The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

They needed cleaning badly. When the carpets had been vacuumed he watered the two large elephant-ear plants and then polished the metal ashtray stand. He was doing this at ten-thirty when the first customer came in. Abe moved out of the glass cubicle as soon as he saw him.

  “Mr. Levinson!” he said. They shook hands warmly. “How are things in Boston?”

  “Could be better.”

  “Here, too. Here, too. But let’s hope things will start to hum soon.”

  “I’ve got a reorder for you.” He handed Abe an order blank.

  “You didn’t come in to New York just to reorder? I have some beautiful things to show you.”

  “The price would have to be very good, Abe.”

  “Mr. Levinson, you and I can worry about price later. All I ask you to do is sit with me and enjoy these new things.”

  He looked toward the cubicle. “Carla. The new line,” his father said.

  She nodded and smiled at Mr. Levinson. She went into the stock room and in a few minutes carried two boxes into the dressing room. When she came out she was wearing only a corset.

  Michael’s hands froze to the ashtray stand he was polishing. He had never seen so much of a woman’s body before. The cups of the corset pushed Carla’s breasts into two high balls of flesh that made his knees weak. She had a birthmark on the inside of her left thigh that matched the one on her face.

  His father and Mr. Levinson didn’t seem to know that she existed. Mr. Levinson looked at the corset and his father looked at Mr. Levinson.

  “I don’t think so,” the buyer said finally.

  “You don’t even want to know how cheap you can pick these up?”

  “It would be an extravagance at any price. I’ve got too much in the store now.”

  His father shrugged. “I won’t argue.”

  Carla returned to the dressing room and changed into a panty girdle and a black bra. The girdle was cut low enough so that her navel winked at Michael secretly as she walked to and fro in front of the two men.

  Mr. Levinson didn’t seem any more interested in the panty girdle than he had in the corset, but he leaned back and closed his eyes. “How much?”

  He winced when Abe told him. They argued heatedly for several minutes and then his father shrugged his shoulders and made a face as he agreed to Mr. Levinson’s last offer.

  “Now, how much for the corsets?”

  His father grinned and the bargaining began again. When the deal was concluded both men looked satisfied. Three minutes later Mr. Levinson was gone and his father and Carla were back at their desks. He sat there polishing vigorously and sneaking peeks at Carla’s bored face, his mind commanding the next customer to walk through the door.

  He liked working with his father. When they closed up Kind Foundations at 5 P.M. on Saturdays the two of them would go to a restaurant for dinner and then to a movie or perhaps to the Garden to watch a basketball game or the fights. Several times they went to the YMHA and worked out together and then sat in the steam room. His father could breathe steam indefinitely and emerge pink-cheeked and bright-eyed. Michael had to leave the room after five or ten minutes, his knees weak and the vitality drained from his body.

  One night they sat on the bench in the steam room, the vapor wisping around their faces.

  “Hit my back, will you?” his father asked.

  He went to the tap in the wall and soaked a towel with icy water, then he shivered while he slapped Abe’s body. Grunting with pleasure, Abe took the towel and wiped his own face and legs.

  “Want me to hit you?”

  Michael declined with thanks. Abe turned the steam spigot and clouds of fresh steam began to pour into the tiny room. His son’s breath became labored, but his own breathing remained slow and easy.

  “I’m going to get you a set of weights,” he said. He was lying on his back on a bench with his eyes closed. “I’ll get you a set of weights and the two of us will work out together.”

  “Great,” Michael said without enthusiasm. The truth was, he couldn’t lift most of the weights his father had in his bedroom, nor did he particularly want to. At thirteen he had already begun to grow, and he was tall and very skinny. He looked at his father’s splendid physique and thought of his short fat mother and wondered about the incredible tricks nature plays.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t want weights?”

  “Not very much.”

  “You want something else?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “You’re a funny kid.”

  It didn’t seem to require an answer so he continued to sit there, gasping.

  “I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you.”

  “What about?”

  “Sex.”

  He was embarrassed, but he tried not to show it. “You got a problem, Pop?”

  Abe sat up on the bench, grinning. “Don’t be a fresh kid. I’ve never had that kind of problem, boychik Now. . . . How much do you know?”

  He couldn’t meet his father’s amused eyes. “I know all about it.”

  For a moment there was no sound but the hissing steam. “Where did you get your information?”

  “The guys. We talk.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  He had several fine points that he had been wondering about for some time. “No,” he said.

  “Well, if you do, you come to me. You hear?”

  “I will, Pop,” he promised. He waited another two minutes and then fled to the shower room. Pretty soon Abe came out and soaked under the cold spray while Michael dawdled under the hot, and they harmonized on “The Sheik of Araby.” Abe had a lousy voice, gravelly and uncertain.

  Abe enjoyed having his son at the plant, but he treated him just like any of the other help. When Michael started to work his father paid him three dollars for Saturday. After he had been there a year he asked Sam to negotiate a raise for him. The union steward was delighted. He and Abe got a great deal of nachus out of a session they dragged out for twenty minutes, and the result was an increase of a dollar.

  After he got his raise he saved for a couple of weeks and took his father to a play. It was Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland, starring Helen Hayes and Philip Merivale. His father fell asleep in the middle of the second act. The following week Abe took him to the Yiddish theatre to see a review called The Greeneh Cozineh, about an American family that was transformed by the arrival of an immigrant cousin. He didn’t understand all the Yiddish, but the jokes that came through to him made him laugh until his cheeks were wet.

  They grew closest through the Friday evenings they spent together. Just before the bar mitzvah Abe had begun to worry a little about whether his own Hebrew was sharp enough to allow him to make a good showing when he was called to the bema, so at his suggestion they attended a Friday-night service at Sons of Jacob Synagogue. The service was not too long and to Abe’s surprise he found that he remembered most of the Hebrew he had learned as a boy. The following Friday they went again, and soon it was a weekly habit. Together they stood and greeted the Bride of the Sabbath. Soon the synagogue “regulars” began to count on their presence. Michael was proud of Abe as he stood next to him, a tough, muscular man with eyes that smiled, singing the praises of God.

  When he was fifteen be became a freshman at the Bronx High School of Science, gratefully making the long underground trip from Queens each morning. He was conscious that it was the most competitive secondary school in New York. His first term paper worried him. It was in biology, and it dealt with the massive reproductivity of Trypedita, the family of which the fruit fly was a member. When he was unable to find enough reference material in the public library his biology teacher managed to get him special permission to use the library at New York University, and several evenings a week he rode the subway into Manhattan and took copious notes, some of which he understood.

  One night, conscious of the fact that the research paper was due in ten days, he sat at a table in the N.Y.U. library and worked feverishly,
in more ways than one. He was tired and he felt as though he was coming down with a cold. His head felt warm and his throat was beginning to hurt when he swallowed. He sat and took notes about the prodigious reproductive efforts of the fruit fly and some of its competitors:

  According to estimates by Hodge, the San Jose scale insect produces 400 to 500 young. The Dobson fly lays 2,000 to 3,000 eggs. Social insects are heavy egg-layers. The queen honeybee may lay 2,000 or 3,000 eggs a day. The queen hermit is able to lay 60 eggs per second until several million are laid.

  Reading about all that laying made him feel a little horny. The only girl within examining distance had bad teeth and a thick layer of dandruff on her shapeless black sweater. Discouraged, he took more notes:

  Herrick has reported that a pair of flies beginning in April, would by August have produced 191,010,000,000,000,000,000. If all of the offspring were to survive through some freak of nature, allowing one-eighth of a cubic inch per fly, there would be enough of them to cover the earth 47 feet deep.

  He sat and thought of what it would be like to have the world covered by forty-seven feet of flies, all buzzing and spreading germs and screwing so that the tide of flies would continue to rise. Or do flies screw? It took him twelve minutes to look up the fact that the females laid eggs and the males fertilized them. Was that kind of sexual arrangement fun? Was there joy in the act of fertilization, or was the male fly a kind of sexual milkman, making his regular deliveries as expected? He tried to find out in the index of the reference book. He looked under SEX, under INTERCOURSE, under MATING and even, although without much hope, under PLEASURE. But he found nothing which shed enlightenment. The process took until ten o’clock, however, and as the library closed at that hour he turned in the book and took the elevator down. The weather was foul; a light drizzling rain had melted the piles of dirty snow along the curb until they were shallow humps, more dirt than snow. Evening classes had let out, and he was moved toward the subway kiosk by a surging human tide. It pressed toward the narrow subway entrance, crowding and pushing. He stood on the fringes of the mob, crushed chest to chest against an attractive chestnut-haired girl in a brown suede coat and a beret. For a moment he forgot his cold. It was a nice situation to be in. She looked into his eyes and then at the books he clutched.

  “What are you, a child prodigy?”

  Her voice was amused. He leaned back, trying to avoid contact with her, hating her suddenly for not being three years younger. The mob surged, but they got no closer to the subway entrance. From the corner of his eye he saw the Fifth Avenue bus approaching less than a block away. He elbowed aside a fat, bearded young man and dashed for the bus, thinking to take it to 34th Street, where the subway station was sure to be less crowded.

  But as they passed 20th Street and out of habit he glanced up at the loft which housed Kind Foundations, he saw that the two front windows were lighted. It could mean only that his father was working late, and his hand shot up and pulled the buzzer cord, happy to exchange the prospect of a long standing subway ride for a relaxed trip in the Chevrolet.

  The building was oppressively hot, as it always was in winter. The elevator was turned off, and by the time he had climbed the three steep flights of stairs to the fourth floor he was perspiring heavily and his throat felt sore. He pushed open the door to Kind Foundations and stood in the threshold and watched his father, naked except for a tee shirt, making love to Carla Salva on the worn couch he vacuum-cleaned so industriously every Saturday morning. One of Carla’s long thin feet was on the floor, resting on the crumpled silk of her panties. The other foot moved gently against the back of his father’s calf. Her Max Factor mouth was slightly open and her thin nostrils were dilated. She made no sound under his father’s athletic efforts. Her eyes were closed. She opened them lazily, looked straight at Michael, and screamed.

  He turned and crashed down the dark hallway to the stairs. “Who was that?” he heard his father’s voice demand.

  And then: “Oh, my God.”

  He was on the second floor landing when Abe began to shout down the stairwell. “Mike. Mike, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  He continued to crash down the stairs until he was out of the hot building and into the icy rain. Then he ran. He sprawled on the ice as a taxi horn blared and a driver cursed him in Southern tones, and he got to his feet and began running again, leaving his books and his notes where they had fallen.

  When he reached 34th Street he was sick and out of breath and he stumbled toward the subway kiosk.

  He didn’t remember how he got home. But he knew that he was in bed. His throat felt as though it had been rubbed with a potato grater, his head throbbed, and he burned. He felt like a bunsen burner; when they turn me off, he thought, nothing will be left but the container.

  Sometimes he dreamed of Carla, of her open mouth, slack and wet, and of the thin nostrils dilating in passion like the slow motion of butterfly wings. He was conscious that he had imagined her that way recently, and he was ashamed.

  Sometimes he dreamed of the fruit fly, reproducing with magnificent ease, gaining far more efficiency out of the mating procedure than man, but no ecstasy, poor thing.

  Sometimes he heard a drum, beating up into his ear through his hot pillow.

  Two days after he became ill he came to his senses. His father was sitting on a chair next to the bed. Abe was unshaven and his hair wasn’t combed.

  “How do you feel?”

  “All right,” Michael said hoarsely. He remembered everything as if the scenes were sculpted in blocks of crystal and set before him in a row.

  Abe looked at the door and wet his lips with his tongue. In the kitchen Michael could hear his mother doing the dinner dishes.

  “There are lots of things you don’t understand, Michael.”

  “Go play with your weights.”

  The hoarseness made him sound on the verge of tears. The fact that this was so filled him with rage. What he felt was not sorrow but icy hate, and he wanted his father to know.

  “You’re a kid. You’re a kid, and you shouldn’t judge. I’ve been a good father and a good husband. But I’m human.”

  His head hurt and his mouth was dry. “Don’t you ever try to tell me what to do,” he said. “Never again.”

  His father leaned forward and looked at him piercingly. “Some day you’ll know. When you’ve been married twenty years.”

  They could hear his mother put down her dish and start toward his bedroom. “Abe?” she called. “Abe, he’s up? How is he?” She came hurrying into the room, a fat woman with sagging breasts and thick ankles and ridiculous red hair. Just to look at her made everything worse.

  He turned his face to the wall.

  8

  The girl in the apartment across the hall was Miriam Steinmetz. One spring evening during his last year at the High School of Science Mimi and he lay together on the thick rug of the Steinmetz living room and read the Summer Help Wanted columns of The New York Times.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find jobs at the same resort?” Mimi asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Actually, the thought made him want to shudder. He felt the necessity to go someplace new that summer, but more than that he felt the need to meet new people, to look at faces that were unfamiliar. Mimi’s face, although pretty and vivacious, was hardly unfamiliar. The Steinmetzes had been living in apartment 3-D when the Kinds had moved into apartment 3-C; she largely ignored Michael until when he was sixteen he accepted an invitation to join the Mu Sigma high school fraternity. She was an Iota Phi girl and the advantages were obvious, so she adopted him. She took him to sorority dances and he took her to fraternity dances and after some of their dates they necked with an almost asexual casualness. The trouble with his relationship with Mimi was that he knew more about her than he knew about his sister Ruthie. He had seen her with her hair just washed and ratty looking, with salve all over her face to fight acne, and with one foot immersed in steaming water to cure an infected toe
. She could never be Cleopatra to his Mark Antony. There wasn’t a shred of mystery left to nurture such an arrangement.

  “This one looks good,” she said.

  The ad was for kitchen help at a hotel in the Catskills. He was more interested in the advertisement directly below it. It was for kitchen help at a place called The Sands, outside of Falmouth, Massachusetts.

  “Shall we both answer this one?” Mimi asked. “It would be fun to spend the summer in the Catskills.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You write down the ad number and I’ll take the paper home.”

  She scribbled the symbols on a pad at the telephone stand and then came to him and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “I enjoyed the movie.”

  Gallantry forced him to take the initiative. He tried to kiss her with as much abandon as Clark Gable had kissed Claudette Colbert in the picture they had just seen together. Involuntarily his hands became interested in her sweater. She offered no resistance. She had breasts like small pillows that would some day grow up to be large pillows.

  “That scene where they hung the blanket between them in the motel was a riot,” she said in his ear.

  “Would you sleep with a guy if you loved him?”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “You mean really sleep with him? Or make love?”

  “Make love.”

  “I think it would be very foolish. Certainly not until you were engaged to be married. . . . And even then—why not wait?”

  Two minutes later he was letting himself into his own apartment across the hall. Careful not to make any unnecessary noise that might waken the family, he got out pen and stationery and wrote a letter of application to The Sands.

  There was a car waiting at the bus station in Falmouth. The driver was a dour, white-haired little man who said his name was Jim Ducketts.

  “Expected you in on the other bus,” he said accusingly.

  The Sands Hotel was on the waterfront, a large meandering white structure ringed by wide porches facing landscaped lawns and a white-sanded private beach.

  There was a bunkhouse at the rear of the hotel property for the hired help. Ducketts pointed to a rickety iron cot.