Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red

by Harry Kemelman

  “What’s wrong with Windemere?” demanded Malcolm Selzer belligerently. “My Abner goes there and he says it’s a damn good school. He ought to know because his first year he was at Harvard and he likes Windemere better.” Malcolm Selzer was definitely not with it clothes-wise. In the refrigerator business where you had to push heavy models around the sales floor, or even lend a hand to the boys loading the truck, it was hard enough just to keep your clothes clean and pressed.

  “Wasn’t your Abner’s name in the paper the time they had the bombing there? I seem to remember him giving out some kind of statement from the student organization.”

  Malcolm Selzer nodded proudly. “That’s right. He had nothing to do with it, of course, but he’s a big shot in the student organization, meets with committees from the faculty and the administration. The kids these days, they’re involved; not like in our time.”

  Miriam, the rabbi’s wife, also had questions. She was tiny with a mass of blonde hair that seemed to overbalance her. She had wide blue eyes that gave her face a schoolgirl ingenuousness, but there was determination in the set of the mouth and in the small rounded chin. “Are you going to have any trouble with the board over this, David?”

  “No, I don’t think so. None that I can’t handle.”

  “But won’t it mean a lot of extra work?”

  “Not really. Maybe some quiz papers to correct every now and then. Preparing my lectures won’t take much time.”

  She asked whether he was really keen on it, or was it just the money.

  “Well, the extra money can be useful. It makes another trip to Israel possible.”

  “And a new rug for the living room?” she asked slyly.

  He laughed. “And a new rug for the living room,” he agreed.

  “Well, it will be a change of pace for you, I suppose. It’s just that …” she hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Well, knowing you, I know it’s not the money at all. It’s the teaching you’re interested in, isn’t it?”

  “So?”

  “So I just hope you won’t be disappointed. Colleges and college students have changed a lot since you were in school, you know.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said confidently, “not really.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Dean Hanbury swung her car sharply into an alley, drove down the narrow, muddy passageway behind two rows of apartment houses, made another sharp turn, and brought the car to rest against the wire-netting shielding some cellar windows.

  “This is the school parking lot?” the rabbi asked in surprise. Dean Hanbury had suggested he ride with her to learn the way to the school.

  “This is my parking spot,” she said, pointing to a small wooden sign that said “Dean Hanbury.” “At least it’s been mine since we took over this apartment building a couple of years ago. I like it because on rainy days I can go through the back door and come out right across the street from the administration building.”

  They mounted the granite steps of the administration building, whose sandstone and red brick gave it an institutional look. All the other buildings resembled apartment houses. “This is the one and original building of the school,” she explained. “After we grew, we built on some vacant land and then over the years gradually acquired the apartment buildings between.”

  “These are all student dormitories?” he asked.

  “Oh no, we remodeled them just as we’re planning to do with the one across the way. There are still a couple of tenants on the top floor who’ve left but still have some of their furniture there. And oh yes, Professor Hendryx has an apartment on the first floor. But that was because when he joined us from down South, he just didn’t have a place to live.”

  She led him up wide stairs flanked by a massive mahogany balustrade. “You’ll be sharing an office with him, by the way. The poor man doesn’t know it yet, but I can’t think of any other place to put you. Professor Hendryx is acting head of the English Department. I think you’ll like him. He’s originally from Barnard’s Crossing, too. So you’ll have something in common.”

  She unlocked her office. “My secretary has the week off between trimesters,” she explained. “The place is like a morgue right now, but once classes start this building—the whole area—is simply mobbed. You’ll be lucky to find a parking spot. That’s important to remember, because your class is required to wait only eight minutes after the hour for you to appear. And believe me, come in after the eight minutes and they’re gone.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand it. They don’t go anyplace in particular; like as not they’re sitting on the front steps, but they won’t remain in the classroom even if they see you coming along the street. There’s a kind of impatience among young people these days, although things have quieted down considerably in the last year or so. The change in the draft law probably had a great deal to do with it. We still get student agitation from time to time, of course, but nothing compared to ’68 and ’69. Although there was a bombing last year. I’m sure you read about it in the papers.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Our students weren’t responsible, I’m sure,” she said quickly. “The police are fairly certain it was the work of outsiders—the Weathervane organization probably. Of course, some of our students could be members. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see to the mail. But first let’s see if President Macomber is free.”

  She spoke into the phone. “Ella? Dean Hanbury. Has President Macomber come in yet? Oh, I see. Well, I’m in my office with Rabbi Small. You’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  She hung up. “He’s busy at the moment,” she said.

  There was a knock on the half-open door, and a workman with a tool kit stuck his head in. “Professor Hendryx’s office?”

  “No,” said Dean Hanbury. “It adjoins this one. I’m sure he’s not in yet, though.”

  “That’s all right ma’am. I can start here. The order calls for cutting into your line.” The man ran his eyes expertly along the telephone wire above the molding of the chair rail. It fed over the frame of the closet door, then along the picture molding. “You say his office is right on line with this one?”

  “Yes—” A bump sounded from the other side of the wall. “Oh, he must have come in, after all,” she said. “Come along, Rabbi, I’ll introduce you.”

  They went down one corridor and then another and she stopped in front of a door whose upper panel of translucent glass had a long diagonal crack. “We’ll have to replace that,” said the dean mechanically, as though she had said it many times before.

  She knocked and Professor Hendryx let them in. He was of medium height with a van dyke beard that emphasized a full sensuous underlip. A pipe jutted out of one corner of his mouth. His eyes were dark and appeared even darker behind tinted glasses in heavy tortoiseshell frames. He was wearing slacks and a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. His shirt was open at the collar. He wore a silk kerchief, knotted with fastidious negligence around his throat. The rabbi estimated he was a little older than himself, perhaps thirty-eight even forty.

  The dean introduced the two men and then said, “I’m afraid you and the rabbi will have to double up, John. There’s no other place in the building. Mr. Raferty can put in another desk.”

  “Where?” asked Hendryx, surprised and annoyed. “It’s almost impossible to move about in this cubbyhole as it is. If you put another desk in there’ll be no room between them. Will we climb over them to sit down?”

  “I was thinking of a smaller desk, John.”

  “I don’t really need a desk,” said the rabbi quickly. “Just a place to leave my hat and coat, and perhaps a text or two.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” she remarked brightly. “I’ll leave you two to get better acquainted.”

  Hendryx circled the desk and pulled out his swivel chair so savagely that it banged against the rear wall, incidentally explaining for the rabbi how the Dean
had known he was in the office. Finding Hendryx’s annoyance embarrassing, since he was the innocent cause of it, David Small looked around the dusty shelves lining the rear wall, the lower ones filled with stacks of bluebooks yellow with age. “It is rather confined,” he remarked.

  “It’s little more than a damn closet. Rabbi, although it’s better than the intolerable clack of the English office on the first floor where I spent two years. Actually, this was a storeroom for freshman themes and exams and old library books. It’s pretty bleak, but I hope to bring over some more of my things and fix it up a little when I get a chance. That print”—pointing to a large framed drawing of medieval London—“is mine, and so is that bust of Homer”—nodding to a large plaster cast on the top shelf immediately above him. He tilted back in his chair and stretched out his legs so that he was almost lying down, in what the rabbi would come to know as a characteristic pose.

  Fishing in his pocket, he brought forth a tiny brass figurine with which he tamped down the tobacco in his pipe. He puffed gently during the operation, and when his pipe was drawing satisfactorily again, he returned the tamper to his pocket.

  “So you’re the new instructor in Jewish Thought and Philosophy,” he said. “I knew your predecessor, Rabbi Lamden. According to one of my students who took his course, he used the time to give little lectures on morality. Believe me, it was a most satisfactory arrangement all around. As far as the students were concerned, it was an easy three credits. As far as Lamden was concerned, it was a pleasant few hours a week for which he got some extra money. And I suppose he could always salve his conscience with the thought that he was returning his students to the religion of their forefathers.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, the administration stood to gain from the course,” said Hendryx. “As you know, the official title of the school is Windemere Christian College. The catalogue and the bulletin we send out to prospective students are careful to explain the school is completely non-denominational, and that’s the actual truth. I’m sure the trustees—one of whom is the insurance tycoon Marcus Levine, one of your kind, I presume, judging by the name—would be happy to drop the, ‘Christian,’ but it would involve all sorts of legal complications. Now we get quite a few Jewish students, not only from around here but also from the New York-New Jersey area. It’s a fallback school, you see, and their parents are apt to jib at sending them to a school clearly labeled Christian. So it helps if there’s a course in Jewish Thought and Philosophy, taught by a real honest-to-goodness rabbi.” He grinned broadly. “From their point of view, you’re a kind of Judas sheep, I suppose.”

  “You don’t like Jews, do you?” asked David Small curiously.

  “How can you say so, Rabbi? Some of my best friends are Jews.” He smiled sardonically. “I know you people consider that the stock rationalization tag of the anti-Semite, but I suspect that in a way it’s true. You people are just the opposite of the Irish in that respect. The individual Jews one knows are dedicated, idealistic, selfless; and yet one is convinced that all the rest one does not know are cunning, grasping, and crassly materialistic. The Irish on the other hand, are supposed to be gay, quixotically gallant, unworldly, even though the Irishmen of one’s acquaintance might be drunken, quarrelsome black-guards whose word no sensible person would accept.” He smiled, showing even white teeth. “No, I don’t consider myself the least bit anti-Semitic, but I guess I’m rather outspoken, and when a thought occurs to me I don’t hesitate to say it. You might call me a sort of devil’s advocate.”

  “Some of my best friends are devil’s advocates,” said the rabbi.

  There was a knock on the door. Hendryx jerked into a sitting position and circled the desk to admit a man carrying a short aluminum ladder. It was the telephone serviceman.

  “I’m here to install the phone,” he said. “Where do you want it? On the desk?”

  “Right.”

  Resting his ladder against the shelves, the serviceman began measuring the wall with a folding rule. He moved his ladder behind the swivel chair and climbed to the top shelf. He grasped the plaster bust with both hands as if to remove it, and then finding it too heavy to lift easily, he slid it along the shelf.

  “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing with that statue?” demanded Hendryx. “I want it right there.”

  “I’ll put it back, don’t worry,” the man said. “The wire has to come through behind it so I can run it down to the desk.”

  “Well, see that you do.”

  The man drilled the hole and then left to return to the dean’s office. Hendryx felt it necessary to explain his show of temper. “I was given that bust by the first class I ever taught. It isn’t anything you can pack easily—it must weigh fifty or sixty pounds—but I’ve lugged it around with me from job to job for the last dozen years.”

  The rabbi nodded sympathetically, although he suspected the outburst at the serviceman was caused by Hendryx’s earlier displeasure on learning he would have to share his office.

  Another knock; this time it was Dean Hanbury. “We can go up to see President Macomber now,” she said.

  President Macomber was a tall, gray-haired man, dressed in slacks, sportshirt, and nylon windbreaker. A bag of golf clubs lay on the floor in one corner of his office. “I just played nine holes,” he said to explain his costume. “Do you play golf, Rabbi?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Pity. You have a parish, or …?”

  “I have a congregation in Barnard’s Crossing.”

  “Of course,” he nodded enthusiastically. “You’re from Dean Hanbury’s hometown. Well, I imagine it’s like being minister of a church or pastor of a parish. I mean, you’ve probably got a board of vestrymen you’ve got to get along with.”

  “We have a board of directors.”

  “That’s what I mean. And I’m sure you’d find it a lot easier to work with that board if you played golf. You can come to an understanding on a golf course a lot easier than sitting across a table decked out in a tie and business suit. A college president these days is a combination salesman and public relations man; and take it from me, there’s nothing like a golf course to transact business. Think about it. Well, Rabbi. I’m happy you were able to join us.”

  He extended his hand to signify the meeting was over.

  “What do you hear from Betty?” the dean asked.

  President Macomber smiled. “She’s almost completed her residence requirement.” He shook his head in amusement. “Sorry, Rabbi, but it’s hard to break the habit of academic lingo. My daughter is in Reno,” he explained to the rabbi, “getting a divorce.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said the rabbi.

  “No need to be. It’s one of those things. You people believe in divorce, don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, as a cure for an impossible marriage,” said the rabbi.

  “Well, that’s what this was.” And to Dean Hanbury, “If everything goes according to Hoyle, she’ll be back here as Betty Macomber again by next week.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” said Millicent Hanbury.

  “Well, again, Rabbi, we’re happy to have you with us, and if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to come and see me.”

  Rabbi Small returned to his office for his hat and coat, and finding Professor Hendryx busy with grade lists and uncommunicative, he wandered down to the first floor of the building to wait for the faculty meeting to begin. It was scheduled for eleven o’clock and by half-past ten the teachers began to arrive. The rabbi killed time, idly looking at the commemorative tablets, dingy oil paintings, and yellowing portrait photographs of earlier presidents and deans—women in stiff lace collars and oval pince-nez, just as he had originally pictured Dean Hanbury—that lined the walls of the marble-floored, rotunda-like foyer. Faculty members greeted each other, with someone occasionally looking at him curiously, but no one came over.

  Then he heard his name called. Turning, he saw the tall figure of Roger Fine advancing towar
d him. “I thought it was you,” Fine said, “but I couldn’t imagine what you were doing here.”

  “I’m going to be teaching here,” said the rabbi, pleased to see a familiar face. “I’m giving the course in Jewish Thought and Philosophy.”

  “I’ve only been here since last February myself,” said Fine, “but wasn’t there another rabbi listed in the catalogue?”

  “Yes, Rabbi Lamden.”

  “Oh, you take turns at the course?”

  Rabbi Small laughed. “No, he couldn’t give it this year and they asked me to fill in.”

  “Well, that’s great,” said the young man. “Maybe we could arrange to drive in together if our hours correspond. You been assigned an office yet?”

  “The dean arranged for me to share an office with a Professor Hendryx.”

  “No kidding?” He began to laugh.

  “Did I say something funny?”

  Instead of answering, Fine hailed a fat young man who was passing. “Hey, Slim, come here a minute. I want you to meet Rabbi Small, the man that married me.”

  The young man extended a hand. “And you’re checking up on him, Rabbi?”

  “Slim Marantz is also in the English Department,” he said to David Small. “The rabbi is teaching the course in Jewish Philosophy, Slim, and Millie just assigned him to the same office with Hendryx.”

  “You’re kidding.” And Marantz began to laugh.

  “And you thought Millie had no sense of humor,” said Fine.

  The rabbi looked questioningly from one grinning young man to the other. Fine proceeded to explain. “John Hendryx has been clamoring for a private office ever since he arrived at Windemere a couple of years ago.”

  Marantz amplified: “He objected to the loud, friendly chaos of the English office.”

  “Not conducive to concentration,” mimicked Fine.

  “And totally inimical to his fine, high pronunciamentos on all subjects philosophical, psychological, sociological—”

  “And racial, especially Jewish racial,” added Fine.