The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

  When Sharon emerged from the toilet she found Arleen and Les entwined on the mattress, watching three TV sets simultaneously. On a twelve-inch black-and-white Sony, the Braves were playing the Red Sox; a twenty-seven-inch Panasonic was showing John Wayne in The Quiet Man; and a reconstituted Phillips portable was presenting a rerun of The Ed Sullivan Show, which had gone off the air the year before. The volume on all three TV sets had been turned down, and a hot guitar was providing background music.

  “Django Reinhardt?” Les called out, disentangling himself from Arleen and sprawling out on the mattress. He laid his head in Arleen’s lap.

  Dave stood off to one side rolling a joint in American flag-patterned cigarette paper. “Right you are, my man! And for that, you get a reward.” He licked and pasted the paper seam and handed the joint to Les.

  “I get clairvoyant when I smoke pot,” Arleen said.

  “This is where I get off,” Sharon made her way to the table near the front door where she’d left her purse and scarf. No one seemed to have heard her. But that didn’t surprise her; she’d been talking to herself all evening.

  “It’s hot as hell in here, can’t you either turn on a fan or open a window?” Arleen asked before taking a drag on the joint Les had passed on to her.

  “Never, my dear lady,” Dave answered. “Never een zees illegal pad do we open zee windows, for zey are nailed shut, mon cherie. But wait!” Now playing the scrappy French magician, he slithered over to a window covered by a pair of black-painted Venetian blinds, and, pulling them open, revealed an air conditioner.

  “Voila! Built in by yours truly, and hooked up like all these private, unbilled telephones here, to the Con Edison electric company free of charge,” he boasted, turning on the air conditioner full blast.

  “Wheee! That’s what I call conning the cons!” Arleen giggled. Now fully stoned, and a little drunk from the wine, her face had puffed up under her Granny glasses and her straight Dutch-boy hair had gone limp.

  “Sure you won’t have one for the road, Sharon?” Dave was leering at her.

  “I said no, thanks.”

  “Leave her be, my sister-the-goody-two-shoes. Always the goody-two-shoes.”

  “I told you it’s those quiet ones you gotta watch out for,” Les said, lifting his head from Arleen’s lap and switching TV channels. “They’re the ones that always turn out to be the narcs.”

  “I’ll just leave this with you if should have any use for it in the future,” Dave dropped a joint into Sharon’s bag on his way to the stereo.

  Here she was, talking about going to court and she might get busted herself, creating a scandal for the Center, destroying any chance for—

  “Fool,” she suddenly heard Rabbi Joachim chiding her, “I’m barely gone a week and you let yourself be taken over by the Other Side. What good has all my teaching done for you?”

  Dave placed a new record on the turntable. “Guess this one!” he called to Les.

  “This is terrific shit,” Arleen said. She yawned and removed her glasses, exposing a bright pink scar under her left eye.

  Suddenly transfixed by the memory of how Arleen had gotten that scar, Sharon stood in the middle of the room, tying and untying her scarf.

  “You did that to her,” Rabbi Joachim scolded her. “Remember how you fought, tossing chairs at each other—at Passover, no less—with Pinnie pleading with you to stop; your grandmother cowering near the cupboard.”

  Of course I remember, Sharon thought. How could I forget smashing both fists into my sister’s eyes, throwing her to the floor, pinning her down with my knee to make her stop taunting me.

  “Swear you’ll shut up and I’ll stop. Swear!” she had screamed at Arleen.

  “Sharon’s got a boyfriend, his name is Jake. Sharon pulls his pants down to kiss him on the snake! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ow! Ouch, stop it!”

  Arleen wouldn’t leave off taunting me, Sharon remembered, not even with the cut opening under her eye, the blood gushing.

  “You stop it!”

  But Arleen wouldn’t stop. She laughed all the way to the hospital and continued taunting me through the four painful stitches they gave her. I was the one crying hysterically throughout my sister’s ordeal. I was the one who had to be sedated.

  “Going home so soon?” Arleen called out in her old taunting voice.

  “Hey, don’t waste that!” Les sprang forward to retrieve the flag-wrapped joint that had fallen from Sharon’s open purse as she pulled the strap over her shoulder.

  “This is boring—boring and childish,” Sharon heard herself say. The wine buzz was almost gone.

  “If you don’t like it, you can fuck off, bitch,” Dave pushed her roughly toward the door.

  Sharon turned to Arleen for a sign of sisterly protection, and got none—which, in light of her own past transgressions, she realized, was exactly what she deserved. Arleen was curled up like a cat on the mattress, smoking her joint with one hand and stroking Les’s hair with the other.

  “What are you waiting for?” Two hard fists nudged Sharon between the shoulders. “Beat it!” Dave opened the door and, pushing her out into the hall, slammed it shut behind her.

  Feeling her way downstairs through the darkness, Sharon stumbled out of the building and fled westward, toward the lights, through the wild, siren-blasted streets, running, until, waving her hands around like a mad woman, she stopped a cab that had just turned the corner and nearly run her down. She didn’t know if she had enough money to get her all the way to Brooklyn. But she didn’t care. She had to get home to Pinnie and the children, where she belonged.

  TEN

  EXCEPT FOR A MAUVE-SKINNED MAN in a peaked cap and a woman in sneakers wearing heavy black lisle stockings, a dirndl skirt, and peasant blouse, her Medusa hair festooned with ribbons, Room 104B seemed to be filled with the same people Sharon had seen the first time she’d come to court. Only today they appeared to be less criminal than demented. As she took her seat beside a worried looking Officer Pols, even the avuncular judge, in his black robes, looked sinister. No sign of Junior Cantana.

  Sharon had barely sat down when she was called up to the bench and informed by the clerk that Jorge Diaz, once again, had not turned up to face trial. Momentarily disoriented, she wondered whether she hadn’t invented the whole purse-snatching story, conjured up Junior Cantana in her despair over Rabbi Joachim’s desertion. Why else would she have come here?

  “It’s because you’re attracted to the goy, that’s why you keep coming back,” Rabbi Joachim leered at her from the bench.

  “And why isn’t the defendant present?” the judge asked angrily after ordering Sharon back to her seat.

  A young moon-faced lawyer wearing thick glasses jumped to his feet. “Your honor—”

  “Yes?” the judge toyed with his gavel as if threatening to clobber the lawyer with it.

  “Mr. Diaz refuses to cooperate with his court-appointed attorneys. He won’t speak to anyone but his mother and keeps demanding new lawyers.”

  “Have you tried getting him a lawyer who speaks Spanish?”

  There was a brief rustling in the aisle as Junior Cantana took his seat next to Sharon. “Sorry I’m late. I borrowed a car and couldn’t find a parking space,” he leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  The judge tapped his gavel.

  “Silence! Silence in the courtroom, please,” ordered the security guard from his post near the window.

  “Will counsel kindly inform Mr. Diaz that he has the right to a fair trial with any attorney he chooses, but that this is not an end-of-the-season-sale,” said the judge, hunching his shoulders and revealing his fleshy pink neck. “Have Diaz in this room on Friday at ten, counselor,” he roared, “or you’ll hear from me! Case postponed.”

  Junior Cantana smiled at her, provoking an unaccountable twinge of pleasure. Officer Pols, she noticed, was sitting in the row in front of her, muttering. No, she hadn’t made them up. They were real. They were here.

  When, in his
weary voice, Officer Pols asked if Sharon would come back to court on the following Friday, she agreed immediately. Nice couple, he thought as he climbed into the seat of his patrol car next to his bull-necked partner of four years. She’s a little taller than he is, and probably has a couple of years on him, but they’re a nice couple anyway.

  “Onward, Charlie,” he said.

  “Problems, eh?” Charlie was looking out the window at a well-endowed legal secretary in a peppermint-striped, backless halter-top and was sweating profusely despite the air conditioning.

  “Nah. Everything’s okay.” Officer Pols removed his hat and sighed. At least that nice couple will have a chance to get to know each other better after this—they’re decent people, he thought. Then placing his hat over his eyes, he leaned back and drowsed as Charlie wove the patrol car slowly through the narrow streets of Little Italy.

  FOR THE SECOND TIME IN TWO WEEKS, Sharon found herself standing next to Junior Cantana on the courthouse steps. Crime, it seemed, had become their only legitimate excuse for coming together. But she was not really surprised, for, like her fraught relationship with Rabbi Joachim, this one, too, was tipped with a dollop of cosmic irony: the man was younger, shorter, and not Jewish. Shrugging her negative thoughts aside, she walked with Junior toward his borrowed car, a shiny new cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle with a ticket fluttering softly against the windshield in the fetid breeze of a passing bus. The meter had expired, its red tongue sticking up at them spitefully. Of course, Sharon thought, how could it be otherwise?

  “I’m sorry, it’s probably my fault,” she said. “I’m like that cartoon character, Joe Bitzflick, do you know him?”

  “Yeah, he’s the little guy with the perpetual cloud over his head. But the ticket isn’t your fault; it’s mine. I didn’t put enough money in the meter.”

  “No, no, it’s me. I’m a jinx, if there ever was one. Better get rid of me now, unless you like courting disaster.”

  “How can you be so sure it isn’t me who’s the jinx, and that you’re not the one who’s courting disaster?” Junior asked archly.

  Sharon wished she could just shut up. Why was she turning a simple traffic ticket into a cosmic disaster? Why wasn’t she like one of those women who’d see the whole thing as an adventure and joke about it? Or laugh and punch him on the arm? Suddenly afraid she might do just that, she sprang away from him.

  Junior didn’t seem to have noticed. “Can you beat that?” He pulled the ticket from the windshield. “It’s seventy-five dollars!”

  “Don’t pay it. You have a Pennsylvania license plate. You’re from out of state,” she said, hurrying after him as he jogged back to the courthouse.

  The judge had just declared a recess and was heading down the narrow staircase leading from the bench to his chambers when Junior intercepted him.

  Sharon stood to one side watching dust motes tumble through a ray of sunlight over their heads.

  “Just give it here,” the judge said in a loud voice, taking the ticket out of Junior’s hands and tearing it in half before disappearing into his chambers.

  “What was that all about?” she asked as they left the courtroom, this time letting Junior take her arm as he led her through the crowd in the corridor and out of the building.

  “All he needed to hear was that I’m a wounded vet, ” he said, giving her a wry smile.

  EXCEPT FOR A LONE POLICEMAN drinking coffee, Hardy’s Luncheonette was empty. A woman in a wraparound apron with SUPERB printed on the front had replaced the droopy-eyed counterman and was spooning rice pudding into single portions from a large glass bowl. Looking up and seeing Sharon and Junior enter, she directed them to a booth and asked them for their order. The waitress was nowhere to be seen.

  “Two coffees, please,” Junior called across the table to the woman behind the counter. Then, turning to Sharon, asked, “Do you really want me to go through the whole boring story?”

  “Yes, everything.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I like stories, any kind. Even boring ones.”

  “Well, thanks a lot for not mincing words.”

  “And tell the truth,” she added eagerly.

  “What makes you think I wouldn’t?”

  “Just checking...go on.”

  The counterwoman brought their coffee.

  Junior took a sip. “Okay, I come from Norristown, Pennsylvania, from a family of working people. My father was a firefighter, but they retired him in 1970, and now he tends bar on the West side of town. Dad’s happy there. The job gives him a chance to hang out with his cronies. My mom worked all her life as a cleaning lady at the local high school. She used to bring stuff home all the time—scraps of geometry paper, the unused halves of notebooks and colored pencils that the kids left behind in their lockers at the end of the term. That’s how I started to draw—copying Mickey Mouse from comic books, stuff like that.

  “Once, my mother brought home a pair of sneakers for Dom, my older brother, but he said he didn’t want to wear any secondhand sneakers, so she gave them to me. I’ve never been too proud to accept seconds. The sneakers were too big, but I saved them till I grew into them and wore them to Scout meetings. My father was Scout Master then, and president of the local American Legion post. I think he still is. He fought in Korea. He and I used to go out on hikes in the Poconos, did all the typical father-son things—roasted potatoes on a stick over a fire—and fought like a pair of wild dogs. We had different opinions about everything, especially politics. Dad came to this country from Naples as a kid with nothing but the clothes on his back. He’s so grateful for what America gave him that you can’t criticize anything about this country without getting an earful. He thought I was too radical, so he made me enroll in ROTC my first semester in Community College. My mother was totally apolitical. She had only one dream in her life for me—that I become a priest.

  “We had a dog, a big black mongrel called O’Dad because Dom would always say, ‘Oh, Dad!’ when my father told him it was his turn to mow the lawn on a Saturday morning. O’Dad’s still around, he’s nearly blind now, with one game leg. Dom was like my dad, a real gung-ho guy. He joined the Marines as soon as he got out of high school. Went off and got himself killed in Vietnam.

  “I did all the typical things Italian kids do in Norristown—played football and busted windows for a lark. One boy—his name was Carlo, too, but he shortened it to Carl—carried around a pair of brass knuckles and had an uncle in the Mafia. He’d cruise the black neighborhoods in his father’s Buick looking for fights, but nobody ever obliged him. Having no one to fight with, Carl got so bored that he killed himself with an overdose of heroin. The Norristown paper didn’t talk about it much, but there were plenty of white guys shooting up in those high school bathrooms my mother was cleaning. The idea that someone my age could really die shook me up, especially after going to the wake and seeing Carl lying in his coffin, dead, with his hair parted on the wrong side. I hadn’t actually seen Dom get killed, so it didn’t hit me so physically at first. Then, after getting the whole story from a Marine who came to the house with my brother’s dog tags wrapped in an American flag, I got this picture in my head of Dom crawling through the jungle, lost, wounded, looking for help. Nights I’d wake up screaming because I had this recurring dream that he was buried in a swamp, but still alive, and I was on the verge of pulling him out. Then he’d get sucked under and disappear. Mom would come running into my room to calm me down. She’d talk about how I wasn’t going to be like my brother, how I’d bring peace and joy to people as a priest—not death and destruction. I really think she was a pacifist without knowing it. Anyway, she lit a lot of candles to the Virgin for me and saved up for my college tuition by working extra hours as a babysitter for the G.E. physicists living in the townhouse developments around the industrial park.

  “Mom is what you would call ‘big-boned.’ She let her hair go gray naturally, never dyed it, never changed her hairstyle; she still wears it in a braid, f
olded up on top of her head. Hard work keeps her alive. She’s never been happy with my father. He treats her badly when he’s drinking too much beer, and when he’s sober he doesn’t talk to her at all. She was pregnant with Dom when they were married. You’d think being a cleaning lady she’d have no energy left when she got home, but she always kept our house neat, everything always in its place. Mom wore her white uniform around the house because she was always on the verge of going out to work somewhere. She’d stick this funny blue velvet ribbon in her hair, and when you asked her why she wore white sweat socks over her nylon stockings, she’d say it was to protect her shins when she scrubbed floors. No mops for her, she wasn’t satisfied unless she got down there on her knees and polished them by hand.

  “On Sunday, off would come the uniform and on the print dress and purple lipstick, the straw bonnet with the cherries, or the blue felt hat with the feather on the side. After church, Mom and her sister Katie would meet with their Italian-American clubwomen at Arby’s on Route 202 for a pot roast lunch. One of them was an astrologer who joined them every other Sunday and told their fortunes. My mother stopped going when Dom died. Losing him was awful for her, and then having me come back wounded must have pushed her over the edge. She’s let the house go to pieces; there’s paint peeling off the ceiling, wet laundry hanging from the backs of chairs in my father’s room—they don’t sleep together anymore—and the kitchen is filled with empty cereal boxes, pie tins, three-day-old bread from the local thrift bakery. Mom’s become a pack rat and refuses to throw anything away. She says that if her mother could see the condition of our house, she’d be rolling over in her grave. But she doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. It’s as if she’s given up—on everything. I tried talking her into seeing a therapist, but she wouldn’t even listen to me, just turned her head away and changed the subject. My aunts have given up on her too. Nobody talks about Mom’s depression anymore when the family gets together at my uncle’s pizza-joint in Bridgeport—that’s the town right before Norristown.