“You see too much death in our business, Rabbi,” he’d told me. “Well, you know, not too much, I don’t mean too much, but all there is. I mean, what the hell, we don’t rent the land out for picnics, do we? We don’t use the organ for dances or pin corsages on the basic black. Jerry, Jerry,” he’d moaned, “we’re under the gun, we’re working at knifepoint here. I memento mori morning, noon and nighttime too. It’s all I ever think about. It makes me crazy and costs me money. Sure. Death makes me a big spender. It puts the glow in my cheeks and the stiff in my cock. Sure. Because I put a big day in at the office, all I’m good for is playing with my electric trains, trying on my new suits, easing the Jag out of my garage and putting the top down and taking her for a spin. I watch my weight, brush after every meal, and regard my pressure like I loved it. I’m aware of every organ, Rebbe. Not just my heart, lungs, guts and glands, but what covers them too, the hankie sticking up out of my breast pocket, the press in my pants. I’ll tell you something. It’s death made me cheat on my wife when she was alive. Because basically I’m a family man basically, or wanted to be, would have been. But you tell me, Goldkorn, you tell me—how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm? How, hey?”
“It ain’t easy for me to get girls,” he’d confessed another time. “Hell,” he said, “it ain’t easy for me to get full grown-up women. Pie bakers, widows, ladies with varicose in their veins, blue rinse in their hair, yellow in their underpants. It ain’t even the immorality of it, that they know I’m this only recently widowered old man. You know what it is? They know I’m a mortician. How? It ain’t the first thing I tell them. I think maybe they sniff it on my fingers. Me, who hasn’t personally handled a stiff since to tell you the truth I don’t even remember. Handled? Looked at in the casket even. Who can say? Maybe they smell the flowers on me, all that death grass. You think that don’t make a difference? You think so? I’m telling you, Rabbi Jerry, I drive these ladies to their own bank accounts! An evening with yours truly and they’re looking for the Neiman Marcus catalogue, the Henri Bendel. A night on the town with me and they’re circling the item, checking off the size, choosing out the color, turning down the page.”
“Hey, listen,” he said yet another time, “it isn’t as if I’m bringing you the news. You’re the rabbi here. You’re familiar with what goes on. Death’s your speciality, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know or haven’t thought about plenty. Only, the way I see it, with you it’s not so geferlech. There’s even something spiritual about it, some natural order business, God’s plan, that people like me don’t even think about. Sunrise, sunset. Whatever. But personally, and speaking strictly for myself, and given the nature of the business even, I’ve got to be thinking ‘Here today and gone somewhere else tomorrow.’ Hell, that is the way I think. It’s the way Tober thinks too, even if he comes at it from a different priority. So I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”
“I know what’s on your mind,” I said.
“Rabbi, please,” he said, “give me a break. You know as well as I do it’s all in the details.”
“What’s up, then? What is it?”
“This AIDS business is doing me in. I don’t think I can handle it.”
“AIDS? What do you mean? Who’s got AIDS?”
“Not me. I don’t know, nobody. It’s a figure of speech, a sign of the times, just one more straw. I told you about the fingers, that maybe they sniff on me what I do? They go further. They flinch when I touch them. They’re thinking, you know, the blood. God knows what they think. But they do, they flinch when I touch them. That’s my stock in trade. Contact. Comfort. My hand on their arm. I lose that, I lose everything.
“They’re terrified out there, Rabbi. They’re shaking in their shoes. No, no, I mean it. They’ve soured on the venereal. Something’s up. Something vicious and narrow-spirited that robs us of our consolations. Jesus, Rov, there ain’t even tea dancing no more, one two three, one two three. What am I, a spring chicken? I’m an old fart. They look at me they’ve got to be thinking ‘Do I need this? I don’t need this.’ I’m wrong they sniff it on my fingers, I’m wrong they smell the flowers on my suit. They breathe it in the ground, in the clods and clumps of my sanctified fields. It sticks to their nostrils, it goes to their heads.” He leaned toward me, he lowered his voice. “There are eleven AIDS victims in the ground here.”
“Hey.”
“Eleven I know of, eleven that’s sure.”
“Hey.”
“This mustn’t get out. It would devastate business. We agreed,” Shull said. “Me and Tober. We made a policy decision.
“Because,” he said, “he saves his money like a miser and I spend mine like a drunk sailor. And because you just ain’t doing your part, Rabbi. Content to call ’em as you see ’em, happy like a clam with all those Ecclesiastes checks and balances of your position, all bought into the goeth ups and cometh downs, the milchiks and fleishiks seasonals. Well, me too. Me too, Rebbe Goldkorn! It’s fucking now or fucking never!”
“What are you saying to me? Why are you talking to me like this?”
“Ach,” said Shull.
“Why would he speak like that?” I asked Tober when I saw him. “What’s he trying to tell me?”
“Argh,” said Tober.
“What do you want from me?” I demanded of both. “I do my job. Don’t I do my job? Is it Charney? Is it Klein? Is that why you’re pressuring me?”
“Phoo,” they agreed.
“And what’s all this about AIDS?”
“You told him?” Tober snapped.
“I told him a figure of speech, I told him a metaphor.”
“You told him.”
“I told him about eleven people,” Shull said. “I never told him we’re the Holy Faygeleh Sacred Burial Ground.”
My God, I thought, they’re crazy. Those multiple hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet lots again. The policy decision. Burying AIDS victims their bold new marketing scheme!
Tober came to the house. He was pushing Edward in a wheelchair.
“Hello,” Tober said, “shalom.”
“Hello,” I said. “How are you, Edward?”
“May I leave him with you a minute?”
“Sure,” I said.
“We’re not disturbing you?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Interrupting anything?”
“Of course not.”
“I’ll be twelve minutes.”
“Take your time.”
“He means well,” Edward said when his father had left.
“Oh,” I said, “he’s a good man.”
“He’s a driven, self-centered, totally obsessive human being, but he means well.”
“Well, Edward,” I said, a little embarrassed as I often was with him, “you’re looking fit.”
It was true. For all his handicaps, his blindness and the fluids sloshing and tumbling in his inner ears like water in a washing machine, Edward was as poised and equable as a man with a pipe. He appeared to lounge in his wheelchair, like a fellow sitting up, taking his ease on a pal’s hospital bed. Though it wasn’t, you imagined one leg crossed smartly over the other. His opaque, fashionable glasses fit comfortably across his face like a dark, thin strip of style on the eyes of a musician. I knew that if he removed the glasses, the clear eyes behind them would seem intelligent, tolerant, amused. As I had before, I wondered again if he knew how elegant he was, how he’d developed—he evidently chose his own clothes—his graceful impeccables and flawless stunnings. He’d been blind since birth.
“In my dreams,” he told me, “I’m someone else altogether.”
I’m sorry?
“You remarked my appearance,” Edward Tober said, “you said I looked fit.”
“You do, kayn aynhoreh.”
“In my dreams I am.”
“That’s terrific.”
“I can see in my dreams.”
“Really?”
“Quite cle
arly, in fact. Twenty-twenty the gnarled, brown stems of apples, the tight weave of wicker or the nubbing of towels. All twenty-twenty. Inches perceiving, acres and rods and nautical miles. Weights and measures, metric equivalencies. The size of a pint. The heft of a scruple, the length of a dram. All calibration’s ordered ranks, where the decimal goes, the bull’s-eye’s dead center, or where to put your nail to hang a picture on the wall twenty-twenty. The stain of the sky in a time zone, presented the hour, given the pressure, the weather, the wind. My dreams as matched to reality as pairs of perfectly teamed horses. I see in my dreams. The orange’s blemished, unfortunate pores, its pitted sheen. I see in my dreams.”
“Vai, such a megillah!”
“I do,” Edward said, “I can. Things most blind men don’t even know about, let alone see.”
“The emes?”
“Freckles like a personal astronomy, suntan like the cream in your coffee.”
“It’s a miracle!”
“It is,” he insisted, “it is. I see trees, their barks like rich textiles. Bolts of birch like sailcloth, and aspen like linen. Elms like a corduroy, and hickory like a patch of burlap. Quilted sycamore, I see. Silken cherry.”
“Genug, I am fartootst!”
“I do,” he insisted, “I can! I see plants, I see flowers. Not just art’s abstractive, generical shapes, the wallpaper posies and the bouquets on ties, but trillium, cattleya, dahlia and quince. And see, in what even a blind man would recognize as the dark, the shaded mosses and shielded ferns—all drizzled ground’s weathered cover.”
“Gevalt, what a gesheft!”
“And shapes like a geometer—triangles, rectangles, pyramids, wedge. Cones and spheres, cylinders and tubes. The rhomboid, the quadrature, the octagon, the pill. All nature’s jigsaw doings.”
“And otherwise?”
“What, my balance you mean?”
“Otherwise.”
“I walk across tightropes and stand on the flyer’s narrow perch as lightly as the most casual man on the trapeze.”
“Oh,” I said, “the trapeeeze.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Eddy, forgive me, you sleep in your bed with the rails up.”
“I’ve no vertigo in dreams. I’m as surefooted as an Indian. Comfortable in height as a steeplejack.”
“It don’t make you nauseous?”
“It doesn’t,” he said, “it really doesn’t. I’ll be riding downhill on a bicycle. Untroubled by curves, negotiating the hairpin turns and spirals, the violent mountain switchbacks, momentum at my back like a gale-force wind. All derring do, all derring done. All will’s and spirit’s exuberant, unencumbered Look-Ma-No-Hands.”
“And Eddy, if you fell, who’d say Kaddish?”
“Listen to me, Rabbi. You’ve known for years about my mazed bearings, my perturbed compass loose, free as a roulette wheel. I’m a guy who doesn’t clean his teeth because I can’t hold a toothbrush in my mouth, because it falls off my teeth. Because I lose track of where everything goes and gag on the bristles. I see, I see in my dreams. And not only see—I’m graceful.”
“You have them often, these dreams?”
“Last night. I had one last night.”
“Ahh,” I said, dovetailing as expectantly into his tale as a psychiatrist.
“So I’m walking along beside this river,” he said, as if breaking into his own story, “when suddenly I realize why those clouds are called ‘cumulus.’ Why, of course, I thought, it’s for the idea of accumulation implicit in them. That’s just what they look like—huge piles, great mounds, high white heaps of accumulated cloud stuff. I saw this reflected in the water—their dense, well-defined, straight-edged bases, their rounded, fluffy tops like the fluting on scallops. In the water, the imposed, accumulated clouds glanced off the current like a bunch of balloons.
“From the swiftness of the current in that latitude, and the light and color values reflected in the river, reduced, packed, tamped by the filters of the air and climate like an image in a lens, I judged it to be about one P.M. Time for lunch. And, indeed, I was starting to feel peckish, not outright hunger, understand, just the crisp snap and bristle in the throat and belly that is the beginning of appetite. I thought to bring it to the boil with some light exercise and determined to go for a swim before I ate. There was a very high, very narrow railroad trestle about a hundred yards ahead which I could probably climb by clambering up the sides of its steep ramparts. I pulled off my shoes and socks, placed them beside a low bush, and began my ascent.
“When I reached the top I heard a train. Well, no,” he corrected, “I didn’t hear the train so much as feel its vibrations on the tracks. There was a palpable shimmy, the rails, it seemed to me, like loose teeth, and swaying with what I could only hope were the factored, mathematical givens, the wobbled, engineered allowances of skyscrapers in a strong wind, say. Though of course I knew better.”
Edward’s voice was cracked now, dry, his tongue thickened around the story of his dream like spoiled meat. His handsome face had lost its poise, and I saw moisture collecting along the black rims of his dark glasses, spouting from God knew what pale and awful skin, tender, vulnerable and secret as a genital.
“It was a dream,” I said dismissively.
“I looked around,” Edward said, “trying to get my bearings.”
“It was only a dream.”
“By my best estimate I was maybe thirty-eight-and-a-half meters high. Throw in my height, I was probably forty-and-a-half meters from the surface of the river.”
“It was just a bad dream, Edward,” I told him.
“Light travels faster than sound. I could see the train, the locomotive, though I still couldn’t hear it.”
“Take it easy,” I said, “you always wake up from these nightmares.”
“I gazed down into the surface of the water. You have to do your calculations and make your allowances in split seconds. Two flattened piles of gray cumulus rushed toward the trestle and flowed under it. You know that moment when you look at something and can’t tell whether it’s you or the object that’s moving? You know that instant of vertigo and confusion?”
“A dream, Eddy. A lousy dream.”
“Is it hot in here? Did it get hot in here all of a sudden?”
“It is a little warm,” I said, to reassure him.
“I could see the train, the locomotive, its black tatter of burned diesel tearing away from the engine like a dark pennant. And heard it now too. And felt the vibration of the rails, and what weren’t vibrations but the drunken sway and stagger of the actual wooden trestle. Did I tell you I had to scan the water, search beneath and between its surface reflections to determine its depth? I mean, I knew mine. Not my depth, of course, my height. A hundred and eleven feet—and, from the apogee of my dive, probably more like a hundred fourteen—above that taut, flowing skin of cloud-bearing, sky-bearing water. Searching, as the speed and weight and sight and sound, and smell now, too, of that train came bearing down on me, for the exact and singular depth between the reflections where it would be safe for me to dive into the river. And did I tell you I not only had to do all this, not only had to find those needle-in-a-haystack clearances almost half a hundred meters beneath me, but that I had to find them through my opaque, black glasses, because what with that charging locomotive and my straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back weight on that flimsy trestle and all, there just wasn’t any time to take them—”
“It was a dream.”
“—off?”
“Edward, please, don’t make a tsimmes. It was only a—”
“So I dove. Or danced. Or maybe just fell, my arms furiously pinwheeling, rotating about some imaginary axis that ran through my armpits—diving, dancing, falling, stumbling along that shaking perimeter of trestle. And recovered. And entered the water at the perfect angle, an angle so perfect, in fact, that if I hadn’t felt the wetness climbing up my fingers as if I were pulling on a pair of gloves I’d have actually thought I wa
s still diving.”
And it was as if he actually had dived into that river he’d dreamed. He was soaked clean through now, what I’d come to think of as his relaxed, summery bearing, his picnic-hamper, seersucker demeanor ruined, soiled.
“After all that,” he said, “boy, was I hungry!”
“You were?”
“Famished.”
“Sure,” I said, “all that climbing, the excitement, that dive that you dove. Who wouldn’t be hungry?”
“And I didn’t get out of the water right away.”
“No.”
“I went for my swim.”
“Your swim.”
“Fortunately, I’d been able to look around from the trestle just before I dived.”
“I see.”
“I’d spotted some wild strawberry bushes not far from where I’d left my shoes and socks. Though the bush in which I’d actually hidden my stuff was a lingonberry. I’m not partial to lingonberries. Too acidic.
“But even if there hadn’t been those strawberries there’d have been plenty of other good things to eat. There were crab apples and plums and, near the poison ivy, a strain of breadfruit I’m rather fond of. There was iceberg, romaine, and good Bibb lettuce.
“So it wasn’t any hardship for me to live off the land. What with the strawberries and the breadfruit and the fish I fried up, it was quite a grand lunch.”
“You caught a fish?”
“Well,” he said, “while I was on the trestle I happened to notice a kind of soil particularly hospitable to bait. I just dug down into it, carefully chose a worm—”
“Carefully chose?”
“—for texture, for color, I’d seen these perch—”
“Go on.”
“—and fitted it to its hook like a stitch in crochet.”
“Then what happened?”
He shrugged. “Nothing much,” he said. “That’s about it. I finished my lunch and dreamt I took a nap beside this weeping willow.”
“Well, well,” I told him, “that was quite a dream. You went for a walk, figured out clouds, had an adventure on a railroad trestle, observed nature, took a swim, went berry picking, fishing, prepared a first-rate lunch for yourself, and caught forty winks in the shade of the old weeping willow.”
The Rabbi of Lud Page 10