The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  The man waved a hand. “Ought to. I’m a gardener by trade.” He looked down at the triangle. “Tell you what,” he said. “All we need do is add three little corners and we can make this into one of them stars of yours.”

  “A Star of David, yes,” Michael said. They fell back to work and soon it was done.

  McNeil made another trip to his car trunk and came back with a cardboard box full of seed packets. “Get them at cost,” he said. “It’s not much of a bed. A lot of them won’t come up. But some of them will. What kind of flowers shall we plant?”

  They made the center of the star white verbena and the six points blue alyssum. “Kind of late to be startin’ ’em from seed,” McNeil said. “But I guess they’ll be all right if you water ’em plenty.”

  “I won’t be here,” Michael said.

  “We heard somethin’ like that,” McNeil said. “Well, maybe they’ll be lots of rain.” He returned the edger and the seed to his car trunk. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll stop by once in a while an’ give ’em a little drink for you.”

  “That will be nice,” Michael said. Suddenly he felt fine. “Maybe we can start a trend. Wherever a cross is burned, a flower bed will spring up.”

  “Be good for business,” McNeil said. “Speakin’ of drinks, could I have one? Work makes my throat like parched ground.”

  “Of course,” Michael said.

  In the kitchen he looked in the refrigerator, but found only half a bottle of orange soda left from a bar mitzvah six weeks before. It was flat.

  “I’m afraid it will have to be water,” he said, spilling the stale soda water into the sink.

  “I never drink anything with bubbles except one bottle of beer every night after work, to clear the dust,” McNeil said. They let the water run from the tap until it was cold and then Michael drank two glasses and McNeil drank four.

  “Wait a minute,” Michael said. He went to the bema and pushed aside the black velvet curtain behind the lectern and pulled out half a bottle of port.

  He poured some into each of their glasses and they clinked them and grinned at one another. “L’chayem,” Michael said.

  “Whatever you said goes double for me,” McNeil said. They knocked the glasses back and tossed off three fingers of warm Manischewitz, neat.

  When it came time to go, Leslie called Sally Levitt and Sally drove over and she and Leslie clung to one another and cried and promised to write. Ronnie didn’t come, nor did anyone else. Michael could think of nobody he really wanted to see except Dick Kramer, and they drove by his house on the way out of town. It was locked and the shades were drawn. A note tacked to the front door asked that mail be forwarded care of Myron Kramer, 29 Laurel Street, Emmetsburgh, Ga.

  With Leslie at the wheel they drove past the pigeon-spotted statue of General Thomas Mott Lainbridge, past the Negro district, onto the state highway, past Billy Joe Raye’s tent, and beyond the town limits.

  Michael put his head back against the top of the seat and slept. When he awoke they were out of Georgia and he sat for a long while without saying anything, watching the Alabama scenery wheel slowly by.

  “It was the wrong way to tackle the issue,” he said finally.

  “Forget it. It’s over,” she said.

  “I should never have attacked it head-on like that. If I had been more tactful I could have stayed there and chipped away at it slowly over the years.”

  “There’s no use iffing,” she said. “It’s over. You’re a good rabbi and I’m proud of you.”

  They were silent for several miles and then she began to giggle. “I’m glad we left,” she said, and she told him about how Dave Schoenfeld had acted toward her on the night it had rained so hard.

  Michael slammed the heel of his palm into the dashboard. “That no-good momser,” he said. “He wouldn’t have tried that with the rabbi’s wife if you had been a Jewish girl.”

  “I am a Jewish girl.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said in a little while.

  “Only too well,” she said clearly.

  It settled between them, like an uninvited and hated passenger, and for almost two hours they talked only in short and infrequent sentences. Then, after stopping at a gas station outside Anniston to allow her to go to the bathroom, he got behind the wheel, and when they were on the road again he put his arm around her and pulled her close to him.

  In a little while she told him that she was going to have a baby, and for the next twenty miles they drove again without talk. But this time they were wrapped in a different kind of silence, his arm still around her even though it had fallen asleep long before, and her left hand, fingers spread, resting lightly on his right thigh, a gift of love.

  BOOK III:

  The Migration

  30

  Woodborough, Massachusetts

  December 1964

  The attendant they called Miss Beverly was a vivacious, wiry little girl who was working in the hospital to pay her way through the Sargent College of Physical Education at Boston University. She believed in the value of exercise. With the permission of Dr. Bernstein she had taken Leslie and a patient named Diane Miller for a long walk through the grounds. They had even held hands and jogged a little, so that when they came back into the ward they were cold and merry and ready for the hot chocolate Beverly had promised to make.

  Leslie had been just about ready to take off her coat when the Serapin woman had thrown herself on Mrs. Birnbaum, screeching like a cat. They saw her arm rise and fall twice, the tiny blade in her fist glittering in the rather dim yellow light, and then they saw the unbelievable redness spreading on the floor and heard Mrs. Birnbaum’s groaning, an ugly sound.

  Miss Beverly had pulled Mrs. Serapin’s hand behind her back and kept yanking the wrist upward, like some three-hundred-pound wrestler on television, but Mrs. Serapin was much taller and she wouldn’t release the knife and finally Beverly began to shout and staff people began to come from every which way. Rogan, the night nurse, came running down from the nursing station with the other attendant and Peterson came charging in from the hall, her eyes bulging and her face the color of sour cream.

  Mrs. Birnbaum kept crying and calling for someone named Morty and Mrs. Serapin continued to scream and in the struggle with her somebody had stepped in the blood on the floor, so that a large area was covered with red footprints, like a crazy Arthur Murray diagram.

  Leslie felt faint. She turned and walked toward the door, which Peterson had left ajar. At the door she stopped. Only Diane Miller was staring at her. Leslie smiled at Diane reassuringly and then stepped out of the ward and closed the door behind her.

  She walked through the hallway, past the vacant desk where Peterson should have been sitting and reading her television magazine, and into the little alcove between the hall door and the outside door. She stood there in the dark, smelling the cold fresh air coming through the bottom of the outside door, waiting for someone to come out and tell her she should not be there.

  But nobody came.

  In a few minutes she opened the outside door and stepped outside.

  She would take another walk, this time in privacy, she told herself.

  She walked down the long winding driveway, past the front gate and the two little stone statues of sitting lions with iron rings in their noses. She breathed deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth, the way Miss Beverly insisted they should.

  She no longer felt faint, but she was tired from the earlier exercise and the tension, and when she came to the bus stop she sat down to rest on the bench in the illuminated enclosure provided by the bus company.

  In a little while a car came and stopped and a very pleasant woman rolled down the front window and asked if they could rescue her from the cold.

  She got in and the woman told her they were from Palmer and bus service was not the best in the world in their neck of the woods, either. They would be glad to drop her off in town, the woman said.

  It was qu
arter to eleven when she got out of their car. Main Street in Woodborough was not the great white way at that hour. Maney’s Bar & Grille was open, so was the Soda Shop, a light burned over the window of the YWCA and the bus depot was illuminated; but the shop windows on both sides of the street were dark and blank.

  She went into the Soda Shop and ordered coffee. The juke box was blasting and in the booth behind her three boys sat and slapped the table with their palms to the beat of the music.

  “Call her, Peckerhead,” one of the boys said.

  “Not me.”

  “She’s probably waitin’ for you right now.”

  Go ahead, Peckerhead, call her, make some little girl’s evening, she thought. They were just a little older than Max.

  The coffee came in a cup just like those in the hospital; even the color was the same. She thought of taking a taxi back to the hospital but she was becoming frightened at the thought that she had walked away. She wondered what Dr. Bernstein would say.

  “Call her, Peckerhead. You’re chicken if you don’t.”

  “I’m not chicken.”

  “Well, call her.”

  “You got a dime?”

  Evidently the coin was passed, because behind her she heard the boy leave the booth. There was only one telephone in the Soda Shop, and he was still using it when she finished the coffee, but there was a sidewalk telephone booth outside the Y and she started toward it after making certain she had a dime in her change purse with which to call Michael.

  However at the last moment instead of entering the telephone booth she walked past it and turned into the YWCA.

  A girl with hair like a brown Beatle wig sat at the desk, scratching her scalp with the eraser end of a yellow pencil while she leaned over a very large book, the kind that could only be a college text.

  “Good evening,” Leslie said.

  “Hi.”

  “I’d like a room. Just for the night.”

  The girl slid her a registration blank and Leslie filled it out. “That will be four dollars.”

  She opened her purse. Spending money at the hospital was paid directly into the commissary. The patients used chits. From time to time she took a couple of dollars in cash from Michael for the coffee machine and newspapers. The purse contained three dollars and sixty-two cents. “Can I pay you by check in the morning?”

  “Sure. Or you can give it to me now.”

  “I can’t. I don’t have my checkbook with me.”

  “Oh.” The girl looked away. “Wow . . . I don’t know. This never happened to me before.”

  “I’m a Y member. Last year I was in Mrs. Bosworth’s slimnasties class,” Leslie said. She smiled. “I’m really perfectly respectable.” She dug into her purse and found her Y membership card.

  “Oh, I’m sure you are.” The girl studied the card. “It’s just that if you forgot they would fire me, don’t you see, or I’d have to pay for your room myself, which I really can’t afford to do.”

  But she reached behind the desk and then held out a key with a numbered tag on it.

  “Thank you,” Leslie said.

  The room was small but very clean. She hung her clothes in the closet and then got into bed in her slip. She felt very grateful to the girl at the desk. She would have to call Michael first thing in the morning, she thought drowsily.

  But next morning the room was quiet; there were none of the early-morning hospital noises which now awoke her daily, and she slept until almost nine.

  When she opened her eyes she lay without moving in the warm bed and thought how nice it was not to have had an electroshock treatment, which she knew was what would have happened that morning if she had been in the hospital.

  A middle-aged woman with bland eyes and blue-white hair was at the registration desk when she turned in her key.

  Outside the Y, she hailed a taxi. Instead of telling the driver to take her to the hospital, she gave him her home address.

  I’m an escapee, she thought as she entered the cab. The idea should have terrified her, but it was so absurd it made her smile.

  The house was quiet and deserted. She found the extra key where they always left it on the little ledge over the back door and she let herself in and brushed her teeth and drew a deep bubble bath and soaked in it and later, when she had changed into fresh clothing, she made herself a large breakfast of eggs and rolls and coffee and ate every bit of it.

  She knew she had to go back to the hospital, that she was nearly finished there, but the thought was disgusting to her.

  One-week vacations for long-term patients should be built into their schedules, she thought.

  The more she considered the idea, the more it appealed to her. In the third drawer of her bureau, beneath her slips, she found the bankbook for the account that held Aunt Sally’s money. She packed a small bag and then wrote I Love You on a slip of paper and placed it in Michael’s bureau on top of his white shirts.

  Then she called another cab and when it came she took it into town; when she paid for it she had eleven cents left, but at the bank she withdrew almost six hundred dollars.

  At the Y she found out that the young night clerk’s name was Martha Berg, and she left her an envelope with a ten-dollar bill in it.

  It occurred to her that the note she had left for Michael was hardly reassuring, and she stopped at Western Union and sent him a telegram.

  The first bus leaving the depot was going to Boston and she got into it and paid the fare. She had no real desire to go to Boston, but she hadn’t thought this thing through, she really didn’t know where she wanted to go. It was an old red bus, and she sat on the left side two seats behind the bus driver, trying to decide between Grossinger’s and a plane to Miami.

  But when the bus came to Wellesley she stood and pulled the cord. The driver looked surly as she gave him her ticket stub. “Paid to Boston,” he said. “You want a refund, you’ll have to write the company.”

  “That’s all right.” She got out and walked down Main Street slowly, enjoying the shop windows. When she reached the train station her arm was very tired and she turned in and checked her bag in a twenty-five cent locker, then she walked to the college campus unencumbered.

  A lot of it was new and unfamiliar, but some of it was exactly the same. She walked until she came to Severance and then, feeling a little foolish, she went in. There were only a few girls around; it was the time of day when most girls would have a class somewhere. On the second floor she went to the right door without hesitation, as though she had left it only half an hour before to go to the library.

  She had half-expected no answer to her knock and when the girl opened the door she stood tongue-tied for a moment.

  “Hello,” she said finally.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you. I had this room a long time ago. I thought it would be fun to see it again.”

  The girl was Chinese. She was dressed in a shortie nightgown and her thick, muscular legs were like ivory columns.

  “Please come in,” she said. When Leslie did she took a housecoat from the closet and put it on.

  It was furnished differently, of course, and the colors were all different. It really didn’t look like the same room. She walked to the window and looked out and the view really did take her back. Lake Waban was unchanged. It was frozen and snow-covered and near the shore some of the snow had been plowed away and the girls were skating on the ice.

  “How long did you live here?” the girl asked politely.

  “Two years.” She smiled. “Do the toilets still stop up and overflow?”

  The girl seemed puzzled. “No. The plumbing seems to be very efficient here.”

  All at once she felt like a perfect fool and she shook the girl’s hand and started to edge toward the door.

  “Won’t you stay and have a cup of coffee?” the girl said, but Leslie could see that she was relieved to get rid of her and she thanked her and left the room and then the dorm.

  The Old
Grad, she thought. Ugh.

  There was a new building, the Jewett Arts Center, and she went inside and into the gallery, which was good. They had a small Rodin and a small Renoir and a head of Baudelaire in light stone with large sightless eyes that she liked. She spent a long time in front of a St. Jerome by Hendrik Van Somer. The picture showed an old man with wrinkled dugs, a bald head, a hooked nose, a long beard and very fierce eyes, the fiercest eyes she had ever seen, and she thought immediately of the way Michael described his grandfather.

  She went out the other side of the building and the moment she stepped through the door she knew exactly where she was.

  There was old Galen Stone Tower and the courtyard and the trees and the stone benches, most of them snow-covered but one brushed clean. She sat facing Severance Hill, on which a solitary skier floundered and then fell. She remembered the hill in May, Tree-Planting Day with Debbie Marcus in a kind of bedsheet playing a vestal virgin.

  A man in a black chesterfield and a woman in a gray cloth coat with a fox collar came out of the administration building. He had the kind of red face that made Leslie think he was a problem drinker without knowing a thing about him. “This seems to be the only bench without snow,” the woman said to her husband.

  “There’s plenty of room,” Leslie said, moving over.

  The man sat on the other end of the bench and the woman sat in the middle.

  “We’re here to see our daughter,” she said. “A surprise visit.” She looked at Leslie. “Are you visiting one of the girls, too?”

  “No,” Leslie said. “I’ve just been visiting the museum.”

  “Which building is the museum?” the man asked.

  She pointed it out to him.

  “Is it all that modern business?” the man asked. “Junkyard scrap and framed paint rags?”

  Before she could answer, a girl came running down the path, a high-colored brunette wearing blue jeans and a wind-breaker. “How are you,” she said, kissing the woman on the cheek. The man and the woman stood.

  “We wanted to surprise you,” the woman said.