The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “Well, I’m surprised.” The three of them started to move down the path. “The thing is, I have a guest staying at the inn until tomorrow. Jack Voorsanger, the fellow I wrote you about?”

  “I never heard about any Jack Voorsanger,” the man said. “Well, why can’t we all visit together?”

  “Oh, we can. Of course,” the girl said heartily. They walked away, the girl talking quickly and both her parents bending toward her as they listened.

  Leslie looked up at the tower and remembered the carillon, how they played before chapel in the morning and before and after dinner. They always ended up with the same song; what was its name? She couldn’t remember. She sat for a little while wishing that they would play now, and then she got to her feet, recalling what she had been told by the first boy who had ever kissed her: she had complained to him, a tall, bookish boy who was her father’s prize Sunday-school pupil, telling him that she hadn’t disliked it or liked it particularly, and he had said angrily, “What do you expect, chimes?”

  She walked back to the railroad station and got her suitcase, then she bought a ticket and in about twenty minutes the New England States came in looking almost as it had when she had taken it home for the holidays, except a little shabbier, the way all trains were now. Right after the conductor took her ticket she fell asleep. She dozed intermittently and when she awoke the last time they were eight minutes outside of Hartford and she remembered with a small feeling of triumph what the song was; it was “The Queen’s Change.”

  She and her father exchanged astonished glances when he opened the door in answer to her ring. He was amazed by her presence and she was astounded by his appearance. He wore a navy-blue sweatshirt and a pair of rumpled black pants marked with gray-white streaks and little lumps of something, maybe wax. His fine white hair was in disarray.

  “Well,” he said. “Well, come in. Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked past him and into the parlor. “New furniture,” she said.

  “Bought it myself.” He took her coat and hung it in the closet. They stood and looked at one another for a difficult moment.

  “What ever are you working on?” she asked, looking again at his clothing.

  “Oh, my goodness.” He turned and hurried away from her, into the kitchen. She heard him open the door to the cellar and then go down the stairs, and she followed him.

  It was a warm, dry cellar, bright because he had turned on all the lights. In a big cast-iron cannibal pot a bed of coals glowed, and in the coals there was another pot filled with something thick that boiled and bubbled. “Must keep watching this,” he said. “To leave it unattended is to invite fire.” From a brown paper bag he took a handful of candle stubs and dropped them into the smaller pot. He watched anxiously while they melted, then he fished out the freed wicks with a long barbecue fork.

  Senility?

  She wondered, watching him closely. Certainly some kind of personality change, she told herself.

  “What do you do with it?” she asked him.

  “Make things. My own candles. Other things in molds. Want me to do your hands?”

  “Yes.”

  Pleased, he utilized two pot-holders to take the molten wax off the fire. Then he took a jar of Vaseline from a cabinet drawer and watched critically as she followed his instructions, smearing the petroleum jelly thickly over each hand and forearm. He kept casting anxious glances into the pot. Finally he nodded. “Put them in. Once it gets too cool you might as well not do it.”

  She looked dubiously at the hot wax. “Won’t it burn?”

  He shook his head. “That’s what the Vaseline is for. I won’t let you keep them in long enough to burn.”

  She took a deep breath and plunged her hands into the wax and in a moment he pulled them out of the pot and she was holding them up in front of her face, hands covered with thick wax gloves. The wax was still quite hot but she could feel it cooling and hardening, and the heat and the slipperiness of the melting Vaseline, the oddest combination of conflicting sensations. She wondered how he was going to get the skin of wax off her hands without breaking it, and she started to giggle. “This is so unlike you,” she said, and he smiled at her.

  “I suppose it is. A man getting old needs something strange to do.” He filled a pail with water, using hot and cold alternately as he tested the water in the pail with his fingertips.

  “We should have done this together when I was about eight years old,” she said, her eyes searching for his. “I would have loved it.”

  “Well—” He placed her hands in the pail of water and waited anxiously. “Temperature’s the important thing. If the water is too cold the wax will break. If it’s hot, the wax will melt.” The water was warm. The wax became plastic enough for him to stretch it at her wrists, allowing her to pull her hands free. She jerked her left hand and the wax tore.

  “Carefully,” he said, annoyed. She withdrew her right hand slowly, and the wax glove that resulted was perfect. “Want to do the left one again?” he asked.

  But she shook her head. “Tomorrow,” she said, and he nodded.

  They left the good cast hardening in a pail of cool water. “How long are you going to stay here?” he asked her as they climbed the stairs.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She realized that she had not had dinner. “Can I have a cup of coffee, Father?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We’ll have to make it ourselves. Woman down the street comes into make dinner, and to clean. I handle my own breakfast. Eat lunches out.” He sat on a kitchen chair and watched her while she made coffee and toast. “Have you quarreled with your husband?”

  “Nothing like that,” she said.

  “But you have some sort of trouble.”

  She found it tremendously moving that he understood her sufficiently to perceive this; she had not thought it possible. She was about to tell him this, then he spoke again—

  “I see people in trouble every day.”

  —And she was glad she hadn’t.

  He spooned saccharine into the cup of coffee she served him and took a tentative sip. “Would you care to discuss it with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Your privilege.”

  She felt the first stirrings of anger. “You might care to ask me how my husband and children are. Your grandchildren.”

  “How is your family?”

  “Fine.”

  They said nothing for a few minutes, until they had finished the toast and coffee and there was nothing more to do with their hands and with their mouths.

  She tried again. “I’ll have to show Max and Rachel how to make wax hands,” she said. “Better still, I’ll have to bring them here and you can make some for them.”

  “All right,” he said without enthusiasm. “How long has it been since I’ve seen them? Two years?”

  “Eighteen months. Two summers ago. The last visit wasn’t a pleasant experience for them, Father. They’re very fond of their other grandfather. They could be of you, if you’ll let them. It shook them to hear the two of you.”

  “That fellow,” her father said. “I still don’t understand how you might have felt I would be interested in entertaining him in my home. Nothing in common. Nothing.”

  She was silent, remembering an awful afternoon of shattered and bleeding personalities. “May I sleep in my old room?” she asked finally.

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s full of cartons and things. Take the guest room. We make sure it always has clean sheets.”

  “The guest room?”

  “Second on the left at the head of the stairs.”

  Her Aunt Sally’s room.

  “There are clean towels in the linen closet,” her father said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you . . . ah . . . in need of spiritual help?”

  Towels and spiritual help dispensed cheerfully, she thought. “No thank you, Father.”

  “It is never too late. Fo
r anything. Through Jesus. No matter how far or how long we have strayed.”

  She said nothing, making a little motion of supplication with her hand, so small that perhaps he didn’t see it.

  “Even now, after all this time. I don’t care how long you have been married to him. I cannot believe that the girl who grew up in this house could renounce Christ.”

  “Good night, Father,” she said faintly. She got up and carried the bag upstairs and turned on the light and shut the door of the room behind her and leaned her back against it for a long moment, staring at the room she remembered from so many nights of burrowing into her Aunt’s bed to sleep huddled against her dried-out virgin’s body. She remembered exactly how her aunt had felt in her arms; even how she had smelled slightly, body odor and stale roses, probably the scent of a perfumed soap Aunt Sally had used in secret.

  She changed into her nightgown, wondering if you still had to light the gas ring in order to get enough hot water for the bath, too weary to find out. She heard him come upstairs and then the sound of his hesitant knock on her door.

  “You run away when I try to talk to you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “What makes you so afraid?”

  “I’m tired,” she said throught the closed door.

  “Can you tell me that you feel as though you are one of them?” he asked.

  She was silent.

  “Are you a Jew, Leslie?”

  But she would not answer.

  “Can you tell me that you are a Jew?”

  Go away, she thought, sitting on the bed in which her aunt had died.

  In a little while she heard him go into his own room down the hall and she reached up and pulled the cord that shut the light. Instead of going to bed right away she went to the window and sat on the floor with her breasts crushed against the sill and her face pressing into the cold pane in the familiar old way, looking through a glass darkly at the street that had once been a part of her prison.

  In the morning when they met for breakfast it was as though nothing had happened the previous evening. She made him bacon and eggs and he ate them with appetite, even a trifle greedily. When she served the coffee he cleared his throat. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have a full calendar of appointments this morning at the church.”

  “Then I had better say good-by now, Father,” she said. “I’ve decided to take an early train.”

  “Oh? All right then,” he said.

  Before he left the house he stopped at her room and handed her two long yellow candlesticks. “A little gift,” he said.

  When he had gone she telephoned for a taxi and when it arrived rode in it to the depot. Inside the railroad station she bought a paperback Robert Frost collection and read it for twenty minutes. When the train was five minutes away she lifted her bag to the waiting-room bench and opened it, picking up the yellow candles to move them to make room for the book, and one of the candles came apart in her hand, the yellow wax crumbling away to show the flaw, a piece of undigested white wax at its heart. In disgust she picked the waxy crumbs out of her suitcase as best she could and threw them with the broken pieces into a trash barrel.

  On the train she began to wonder what she could do with one candle and going through Stamford she removed it from the suitcase and dropped it down the crevice between the armrest and the wall beneath the window. Without knowing why, she felt better.

  As they drew closer to New York she watched the scenery roll past like a long television plea for urban renewal. It was a warm day for winter. Off the tracks, mist rose from the snow in gray banks, and she thought of mornings in San Francisco where to look out the windows was to know that the earth was waste and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the earth and the face of the waters, disguised as lovely mother-of-pearl fog.

  31

  San Francisco, California

  January 1948

  The house, a narrow three-story gray shingle with a white picket fence, clung by the knuckles of its foundation to the side of a very steep hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. The man was middle-aged, short and broad. He stood with his foot on the running board of a discolored black panel truck laden with ropes and ladders and color-crusted buckets. He wore an air of somewhat raffish competence, clean but paint-spotted white coveralls, and a painter’s cap with DUTCH BOY printed across the bill.

  “So,” he said, basso profundo, with satisfaction but no smile, “you made it. Lucky you caught me home. I was just leaving for my work.”

  “Can you tell us how to get to our new address, Mr. Golden?” Michael said.

  “Never find it. Long way from here. I’ll drive my truck, you’ll follow.”

  “We don’t want to cut into your workday,” Michael said.

  “Cut into my workday every day for the temple. Only way the temple gets anything done. Not an officer, like the machers, the big shots who talk-talk-talk all the time. Just a worker.” He opened the door and climbed into the truck. He had a heavy foot on the gas pedal; the motor started with a roar. “You follow me,” he said.

  They followed, grateful for the truck ahead because Michael had trouble seeing the traffic lights; they were located in places an Easterner expected they had no right to be.

  They drove for a long, long time. “Where is it, in Oregon?” Leslie said, whispering as though Mr. Golden were in the back seat instead of in the car ahead.

  Finally they turned off into a street of small, neat ranch houses with closely clipped green lawns. “Michael,” Leslie said, “they’re all alike.” Street after street of the same house, set in the same way on identical lots of land.

  “The colors are different,” Michael said.

  The house Mr. Golden stopped in front of was green. It was set between a white one on the right and a blue one on the left.

  Inside, there were three bedrooms, a good-sized living room, a dining area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The rooms were half-furnished.

  “It’s very nice,” Leslie said. “But all those other hundreds of houses just like it . . .”

  “A big tract,” Mr. Golden said. “Everything mass-produced. Get more for your money that way.” He walked over and stroked a wall. “I painted these rooms myself. Good job. You won’t find nicer walls even if you decide to look around.”

  He studied Leslie’s face shrewdly. “You don’t take it, well just rent it out to somebody else. Except this would be a good deal for you. The temple bought this house from our former Rabbi. Name of Kaplan, went to Temple B’nai Israel in Chicago. We don’t have to pay taxes on it. Nonprofit religious institution. So it wouldn’t cost you much.” He disappeared through the doorway.

  “Maybe we can live in a big old house with gingerbread. Or an apartment on one of the high hills,” Leslie said in a low voice.

  “I was told that good places are hard to find in San Francisco now,” Michael said. “And very expensive. Besides, if we take this, it will mean one less headache for the congregation.”

  “But all the carbon copies.”

  He knew what she meant. “In spite of that, it’s a nice little house. And if we find that we don’t like living in a tract we can simply look around at our leisure and then move out.”

  “Okay,” she said, and came to him and kissed him just as Phil Golden came back into the room. “We’re going to live here,” she said.

  Golden nodded. “Want to see the temple?” he asked her.

  They went for another drive which ended at a yellow-brick building. Michael had seen it only on the evening of his audition service. By daylight it looked older and wearier.

  “Used to be a church. Catholic. Saint Jerry Myer. Jewish saint,” Phil said.

  The interior was roomy but dark and Michael thought it smelled faintly of age and the confessional. He had forgotten what an ugly temple it was. He tried to put down the disappointment that welled within him. A temple was people, not a building. But some day, he could not
help thinking fiercely, he would have a temple full of light and air and a sense of beauty and wonder.

  They spent the afternoon shopping for furniture, buying several pieces for more money than they had intended to spend and making an alarming dent in the bank balance.

  “Let me use the thousand dollars Aunt Sally left me,” she said.

  He remembered her father’s face. “No,” he said.

  She sat very still. “Why not?”

  “Is the reason important?”

  “I think the reason might be important. Yes,” she said.

  “Save it and someday use it for something our children really want,” he said. It was the right answer.

  The house was spotlessly clean and this time they had come prepared with clean sheets and towels. Nevertheless when night came they lay in the darkness of the unfamiliar room without sleeping. Leslie tossed.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I hate to meet those women,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” he said, amused.

  “I know what I’m talking about. Remember, I’ve been through it before. Those . . . yentehs . . . flock to the temple, not to pray, not even to hear the new rabbi, but to see the shickseh.”

  “Oh, God,” he said heavily.

  “They do. They look you up and down. ‘How long are you married?’ they ask. And then, ‘Do you have any little ones?’ and you can see their minds ready to go to work like little computers to see if their rabbi had to marry me.”

  “I didn’t realize it was that bad for you,” he said.

  “Well, now you realize.”

  They lay next to each other in silence.

  But a moment later she turned to him and covered his face with quick kisses. “Ah, Michael,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what gets into me.” He reached to take her in his arms but she turned suddenly and slipped out of the bed and ran for the bathroom. He listened for a few moments and then followed after her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, tapping at the door.

  “Go away,” she said in a strangled voice. “Please.”

  He went back to bed and put the pillow over his ears, unsuccessfully trying to blot out the tortured noise of her nausea. How many nights had this happened while he slept undisturbed, he wondered.