The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

  But after spending an hour in Rabbi Joachim’s company, Pinnie had changed her mind. Sharon’s Kabbalah master wasn’t at all like the black-bearded desperadoes who preyed on old women. In fact, he was like no other rabbi she’d seen before. A charlatan, yes, but no beggar. Crazy, yes, but like a fox. Instead of asking Pinnie for money before leaving, he’d offered a waiver on Paulie’s tuition and hung expensive silver made-in-Israel mezuzahs in every doorway without asking for as much as a dime. From the way Sharon had looked at the rabbi as he tapped the mezuzahs into the lintels, mumbling in Hebrew with his eyes half-closed, Pinnie could see that her daughter was already too far-gone to be rescued. She was therefore totally unprepared when Sharon appeared in the front porch doorway under Rabbi Joachim’s bulging silver mezuzah with a handsome young man who, introducing himself as “Junior Cantana,” warmly shook her hand. Pinnie was so shocked by the uncanny likeness between her late husband George and the young man standing alongside her daughter that she couldn’t open her mouth to speak, and Sharon had to invite him in.

  Pointing a trembling finger at the brown wing chair (in her opinion, the best piece of furniture in the living room), Pinnie at last found her voice. “Sit down, I’ll get you some cold apple juice. It’s organic, just what you young people like, the best kind.” She hurried toward the kitchen. “They advertise it on the radio every morning.”

  Junior settled into the chair and looked around. He was smiling at Sharon, making her want to run over and kiss him on the mouth again, as she had when they were sitting in the movie theater, holding hands in the dark. Not a good idea with Pinnie poised to come back from the kitchen any minute—but she’d really enjoyed that kiss. It had been good for her ego, if nothing else. Instead, she turned on the radio, stopping at a music station playing an Edith Piaf song in French. She cast Junior a suggestive smile. Pinnie was calling her from the kitchen in a suspiciously casual tone. There were bound to be the usual mutterings at the sink, to be followed by her mother’s crudely spat out disapproval. Too bad, Pinnie, it’s just too damned bad, Sharon thought, planning her attack as she backed out of the living room and headed for the kitchen. If only she weren’t always forgetting to install a dimmer switch, she could have lowered the room lights. What was wrong with her? Had she gotten drunk on one kiss? Or was it because she was so eager to spite Rabbi Joachim for leaving her?

  “Shit,” Sharon’s heel got caught in a loose flap of linoleum at the threshold and she nearly fell face-forward into the kitchen.

  “Junior ... Cantana? What kind of name is that for a Jewish boy?” Pinnie asked, loudly slamming the refrigerator door so as not to be heard in the living room.

  Reminded of Mrs. Wolstein by her mother’s commanding tone, and then of Rabbi Joachim winging his way over the ocean through the clouds to bed his wife, Sharon said aggressively, “He’s not Jewish, Ma, he’s Italian, Catholic.”

  “Italian?” Pinnie repeated warily.

  “Yeah.”

  Pinnie replaced the sweating bottle of apple juice in the refrigerator. Standing in one tiny square on the linoleum floor, with the deft and easy movements of her fading breed, she set three full glasses of juice on a tray without spilling so much as a drop, pressed three paper napkins into service, and arranged a platter of Oreos to serve alongside them.

  “There!” she dusted her hands free of imaginary crumbs against the sides of her dress. “Just like you to catch me in my housedress and torn slippers. So how come you didn’t call?”

  “First of all, you don’t have to stay up and wait for me. I’m not fifteen, and it’s not my first date.”

  “I’m not prying, if that’s what you think. I would have prepared something more substantial to eat if I knew you were coming, that’s all. So stop devouring me with your eyes.”

  “Cookies and juice’ll be fine,” Sharon picked up the tray and walked out of the kitchen. When she was halfway into the foyer, she heard Pinnie whisper behind her, “He’s younger than you.”

  “Yes, he is,” Sharon resumed her suggestive smile without turning around to face her mother. “So what?”

  “Nothing ... sew buttons,” Pinnie joked lamely.

  Junior was no longer seated when mother and daughter entered the living room. Standing with his back to them, he was selecting books from the shelves. He was even shorter than Sharon thought, but at that moment he looked like a giant, his head almost touching the ceiling. “Mother says the children are sleeping. You’ll have to visit with them some other time.”

  “Gladly,” Junior said, nodding self-consciously in Pinnie’s direction. “It’ll give me a good excuse for visiting here again.” Embarrassed at having invited himself, he quickly turned his attention back to the bookcase. “Interesting set of books you’ve got here. Like The Mystic Way.” He opened one of Rabbi Joachim’s precious volumes and glanced at the Center’s purple stamped address on the inside cover.

  “What is this soldier, this Catholic from Pennsylvania, doing here in your living room handling my books, sacred works I’ve entrusted exclusively to your care!” the astral voice of Rabbi Joachim bellowed at her from behind the bookcase. “Remember, Sharon, these are dangerous volumes containing secret symbols of the Jews, never, never to be profaned by the hands of nonbelievers!”

  Here, right this minute, before her eyes, a gentile intruder she herself had brought into her home was flipping through the precious pages of the Kabbalah. What had she done? Sharon dropped the tray roughly on the coffee table, spilling juice on the paper napkins and wetting the cookies. “But those books aren’t mine,” she cried desperately. “They belong to my boss!”

  “Are you aware of the holiness therein? Make him put them down! Quickly!” No longer just a voice coming from behind the bookcase, the fully embodied astral Rabbi Joachim was now standing in front of it, his eyes boring into her.

  “Those books have a lot of complicated symbols, things like that,” Sharon explained to Junior. “They wouldn’t interest you. My boss is a...a religious scholar doing research on—gosh, here I’ve spilled...give me...let me put the book back. You really wouldn’t be interested at all.” Sharon flung herself at Junior, trying to replace the book and shove the glass of juice under his nose at the same time.

  Ah, now what? Pinnie thought. Aloud, she said, “Well, folks, I’ll be leaving you. I’m pooped and the kids will have me up by six-thirty, so...”

  “Oh, don’t go,” Junior coaxed.

  “Good night, Pinnie. Sleep well.” Sharon waved for her mother to leave, but Pinnie wouldn’t budge.

  Mercifully, Rabbi Joachim had vanished.

  “I can’t stay very long anyway, I have to get my friend’s car back,” Junior said. He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, waiting to be asked to stay a while longer.

  Sharon rubbed the blister that had formed on her left ring finger, a white band circling where she’d worn her wedding ring. Now that the book incident had torn away what Rabbi Joachim called “the veil of illusion,” she was disgusted with herself. The blister on her finger opened and began oozing lymph. It had started with a paper cut she’d gotten in the office on the day before Rabbi Joachim’s trip to Israel. Seeing her wince as her finger began to bleed, he hadn’t so much as offered her a Band-Aid. “A paper cut hurts most,” was all he’d said, absent-mindedly looking past her.

  Junior was shaking hands with Pinnie. Why hadn’t her mother gone to bed yet? Why was she still standing there in her hideous carpet slippers playing chaperone? Why, after all these years, was she still meddling? Sharon fixed on the plastic-covered sofa as an emblem of all she hated about the house. Not a spot of dirt had rubbed off on it, not a dent, no dark, worn grooves where a man might have sat. She and Barney had lugged it home themselves.

  “Too cheap to hire a mover!” she’d screamed, panting as she’d helped him heave the sofa up the porch stairs. “Too cheap, you’re just too cheap for words!”

  Barney had insisted on buying the sofa at an auction for twenty-five doll
ars.

  “I wouldn’t take that thing if they gave it away,” Sharon heard a gray-haired man with a pipe sticking out of his jacket pocket say to his wife on the bench behind them.

  Every piece of furniture in the living room had its own shabby history. Now Junior Cantana was standing in the middle of it, becoming part of that history, his feet planted on the spotted square of Moroccan carpet, his eyes moving from the La-Z-y Boy to the ancient oak coffee table, to the window seat that doubled as a radiator cover to the burlap curtains Pinnie had sewn herself and hung on thick brass rings—standing on a chair without any help from Sharon. The room smelled of mothballs and kids’ vomit, and the plastic sofa covers had squeaked obscenely when Junior plopped down where Rabbi Joachim had refused to sit.

  “Good night, all. Nice to meet you,” Pinnie finally waddled off.

  “I’d really better get going,” Junior said.

  Startled out of her reverie by his voice, Sharon gave Junior her hand. It was like loving him, bringing him home like this. Not that she really understood anything about love. Lust, maybe—yes, what she was mistaking for love was really lust. The radio’s musical broadcast was interrupted by a perfume commercial followed by a station break, and a gong—in that order.

  “I have a birthday coming in two weeks,” she said, letting him pull her closer. “I’ll be thirty-five.” Someone else seemed to be speaking thickly from behind her face, using her voice. The announcement hung in the air between them as they stood facing each other in her tacky living room surrounded by reminders of her failed marriage and Rabbi Joachim’s invisible presence.

  “Sshh, a girl’s not supposed to tell her age.” Junior took her hand and pressed it gently. “Will you come and spend the weekend with me?” he murmured. “There’s an inn...and farms...a picnic...my friends...” Sharon heard him say through the barrier in her ears caused by her pounding heart.

  Lust, she thought. This is what I’m feeling now with him, not love. It’s Rabbi Joachim I love. This is pure lust.

  “Yes, I’ll come,” she promised.

  Junior kissed her eyelids. The warmth of his breath, the scent of trees in the rain—Sharon let them enfold her then pushed him away. “Stop, no more now,” she said hoarsely.

  I’m afraid of what I want, she thought. Now he’ll go home. Next weekend we’ll be together. After that, Rabbi Joachim comes back and it’ll all be over.

  “We can leave right after court. I’ll borrow the Volkswagen again. You’ll meet them, my friends.” Junior tapped her on the nose. “The woman you thought I was having an affair with. My friend’s wife—you’ll like her. We’ll go on a picnic. Do you like horses? Do you ride?” Junior was breathless, too, stammering, fumbling in his efforts to convince her to take part in this thing that was enveloping them both so quickly.

  Sharon felt his erection as he pressed her close to him. Again she pushed him away. This time, Junior let her push him out onto the porch. Watching as he walked down the cement path leading away from the house, she saw a thick-furred black tomcat stalking into the night behind him.

  TWELVE

  SHARON WAS SITTING IN THE FARTHEST CORNER behind the upper railing enclosing the Grand Army Plaza Library Rare Book Room trying not to feel guilty about her betrayal in accepting Junior’s invitation to spend the weekend with him. She was using Rabbi Joachim’s special scholar’s pass, hastily scribbling notes on a long yellow legal pad from a pharmacopoeia of herbs that would ostensibly cure all but her own discontent. Despite the air-conditioning, it was so wickedly hot that the librarian had gotten up from her desk to switch on a standing fan in the opposite corner of the room. The fan blew the onion-smelling air around, flipping the pages of Sharon’s yellow pad back and forth until she placed a book on top to hold them down. Two men in open-necked polo shirts who looked like plainclothes detectives were conferring near the dust-covered microfilm machine that no one had used all morning. Fearing that the plainclothesmen might take it into their heads to use the microfilm machine, the annoyed librarian, after returning to her desk and throwing a pink sweater over her shoulders against the draft from the fan, now sat frowning at them.

  Sharon was the first person in the sparsely occupied room to notice an old man shuffle in, groping with palsied hands at nothing in particular as he threaded his way toward the open bookshelves like a beached turtle. Putting down her pen, clicking it shut, and pressing the soles of her shoes against the bar of the table in front of her, she settled back in her chair to watch the trembling old man. Taking down a book and opening it to what appeared to be dead center, he would mumble a few lines to himself, then, apparently dissatisfied, would shake his head, put the book back on the shelf, and start the procedure all over again. Having spent a good part of her life in libraries, Sharon was hardly moved by the old man’s eccentric behavior. She’d seen much worse. It was only because she was tired of writing that she kept watching him. That was how she came to be the first person in the library to see the old man go white from the cross-hatched baby hairs on his head to the turkey skin at the opening of his shirt collar as he let the fifth book drop and slumped to the floor. Instinctively, Sharon rushed to the stricken man’s side.

  The old man was deathly pale but, thank god, he could still talk to her. His false teeth were clattering around in his mouth like a pair of castanets. Take his teeth out! Sharon vaguely recalled the words of a distant lifeguard at a hotel in the Catskill Mountains...a lake...her honeymoon. There, parodying the seriousness of her present situation, surrounded by flagstone and shrubbery and oiled brown bodies, one of the hotel guests, a laughing man with a hairy chest, had simulated a heart attack for a lifeguard’s quickie course in First Aid. That distant summer afternoon, along with a host of other strange, unrelated images, tumbled through Sharon’s mind as she bent over to help the old man. It was as if an invisible hand were flipping through a dusty family album she hadn’t bothered to look at in years. Most important is that you act quickly. Sharon reached past the old man’s parched lips and removed his bridge. At least he won’t choke, was her final thought before calling out for help. Despite his weakness, the old man’s clammy fingers were wrapped around her wrist so tightly that her skin was turning blue. He wore many rings, and the backs of his hands were covered in liver spots.

  Fortunately, as it turned out, the two men in polo shirts were not plainclothes detectives but off-duty hospital aides. Spotting the old man on the floor and Sharon kneeling at his side, they hurried over to help. One of them told the librarian in the pink sweater to call for an ambulance while the other removed the victim’s jacket and rolled it into a pillow, which he placed under his head. Searching for a medical bracelet, and finding none, he asked the old man if he was diabetic. The old man gathered enough strength to whisper back that he wasn’t, adding that he’d smoked for too many years to give it up now, and that the doctor had been watching the old ticker recently.

  “Did you take out his bridge?” the first hospital aide asked Sharon.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now go and get some cold water and some paper towels; he’s sweating.” The more assertive of the two men had a blond buzz cut. His nose was thin and beaked, the skin on it nearly transparent.

  Returning with the roll of paper towels and cup of ice water the librarian had handed her, Sharon noted that the old man had perked up and got some of the color back into his face. It was as if the mere presence of the beak-nosed hospital aide, his barking orders at everyone and expecting to be obeyed, had somehow convinced the old man to remain conscious. Everyone else in the room seemed equally impressed. Neither Sharon nor the snippy librarian had questioned his orders; even his colleague had submitted to the beak-nosed man’s commands. Remarkably, only three minutes ago, they’d all been strangers, no contact between the librarian and the casual, nondescript men in the polo shirts, the old man on the floor, and Sharon. Now, guided by the beak-nosed hospital aide, they were a team intimately linked in a drama of life and death.

&nbs
p; Dipping a wad of paper towel into the water, Sharon knelt beside the old man and sponged his veined forehead with it. Her hands and feet, her entire body, seemed to be moving of their own accord—infused by a strength she’d never known before. So this was what Rabbi Joachim meant by “spiritual power”: Kneeling here on the floor next to a fusty old man among thousands of rare books, squeezing drops of ice water from her improvised poultice to his foam-flecked lips. Reaching for the roll and tearing off several more sheets, she wrapped the old man’s false teeth in a dry paper towel.

  “Ah...ah...that’s good,” he murmured brokenly, the corners of his mouth flecked with foam. Then pulling her down, he whispered into her ear, “I—I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Bringing the old man into a seated position, she pointed to the wastebasket alongside the librarian’s desk; immediately, the meeker of the two aides got up and fetched it. Clearly displeased by the thought of the old man vomiting into her wastebasket, the librarian sprang into action. “Look here,” she began waspishly, “just a minute—”

  The beak-nosed hospital aide had only to look up to stop her in mid-sentence.

  “I—I feel better,” the old man said, leaning back. “It’s passed. I feel better this way, lying down, I think.”