The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  There was a silence. “How’s the plumbing over there now?” Michael asked.

  Ruthie didn’t smile, and he saw that she didn’t remember, and then she did. “I don’t mind it at all now,” she said. “I don’t know if that means it’s gotten better or I’ve grown up.” She looked in the direction her father had gone and she shook her head. “What do you people know?” she said softly. “What do you people really know? If you really knew, you’d be there instead of here.”

  “Pop said it,” Michael said. “We’re Americans.”

  “Well, my children are Jews the way you’re Americans,” she said. “They knew what to do when the planes came over. They ran like hell for shelter and sang Hebrew songs.”

  “Thank God none of you was hurt,” Michael said.

  “Did I say that?” she said. “No, I know I didn’t. I said we were all well, and we are, now. Saul lost an arm. His right arm.”

  Leslie drew a quick involuntary breath and Michael felt tired and ill. “Where?” he said.

  “At the elbow.”

  He had meant where had it happened, and when he didn’t say anything she understood this. “A place called Petah Tikvah. He was with the Irgun Zvai Leumi.”

  Leslie cleared her throat. “The terrorists? I mean, weren’t they a kind of underground?”

  “They were in the beginning, with the British. Later, during the war, they became part of the regular army. That’s when Saul was with them. For a very little while.”

  “Is he teaching again?” Leslie asked.

  “Oh, yes. For the longest time. The arm makes it easy for him to control the children. He’s a big hero in their eyes.” She snubbed out her cigarette and smiled at them with something less than tenderness.

  The morning after the period of shiva was over Abe and Michael drove Ruthie to Idlewild.

  “You’ll come at least to visit?” she said to Abe as she kissed him.

  “We’ll see. Remember the date. Don’t forget to say yahrzeit.” She clung to him. “I’ll come,” he said.

  “It’s a pity,” she said when she hugged Michael just before boarding. “I don’t know you or your family and you don’t know me or my family. I have a feeling we’d all like one another.” She kissed him on the mouth.

  When she had left them they watched until the El Al plane dwindled into nothing in the sky and then they walked back to the car.

  “What now?” Michael asked when they were on the road. “How about California? You’re welcome in our house. You know that.”

  Abe smiled. “Remember your Zaydeh? No. But . . . thank you.”

  Michael kept his eye on the traffic. “Then . . . what? Florida?”

  His father sighed. “Not without her. I wouldn’t be able to do it. I’m going to Atlantic City.”

  Michael grunted. “What’s there?”

  “I know people who have retired there. I know other people who haven’t retired yet, but who go there for the summer. Garment manufacturers. My kind of people.

  “Come down there with me tomorrow,” he said. “Help me pick out a place to live.”

  “All right,” Michael told him.

  “I like the waves. And all that goddam sand.”

  They found him a bedroom, kitchenette, sitting room and bath in a small but good residential hotel in Ventnor two blocks from the beach. It was furnished.

  “It’s expensive, but what the hell,” Abe said. He smiled. “Your mother had grown sort of tight the last four-five years, you know that?”

  “No.”

  “You want the stuff in the apartment?” Abe asked.

  “Listen—” Michael said.

  “I don’t want it. Nothing. If you want it, take it. An agent will sell the apartment.”

  “Okay,” Michael said after a while. “Maybe Zaydeh’s brass bed.” He felt angry, but he didn’t know why.

  “The rest, too. What you can’t use, give away.”

  After lunch they walked a long way, stopping for a while at a fake auction where shlahk items were sold at three times their worth, and then they sat on deckchairs under a dazzling noonday sun and watched the Boardwalk pour its stream of people past them.

  Fifty feet away two hawkers separated by a beer stand fought a battle of sex symbolism. A shirtsleeved man in a straw hat was spieling hot dogs, THE BIGGEST FRANKFURTER IN THE WORLD GET IT HERE GET IT HOT GET IT EIGHTEEN DELECTABLE INCHES LONG, the man screamed.

  ALL COLORS BALLOONS BIG AND ROUND AND LOVELY AND BOUNCY AND JOUNCY AND BEAUTIFUL, he was answered by a short Italian-looking man who wore faded levis and a torn blue jersey.

  A sweating Negro pushed a rolling chair containing a very fat lady holding a naked baby.

  A covey of teen-age quail in bathing suits walked by, rolling their skinny hips in pathetic imitation of the voluptuous rotating behinds of their Hollywood favorites.

  Carried on a salt breeze from a mile down the Boardwalk came the husky whisper of a distant crowd and faint far-off cries of terror.

  “The broad jumped into the yahm on her horse,” Abe said with satisfaction. He breathed deep. “A michayeh. A real pleasure,” he said.

  “Stay here,” Michael said. “But when you get bored, remember we’ve got beaches in California, too.”

  “I’ll come to visit,” Abe said. He lit a cigar. “Don’t forget, any time I feel like it here, I can jump in the car and visit her grave. That I can’t do in California.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “When are you going back?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow, I guess,” Michael said. “I’ve got a congregation. I can’t stay away forever.” He paused. “If you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Pop, don’t keep going to her grave.”

  His father didn’t answer him.

  “It won’t do anybody any good. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Abe looked at him and smiled. “At what age does the father have to begin obeying the son?”

  “At no age,” Michael said. “But I see death, sometimes half a dozen times a week. I know it doesn’t pay for the living to sacrifice themselves. You can’t turn back the clock.”

  “Doesn’t it depress you, your job?”

  Michael watched a sweating Shriner, wearing a fez that looked too small for his fat bald head, put his arm around a tiny, cool-looking redhead who appeared to be sixteen years old. The girl looked up at the fat man as they walked. Maybe her father, he thought hopefully. “Sometimes,” he said.

  “People come to you with death. Sickness. A boy gets in trouble with the law. A girl gets pregnant behind the barn.”

  Michael smiled. “Not any more, Pop. Today that happens, but not behind the barn. In cars.”

  His father waved off the distinction. “So how do you help these people?”

  “I do my best. Sometimes I manage to help. Lots of times I don’t. Sometimes nobody can help, only time and God.”

  Abe nodded. “I’m glad you know that.”

  “But I always listen. That’s something. I can be an ear.”

  “An ear.” Abe looked out to sea where a trawler sat apparently motionless, a black fleck on the blue horizon. “Suppose a man came to you and said he was living up to his knees in ashes, what would you tell him?”

  “I’d have to know more,” Michael said.

  “Suppose a man had lived like an animal most of his life,” he said slowly. “Fight like a dog for a dollar. Screw like a cat at the whiff of a woman. Run like a race horse, round and round and round without even a jockey on his back.

  “And suppose,” he said in a low voice, “he woke up one morning and found that he was an old man, without anybody who really loved him?”

  “Pop!”

  “I mean really loved him, so that he was the most important thing in the other person’s life.”

  Michael could think of nothing to say.

  “You saw me once at a pretty ugly moment, for you,” his father said.

  “Don�
��t start that again.”

  “No. No.” he said, speaking quickly, “but I just want to tell you that it wasn’t the first time I had other women while I was married to your mother. Nor the last. Nor the last.”

  Michael gripped the edges of his chair. “Now why do you feel you have to inflict this on me?” he said.

  “I want to make you understand,” Abe said. “Somewhere along the line all that stopped.” He shrugged. “Maybe my glands, maybe change of life. I can think of half a dozen funny possibilities. But I stopped, and I fell in love with your mother.

  “You never had a chance to know her, really know her. You didn’t and Ruthie didn’t. But now it’s worse for me. Can you see that, Rabbi? Can you understand that, m’lumad, my wise man? I didn’t have her for a long time, and then I had her for only a little while, and now she’s gone.”

  “Pop!” he said.

  “Hold my hand,” his father said. He hesitated, and Abe reached over and took his son’s hand in his own. “What’s the matter,” he said roughly. “You’re afraid they’ll think we’re queer?”

  “I love you, Pop,” Michael said.

  Abe squeezed his hand. “Shah,” he said.

  Gulls wheeled. The crowd poured past. There were lots of fezzes, an entire Shrine convention. Little by little the small black trawler crept across the rim of the sea.

  THERE ARE MANY PRETENDERS TO THE TITLE BUT THIS IS THE ONE THE ONLY THE BIGGEST FRANKFURTER IN THE WORLD.

  The girl on the horse must have jumped into the sea again. People screamed faintly. In front of them their shadows grew longer and less distinct.

  When it was time to leave, Abe drew him toward the beer stand and held up two fingers. There was a young girl behind the counter, brown-haired and bored, an ordinary zaftig girl of about eighteen, slightly pretty but with crooked teeth and an imperfect complexion.

  Abe watched her as she took the mugs off the tray and reached for the spigot. “My name is Abe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sheila.” In her cheek, a dimple.

  He sampled it between his thumb and forefinger, then he went to the balloon man and bought a balloon, a passionate red one, and he came back and tied the string around her wrist so it floated above them like a big bloodshot wink. “This guy is my son. Stay away from him. He’s a married man.”

  Coolly she took his money and made change. But she laughed as she walked away from the cash register, bouncier than she had walked before, the balloon bobbing above and just a little to the rear.

  Abe slid him a schooner of beer.

  “For the road,” he said.

  36

  Life, he began to understand, was a series of compromises. The Temple Isaiah rabbinate had not worked out the way he had hoped, with hordes of people to sit at his feet and listen to his brilliant twentieth-century interpretations of Talmudic wisdoms. His wife was now a mother and he surreptitiously searched her eyes for the girl he had married, the one who had shuddered when he looked at her in a certain knowing way. Now sometimes at night in the middle of their lovemaking a thin wail from the other room caused her to push him away and run to the baby, and he lay there in the dark hating the infant he loved.

  The high holidays came and the temple overflowed with people who remembered suddenly that they were Jews and that it was time to fill up with enough repentance to last another year. The sight of the crowded sanctuary excited him and filled him with new hope and firm resolve that he would not fail to win them over in the end.

  He determined to make another try while the Yom Kippur sermon was still fresh in their minds. One of his former professors, Dr. Hugo Nachmann, was spending some time at the Los Angeles branch of the rabbinical institute. Dr. Nachmann was an expert on the period of the Dead Sea scrolls. Michael invited him to San Francisco to lecture at the temple.

  Eighteen people attended the lecture. Michael recognized fewer than half of them as temple members. Two of them turned out to be science reporters there to interview Dr. Nachmann on archeological aspects of the discovery of the scrolls.

  Dr. Nachmann made things easy for the Kinds. “This isn’t at all unusual, as you know,” he said. “People simply are not interested in lecturers on certain nights. Now, if you had offered them a dinner dance. . . !”

  The next morning, leaning on the fence overlooking the half-completed church, Michael found himself telling Father Campanelli about it. “I keep failing,” he said. “Nothing I do will get them inside the temple.”

  The priest fingered the mark on his face. “On many a morning I give thanks for the Days of Obligation,” he said quietly.

  One morning several weeks later Michael sprawled in bed feeling mildly dejected at the thought of another day. He knew enough about the psychology of personal loss to realize that the mood was a lingering remainder of his mother’s funeral, but this awareness did nothing to bolster his spirits as he lay absent-mindedly seeking comfort in his wife’s warm thigh and staring at a crack in their bedroom ceiling.

  There was little at Temple Isaiah to draw him out of bed; not even a clean floor, he told himself.

  Just before the holidays the temple janitor, a gap-toothed Mormon who had kept the premises tabernacle-clean for three years, had announced his retirement to his married daughter’s home in Utah to lull his sciatica and reawaken his spirit. The house committee, which met infrequently, had been lethargic about replacing him. While Phil Golden fumed and scolded, the silver and brasswork went unpolished and the wax yellowed on the floors. Michael could have hired a janitor, secure in the knowledge that his salary checks would have been issued at the rabbi’s command. But it was the house committee’s job to hire a new man. At least they would be held to that much commitment to the temple, he thought grimly.

  “Get up,” Leslie said, twitching her hip.

  “Why?”

  But seventy minutes later he was parking his car outside the temple. To his surprise the door was unlocked. Inside, he heard the rasp-rasp of scrub brush against linoleum, and following the sound downstairs he saw the man in paint-spattered white coveralls scrubbing the hallway floor on his hands and knees.

  “Phil,” Michael said.

  Golden wiped a wet forehead with the back of his hand. “I forgot to bring newspapers,” he said. “When you were a kid did your mother wash all the floors on Thursday afternoons and spread newspapers?”

  “Fridays,” Michael said. “Friday mornings.”

  “Nah, on Friday mornings she baked chaleh.”

  “What are you doing? A decrepit old momser like you, scrubbing floors? You want a heart attack?”

  “I got a heart like a bull,” Golden said. “A temple’s got to be clean. You can’t have a dirty temple.”

  “So let them hire a janitor. Hire one yourself.”

  “They’ll krahtz around to it after a while. Start doing things for them, they’ll never bother to think about the temple. In the meantime, the floors will be clean.”

  Michael shook his head. “Phil, Phil.” He turned on his heel and went back upstairs. In his office he took off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves. Then he searched through several closets until he found another pail and brush.

  “Not you,” Golden protested. “Who needs help? You’re the rabbi!”

  But he was already on his hands and knees, rotating the brush over the soapy water. Sighing, Golden returned to his own pail. Together, they scrubbed. The sound of the two brushes was friendly. Golden began to sing, in a breathless, grunting voice, snatches of opera.

  “I’ll race you to the end of the hall,” Michael said. “Loser goes for coffee.”

  “No races,” Phil said. “No kids games. Just work, a good job.”

  Golden reached the end of the corridor first and went out for the coffee anyhow. A few minutes later, sitting together in an empty Hebrew-school classroom, they drank it slowly and regarded one another.

  “Those pants,” Phil said. “Don’t let the rebbi
tzen see them.”

  “She’ll see I’m finally working for my money.”

  “You’re working for your money every day.”

  “No. Come on, Phil.” He sloshed his coffee round and round in its container. “I’m almost a full-time Talmudist. I spend every day with books, looking for God.”

  “So who knocks that?”

  “If I find Him, my congregation won’t come to hear about it until next Yom Kippur.”

  Golden chuckled and then sighed. “Ah, I tried to tell you,” he said. “It’s that kind of a congregation.” He put his hand on Michael’s arm. “They like you. You probably won’t believe it, but they like you very much. They’re going to offer you a long-term contract. With a good yearly increase.”

  “For what?”

  “For being here. For being their rabbi. On their terms, sure, but still their rabbi. Is it a bad thing for a rabbi to be financially secure and still to be able to devote most of his time to study?”

  He took the coffee container from Michael’s hand and dropped it into the wastebasket along with his own. “Let me talk to you as if you were one of my sons,” he said. “This is a good set-up. Relax. Be comfortable. Grow prosperous. Let your kid grow up with the rest of the lotus-eaters and go to Stanford and only hope that he ends up with this good a deal.”

  Michael said nothing.

  “Another couple of years, we’ll buy you your car. Later on, your house.”

  “My God.”

  “You want to work?” Golden said. “Come on, let’s wash some more floors.” His laughter was like blows on a drum. “I guarantee you, when I tell that lousy house committee who their acting janitor was, they’ll have a permanent man hired by tomorrow!”

  On the following day his muscles complained about the unnaccustomed exercise. He stopped at St. Margaret’s and leaned on the fence watching the steel-helmeted workers swarming over the new building, the knotted sinews in the backs of his thighs causing him to feel a new kinship with the workers of the world. Father Campanelli was not there. The priest now rarely came out to watch the work, remaining inside the red-brick walls of the old church, soon to feel the clout of the swinging iron ball.