The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  Someone had propped a leaflet against her juice glass.

  She picked it up and read the mimeographed lettering on the title page, THE REAL ENEMY.

  She started to read it as she sipped her tomato juice.

  The real enemy that faces America now is the Jew-Communist conspiracy to conquer us by diluting our white Christian race with the blood of an inferior and cannibalistic black race.

  Jews have long controlled our banks and propaganda media through the machinations of their international cartels. Now their sly sights have been set on education, in order to brainwash our children at a time when their minds are most malleable.

  What do you want for your children?

  Do you know the number of kike communists teaching in the Manhattan public schools?

  She dropped it on the table. “Does this belong to you?” she asked the fat young man.

  He looked at her for the first time.

  She picked it up and held it out to him. “Did you see anybody leave this?”

  “Lady, I was just reading my paper. Jesus.” He picked up his brief case and walked away. One strap of the brief case was undone. Had it been that way before? She tried to remember, but couldn’t. She looked at the people at the nearby tables, all of them ignoring her, eating, feeding blank faces. One of them? Anybody could have dropped the leaflet.

  Why? she asked silently, speaking to the featureless face. What do you want? What do you gain? Disappear and leave us alone. Go into the forest and hold Black Masses at midnight. Poison dogs. Strangle small furry things. Walk into the sea. Or better, fall into a hole and let it close over you, clean earth.

  What do you want for your children?

  To begin with, I want them to have room to breathe, she thought. Just to breathe.

  But you don’t get it for them by hiding in a hotel room, she told herself. You begin by going home.

  But there remained a thing important for her to do, she realized. There was no similarity between her father and the person who had written this poison. She had to look into her father’s eyes and answer the question he had asked her, in a way that would make him understand.

  On the train next morning she tried to remember when she had last given her father a gift and she wanted very much to give him something. When the train pulled into Hartford she got off and went to Fox’s and bought a book by Reinhold Niebuhr. In the taxi on the way to Elm Street she saw from the copyright date that it was several years old and realized that her father probably had read it.

  At the parsonage nobody answered her knock but the door wasn’t locked.

  “Hello?” she said.

  An elderly man came out of her father’s library, holding a clipboard and a pen. He had a lion’s mane of white hair and wild grey brows.

  “Is Mr. Rawlins here?” she asked.

  “Here? No. Ah . . . You don’t know?” He put his hand on her arm. “My child, Mr. Rawlins is dead.

  “Here, here,” he said in a worried voice. She heard the book strike the floor and she felt him leading her to a chair.

  Rather surprisingly, in a few minutes he left her. She could hear him moving about in the back part of the house and she got up and walked to the mantel and saw a replica of her right hand in plaster of paris. He must have used the wax as a mould, she thought. The man came back with two cups of steaming tea and they drank it slowly together; it was very good.

  His name was Wilson. He was a retired minister and he was assembling her father’s church records. “The kind of job they give to an old man,” he said. “I must say in this case it’s no difficult chore.”

  “He was very orderly,” she said.

  She sat with her head back against the chair and her eyes closed. He left her alone again. But in a little while he asked whether he might drive her to the cemetery.

  “Please,” she said.

  When they got there he pointed out the grave but he waited in the car, for which she felt very grateful.

  The earth was still new-looking and she stood there looking at it and trying to think of something to say that would tell her father how, in spite of everything, she had loved him. She could almost hear the sound of his voice singing a hymn and she sang along with him silently.

  Abide with me; fast falls the even-tide;

  The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide

  When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

  Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

  On the fourth verse she almost faltered.

  Hold Thou thy cross before my closing eyes;

  Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies.

  Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;

  In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

  But she sang it through; that had been the gift. Now, although it was too late to make him understand, she answered the question with the prayers she had been saying for her mother for eighteen years. “Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabo, b’ol’mo deevro hir’usay, v’yamleeh mal’husay. . . .”

  46

  He had gone to bed the night before with the temperature at a chilly ten degrees, but when he awoke in the morning there had been a New England thaw. When he drove downtown the gutters were streams and the ground showed through the snow in shaggy brown patches, like holes in a blanket.

  In the temple they gleaned nine men painfully, one by one the way it happened some mornings, and he finally had to call Benny Jacobs, the Brotherhood president, and ask him to come over and complete the minyan as a special favor to the rabbi. As always Jacobs came. He was the kind of person who made it easy for a man to be a rabbi, Michael thought. When he tried to thank him after the service, Jacobs brushed his thanks aside. “I’m going in to pick up the liquor for the temple New Year’s party. Want anything special, Rabbi?”

  He smiled. “I’ve had experience with your taste in alcohol. Whatever you get, Ben.”

  In his study he saw that there were absolutely no appointments on the calendar and he left the temple and went home to check the mail: bills and the Burpee seed catalogue. He escaped for a fine hour looking at the new vegetables and reading the mouth-watering promises before filling out his order blank the same way he had the year before. He lay on the living room couch for a little while listening to FM radio music and then the station meteorologist predicted that the temperature would go a few degrees higher before rapid cooling followed by a heavy snowfall late that afternoon. He had neglected to fertilize the garden the preceding fall and realized this might well be the only time it would be possible all winter. He changed into worn slacks and an old jacket and work gloves and put on his six-buckle arctics, then he drove to the supermarket and picked up half a dozen empty cardboard cartons. He had a long-standing arrangement with the owner of a turkey farm and he drove to the field where each year after the Thanksgiving and Christmas rushes the man built a mountain of bird droppings. The manure was weathered and fine, the consistency of sawdust, full of long white ghost-haunted feathers he knew would vanish beautifully into the garden earth. It was odorless at that temperature and all the insects that made the job unpleasant during the spring and fall had been winterkilled. He shoveled it into the cartons, careful to fill them so there would be no spillage in the back of the station wagon, which he had lined with newspapers. The sun was warm and he enjoyed the work in the beginning, but he knew from experience that he needed five trips with the car to carry enough fertilizer for the garden, and when he had hauled the third load back to the house and carried it by hand to the garden and dumped it the clouds were rolling in and it was cooler, so that he no longer sweated. By the time he drove into the driveway with the last load the snow had started, light flakes like small barley.

  “Hey.” Max was home from school, and he came to the car and looked at his father’s work clothes. “What are you doing?”

  “Gardening,” said Michael, while the snow gathered on his lashes and brows. “Want to help?”

  They carried the las
t of the cartons to the garden together and dumped them and Max went into the cellar and brought out the shovels and they began to spread the manure while the snowflakes grew larger, floating heavily through the gray air.

  “Tomatoes like pumpkins,” Michael called as he threw a shovelful—swoosh!—and saw a yard-square skim of snow covered with a dark layer of fertilizer.

  “Pumpkins big as tangerines,” Max said. Swoosh!

  “Corn sweet as kisses.” Swoosh!

  “Radishes full of worms. Squash covered with black sores.” Swoosh!

  “Punk kid,” his father said. “You know I have a green thumb.”

  “This stuff stains through the gloves?” Max said. They worked steadily until all the fertilizer was spread and Michael leaned on his shovel like the character in the old WPA cartoons and watched his son finish the job. The boy needed a haircut badly and his hands were chapped and red. Where were his gloves? He looked more like a farmer’s son than a rabbi’s, and Michael thought how in the spring he and Max would turn this under together and plant the seeds and wait like kibbutzniks for the first pale green spikes to push up through the enriched earth.

  “Speaking of kisses, want the car New Year’s?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. Thank you.” Max threw a last shovelful and straightened up with a sigh.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t have a date. Dess and I aren’t going steady any more.”

  He looked for signs of scar tissue.

  “She was asked out by this older guy. He’s already going to Tufts.” He shrugged. “That was that.” He knocked manure from the shovel blades. “The funny thing is, I’m not even upset. I always figured I was ape over her. That if anything ever broke us I’d be real shook.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I don’t think so. The thing is, I’m not even seventeen, this thing with Dess was like . . . well, a dry run. But later, when you’re older, how do you tell?”

  “What’s your question, Max?”

  “What’s love, Dad? How do you know when you really love a girl?”

  He saw it was a serious question, one that troubled the boy. “I don’t have a workable definition,” he said. “When the time comes, when you’re older and you meet a woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you won’t have to ask.”

  They gathered up the cardboard cartons and placed them one inside the other for easy carrying. “Is it too late for you to get another New Year’s date?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I called a bunch of girls. Roz Coblentz. Betty Lipson. Alice Striar. They all had dates. Weeks ago.” He looked at his father. “I called Lisa Patruno last night, but she was busy, too.”

  Oy. Steady, Zaydeh.

  “I don’t think I know her,” Michael said.

  “Her father is Pat Patruno, the druggist. Patruno’s Pharmacy.”

  “Oh?

  “That make you sore?” Max asked.

  “Not sore.”

  “But . . . something?”

  “Max. You’re a big guy, now, not quite a man. From here on in there are going to be decisions you’re going to have to make on your own. Important decisions, more and more of them as you grow older. Whenever you want my advice, I’m right here to give it. You won’t always make the right decisions—none of us does. But it’s going to take an awful lot to make me sore at you.”

  “Anyhow, she had a date,” Max said.

  “There’s a girl named Lois from New York. Sixteen. She’s visiting Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Mendelsohn. If you want to take a chance you’ll have to call information. They’re not in the phone book yet.”

  “Is she bearable to look at?”

  “I’ve never seen her. Her older sister is what at one time I would have called Good-Looking Head.”

  They started for the house and Max threw a punch that landed like a pole-ax, removing sensation from his shoulder probably forever. “You’re not such a bad geezer to have for an old man—”

  “Thank you.”

  “For a rabbi who stands around throwing bird crap into snowstorms.”

  Michael showered and changed and they had canned soup for lunch and then Max asked if he could take the car and go to the library. When the boy was gone he stood by the window for a little while and watched it snow and then he got the idea for a sermon and he sat at the typewriter and developed it. When he had finished writing he went into the hall closet and found a can of Brasso and took it upstairs. Zaydeh’s bedstead was becoming dingy. He worked on it slowly and carefully. After he had applied the polish he washed his hands and began to rub the bedstead with soft rags, enjoying it as the tarnish disappeared and the renewed metal shimmered through with layers of warm internal light.

  He still had the entire headboard to do when he heard the front door open and the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  “Hello?” he yelled.

  “Hello,” she said, coming in behind him.

  She kissed him in the corner of the mouth as he turned and then buried her face in his shoulder.

  “Better call Dr. Bernstein,” she said, the words muffled.

  “We have time,” he told her. “All the time in the world.”

  They simply stood, holding one another, for a long time. “I’ve been on the other side of the looking-glass,” she said.

  “Was it good?”

  She looked into his eyes. “I shacked up in a room and experimented with whiskey and drugs. Each day I took a different lover.”

  “No. No, you didn’t. Not you.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I went back to every place I had ever lived without you, trying to find out what I am. Who I am.”

  “What did you find out?” he asked.

  “That for me nothing important exists outside of this house. Everything else goes up in smoke.”

  She saw in his face that he was tortured by the necessity to tell her. “I already know. I went to Hartford this morning,” she said.

  He nodded and reached out and touched her cheek. “Love,” he said. This is what it is, he told the boy silently; it is what I feel for your mother, this woman.

  “I know,” she said, and he took her hand, seeing their complicated images in the brass. Downstairs the front door opened and they heard the sound of Rachel’s voice.

  “Daddy?”

  “We’re up here, darling,” Leslie called.

  He held her hand so tightly it was as if their flesh had grown together, so that even God would have found it difficult to pull them apart.

  47

  On the last morning of the year he reached out and turned off the alarm clock as Rachel crawled into his bed and burrowed against him for warmth. Instead of getting up he held her head against his shoulder, fingertips gently massaging the egg-shaped little skull beneath the thick warm hair, and they both fell asleep again.

  When he awoke for the second time he saw with a pang that it was after ten o’clock; he had missed the morning service for the first time in months. But there had been no desperate telephone call from the temple, and he relaxed, realizing they had gathered a minyan without him.

  He got out of bed and showered and shaved and dressed in chinos and lumberjacket shirt, taking only juice and then sitting in his study with his feet bare, writing a long letter to his father before lunch: Leslie was overjoyed at the news. When are we going to meet the bride? Can you come soon? Give us enough notice so we can plan a suitable welcome.

  After lunch he went to the hospital. Bundled like Eskimoes against the cold, he and Leslie tramped through the long bright afternoon. They climbed the highest point on the hospital grounds, a wooded hill with no paths so their booted feet had to fight the crusted snow all the way, and when they reached the top he was short of breath and he saw that there was actually a round red Katzenjammer Kids spot on each of her cheeks. The sun was hard-bright on the snow and below and away was the lake, snow-covered but ploughed in places to permit skating, with the small clashing figures of hockey players. They sat
in the snow and held hands and he wanted to hide the moment, make it last, stick it under his tongue like a piece of hard rock candy to be tasted at length and in stealth. But the wind blew snowdust demons into their faces and their behinds grew numb with cold and in a little while they deserted the hilltop and walked back to the ward.

  Elizabeth Sullivan was brewing coffee in her cubicle and she invited them in for a libation. Before they could drink it, Dan Bernstein came striding in on morning rounds, and he pointed a blunt accusing finger at Leslie. “I’ve got a present for you. We just discussed you at staff meeting. We’re going to kick you the hell out before long.”

  “Can you tell us when?” Michael asked.

  “Oh, we’ll have another week of treatment and take a couple of days to rest up. And then, good-by charlie.” He patted Michael’s shoulder and walked into the ward, Miss Sullivan following with the records wagon.

  She opened her mouth to speak and couldn’t, but she smiled at him and lifted her coffee mug and he touched his to it, trying to think of a very funny speech that would say it all and quickly realizing that speech was unnecessary; instead, looking into her eyes, he drank the coffee and burned his tongue.

  That evening Max stopped the car in front of the temple and waited for him to leave.

  “Good night, Dad. Happy New Year.”

  Without knowing he was going to, he leaned over and kissed the boy on the cheek, smelling his own after-shave lotion.

  “Hey. What’s that for?”

  “Because you’re too old for me to do that ever again. Be careful how you drive.”

  The downstairs function hall was crowded with people wearing silly little paper hats. Behind a makeshift bar, members of the Brotherhood dispensed drinks, making money for the Hebrew school. Five musicians thumped out a wild bossa nova and a double line of females moved their bodies to the beat like tribal communicants on the dance floor, eyes half closed.