The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  When the ceremony began everything went as rehearsed. Mort was sober and serious. Deborah’s white net cloud, topped by a halolike wreath of white blossoms, created the standard gasps when she entered on her father’s arm, her eyes demure and doe-like behind the full veil. Only the tightness with which she held her floral prayerbook denied her tranquility.

  When it was over and he had congratulated everybody, Michael found himself reaching for champagne while Leslie Rawlins’ eyes stared at him over the rim of her glass.

  She swallowed and smiled at him. “My,” she said, “you’re an impressive fellow.”

  “Was it all right?” he asked. “I’ll let you in on a secret if you don’t tell anyone. It’s the first one I’ve ever handled alone.”

  “Congratulations.” She held out her hand and he shook it. “Wonderful, honestly. You sent chills up and down my spine.”

  The champagne was dry and icy cold, exactly what he wanted now that the ceremony was over. “You’re the one to be congratulated,” he remembered presently. “You and Deborah were graduated in June, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I have a job. After Labor Day I’m going to be a researcher at Newsweek. I’m quite excited. And somewhat frightened.”

  “Just remember to count ten and then set the hook,” he said, and they both laughed. Her dress and accessories were the color of cornflowers, the exact shade of her irises. The bridesmaids, who were the other three Wellesley girls plus one of Deborah’s cousins from Winnetka, wore rose. Blue made her bronze hair blonder, he decided. “I like you in blue. But you’re thinner.”

  She made no effort to hide her pleasure. “I’m so glad you noticed. I’ve been dieting.”

  “Don’t be a fool. You said Newsweek, not Vogue. You were perfect before.” He took her empty glass and returned a moment later with two full ones. “I’m looking forward to November. Three weeks vacation. I’ll be going to New York myself. I can hardly wait.”

  “I don’t have an address yet. But if you get bored call me at the magazine. I’ll take you fishing.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Rabbi Sher was very pleased. “Very pleased,” he repeated. “I can’t tell you how happy I am that your traveling circus has worked out. Perhaps this will lead to circuit-riders being sent to other remote areas.”

  “Next time I’d like a jungle,” Michael said. “Some place with swamps and lots of malaria.”

  Rabbi Sher laughed, but he looked at Michael keenly. “Tired?” he said. “Want to give somebody else a shot at it?”

  “I’ve got two boys almost ready for bar mitzvah. I’ve learned to find my way over a lot of mountains. I’m working on plans for a communal seder next Passover, with perhaps forty families taking part at Mineral Springs.”

  “The answer, I take it, is no.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, just remember that I never envisioned this as your life’s effort. Temples all over America are trying to hire rabbis. Outside of the country, too. When you get tired of pioneering, let me know.”

  Each of them was content when they shook hands.

  New York, New York was somewhat dirtier than he had remembered it but far more exciting. The preoccupied pace of Manhattan; the unheeding way people banged shoulders on the sidewalks; the bitchy loveliness of the smart women along Fifth Avenue and upper Madison; the sophistication of a white French poodle squatting to defecate in the gutter on 57th Street off the Park, while a gray-haired Negro doorman flicked his cuffs and looked the other way, holding the leash slack—all these things appeared new to him, although he had seen them most of his life and had thought nothing of them.

  On his first day in the city, after talking with Rabbi Sher, he walked a lot, and then he took the subway back to Queens.

  “Eat,” his mother said.

  He tried to explain to her that he had been well fed, but she knew that he lied to spare her.

  “So what do you think of the kids?” his father asked.

  Ruthie’s son was seven years old. His name was Moshe. The girl, Chaneh, was four. Their maternal grandparents had visited them for two months on the previous year, despite Arab raids and the British blockade, through which they had sailed with their hands on their American passports. They had a dress box full of snapshots of two little tanned strangers to show him.

  “Imagine,” his mother said, “so young to sleep all alone away from the mother and father. In a separate building with only other pitzilehs. What a system.”

  “Socialists, the whole kibbutz,” his father said. “And outside, Arabs that look daggers. Can you imagine your sister driving a truck with a gun on the seat?”

  “A bus. For the children,” his mother said.

  “A truck with seats in back,” his father said. “I’m glad here I’m a Republican. And those British soldiers, everywhere inspecting with long noses. And no food. Did you know it’s impossible to buy a dozen eggs there?”

  “Eat,” his mother urged.

  On his third night home he started thinking about some of the girls he had known. He could remember only two who he had not heard were married. He called the first one; she was married. The other girl’s mother informed him that her daughter was a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at the University of California. “At Los Angeles,” she emphasized. “Don’t write to her at the other one or it may not reach her.”

  He called Maury Silverstein, who had his own apartment now in the village. Maury had majored in chemistry at Queens but he was a television agent, having joined one of the largest agencies as a trainee directly from the Marine Corps. “Listen, I’m going to California in about forty minutes,” he said. “But I’ll be back next week. I must see you. I’m giving a party at my place on Thursday. I want you to come. Lots of wonderful people I want you to meet.”

  He called Mrs. Harold Popkin, née Mimi Steinmetz. She had just received word that a rabbit test had proved positive. “You should be flattered,” she said. “My mother doesn’t even know. Only Hal. I’m telling you because you’re an old flame.” They chatted about pregnancy.

  “Say,” he said finally, “do you know a nice girl I can date while I’m home? I seem to have lost touch.”

  “See what happens to old bachelors?” She was silent for a moment, savoring what he had become without her. “How about Rhoda Levitz? We’ve grown to be very good friends.”

  “She was a very heavy girl? With a lot of acne?”

  “She’s not that heavy,” Mimi said. “Look, I’ll think about it. I’m sure I can come up with somebody else. New York is full of single girls.”

  The telephone operator at Newsweek didn’t know how to find Leslie, but when he told her that Miss Rawlins was a new employee and in the research department, she checked a list and located the extension.

  He waited for her outside the building on 42nd Street and at five-ten she came down, looking lovely and just excited enough.

  “So that’s another thing about you,” he said, taking her hand. “You’re late for appointments.”

  “So that’s another thing about you. You’re a clock-watcher.”

  He looked for a cab, but then she asked where they were going and when he suggested Miyako she wanted to walk. They strolled the fourteen blocks. It was not very cold but the wind blew in gusts, whipping open the lower flaps of her coat and plastering her skirt against her fine legs. When they got to the restaurant the blood was marching through their veins and they were ready for martinis. “To your job,” he said as they touched glasses. “How’s it going, anyway?”

  “Ah.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not as exciting as once it sounded to me. I spend a lot of time in libraries and poring over dramatic volumes like the Ashtabula telephone directory. And I clip newspapers from towns you’ve never heard of.”

  “Going to try something else?”

  “I don’t think so.” She ate her olive. “Everybody said I did a very good job as editor of the Wellesley News. One
story I wrote—about the hoop race being won by a married woman—was picked up by the Associated Press. I think I’d make a pretty good news writer. I’ll hang on until they give me a chance to see.”

  “What’s a hoop race?”

  “At Wellesley the senior girls roll hoops every year in their caps and gowns. It’s a very old tradition. The winner is supposed to be the first girl in the class to snag a husband. That’s what made it so funny our year. Lois Fenton had been secretly married for six months to a boy at Harvard Medical. When she won she became so flustered that she burst into tears and blurted out everything, and that’s how they announced their marriage.”

  The food came, tempura and a clear delicately flavored soup garnished with thin slices of vegetables cut in intricate patterns, followed by sukiyaki cooked at the table by a deft, theatrical waiter. Michael ordered a stone jug of saki but she didn’t care for it because it was heated and he drank it alone, quickly losing all feeling in his toes.

  Afterward, while he was helping her on with her coat, the heels of his palms touched her shoulders lightly and she turned her head and looked at him. “I didn’t think you would call me,” she said.

  Perhaps it was the liquor, but he felt a great urgency to be completely honest with this girl. “I didn’t want to,” he said.

  “Rabbis shouldn’t date gentile girls. I know that,” she said.

  “Then why did you accept my invitation?”

  She shrugged, then shook her head.

  Outside, he hailed a taxi, but she didn’t want to go anywhere else.

  “Look, this is silly. We’re adult and we’re modern. Why shouldn’t we be friends? It’s so early,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere and listen to good music.”

  “No,” she said.

  They talked hardly at all until the cab pulled up at her address, a red-brick roominghouse far west on 60th Street.

  “Please don’t get out,” she said. “Sometimes it’s awfully hard to get another cab on this block.”

  “I’ll get one,” he said.

  She lived two flights up and the hallway was a bleak brown. She stood in front of her door. He felt that she did not want to go into the room.

  “Let’s start fresh tomorrow night,” he said. “Same time, same place?”

  “No,” she said. “Thank you.” She looked at him and he knew that she would probably cry when she was alone.

  “Look,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her, but she turned and their heads bumped.

  “Good night,” she said and went inside.

  He found a taxi without any trouble, as he had known he would.

  He slept late the next morning, consuming an enormous brunch when he finally did leave his bed after eleven o’clock.

  “You’re appetite’s improved,” his mother said happily. “You must have had a good time with all your old friends last night.”

  He decided to call Max Gross. He had not studied with a fine Talmudic scholar in two years and this is how he would spend the rest of his vacation, he told himself.

  But when he went to the telephone he dialed the magazine’s number and asked for her.

  “This is Michael,” he said when she answered.

  She was silent.

  “I would like very much to see you tonight.”

  “What is it you want from me?” she asked. Her voice sounded strange, and he realized she must be cupping her hand over the speaker of the telephone in an attempt to keep the conversation private from someone in the proximity of her desk.

  “I just want to be your friend.”

  “It’s because of what I told you last spring, isn’t it. You have some sort of a social-worker complex. You consider me a case history.”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  “Well, if that’s not the case you must consider me a pushover. Is that what you want, Michael? A little secret sex before you return to the hills?”

  He became angry. “Look. I offer you my friendship. If you don’t want it, to hell with you. Now, shall I be there at five or not?”

  “Be there,” she said.

  They had dinner again, this time at a Swedish restaurant, and then they had the music, Eddie Condon’s in the Village. At her door she shook his hand and he kissed her cheek.

  The following night was Friday and he went to the synagogue with his parents, gritting his teeth throughout the oneg shabbat while his mother introduced him to half a dozen people he already knew: “This is my son the rabbi,” just like in the jokes.

  On Saturday he started to call her and then, after he had dialed only the first two digits of her number, he stopped and asked himself what he was doing, like a man suddenly awakened from a dream.

  He got into the car and drove for a long time, and when he thought to look around he was in Atlantic City, and he parked the car and turned up his coat collar and walked along the beach close to the edge of the water. He played the game he always played while walking along a beach, letting the water hiss up to his feet until the very last minute and then stepping away very quickly in order not to get his shoes filled. Eventually the sea would win if he kept it up long enough; it was a fool’s game, he knew, like the game played by a rabbi who would date a minister’s daughter. The way to win at both games was to step far away, and permanently. No more dinner engagements, no more jokes, no more secret studying of her profile or longing for her flesh. He would not contact her again, would not see her, would not talk to her, would thrust her out of his mind. The decision filled him with relief and he stepped away from the water with a kind of sad pride, lengthening his stride and filling his lungs with salt air as he marched over the hard-packed sand. The wind drove spray into his face and eventually cut through the protection of the coat and he quit the beach after a while and had a tasteless shore dinner in a restaurant full of conventioneers, either refrigeration people or frozen foods, he couldn’t make out which.

  He drove around New Jersey some more and it was almost midnight by the time he got back to New York and he stopped and called her from a telephone booth in an all-night drug store, feeling the dream quality catch him up again as she answered the insistent ringing.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “I can’t. I just started to wash my hair. I thought you weren’t going to call tonight.”

  He was silent. “I’m not working tomorrow,” she said. “Would you like to come here for lunch?”

  “What time?” he asked.

  She lived in a large furnished room. “This is what they call an efficiency,” she said as she took his coat. “What saves it from being a studio apartment is the small kitchen. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” She smiled. “I could have afforded something better if I had doubled up with one or two other girls, but after four years of dormitory life, privacy means a lot to me.”

  “It’s nice,” he lied. It was a gloomy room, with one large but solitary window which she had tried to make attractive with bright curtains. There was an Oriental rug, not quite threadbare; ugly old lamps; one beaten-looking stuffed chair; a painted table and two straight-backed chairs; a good mahogany desk that she had probably bought herself; and two bookcases containing college texts as well as a good number of novels, none of them historical. The kitchen was tiny, with barely enough room for the person doing the cooking on the two-burner range. The minuscule refrigerator was located under the sink. She gave him a martini and he sat on the hard convertible couch and drank it while she prepared the meal.

  “I hope you like a large lunch,” she said.

  “I do. Then I can buy you a small dinner. Think of the money I’ll save.”

  They had blue cheese and crackers and tomato juice and an antipasto with lots of anchovies, and veal cutlets parmigiana and lemon pie and black Turkish coffee. Afterward they started the Times crossword puzzle together and when they got stuck she washed the dishes and he wiped.

  When the dishes were put away
he sat on the couch and smoked and observed the way her breasts were mashed flat when she lay on her stomach chipping away at the puzzle.

  He looked away, at her books. “Lots of poetry,” he observed.

  “I love it. I learned about poetry and about men and women from the same place, the place every minister’s kid does.”

  “The Bible?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She smiled and closed her eyes. “When I was a young girl I used to daydream that on my wedding night my husband would recite the Song of Songs.”

  He wanted merely to touch her face with his hands, to push the hair back from the soft pink flesh of her ears and kiss her there. Instead he reached past her for an ashtray and tapped the dottle from his pipe. “I hope he does,” he said gently.

  On Monday she managed to leave the office early and they went to the Bronx Zoo and spent a lot of time laughing at the monkeys and at the horrible stink in the enclosure, which she swore turned his complexion an attractive light green. On Tuesday they went to Aida at the Metropolitan and then to Luchow’s for a late supper. She exulted over the dark beer. “It tastes as though it were brewed from mushrooms,” she said. “Do you like mushrooms?”

  “Love, not like.”

  “Then you’ll quit the rabbinate and I’ll quit the magazine and we’ll become farmers, we’ll raise thousands and thousands of mushrooms in lovely steaming beds of manure.”

  He said nothing and she smiled. “Poor Michael. You can’t even joke about leaving the rabbinate, can you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m glad. That’s the way it should be. Some day when I am an old woman and you have become a great leader to your people I’m going to remember how I helped you spend your vacation when we both were young.”