The Day the Rabbi Resigned

by Harry Kemelman

“What’s his name?”

  “When are we going to see him?”

  “Why haven’t you invited him to have dinner with us so we can get a look at him?”

  “He’s old-fashioned about these things. He feels that if he should come to dinner here with my parents, it’s like announcing our engagement.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with announcing your engagement if you’re serious?”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “I met him when I was still at school and he was doing graduate work at Harvard. We met at a party and we went out together a few times. He didn’t have much time. He was working on his thesis and studying for his orals. And he didn’t have much money either, I suspect. Then I bumped into him in town one day, and he asked me to have dinner with him. And we’ve been seeing each other ever since.”

  “But what does he do?” her father insisted.

  “He’s a teacher,” she said defensively. “He’s a professor, an assistant professor of English at Windermere Christian.”

  “Windermere Christian?”

  “Windermere Christian is nonsectarian, you know. And his name is Mordecai Jacobs.”

  Further questioning elicited the information that right now he was uncertain of his future; and that while it had been hinted to him by the head of the department that he would in all probability get tenure at the end of the year, he’d prefer to wait until he had actually received it.

  “But we want to see him,” her mother urged. “All right, I can understand about his reluctance to come to dinner here, sort of. But I have an idea. Why doesn’t he come to Ben’s Bar Mitzvah party Saturday night? The whole family will be here, but there’ll also be a lot of friends of the family, so his presence won’t be noticed.”

  “I had the same idea,” said Clara, “and I sent him an invitation. The trouble is that the Windermere faculty is having a dinner that same night, and it was intimated to him that he ought to be there. It’s going to be held at the Breverton Country Club. He thinks he might be able to get away early, but he can’t promise.”

  Later, alone with Clara in her bedroom, Mrs. Lerner asked, “What’s he like? Is he tall? Is he good-looking?”

  “He is to me,” said Clara stoutly. “He’s not tall, but he’s not short either. Sort of medium. At least, I don’t have to tilt my head back to talk to him. And he’s not, you know, movie-actor handsome, but he’s nice-looking. He’s nice and warm and friendly, and fun to be with, and I’m going to marry him.”

  “Have you met his folks? Are they from around here?”

  “No, he comes from a small town in Pennsylvania, so—”

  “But he wants you to meet them, doesn’t he?”

  “Sure, but where they live so far away, it will have to wait until we can arrange it.”

  “But he’s right here,” Mrs. Lerner insisted, “so there’s no reason why we can’t meet him. Now look, Clara, I want you to tell him that he can come to see us Saturday night, no matter how late his faculty dinner ends. There’ll be people here even after midnight.”

  “All right, I’ll tell him.”

  15

  As the rabbi and Miriam dawdled over their second cup of coffee at breakfast, the mail came, and Miriam went to gather it up from the floor beneath the chute. As she came back to the table she said, “The usual junk mail: a couple of mail-order catalogues, pleas for donations from the local public broadcasting station and from—let’s see—from Support the Children, AIDS research, and the Heart Fund: a chance to win a Cadillac by just going up to visit Forest Park, the new vacation homesite. We don’t seem to get any regular mail anymore.”

  “It could be,” the rabbi agreed. “I remember in my course in Economics there was a theory—no, it was a law, Gresham’s Law, that’s it—that said bad money drives out good money. So maybe junk mail drives out good mail.”

  “Oh, here’s one from the University of Chicago,” said Miriam, who had continued to slit envelopes. “It must be from Simcha.”

  She handed it to the rabbi and he read it aloud for her benefit.

  “Dear David:

  Unless something comes up to prevent it, I shall be in your area in early June for the meeting of the Anthropological Society. The first session is on Monday, June eleventh. The next day I am to receive the Dreyfus Medal and read a paper. I will be coming in the week before, on Friday, June first, because I have to attend a wedding in Gloucester on the second. It is the granddaughter of Martha’s sister Sarah, the unpleasant one. So why do I have to go? Because according to Martha, if Sarah hears that I was in the area and did not come to her granddaughter’s wedding, she will be indignant and be even more unpleasant than she usually is and cause all sorts of ill-feeling in the family. And how will she know that I was in the area? Because I will be receiving the Dreyfus Medal and Martha is sure it will be in the newspapers.

  “Martha will not accompany me; I will be coming alone. Ellen is going into the hospital for a hysterectomy. Nothing serious, I am assured, but requiring a stay in the hospital for a week or ten days. So Martha will be taking care of Ellen’s children for that week, which lets her off the hook for the wedding.

  “I note, by checking the map of your state, that Gloucester is only about thirty or forty miles from Barnard’s Crossing. So you could easily drive up there Sunday morning and we could spend the day together.

  “I have been making inquiries about your little problem from various knowledgeable people around here, and perhaps I can be of some help to you. In any case, hold June third open and let’s get together.

  “Regards to Miriam—all the best, Simcha. “P.S. I’ll call you from Gloucester to make specific arrangements.”

  “Oh David, do you think he knows of a job for you?”

  Her husband shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like it. I think he would have said so if he had anything definite. He’s probably got the names of a few colleges that have Judaica departments, and perhaps some rumors of some people in those departments who might be leaving or retiring.”

  “But suppose he did have a job for you, wouldn’t it be apt to be somewhere in the Midwest? Would you want to leave New England?”

  “Well, I’d have to think hard about it, and it would have to be a pretty good job. But it makes no difference; I’d like to see Simcha anyway. I don’t like the idea of driving all the way up to Gloucester—”

  “It’s only about thirty miles, less than an hour, and on a Sunday morning there’s not likely to be much traffic.”

  “Unless it’s a sunny day. Tell you what, Miriam, why don’t you inquire around and find out about train or bus service. Maybe there’s a bus that runs between Gloucester and Barnard’s Crossing, or a train from Gloucester that stops at the Swampscott station. Then when he calls, I can suggest that he take one or the other here instead of my going up there to pick him up.”

  16

  From the time of his appointment, Mark Levine had been conscientious in attending the meetings of the Board of Trustees of Windermere College. Not that he was particularly interested in the college, but because it gave him an excuse to escape the boisterous optimism of his associates in Texas for the quieter charms of Boston. He would arrive on Saturday and spend the day in the company of his friend, Don Macomber, and sometimes Macomber’s daughter, who lived in Rockport and would come down to see “Uncle Mark.” They would have dinner at the Ritz Carleton, where Mark stayed, and then go on to the theatre or a concert. Macomber’s daughter would stay over at the president’s house in the college, and then on Sunday they might all drive to her home in Rockport and spend the day there going through the various art galleries in which the town abounded. Monday, he would take care of any business he might have, or if the weather were fine, just walk the streets of the city. Tuesday morning he attended the board meeting. He could easily have come to Boston any time the spirit moved him, but he felt it was frivolous to leave his business without a specific reason, and the
board meeting provided that.

  But now he was in Boston on his own. He had come up in the middle of the week, and he had to fly back the next morning. He was taking dinner at the president’s house, and it was a plainer meal than the Ritz dining room afforded because it had been prepared by the housekeeper, who also did the cooking for Macomber. They had just finished, and Levine lit a cigar. “How are things going at the school?” he asked.

  “All right so far, but applications for admission are down. Oh, there are a lot more applications than we can accommodate. I mean, even of those who are acceptable, but the trend is down.”

  “Young people getting disenchanted with the idea of coming to Windermere?”

  “Oh, it’s national. It’s not just us. Tuition is up everywhere, student loans harder to get because of government cutbacks, and there’s a decline in the number of young people of college age in the population as a whole.”

  “You mean you’re worried about next year and the year after?”

  “And the year after that and maybe for the next few years. A number of colleges have already closed down. The well-known schools, the prestige universities, won’t feel it for a while, maybe never, but my guess is that they’ll be taking in more and more students that they wouldn’t have considered a few years ago. You might say that the bloom appears to be off. It’s like any other business: in boom times it expands, and when there is a downturn, the weaker ones are driven to the wall.”

  “But education is not a business,” Levine objected. “I know what you mean, of course. Down in Dallas, when oil was selling at thirty dollars a barrel and higher, people began building like crazy, and now when it’s selling at about half that, we have any number of real estate firms filing for bankruptcy and dragging the banks that gave them construction loans with them. But colleges …”

  “Well, colleges are in the real estate business, too. They got up a bunch of new buildings, too, dormitories, laboratories, classrooms. We didn’t because we had no land to expand on, but we took over all the old brownstones on Clark Street and converted them into dormitories, mostly. You see, as a fall-back school, we get a lot of out-of-towners. We’re no longer a local college where the students live at home.”

  “Are we in trouble?”

  “Not yet, but looking ahead …”

  There was a silence for a little while as Macomber sipped his coffee and Levine blew smoke up at the ceiling. Then Levine asked, “So what do you plan to do?”

  “I’m hoping to change the nature of the school. Make it a school of first choice rather than a fall-back school. Actually, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. It’s my reason for coming here in the first place.”

  “I’ve always wondered why you did,” said Levine, and then with a chuckle, “I’m sure it wasn’t for the money.”

  Macomber smiled. “No, it wasn’t for the money. Fortunately, I don’t depend on my salary.”

  “And you certainly didn’t take it for the prestige.”

  “Hardly. Or you might say I took it because there was so little prestige attached to Windermere Christian.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Do you remember Professor Cotton, Mark?”

  “Of course, your guru,” he jeered. “What did they call you guys who were his disciples? Oh yeah, Cottontails.”

  Macomber chuckled. “That’s right, Cottontails. You never took a course with him, did you?”

  “No, but at your urging I audited his course in Anthro 4 a couple of times when you were taking it.” He blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “I remember in one of those lectures, he spent the whole hour talking about the modern college, how it was becoming a kind of factory for the manufacture of knowledge rather than a means for passing on knowledge from one generation to the next; and that it was encouraging competition rather than cooperation. It was interesting, but what it had to do with anthropology, I don’t know.”

  “He was demonstrating how an institution, the college, that we were all familiar with, could change under our very eyes, and no one would notice it. And that was twenty-five years ago, Mark. It’s a lot worse today. It now characterizes all education in this country. Education used to be the way we discovered ourselves, our humanness, our relation to society and the world. Now it’s just a contest to get ahead of one’s fellows to the next plateau, from where you go on to the next escalation. It starts back in the grade school where the kids are separated according to perceived capacity, the track system. Those on the highest track are eligible to take the college prep course when they get into high school, and there the competition is for admission to the better colleges where the competition is for admission to the graduate and professional schools, and there they compete for jobs in the more prestigious law firms, or internships in the best-known hospitals. It just goes on and on. It’s a rat race.”

  “It’s the character of the times, Don.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a confusion between training and education that developed as a result of a sudden increase in technology.”

  “All right,” said Levine good-naturedly. “So what can you do about it?”

  “I can try to make Windermere an institution for education.”

  “How?”

  “By gradually changing the attitude of the faculty so that they focus on the student rather than on research. I’d get away from the ‘publish or perish’ idea. The way things are now, the emphasis is all on research. The professor gets advancement by publishing in the learned journals, and the better he is at it, the fewer courses he’s required to teach. It hasn’t happened to us as yet. But in some of our better-known colleges, the most prestigious professors, whose reputations attracted students to their school, never see a student. Even if they are listed in the school catalogue as giving a course or two, the lectures are apt to be given by a graduate assistant. Well, I’m going to try to attract teachers; men and women who know their subjects and whose primary interest is in transmitting their knowledge to their students, to exciting their interest and curiosity. And if they find something of particular interest that they feel the world should know about and want to publish their findings, they’ll do it on their own time. And I could try to stop some of the competitive spirit that has changed the student’s desire to learn into the desire to beat his classmates.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “By changing the marking system,” said Macomber promptly. “I’d have just two grades. Pass or Fail, or maybe Pass, Fail, and Honors. And I’d abolish so-called objective tests. Check one of five possible answers. That sort of thing. All testing in the humanities at least would be of the essay type.”

  Levine nodded appreciatively. “It might work. At least, it might teach them how to write English. So why haven’t you done it up till now? You say it’s what you’ve wanted since you came here, that it’s why you came here in the first place.”

  “I didn’t have the backing of the board. I knew I didn’t when I came here, but I thought I’d be able to win them over; change some, replace some over the years.”

  “And now, you feel you’ve got the board behind you?”

  “Well, I’ve got the votes for certain things, but not for others. You know, in nominating members for the board, I didn’t grill them on their attitudes any more than I did you when I asked you to join. I chose people whom I thought would agree with me. Sometimes I made mistakes. Cyrus Merton, for example. He is against changing the name, and not merely against it, but in active opposition. He knows that the school is not and never was Christian in anything but name. Nevertheless—”

  “He doesn’t want to change it.”

  “That’s right. It’s a kind of superstition with him. He’s fighting a kind of religious war, and he thinks to change the name would be a victory for secularism.”

  “And why are you so anxious to change the name? I mean, how does the change affect your plans for the school?”

  “As long as we were a fall-back school, it didn’t make too m
uch difference. It may even have helped. You see, a youngster applies to Harvard, say, and then to Tufts or B.U. in case he doesn’t make it. But Tufts and B.U. have raised their standards, so there’s a good chance that he won’t get into any of the three. So they’d also apply to Windermere Christian because it is thought that faith, perhaps, as attested by a letter from their priest or minister, maybe will take the place of good grades. As you know, I tried to offset the effect of the name by instituting a course in Judaica and having it taught by a rabbi. I imagine your name on the Board of Trustees also helped,” he added with a smile.

  Levine laughed. “I get two or three letters every year from coreligionists excoriating me for having converted.”

  “Is that so? I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” Levine assured him. “But what makes you think you’ll be successful this year? Has Cyrus changed his mind?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he hasn’t. But this time I might be able to offer him a quid pro quo that improves my bargaining position. His niece—who is like his daughter, since he has no children of his own—is married to one of the young men on the faculty who hopes to get tenure. Well, I have the final say on who gets tenure.”

  17

  Included in Cyrus Merton’s notice of the date for the June meeting of the Board of Trustees of Windermere Christian College of Liberal Arts was the usual agenda of topics to be discussed and voted on. The items, he noted, were much the same as those that had appeared on previous agendas. In part this was due to continuous situations and problems that called for discussion meeting after meeting. Sometimes, even after they had seemingly been resolved, and been voted on, they recurred in slightly different form, and would again be discussed in a succession of meetings. In large part, however, the same subjects appeared on agenda after agenda because the board never really got a chance to deal with them. The meetings started at ten in the morning and ended at noon, when the members were served an elaborate catered lunch.

  Cyrus had inquired about it toward the end of the first year of his incumbency. “Seems to me,” he said to the member who sat beside him at the luncheon table, “that we have the same subjects on the agenda for each meeting, and most of them we don’t ever get around to discussing.”