Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet

by Harry Kemelman

  “Oh, it’s you, Rabbi,” Joe Kestler said. “Come right in.” And then embarrassed, he explained. “The wife was kind of low, and I thought a couple of hands of gin would get her mind off—well, off things.”

  “I understand,” the rabbi replied.

  Christine Kestler seconded her husband with, “I was like all edgy. It was such a shock.”

  “Still, he was a very old man, and sick,” the rabbi murmured.

  “He could have gone on like that for years,” Kestler asserted, “if Cohen hadn’t fed him that pill.”

  Mindful of his conversation with Lanigan, the rabbi responded sharply. “Are you suggesting that the doctor deliberately gave your father medication that would harm him?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” said Kestler doggedly. “All I know is Cohen was sore at my old man on account he sued him about a fence he put up. Maybe that’s why he didn’t take too much time to think it out. He was in and out of here in a matter of minutes. I even complained about it, didn’t I, Chris?”

  “That’s right,” she nodded vehemently. “Joe was real sore about it.”

  “If the diagnosis is obvious …” the rabbi suggested.

  “Then it wasn’t, or my father wouldn’t have died. He was sick, but all right. You saw him. Then he took that pill and in less than half an hour he was dead. You saw him take the pill. You were a witness to it.”

  “I saw your wife administer a pill,” said the rabbi coldly. “I have no way of knowing what kind of pill it was.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Kestler confidently. “It was the cops in the cruising car that delivered the pills. You must have heard them drive up. In any case, they’d have a record of the time, and it was while you were here. A minute later, the wife comes up to give it to him. Then when the police ambulance arrived they took the whole bottle of pills. So we got everything nailed down evidencewise.”

  “But I have no way of knowing that the pill that Mrs. Kestler received from the police was the one she gave your father.”

  “Are you saying she could have switched them, Rabbi? That my own wife would want to hurt her own father-in-law?” Kestler was aghast.

  “I’m not saying anything except that the chain of evidence is not as complete as you seem to think. The discrepancy that I pointed out is what any lawyer would be certain to seize on. He might also think it strange, as would the court, that you would engage a doctor with whom you had quarreled.”

  “I didn’t want to call Cohen. It was my father who made me. I begged him not to. But he said that suing him was just business and had nothing to do with calling for doctoring. So say he was wrong, that still don’t give Cohen the right to give him the wrong medicine.”

  “And you think because he was angry with your father, he prescribed the wrong medicine?”

  Kestler’s face took on a look of great cunning. He smiled. “Oh, I’m not saying he did it deliberate. That would be murder, and I’m not accusing him of murder. All I’m saying is that because he was sore at my old man, he didn’t take the time to make a careful diagnosis, so he made a mistake. That’s negligence, and that’s malpractice. And I’m going to sue him for it.”

  “When you called Dr. Cohen, he immediately agreed to come over?” asked the rabbi.

  Kestler’s eyes narrowed as he thought about the question, suspicious that the rabbi might be laying a trap. “Oh, I wouldn’t say he agreed right away.”

  “And yet you persisted.”

  “Well, it was Wednesday,” Mrs. Kestler offered.

  Her husband glared at her. “The old man had confidence in him as a doctor.”

  “I see. So even though it was Wednesday, his day off, he came to see your father. And your point is that he just took a quick look at him and then handed you a prescription to—”

  “He didn’t give me any prescription,” said Kestler. “He called it in when he got home.”

  The rabbi showed his surprise. “When he got home? Why didn’t he call it from here or just give you a written prescription?”

  “Joe thought he might have some samples,” Mrs. Kestler hastened to explain.

  Joe Kestler shot her a venomous glance. “It was kind of late,” he elaborated, “and all the drugstores were closed except Aptaker’s, and I don’t go in there. So I asked him if he had any samples, and he said he’d drop them off to me if he had. And if he didn’t, he’d call in the prescription and they’d deliver it.”

  The rabbi nodded as he considered. “So here’s a doctor,” he said, as though he were trying to reason it out for his own understanding, “who is called on his day off by someone who has brought suit against him. And he not only comes, but offers to drop off samples of the medication he prescribes or make arrangements for it to be delivered. And this is the man you’ve been slandering and are planning to sue?”

  “He made a mistake,” said Kestler, “and my father died. So that’s malpractice. I got nothing against the doctor personally, but I got a right to sue, same as I would if my best friend rammed into me with his car.”

  “It’s the insurance that pays,” his wife added.

  The rabbi rose to go. “The doctor may have made a mistake,” he said, “as any man can make a mistake. Or he may have prescribed the correct medicine. If you bring the matter to court, it will be the court that will decide. But to speak evil of a man is considered a very grave sin by our law, Mr. Kestler. In our tradition, it is thought to bring on the most terrible punishments.”

  Remembering the disapproving looks from her husband, Mrs. Kestler feared that she would receive a torrent of abuse as soon as the rabbi left. But Joe Kestler maintained a dour and gloomy silence as he paced up and down the room in deep thought. Finally he stopped and faced her. “You know what he was trying to say?”

  “Well, Joe, I think—”

  “Shut up and listen. This guy Cohen is a member of his congregation, see. So he’s got to take care of him. He knows I’m going to call him for a witness, and being a rabbi, he’s got to tell the truth. But he’s smart and can shade it which way he wants. So I think it’s time I saw a lawyer. In the meantime, I don’t want you shooting off your mouth about Doc Cohen. Understand?”

  “But I never—” She saw his annoyance and said, “Oh, I won’t, Joe. I won’t say a word.”

  21

  Once again, as he had half a dozen times during the weekend, Daniel Cohen covered his head with the prayer shawl. It was Sunday morning and the last scheduled meditation of the retreat program. But the hope that he had had at the beginning that perhaps, just perhaps, there was something in it was gone. And he now felt only a kind of embarrassment that he, a doctor, a man of science, should have come here in the woods to commune with The Almighty in order to—to what? To ask for a special suspension of the universal law of cause and effect for his personal advantage?

  True, when he went to the synagogue on the High Holy Days, or even to an occasional Friday evening service, it was ostensibly for the same purpose. But that was different. In actuality, it was more of an affirmation of his connection with the group in which he had been born. One did not so much pray as recite set prayers more or less by rote. It was a social obligation, one of the things that Jews expected of each other.

  This was different. He had really tried. During the traditional prayer services, while his lips moved in recitation of the Hebrew prayers, his mind asked earnestly in English for help. During the meditations, he had remained standing until time was called, not once sitting down to rest or even leaning against the windowsill. And in the discussions, he had actively participated.

  “Why can’t we sit down and relax for the meditation, Rabbi?”

  “Because you might fall asleep, for one thing. In Transcendental Meditation, which was popularized by the Maharishi, they do sit in a comfortable position—”

  “And does it work?”

  “Oh, sure, as a means of beneficial relaxation. There’s a doctor from the Harvard Medical School, I believe, who’s e
ven done some scientific experimentation with it, controls and all that sort of thing, and found that it actually reduces high blood pressure. You may have heard of it, Doctor. But that’s just a technique for relaxing; it’s not religion. Remember, we’re after a religious experience. And for that you need a state of tension, balanced tension. The Buddhists use the lotus position; in Zen they kneel. But I’m convinced that the Jewish tradition calls for standing.”

  “How about this business of saying a word or a phrase over and over again?”

  “The mantra?” Rabbi Mezzik nodded his handsome head. “Some find that it helps their concentration. There’s some evidence that our ancestors made use of it. At the end of the Yom Kippur service we recite Adonai Hoo Elohim—the Lord, He is God—seven times. That suggests to me that the phrase may have been used as a mantra and not just the seven times ordered in the prayer-book.”

  “But what’s supposed to be the effect of the meditation?”

  “It’s hard to say, because it differs for each individual. You may feel that everything is connected to everything else, what I call the Universal Relationship. Or you may sense the basic unity of the universe. Or you may experience a great serenity.”

  Dan Cohen experienced none of these. What he had experienced, he told himself grimly, was tasteless food, a hard lumpy mattress on a narrow cot with a too-thin blanket against the night chill and the constant dull companionship of Matthew Charn. Of Kaplan, he had seen very little outside the group sessions, for he had been largely preoccupied with a special circle, all of them members of the board of directors of the temple, who had kept apart from the rest. And this morning, when he came down for the first service, they were gone.

  “Chet and some of the others had to return early this morning,” Rabbi Mezzik explained. “There’s an important board meeting they’ve got to attend. However, we still have a minyan, so it’s all right.”

  No one seemed to mind, but for Dan Cohen it was one more annoyance to be added to those he had suffered during the weekend. As he stood there with the prayer shawl over his head, he asked himself just why he had come. Of course, he had wanted to get away from Barnard’s Crossing and from his practice. But why here, and why did he need to get away at all?

  The death of a patient, while always traumatic, was to be expected in medical practice. Nor was he overly concerned about a possible malpractice suit; he was sure his treatment had been correct and certainly defensible.

  The reaction of his colleagues, especially the two older men, had been unexpected and disturbing, but surely the way to deal with that situation was to stay and fight it out rather than to run away. Conceivably, it might get to the point where they might ask him to leave the clinic. That would be disturbing, he admitted. It would not happen immediately because he had a contract, and if he were to hold them to its terms, it would be a year or more before they could force him out. By that time, he might be able to build up a clientele and open his own office in Barnard’s Crossing. And he didn’t have to come all the way up here and stand with a prayer shawl over his head to arrive at that conclusion.

  So why then was he here? Once again, he remembered his embarrassment during the telephone conversation with Kestler, all the more acute because it was overheard by Lanigan. He wondered uneasily if the police chief knew about the lawsuit over the fence. Were the police notified of such things? It suddenly came to him that what really bothered him was the repetition of his failures. He had failed in Delmont, and again in Morrisborough. Was the same thing going to happen in Barnard’s Crossing? Was he failure-prone, as some people are accident-prone? Taking the experience in the three towns together, did it mean that he was unsuited to the practice of medicine?

  Was he losing faith in himself as a doctor? An uneasy thought occurred to him which he tried to put out of his mind: was it possible that the first time he had prescribed Limpidine for Jacob Kestler, there had been an allergic reaction? He had not consulted his case records before going to see him the night of the storm, relying on his memory. He was sure there had not been but it had been months before and he might have forgotten. And now, standing there alone, he admitted that when he first heard of Kestler’s death, the idea had crossed his mind. He had not bothered to verify it, because he was so sure. Or was it because he was afraid?

  Although the retreat program called for Sunday dinner and a meeting afterward, he decided not to wait but to leave immediately after the meditation. He must check his records; he would hesitate no longer.

  To his roommate, he lied that he had a patient whom he had promised to visit before noon. And he used the same excuse in saying good-bye to Rabbi Mezzik.

  “And how did you enjoy your experience?” Mezzik asked.

  “All right, I guess. I think the rest did me some good.”

  “And the religious experience, did you profit from it?”

  He was on the point of making polite acknowledgment, but he still felt aggrieved. “I’m afraid not, Rabbi. It didn’t touch me at all. To be perfectly frank with you, I thought it was a lot of nothing.”

  Surprisingly, Mezzik was not offended. He even smiled. “That’s the way it frequently strikes people at first.”

  “What do you mean, at first?”

  Mezzik looked off into the distance. Then he eyed the doctor speculatively and said, “When you treat a patient, Doctor, when you give him medicine, is he healed immediately?”

  “Sometimes he is. Most of the time not immediately.”

  “Well, that’s the way it is with a religious exercise. Sometimes there is a great and sudden cognition, a revelation, a sudden awareness as though someone had snapped on the light in a dark room. And sometimes it takes a little time. And of course sometimes, as with your medicines, nothing happens. Now you prayed and meditated. I watched you and I think—I have some experience in these matters—that you prayed honestly and sincerely. Believe me, something will come of it. Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, but something will happen, I’m sure.”

  As he drove home Dan Cohen thought of what Mezzik had said, and his face relaxed in a wry grin. It was the old hokum. The fakers who operated medicine shows probably used the same spiel. It gave them time to get out of the county before the wrath of their dupes caught up with them.

  Home at last. He had no sooner parked his car when his wife called to him, “Dan? Telephone. It’s Chief Lanigan.”

  22

  “Hello, Dr. Cohen? … My sacroiliac kicked up, but real bad. I was just able to make it back to my desk.”

  “It’s happened before, has it?”

  “I can count on an incident about once a year or so. But usually, it’s just a gnawing kind of ache like I’m carrying a hundred pounds of lead strapped around my waist. This time, I got a shooting pain and I just couldn’t straighten up. I’m down at the stationhouse. At home I got a special belt that I put on when it happens, but I sure can’t drive home now.”

  “Maybe I’d better come and have a look at you. I could at least strap you up.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Doctor. I know that about all I can do is live with it until the pain wears off, but I’ve never had it so bad before.”

  “Well, maybe I can give you something. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  A little while later, the doctor was looking at the woebegone face of the chief and nodding as he explained, “I wouldn’t mind, Doctor, if I had done something foolish like trying to push a car out of the snow. I did that once and my back kicked up. I deserved that, and it was only a mild case as these things go. But here I just leaned forward to return a folder to the file cabinet and, wow! I couldn’t move.”

  Dr. Cohen nodded. “It goes away after a while, doesn’t it? Two or three days?”

  “It gets easier in a few days, but it lingers on for a couple of weeks usually. But I’ve never had anything like this. Usually, it’s a kind of ache, if you know what I mean. This was a sharp shooting pain, and I couldn’t move at all for the first few minutes. Then I
managed to work my way over to my chair by holding onto the cabinet and then the desk.”

  “I think maybe I’d better give you something,” said the doctor. He fished in his bag and came up with a small bottle. “Luckily, I had some samples at home. This is a muscle relaxant. It may make you drowsy, so I wouldn’t take a long auto trip if I were you. I’ve had pretty good luck with these pills, although some of my patients said that they didn’t help at all.” He went to the little sink in the corner of the office and drew a glass of water. “Here, I’d like you to take a couple of these now, and then a couple every four hours. By the way, are you allergic to anything?”

  “Not that I know of,” the chief replied as he took the pills from the doctor’s outstretched hand. He looked at them curiously for a moment and then popped them into his mouth, and swallowed them with the aid of the water.

  “Why do you ask if I’m allergic to anything?” Lanigan asked. “My back problem couldn’t be the result of an allergy, could it?”

  “Of course not. I was thinking of the medication. There’s always a chance of an allergic reaction, sometimes quite severe, from almost any medication you might take. It’s especially true these days when we use such highly sophisticated formulations.”