The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  He drew books from the library and read whatever he could find about electric-shock treatments. He realized with a slow horror that Dan Bernstein and every other psychiatrist in the world didn’t know exactly what happened when they buffeted his wife’s brain with electric bombardment. All they had were theories, and the knowledge that the treatments got results. One of these theories said that the electrical charge burned out abnormal circuits in the switchboard of the brain. Another said that the shock was close enough to the death experience to satisfy the patient’s need for punishment and assuage the guilt feelings that had plunged him into despair.

  That was enough; he stopped his reading exercises.

  Each treatment day he called the hospital at 9 A.M., and a ward nurse with a flat, nasal voice told him that the treatment had been uneventful and that Mrs. Kind was resting comfortably.

  He wanted to avoid people. He did paperwork, catching up with his correspondence for the first time in his life, and he even cleaned out his desk drawers. On the twelfth day after Leslie began the shock treatments, however, the rabbinate caught up with him. That afternoon he attended a bris, blessing a baby named Simon Maxwell Shutzer as the mohel slit away the foreskin of the little bloody penis and the father trembled and the mother wept whitely and then laughed in joy. Then, covering the life span from birth to death in two short hours, he officiated at the funeral of Sarah Myerson, an old lady whose grandsons wept to see her lowered into the grave. Darkness had fallen by the time he returned home. He was bone-weary. At the cemetery the sky had begun to spit a fine sleet that stung their faces until they burned, and he felt chilled through to the marrow. He was on his way to the liquor cabinet for some whiskey when he saw the letter on the foyer table. When he picked it up and saw the handwriting he had trouble ripping it open. It was written in pencil on inexpensive blue stationery, probably borrowed.

  My Michael,

  Last night a woman down the hall screamed that a bird was beating its wings, beating its wings against her window, and finally they came and gave her a needle and she fell asleep. And this morning an attendant found the bird, an ice-covered sparrow, lying on the walk. Its heart was still beating, and when they fed it warm milk with a dropper it lived, and he brought it to show the woman it was all right. They left it in a box in the dispensary but this afternoon it died.

  I lay in my bed and remembered the sound of the birds in the woods outside our cabin in the Ozarks, and how I would lie in your arms and listen to them after we had made love, our hearts the only thing we could hear in the cabin and the birds the only thing we could hear outside.

  I want to see my children. Are they well?

  Wear your thermal underwear when you make pastoral calls. Eat leafy vegetables and stay away from your spices.

  Happy birthday, my poor old man.

  Leslie

  Mrs. Moscowitz came in to announce dinner and stared in amazement at his wet face. “Rabbi, is anything wrong?”

  “I just got a letter from my wife. She’s going to be all right, Lena.”

  The dinner was burned. Two days later Mrs. Moscowitz announced that she was needed by her widower brother-in-law whose daughter was ailing in Willimantic, Connecticut. Her place was taken by a fat, gray-haired woman named Anna Schwartz. Anna was an asthmatic with a wen on her chin, but she was very clean and she could cook anything, including a lochshen kugel with two kinds of raisins, light and dark, and a crust that was so good you hated to chew.

  2

  When the children asked what their mother had written he told them she had wished him a belated happy birthday. He wasn’t hinting—or perhaps he was—but the next day resulted in a crayoned card from Rachel and a store-bought one from Max, plus a gorgeous loud tie from the two of them. The tie matched nothing he owned, but he wore it to temple that morning.

  Birthdays made him optimistic. They were turning points, he told himself hopefully. He remembered his son’s sixteenth birthday, three months before.

  The day Max had lost his belief in God.

  In Massachusetts, at sixteen a boy becomes eligible to apply for a driver’s license.

  Michael had taught Max to drive the Ford and he had an appointment to be examined for his license at the Registry of Motor Vehicles on the morning before his birthday, which fell on a Saturday. On Saturday night he had a date with Dessamae Kaplan, a child-woman with blue eyes and red hair who made Michael envy his son.

  They were supposed to go to a square dance at a barn overlooking the lake. Leslie and Michael had asked a group of their son’s friends to a small birthday party before the dance, and they had planned to hand him the keys to the car so he could celebrate by driving for the first time without parental escort.

  But it was on the Wednesday before Max’s birthday that Leslie fell into the deep emotional depression that sent her to the hospital, and by Friday morning Michael had been told that she would be there for an indeterminate stay. Max canceled his appointment for the driver’s test and called off his party. When Michael heard him breaking his date with Dessamae, too, he pointed out that Max’s becoming a hermit wouldn’t help the state of his mother’s health.

  “I don’t want to go,” Max said evenly. “You know what’s on the other side of that lake?”

  Michael knew, of course, and he stopped urging Max to attend the dance. It would not be pleasure for a boy to stroll with his girl at the water’s edge and gaze out across the lake at the sanitarium his mother had entered a few days before.

  Most of the day Max stayed on his bed, reading. Michael could have used his son’s customary ability to clown, because he was having a bad time with Rachel, who wanted her mother.

  “If she can’t come here, let’s go and visit Momma.”

  “We can’t do that,” he told her again. “It’s against the rules. There are no visiting hours now.”

  “We’ll sneak in. I can be quiet.”

  “Go and get dressed for services,” he said gently. “We have to be at the temple in an hour.”

  “Daddy, we can make it. We don’t have to drive all the way around the lake. I know a place where there’s a rowboat. We can float right across and see Momma and then we can go right back again. Please,” she said.

  He could only slap her on the behind and leave the room in order not to hear her cry. He poked his head into Max’s room as he went by.

  “Better get ready, son. We’ll be going to the temple soon.”

  “Would you mind if I didn’t?”

  Michael stared at him. Nobody in their household ever missed services unless he was ill.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’m not sure there’s a God.”

  “God’s a phony?”

  He looked at his father. “He may be. Who really knows? Nobody’s ever had any proof. He may be a legend.”

  “You think I’ve spent more than half my life serving a puff of smoke? Perpetuating a fairy tale?”

  Max said nothing.

  “Because you mother has taken sick,” Michael said, “and you in your wisdom have reasoned that if there were a God He would not take her away from you?”

  “That’s right.”

  His argument was hardly new and Michael had never learned to refute it, nor did he desire to do so. A man either believes in God or he doesn’t.

  “Stay home, then,” he said. He washed Rachel’s red eyes and helped her dress. As they left the house a short time later he heard Max’s harmonica begin to shrill a blues. Ordinarily his son refrained from playing on Friday night out of respect for the shabbos. But on that night Michael understood. If, as Max suspected, there were no God, why observe any of the meaningless scribbling on the totem pole?

  Michael and Rachel were the first ones at the temple and he opened the windows wide, trying to court a small breeze. Billy O’Connell, the organist, arrived next, and then Jake Lazar
us, the cantor. As usual Jake hurried into the men’s room as soon as he had struggled into his white robe and put on the skullcap. He always stayed there exactly ten minutes, leaning over the washbowl and staring into the mirror as he practiced scales.

  By eight-thirty, when the service was scheduled to start, only six other people had arrived. Jake looked at the Rabbi questioningly.

  Michael motioned to him that they would begin: God should not have to wait for laggards.

  For the next thirty-five minutes the people drifted in, until there were twenty-seven—it was easy to count from the bema. He knew that a number of families were away on vacation. He also knew that at least a minyan could be collected in a bowling alley within driving distance, that several cocktail parties were being held that night, and that tent theaters, supper clubs, and several Chinese restaurants no doubt held more of his congregation than the temple did.

  Years before the knowledge that only a handful of his people had come to the synagogue to greet the shabbos would have been a knife mincing his innards. But he had long since learned that to a rabbi even one Jew is satisfying company in prayer; he was at peace as he led the service for a tiny group that barely filled the first two rows of benches.

  Word of Leslie’s illness had spread, the way such things always do, and several of the ladies fussed over Rachel during the oneg shabbat, the refreshment period following the service. Michael was grateful. They stayed late, desiring the company of the herd.

  When they got home the light was out in Max’s room and Michael didn’t disturb him.

  Saturday was a replica of Friday. Shabbos as a rule was a time of rest and meditation, but there was no peace in the Kind house that day. Each of them suffered in his own way. Shortly after dinner Michael received word that Jack Glickman’s wife had died. It meant that he would spend the evening in a condolence call. He hated the thought of leaving the children.

  “Do you want to go out?” he asked Max. “If you do, I’ll call in a sitter to stay with Rachel.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. She’ll be all right.”

  Later Max recalled that after his father left he had put his book down and had stopped in Rachel’s room for a moment on the way to the bathroom. It was hardly dusk, but she was already in her pajamas, lying with her face to the wall.

  “Rache,” he said softly. “You asleep?” There was no reply, so he shrugged and ambled along. He returned to his book, this time not setting it down until he felt hunger pangs half an hour later. On his way to the kitchen he passed Rachel’s room again.

  The bed was empty.

  He wasted five minutes roaming through the house and then the yard, calling her name and not daring to think about the lake and the boat she had been wanting to float away in, into her mother’s arms. He didn’t even know whether it was a real boat or an imaginary one, but he knew that he was going to have to get to the lake. His father had taken the car, and that left only the hated bicycle. He took it down from where it hung on two rusty nails on the garage wall, noticing with a mixture of anger and fear that Rachel’s bike was missing from its usual spot next to the lawn mower. Then he pedaled through the humid August night as fast as he was able. They lived less than half a mile from Deer Lake, but he was perspiring freely by the time he got there. There was a road that circled the lake but it didn’t hug the shore, and trees hid the water from view even during the day. There was a narrow path that followed the waterline. It was rutted and root-veined and it was impossible to ride a bicycle on it. But he stuck to his bike as long as Rachel had stuck to hers. He saw the moon glinting redly off the reflector of her bicycle where she had parked it neatly against a tree trunk just off the path, and he let his fall to the ground next to it and ran on down the path on foot.

  “RACHEL?” he called.

  Crickets shrilled in the grass and the water splashed on the rocks. There was a pale moonlight, and he searched the waters off the shoreline with his eyes.

  “RA-A-CHEL. . . .”

  Somebody laughed from under a nearby tree and he thought for a moment that he had found her. But then he made out three figures, two men in bathing suits and a woman who wasn’t many years older than himself. She wore a halter and a cotton skirt, and she sat with her back to a tree, her knees in the air. The moon shone softly on her thighs.

  She laughed again. “Lost your girl, sonny?”

  “My sister,” Max said. “Did you see a little girl? Eight years old.”

  All three of them held opened cans of beer. The woman tipped hers to her lips and swallowed, her white throat moving as she drank. “Ah, that’s all right,” she whispered.

  “We ain’t seen a kid,” one of the men said.

  He crashed along down the trail. The other man said something as he ran away, and the three under the tree laughed.

  He remembered that two summers before he had been swimming in this part of the lake one afternoon when a drowned man had been discovered. The man’s hair had streamed when they pulled him out of the water and his flesh had been like dough. Rachel could dogpaddle for about five feet and when she tried to do the dead man’s float she got water in her nose.

  “Please, God,” he said. “Oh, God, please, please, please.” He ran on and on, stumbling on the rough trail, too winded now to call out, praying soundlessly and without end.

  The boat was about two hundred feet offshore when he saw it. It was an old skiff. It looked black in the moonlight, and it was pointed the wrong way, its nose toward the near shore. A small figure in white pajamas sat in one corner of the stern.

  Max kicked off his sneakers and skinned out of his pants. The chinos, crumpled into a ball when he threw them from him, dropped over the slight bluff that was the shoreline and fell into the water, but he didn’t bother about them. Instead he threw himself into the lake. The water was shallow near shore, with a rocky bottom five or six feet out, where he landed in his shallow dive. His chest scraped lightly against the rocks and then he rose and started to swim, his legs kicking him swiftly toward the boat. He reached it and heaved himself aboard.

  “Hi, Max,” Rachel said dreamily. She was picking her nose. He sprawled spread-eagled in the bottom of the boat and panted for breath. There was a lot of dirty water in the skiff, which was very old and very leaky.

  “Momma’s over there,” she said.

  Max stared at the network of yellow lights at which Rachel pointed. They were on the far shore, a quarter of a mile away. He moved over to his sister and took her into his wet arms. The two of them sat that way for several minutes, looking at the hospital lights. They didn’t speak. It was very quiet. Every now and then a burst of music from the dance at the barn drifted across the water. Closer, a girl began to laugh shrilly, then to scream. The beer-drinkers, Max thought.

  “Where are the oars?” he said finally. “The two oars?”

  “There was only one, but I lost it. I think it sank. Why are you wearing your BVD’s? They look funny, sticking to you that way.”

  He had been watching the water in the skiff’s bottom for some time, and now it was unmistakably clear that it was rising. “Rachel,” he said, “this boat is sinking. I’m going to have to swim you to shore.”

  Rachel looked at the black water. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

  He had often towed her during horseplay in the water, but he was tired and he doubted his ability to get her to shore if she fought him. “Rachel, if you let me swim you to shore, I’ll give you half a dollar,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’ll do it on one condition.”

  He watched the water. It was beginning to rise swiftly.

  “What?”

  “You let me use your harmonica for two whole days.”

  “Come on,” he said. He slipped over the side of the skiff and treaded water while he held up his arms to receive her. She squealed as she entered the water, but she was quiet and good as he lay on his back, his hand under her chin, and pulled her ashore.

  His sneake
rs were where he had left them, but his chinos could not be seen. He stepped off the bluff into a deep ooze and felt around in the water with his hands.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My slacks.”

  “See if you can find my oar.”

  He searched fruitlessly for ten minutes, treating his sister to several additions to her vocabulary, and then he gave up.

  He held her hand all the way back to the bicycles, keeping an eye peeled for the two men and the woman, but the only sign of them was a six-pack of empty beer cans under the tree where they had drunk.

  They took a long time cycling home. Max’s BVD’s didn’t come equipped with zipper fly. He chose the darkest streets he could find, and twice he dived for nearby bushes to escape the beams of approaching automobiles.

  Finally, tired and scratched, he stood in the darkness of the garage and put the bikes away. He did not turn on the lights. There were no curtains on the garage windows.

  “I won’t spit in the harmonica, Max,” Rachel said. She stood outside in the driveway, scratching herself. “Hurry up,” she said, yawning. “I want a glass of milk.”

  Max had half turned to go when the sound of footsteps approaching the driveway froze him in his tracks. They were light, feminine steps, and he had guessed whose they were even before he heard Dessamae Kaplan’s voice.

  “Rachel? What are you doing out here? Where’s Max?”

  “We been swimming and riding our bikes. I got on my p.j.’s and Max is wearing his underwear. See?”

  Her thumb tripped the light switch, and Max stood in his muddy yellow BVD’s as if rooted to the oil-spotted garage floor, his hands cupping his crotch, while the love of his life shrieked and fled into the darkness.

  All this Max told to Rabbi Kind on the following Friday evening as they walked together to the shabbos service at the temple.

  And three months later Michael thought of his son’s birthday as he sat, his own birthday letter, cards, and gift spread in front of him, and wrote a letter to his wife in the hospital overlooking the shore where his son had found his God and lost his pants.