The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  All we needed, he thought.

  Morning sickness.

  Ech.

  Her beautiful belly will blow up into a balloon.

  She’s wrong about the women, he thought, this will take care of everything. She’ll sit in the first row and during Friday night services the women will look from her swelling stomach to me and their lips will smile tenderly but their eyes will say, Beast, you did this to all of us.

  Big. Very soon now.

  Oy, I love her.

  I wonder if we have to stop making love?

  When she came back, limp with sweat and her mouth smelling of Listerine, he held her and touched her stomach carefully with his fingertips, finding it flat and hard and unchanged.

  He looked at her in the growing light and the nausea was gone and unexpectedly she smiled a satisfied female smile, proud that she was in a position to have morning sickness. As he put his arms around her and his cheek on her cheek she belched into his ear and instead of excusing herself she burst into tears. The honeymoon was over, he told himself as he stroked her head and kissed her eyelids that were soft and wet like little flowers.

  For two days he met and talked to people, the officers and the machers of the temple. The former rabbi’s secretary had gotten married and was living in San Jose, and he spent a great deal of time simply trying to locate things. He found a membership list and started to work out a schedule of personal visits to help him get acquainted with the less-active members of the congregation.

  On the second day Phil Golden came into the temple at noon. “Like Chinks? Place down the street does wonders with a moo goo gai pan. Owned by one of our members.”

  Golden wore a pin-striped blue suit that looked custom-tailored. “Aren’t you working today?” Michael asked.

  Golden grimaced. “I’ll tell you,” he said as they walked together toward the restaurant. “Years ago when I was a young man I worked like a horse. Paint, paint, paint. For a tough, bare living. Over the years my wife and I had four sons, thank God, all big, healthy boys. I taught them all how to paint houses. I had a dream, some day I’ll be a contractor, my boys will work for me. Only now all the boys are contractors. I’m president of the parent company, but that’s what it is. A parent company. The only time I get a paintbrush in my hands is when I do something for the temple.”

  He chuckled softly. “That isn’t quite true. Every six months or so I can’t stand it any more and I go out like a thief and take a small job on the q.t. I hire a helper, a Mexican kid, and give him all the profits. Don’t tell the boys.”

  “I won’t.”

  The restaurant was called Moy Sheh. “Morris in?” Golden asked the Chinese waiter who brought the menu.

  “He’s at the market,” the waiter said.

  They were hungry and the pungent food was good. They talked little, but finally Phil Golden sat back and lit up a cigar. “So, how are you doing?” he asked.

  “I think I’m going to like it here.”

  The older man nodded noncommitally.

  “A peculiar thing,” Michael said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people. And from four different men I got the same warning.”

  Golden puffed. “What was the warning?”

  “‘Watch out for Phil Golden,’ they said. ‘He’s a rough one.’”

  Golden inspected his cigar ash. “I could tell you the four names. And what did you tell them?”

  “I told them I’d watch out.”

  Golden’s face remained expressionless, but the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Make it easier for you to watch, Rabbi, you and your wife come tomorrow for Friday-night dinner,” he said.

  There were eleven people around the dining-room table. In addition to Phil and Rhoda Golden there were two of the sons, Jack and Irving, their wives, Ruthie (Jack’s) and Florence (lrving’s), and three of Phil’s grandchildren, ages three to eleven.

  “Henry, our other married son, lives over in Sausalito,” Phil explained. “Got two kids and a nice deck house. He married an Armenian girl. They have two little William Saroyans, big brown sensitive eyes and noses bigger than plain Jews could afford. We don’t see them much. They stay in Sausalito doing who knows what, maybe picking grapes.”

  “Phil,” Rhoda Golden said.

  Phil remembered about Leslie and felt impelled to explain to her. “He didn’t convert, she didn’t convert, and the kids are nothing. I leave it to you, is this good?”

  “I guess it isn’t,” she said.

  “What’s the name of your fourth son?” Michael asked.

  “Ai, Babe,” Ruthie said, and the others smiled.

  “I ask you to picture, Rabbi,” said Florence, who was blond and well-built but skinny, “a handsome guy of thirty-seven. Still has all his hair. Makes money. Is a very tender person, a real booby-doll. Loves kids, they love him. Is all man, walks the streets of San Francisco on broken hearts instead of paving stones. Yet he won’t get married.”

  “Babe, Babe, Babe,” Rhoda said, shaking her head. “My Babe. If I could dance at his wedding. Even to Armenian music. Too much pepper in the fish?”

  The fish was excellent, as was the soup and the roast chicken and the stuffed derma and the two kinds of kugel and the fruit compote. Shabbos lights burned in brass candlesticks on an upright piano in the next room. It was the kind of apartment Michael remembered but had not been in for a long time.

  After dinner there was brandy while the women did the dishes and then the two sets of younger parents said good night and dragged their sleepy children home. Before leaving, Florence Golden made a date to take Leslie to lunch and to the De Young Memorial Museum the following day, which somehow turned the conversation to pictures and then photographs, and Rhoda hauled out a giant album which she and Leslie pored over in the kitchen, occasionally sending squalls of laughter into the living room where Michael and Phil sat over another brandy.

  “So, now you’re a Californian,” Phil said.

  “An old Californian.”

  Golden smiled. “Zehr old,” he said. “I’m what you call an old Californian. I came out here when I was a little boy, with my mother and father from New London, Connecticut. My father was a drummer. Marine hardware. Always carried a trunk weighed a hundred and four pounds. When we first came here we tried a series of shuls in the old Jewish neighborhood around Fillmore Street. The Yiddlech huddled together in those days, like the Chinese. That didn’t last long, of course,” he said. “You can hardly tell the difference between Jews and Catholics and Protestants any more. Three good whiffs of California air and everyone becomes homogenized. Ah, Rabbi, its’ a different story from the old days, being a Jew today.”

  “In what way?”

  Golden snorted. “Take the bar mitzvah. It used to be a big thing for a little boy. He’s called the bema for the first time, he sings a section of the Torah in Hebrew, like magic he becomes a man in the eyes of God and of his fellow Jews. Nobody sees anybody but him, you know?

  “Today by comparison the boy takes a back seat. The show’s the thing. There’s more bar than mitzvah. Your temple congregation is mostly a cocktail crowd. Young American moderns. What do they know from Fillmore Street?” He shook his head.

  Michael looked at him thoughtfully. “Why was I warned about you?” he asked.

  “I’m the temple scold,” Phil said. “I keep insisting that the reason we got a building is to have services in. That to be Jews you got to be Jewish. It doesn’t make you popular in Temple Isaiah.”

  “So why are you a member?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “My boys joined. My boys are as bad as the rest of them. But I feel a family should go to services as a family. I figured it won’t hurt the rest of them to sit in the same temple as one old-fashioned yiddel when they come to their annual service.”

  Michael smiled. “Things can’t be that bad. They can’t.”

  “They can’t, huh?” Golden chuckled. “They started Temple Isaiah eight years ago. You know why? The
other Reform temples demanded too much time. Too much personal commitment. Your people want to be Jews, but not to the extent that it’s going to take any of the free time they came to California to enjoy. Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashonah. That’s all, brother.

  “Now,” he said, holding up one large hand like a traffic cop, “don’t think they’re unwilling to pay for this privilege. Our dues are fairly high, but this is a young, successful congregation. Times are good. They make money and they pay their dues so you can be Jewish for them. You want to spend money for any temple project within reason, I can tell you here and now you can do it. Just don’t expect to see many people at your services. Just . . . realize that you’ve got enemies, Rabbi. Rows of empty seats.”

  Michael thought about that. “The Ku Klux Klan doesn’t bother you?”

  Golden shrugged his shoulders and made a face. Bist mishugah? his expression asked.

  “Then don’t worry about the seats. We’ll try to fill them.”

  Phil smiled. “That would take a miracle worker,” he said gently, reaching for the bottle. He poured more brandy into Michael’s glass. “I never have trouble with the Rabbi. With the board, yes. With individual members, yes. But not with the Rabbi. I’ll be there if you need me, but I won’t be a pest. It’s your baby.”

  “Not for six months yet,” Michael said, as Leslie and Rhoda came into the room.

  And that changed the subject.

  The following day some of the furniture came. Michael sat in a new chair in front of the television set formerly owned by Rabbi Kaplan. On CBS, newsreels were being shown of armies representing 40,000,000 Arabs of six countries directing their combined military hate toward 650,000 Jews. The film strips showed ruined kibbutzim and corpses and Israeli women huddled in olive groves, answering Jordanian fire with long bursts of tracer bullets. Michael watched the news programs closely. His parents heard from Ruthie infrequently now. She was evasive when they wrote to her with questions about what she was doing during the fighting. She would say only that Saul and the children were well and that she was well. Was that his sister Ruthie, Michael thought, lying behind a fallen olive tree and attempting to send a stream of bullets through an invader’s flesh? He stayed in front of the television screen all day.

  Leslie enjoyed the afternoon outing with Florence Golden. She came home with the name of an excellent obstetrician and with a framed print of Thomas Sully’s The Torn Hat. They spent a long time hanging it, then they stood with their arms around one another and studied the sweet, serious face of the boy in the picture.

  “Do you have your heart set on a son?” she asked.

  “No,” he lied.

  “I really don’t care. All I can think about is that our love is making a human being. That’s all that matters. It doesn’t make any difference whether he has a penis or not.”

  “If it’s a he, I’d rather he had,” Michael said.

  That night he dreamed of Arabs and Jews killing one another and he saw Ruthie’s dead body in his dream. Next morning he got out of bed early and walked in his bare feet into the back yard. The fog was thick and ropy, and he breathed it deep inside, tasting the fish-tang of the Pacific Ocean four miles away.

  “What are you doing?” Leslie asked sleepily, coming up behind him.

  “Living,” he said. As they watched, the sun cut through the fog like a windshield defroster.

  “I think I’ll make a small garden and grow some tomatoes,” he said. “And maybe an orange tree. Are we too far north for an orange tree?”

  “I think we are,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said crankily.

  “Then plant it,” she said. “Oh, Michael, this is going to be good. I just love it here. We were meant to stay here always.”

  “Whatever you want, Baby,” he said, and they went inside, he to scramble the eggs and make the coffee, she to be sick with child.

  32

  On that first shabbos in his new temple he knew with a thrill of triumph that Phil Golden was wrong. His sermon had been short enough, bright enough and intelligent, stressing the importance of identification and participation by the members. The seats were four-fifths filled, the congregation was attentive, and after the service friendly hands grasped his and warm voices caressed him with words of support, even of incipient affection. He felt certain that his congregation would return.

  Most of them did on the following week.

  Fewer showed up on the third Friday evening.

  When he had been rabbi of Temple Isaiah for six weeks, the empty seats were very noticeable from the bema. The backs of the seats were of polished wood veneer that reflected the lights like a great many mocking yellow eyes.

  He ignored them, concentrating on the worshipers who filled the other seats. But the number of worshipers dwindled every week and the number of empty seats grew, so many unblinking eyes of yellow light on the backs of the chairs that he could no longer ignore them, and finally he knew that Phil Golden was right.

  His enemies.

  It was easy, he and Leslie found, to become Californians.

  They learned not to drive behind cable cars going up steep hills.

  They visited Golden Gate Park on Sunday afternoons when the air was the color of pollen and they sat and grass-stained their clothing and watched lovers walking and necking while all around them small children played and laughed and cried.

  His wife’s belly grew, but not into the ugly and swollen thing he had feared. It bloomed like a large, warm flesh bud, pushed outward by the growing life inside. At night now he sometimes turned back the covers and switched on the bed lamp and watched it while she slept, smiling to himself and breathing hard when he saw her belly shudder quickly as the baby within her kicked or tossed. He was haunted by thoughts of terrible things, of fatal miscarriages and hemorrhages and breech births and claw hands and no legs and vegetables with feeble minds, and he prayed through long sleepless nights that God would spare them from all of these.

  The obstetrician was named Lubowitz. He was a fat grandfather and an old hand, and he knew when to be tender and when to be tough. He put Leslie on a regimen of walking and exercise that gave her a ravenous appetite and then placed her on a diet that kept her hungry all the time.

  Michael spoke to her as little as possible about the temple as her pregnancy advanced, preferring not to disturb her. He was becoming increasingly disturbed himself.

  His congregation puzzled him.

  Phil Golden’s family and a handful of others could be relied upon to attend services regularly. But his contact with the body of people who made up his temple remained almost nonexistent.

  He went to the hospitals daily in search of sick Jews he might comfort and get to know. He found some, but rarely from his own congregation.

  Calling at the homes of temple members, he found them polite and friendly but strangely remote. In a patio apartment on Russian Hill, for example, a couple named Sternbane regarded him uneasily after he had introduced himself. Oscar Sternbane was an importer of Oriental curios and owned a small interest in a coffee house on Geary Street. His wife, Celia, gave voice lessons. She had black hair and pink skin and was arrogantly aware of her looks, with a coloratura’s chest tenderly displayed in a bulky scoop-neck sweater and flanks that deserved to be hugged by blue Pucci slacks, and nostrils that cost six hundred dollars apiece.

  “I’m trying to reorganize the Brotherhood,” Michael said to Oscar Sternbane. “I thought we might begin by having Sunday breakfasts at the temple.”

  “Rabbi, let me be frank,” Sternbane said. “We’re happy to belong to the temple. Our little boy can learn Hebrew every Saturday morning, and all about the Bible. That’s nice, it’s cultural. But bagels and lox! We were happy to leave bagels and lox behind when we came here from Teaneck, New Jersey.”

  “Forget the food,” Michael said. “We have people in the temple. Do you know the Barrons?”

  Oscar shrugged. Celia shook her head.

  “I think
you’d like them. And there are others. The Pollocks. The Abelsons.”

  “Freddy and Jan Abelson?”

  “Hey,” he said, delighted. “You know the Abelsons?”

  “Yes,” Celia said.

  “We’ve been there once and they’ve been here once,” Freddy said. “They’re very nice, but . . . to tell you the truth, Rabbi, square. They don’t”—he held up his hand and turned it slowly, like a man screwing in an invisible light bulb—“swing enough for us. You know? Look,” he said kindly, “we’ve all got our own groups of friends, our own interests, and they just don’t revolve around the temple. But what time will the breakfasts begin? I’ll try to make the scene.”

  He didn’t. In the end, eight men showed up on the first Sunday morning, four of them named Golden. Only Phil and his sons came back the second week.

  “Perhaps a dance,” Leslie suggested when he finally discussed his problems with her after he had consumed three martinis one evening before dinner.

  They spent five weeks planning it; they prepared a flyer, sent two mailings, devoted the front page of the temple bulletin to the affair, hired a combo, ordered a catered buffet, and on the night of the dance watched with frozen smiles as eleven couples shuffled over the floor of the large temple hall.

  Michael continued to visit the hospitals. He spent a great deal of time on his sermons, as if every seat in the temple were being fought over.

  But this left a great deal of unfilled time. There was a public library two blocks away. He took out a card and began to draw books. At first he went back to the philosophers, but soon the jackets of the novels tempted him. He developed a nodding-smiling acquaintanceship with the ladies behind the circulation desk.

  He returned to the Talmud and the Torah, studying a different portion each morning and reviewing it with Leslie each evening. In the stillness of the afternoons, when the temple building was quiet with the dead weight of undisturbed air, he began to experiment with the mystic theosophy of the Cabala, like a small boy dipping his toe into dangerously deep water.