The Rabbi of Lud

by Stanley Elkin

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To look at the house. In Oakland. Because the agent who normally shows it had to be somewhere else. So she let Elaine have the key. Well, they know her. Well, they do so much business. Or Elaine might have been killed too.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Killed?”

  “If Elaine hadn’t already promised to go with me after I dropped Connie off at school.”

  “Killed?”

  “Sure,” Shelley said. “That’s why she had to tell her no when Joan invited her. Because we already had this appointment to look at the house.”

  “Invited her.”

  “To go walking,” she said. “In the woods. Near the lake. She wanted to try out her new boots. Elaine saw them. She said they were gorgeous, that they looked beautiful with that new fawn skirt she was wearing. She would have gone, too. Such a lovely, crisp day. After all this rotten weather we’ve been having. Elaine Iglauer says I saved her life.”

  “Killed? Joan Cohen?”

  “Yes,” Shelley moaned, “isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

  “Who killed her?”

  An image of Bubbles came into my head, twenty dollars’ worth of manicure clutching a hand mirror, examining his face, the blood Sal had brought up.

  “Rangers found casings,” she said. “They think it was a hunter. They think it was a hunting accident.”

  Sure, I thought, of course. What else? A hunting accident. Do ye ken Joan Cohen? It was hunters jumping the season must have bagged her.

  twelve

  IT FELL TO ME to do the honors.

  All these years in the business and—touch wood—there’d never been anything personal before. No one—thank God—had died on me. (Well, there was my little stillborn boy, but he didn’t even have a name, and we didn’t have the koyach to bury him.) What I’m saying is that, well, for me, kayn aynhoreh, it had all been in the rabbi mode. Not that any man’s death doesn’t diminish me too. Sure it does. It does. If a clod be washed away by the sea, isn’t Jersey the less? This is a given. Still, there’s loss and there’s loss, there’s death and there’s death.

  They came the same bright, crisp afternoon of the day she was shot, Fanny Tupperman and Miriam Perloff, and assured me they spoke for the surviving Chaverot, for Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, for Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore, even, they said, for Shelley.

  “My,” I told them, “such a vote of confidence, but surely, wouldn’t it be better if her own rabbi performed the service?”

  “You were her rabbi,” Fanny Tupperman said.

  “What’s Judaism coming to?” I deplored. “No one belongs to a temple nowadays? I was her rabbi? I was? I rabbi the dead. I minister the fallen away, the caught out and caught short in New Jersey.”

  “That’s Joan all right,” Fanny Tupperman said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “if I’m up to it. A grotesque, off-season hunting accident. Listen, I’m still in shock.”

  I was. I was a draikopf, and couldn’t keep it straight who knew what and when they knew it. I was her rabbi, singing Fanny Tupperman had enigmatically piped. Plus there was the truly false light into which I would be plunging my wife, and daughter, too, for that matter, who would probably take a day off from school and martyrdom to hear the family’s other religious, her dad, recite his holy bygones-be-bygones above Joan Cohen’s gamy remains. A tall order for a guy who for most of his professional life had tried to maintain a low profile. Plus the fact of my own real, adulterous, grief. Which was unresolved and would make, along with the visions I continued to access in my head of Joan Cohen’s doelike leaps to errant, risky freedom, all that tragic dodge and cut-and-run (because surely she would have picked up his scent even before he—the killer poacher, man-eating, deer-stalker hunter—would have picked up the visual equivalent of hers—that quick tweed movement in the field, that flash of leather boot or hoof), any words of mine of no avail, of never any glimmer of avail. (Who would still think “doomed” the moment I remembered the moment she proposed to Elaine Iglauer that they go walking in the woods. And still ask God-God!—“What would a woman like this be doing out on a day like that anyway? Tell me, what could You have been thinking of?” Or scold, scold her memory. “Running such risks! Practically inviting every trigger-happy, redneck, rifle-bearing yahoo in this neck of the woods to take a potshot at you! You were asking for it. You almost deserve to have been killed!”)

  I tried to tell them I was the wrong man for the job and marshaled all the fool-for-a-client arguments I could think of. They looked at me closely. “It’s just that I knew her,” I told them lamely. “I couldn’t be objective.”

  “Those other times,” Fanny Tupperman said, “those were objective funerals?”

  Shelley asked me to do it. “If not for me, then for Joan Cohen. She’d have wanted it that way.”

  “Boy,” I said, “every Tom, Dick and Harry knows what dead people have in their heads, what they’ve got up their sleeves and would get off their chests. Why do they draw up wills? What do we need lawyers?”

  “Jerry,” Shull confided, “I’m picking up the expenses on this one. The deluxe mahogany. Down stuffing in the satin lining. I’m going all out.”

  “What, you are?”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  “Your pleasure? That’s very kind, Sam.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. My pleasure. I dated her.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Twenty grand I must have spent on that woman. At least twenty grand. I was the one who put her into all those suedes and Harris tweeds she wore. The tiny pinstripes. I dressed her for success. What the hell? What’s a few thousand more? Still, well, you know, if we had to bring in another rabbi …”

  That she’d never married. That she left no survivors. That was the angle I meant to punch up. Working her childlessness, working her spinsterhood, working the theme we were all her survivors.

  Her singing. I’d bring in her singing. Her musical Judaism. And sketch her, powerfully clapping, bounding round the campfire, draw her generous kibbutz heart. A cheerful, reliable, companionable sort, her soul in the backpack with the provisions. This echt Sabra, some maiden Jewess, say, who might have been there with Moses on the long voyage out from Egypt to the Promised Land. Some slim, dark au pair of the wilderness who kept an eye on the kids and helped with the tents. Though this, of course, was not how I really saw her. (Oh, how I really saw her! Never mind how I really saw her!) Though you know? In a way I did.

  Her good-sport mode, I mean, and elegant outdoor ways. Which got her killed for her trouble, slaughtered for her style. And led her out into the very fields and locales where models posed for their pictures, out into the unfenced surreal, that deer-stalked, fox-hunted, cony-catchered bluegrass where you could almost have anticipated the sniper would be.

  And that’s not how I really saw her either.

  One time—this was two years ago—Shelley came to me, very excited.

  “We’ve got a gig-e-le.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A gig-e-le, a booking. It’s a show biz-e-le term.”

  “Who does?”

  “We do, the girls. The Chaverot.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.”

  “It is,” she said. “Jack Perloff finally popped the question. Miriam doesn’t have to be a divorcee anymore.”

  “Well, that is good news,” I said. Jack Perloff had an automobile dealership in the Oranges. He and Miriam had been seeing each other for years. There was a question about his intentions. Until Shelley’s announcement it was understood that, officially, they were only “going steady.”

  “They’re getting married in Philadelphia. His parents live there. Miriam wants the Chaverot to entertain. Of course, we couldn’t think of charging anything. It’s a professional courtesy.”

  “Of course you can’t charge them,” I said. “It will be your wedding
present.”

  “Oh, no,” Shelley said, “we have to get them a gift. Anyway, we’re all invited. The Chaverot spouses too. We could go down on Friday. The wedding’s Saturday night and we can drive back Sunday. The ceremony’s in this wonderful new hotel, which is supposed to be very nice. They have a weekend special. Miriam says the groom’s people will make all the arrangements. Can we, Jerry, can we?”

  Why not? Every once in a while every now and then you have to make a weekend of it. I say this in my rabbi mode.

  So we drove—the Chaverot colleagues, the Chaverot husbands—the eighty or so miles down to Philly in three of our big cars and checked into the hotel. The Barry Bernstein bar mitzvah was posted on a black hotel reader board in the lobby, Lou and Gloria Kaplan’s Silver Wedding Anniversary was. An announcement for the Mindy Weintraub Sweet Sixteen party was up on an easel. (Shelley was right, I thought, it was a wonderful hotel. Understand me, when I say that every once in a while every now and then you have to make a weekend of it, I don’t mean you must get away. The opposite, rather. You have to go back. You must ground yourself in the familiar, settle back in the thick, sweet old gravity of things.)

  There were a dozen of us, five men and seven women. Miriam and the lucky man had gone down before us and would be staying with the Perloffs. Fanny Tupperman (divorced, she was Fanny Lewis then) shared a room with Joan Cohen, who was also single. (I’d never met Joan’s husband, and until that weekend hadn’t realized she hadn’t any.)

  We’d hardly unpacked when there was a knock on the door. It was Jack Perloff, big in the doorway, rubbing his hands, kibitzing, bullying welcome. “How is it,” he asked, stepping inside, “is it all right? Is it going to be big enough? Oh, yes, it’s a nice size. Jesus, you could sleep three in the front and five in the back in here,” the car dealer remarked amiably. “What about closet space? Got enough? What’s this, a walk-in? Oh, yeah, terrific. Swell threads. Gorgeous gown, Shelley. Am I marrying the wrong chick, or what? Hey, how about these soaps? That’s some classy odor. Very delicate. You don’t have to use ’em, you know. Take them home if you want. With the shampoo and the shower cap. Souvenirs. Call the desk, say the maid didn’t leave you any. Have them send up some more. Wait a minute. Something’s amiss here. Where’s your rose? There’s supposed to be a long-stemmed rose in this room.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “The hell it’s all right! It’s part of the deal. Listen, you don’t have to do a thing. When I’m in the lobby, I’ll speak to the concierge. There won’t be any trouble. Oh, wait a minute. You got the fruit. Some get the fruit, some get the flower. Would you rather have the flower or would you rather have the fruit? I know the Iglauers got a rose. Maybe you could trade. There’s your TV. Look, they’ve got a movie channel. If you’re still up at three, they show an X-rated film. If you slipped the kid a fin, I bet they’d probably run it for you now. Sure, all they do is throw it up on their VCR and just plug you in. You’re too shy, I’ll say something on your behalf myself. Rabbi, and give him the finif, too, for that matter.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “that won’t be necessary.”

  “You’re not offended? I didn’t offend you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Hey, just because old Cupid stings my toches with his arrows I think all blood is boiling. I shouldn’t be that way. I’m too romantic.”

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Miriam and I are delighted you came. Rabbi and Shelley,” he said gravely, “and only hope that this weekend will be as memorable for you as I know it’s going to be for us.”

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  “Thank you,” Jack Perloff said. “Coming from a rabbi, I’m going to regard that as a blessing.”

  “That’s how I intended it.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi.”

  “Jerry, Jack.”

  “Jerry,” he corrected. “Hey, I almost forgot,” he said, and opened a door next to the desk. “It’s our hospitality suite,” he said. “It’s for the wedding party, but I want everyone to feel free. Mi casa, su casa,” he said, and just then we heard his intended in the hall.

  “Knock, knock,” Miriam said in the open door.

  “Hi there, sweetheart.”

  “Just a minute,” she said, and moved a foot or so back out into the corridor. “On the count of three,” Miriam called down the hallway. “One!” Jack stepped up to a door at the side of the television set, and turned the little whoosis in its round, recessed fitting. “Two!” she proclaimed. “Three!” she sang out. Jack opened the connecting door and, on their side of the wall, the Picklers did the same. Rose Pickler stood at the threshold between our two rooms. “Hi, stranger,” Rose, grinning, greeted Jack, “how you doin’?”

  “Come here, Miriam,” Jack Perloff said, “will you just look at this, will you?”

  Shelley and Jack and Miriam and I crowded around the connecting doors. Through some repeated suite, double, double, suite arrangement peculiar to the hotel, we could see down the entire length of rooms. I looked past Rose and Will Pickler in their room, and Al and Naomi Shore in theirs, beyond the Iglauers where Elaine held her rose, and beyond Ted and Sylvia Simon to where, at the distant end of the queer railroad-flat configuration, Fanny was handing Joan Cohen a piece of complimentary fruit.

  And that’s how I saw her.

  And later, after dinner, in Perloff s hospitality suite, where we had gathered to shmooz and tell jokes, to play cards and listen—and some of us dance—to the music on the FM, and watch the lights of downtown Philadelphia, and pick from the bowls of nuts, and nosh from the platters of food Perloff had had sent up (not so much without appetite or edge as somehow ahead of it), and drink from the bar he had stocked, lying about, secure, lulled by the movements of the ladies, by the sweet, soft music of their commentary like a kind of vocalizing, brought back to some ancient, lovely treehouse condition, that’s how I saw her, too. Then, later, after Perloff had left with Miriam, and some of the others, tired out, had mumbled vague good-nights and gone back to their rooms (actually too tired to leave the hospitality suite, too tired or too reluctant, and choosing the shortcut, returning through the inner corridor, through our rooms, through the Picklers’ and Shores’ and Iglauers’ and Simons’), and then a few more did, and then the rest, until, deep in the dark Shabbes, neither of us speaking and the volume turned low, only Joan Cohen and I were left to watch the X-rated movie when it came on at three.

  Because I saw her all sorts of ways. (I couldn’t stop seeing her. Should I try to put that in?) How she danced at the wedding. With me, with the others. Sensing some distant availability in her, something game and something ready. Up for a frelach, leading a hora. Maybe there was nothing more to it than her bachelor-girl pluck, the simple, ordinary honor of the privately led life. And I could bring in how gorgeous she looked in a lobby. Jesus, she did! Never mind the fancy Philadelphia hotel where the Perloffs tied the knot. In the Rutherford Best Western even. How she shined there! They could just imagine what she must have looked like, how she must have been, set off against all that Philadelphia Bulgari and Pucci, the high glitz of all those upscale outlet stores! I’m a rabbi, a teacher. I leave nothing to the imagination. If they were to get a last good glimpse of her during that brief, last patch of time before I consigned her to earth forever, then I would have to lead her to them up through the murk of seance and memory. Presented like a girl on the arm of a pop. Handed off like a deb, handed off like a bride.

  I’d certainly have to tell them about the lobby. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I would have to tell them about the lobby, occupied by that vast guest population, guests not just of the spiffy Philadelphia hotel but by the guests of those guests, invitees to all the showers, weddings, parties and anniversaries, all the affairs and mitzvahs, floating their generous mood like a kind of collective weather, and packing their gifts like handguns.

  People checkin
g in, people checking out. (And didn’t I wish I could stay there forever? Held inside the gold parameters of the handled, splendid atmospherics of the place? Didn’t I just?)

  We sat near one of the hotel’s bars and breathed the lovely alcoholic spice lofted out over the lobby, and watched the richish, sporty, middle-aged Jews importantly lounging, guys in crew necks, guys in gold, guys with a bypass under their sport shirts and a hint of Sunday brunch on their breath, Wasps in a Jewey register. Except that I felt almost like some pale, poor relation beside them, thinking, Oy, the savvy Sabbath motley of our crowd.

  I could repeat our conversation for them, explain the conditions—I mean the context—in which it took place—Shelley gone back to the room after the late breakfast we took with the rest of the wedding party—our last collective act before it broke up and we went back to New Jersey—to see if she’d left anything behind, to try to move her bowels.

  “Well,” I said, “it was a lovely wedding.”

  “Yes, it was fun. Everyone enjoyed themselves.”

  “I’m glad we decided to make a weekend of it.”

  “Yes, it was nice.”

  “I like this hotel. I’m glad we stayed here.”

  “It’s lucky Jack’s parents live in town and knew about it.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “It’s an advantage when you’re not familiar with a city if someone you know is.”

  “Philadelphia’s so close. It can’t be ninety miles.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but New York is closer. New York’s where we go when we go out to dinner.”

  Joan Cohen chuckled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “The way those rooms were connected.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “That was cute.”

  “Look, that girl brought those people drinks from the bar. How about a drink, would you care for a drink? They serve you right in the lobby.”

  “After last night? No, I don’t think so. But you go ahead if you like.”

  “Who, me? No. Drinking’s not one of my vices.”