The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  Kiss my children for me. I love you so much.

  Leslie

  He read it many times.

  It was remarkable that she had forgotten the boy’s last name. It was Phillipson. Roger Phillipson.

  She had said it to him only once, but he had never forgotten it. Seven years ago, awaiting dinner at the home of a rabbinical colleague in Philadelphia, he had chanced to look through the tenth yearbook of his host’s Harvard class. The name had flown out of the page at him from beneath a picture that smiled with insurance-man sincerity. Partner, Folger, Phillipson, Paine & Yeager Insurance Agency, Walla Walla, Wash. Wife, the former something or other of Springfield, Mass. Three daughters, nordic names, ages 6, 4, 1½. Hobbies, sailing, fishing, hunting, statistics. Clubs, University, Lions, Rotary, two or three others. Life’s goal, to play touch football at the fiftieth class reunion.

  A few weeks later, during Yom Kippur services at his own temple, he had repented, seeking atonement in his empty belly and asking God’s forgiveness for the feeling he had experienced toward the smiling picture. He had prayed for Roger Phillipson, wishing him long life and short memory.

  13

  The letter heightened the concern he felt for Max.

  That night he lay in the brass bed, trying to remember what his son had looked like as a baby and as a little boy. Max had been a plain child, escaping ugliness only when he smiled. His ears had sprung from his head like—what were those things, sonar receivers?—instead of lying flat. His cheeks had been full and soft.

  And today, Michael thought, you go to his wallet to borrow a stamp and you discover that he’s a hulking male with sexual desires. He brooded.

  His imagination was not dampened by the fact that Max and Dessamae Kaplan had entered the house twenty minutes before and were making noises in the living room. Low laughter. And a variety of other sounds. What is the sound of a wallet leaving a pocket? He found himself straining his ears to catch it. Keep your wallet in your pocket, my son, he pleaded silently. And then he started to perspire. If you must be that stupid, my son, he thought, be sure and take your wallet out of your pocket.

  Sixteen, he thought.

  Finally he got up and put on his robe and slippers. He started down the stairs. He could hear them plainly now.

  “I don’t want to,” Dessamae said.

  “Come on, Dess.”

  He stopped, halfway down, and stood on the dark stairs, frozen. In a second he could hear a small sound, regular and rhythmic. He wanted to run away.

  “That feels so good. . . . Ah, that’s good.”

  “Like this?”

  “Uh-huh. . . . Hey—”

  She laughed, a throaty sound. “Now you scratch my back, Max.”

  Ah, you dirty old man, he told himself. You filthy middle-aged voyeur. He hurried down the stairs, stumbling a little, and pushed into the living room, blinking against the light.

  They sat cross-legged on the rug in front of the fireplace, Dessamae holding the ivory Chinese backscratcher.

  “Hello, Rabbi,” she said.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He said hello. He couldn’t look at either of them. He went into the kitchen and brewed some tea. They came in and joined him for the second cup.

  When Max left to take her home he went up the stairs and crawled into the brass bed, falling into sleep like a man dropping into a warm bath.

  The telephone woke him. He recognized Dan Bernstein’s voice.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. That is, I don’t think so. Is Leslie there with you?”

  “No,” he said, unpleasantly awake.

  “She walked out of here a couple of hours ago.”

  He sat up on the edge of the bed.

  “There was a disturbance. A patient named Mrs. Serapin cut up a patient named Mrs. Birnbaum with one of those tiny pocket knives. Lord knows where she got it. We’re trying to find out.” Dr. Bernstein paused and then said quickly, “The incident has nothing to do with Leslie. But it was the only time she could have gotten out; it must have been then.”

  “How’s Mrs. Birnbaum?”

  “She’ll be all right. These things happen.”

  “Why didn’t you call me right away?” he asked.

  “Well, they just now discovered she was missing. She’d have been there by now if she had headed home,” the psychiatrist said thoughtfully. “Even if she walked.”

  “Is she in any danger?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Dr. Bernstein said. “I saw her today. She is absolutely not suicidal. Or dangerous to anybody. She’s a pretty healthy woman, in fact. She would have been sent home in two or three weeks.”

  He groaned. “When she comes back, will this mean a longer hospitalization?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” Dr. Bernstein said. “Sometimes patients take French leave for healthy reasons. Let’s see what she had on her mind.”

  “I’d better go look for her.”

  “I have a couple of attendants out. Of course, by now she may be on a bus or train.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Why would she want to do that?”

  “I don’t know why she left,” Dr. Bernstein said. “We’ll see. We notify the police as a routine procedure.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I’ll call you when we have word,” Dan said.

  When he had hung up Michael dressed warmly and took the large flashlight down from the closet shelf.

  Rachel and Max were asleep in their beds. He walked into the boy’s room. “Son? Wake up,” he said. He touched Max’s shoulder and the boy opened his eyes. “I’m going out. On temple business. Take care of your sister.”

  Max nodded, half-comprehending.

  Downstairs, the hall clock said twelve-thirty. He put on his arctics on the front porch, then he walked around the front of the house to the car, the boots making little squeaking noises in the crisp snow.

  There was a sound.

  “Leslie?” he said. He switched on the flash. A cat sprang from the trash barrel and fled into the darkness.

  He backed the car out of the driveway and drove the entire route between the house and the hospital, very slowly, stopping three times to beam his light at shadows.

  He passed nobody walking, and only two cars. Somebody might have given her a lift, he thought.

  When he reached the hospital he parked overlooking the lake and floundered through the snow to the shore and then onto the ice. Two winters before, two college boys on a fraternity initiation had wandered blindfolded across the lake and had crashed through soft ice and one of them had died; Jake Lazarus’ nephew, he remembered. But the ice seemed hard and thick; he played the electric torch across the white expanse and saw nothing.

  On a sudden hunch he returned to the car and drove into town to the temple. But Beth Sholom was without light. The sanctuary was empty.

  He went home.

  In the house he looked through every room, one by one. In the living room he picked up the backscratcher. We were never that young, he thought wearily.

  The telephone didn’t ring.

  The letter from Columbia was on the mantel. It reminded him of Phillipson’s Harvard yearbook but he picked it up anyway and read it through, then he sat down at his desk and in a little while he began to write. It was something to do.

  Columbia College Alumni Association

  116th Street and Broadway

  New York, New York 10027

  Gentlemen:

  The following is my autobiographical contribution to the Quarter-Century Book of the class of ’41:

  It is incredible to think that almost twenty-five years have vanished since we all left Morningside Heights.

  I am a rabbi. I have filled Reform pulpits in Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where I now live in Woodborough with my wife, the former Leslie Rawlins (Wellesley, ’46) of Hartford, Connecticut, and our son Max, 16, and our daughter Rachel, 8.

 
; I find myself looking with surprising anticipation toward the twenty-fifth reunion. The present is so busy, we do not often enough have opportunity to look back at the past. . . .

  14

  Queens, New York

  February 1939

  One wintry afternoon during Michael’s sophomore year at Columbia his mother gave careful instructions to Lew, her beauty operator of many years service, and he applied foul-smelling liquids which changed her hennaed hair to gray. Her entire life took a subtle shift. Perhaps Abe Kind subsequently gave up chasing other women because he was putting his youth behind him; Michael preferred to think it was because his mother had come to terms with herself. For one thing, she used less makeup, the gray hair surrounded a face instead of a mask. She learned to knit, and the whole family began to wear cashmere sweaters and argyle socks. Both Abe and Dorothy started to go to services with their son on Friday nights. The Kinds became, for the first time in any real sense, a family.

  One Sunday morning while his parents slept late Michael dragged himself out of bed to find his sister, still in her pajamas and robe, curled up on the living-room sofa eating a bagel and cream cheese while she did The New York Times puzzle. He took the book section and the News of the Week in Review and fell into a chair. For ten minutes they sat and read and he listened to Ruthie eat the bagel and cheese. Then he couldn’t stand it any longer and he got up and brushed his teeth and spread cheese on a bagel of his own. She looked at him while he ate and ignored her. Finally he looked up. She had his mother’s eyes, but they contained his father’s intelligence.

  “I almost didn’t come back from Palestine,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked warily.

  “I met a boy there. He asked me to marry him. I wanted to, very much. Would you have missed me, if I hadn’t come back?”

  He took another bite and studied her. She was telling the truth, he decided. If she had been giving him the business she would have done it more dramatically.

  “If you wanted to, why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’m no good. Because I’m a spoiled, middle-class bag from Queens instead of a pioneer woman.”

  He asked what the Palestinian was like. She got up and padded to her room in her bare feet. Michael heard the click of her purse opening. When she came back she held a snapshot of a young man with wavy brown hair and a crisp brown beard. He wore only khaki shorts and sneakers and he stood next to a tractor, one hand on it and his head cocked to one side, his eyes half-closed against the sun. He wasn’t smiling. His body was tanned and muscular, a little on the skinny side. Michael didn’t know whether he liked the man in the picture or not.

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  “Saul Moreh. It used to be Samuel Polansky. He’s from London, England. He’s been in Palestine four years.”

  “He changed his name; he’s not in the foundations business?”

  She didn’t smile. “He’s very idealistic,” she said. “He wanted a name that would mean something. He chose Saul because when he first got to Palestine he spent three months as a soldier fighting off Arab raiders. And Moreh because it means teacher and that’s what he wanted to be, that’s what he is.”

  Michael looked at the tractor. “Not a farmer?”

  She shook her head. “He teaches in the kibbutz school. The settlement is called Tikveh le’ Machar. It’s in the middle of the desert with only a few friendly Arabs for neighbors. The sun is so strong it hurts your eyes. The sky hardly ever has clouds in it. The desert is nothing, just bleached sand and baked rocks, and the air is very dry. The only green is inside the irrigation ditches. If they stop flowing, the plants shrivel and die.”

  There was a silence. He saw how serious she was, and he didn’t know what to say to her.

  “There’s one telephone, located in the kibbutz office. Sometimes it works. You should see the toilets. Like something out of ancient American history.” She picked a flake of bagel crust from her robe and turned it over and over, studying it. “He asked me to marry him, and I wanted to so badly. But I couldn’t stand the toilets, so I came home.” She looked at him and smiled. “Isn’t that a hell of a reason for turning down a proposal?”

  “What are you going to do?” She had quit school after studying merchandising for two and a half years at N.Y.U. Now she was working as a secretary at the Columbia Broadcasting System.

  “I don’t know. I’m so mixed up. For more than a year he’s been writing to me. I answer all his letters. I can’t stop.” She looked at him. “You’re my brother. Tell me what to do.”

  “Nobody can tell you what to do, Ruthie. You know that.” He cleared his throat. “What about all the guys you date all the time? Isn’t there anybody who . . .?”

  Her grin was sad. “You know most of the boys I date. I’m destined to marry someone who writes commercial continuity. Or a customer’s man. Or somebody with a father who owns an automobile agency. Somebody with heartburn, somebody who can give me a toilet that plays Brahms when you sit on the Church seat and sprays Chanel when you turn the golden knob to flush it.”

  He stared at his sister, seeing her for a moment as she appeared to other men. A clear-eyed brunette with a nice smile that showed even, white teeth. A high-breasted girl with a good body. A beautiful woman. He sat down next to her and for the first time since their childhood he put his arm around her. “If you do,” he said, “I’ll come over all the time, to use the john.”

  His own romantic life was scarcely more auspicious than Ruthie’s. He dated Mimi Steinmetz because she was there, right across the hall. Every once in a while they engaged in schoolboy-schoolgirl sexual play, her hands holding him away, but reluctantly, pleading to be overruled. He did no overruling, sensing that what she was experiencing was not so much desire to have him as it was desire to own him. He had no wish to own or to be owned.

  His sexual energy had no real outlet and he became restless and nervous. Sometimes while he studied late at night he paced. The Friedmans, who lived in the apartment directly below the Kinds, complained hesitantly to Dorothy. So Michael started taking long outdoor walks. His feet ate up the pavement near the campus, block after block of Manhattan. He walked in Queens. One day he took the elevated into Brooklyn, at first thinking to get off at the old Borough Park neighborhood but instead remaining glued to his seat until the train was well past it, getting off in Bensonhurst and walking past block after block of old attached houses. Walking became like liquor and he became a drunkard, spending time at the secret vice when his friends were sleeping or listening to music or studying or trying to make a girl.

  One January night after studying until ten o’clock he left the Butler Library and started to walk to the subway. It was snowing, fat white flakes that masked the world. He walked past the subway kiosk like a man in a dream. In ten minutes he was lost but he didn’t care. He turned a corner into a dark, narrow street, too wide to be an alley but a place of no light, broken tenements on both sides. A cop stood in the single island of light under a corner street lamp, big and blue-shouldered with his chapped red face turned up at the falling snow. He nodded as Michael walked by.

  Halfway down the block Michael heard quick, light steps following him. His heart began to hammer and he turned, sorry he had been foolish enough to walk alone at night in Manhattan, then the man passed, quickly but close enough for Michael to barely see him. A short man, big-headed and bearded, snow sticking to his beard, large-nosed, eyes unseeing and half-closed, dark coat unbuttoned despite the temperature, ungloved hands clasped behind his back while he muttered softly to himself. Praying? Michael thought he heard Hebrew.

  In a few seconds Michael could no longer see him. He heard the attack rather than saw it: the sound of blows, the grunt of expelled air as they hit him in the stomach, the smack of fists.

  “POLICE!” Michael yelled. “POLICE!” Far down the street, the cop under the lamp turned and began to run. He was very fat and he lumbered with infinite slowness. Michael wanted to run t
o him and lead him by the hand, but there was no time. He ran forward instead, practically stumbling over them, two of them, kneeling over a still form.

  One of the kneeling figures rose silently and ran into the darkness. The other, closer, came at Michael, whose right fist rasped on the man’s cheek-stubble. Michael saw eyes full of hate and fear, a mashed nose, a thin mouth. Young, a black leather jacket. Leather gloves. One smashed into his mouth and he felt it with relief: no knife. In his left hand was Ferguson and Bruun’s Survey of American Civilization, weighing at least four pounds. He shifted it to his right hand and swung as hard as he could. The book smacked solidly and the assailant sprawled in the snow. “Prick!” he whispered in a half-sob. He scuttled a few feet on his hands and knees, rose and ran away.

  The short, bearded man on the ground was sitting up. His wind had been knocked out of him and his breath rattled in his throat as he sucked air. Finally he breathed deeply, and grinned, ducking his head at the textbook. “The power of the printed word.” His words were thick with accent.

  Michael helped him to his feet. A dark blob in the white snow turned out to be a yarmulka. It was full of snow. Snow and all, he stuffed it into his coat pocket with an embarrassed nod of thanks. “I was saying Shema. The evening prayer.”

  “I know.”

  Panting horribly, the police officer arrived. Michael told him what had happened, drinking the blood from his smashed mouth. The three men walked back into the pool of light beneath the street lamp. “Did you see their faces?” the policeman asked.

  The short man shook his head. “No.”

  Michael had seen a few features, blurred by motion. The cop asked if he could pick the man from a lineup. “I’m sure I couldn’t.”

  The officer sighed. “Might as well forget them, in that case. By now they’re far away. Probably from some other part of town. They get anything?”

  The bearded man had a dark bruise below his left eye. He reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out his fist. When he opened it, his palm contained a half-dollar, a quarter, and two nickels. “No,” he said.