Junior paid the bill, wouldn’t hear of her offering to contribute so much as the tip.
Outside, the rain had washed the streets clean, a pale sun was casting a beginning-of-the-world glow over the wet shop fronts, and people were tentatively emerging from their shelters. In the narrow, crooked Chinatown lane bordering the courthouse, a boy on a delivery bicycle piled high with greens half-stood in the saddle, whistling as he pedaled past them. On Canal Street, a man flipped a green tarpaulin from the stands flanking his hardware shop, disclosing piles of copper hobnails, chromium ball bearings, and iron rings whose shapes, Junior said, reminded him of modern sculpture.
Recalling their first meeting, Sharon asked, “Are you really an artist?”
She had barely gotten out the words when a horse leading a junk wagon, a cowbell ringing from its neck, stepped into an enormous puddle at a smart clip and drenched them both. Junior’s light beige suit now had dark amoeba-shaped blotches at the knees and shins; Sharon’s stockings were soaked and the hem of her dress was instantly dyed a cyanotic blue. They looked at each other and burst out laughing.
“Modern art!” Sharon giggled, pointing to Junior’s ruined pants.
“Watercolors!” he called back between fits of laughter, pointing to her dress.
“W-what d-do you care? You’ve pr-probably gotten more s-suits like th-that one! This is my one g-good summer d-dress!” she shouted, her laughter mounting. It was crazy to be breaking down like this in the middle of the street, but she couldn’t control herself.
“My only suit, you mean,” he responded before giving way to a wild swell of laughter.
As soon as their laughter had subsided, it seemed perfectly natural that they spend the rest of the afternoon together. Junior suggested she might like to see an exhibit of political cartoons by Hogarth at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Sharon, reminded of her father’s thumb-smudged copy of The Rake’s Progress, enthusiastically agreed.
How long had it been since she’d been with a man who really cared about paintings and books? Not since her father died—ending their weekly trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the ivy-covered library, the hours of avidly reading Dickens aloud together in the living room while Pinnie clattered about in the kitchen and Arleen painted water-color family portraits in her bedroom. These days, even if Sharon had wanted to read for pleasure, she couldn’t; it was hard enough trying to decipher the texts Rabbi Joachim had assigned her. She’d once gotten up the courage to complain of this to him, but the rabbi had waved her off, saying, “Only books like the Zohar have the power to open the psychic channels in the mind necessary for advanced meditation.” Yet, no matter how long and hard she pondered the Zohar, no psychic channels opened in her mind—at least none that she was aware of. Rabbi Joachim had enigmatically responded to her failure by advising her to meditate more deeply on the mystery of Jewish suffering. Taking his advice, she’d spent the last few months meditating on the sections in Exodus describing the Egyptian enslavement of the children of Israel—still to no effect. Amazingly, it was not until today, standing next to Junior Cantana facing Hogarth’s secular illustrations of daily human suffering, that she finally understood what Rabbi Joachim had meant.
“You really like this?” she asked, pointing into a glass case at a sketch of a vomiting drunkard.
“As a subject, do you mean?”
“Yes, the subject.”
“Well, it’s not the Mona Lisa, but it does just what the artist intended it to—it moves you, right?”
Grimacing, Sharon nodded.
“And the craftsmanship is unbeatable. Look at that hand, how alive it is. You can almost see the blood running through the veins. Do you know how long it takes to learn just to draw a hand,” Junior pointed to a harlot in a lace cap holding hands with a paunchy customer.
“No, I can’t draw. My sister supposedly can, but I haven’t seen any of her work since she left home.”
“Well, I started formal art lessons when I was at college. That seems like ages ago and, do you know, it still isn’t easy. Hands are just not my thing, I guess. But noses, you should see my noses,” Junior chuckled as he circled a glass case.
“Is that what you do for a living, draw?” Aware that she was stepping over the border of the purely sociable, Sharon wanted to know more about Junior Cantana; his vulnerability demanded it of her.
“That, and recuperate.”
Sharon watched as he moved from sketch to sketch, now peering up close to the glass, now gazing from a distance, and now stopping to remove a pair of glasses from his breast pocket, putting them on and then taking them off again before replacing them in his pocket. Looking at the world, nose to nose with it—no wonder he was good at drawing noses. She liked the ease with which he moved and the way he had of being playful and earnest at the same time, his gestures assuring her that she could trust him. And while fearful of their mutual sexual attraction, she’d have liked to have him as a friend. Someone to remind her of her lost childhood, where, as trapper in coonskin, Indian, explorer, and detective, she and her father had roamed and conquered. Sharon briefly thought of telling him this, but held back. Their intimacy was still raw and tenuous, and, too, the fact that he was probably Catholic.
The morning’s rain had come and gone like a vivid dream and the streets were now baking in the glare of a newly revived afternoon sun. It had become a scorching day. Walking alongside Junior Cantana, surrounded by office workers, dog walkers, and fashionable shoppers, immersed in the material world of the “shattered vessels” Rabbi Joachim had been training her to resist, Sharon was relieved when they reached Forty-Second Street.
“I can catch the subway here,” she said.
Junior nodded. “See you on the nineteenth.”
“Yes, see you then,” she called as she entered the subway and descended the stairs without looking back, knowing that he’d remain standing there, watching her until she disappeared from view.
SEVEN
PAULIE HAD NEVER BEEN AN EASY CHILD to deal with. But after Sharon’s divorce, his angry eruptions at home and at school had grown more frequent. When she could no longer dismiss his flare-ups as a “passing phase,” she’d briefly consulted Rabbi Joachim—and gotten the enigmatic reply, “Change of place, change of luck,” which she interpreted as a directive to take Paulie out of public school and enroll him at the Center for Mystical Judaism’s Orthodox Yeshiva Rav Shimon bar Yohai for Boys. To make up for the inconvenient distance between her home in Flatbush and the yeshiva’s location in Crown Heights, not to mention having to pay for a private school, Rabbi Joachim had arranged with his deputy, Rabbi Tayson, the yeshiva’s principal, to give her a tuition waiver that included admission for Paulie to the summer day camp. Sharon had resisted at first, but gave in at the offer of the tuition waiver. Nonetheless, the transfer hadn’t changed Paulie’s behavior, which was the reason she now found herself traveling two hours by bus to get from Westminster Road to Eastern Parkway, with plenty of time to dread having to plead with Rabbi Tayson to keep Paulie on. But what choice did she have when her son’s conduct had deteriorated to the point where no other day camp would have him?
She and Pinnie had argued, and she’d left the house forgetting her wallet, with only enough change for round trip bus fare in her purse. Last night’s conversation with Barney hadn’t helped, either. When she’d called him, a woman had answered.
“Is Barney Berg there?”
“Barney—I think it’s your ex-wife,” the woman yelled into the mouth of the receiver without bothering to cover it. Sharon heard the magnified sound of her chewing gum, followed by the popping of a bubble.
Barney took the telephone, “Yeah?”
Picturing his pink, bald dome, Sharon asked, “Who was that?”
“Who?”
“That woman who answered.”
“Oh, that was Irma, I’m going to marry her this coming winter.”
“Congratulations.”
A tense, long pause, then, finall
y, from Barney’s end: “What did you want, Sharon? The alimony’s not due till next month.”
“I didn’t call for money. I’m calling because of Paulie.”
“Is he sick?”
“No ... yes, in the head a little, maybe. Phyllis had a cold last week, but she’s better now.”
“Yeah?” he breathed impatiently into her ear.
She’d be damned if she let his cud-chewing Irma get off that easily. And Barney, too, whose accidental spilling of seed eleven years ago had produced Paulie despite her pleading with him to put on a condom. Deciding against further stalling, Sharon let him have it all in one unedited rush. “Your son is on the verge of being turned out of the last day camp that would have him. And Rabbi Tayson doesn’t want him back in school this fall, either.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a discipline problem, I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him, Pinnie did. Anyway, I’m going out there to see the rabbi about it tomorrow, do you think you can come?”
He made an indecipherable sound, and then seemed to disappear.
“Barney?” she thought she’d lost him for good then, their connection cut by the impatient Irma’s hand. “Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Barney muffled the receiver, permitting her to hear only the sound of murmuring. After a few seconds he got back on. “Listen, Sharon, I don’t know why you bother me with these things. I have enough trouble keeping up with all the alimony you need. Where is it written that Paulie needs to go to a yeshiva? What do you want to do, turn him into a rabbi or something? You live in a good neighborhood. Let him go to public school like the rest of the kids.”
Sharon was stunned. That little speech was the longest Barney had ever delivered in all the years she’d known him. She needed a minute in which to recover. “Is that how you feel about it?” she forced out, not sure whether she was about to laugh or scream.
“Yes, it is. Irma has two kids of her own, and I’ll have to help out with them, too, come winter. And I’m no money machine. Besides, it’s the slow season now anyway.”
“Oh, yes, I remember.” Though she tried hard to disguise her rage by tightening her quavering voice, she could not, so she took the next best way out: “Oh, my God! Soup’s overflowing the pot! Sorry, Barney, gotta get off this very minute!” Hoping it would leave him at least partially deaf for life, she slammed the telephone receiver into its cradle.
It wasn’t until the next morning as she was preparing to leave the house that, imagining Barney and his ruminant Irma interrupted while watching The Price is Right, Sharon saw the humor in that telephone call.
She was still three long city blocks away from the yeshiva and was already exhausted. Her feet were hurting. She wanted to sit down on one of the benches under the mealy canopy of trees lining Eastern Parkway and rehearse what she was going to say to Rabbi Tayson, but every bench she approached was torn to splinters. The neighborhood had fallen into such decay that very soon not even the Center’s yeshiva could safely remain there. No doubt about it, this was no neighborhood for a yeshiva, or any kind of school, for that matter. Hence the urgency of Rabbi Joachim’s fall fund-raising campaign. Should Leon Berkowitz, one of the Center’s main wealthy donors, fulfill his promise to relocate the Center entirely to L.A., all their problems would be over. Poor Leon, lying with his bandaged knee up in the air at Lenox Hill Hospital.
Arriving at the yeshiva’s front entrance, Sharon adjusted her headscarf and prepared her most convincing suppliant’s smile for her talk with the formidable Rabbi Tayson. Just as she was about to take the first of the steps leading to the building, a huge brown dog rushed up ahead of her, barking furiously.
“Hush. Get out of here, you.”
Leaping away at the sound of her voice, the dog gave her a mournful glance before loping down the steps into the street and disappearing around the corner.
If I believed, really believed in omens, she thought, what would I make of that one? As she stood there pondering the possibility that she only might have imagined the dog, she was interrupted by the deafening blast of a bell. Within seconds, boys of all shapes and sizes wearing identical white shirts, black pants, and black yarmulkes barreled past her in every direction. Desperately, she searched for Paulie but could not find him among them.
“Sorry missus,” a little boy no older than five called back at her over his shoulder after stumbling over her shoe.
Sharon opened the front door and followed the boy into the building. In the hall, she passed three Ultra-Orthodox teenagers flaunting tzizith and long payos, who covered their eyes with their hands so as not to look her in the face. The little snot-noses!
She climbed the creaking wooden stairs to Rabbi Tayson’s office fortifying herself with a list of complaints about the day camp: the hallways were dark and dangerous, there was dust everywhere, and the so-called playing field in the back was filled with dog poop and garbage. There were only four counselors out there managing a writhing mass of fifty boys. And they had been trained to discipline the younger, smaller ones by slapping them around, which, even for private religious schools, was against the law.
She reached the third floor. Walking past a storage room, she saw two bearded men in shirtsleeves stacking prayer books in neat little rows. One of the men let loose a ferocious sneeze that almost knocked her over. To her left there was a darkened classroom that smelled oddly of fresh tar. Down a long stretch of tiled corridor ending in a triptych of doors, Sharon found herself in front of Rabbi Tayson’s glass-windowed office. It was there that her complaints about the yeshiva’s dirty conditions failed her. Turning the knob with a trembling hand, she opened the door.
RABBI MORDECAI TAYSON HAD A REPUTATION for being a devious martinet who had come to the Kabbalah by default. Five years before being appointed principal of the Yeshiva Shimon Bar Yohai by Rabbi Joachim, he’d been headmaster—and the key figure in two scandals—at Derech Emet, a rather large and prosperous yeshiva in Borough Park. The first scandal had been minor, gaining no publicity beyond the parties involved. The second had been serious enough to make the newspapers and cost him his job. The trouble began when the school’s accountant discovered that Rabbi Tayson had diverted funds designated for student scholarships to a down payment on a two-family house two doors away from the school, in which he’d hastily deposited his wife, four children, and in-laws. On being discovered, the rabbi immediately threw himself on the mercy of the school’s board of trustees. A vote was held, the result ending in a tie. The Modern Orthodox members of the board wanted to give him another chance while the Ultra-Orthodox faction voted to fire him immediately. Their spokesman, Herbert Kravitz, the seventy-five-year-old owner of a chain of glatt Kosher barbecued-chicken stores, argued that the rabbi’s admission of guilt was nothing but a ploy designed to keep his job and the house. Mr. Kravitz went on to warn that this would not be the end of what he called the rabbi’s “machinations.” Not one female member of the community was asked her opinion, but this did not stop the women from rallying in favor of Rabbi Tayson. Led by the Kosher butcher’s wife—who was loath to lose a valued customer like the Rebbitzen Tayson—they pressured their husbands to give the rabbi another chance. As a compromise, the Ultra-Orthodox faction agreed to reinstate him on a trial basis. Except for an occasional complaint about his overuse of corporal punishment, the first year of the rabbi’s probation passed in truce. Eventually, people lost interest in the affair. Several board members died, others left for retirement homes in and around Miami, and the angry Herbert Kravitz moved out of the neighborhood without telling anyone where he was going.
On resuming control of Yeshiva Derech Emet, Rabbi Tayson immediately set about implementing changes. One school committee after the next was proven to be an unnecessary expenditure of time and money. Jimmy, the porter of twenty-two years, was suddenly fired without severance pay. The entire English faculty was given notice and new teachers were hired to replace them. Parents were informed by letter that the Rebbitz
en Tayson (who, it was later discovered, had never earned a teaching certificate) would be teaching three Hebrew history classes in the coming fall. A new dress code was announced: long sleeves, skirts, and headscarves were to be worn by all female teachers and visitors—Ultra-Orthodox or not. Yarmulkes were to be worn at all times by boys and men. Corporal punishment was to be administered at the discretion of each teacher, and Rabbi Tayson had the last word on all decisions relating to expulsion. The school sign was mysteriously repainted overnight; a brass weathercock was placed on the roof; and an intricately wrought matching brass door knocker (valued by a local hardware store owner to be worth seven-hundred dollars) was clamped to the massive front door—all of this without consultation from the school’s Board of Trustees. Sunday classes were formed, and students—especially boys nearing the bar mitzvah age of thirteen—had to furnish parental notes in advance in order to be excused from Sabbath services. No English at all was to be spoken during the morning Hebrew session—not even at recess periods.
The community at large was too stunned to react. Except for one irate mother whose son had been suspended from school for refusing to stop speaking English, no one dared to confront Rabbi Tayson. But when the boy’s mother actually found herself face to face with the rabbi, the poor woman was too intimidated to do anything but blubber into her handkerchief, “You’re just a principal of education, not the boss over everything here.” And her son was duly expelled.
Still, the rabbi was not without his critics.
“He’s too Orthodox for my taste,” the vice president of the ladies’ auxiliary whispered in the ear of the treasurer at a luncheon to which Rabbi Tayson had appointed his wife keynote speaker.
“He’s so religious he won’t even look in a woman’s face. Must be afraid we’ll eat him up,” clucked the treasurer.
The Kabbalah Master Page 6