And now, one week before the performance, the dress rehearsal! They were alone in the main sanctuary, the cantor in a sea of pews, the boy on the deep altar, the twin heights of stained glass on either side of the ark showing Jacob wrestling with the angel. The boy sang and the cantor moved from place to place, to test the acoustics, a luxury he had never had with his other students, who up to a day before the bar mitzvah were still trying to memorize their parts from a recording.
“You can sing louder,” the cantor called out from the back row. “Don’t be afraid!”
The boy complied.
The cantor finally settled in a spot directly before the boy, three rows back. In his black suit and white shirt the boy was for once wearing the right shoes; he had even tamed his curls and allowed the shaved side of his head to grow out a little. He looked right up there, like a man, and the cantor felt everything was going to be fine. But instead of the few moments of peace the boy’s voice usually brought him, the cantor saw Aaron and Moses pleading with the enraged Lord not to destroy the Israelites, not to kill them all. And the Lord agreed and sent Moses, though he couldn’t speak well, to stand before the people and predict the miracle and warn the righteous to move out of the way. And now it was happening, the earth cracking open and closing like a mouth, swallowing up the three rebels and their families.
Now it was over and the Jews could move on.
For this was the miracle—not the swallowing up but the moving on. A story of salvation, not of destruction: this was what the boy, self-blinded, revealed. Some had to die so that others might live. We are all of us standing on the fault, but it is for each of us to choose to stay—or step away.
The cantor sat trembling with terror and awe.
Why was the boy disclosing this now, now that the cantor had already, in his head, stepped away? Today was the final lesson, today he would receive the last check—and afterward it would be over and he could go back. He wouldn’t touch the check, he would take it and put it in his desk drawer. If that would leave the accountant father’s books suspiciously out of balance, the cantor would deposit the check but not touch the money. Or he would touch the money—but only to give it to charity. He would give it all to charity, everything that the mother, that trusting soul, had given him—for he hadn’t yet spent a penny on the necklace and he didn’t intend to. He would tell Siegel the deal was off. Then he and Leah could get back to the lakes.
When the lesson was over he resisted taking a shortcut through the rabbi’s office, though the rabbi wasn’t in. With the boy following, the cantor walked down the central aisle of the sanctuary, speeding up as he approached the lobby, racing across the slick floor in his white robe like a determined ghost, then bursting into the junior congregation room. The mother’s perfume was in the air. Never had scent smelled so sweet! With a blinding smile stretched across his face he threw open his office door. She wasn’t there. But of course she wasn’t. She probably didn’t know they were practicing in the main sanctuary today, she had come to the junior congregation room to find it empty and had left.
Then he saw that something had been left behind: an envelope in the center of his desk. He tore it open to get at the check, which he would never spend and which as a result was all the more valuable, his ticket to the future itself.
But inside there was just a note, no, a letter, both sides of the page covered by a tiny scrawl. Even when he shook the envelope no check fell out—and when he turned around the boy was gone.
The cantor ran to the front door of the synagogue and pushed it open. He saw the back of the mother’s Cadillac heading away down the drive. The cantor jogged alongside the car, he wanted to say a word, only one! But as the passenger window flowed by, he saw only his own ashen face.
Back inside the cool gloom of the lobby the cantor found he still had the note in his hand. He squinted to make out the words.
Dear Cantor,
Last week I ran into Elise Epstein at the synagogue when I came to pick up my son. She was here to pick up her son too, who as you know is in my son’s bar mitzvah class. I happened to mention how much you’ve been doing for my son. That’s right, I praised you—and I meant every word of it. I didn’t mention how much you were charging me, I promised you I would not. But I did happen to make a joke about what a bargain it was, considering how far my son had come. She said she didn’t know what I meant. I thought she meant that because her son is not as exceptional as mine, no amount of singing lessons would do any good, no matter how much they cost.
That isn’t what she meant.
You aren’t charging Elise or Arlene Goodman or Natalie Berens or Etta Friedman or Bathsheba Blum. I know because I called them all, even the ones I don’t know so well, even the ones who high-hat me when I run into them, and it was awkward and it hurt. But sometimes the truth hurts.
The blood drained from his fingers, the note was in danger of falling to the floor—but he held on to it.
I intend to get my money back. And I intend to stop you from victimizing anyone else—if you can find anyone as dumb as I was. That’s why I’m going to the Board. Who knows, maybe they already know, considering everyone else does. I don’t care if I’m a laughingstock, I don’t care what people think of me, not anymore. At this point the only one I care about is my son. Which is why I’m not going to the Board until after his bar mitzvah. It will be the most beautiful event anyone has ever seen. I’ve planned it all to perfection, from the flowers on the bimah to the pastry selection for dessert. And you will be up there with my son who adores you. You can pack your bags and leave town the day after, for all I care. But it is my son’s special day and I want him to be none the wiser.
I don’t know what will be going on in your head. But I’m not letting you out of my sight. And if you look out at me, you’re going to see a woman ruining her makeup crying. I will be crying at the miracle I’ve produced, the miracle that a son like this could come from someone like me.
I’m not talented. I don’t think I write like Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you could give me a hundred lessons and you still wouldn’t want to hear me sing! I’m not educated, not really. But I have learned enough Hebrew to say the Shabbat prayers. I have learned enough to make a decent Jewish home for my family, a home where we put our Jewish principles into practice, where we would never take advantage of anyone the way—
“What a day,” the cantor heard his Leah say as she approached.
He started to stuff the letter into his pocket—but for what reason, now that everything had been revealed?
The lights in the office were dark, the secretary had gone home, and they both knew they were alone in the synagogue.
“Nu?” she asked.
His smile had returned but it no longer blinded.
“And what are you reading?” she asked.
“Something. From the boy’s mother.”
Leah raised a perfectly drawn eyebrow. “A love letter?”
The cantor shook his head. “A thank-you note.”
THE GOLEM
I
In Solomon Blaustein’s personal cosmology, the dealer stood at the bottom. The excrement of everyone else, virtuous ones and other demonic types as well, dropped onto the dealer’s head. With his access to brand-new certified quote-unquote standard parts, priced to eliminate any profit that Blaustein or any other hard-working American small businessman might hope to make, the dealer believed himself to be a god. But a gulf lay between image and reality.
Blaustein got parts elsewhere. A Jew named Herman Lefkowitz, who had turned his father’s junkyard into an impressive “metal recycling” business, supplied them. Actually, he did nothing so active as that, having pioneered something called Pick and Pay—there had been legal troubles with the shoe outfit of a similar name but Lefkowitz had won—in which the customer searched for the part he needed among rows of junked cars. The cars themselves didn’t get fed into Lefkowitz’s state-of-the-art recycling machine until they had been drained of all fluids
and stripped of every part of value. Lefkowitz needed no one on his payroll for this; customers paid for the privilege.
Usually Blaustein called ahead. Lefkowitz took his calls—but they went always the same way. After a long and pointless conversation in which Blaustein inquired and Lefkowitz hedged and Blaustein begged and Lefkowitz laughed and Blaustein threatened and Lefkowitz cursed before finally admitting he had no idea what the hell was in his yard, he just wanted his old friend Blaustein to come over and have a cup of tea or some schnapps with him, Blaustein sighed. Lefkowitz was rich, he could afford to sit all day on a toilet and read the paper if he wanted to. Blaustein could not. He hung up and drove over to the yard. He tried to sneak past Lefkowitz. His office in this place of destruction was done up to look like a little house, made of cinderblocks painted yellow, with a white picket fence and even a rosebush, and if Blaustein crouched below the window with its open doll-house shutters he was usually home free, at least until he had found his parts and it was time to pay. It was a hell of a way for Blaustein to run his business.
Where Lefkowitz stood in Blaustein’s cosmology was high. He hadn’t worked it out completely, but this was a charitable man whose scales, as far as Blaustein knew, were true. Where he himself, Solomon Blaustein, stood in his own personal cosmology was not up to him to say. Nor would it be to any man of himself. Not at the top, not as high as Lefkowitz—but nowhere near the bottom where the dealer with his shit head stood.
Blaustein had three mechanics working for him. They took the parts that came from the yard, cleaned them up, and installed them in the cars where they were needed. This was Blaustein’s business. You could say he had others working for him as well, though they were not on his payroll. There was a fat blond girl named Shirlene and a skinny black girl named Tanyetta who worked as dispatchers at AAA, and at Christmastime he always sent a little something their way. There were four cracker adjusters—three affiliated with insurance companies, one independent—to whom he supplied the finest in whiskey, and not just at Christmas. The whiskey Blaustein himself fetched, from a place of perfect order and cleanliness in the historic district that was named the Crystal Decanter and owned by a goy.
Because of his many absences, Blaustein’s business, he felt, was always on the verge of collapse. He had no evidence of this, and in fact, as his accountant observed and he himself would announce to anyone who asked, business was booming. But the distance between boom and collapse was not so great. On a nature program he had seen that a Chinese bird’s nest was held together with spit. Or you could take the example of a house of cards. In his business Blaustein supplied the spit; he was the card at the very bottom of the house that if removed would bring the entire structure toppling down. It was his name on the front of the building and the sides of the tow truck. And if you pulled into his garage nowadays, there was no guarantee he would even be there. Instead a mechanic, who might or might not be stealing from the business, would lift his head out of the hood of a car and make you wait until he was done. Finally, this greasy-handed person would ask what you wanted, whereas any good businessman knew you didn’t ask the customer what he wanted, you told him.
Here in the “men’s sports area” of the Jewish Educational Alliance, a brownness pervaded everything—the lockers, the medicine ball, the punching bag, the cracked and taped-up vinyl massage table, and everywhere the light that had no visible source and appeared to be filtered through wastewater. Airless, humid, hot, fragrant with the activity of a million microorganisms, the place had much in common with a sewer, although unlike a sewer, this was a place where a man could be bent, stretched, karate-chopped, and kneed into submission.
Blaustein had come here to relax. The masseur was a man named Martin—no one called him by his last name—who wore thick-framed Coke-bottle glasses and a kind of medical orderly’s outfit and the goofy smile of a simpleton. He was a universal object of mockery and yet was known to have a firm touch. Blaustein nodded at Martin—you didn’t shake this man’s hand—and went to the lockerroom to disrobe. On his way in Blaustein saw his old friend Artie coming out. The stack of towels in Artie’s hands almost completely covered his face, but Blaustein would have recognized him by his limp alone. For every three steps he took, his left foot took a break. The top half of his body lurched forward and with this momentum his right foot took a big step, and in this way Artie made it through the world, surprisingly fast.
It was because of this limp that Blaustein liked to keep an eye on Artie. Make no mistake—even before the attack, Artie had been a slow type of individual. Afterward, well—This was in the old neighborhood, a softball game that had gone on too long, crickets screeching around them, bats streaking past the treetops, and just then three Irish boys materializing out of the lane. You could barely see—but the biggest one said they wanted to play. Artie and the other Jewish boys turned to Sol, who was holding the baseball bat. What choice did he have but to hand it over? Would any one of them have done different?
Blaustein stopped and called Artie’s name.
Artie turned around but didn’t seem surprised.
“When did you start here?” Blaustein asked.
“It was. Let’s s-s-see, it was—”
“What happened to Grossman’s?” This was a local supermarket chain where Artie had had a job as a bagboy.
“They let me go last year.”
“Goddamn that Grossman. What, he fired you because you weren’t as fast as a kid? That’s what you call age discrimination, you could sue. I’ll call Stevie Goldberg, he’ll know what to do.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you give me a massage.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I can see you’re like the golem here, with that Martin telling you what to do, but do you ever get to give a massage yourself? Don’t you want to learn a trade?”
In fact Artie sometimes gave a massage. The fat ones, the ones bearlike with hairiness, those who had bad odors or poked at the sheet with an erect member—these were the clients that Martin gave him.
A few minutes later Artie was kneading Blaustein’s muscles through his papery copper-colored skin. Blaustein turned his head to the wall, and though they were in a private room he spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Are you happy here?” he asked. And: “Is this what you want out of life?” He offered his old friend the chance to leave this underground world for a fresh-air job; to work in a more manly field; and to be his own man, albeit in the capacity of Blaustein’s assistant.
Artie rarely spoke more than he needed to anyway. Still, Blaustein could tell from Artie’s silence that he wasn’t getting anywhere. “I haven’t had a solid bowel movement in years,” he said, letting the gas escape from under the sheet in illustration. “Food doesn’t digest inside me, it rots. I buy Tums by the case at Kmart and that’s what I eat instead of candy.”
Artie seemed to be trying to pull Blaustein’s leg out of its socket and he cried out.
“Ask me how I sleep,” Blaustein said.
“Okay.”
“I don’t. But every night I try. I drink a NyQuil chased with a shot of slivovitz and sometimes I take a Valium if necessary.”
Artie pulled Blaustein’s arms straight back along his spine, and Blaustein muttered curses under his breath.
“Why?” Blaustein asked. “One word. Tension! I need help. Someone I can trust. An old friend. How long has it been since we’ve seen each other?”
“Last time was—” Artie snuck in almost before Blaustein had finished. “I don’t know. I s-s-see you around.”
The words the and a, Blaustein had noticed, caused Artie special trouble, and so he left them out, like a Russian. Also his timing was off. Whenever whatever he needed to say was in the bag, he said it. Or maybe it just came out. Otherwise he circled the words he had to utter, like a hawk after a mouse, and when he spotted one of them he dove for the kill. It was a shame, Blaustein thought, that the ambition and aggressiveness other men were able to dedicate to b
eing a big success in life, this man harnessed it all just to say boo.
“How much?” Artie asked, wedging the two words into the tiny space he felt was his.
“I’ve mentioned the perks.”
“I’ll t-t-tell you how much I make here.”
“So that’s it?” Blaustein asked, his voice rising. “That’s all you’re interested in?”
“Why not get a kid?”
“I’ve tried a kid. He wasn’t responsible. Also a shvartzer I’ve tried. No good.”
“What’ll you pay me?”
Blaustein craned his neck up and around. “If that’s all that matters to you, goddamn it, if that’s how you talk to an old friend—”
“Hey,” Artie said in a soothing voice, running his finger down Blaustein’s spine. “You’ll turn over now. You can look me in the face.”
Where Artie fit into the cosmology, even the Lord Almighty would have had a hard time saying. In addition to his stutter and limp, his eyes pointed in different directions, like misaimed headlights. He got a disability check, which enabled him to survive on his salary from the discontinuous string of part-time and unreported shit jobs he had had over the years. Once Blaustein had seen Artie by the side of the road spearing garbage and putting it into a sack, though he wasn’t wearing an orange vest or anything else that would distinguish him from a meshuggener. It was rush hour and Blaustein didn’t want to embarrass him by stopping anyway. It was hard to know what to do. When Blaustein ran into him at the JEA he was glad to see him employed, but anyone could do better than that, even a man like this.
Artie saw reason and came to work at the garage. Blaustein paid him fifty cents more an hour than he was making at the JEA. But who knew if this investment would pay off? Blaustein tried to keep the big picture in mind, though from the start Artie tried him. He didn’t know the makes or models of cars; he didn’t even own one himself. The first time Artie went to the scrapyard by himself, it took him twice as long as it should have. Next to the yard was the dump and for some reason he had stopped there, in a dump. It was only because he was an old friend that Blaustein didn’t fire him on the spot. Rarely in a businessman’s life did a hiring opportunity permit the fulfillment of a mitzvah. But should a respect for the past outweigh one’s responsibilities to the present? When is enough enough? Such weighty questions kept Blaustein up that night and the next.
Fire Year Page 9