The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “So, the American success story,” Abe said. “I work hard all my life, I save my money, and in my middle age I buy my daughter a peasant.”

  He gave them a choice of a large wedding or a small family chupeh plus three thousand dollars with which to start their married life in Palestine. Saul took visible pleasure in refusing the money. “Everything we ever need will be given to us by the kibbutz. Everything we have will be owned by the kibbutz. So save your dollars, please.” He would have preferred a chupeh to a formal ceremony but Ruthie overruled him, accepting a wedding at the Waldorf, small but very elegant, as a last wallowing in luxury. It cost twenty-four hundred dollars. Saul agreed to accept the other six hundred dollars in the name of the kibbutz. It became the basis of a larger fund that grew out of wedding presents which either came in as cash or were exchanged, since there are not many gifts suitable for a bride and groom about to start their life together in a socialized desert village. Michael gave Ruth an antique chamber pot and added twenty dollars to the kibbutz fund. At the wedding he drank too much champagne and danced a medley of numbers with his right leg between Mimi Steinmetz’s thighs, bringing a flush into her high-boned cheeks and a sparkle into her kitten’s eyes.

  The ceremony was performed by Rabbi Joshua Greenberg of Sons of Jacob Synagogue. He was a spare, well-dressed man with a carefully trimmed goatee, a silky declamation style, and a habit of rolling his rs in moments of high emotion, as when he asked Ruthie if she would love, honor-r-r, and obey. In the middle of the ceremony Michael found himself comparing Rabbi Greenberg to Rabbi Max Gross. Both of them were Orthodox, but there the similarity ceased with an almost comical abruptness. Rabbi Greenberg enjoyed a salary of thirteen thousand dollars a year. His services were attended by well-dressed middle-class men who grumbled when it came time to make donations to the shul but who made them nevertheless. He drove a four-door Plymouth sedan which he traded for a new car every two years. He and his wife and their plump daughter spent three weeks every summer at a kosher resort in the Catskills, where he paid their bill in part by conducting services on shabbos. When they entertained in their Queens apartment, which was in a new co-operative building, the linens were snowy and the silver service was sterling.

  Let’s face it, Michael told himself, watching as the Rabbi gave the nuptial cup of wine first to Ruthie and then to Saul, compared to Rabbi Greenberg, Rabbi Gross is a shabby bum.

  And then the glass, wrapped in a napkin to catch the flying shards, was shattered under Saul’s piledriver heel and his sister kissed the stranger and people surged forward. Mazel tov!

  Not content with killing Michael’s people, Hitler succeeded in ruining his sex life. The hat industry began to manufacture military caps for the Army and the Navy and the union ejected the Communists and refused to picket defense plants, so Farley no longer traveled to Danbury and Edna never again invited him to her apartment. Finally, at their request, on a cold Friday morning he accompanied them to City Hall and witnessed their marriage. He gave them a sterling tray he couldn’t afford, with a small card on which he had written “Knowing you has meant one of the most important experiences in my life.” Farley raised his bushy eyebrows and said Michael would have to come to dinner. Edna blushed and frowned and crushed the tray against her breasts. After that he saw very little of the Farleys, even in the Student Union. Eventually the episode in Edna’s bed became like an incident he had read in a book and he was once more a virgin, restless and desiring.

  One of his friends, a fellow named Maury Silverstein, was trying for a place on the Queens College boxing team. One evening Michael went to the gym with him and sparred. Maury was built like Tony Galento, but he was no wild-swinging ox, his left flickered in and out like the tongue of a snake and his right was a rocker. The idea of Michael’s putting the gloves on with him was to give him practice against a taller boxer with a lot more reach. Silverstein treated Michael carefully at first, and for several minutes it was an enjoyable experience. Then Maury became overenthusiastic; the rhythm of the thudding gloves carried him past his restraints. All at once Michael was aware of leather slamming into his body from all directions. Something exploded on his mouth. He raised his gloves and another explosion in his midriff sent him crashing to the mat.

  He sat there and gasped. Above him, Silverstein rocked on the balls of his feet, his eyes veiled and his gloved hands still raised. Then slowly the veil lifted and his hands were lowered; he looked down at Michael in astonishment.

  “Thanks, killer,” Michael said.

  Silverstein knelt, babbling apologies. In the shower Michael felt sick, but afterward, toweling in the locker room, he caught sight of his face in the mirror and felt a thrill of strange pride. He had a fat lip and a red welt under his left eye. At Maury’s insistence they went to a walkdown cellar joint not far from the campus, a place called The Pig’s Eye. Their waitress was a skinny redhead with improbably tilted breasts and slightly buck teeth. As she served them she looked at Michael’s battered face and shook her head.

  “Some ape made a pass at a lovely waitress and I flattened him.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said wearily. “Anyway, he should have murdered you, buttinsky. Can’t waitresses have any fun?”

  When she brought the second round of beers she dipped some foam from the top of his glass and touched her cold, wet fingertip to the bruise on his cheek.

  “What time do you finish work?” he asked.

  “In twenty minutes.” They watched her little behind waggle as she walked away.

  Silverstein was trying not to reveal that he was excited. “Listen,” he said, “my folks are visiting my sister in Hartford. The apartment’s empty, the whole apartment. Maybe she can get another pig for me.”

  Her name was Lucille. While Michael telephoned to tell his mother that he would not be home, Lucille got another girl for Maury, a short blonde named Stella. She had thick ankles and she chewed gum, but Maury appeared to be eminently satisfied. In the taxi on the way to the apartment the girls sat in their laps and Michael noticed a small wen on the back of Lucille’s neck. In the elevator they kissed and when she opened her mouth he tasted onion on the tip of her tongue.

  From a closet Maury produced a bottle of Scotch and after two drinks together they separated, Maury and his girl going into what Michael assumed was the bedroom of the elder Silversteins, since it was adorned with a large double bed. Lucille and Michael settled down on the living-room couch. He became conscious of blackheads on her chin. The girl lifted her face for his kiss. In a little while she clicked off the light.

  From the other room there came the sound of Silverstein’s groan and a rush of giggling.

  “Now, Lucille?” Stella shouted.

  “Not now,” Lucille called irritably.

  He found that he had to think of other women, Edna Roth, Mimi Steinmetz, even Ellen Trowbridge. Throughout the entire subsequent act she lay motionless, nasally humming. April in Paris, he thought in bewilderment as he labored. When it was over they lay half-dozing until Lucille wriggled from under him.

  “Now,” she called gaily, walking naked toward the bedroom. As she entered, Stella slipped out. The maneuver was accomplished with the ease of practice at many similar parties, he realized suddenly. The switching excited him. But as the short, plump Stella came to him his fingers touched doughy flesh and he was struck by odor, not of woman but of unwashed flesh, and he was suddenly impotent.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. His clothes were in heap on the carpet at the foot of the couch. He picked them up and walked carefully through the dark apartment until he came to the foyer, where he dressed quickly, not bothering to lace his shoes.

  “Hey,” the girl called as he let himself out of the apartment. He took the elevator down and walked quickly away from the building. It was 2 A.M. He saw no taxis until he had walked more than half an hour; by that time he was only two blocks from home, but he took the cab anyway.

  Happily, his parents were sleeping when he let himself into
the Kind apartment. In the bathroom he brushed his teeth for a long time and then took a scalding shower, using a great deal of soap.

  He felt no urge to sleep. In pajamas and robe he crept out of the apartment and as softly as a thief climbed the stairs to the roof. Walking on tiptoe in order not to wake the Waxmans, who lived in the top rear apartment, he went to a chimney and sat down with his back to the bricks.

  He could taste spring in the wind. The sky was studded with stars and he held his head back and stared at them until the breeze made his eyes fill and the glowing white points of light circled and swam in his vision. There has to be more to it than that, he told himself. Maury had called the girls pigs, but if so he and Maury had been pigs, too. He swore that he would have no more sex until he fell in love. The stars were unusually bright. He smoked a cigarette and watched them, trying to imagine how they looked without the interfering lights of a city. What held them up there, he wondered, and then the automatic answers came; he remembered vaguely about mutual attractions, the force of gravity, Newton’s First and Second Laws of Motion. But there were so many thousands, scattered at such vast distances, and so balanced, behaving so steadily, circling precisely in their orbits like the works of a giant, beautifully constructed clock. The laws in the textbooks weren’t enough, there had to be something else, otherwise for him the beautiful complexity was meaningless and without passion, like loveless sex.

  He started another cigarette with the old one and then flipped the butt over the edge of the roof. It glowed like a nova as it fell but he didn’t notice it. He stood with his head thrown back, looking at the stars, trying to see something far beyond them.

  That afternoon when he opened the door of the Shaarai Shomayim Synagogue an old man was talking quietly with Max Gross at the study table. Michael sat on a wooden folding chair in the rear row and waited patiently until the old man sighed, patted the rabbi’s shoulder, struggled to his feet and left the shul. Then Michael walked to the table. Rabbi Gross peered up at him. “So?” he said. Michael said nothing. The rabbi continued to stare. Then he nodded in satisfaction.

  “So.” He reached into the mound of books on the table and selected a Gemara and the Pentateuchal commentary of Rashi. “Now we will study,” he said kindly.

  18

  It was five months before he broke his vow of chastity. Accompanying Maury to a bar mitzvah in Hartford—the bar mitzvah of Maury’s brother-in-law’s sister’s son—he met the sister of the confirmee, a slim girl with black hair and very smooth white skin and thin, waxy nostrils. When they danced at the party that evening he noticed that her hair smelled sweet and clean, like soapy water that had dried in the sun. The two of them left the house and he drove Maury’s Plymouth into a country road off the Wilbur Cross Parkway. He pulled the car under a huge chestnut tree whose lowest branches brushed the car roof and they kissed a lot until things happened without plot or plan. Afterward, sharing a cigarette, he told her that he had broken a promise to himself that this would never happen again until it was with a girl he loved.

  He expected her to laugh but the girl seemed to think this was very sad. “You mean it?” she said. “Really?”

  “Really. And I don’t love you,” he said, adding hastily, “how could I? I mean, I hardly know you.”

  “I don’t love you, either. But I like you a lot,” she said. “Won’t that do?” They both agreed it was the next best thing.

  That summer, the summer of his junior year, he worked as an assistant in a laboratory on campus, washing glassware, wiping down and storing microscopes, setting up equipment for experiments whose purposes or outcome he never learned. At least three times a week he studied with Rabbi Gross. Abe questioned him eagerly when he came home from work. “So, how’s Einstein?”

  His answers failed to disguise his lack of enthusiasm, his disappointed disinterest toward physics and science in general. Several times on these occasions he felt that Abe had something to say to him, but his father always stopped before he began and Michael didn’t press him. Finally, on a Sunday morning two weeks before school reopened, at Abe’s suggestion they drove to Sheepshead Bay, where they rented a boat and bought a shoebox full of wicked-looking seaworms. When Michael had rowed out far enough to satisfy his father they dropped bottom rigs and the flounders cooperated with Abe’s desire to talk by not even nibbling.

  “So what’s going to happen next year at this time?”

  Michael opened two bottles of beer and handed one to his father. They were not very cold and the foam spilled over. “To whom, Pop?”

  “To you, that’s to whom.” He looked at Michael. “You spent three years studying physics, all about how everything is made up of little pieces that you can’t see. And now you’re going back for another year. But you don’t like it. I can tell.” He drank some beer. “Right? Or Wrong?”

  “Right.”

  “So, what will it be? Medicine? Law? You got the marks. You got the brains. I got enough money to make a doctor or a lawyer. Take your pick.”

  “No, Pop.” Two desperate jerks pulled the line in his hands and he hauled dripping lengths of it into the boat, glad for something to do.

  “Michael, you’re older now. Maybe you understand certain things better. Have you forgiven me?”

  Damn it, he thought savagely. “For what?”

  “You know very well what I’m talking about. For the girl.”

  There was nowhere to look but the water, with the bright sun reflecting to hurt his eyes. “Forget that. It doesn’t do any good to hang on to things like that.”

  “No. I must ask you. Have you forgiven me?”

  “I’ve forgiven you. Now—let it go.”

  “Listen. Listen to me.” He could hear the relief in his father’s voice, the excitement and the rising hope. “This shows how close we really are, you and me, to be able to survive something like that. We got a business in our family that’s always given us the best of everything. A good business.”

  At the end of the line was a fish the size of a dinner plate. When Michael hauled it into the boat it thrashed, knocking over the bottle of beer and sending foaming liquid spilling onto one of his sneakers.

  “Once I thought I could do it,” Abe said. “But I’m of the old school, I don’t know big business. I got to admit it. But you—you could go to Harvard Business for a year, come back full of modern methods, and Kind Foundations could be a leader in the industry. What I always dreamed of.”

  To control the flopping of the fish Michael placed the foot with the beer-wet sneaker on the flounder’s mottled brown flatness, feeling the fluttering spasms through the thin rubber sole. The fish was hooked deeply. Its white, blind side was down, and both dark goggle-eyes looked up at him, still bright and unglazed.

  Michael spoke the words quickly. “Don’t Pop. I’m sorry.” He started to twist out the hook, hoping that it wouldn’t hurt but feeling the tearing of the flesh as the barb pulled free.

  “I’m going to be a rabbi,” he said.

  19

  Temple Emanuel of Miami Beach was a large brick building with white Georgian columns and wide steps of white marble. Over the years the crystals in the marble had been worn by the feet of worshipers until they were highly polished, causing the stairs to glitter in the strong Florida sun. Within the building there was air conditioning that was almost noiseless, a sanctuary of seemingly endless rows of red plush seats, a sound-proofed ballroom, a complete kitchen, an incomplete library of Jewish reading, and a small but carpeted office for the assistant rabbi.

  Michael sat in misery behind a polished desk that was only a few square inches smaller than the desk in the larger office down the hall, the domain of Rabbi Joshua L. Flagerman. He frowned as the telephone rang. “Hello?”

  “May I speak to the rabbi?”

  “Rabbi Flagerman?” He hesitated. “He isn’t here,” he said finally. He gave the caller the rabbi’s home telephone number. The man thanked him and hung up.

  He had been on the job f
or three weeks, or just long enough to ascertain that he had made a mistake in becoming a rabbi. His five years as a rabbinical student at the Jewish Institute of Religion had sadly misled him.

  He had shone at the rabbinical school. “Like a jewel among the Reform pebbles,” Max Gross commented bitterly on one occasion. Gross didn’t try to hide his sense of betrayal over the fact that Michael had chosen Reform as the vehicle for his rabbinate. They remained bound by spiritual ties, but their relationship never became what it might have been if Michael had become an Orthodox rabbi. He had found it difficult to explain his choice. He knew only that the world was changing quickly and Reform seemed to him the best available way to handle the change.

  During the summers he worked in a settlement house in lower Manhattan, trying to throw straws of faith to children who were drowning in invisible seas. Some of them were kids whose fathers were away in the military and whose mothers worked double shifts in war plants or brought home a variety of unfamiliar, very temporary “uncles” in uniform. He learned to recognize the bouncy walk and the dilated pupils of the teenage junkie who was high, and the spastic limb control and the jerky gum-chewing of the tortured juvenile who was hung up without a supply. He watched childhood being ground down by ugliness. Once in a very great while he was conscious that he had helped someone in a very small way. The realization prevented him from quitting in favor of a counseling job at a summer camp.