“The candles.”
“The wine.”
“Making over dead people.”
“Making over God.”
“Look,” said Shull, “you don’t have to worry.”
“Your job is assured,” Tober said.
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of my employers as some other rabbi might have thought of the people on the board of directors of his congregation. Trustees and governors.
They were not like the women.
They watched me like a hawk.
They listened to every word of every eulogy, professional as people at the rear of a theater on opening night, interested as backers, hanging on the sobs, waiting for the laughs and show stoppers.
“My job is assured?”
“If it’d make you more comfortable we could draw up a new contract.”
“I don’t think I—”
“Sure,” Tober said, “we could stick in a no-cut clause, guarantee you four or five more years.”
“Five or six.”
“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”
“But—”
“You know what keeps us going?” Shull said.
“The perpetual care,” Tober said.
“The perpetual care and the exhumations.”
“The perpetual care and the exhumations and the deconsecrations.”
“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island.”
“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island and up to Connecticut.”
“Because this necropolis is dying on its feet.”
I’m a fellow whipsawed between admiration and contempt, hard men and soft women, needful daughters and loony wives, God jerks and morticians.
“Think, Rabbi. How many graves and tombstones have we dug up this year? Just this year? How many times have you found yourself having to mumble deconsecration prayers over some watertight, concrete vault?” Tober asked, emptying his cup and rinsing it in the deconsecrated sink.
“Sure,” Shull said, “that’s what keeps us going.”
“Fashion!” Tober grumped.
“Fashion and the interment customs. The laws and principles of the Funeral Code of the Great State of New Jersey.”
“We live by checks and balances, Rabbi.”
“And what if,” Shull put in, “God forbid it should come to this, the fashionable Long Island or fashionable Connecticut funerary lobby bastards ever got to our Trenton bastards and made them do away with the points in the code which keep us viable?”
“Exhumation taxes.”
“Fees for rezoning deconsecrated back into consecrated ground.”
“The ten-buck-a-mile charge, point A to point B, to move the disinterred across a state line.”
“All your prohibitives and pretty-pennies.”
“Pffft!”
“Up in smoke.”
“Gone with the wind.”
“But it makes you more comfortable we draw up a brand-new contract.”
“No cut for two or three years.”
“One or two.”
“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”
Shull took an ice-cream scoop from behind the counter and hung over the open freezer, studying the flavors. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to make myself a frappe. Anyone else? How about it, Rabbi? You up for a frappe?”
“Why are you saying these things to me?” I asked Tober. “I don’t know why you’re saying these things to me,” I told Shull.
“Listen,” Tober said, “we’re not the type to go behind your back.”
“Of course not,” Shull agreed. “Believe me, Rabbi, if we had a beef we’d be in touch.”
“We perfectly understand your position,” Tober said.
“We comprehend totally your point of view.”
“It isn’t as if we could reasonably ask you to fix up your eulogies.”
“Good Christ, man, you never even knew these people!”
“By the time you see them they’re already dead!”
“All you got to go on is what their loved ones tell you about it,” Shull said.
“You going to trust loved ones at a time like that?”
“With all their special stresses and vulnerabilities?”
“Though you have to, of course.”
“Even they tell you their daddies could fly.”
“Stand around in the air like a guy on a staircase.”
“It’s the age-old story.”
“Garbage in, garbage out,” Tober said.
“We won’t stand on ceremonies. What it comes down to is what it came down to the last time,” Shull said.
“Arthur Klein and Johnny Charney have been asking about you again,” Tober said.
“What with death moving further and further out on the Island and up to the bedroom communities in Connecticut, well,” Shull said, “we don’t honestly see how we can continue to protect you.”
“I’m a rabbi,” I protested.
“Of course you are. I’d come to you myself for spiritual guidance. Wouldn’t you, Shull?”
“In a minute, Tober.”
“I studied Talmud. What do I know about real estate?”
“Plots,” Tober said, laughing lightly. “Not real estate. Burial plots. Real estate is something else altogether.”
“They tax real estate.”
“We believe in the separation of church and real estate.”
“Posolutely,” Shull agreed.
“It’s Klein’s opinion you wouldn’t even need a realtor’s license.”
“Charney’s too.”
“Please,” I said, rising to go, “I’m not your man.”
“It isn’t as if you’d be knocking on doors.”
“Is that what he thought, Tober, he’d be knocking on doors?”
“Leads,” Tober said, “you’d be following leads. Charney said to say.”
“All you’d have to do is close.”
“And collect the commission Klein says you’re entitled to.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee.” Again I raised my imaginary cap. “Reb Tober. Reb Shull.”
It was always astonishing to me to see them work in tandem, zip through routines I knew had to have been rehearsed, the letter-perfect meeting of their minds, their rhymed intentions. Though of course this wasn’t the first time they’d introduced the subject. For years they’d been after me to work part time at Lud Realty with Klein and Charney. Indeed, though they professed to be passing along Klein’s and Charney’s views—the business about the realtor’s license, the commission, the leads—the idea of my selling cemetery lots had been theirs. They thought a rabbi would have extra authority with the customers.
Shull and Tober knew they were dealing in a depletable resource—not the dead; the dead, like the poor, we would have always with us, but the land, parcels of ground no bigger than the doorway to your room—and they were terrified. Always they were turning new ideas over and over in their heads. They entertained (and dismissed) a plan for a new, ecumenical cemetery, and offered at discount burial plot, casket, funeral and tombstone combinations that could only be purchased in advance. They worked out all sorts of schemes and drew up models of landscaping (like Simplicity dress patterns) that the men and women who would one day be buried there could not only preselect but were encouraged to tend themselves, like people working on their gardens. They would even sell you the seeds and rent you the tools.
So their overture to me in the coffee shop was not new. Even my guarded outrage reflected old positions, and each time they introduced the idea it seemed a little less outlandish.
“Goldkorn,” said Tober, “think about this, please.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, starting for the door and stepping out into the street. “I really don’t see what there is to think about.”
“Goldkorn,” S
hull called, rushing to the door and shouting after me. “Hear me, Goldkorn! There are worse parishes than Lud! If this cemetery goes belly up you could finish your career in some condo on the Palisades! You could be The Bingo Rabbi, The Theater Party Rabbi! The Rabbi of Wheelchairs and Walkers! Is that what you want? Is it? Is it, Goldkorn?”
So they were terrified. It was those indivisible cubic feet of earth they knew they were stuck with, saddled with, the seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet—just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet. Because they figured that all they really had to sell was the topsoil. Never mind that it had dimension, that it bottomed out at China. For these two, everything after those first twenty-eight-or-so initial square dirt feet was throwaway, pure loss leader, the mineral rights to which they could neither retain, sell nor give away. Hence the advance purchase plans, collaborative eulogies, all the layaway obsequies; hence the seeds and garden tools and elaborate landscaping arrangements. Hence their tandem, bicycle-built-for-two hearts.
But however alike Tober and Shull appeared to be in business, privately they were as different as day and night.
Emile Tober was the night.
Tober was a big, troubled, crafty and, on his own, secretive, taciturn and probably insane old man who was driven by a single goal—putting together enough money to guarantee that his son, Edward, once Tober was out of the picture—that’s how he put it—would be provided for for life, a life, Tober was convinced, that would not only outlast his own and that of Tober’s wife but the lives, too, of Emile’s and Sonia’s three other children, Edward’s brother and two sisters, as well as their kids’, Ed’s unborn nieces and nephews, should they ever be born, which, frankly, might never happen since they, the siblings, were not married yet and, so early were they enlisted into the service of their daddy’s obsession, that they not only believed in it and shared in it but were actually given over to it as much as the father, and who (not even counting Edward), the funeral parlor guy’s grown kids—ninety-six years old collectively, which was the only score Tober ever kept, and the only way he ever kept it, growing three additional collective years per annum which, should all of them live, would make them ninety-nine years the following year and one hundred and two the year after that one, only Edward getting the benefit of an individuated, customized, bespoke birthday—thirty-eight, according to his father, of the darkest, dizziest years in the recorded, concentrated history of man—therefore actively contributed to it, that hard-earned fund, store, reserve, hoarded, hope-chest and war-chest, nest-egg kitty, call it what you will, which, or so ran his dad’s mad theory, would, if only it were allowed to grow big enough (if, that is, only God saw fit to allow all of them to live longer, if only He found them better jobs, kept inflation down, improved interest rates and guided them into safe, terrific investment opportunities), might finally permit—twenty-nine, thirty-two, thirty-five, sixty-one and sixty-four were their actual ages—one of them to die, so long, that is, as the rest of them didn’t slack off and continued to chip in with their fair share, until, if God saw fit, they would perhaps have saved enough to permit another of them to breathe his or her last and thereby leave off putting by, so long, that is, as it was the surviving, least good wage-earner He took, and so on and so forth until the time, or so old Tober figured, that the nut was at last large enough to cover just about whatever might yet come up, leaving the by-that-time fatherless, motherless, brotherless-and-sisterless kid to all the devices in the armory of his protective attendants and retainers. Which had better be considerable.
Edward Tober had been blind since birth.
Which might not, considering all the possible curses and combinations of curses, have been so bad. There’s leglessness and armlessness, hearing loss and a broad palette of the chronic and congenital that not only outruns, but will probably continue to outrun, however correct our priorities, strong our commitment or deep our pockets, however refined and elegant our solutions or frequent and prime-timed our telethons, our needs. And now we are up old Tober’s alley, on old Tober’s turf, somewhere along his twisted and complicated, infinitely long corridor and rich vein of troubles. There was just too damn much on Edward’s plate.
He had been born without a labyrinthine sense. He had, that is, not only none of the blind man’s comforting overcompensations but an additional and quite dreadful undercompensation with which he had to deal. He had perfect pitch, a keen, too keen, sense of smell, strength, a good heart, brains, common sense—all the attributes. Only a good sense of direction he did not have, or any sense of direction at all. He could not tell left from right, up from down, or even in from out. There he was, a loose cannon on the deck, apparently without the gift of gravity, unfixed as an astronaut. Thrown into a pool, or fallen into the sea, he would as likely swim to the bottom as to the top.
Because he was unable to see and had none of his labyrinthine senses, he couldn’t learn to knot his tie, or tie his shoes, or dress himself at all. He buttoned a shirt by chance and main force, sometimes actually pushing—he was strong—the buttons through the cloth. He forced both feet into the same pants leg, blew his ear in his handkerchief and wore his hat rakishly on his shoulder. He could never learn braille, or even turn on a radio. He wouldn’t be able to make love, of course, and I refuse to think about how he handled his bodily functions.
Yet Edward more than held his own in conversation, told delightful stories, had a sweet, equable disposition, and there was no one I knew whom I would rather go to for advice.
Shull.
Shull was the day, affable as sunshine. If Tober was driven to miserliness by his sense of the terrible consequences his death would bring to his handicapped son, Shull was hounded to earn by nothing more urgent than the pursuit of happiness. Not even happiness—pleasure. Though you couldn’t tell it from his behavior during the long hours of his working day, which, until you knew him better, would have seemed to you not only full but frantic—the two and sometimes three phone conversations he could conduct simultaneously, a telephone held like an earache between his inclined head and shoulder, and another in each hand, shouting orders to his chemicals supplier in Philly, discussing a floral arrangement with his nurseryman in Lud, solicitous of some broken-hearted widow on the other end of a third phone, and perhaps already catching the eye of some workman just then passing the open door to his office and signaling with nothing more than directions jabbed out with his chin not only where he wanted the workman to go but what he wanted him to do when he got there—even his stomach-knotting, ulcer-growing, stress-inducing activities a source of pleasure to him (as almost everything was that he could feel—a sore throat, a headache, an abscessed tooth, and his coffee and marble cake and two- and three-frappe lunches too), though he perfectly understood that what hurt him hurt him, was not, that is, good for him, and betrayed nerve endings that might just as well be used in a better cause than the destructive impulses and synapses of masochism. Understood, that is, that if he was to be a voluptuary, if he was to make his pleasures extend over a long lifetime—he was already sixty-one, the same age as Sonia, his partner’s wife—then he’d better knock it off, get right with his body. Periodically he gave up smoking, cut down on his drinking, traveled two to three times a year to the most expensive fat farms, had himself checked by important specialists, elected surgeries not covered by his health insurance, all the while balancing, even juggling, the golden means of moderation in all things, including his concern for his own health.
He spent what he earned. He could have been some dedicated, even obsessed, hobbyist or collector deliberately setting, despite its cost, a final treasure triumphantly into place in the collection. Yet he had no hobbies, no collection. His pleasure was pleasure, his pastime was fun.
He’d once purchased a big-ticket, luxury item from a mail-order catalogue and now he received catalogues from every mail-order house in the country. These retailers, whatever they sold, must have pictured him as some world-class yuppie
and, indeed, the stuff he sent away for was exactly the sort of merchandise you might expect to see on the wish list of any upwardly mobile, spoiled-rotten kid in the land. He owned almost everything L.L. Bean and Sharper Image had to offer. Banana Republic sent him pith helmets and commando gear—sweaters, boots, compasses and flight jackets—from a dozen armies. He owned a Swedish submariner’s first-aid case, fuses and assorted makings that might have been used by the PLO. He owned an official knife from the Portuguese Fishing Fleet that he used to loosen knots though it was designed to fillet fish. He sent away for the best telescopes. He had an expensive home gym. He owned a robot. He purchased state-of-the-art Camcorders, audio equipment, edge-of-the-field cameras, rifles, Betamax machines, and alarm systems to protect all this shit. He gave elaborate luaus and liked to charter planes on New Year’s Eve and fly his friends to mystery destinations. He hired symphony musicians to entertain at his parties. They strolled among the guests and took requests like gypsies in a restaurant. He flew to Europe only if he could get reservations on the Concorde and, though he did none himself, at parties he would lay, with this tiny, special limited-edition sterling silver spoon beside it he’d purchased from the Franklin Mint, cocaine out on the coffee table as if it were fruit. His measurements were on file with half a dozen Jermyn Street shirtmakers and Savile Row tailors. A Brazilian bootmaker had lasts for his feet. He had season tickets to everything.
But oh, oh, infinite is the cash cost and list price of pleasure. There seemed no bottom to the bottom line. He was always strapped, as desperate as Tober to think up new ways to make the funeral home pay off, to parlay the other guy’s cancer and bad germs into cash flow, additional ready for the general fund, store and reserve, that hoarded hope-chest, war-chest treasury and nest-egg kitty, that protective cushion, call it what you will, that Tober wanted for the rainy day when he would be dead and Shull to tide him over until the weekend.
Because he was a ladies’ man, of course, a good-time Charlie, an actual out-and-out Lothario.
I never met a more romantic-looking sixty-one-year-old. In his camel’s-hair coat, brushed Borsalino, suckling lionskin gloves and soft Gucci shoes, he was the sharpest grandpa I’d ever seen. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d once been Rose Pickler’s and Naomi Shore’s lover.
The Rabbi of Lud Page 9