The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  The living room was large and comfortably furnished, but more like a lodge den than a living room, with antlers over a great stone fireplace, and a glass-covered gun rack.

  “Drink?” Dick asked.

  “If you have one,” Michael said.

  “Oh, I’ll have one. They say an occasional drink is good for my nerves. I’ve got bourbon. A little water?”

  “Fine.”

  They finished the liquor and sat there with the empty glasses in their hands, and then Dick poured another.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Michael asked.

  “If I wanted to chat about it, damn you, I would have looked you up. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “It crossed my mind.” He stood up. “In that case, I’ll be getting along. Thanks for the booze.”

  The boy’s voice stopped him at the door. “Rabbi, I’m sorry. Don’t leave me.”

  He came back and sat down. The dog settled himself at his master’s feet and moaned softly. Michael reached for his glass and took a long swallow. In a little while Dick Kramer began to talk.

  When he was through there was another small silence.

  “Why didn’t you come to me?” Michael asked humbly.

  “You had nothing to offer me,” Dick said. “Not what I was looking for. Billy Joe did. For a little while there, it looked as though he had come through. If he had, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for him.”

  “I think you should go back to your doctor,” Michael said. “That’s the first thing.”

  “But you don’t think I should go back to Billy Joe Raye?”

  “That’s something only you can decide,” Michael said.

  Dick Kramer smiled. “I think if I could have really believed him I might have made it. But my Jewish skepticism kept pushing me away from him.”

  “Don’t blame your Jewishness. Religious medicine is an old Jewish concept. Christ was a member of the Essenes, a group of Jewish holy men who devoted themselves to healing. And only a few years ago sick Jews in Europe and Asia traveled great distances and suffered hardships in order to be touched by the hands of rabbis who were supposed to have healing powers.”

  Kramer took Michael’s right hand, which was holding a drink. He held it up and looked at the fingers curled around the glass. “Touch me,” he said.

  But Michael shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you that way. I have no direct line to God.” The boy laughed and shoved the Rabbi’s hand away. The liquor in the glass sloshed over the rim.

  “In what way can you help me?” he asked.

  “Try not to be afraid,” Michael said.

  “It’s more than being afraid. I am afraid. I admit that. But it’s knowing all the things I’ll never do. I’ve never had a woman. I’ve never gone to far places. I’ve never done anything to leave my mark on the world, to make it a better place than it was before I got here.”

  Michael struggled, sorry that he had taken the liquor. “Have you ever felt love for someone?”

  “Of course,” he muttered.

  “Then you’ve increased the worth of the world. Immeasurably. As for adventure—if what you fear is true, you will soon have the greatest adventure possible to man.”

  Dick closed his eyes.

  Michael thought of his anniversary and of Leslie waiting for him, but something held him in his chair. He found that he was studying the rifles in the gun cabinet, and a shotgun leaning against a corner of the fireplace with a greasy rag poking out of one muzzle. He was remembering a night in Miami Beach, and a sad little man holding a German pistol. When he looked up, Dick’s eyes were open and the boy was smiling at him.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “I’m sure of it,” Michael said.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Dick said. “Two years ago I was supposed to go into the swamp country with a bunch of fellas who have a hunting camp there, for the opening of deer season. When the time came, I had a miserable cold, and I told them to never mind about me. But on opening day I got the itch and I got up early and took my rifle and went into the woods not more than a quarter of a mile from where we’re sitting. And I wasn’t more than three steps from the road when I saw a big young buck and I snapped off a shot that dropped him.

  “When I got to him he was still alive, so I took my hunting knife and I slit his throat. But still he wouldn’t die. He kept looking at me out of those big brown eyes and his mouth kept opening and he made baaing sounds just like a big old sheep. Finally I put my rifle to his head and fired it. But still he wouldn’t die, and I didn’t know what else to do. I had shot him near the heart and in the head and I had cut his throat. I couldn’t slit open his belly and dress him down while he was still alive. And while I was sitting there trying to make up my mind, he thrashed to his feet and took off through the woods. It started to rain, and it took me two hours to find him where he had finally dropped dead in the brush. I nearly got pneumonia.

  “I thought a lot of that old deer,” he said.

  Michael waited until the Negro woman arrived to cook the boy’s supper, then he left him sitting alone with the dog in front of the cold fireplace, drinking bourbon.

  Outside, the air was sharper than he remembered, and sweeter-smelling. He drove home slowly, praying and at the same time noticing shadows and geometric shapes and variations of color and shade. In the house, Leslie was standing over the stove and he walked to her and put his arms around her, grasping a breast in each hand and burying his face in her hair. She let him hold her and then she turned to kiss him and he shut off the burner under the pot, pulling her in the direction of the bedroom.

  “You damn fool,” she laughed, half annoyed. “The supper.” But he continued to press her toward the bed.

  “At least let me—” she said, looking toward the bureau where the diaphragm was kept.

  “Not tonight.”

  The thought excited her, and she stopped all struggling. “Were going to make a baby,” she said, her eyes gleaming in the dim light from the kitchen.

  “A king of the Jews,” he said, touching her. “A Solomon. A Saul. A David.”

  She rose to meet him and as he kissed her she was speaking. “Not a David,” it sounded as if she said.

  29

  The Temple Sinai Annual Brotherhood Awards, two handsome walnut plaques with silver face-plates, arrived in the mail from Atlanta, and at a board meeting Michael was urged to write a Brotherhood Day speech without delay.

  “I’m a little troubled by the national epidemic of Jews giving brotherhood awards to goyim,” Michael said pensively. “Why don’t goyim ever give brotherhood awards to Jews? Or better still, why don’t Jews give the brotherhood awards to Jews?”

  The members of the board looked puzzled, and then they laughed.

  “You just write that speech, Rabbi,” Dave Schoenfeld said. “First we’ll give ’em likker and a good dinner, then you talk ’em happy, then I’ll hand out the awards.” They set a date for a Sunday evening six weeks away.

  Two days later, as Michael sat in his study and polished his sermon for the coming week, he had a visitor.

  Billy Joe Raye sat on the edge of his chair with his feet flat on the ground and his hat in his lap. He beamed. “I figured it was time I was paying you a neighborly call, Rabbi,” he said. “I brought you a little gift.”

  It was a copy of the New Testament in Hebrew. “I had it printed up especially for our Jewish friends,” Billie Joe said.

  “Well,” Michael said. “Thank you.”

  “I ran into a young friend of yours on the street the other day. Young Richard what’s-his-name?”

  “Kramer?”

  “That’s the boy. He told me he wasn’t going to be coming to see me anymore. Told me you and he had had a long talk.”

  “We did.”

  “A nice boy. A nice, clean-cut boy. Pity about him.” He looked down and shook his head. “Of course, I wanted you to understand I didn’t try to get him to come t
o my meetings. I never met him before he came into my tent.”

  “I know that,” Michael said.

  “Yes. Heaven knows folks like you and I have enough to do without trying to steal from one another’s flock like two niggers raising chickens.” He chortled and Michael smiled thoughtfully as he stood to show him to the door.

  Three full weeks went by before he forced himself to think again of the brotherhood awards. Over the next ten days he wrote three drafts of the brotherhood speech, working slowly and laboriously. Each draft he ultimately tore up and threw away.

  Two days before the presentation dinner he sat down and wrote the speech, quickly and with few revisions. It was short and to the point, he thought, reading it over. And, he knew with a sudden sinking of his heart, it was true.

  When the dessert plates and coffee cups had been pushed back he stood and greeted them—the members of his synagogue, the men being honored, the eminent gentiles at the head table.

  “When any clergyman comes to a strange town, he worries about the religious atmosphere,” he said.

  “I must admit that I was worried when I came to Cypress.

  “Here is what I found.

  “I found a community in which the various churches behave toward one another in a remarkably civilized fashion,” he said, and Judge Boswell looked at Nance Grant and smiled, nodding.

  “I found a community in which the Baptists loan the Jews the use of their church, and in which the Methodists buy tickets to the Baptists’ socials.

  “I found a community where Episcopalians respect Congregationalists, and where Lutherans work in harmony with Presbyterians.

  “I found a community which recognizes the Sabbath and which places a high value on it. A community where every man is encouraged to worship God in his own way.”

  Judge Boswell lifted his eyebrows at Dave Schoenfeld and nodded slowly and approvingly, projecting his lower lip slightly as he did in court when listening to a jury verdict.

  “I found that in Cypress brotherhood flows from one denomination to another, like wells of sweet, God-given water which are interconnected by free-flowing, man-made tunnels,” Michael said.

  “But I also found a puzzling thing.

  “Those tunnels go over and under and around almost sixty per cent of the population of this community.”

  Judge Boswell, smiling, had lifted a water glass to his lips. When he set it down his smile was still there, as if painted on. It faded slowly, like the closing of a flower.

  “In Cypress, brotherhood is like a selective chemical that vanishes—pouf!—when it comes into contact with a colored skin,” Michael said.

  “Now, that is my impression of the macrocosm.

  “As for the microcosm, I am familiar with my own congregation. So let us consider the fifty-three families which make up Temple Sinai of Cypress, Georgia.

  “Three members of this congregation own businesses which refuse to sell food or drink to a man, woman, or child whose skin is not whiter than was the skin of Moses’ wife.

  “Two members of this congregation own businesses which refuse shelter and lodging to a person of color.

  “Several of our members sell shoddy goods to Negro customers on credit, at premium prices which keep their customers in their debt.

  “One of our members owns a newspaper which identifies each person by the title of Miss, Missus, or Mister—unless he or she is colored.

  “The entire congregation patronizes a bus line which forces Negroes to sit in the rear or stand while there are empty seats in forward sections.

  “This congregation lives in a town which contains a Negro district where much of the rented housing should be condemned and rebuilt for health reasons.

  “This congregation helps to support an educational system in which Negro children are sent each morning to miserable schools which dare eager minds to survive.” He paused.

  “What the hell?” Sunshine Janes said to the Sheriff.

  “Today we are gathered to give awards to two community leaders for brotherhood,” Michael continued. “But are we entitled to confer such awards?

  “The act of bestowing them says by implication that we are in a state of brotherhood ourselves.

  “I say to you in all troubled earnestness that we are not. And until we achieve brotherhood ourselves, I do not believe that we are capable of recognizing it in others.

  “I applaud the intent of what we have set out to do here today. Yet, because it points up the single greatest danger to our human souls in the days and years ahead, I am forced to issue solemn warning.

  “Until we can look at the Negro and see Man, we are marked with the sign of Cain.

  “Dostoevski said it: ‘Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.’”

  Two things he was aware of as he left the bema. One was the look in Judge Boswell’s eyes. The other was his wife’s loud, solitary applause, making a beacon of sound to guide him home.

  Two nights later, Ronnie and Sally Levitt broke the wall of silence which the rest of the community had built around the Kinds.

  “I must admit,” Ronnie Levitt said, “that I agreed with the rest of them until a few hours ago. After all, it was my money that bought and paid for those damn awards. You’ve got to remember that Cypress isn’t New York,” he told Michael. “No, nor is it Atlanta or New Orleans, either. In those big places you might be able to alienate people and still stand a chance. If we alienate people here, we might as well close up our businesses. And we’re not about to let you throw away our bread and butter.”

  “I don’t expect you to, Ronnie,” Michael said.

  “Now. I think this may blow over if you just play it smart. I don’t think you should apologize the way some are sayin’. Only make matters worse. We’ll explain privately that you’re young and a Northerner and that you’ll watch what you say from now on, and perhaps eventually the whole thing will be written off.”

  “No, Ronnie,” Michael said gently.

  Sally Levitt burst into tears.

  They left almost everything and packed small bags. “It’s too hot to drive all the way,” Michael said. They had saved some money, and Leslie agreed. They drove to Augusta and flew to New York from there.

  Rabbi Sher sighed when he heard their story. “How difficult you make life for all of us,” he said. “If only you were wrong.” He forbade Michael to resume teaching. “If you’re not careful you’ll spend your entire life teaching Hebrew to little children,” he said. “And then how horribly peaceful everyone outside your classroom would be.”

  It took three weeks of interviewing, and Michael finally flew all the way to California to preach a guest sermon, and then he was hired as rabbi of Temple Isaiah of San Francisco.

  “They’re all nonconformists out there, and it’s three thousand miles away from this office,” Rabbi Sher said. “You should only stay there until you die a happy old man.”

  They flew back to Augusta and drove the blue Plymouth into Cypress exactly eleven months and sixteen days after they had first driven into town.

  The house on Piedmont Road was just as they had left it three weeks before.

  Together they packed their books. Michael called Railway Express and arranged for the desk and books to be shipped to California. They had bought a rug and a lamp, and after much discussion they shipped the rug and left the lamp.

  “I’ll clean out my study at the temple,” he told Leslie.

  The first thing he noticed when he parked his car in the Temple Sinai driveway was the remains of the cross on the lawn. He stood and looked at it for a long time. Then he unlocked the door. There was no sign of Joe Williams, the shamus, and anyhow Michael assumed that Williams would not relish the job of cleaning up after the Klan or its equivalent. He found a rake and a spade in the utility shed and he raked the ashes and the charred chunks of wood carefully and then loaded the debris into a wheelbarrow and added it to the overflowing rubbish bin
in the back yard. Then he came back to the front lawn and inspected what was left. The top of the cross evidently had been consumed before the entire flaming structure had toppled and burned itself out on the ground. The result was a T-shaped scar etched blackly into the turf, with each bar of the T about twelve feet long. Michael kicked the spade into the turf and began to turn the sod over along the burned lines. It was an old lawn, with a deep layer of interwoven roots that gave like a sponge before allowing the edge of the spade to cut through. Soon he was sweating.

  A green Chevrolet, prewar but clean and shining, drifted slowly by. Three houses beyond the temple the driver stopped the car and then shoved it into reverse. A very black man got out and sat on the car’s front mudguard, rolling up the sleeves of his blue workshirt. He was tall and thin and balding. What hair he had left was mixed with gray. He watched Michael in silence for a few minutes and then he cleared his throat.

  “Trouble with that,” he said, “is that the places you turned over are gonna have to be seeded. Then they’re gonna come up a lighter green than the rest of the grass. That cross is still gonna be there.”

  Michael paused and leaned on his shovel. “You’re right,” he said, frowning. He looked down at the half-spaded T. “Why don’t I just connect the corners?” he asked. “Then there’ll be nothing but a green triangle.”

  The man nodded. He reached through his car window and took the keys from the ignition, then he walked around and unlocked the trunk and took out an edger. He came over to the place where the cross had been burned and began to stamp the half-moon blade into the turf. They worked together without speaking until the triangle was completed. The Negro’s face had grown a crop of tiny water droplets, causing his pate to gleam darkly. He took a large handkerchief from his back pocket and carefully wiped his face and neck and bald spot and his circlet of hair and then his palms.

  “My name is Lester McNeil,” he said.

  Michael held out his hand and they shook firmly.

  “Mine is Michael Kind.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Michael said. “You did a beautiful job.”