for herself. She bought several things she needed and she window-shopped for a great many things she didn’t desire but were enjoyable to look at. She bought an English tweed skirt for Rachel at Lord & Taylor and a thick blue cashmere sweater for Max at Weber & Heilbroner.

  But that night things took a subtle shift. She couldn’t sleep and she had become sick of the four small walls of the hotel room. I
t was the sixth day and perhaps subconsciously she already had had her fill of New York. To top it off, there was no sound of passion from the honeymooners; they had checked out and abandoned her. In their place was someone who gargled and flushed the john a lot and used an electric razor and turned the television up very loud.

  Early in the morning it began to rain and she stayed late in bed, half-dozing, until hunger drove her out. The entire wet afternoon was consumed in a place called Ronald’s, a kind of matron’s Playboy Club off Columbus Circle where customers went from sauna to masseur to hairdresser in particolored muumuus with big fluffy bunny tails that wiggled with their behinds. She baked at 190° F. while the Boston Pops played “Fiddle-Faddle” and then a Marchessa de Sade with muscles in her fingers kneaded and slapped and pinched her. A girl named Theresa gave her a shampoo. While a pink cream soaked into her facial pores a girl named Hélène gave her a manicure and a girl named Doris gave her a pedicure, both at the same time.

  When she left the salon the rain had tapered off but still fell lightly, almost a mist. The Broadway lights threw shivering streaks on passing cars and the surface of the street. She opened her umbrella and walked downtown, feeling rested and very attractive. Where to have dinner was the vital question. Her mood called for a very fancy restaurant and then suddenly it didn’t; it seemed silly to go through the business of waiting to be seated at a table and ordering and eating a large meal all by herself. She stopped under a pulsing slab of neon and peered through the wet window at a white-hatted psuedo-chef building a mountain of yellow egg in a pan, trying to decide whether to go inside. Instead she walked another half a block and entered a Horn & Hardart’s. She swapped a dollar bill for a handful of change and collected tomato juice, vegetarian vegetable plate, Parker House rolls and jello. The cafeteria was crowded and she walked by table after table until she came to a two-chair table occupied by a fat man with a cheerful Stubby Kaye sort of a face, reading the Daily News over his coffee while his bulging brief case rested against his legs. She unloaded the tray and set it on the wagon of a passing busboy and then discovered she had forgotten her coffee. The coffee robot was only a few steps away and she walked to it and drew a cup that was a bit too full and carried it carefully back to the table.