“We miss you, Jake,” I told him. “Norman Sachs, Ray Haas, Donny Levine, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stan Bloom, Al Harry Richmond and myself miss you,” I said, calling off his colleagues for him from Wolfblock’s long-ago, first-team minyan.
Connie stared at me, nervously paying out stones onto Jake’s monument like someone who does not know the currency of the country in which she finds herself.
“Lobsters, Daddy?” she asked later, after our walking tours of the graveyard ceased and I’d started her in on her “Know Thy Lud” lessons. “May rabbis eat lobster?”
“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t always a rabbi. Was I?”
And it was a little, I thought, like giving up the past of a priest, always more mysterious, at least to me, than the known proscriptions of his circumscribed life, all that last-fling riot and disorder, the whirlwind sexual spree and rampage of his ladies’-man, precelibate years. Maybe it was melodramatic, but I’d felt a little like that back in the cemetery explaining Jake Heldshaft to Connie, mentioning Sachs and Haas and Stan Bloom and the others to her for the first time. Now, with my remark that I hadn’t always been a rabbi, and my gratuitous digs about her mom, it seemed to me that it was as if I’d told Connie she was adopted or suggested, boasting, some prepriestly, wild-oats past. It was a wrong footing, clumsy, almost drunken.
I’d felt rotten since the Kaddish at the Puffy Pisher’s graveside and had been trying to call Al Harry Richmond in Chicago. Al Harry was the sort who kept up. If anyone did, he’d know what happened. But when you’re a professional grief administrator like myself you’re always running into problems of measurement, issues of proportion. You have to give them their money’s worth over a eulogy, touch their hearts without breaking them, as one of the holy men back in the Maldives put it. Also, you never know how much anybody knows. It’s the beginning of politics. So when I finally reached Al Harry I was all bluff, hail-fellow congeniality and cautious, red-alert pussyfoot.
“Son of a gun,” I told him, “it’s a blessing from Eternal-Our-God just to hear your voice again. Your voice is a sight for sore eyes, Al Harry. It’s been way too long. Way too long. Remember the South Side? Remember the minyan? Remember old Wolfblock? Those were the days, hah? Carefree and gay. Not like today with all our responsibilities and what-with-one-thing-and-anothers. Say,” I said, “I’m something of a Wolfblock myself now. Our-God-and-God-of-Our-Fathers saw fit to make me a rabbi in Lud, New Jersey. Maybe you knew that. Well, the other day, the strangest thing. I was walking through this graveyard and I came across a marker for a Jacob Heldshaft. Remember Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird? Well, this one out here has a birth year that would be just about the same as Jake’s and I was wondering, well, do you think it could be the same fella? You hear any talk about He-Who-Is-Most-Merciful taking him out?”
“That’d be Jake all right,” he said. “Throat cancer.”
“Throat cancer? The thrush?”
“His falsetto did him in.”
And went on to tell me that Sachs, Haas and Marv Baskin were also history.
“What? No!”
Stan Bloom, who was still alive, he said, had been diagnosed as having a rare and dangerous blood disease. The trouble with people who keep up is just that. They get the bad news first. I felt awful. I was even a little jealous, if you want to know. I was the rabbi here, I was supposed to be the guy with the backstage access. Hearing all this gave me the same sense I sometimes get in Sal’s about how underemployed I am. Never mind that four of us were already out of the picture, never mind that Stan Bloom was apparently down for the count. Other things troubled me. I’d turned into this hick. Sowing my indifferent dead into the ground like a sort of truck farmer.
“Listen,” I told my old friend, “I’m glad we had this talk. Your news is terrible. It’s hard to take it all in. Jesus, Al Harry, the Jewish Nightingale was a falsetto? The Puffy Pisher wasn’t a natural soprano?”
“Heldshaft? He wasn’t even a natural tenor.”
“I’m going to pray for Stan Bloom’s blood count,” I told him.
“Sure,” he said.
“I’m going straight to Creator-of-the-World with this one.”
“Do what you have to.”
“I’m the Rabbi of Lud!”
“Kayn aynhoreh.”
“What, you think Gracious God is just going to stand by when He hears about this one? In the old days, in the minyan, in the old days He wouldn’t even let us catch a cold!”
“Tell Him.”
And I did. I dug out my phylacteries and prayer shawl and squeezed my eyes tight shut during an entire unmodified Shachris, conjuring God and praying and praying for the restoration of Stan Bloom’s blood. Though the image I had behind my boarded-up eyelids was the leather box blossoming from my forehead like the horn on a Jewish unicorn.
Because I was a little spooked myself now, just like my little girl, on the defensive in the upper reaches of the Garden State, hard by Pineoaks and Masada Plains, those big Jewish graveyards in the Jersey flats where Jake Heldshaft was buried and which death and Perpetual Care had made bloom like a desert in Israel. Hence the sociology, all the worked-up learning and high academics of my lessons, my scholarly observations on Lud and Judaism. Which I was actually preparing, writing down now, like Connie on a homework tear, rehearsing and delivering to the kid just as if, Lord save us, she were a living, breathing, fleshed-out, honest-to-God congregation instead of only just a by-blood, captive audience of one.
“Since coming to Lud,” I told her in my discourse upon Civilization and the Jews, “which, to be quite frank with you, Connie dear, has too many people under it not to be classified as a sort of Jewish death farm, I have had ample opportunity to observe our gentile, American neighbors. They’re handymen and artisans. They not only putter, these people, they flat-out build! And they do this with an ease that belies simple competence or skill. Now I put it to you that what’s happening here is that many of even the Yankee waspiest of our Christian friends are simply presenting—I use the word in its medical sense—not so much traditional values as racial traits and characteristics, the drives, I mean, of the peasant! And now I put it to you—I speak in my rabbi mode here—that most Jews don’t know their wrenches, are board-foot illiterates and are behind in their band saws. We’re often heavy smokers but generally nondrinkers, good husbands and loving, doting daddies who worship our kiddies. We leave them philosophy, talmudic quease and quibble, leave them, that is, history, culture and civilization. But for all that we practically invented the city, there are very few Jewish architects, and for all that a gemütlich notion of our families is the popular and conventional one, or that our drawing rooms frequently smell like comfortable old quilts or the fixings for soup, it’s the Wasp pop who’s loved.—And I’ll never understand how we ever got our reputation as a desert people!”
“I love you, Daddy,” Constance said.
“Then why are you so troubled?”
“I have no one to play with.”
This wasn’t, in the strictest sense, true.
As Lud’s only living child it would have been unusual if Connie weren’t at least a little spoiled. She could have had, had she wanted them (as once she did, on first-name terms with the gravediggers and, when she’d been small, Sal’s happy little helper, his assistant—I hadn’t known this—coffinside, bumping up bouffants, shaping corpses’ hairdos with her little hands and picking the odd thread from the burial clothes they lay in, smoothing the lapels of the men and punching up the big, puff sleeves on the women’s dresses, playing dolly with the dead), all the town’s day laborers at her beck and call, all its clerks, landscapers, stonecutters, morticians, and small shopkeepers.
And me. She had me. I was still giving her instruction, coaching her in her theosophics, rabbinics and doxologicals.
“When Hear-O-Israel wants—”
“Why do you use those names?”
“What names?”
“He
ar-O-Israel. Holy One, Blessed-Is-He. Whole-Kit-and-Kaboodle. Master-of-the-Fruit-and-Vegetables. Those names you call God.”
And I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t mockery but I/Thou, only a little tit for tat. “He likes it,” I said. “He likes the way I do business.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” I said, “He don’t mind. He’s got a terrific sense of humor.”
“Really?”
“Hey,” I said, “didn’t He hang some monikers on the Jews? Why, your own name is Goldkorn. Your mother was a Guttman. Or take a look at the names on those stones out there. Schwartz and Fishbloom, Cohen, Lebowitz and Prumm and Stein. Steins fore and aft. Steinberg. Rothstein. All the Steins—Goldstein, Rubenstein, Finklestein, Finestein. Feigenbaum, Wiedenbaum, Teitelbaum. Weinberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg. The Baums and the Bergs. The Baums and the Bergs and the Blooms. Goldbloom, Rosenbloom, Blumbloom. You see? He stuck us with Plotkin and Popkin. He stuck us with Krochmalnik and Eppel.
“Even first names. Names you’d have every right to expect would be denomination-neutral. What did Old Nachas-Giver give us? Irving and Sam, Jake and Izzy. Moe and Meyer. Are these proper Christian names? Names out of jokes, Connie. Tailors’ names, names from the rag trade. Of peddlers, diamond merchants, the owners of discount appliance stores.
“And what about Jew itself? Jewish?”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Papa.”
“Fa-ther!”
“Pop.”
Because, as I told my Connie, we’re not a chosen people so much as a marked one. Handles on us like signs over pubs. A called attention. This way to the Jews! The sounds of our titulars like cleared sinuses, the intimate throat and nose catarrhs. This way to the Jew! The blums, blooms, baums and bergs, the steins and itzes like a periodic table of the percussive, all the booms, snares and rimshots of baggy pants and low comedy. This way, this way to the Jew! All the landmarks, signposts, milestones. Our banners and gonfalons. The heraldry of our hair. The footprint of our faces. Something in our mien and countenance, at large in the lineaments like handwriting. The spectacle of the schnoz, the shrug like a broken code and an accent like a visible scar. Our outsize pores and busted profiles like difficult coastline. Some faint sweat and kasha scent and feel in the ambiance. And all the rest. Our farpotshkets, zaftigs, zhlubs, and shlumperdiks. The loksh’s unleavened life. Genug! Who said genug? Not genug! Step right up, right this way, ladies and gentlemen. This way to the Jew! The ghetto and mezuzah. The menorah, the yarmulke, the golden chai. The inscribed gates, I mean, the lintels and frontlets—all the blood plagues, all the frog, the vermin and beasts and marred cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts and darkness and smiting of the firstborn—the Angel-of-Death-blessed, God-fingered children of Israel with their bloodied, odd-and-even, apotropaically marked doors. This way, this way to the Jews!
So don’t talk to me about designation and nomenclature, don’t tell me about the shrill, brassy mouthfuls, the racket of roll call. Because if I feel like mixing it up with Him once in a way now and again or, as I was laying it right out for my daughter, if I take Him at His Word and choose to engage Him in the I/Thou’s and Me/You’s, it ain’t only any testy Old Testament God we’re dealing with here, it’s a testy Old Testament rabbi, too! Don’t go screaming Mocker! Heresiarch! Blasphemer! Apostate! Pagan! at me. I’m in a game two can play, and am only living the quid pro quo, turn-table, give and get, measure-for-measure life. Ain’t that so, Blessed-Art-Thou? Do I have the range, All-Including-I-Am-the-One-and-Not-the-Other? Do I, Messiah-Scheduler? Am I at least in the ballpark, Sabbath-Sanctifier? How about it, Eternal-Our-God, Ruler-of-the-Universe? How about it, King-of-the-King-of-the-Kings?
Now genug! Basta! Genug already!
Anyway, Shelley came in at this point in the discussion and threw me one of those quick little as-you-were headshakes, sloughing her existence with some don’t-mind-me squint and grovel of the eyes, all her voluntary, I’m-not-here subordinatives and Cheshire meltdowns of being. She may even have put a finger to her lips. They were like salutes, selfless Shelley’s sinuous sloughings and shruggings, and I’m here to tell you you wouldn’t believe what one of my wife’s elaborate downcast-eyes gestures could do to this little man of God.
Or I, apparently, in my rabbi mode, to her.
“Go, doll,” I told my daughter, “go play.”
“No,” Shelley said in what I can’t help but think of as her piggy Jew Latin, “go on with the lessons-e-le. Don’t mind-a-le me.”
“It’s all right, Shelley. We were through anyway.”
“Oy, I’m interrupting,” Shelley said, pouting obeisance.
“Really,” I said, “we’re finished. Aren’t we, Connie?”
“I guess.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go on, sweetheart. Go and play.”
“Who with?”
“What about Robert? Go find Robert and keep him company.”
“That’s so grisly. Daddy. Robert’s crazy.”
“Robert is not crazy. Don’t say Robert is crazy. Robert has a touch of Alzheimer’s.”
I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Or vice versa either. Some mutual sucker punch to the wayward randoms of our drifting sexuals, I guess. A shove in the frictions, the rubbed chilblains of our underground plates and riled, misunderstood tectonics of all low nature’s abrasive underbite, I suppose. The attractions and curious customaries—tits, testicles, elbows and armdown, great gams, fleshy cocks, muscles and eyebrows, kneecaps, jawlines and hairlines, the heft of an ass or tone of a tooth—in us converted to stuff lifted above conventional flesh and blood and bone, lifted beyond fact or even ordinary aberrant deviation, the quotidian fabrics and metals, I mean—your leathers, your irons, I do declare! In us converted to stuff beyond parsing, mysteries, enchantments, beyond, in fact, my rabbi’s mode to understand, all my offshore learning notwithstanding, all that talmudic quease and quibble I was telling our Connie about. Our aphrodisiacs, our spice and pick-me-ups, sorcerous endearings, something amiss in the character perhaps. In Shelley a thing—though I wear none—for beards. (Didn’t I say lifted above the conventional flesh and blood and bone?) The gray and unkempt beard she cartoons in on me in her imagination to her only some necessary high sign of spirit. God the turn-on and the rabbi, in her mind, merely the conductor or maybe the buffer or just the good grounding that will keep her from harm. Or in love, could be, with the dark Jew gabardines of the head and heart. And in me—the attraction—to quirkiness itself, Shell’s forlorn, fussy, pseudo-baleboste ways. I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Well, of course I know what. It’s how that sends me to the encyclopedias.
Meanwhile I’m growing a hard-on as big as the Ritz and Shelley is filling up with wet like you could let in a tub from her. She’s probably raining on herself. I know this. I can tell. It’s urgent. We’ve got to dispose of Connie. And it’s Shelley who’s going to handle it.
“Sha,” she says. “Let-e-le me. I’ll talk-e-le to her.”
“I understand Yiddish, Ma!” Connie, exasperated, said.
“I know that, darling. We’re just so proud of you. But you know,” she said, “Daddy’s right. Robert’s always been so fond of you. It cheers him up just to look at you. I know it does. And I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve been meaning to send over some of that bread of mine he loves so much. You could do Mommy a favor and take it over for her.”
Connie rolled her eyes, but Shelley had already turned her back and was headed into the kitchen. When she returned she was holding a loaf of Wonder Bread. She held it out to our daughter. “Tell Robert he’s always in our thoughts and that I’m going to get over myself just as soon as I can make time-e-le.”
“Sure,” Connie said, and left.
“Oh, oh!” Shelley exclaimed as I danced around her and shook my head and snapped my fingers like a naked Tevya. “Oh! Oh!”
“In Yiddish,” I groaned, coming.
“Oy!” she said. “Oy!”
We lay back,
breathless, spent.
“Maybe,” Shelley said after a while, “I should have sent over some of my jelly too.”
“Your Welch’s?”
“My Smucker’s,” she said. “It’s Robert’s favorite.”
Robert Hershorn couldn’t have been in his sixties but presented symptoms everyone regarded as the onset of Alzheimer’s. (It’s surprising how little we knew in Lud about disease, what with its being a cemetery town, I mean.) The stuff we got from the papers, the cover stories in the newsmagazines—a spotty and, in Hershorn’s case, loosely reasoned paranoia, a memory in visible retreat, sliding, that is, off the tip of his tongue (in most people his age there’s still this tension at least, this urgent, clumsy reach and stretch for forgotten words and names as for badly fielded ground balls, some nervous working of the visible will to hold on and draw up, like an inexperienced fisherman, say, with a bite on his line) and out of sight, slipped through the cracks forever. Robert hadn’t only surrendered the words and names but had almost absently, and quite possibly with some relief, agreed to the surrender terms. The struggle had gone out of him, I mean. Abandoning even his confusion. (That other big symptom in the inventory we all recognized.)
As far as we knew all his autonomics were still in place. He didn’t appear incontinent. He didn’t smell of urine or the telltale clays. If he felt a sneeze coming on he reached into the pocket where he kept his handkerchief.
He even drove an automobile, negotiating the distance between his home in Ridgewood twelve miles off, and managing the correct turns on the half-dozen streets in his hometown that would take him the seventeen blocks to the one state, then one federal, then one state highway again that brought him to the first of the three-and-a-quarter blocks to Seels, the vicious, anti-Semitic tombstone carver and Jewish monument names chiseler who figured that a jew buried was a jew nailed (and who probably thought “jew,” in lower case, as if it were a verb or adjective, and once remarked in my hearing that the pebbles and stones people placed on jew gravestones wasn’t a kind of calling card, or for remembrance, it was for the extra weight, to keep them down, in the earth), and who, at least officially, was still on Hershorn’s payroll, though anyone would have thought it was the other way around, that it was Seels who kept Hershorn on the books, for the humiliation of the thing, for the pleasure it gave him to see a Jew in decline.
The Rabbi of Lud Page 6