The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

  “As for me, I ran wild after Dom died. When I graduated from high school I went to work in a nearby carpet mill because I was convinced I needed the money to buy a car. Don’t ask me where I was planning to go, I had no idea. All I knew was that I wanted a car, even if it meant only looking at it in the driveway or hosing it down on a Saturday. As soon as Mom found out I was working in the mill she came right down there and yanked me out by the collar of my shirt. I was almost glad she did. The nap from the carpets would get into your throat and stick there like a package of dried breadcrumbs with the cellophane still on them, and you were always wheezing and blowing your nose. Many of the people who’d worked there for years developed T.B. or lung cancer later on.

  “If I couldn’t have a car, I decided that I had to have something, so I went out and got myself tattooed on the leg. I wanted it on my arm, but I got the tattoo on my leg so my parents wouldn’t see it. Dad probably wouldn’t have cared but Mom would have gone nuts. Imagine, a priest with a tattoo! I couldn’t think of anything in particular I wanted, so I chose the picture of the first billboard I passed, and that was an ad for a summer theater version of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. The coincidence impressed me, I guess, and here I am with a rose tattoo on my leg.”

  Bending over, Junior lifted the left leg of his pants and showed it to her. Oddly, rather than being disgusted, Sharon was fascinated.

  “Were you sorry you did it?”

  “Not at all, I even thought about becoming a tattoo artist myself. But my mother acted even faster on that idea than on getting me out of the carpet mill. I’d been taking courses at Norristown Community College after graduating from high school, and since my grades were good, my counselor advised me to apply to college after my first year there. I’d made a half-hearted application to Villanova and forgotten about it. But one day I came home and found that I’d been accepted. You can imagine how Mom reacted, and before I knew it, I was a theology major heading straight for the priesthood. At Villanova I developed a passion for drawing and—unfortunately for my mother—a huge distaste for religion. Art and theology never mixed for me; they still don’t. I took honors in every studio class, even pulled an A minus in sculpture, gobbled up a thousand years of art history—and flunked all my other courses. They put me on probation, gave me aptitude tests, the works. For one semester the school even paid for me to see a shrink twice a week. He was a nice old Viennese guy, a Freudian type in a vest with a watch chain—just like the shrinks in the movies. On his report to the probation committee he advised against the priesthood for me and recommended I switch my major from theology to art. He was a good man, Dr. Berkan. Too bad he died of a heart attack right in the middle of the faculty dining room one afternoon—over an untouched cup of tomato soup and a cracker.

  “On the doc’s recommendation, the committee let me stay on through my sophomore year. I worked like a fiend, trying to prove myself. I became art editor of the school newspaper, but they dumped everything else in my lap as well—writing, drawing, printing, you name it. Not that I complained, mind you. It was a terrific opportunity for me, a real proving ground. I started a cartoon strip of my own for the sports page, made up a character called Harvey the Hoop, and was soon satirizing the bigwigs on campus in the guise of a basketball net. From there I moved on to politics, scouring the papers, reading every political cartoon I could get my hands on. I’d found what it was I wanted to do with my life, and nothing was going to stop me. I had my mind set on it. Until then it had all been a blur. Then, wouldn’t you know it; I was thrown out of school once and for all. They simply couldn’t keep me on with my failing grades, they said, because I was taking the place of a more deserving student who would pass all his courses, and not just the ones he liked.

  “For a few months after that I just bummed around. The mill had closed and work in the area was scarce. Even the physicists at G.E. were being laid off. My mother was crushed by my failure and wouldn’t even talk to me. My father, who couldn’t care less, sat around reading the American Legion News, with one hand always firmly wrapped around a beer bottle. Every so often he’d look up and curse out the ‘pinko priests’ at Villanova as a kind of cold comfort to her, then he’d look at me and say something like, ‘Why don’t you join the army and become a real man for once in your life?’

  “’Sure, a dead man, like his brother,’ my mother would answer for me. But by then, even she didn’t seem to care what I did with my life.

  “I spun pizza dough in the window of my uncle’s place in Bridgeport until the smell of tomato paste and basil drove me back into the streets. At night, with O’Dad snoring on the studio couch next to me, I’d sit in my room drawing cartoons. Within four months I’d covered enough paper with political satire to fill a portfolio for the F.B.I. My father would have been the first person to report me, I’m sure, if he ever saw what I was drawing in secret. During the day I’d study karate, flirt with the waitresses at the Route 202 Diner, or just sit in the public library reading art books. When Mom stopped supporting me, I enlisted in the Marines. That was before the Tet Offensive, and I wasn’t even thinking about being sent to war.

  “At Fort Pendleton, where I did my basic training, I became a medic. That’s a story in itself, but I’ll save it for some other time. From there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump from California to Da Nang, to getting a sniper’s bullet in the stomach while evacuating three wounded soldiers, to being shipped straight to Walter Reed and becoming a recovering war hero. Once I was on my feet, they sent me home to Norristown—the last place, I would have chosen myself. One advantage, though, is that my parents don’t bother me anymore. The other good thing about all this is that I get my honorable discharge in October, with the Pentagon paying for twenty-two months’ worth of missed art lessons.

  “From there, I’m on my own. I’ll probably take a job on a paper somewhere in Podunk, live in a barn, and draw anti-war cartoons to my heart’s content. Eighteen months in Vietnam has given me more than enough raw, firsthand material to start with,” Junior signaled the woman behind the counter for more coffee. The policeman had gone, leaving them with the luncheonette entirely to themselves.

  “There it is in a nutshell.” Junior spooned sugar into his coffee then handed Sharon the shaker. “What about you?”

  “You didn’t tell me how old you are,” Sharon said.

  “Guess.”

  “I’m not good at guessing people’s ages.”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” he said quickly.

  “I thought you were still in your twenties. Would you like to see a movie?”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “It just came up out of nowhere, I guess.”

  “Sure, but not before you tell me your story. I’m not letting you off so easily now that I’ve bared my soul.”

  “Tit for tat,” Sharon laughed, and quickly turned red at having used the word ‘tit.’ “Okay,” she added, hoping he hadn’t picked up on her embarrassment, “I’ll tell you my life story after the movies.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Remember, though, it’s your turn after the movies.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good, let me pay for the coffee first. Hey, do you even know what you want to see?”

  “No, but I have two free passes to any Fox theater in Brooklyn.”

  “Well, then, who cares what’s playing.”

  Sharon put on her sweater.

  “Won’t you be too warm in that?”

  “No, I get cold in air-conditioned theaters. They always turn it up too high.”

  “I’ll keep you warm,” Junior said.

  Pretending not to hear him, Sharon stifled a smile.

  They left the luncheonette and were walking toward the car when she touched him on the shoulder and blurted out, “I’m desperately unhappy,” the words pouring out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

  “Is it your family?” Junior put his arm ar
ound her and caressed her cheek with the tips of his fingers.

  Mortified by her outburst, Sharon shook her head. “Let’s not talk about it now, she murmured. “Later, you can come home with me after the movie.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have to bring the car back?”

  “Not until tomorrow. It belongs to my friend’s wife, she’s a nurse.”

  “Are you having an affair with her?”

  “Of course not! Really, Sharon, you say some weird things.”

  “That’s only one of the things Barney hated about me.”

  “Barney?”

  “My ex-husband. He’s marrying someone named Irma this winter. She’s a gum snapper. I just thought you might like to meet my mother and kids, but you don’t have to come home with me if you don’t want to.”

  What dybbuk had taken possession of her and was driving her to talk to him like this?

  Junior pulled her closer. “Don’t worry, Sharon. I’m great with mothers and kids.”

  ELEVEN

  PINNIE WORRIED ABOUT WHAT SHE CALLED “the weirdness” her daughters had inherited from their father. Sharon had been twelve and Arleen ten when he died, too young to do anything but glorify him—especially his favorite, Sharon, the one he proudly called “my first-born” and whose head he’d fill with crazy stories before disappearing for days on end. She’d never really gotten over the shock of his permanent absence. Unlike Arleen, who’d raged and screamed when George died, Sharon had numbly retreated into silence.

  George Kellner—aspiring writer and failed husband—may he rest in peace. Pinnie had married him after only two months of dating—if sitting in a rowboat on Central Park Lake listening to George lecture her on everything from Aristotle to Zen could be called “dating.” Occasionally she’d put in a word or two, but mostly she listened. She’d fallen in love with him almost as much for his formidable intelligence as for his looks, his smooth-skinned oval face and burning black eyes. In contrast to her own placid, easy-going sensuality, George was nervous and driven, consumed by goals and aspirations that were never to be fulfilled. He’d charmed her by reading his scribbled journal notes to her at the oddest times, compelling her to stop what she was doing and listen to the jumble of philosophy, economics, doggerel, and plots for detective novels he intended to turn into films. George’s imaginative and wide-ranging interests continued to stoke her desire for him even as their marriage faltered. Pinnie accepted the paradox presented by her husband, even after she’d confronted him and he’d admitted to his affair with a Venezuelan dyer in the shoe factory on Greene Street where he worked as a foreman.

  It was on a cold winter evening during one of his extended absences from home—when she presumed he was with his lover—that George either jumped or fell to his death on the tracks at the Greene Street station of the Lexington Avenue subway. As soon as she got the news, Pinnie decided to tell her daughters that their father had died of a heart attack. Why further complicate an already complicated situation?

  As for herself, she had no desire to marry again, one husband like George was enough. Besides, widowhood afforded her a newfound independence that, except for the cash-strapped state in which George had left her, she rather enjoyed. She could now polish her nails silver (which he’d hated), slip into one of the full, open-collared rayon dresses he’d called “cheap looking,” eat a whole box of almond-nut-honey chocolates if she wanted to, and spend her afternoons playing canasta with her neighbors. George had tried to expand her mind with books and classical music, and Pinnie had resented him for it. She’d had no idea how much she’d resented George’s efforts to educate her until the tragedy on the Lexington Avenue subway put an end to them. It was like having an iron bar removed from her chest. The only thing she’d been afraid of was that his Venezuelan mistress might turn up at the funeral, but to her relief, the woman stayed away. In the weeks following George’s death there’d been a few times Pinnie thought of telling her rival off to her face, but by spring the impulse had passed and she became her old, cheerful, easy-going self again.

  Pinnie was sure that her younger daughter, Arleen, was, like herself, a survivor who would make her way. But Sharon seemed headed for an especially hard ride. Like her father, she wanted too much out of life. Living with George had taught Pinnie that such desires were doomed and that the disappointment they carried with them could be fatal. She also knew that despite her own motherly efforts to soften the blow, Sharon would have to confront her disappointment alone—hopefully, not in the way her father had. In the midst of bathing and diapering Phyllis, or mixing milkshakes in the blender for Paulie, Pinnie grieved for her afflicted daughters. Maybe it was her fault for trying too hard to protect them. Maybe she’d done the wrong thing by lying to her daughters about George’s death, or by keeping his affair with his Venezuelan mistress a secret—even now that they were grown women with a right to know the truth about their father. But Pinnie had missed her chance. Arleen was hardly on speaking terms with her these days, and Sharon was far too fragile.

  Pinnie had once hoped that husky, round-shouldered Barney Berg might inject some normalcy into Sharon’s life. True, she’d had her misgivings about his being fifteen years older, yet, knowing that Sharon was one of those girls who needed a father substitute for a husband, she’d kept her misgivings to herself. But the promised salvation in Barney’s adoring glances had turned out to be illusory. There were the fights to put up with, the frantic calls interrupting Pinnie’s canasta games, when, ashamed that her friends might overhear Sharon’s screams, she’d turned from them and whispered into the telephone, “I’ll be there. Just give me twenty minutes.”

  “Another emergency?” Yetta Solow had pressed her thumbs to her sagging cheeks, barely suppressing the glee in her voice.

  “No, just one of the usual minor catastrophes—one of the kids fell off a chair and they need me to watch the other one while they drive to the hospital,” Pinnie said, overcoming the urge to slap her ill-wishing neighbor in the face.

  “Ah, they never stop needing their mamas, not even when they become mamas themselves,” said the good-natured Flo Kaplan tipping back in her chair and popping a caramel in her mouth. “God bless them. Here, I’ll play out your hand, Pinnie. I’ve got nothing in mine anyway.”

  The “emergencies” were inevitably followed by Sharon’s futile attempts to explain why Paulie was wandering around the house barefoot, entangled in pajama bottoms that had fallen to his knees. Sharon had never learned to sew, and her kids’ perpetually buttonless and zipperless condition were a testament to her marital disarray. The first time she’d been called to intervene, Pinnie had hurried up the stairs with her heart thumping, prepared for a replay of her own brawls with George. But here the roles were reversed: it wasn’t Barney screaming and throwing furniture around, it was Sharon. Barney was sitting in a daze in front of the television set. When Sharon divorced him, Pinnie proclaimed her public approval. These days, alone, in private, she cried with her face in her hands at the thought of her vulnerable daughter’s headlong flight into “Mystical Judaism.” At Sharon’s request, Pinnie had moved in with her and assumed care of the children—knowing even as she did so that she was positioning herself to buffer the heartbreak awaiting her daughter at Rabbi Joachim’s hands—and that her efforts would come to nothing. Restrained by the glow in Sharon’s eyes as she enthusiastically described her work at the Center for Mystical Judaism, Pinnie didn’t have the heart to warn her of the crushing rejection that lay ahead. Instead, as she had in the rowboat with George, Pinnie sat quietly listening. Then one day she exploded. Her fierce mother’s instinct wouldn’t allow her to do otherwise. It was past midnight and she was heating Phyllis’s milk at the stove when Sharon came into the house and walked past the kitchen without greeting her.

  “So, now you’re too high and mighty to even bother saying hello to your mother!” Pinnie yelled after her.

  “Leave me alone, Ma, can’t you see I’m exhausted.”

>   “Sure you’re exhausted. That fraud rabbi of yours has got himself a first-class pigeon.”

  “Don’t go there, Pinnie, I’m warning you.” Sharon had come back and was now standing in the kitchen doorway, shaking her finger at her.

  “Don’t you tell me where to go or not to go; I’m your mother! And I see what’s happening. I see you throwing yourself away on that phony-as-a-two-dollar-bill crackpot rabbi of yours! Working like a horse for a pittance, spending money you don’t have on seventy-five-dollar initiation fees and non-accredited yeshiva tuition. You’re making yourself sick over a man who’s just using you, can’t you see!” Pinnie cried.

  Sharon paused for a moment, the blood draining from her face as she fought to control her temper. In ominously quiet tones, she said, “The milk is boiling over. You’d better turn off the gas.” As soon as she’d spoken, she left the doorway and went straight to her room.

  Pinnie’s hands were shaking as she turned off the gas and removed the pan of milk from the stove. She’d waited too long to warn her daughter of Rabbi Joachim’s power to destroy her. She should have said something after his one and only visit, to “Kosher” the house, but she’d been too afraid of provoking a fight.

  The children had been sent to Flo Kaplan’s so as not to disturb the Koshering ritual, and there’d been just the three of them: Sharon, Pinnie, and the rabbi—tall, lumpish, goateed, with a wrinkled brow, wearing a black hat that he never removed. Once he’d finished touring the house mumbling incantations and scalding the dishes and pots and pans in the kitchen, he’d stood in the middle of the living room scanning the furniture and the worn Moroccan carpet, frowning at the plastic forsythia in the cracked peanut butter jar on the coffee table. Pinnie was certain that the whole Koshering ritual was nothing but an excuse for the rabbi to assess Sharon’s family finances and that his real purpose for coming had been to nose out a potential donor. She’d had enough experience with his kind from way back, in her mother’s time: big-bellied, black-bearded rabbis smelling of musk and schnapps, selling holy trinkets at the door; vending prayers for the dead, obscurely creeping up on you in cemeteries from behind a loved-one’s headstone with their dog-eared prayer books open to the mourner’s page, their rancid breath on your face as they read the Kaddish “for a small fee, Missus, whatever you can give.” Recently, from Yetta Solow, an ardent Israel supporter who traveled there twice a year, Pinnie had heard that the same bearded men in the black hats were selling prayers in Hebrew to American Jewish pilgrims at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, shamelessly begging for money even there, on holy soil.