The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  But when he got to the inn she was still there and there was no boy friend in sight, only Beerman. He had thinning hair and a sense of humor and a second-hand Buick, and the proud Marcuses had made him their son upon introduction. That night Leslie and Michael played bridge against the engaged couple, and Michael bid very badly, even getting his counting all mixed up, but nobody cared because they were drinking good brandy that Nathan Marcus had brought up out of his cellar, and laughing a great deal about things they couldn’t recall an hour later.

  Next morning when he appeared for breakfast, the girl was eating alone. She was wearing a cotton skirt and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that made him look away as if by reflex.

  “Morning. Where is everybody?”

  “Hi. Mrs. Marcus is training a new housekeeper. Mr. Marcus is off in the pickup, buying vegetables.”

  “And your hostess and her beau?”

  “They vant to be ah-lone,” she whispered.

  He grinned. “Can’t say that I blame them.”

  “Not at all.” She applied herself to her grapefruit.

  “Hey. Would you like to go fishin’?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. I’ve been giving Hebrew lessons to a little boy and he’s been giving fishing lessons to me. It’s opened up a whole new world.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Fine.” He threw another brief glance at her blouse. “Better wear old clothes. In places this country’s rough as a cob, as we people say.”

  He drove slowly toward Big Cedar Hill, making one stop at a river landing to buy a bucket of chub shiners. He had rolled all the windows down, and the warm spring air, exciting with the smell of melted ice, poured over them. The girl had changed into sneakers, jeans, and an old gray sweatshirt. Sitting beside him she yawned and stretched, grunting in unashamed pleasure.

  He drove over the suspension bridge and then parked. She carried a blanket and he took the bait and the fishing rod, walking after her along the narrow path that followed the stream-cut gulley. The path was lined with flowering shrubs, heavy with small red blossoms and larger white ones. Her jeans were faded from repeated washing until some of the threads were almost white, and they were very tight; he could imagine her wearing them while hunched over the handlebars of a bicycle, riding around the campus. The dappled sun set off little lights in her hair.

  They followed the path until the gulley’s sides leveled off and disappeared and the river widened and slowed in tempo, then finally they found a spot and spread the blanket on a grassy bluff overlooking a deep, clear pool at the foot of a riffle caused by drift logs. She watched in silence as he palmed a shiner from the bucket and plunged the hook in one side of its body and out the other, careful to place the hook above the spinal column so the bait would stay alive.

  “Does that hurt the minnow?”

  “I don’t know.” He swung it out into the center of the pool and they watched it for a few moments as it wriggled deeper, to where the water was slightly green and cold-looking and they could no longer see it.

  A blossom floated at the water’s edge and she leaned over the bluff to pick it up. Her sweatshirt rode up, revealing two inches of lower-back flesh and the first sweet spreading hint of hips above the top of her beltless jeans, then dropped back as she sat up holding the dripping flower, large and creamy-white but with one of its four petals broken. “What is it?” she asked, and looked at it with wonder when he told her it was dogwood.

  “My father used to tell me stories about the dogwood,” she said.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Religious ones. It was dogwood from which the Cross was fashioned. My father is a minister. Congregational.”

  “That’s nice.” He tugged experimentally on the line.

  “That’s what you think,” she said. “He was my minister, just as he was everybody’s, but he was so busy serving God and the people he never found time to be a father. If you ever have a daughter, Rabbi, watch out for that.”

  He started to reply but then he held up his hand and pointed to the floating line that was beginning to disappear beneath the surface, a few feet at a time, tugged by something unseen. He stood, reeling hard, and the fish broke the water, a good brassy-green fish about a foot long with a white belly and a broad tail that it walked on twice before shaking off the line and disappearing in the pool. He reeled in. “Hit it too soon and forgot to set the hook. My teacher would be ashamed.”

  She watched him rebait and cast. “I’m almost glad,” she said. “If I tell you something will you laugh?”

  He shook his head.

  “From the time I was fourteen until my senior year in high school, I was a vegetarian. I just decided that it was wicked to eat living things.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “I didn’t, really. But I began to go out with boys and a whole crowd of us would go out for dinner all the time and people would eat steak and I would munch salads and the smell would drive me out of my mind. So finally I ate meat, too. But I still hate the thought of living things suffering.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I understand. But you’d better hope that that living thing bites again, or one of his cousins. Because that fish is your lunch.”

  “Didn’t you bring us any other lunch?” she asked.

  He shook his head again.

  “Is there a restaurant around?”

  “Nope.”

  “My God,” she said, “you’re crazy. Suddenly I’m famished.”

  “Here, you try,” he said, handing her the rod. She stared into the water.

  “Kind is a funny name for a rabbi, isn’t it?” she said after a while.

  He shrugged.

  “I mean, it’s not very Jewish.”

  “It used to be Rivkind. My father changed it when I was a little boy.”

  “I like originals. I like Rivkind better.”

  “So do I.”

  “Why don’t you change it back?”

  “I’m used to it. That would be just as silly as his changing it in the first place, wouldn’t it?”

  She smiled. “I understand what you mean.” About two feet of the floating line went under suddenly and she placed her hand on his arm. But it was a false alarm, nothing else happened.

  “It must be very uncomfortable being Jewish, far worse than being a vegetarian,” she said, “with all those people hating you and knowing about the death camps and the ovens and all that.”

  “If you’re in the ovens or a concentration camp, yes, it must be uncomfortable,” he said. “Outside, anywhere else, it can be marvelous or I imagine it can be uncomfortable if you let it, if you let people ruin a good day for example by talking when they should be concentrating on filling their beautiful but hungry and rumbling bellies.”

  “My belly isn’t rumbling.”

  “I heard it distinctly, a most animal-like noise.”

  “I like you,” she said.

  “I like you, too. I have so much confidence in you I’m going to take a nap.” He lay back on the blanket and closed his eyes and amazingly, although he had not at all intended to do so, he fell asleep. When he awoke he had no idea how long he had slept, but the girl was sitting there in the same position, looking as though she hadn’t moved except that her sneakers were off. Her feet were well shaped but there were two little yellow callus ridges on her right heel and a small corn on the pinky of the same foot. She turned her head and caught him looking at her and she smiled and just then the fish struck and the reel gave a loud whir.

  “Here,” she said, shoving the rod toward him, but he pushed it back into her hands.

  “Count to ten, slowly,” he whispered. “Then give the rod a good jerk to set the hook.”

  She counted aloud, her voice shaking with nervous laughter after she reached four. When she said ten she yanked, hard. She began to reel in but the fish ran back and forth across the pool, not breaking water but fighting all the way, and in her excitement she dropped th
e rod and hauled the line in hand over hand until she had the fish out of the water, a beautiful bass, better than the first one, deep and broad and about fifteen inches long. The fish bounced and flapped on the blanket, trying to get back into the pool, and they both tried to grab it until it was trapped between them and his arms went around her and her hands were in his hair and he felt her breasts separate and alive against his chest and the fish even more alive between her breasts, while as he kissed her the laughter bubbled into his mouth from hers.

  He was afraid that Leslie would be angry with him when she saw Stan Goodstein’s hunting lodge at the top of the hill, but she began to laugh again when he showed her the shelves full of canned food. He set her to heating baked beans in the cabin while he took the carcass of the fish out to the pump behind the house. This was the part he had forgotten about when he had planned the day. Except for one small bass he had hooked with little Bobby Lilienthal two weeks before, the only fish he had ever caught were flounders which he and his father were accustomed to hand triumphantly to a neighborhood fish market clerk for conversion into food. He had watched Phyllis Lilienthal prepare her son’s catch for their supper and now, armed with a rusty scissors, pliers, and a dull butcher knife, he tried to remember what she had done, step by step.

  With the knife he made two deep but shaky incisions along each side of the spiny dorsal fin, then he used the pliers to yank it out. When Phyllis Lilienthal had done this the fish had proven to be still alive and it had leaped almost out of her hands. Recalling that, Michael had smashed the head of this fish against a rock with enough force to decapitate a man, but nevertheless the remembrance of the other fish’s gory revival made him shudder. He used the scissors to slit the white belly from the anal opening to the jaw. Then he peeled the skin off with the pliers and was amazed at the ease with which the viscera popped out, with very little tearing. He had trouble cutting off the head. As he struggled and sawed the knife back and forth the red eyes seemed to stare accusingly, but then the head dropped off and he ran the blade down the backbone and over the rib cage. If the resulting fillets were a bit ragged, they were nevertheless fillets. He rinsed them under the pump and carried them inside.

  “You look a little pale,” she said.

  Bobby’s mother had dipped her fish in beaten egg and cracker crumbs and then fried it in vegetable shortening. There was no egg and no shortening, but he found cracker crumbs and a bottle of olive oil. He was somewhat dubious about the omission and the substitution, but the fish came out looking like a Crisco ad in the Ladies’ Home Journal. She watched and listened intently when he said the brocha. The beans were good and the fish was flaky and wonderful, and she had opened another can on her own and heated its contents, zucchini, which he usually hated but now ate with relish. For dessert they opened a can of Elberta peaches, drinking the juice.

  “You know what I’d love to do?”

  “What?”

  “Give you a haircut.”

  “What else would you like to do?”

  “No. Really. You need one so badly. And the way your hair is, somebody who doesn’t know you might think you’re . . . you know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Queer.”

  “You hardly know me. How do you know I’m not?”

  “I know,” she said. She continued to tease and in a few moments he gave in and moved one of Stan Goodstein’s maple chairs outside into the sunshine. He removed his shirt and she went and got the scissors and began to snip and then he sniffed a couple of times and became angry.

  “For Christ’s sake, didn’t you wash it? It’s all fish.” He was ready to quit right there but she went back to the pump and rinsed the scissors and wiped them on the taut seat of her jeans and he told himself, I’ve never before had this much fun in all my life.

  He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun while the rusty scissors went snip-snip, snip-snip.

  “I’m very grateful to you,” she said.

  “What for?”

  “I responded when you kissed me. I responded very strongly.”

  “Is that so unusual?”

  “It is for me ever since I had an affair last summer,” she said.

  “Hey.” He leaned forward so that she had to stop cutting his hair. “You don’t want to be telling me about something like that.”

  She grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. “Yes, don’t you see, I haven’t been able to tell anybody, but this is so safe. This is practically made to order. You’re a rabbi and I’m a . . . a shickseh, and we’ll probably never see each other again. It’s even better than if I were a Catholic telling it to a priest hidden behind a screen in a confessional, because I know the kind of person you are.”

  He shrugged and sat quietly while the scissors snipped and the hair fell on his bare shoulders.

  “It was with this Harvard boy I didn’t even like. His name is Roger Phillipson, his mother went to school with my aunt, and to please them we went out a couple of times so we could both write home about it. I let him make love to me in his car, only once, just to see what is was like. It was simply awful. Nothing. Since then I haven’t enjoyed kissing a boy and I’ve never been able to feel passionate. I was very worried. But when you kissed me after I caught the fish I felt as passionate as anything.”

  He felt both flattered and extremely annoyed. “I’m glad,” he said. They were both silent.

  “You don’t like me as much as you did before I told you that,” she said.

  “It isn’t that. It’s simply that you caused me to feel like something that made the right color on your litmus paper.”

  “I apologize,” she said. “I’ve wanted to tell somebody about that ever since it happened. I grew so disgusted with myself afterwards, and so sorry that I had let my curiosity get the better of me.”

  “You shouldn’t let that single experience make a great big difference in your life,” he said carefully. His back was beginning to itch, and several clumps of hair had worked their way down into his trousers.

  “I don’t intend to,” she said in a low voice.

  “None of us can go through life untouched. We all hurt ourselves and others. We feel boredom and we put a small creature on a hook, we feel hunger and we eat flesh, we feel desire and we make love.”

  The girl burst into tears.

  He turned to look at her, touched and amazed that his words should have so profound an effect, but she was staring at his head as she wept.

  “It’s the first time I ever cut anybody’s hair,” she said.

  They drove slowly over the mountain roads, talking quietly, until it was dark. Once Leslie covered her face with her hands and slumped down in the seat, but this time he knew she was laughing. When they arrived at the inn he kissed her good-by in the car.

  “It was a day,” she said.

  He sneaked up to his room without being seen. Next morning he got up and out very early, having instructed Leslie to make his excuses. In order to find a barber—one he had been avoiding for weeks because the man was careless and unskilled—he had to drive thirty miles beyond his next scheduled stop.

  The old man kept shaking his head as he cut his hair. “Have to get it down mighty close to even it off,” he said.

  When he finished, a yarmulka would not hide the fact that all that was left was a sort of brown fuzz. In a general store next to the barber shop Michael bought a khaki hunting cap, which during the next few weeks he wore even when the days became hot, feeling fortunate that he did not have to remove his hat to pray.

  22

  When summer actually came he stopped seeking shelter at night and unrolled the sleeping bag that had been one of the items on Rabbi Sher’s good list, finding it slightly mildewed but very serviceable. At night he lay under the stars waiting to be eaten by a wolf or a bobcat and listening to the wind sliding over the mountain tops and making restless noises in the trees. On afternoons when the distant hills shimmered blue in the
hot sun he stopped the car and imitated the fishes instead of trying to catch them, sometimes lying naked and alone in a shallow, tumbling stream and shouting and laughing aloud at the icy cold, and once in his BVD’s joining a bunch of gawking, silent mountain boys in a river swimming hole. His hair grew, and as it did he soaked it with water every morning and brushed it straight back, getting rid of the part he had had before his short haircut. He shaved regularly and used the tub or shower wherever he made a stop. His congregation kept him too well fed, everyone planning large meals on the occasion of the rabbi’s visits, and he stopped doing his own laundry after receiving four offers from housewives along his route; he let them take turns.

  Bobby Lilienthal was learning enough Hebrew to begin working on his haftorah in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Stan Goodstein’s mother died and he had his first Jewish funeral in the congregation and then Mrs. Marcus reserved his services for August 12 and he had his first wedding.

  It was a good-sized wedding, almost but not quite taxing the facilities at the inn, and surprisingly formal for the Ozark Mountains. Marcus and Beerman relatives came from Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Ohio, and two towns in Wisconsin. Mort’s male friends were not there but four of Deborah’s classmates were, including Leslie Rawlins, who was maid of honor.

  Before the ceremony Michael sat for almost an hour in an upstairs bedroom with Mort and his younger brother, who was to be the best man. Both brothers were extremely nervous and had been nibbling on the contents of a pinch bottle in search of ease. Michael took the bottle with him when he left the room. He stood at the top of the stairway, wondering where he could dispose of the Scotch. In the room below him a crowd had gathered, the men in white jackets and the women in gowns that obeyed the New Look commandment of Dior. In their long gloves and big floppy hats and peau de soie dresses of lovely pastels, viewed from the top of the stairs the women looked more like flowers than females, even the fat ones. Obviously, he decided, he couldn’t walk down among them carrying a bottle of booze. He disposed of it finally in an upstairs hall closet, standing it behind a vacuum cleaner and in front of a large can of floor wax.