The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  They didn’t want me near sickrooms. Or doing my hovered-buzzard number in any dayrooms or otherwise, in nursing or retirement homes where this twenty-four-hour service or that twenty-four-hour service, or any damned service you could think of, including the one I was prepared to render, was constantly on call. I had no access to an official list of telephone numbers of even the merely widowed or widowered or bachelored or spinstered elderly, people living on their own who got called every morning by concerned volunteers ringing up just to see if they could still get to their telephones. They didn’t, I mean, want me where I might, even reasonably, become unctuous.

  And had other plans for me altogether.

  There are these seminars conducted in motels, sessions on tax shelters, positive thinking, how to get rich in real estate with no money down. Experts advise on ways to increase your word power, build your memory, bulk up your portfolio, and offer instructions on avoiding probate. Any number of transcendental arrangements take place in these ballrooms, hospitality suites, and private, sectioned-off dining rooms of the country’s leading motels. This—motels were only rarely the venue—was the aura—places where Kiwanis met, the Lions’ Club, the Jaycees. The scrubbed and neutral geography of profit and community service, some vaguely fraternal sense of the benevolent and secret.

  Halls I mean. The card and game rooms of great condominium structures on the Palisades. Chambers of the hired-out and interchangeable. Though occasionally in the auditorium—never full—of a Jewish Community Center, and sometimes in an actual temple on an actual Friday night. These were the places that usually booked me, Lud Realty’s designated speaker. And where I came to them, Lud Realty’s booked and bookish man.

  “Shalom,” I’ll begin. “Good yontif to you,” and sweep into my theme, speaking, except for the commercials, much as I might have spoken to them at their funerals:

  “ ‘We owe God a death,’ says the poet, ‘He who pays it this year is quits the next.’ Yet we dassn’t rush to die, ladies and gentlemen, but must take our turn, and wait till the last minute.

  “But you know something, friends? We are owed to earth, mortgaged to dirt, in debt to the very ground we walk on, up to our ears in arrears to the planet. God holds our note. This is the reason for sickness, this is the meaning of pain, why He duns us with sniffles, eczema, germs. Why He claims us with rashes and toothaches. Why He forecloses with tumors and strokes.

  “We must never forget obligation. This is why it’s all right to smoke and stay up late, de rigueur to dance and carouse. Yet we must never forget obligation. It’s good God ties a string round our finger with troubles. It’s good He favors us with envy and ambition and plants needs in us in perpetual shortfall to our means. Thank Him for cancer and kidney disease, for our preoccupation with money and the kids who break our hearts. He gives us our renewable thirst and programs our hunger. He sets up our lives like a memento mori. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

  “Is this harsh?

  “We must never forget we’re gifts He gives to Himself, that it’s His right to move us about like lead soldiers, to run us around like a set of toy trains. The world’s only this box where He puts away His things. Is this harsh? This Nutcracker view of Creation? Is this harsh? No, in thunder, says the Sugarplum Fairy. It’s delightful to be God’s bauble, this human doodad knickknack of the Lord’s.

  “And that’s why we mustn’t get too big for our britches, mustn’t forget what’s what. Prepare to die. Let’s just get it over with, I say. Make our arrangements, I mean. Turn our thoughts to the time when we have to get back in our boxes, fluffed up in our deaths like pillows, mounted in our caskets like jewels or bright gewgaws. Never put off till tomorrow.

  “Hey,” I’ll tell them, “I’m selling cemetery plots here. It’s your duty to ground yourselves in ground, that obligatory 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 of clay and dimension, that closes out your indenture like a valedictory ‘Yours truly’ above your signature in a letter.

  “Is this harsh?

  “Because the alternative to Nature is Nature—flora, fauna, beauty, geology, corrosives and temperature. Floods and avalanches, forest fires, tidal waves and the Richter scale. We’re human beings. Is this harsh? We’re human beings and weren’t raised to be salvage. We’re human beings and weren’t created to become party dip for the vultures and buzzards. Or lie about on the lawn like the Sunday paper. Is this harsh? We’re human beings, and He didn’t make us to bob the high seas like flotsam or, random as jetsam, wash up on the shore.

  “Come on,” I’ll tell them, “cemetery plots, cemetery plots here! Get your cemetery plots! I’m the ashes-to-ashes man, the dust-to-dust kid comin’ at you! Get your cemetery plots!”

  And while they look up at me, staring, wondering (no longer recalling—last month’s talk now—exactly whose father I’m supposed to be) about me, maybe even a little frightened, gentle Jews unaccustomed to the stench of brimstone, more used, at least the older ones, to the odor of cooking, the smell of vaguely camphorous stews and briskets in the hall, family people (or why would they be here in the first place?), no use for mishegoss, impatient with it but too polite to say so, unapocalyptic altogether, I’ll finally tell them something that strikes a chord, that actually rings a bell.

  “What, were you brought up in a barn? You weren’t brought up in a barn.

  “Look,” I’ll say, “it’s like this:

  “Who dies? Your children die. You die. Everyone dies. Your parents and uncles. Your cousins and aunts. Your wife and your husband. No, no, don’t you dare say ‘God forbid.’ What, God forbid God? I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. He wasn’t raised in a barn. It’s how He picks up after Himself. Death’s just the way He keeps up His housekeeping. He’s a balebatish kind of God. He’s neat as a pin. He makes us natural disasters no insurance policy in the world would cover us against, but He forbids us to lie in the rubble. It’s simple as that, ladies and gentlemen. It’s simple as that, my good friends. From the beginning. It was always as simple as that.

  “Didn’t He guide Noah, didn’t He instruct Moses right down to the last cubit of the chore? Ain’t that His wont? Ain’t God in the details? Well, then. You think He’d trouble with the minutiae of weights and measures and then fail to ordain those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet of His holy metrics? What, you think so? Get outta here!

  “Because the reason there was a Diaspora in the first place was just that Canaan’s soil was too sandy ever to hold a grave steady! Why do you suppose He jerked the Jews around for forty years in that wilderness? To prepare them, to get them ready. Because if you can scratch out those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic feet and bury your dead in just sand, you can bury them anywhere!

  “It’s that important. It’s that important to Him. And that’s the reason for markers. (Didn’t I tell you we die? Didn’t I mention that everyone does?) Because how could He find us otherwise? That’s why it’s important we bury our dead, His dead. Why none dast break the chain of relation. Just so He can find us again if he should need us!

  “Plots here!” I’ll hawk. “Cemetery plots here! Get your plots here! Nuclear and extended-family cemetery plots here! Get ’em while they last! Get ’em while you do!”

  And they did. The harder, more outrageous the sell, the quicker and more eager they were to take me up on it, as if as long as they had to die anyway I could somehow sanctify their passage, or at least make the absurdity of their death le dernier cri, lending just that in-the-swim spin of flair and style and currency to it. I might have been that season’s caterer or society band leader. Nothing would serve but that they have their little plot of death from the Rabbi of Lud. I was good for business.

  It didn’t last long. Probably no more than four or five weeks. So it didn’t last long. It couldn’t have. (Though if it had lasted even a little longer I’d probably have started to earn my commissions.) An
yway it didn’t, and the talk, already dying down when Tober and Shull traded me to Klein and Charney, had ceased now altogether. The archbishop, had I tried to get through to him—which I didn’t—would probably have taken my call. So either the talk had died down, or it no longer made a difference to anyone that my daughter used to receive Holy Mother socially. People were asking to have me at their funerals again—Sal called to tell me it had got back to some people he knew what a good job I did—and Klein and Charney, suspecting, I suppose, if not the staying power of such campaigns then the staying power of such campaigners, proposed trading me back to Shull and Tober.

  It was about this time I heard from Al Harry Richmond in Chicago.

  “I’m sorry about Stan Bloom, Al Harry,” I told him. “I gave her all I got.”

  “Sure,” Al Harry said.

  “I did,” I assured him. “I tried my best. I went after her tooth and nail. But you know how it is,” I said, holding my hands up for him almost a thousand miles away. “The old gray mare.”

  “You saying she ain’t what she used to be,” Al Harry said.

  “That’s right. That’s so.”

  “Goddamn it, Goldkorn, she never was.”

  “Oh, yes, Al Harry,” I said. “Don’t you recall Wolfblock and our charmed lives? We couldn’t get arrested, or come down with a cold.”

  “I recall a thousand Kaddishes. I recall all that grief and remember thinking it’s a good thing death ain’t contagious.”

  “Oh, no, Al Harry, that was some minyan, that minyan of ours. We were the ten musketeers. I even got a vocation out of it. And that was some Wolfblock, that Wolfblock of ours. What a character! I miss that old man.” But couldn’t get a rise out of him, or catch him up in my nostalgia, or any other of the historical sympathies who’d already, it seemed, let bygones be bygones. “Gee,” I mused, “ain’t it odd? Your turning out to be our sort of social secretary and all, the one who keeps up. I mean, I’m the one that came to New Jersey and turned out to be the rabbi, and you’re the one who stayed in Chicago and turned out to be the pope.”

  “There’s one in every minyan,” Al Harry said. I listened to the contempt he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

  “Listen,” I told him, “you only heard one side of the story. Ain’t you learned yet that anybody can make a good impression with just one side of the story?”

  “A good impression? A good impression?” Al Harry shot back. “With her punim on matchbooks and milk cartons? On coupons to Resident offering half off on film, on tools and detergent? A good impression?! I wasn’t even struck by the goddamn likeness! Tell me, Rabbi, how come you didn’t give them a more recent photograph?”

  “I didn’t have one.”

  “Ahh,” said Al Harry.

  “Al Harry,” I said, “it’s not what you think. Connie shies out of pictures. Literally. Really. She does. She jumps out of focus the minute you snap. Or ducks under parallax quick as a wink. She leans her head into shadows and wards you off with one hand to the side of her face, or a hankie she’s pulled out of the sky you didn’t even know she had. They don’t make ASA ratings or shutter speeds fast enough to catch her. She thinks,” I confessed, “she’s homely.”

  “Oh, Goldkorn. Oh, Jerry.”

  “I’m a different person now,” I told him. “You don’t judge a guy by the length of his haphtarah passage.”

  “She’s flying into Newark,” he said. “I’ll call you when her plane takes off.”

  “God bless you, Al Harry. Thanks, thanks a lot. Oh, and Al Harry?”

  “What is it?”

  “That picture of Connie that they ran in the Star? That didn’t come out until after the matchbooks and milk cartons had already gone to press.”

  “Oh, Jerry,” he said, “oh, Goldkorn.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  And he didn’t, of course. Because how could he? Because it’s just like I said. No one can know the other side of a person’s life.

  ten

  HANGDOG. I was hangdog. Shelley was sheepish. Connie was like a little jellyfish. We seemed, come together outside the gate in the Newark airport where the TWA flight from Chicago had just landed, like characters in a fable, a little bestiary of the wishy-washy. Like embarrassed Animal Crackers.

  “Uncle Al Harry signed me up for their frequent flyer program,” Connie said.

  Sure, I thought. Just in case. “How was the flight?” I asked.

  “Fine.” She was holding a stuffed animal I didn’t recognize. Al Harry must have given it to her.

  “Did you eat on the plane?” Shelley asked.

  “I ordered a kosher snack.”

  I wondered if it was an apology.

  “How was Chicago?” Shelley asked.

  “Chicago was fine.”

  “Did you go to the museums?” I said.

  “I went to the Natural History Museum with Beverly and Diane.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Uncle Al Harry’s their grandfather.”

  “Al Harry has grandchildren?”

  “He has three grandchildren. Seth lives in Ohio.”

  “Was it boring for you,” I said, “having to be around babies?”

  “Diane’s almost thirteen. Beverly’s eleven and a half and tall for her age. Both kids are taller than I am.”

  Shelley looked as if she’d been slapped. Long red wales appeared on her cheeks, without depth or texture, a blushed stigmata.

  “Where else did you go?”

  “We went to the Art Institute.”

  “Did you get a chance to go to the Museum of Science and Industry?”

  “Yes,” said Connie.

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s a good one. That was always one of my favorites.”

  “Do you have any bags?” my wife asked, and suddenly we couldn’t look at each other, a kind of mortification glancing off our eyes and wildly strafing the carpet, the passengers still coming out the jetway, the entire lounge area. It was the first allusion we’d made to Connie’s having run away. Until now it was as if she’d come back to us from a vacation.

  “Yes,” she said, “there’s the duffel I took to camp that time,” and burst into tears.

  Shelley had hurriedly removed her things from the spare bedroom, overlooking a tortoiseshell comb, a set of matching brushes. Connie brought them to her.

  “Oh,” Shelley said, “I’ve been looking all over for those.”

  She brought a porcelain lion Shelley kept on top of the dresser.

  “Oh,” Shelley said, “thank you, sweetheart.”

  She brought a small case in which Shelley kept her jewelry.

  “Well,” Shelley said, “imagine that.”

  “Guess what?” Connie said.

  “What?” Shelley said.

  “Cousin Diane has a boyfriend.”

  “You told us she’s not even thirteen years old,” said Shelley.

  “A boy in her Hebrew school class. Guess what else?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Mom?”

  “What else?”

  “Beverly’s on the swim team at her middle school.”

  “That’s not all peaches and cream,” I said. “Every morning you have to get up early for practice. Her hair could dry out. Her ends could all split. She probably smells of chlorine.”

  “Guess what?” she asked at the dinner table.

  “What?” Shelley said.

  “They belong to a health club. The East Bank Club. It’s very exclusive. They have a family membership and go whenever they want. I was their guest. There was this cosmetologist, there was this hair stylist. I had a makeover. They gave me a facial with collagen, the skin’s natural moistening conditioner, and taught me to use eyeliner, to start in the middle and go to the outer corners instead of starting from the inner corners. That opens your eyes and makes them look bigger. Guess what?” she demanded.

  “What?”

  “You have to pat it with a Q-tip to make it
less harsh.”

  “Connie?”

  “Because my face is so round she showed me how to use blusher to bring out my cheekbones. She put apricot scrub on my skin to clean out the pores. I had a cellophane wrap. I lost three pounds.”

  “Connie?”

  “Guess what?”

  “Connie?”

  “Guess what?!”

  “What?” Shelley said.

  “They gave me a shampoo and washed it out with herbal rinse. They conditioned my hair, they styled it. They gave me the layered look. Guess what else?”

  “Connie.”

  “Go ahead, Dad. You can guess too. Guess what else?!”

  “What else?”

  “Marvin? Diane’s boyfriend from Hebrew school? Marvin likes me. That’s what they told me at the slumber party. They said he got this crush on me when he saw my new makeover. They said he means to write me. And guess what else?”

  “What else?” Shelley and I said together.

  “They get clothing allowances. All the girls get clothing allowances. My colors are autumn. Forest green, deep orange, the browns. Guess what?”

  “No, you guess what, Connie! You guess what,” I shouted at her.

  “‘What?”

  “More St. Myra Weiss? More with your St. Myra Weiss?”

  “You don’t believe Marvin likes me? He likes me all right! You think I made that up? You think I’d lie about something like that? You just wait until he starts writing me letters.”

  “Connie,” Shelley said.

  “Connie,” I said, “Connie, sweetheart.”

  “Or that they don’t get a clothing allowance? Well, they do too.”

  “Connie,” said Shelley.

  “Connie,” I said.

  “And they belong to the East Bank Club! It has Nautilus. It has free weights. It has aerobics and jazzercise. It has Jacuzzi and whirlpool and sauna and racquetball. It has an Olympic pool and a natural juice bar where they’ll mix you a cauliflower or spinach cocktail or anything else you want, or squeeze out the juice not just from organically grown fruit, melons and oranges or bananas or whatever, but from right out of the peel too. And they bring it right to your table. I had this cauliflower cocktail on a dare? And you know something? If you chug-a-lug it, it’s not half bad.”