The Kabbalah Master

by Besserman, Perle;

  “Guess you ought to think about quitting smoking Pop,” the beak-nosed hospital aide said jokingly. “I stopped—took me, let’s see... Harry?” He looked at his colleague and wrinkled his forehead. “How long is it now since I stopped smoking?”

  Catching on to the game, Harry said, “Gosh, Phil, maybe three years. Yeah, I’d say three years.”

  Phil looked at Sharon and said, “How’s about some more sponging for our friend Pop here, eh, Miss?”

  By now the old man’s color had returned to the point where his face no longer resembled a paraffin mask. The two men kept bantering and Sharon continued sponging the old man’s forehead until the ambulance arrived. Tearfully thanking them for their help, he made the sign of the cross as he was lifted onto a gurney and rolled out of the library into the street.

  Phil got up patting his pants pockets to make sure that nothing had fallen out of them, causing a crumpled package of Camels to fly out and land in the wastebasket. Harry bent over to pick up the cigarettes and the two hospital aides smiled at each other sheepishly.

  “Ya gotta tell ‘em something to keep their minds off it, right?” Phil said.

  “Does the old guy have a chance, do you think?” Sharon heard Harry ask as the two men brushed past her without saying goodbye.

  “Who knows? You never can tell with them tickers,” said Phil without a trace of feeling, “especially at his age.”

  BACK IN HER CHAIR, Sharon tried reading her notes but could not concentrate because the incident with the old man had brought back memories of her honeymoon: the lake, the slick young bodies, Barney’s yellow-checkered bathing trunks, the disappointment of their sweaty first night of lovemaking, but mostly the dreadful story of that afternoon kept pressing in on her. Too vivid as it was now, rendering her scrawls illegible, the story demanded—like a suitcase standing unopened in a hallway too long after the end of a trip—to be opened, and its contents properly stored away.

  Sharon closed her notepad and slipped her pen into the pharmacopoeia between two glossy color sketches of St. John’s Wort to keep her place. All right, she told herself, you can think about it if you want to—but only for five minutes. It was a “waking dream” exercise Rabbi Joachim had given her, designed to purge the mind of obstructive memories.

  The Evergreen Lodge. I’m on my honeymoon, making my way to the lake to meet my new husband Barney. I walk through the red plush and cherry wood bad taste of the lodge’s lobby and out the curtained French doors past the reception desk and the black studio piano that no one plays, narrowly avoiding the disheveled old man with the yellow walrus mustache, whom I like to think of as British. As I push the door open, the curtain flutters in the sunlight. I hurry down the fir-lined path and hear the screams of honeymoon wives being plunged in chicken-fights from the shoulders of their new husbands into the cold water of the lake. When I reach the lake, the first thing I see is the white wooden dock bobbing up and down in the black water on its orange oil drum anchors.

  “Eeek! Barracuda!” a man shouts in a falsetto.

  “Shut up, dope,” a woman screams.

  An oversized pink beach ball hits the water with a thunk. The lifeguard blows his whistle. I squat down and scan the water for Barney, my new husband, a sparse-haired ad salesman from the seventeenth-floor offices of the Belvedere Mill Corporation. Squatting on my haunches like this, I can stay put for hours, which never ceases to amaze Barney, who says he can’t even bend over and touch his toes, his knees are so stiff. Barney is fifteen years older than me, but he is a strong swimmer, whereas I can only negotiate the water with a reluctant sidestroke.

  On a rise above the cropped grass shoreline where the flagstone begins, serious sun-worshippers oil and grill their bodies on long, white chaise lounges, and cabana boys in red-white-and-blue boaters hustle for tips. Mitzi Dorman, a blond interior decorator wearing an oversized pink straw coolie hat tied under her chin with a red sash, says, “Imagine using railroad ties for a sundeck. Wonder who thought that one up? What a savings...” Mitzi is talking to her bridge partner, a very fat woman in a muumuu. Mitzi is divorced, a stalker of other women’s husbands. She drinks frozen daiquiris and uses the word “nifty” a lot. Her silver mandarin fingernails flash like mercury in the sun as she picks up and puts down cards, reminding me of Pinnie. On a nearby chaise lounge, with her rump up, sprawls Betty-with-no-last-name. Like the elderly “British” gentleman and Mitzi Dorman, Betty, too, is unattached, but Betty isn’t looking for company. She arrived at dusk three days ago during a furious ping-pong match on the front lawn with only one suitcase and a pile of Vogues under her arm. From her first day out, Betty has spoken to no one. She lies sunning her magnificent body, which she enhances by changing bikinis mornings and afternoons and by turning browner every day.

  The lifeguard blows his whistle again. He’s a Princeton student, wearing an orange baseball cap with a miniature orange tiger embroidered on the brim. In the evenings, having changed into a blue blazer, white slacks, and sky-blue polo shirt, he dances with the unattached women at the lodge. Everyone but the lifeguard gets slightly tipsy before nine, when the comedian comes onto the dance floor and tells forty-five minutes’ worth of dirty jokes through a hand-held microphone.

  The lifeguard picks up his bullhorn and announces that a special guest, an intern from the local hospital, will give a lesson in first aid. I see Barney getting out of the water and wave to him. He is talking to Ed Mendelsohn, a spindly-legged insurance salesman. Greeted by a chorus of mock groans, the lifeguard shoos everyone out of the water. Betty-with-no-last-name never so much as moves a muscle. The intern, who wears his hair long and is dressed in hospital blues, winks at the lifeguard and tells everyone to form a circle. Still talking, Barney and Ed Mendelsohn join the circle. The intern asks for a volunteer who will simulate a heart attack, and a hairy-chested honeymooner in a Speedo steps to the center of the circle and lies flat on his back on the ground. His wife, a pony-tailed blond, immediately gets into the spirit of the demonstration by crying for help.

  I feel the saliva welling up in my mouth. Barney is motioning for me to come over. His athletic supporter is sticking out of one leg of his yellow-checkered bathing suit. The intern says, “Seriously, though, Mrs.—”

  “Robbins,” says the ‘victim’s’ wife.

  “Right. Okay, then, Mrs. Robbins, what would you do first if you found your husband like this?”

  “Take out his false teeth!” a man yells from the second row of the circle.

  “Scream bloody murder, that’s what I’d do,” says Mrs. Robbins, making the crowd laugh. A few of the men appear to be on the verge of leaving.

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go. That’s my philosophy,” says a man wearing blue espadrilles and smoking a cigar.

  “Who started this, anyway?” a middle-aged self-described engineer on his second marriage asks irritably. His wife, a schoolteacher twenty years his junior, is pouting.

  Under the intern’s direction, the lifeguard gets down on his knees and presses the heels of his hands into the victim’s hairy chest.

  “Hey, boy,” comes the muffled complaint. “Go easy there, will you? I’m not made of rubber.”

  A few people snigger, others cough self-consciously. The lifeguard demonstrates three different methods for applying artificial respiration. The intern says, “Mouth-to-mouth is best, of course.”

  “Specially if she’s well built, huh?” The man in the blue espadrilles chortles, biting down hard on his cigar and squirting brown juice on his chin.

  I walk up to Barney and whisper in his ear: “This is embarrassing.” Barney slips his arm around me and draws me into the circle around the intern and his victim.

  “Marry him. He’ll be good to you. He’s not the type that’ll eat your heart out,” Pinnie had said, urging me to accept Barney’s pearl and sapphire engagement ring.

  Barney is a good cook and an Easy Listening fan. What does it matter that I don’t feel passion for him or that his jock stra
p hangs out of his bathing suit? Who am I to rate an Adonis? For everyone a season. Mine, I feel, is probably autumn. In the autumn of our lives, Barney and I will be a happy couple eating cilantro-seasoned omelets while listening to Easy Listening radio.

  “I once had the dubious pleasure of resuscitating a corpse,” the intern says.

  The man in the blue espadrilles grunts.

  “Well, not really an honest-to-goodness corpse in the technical sense,” says the intern. “But the man was as close to dead as any I ever saw.”

  The circle narrows and the card players stop in mid-game. Barney, and I, too, are now transfixed. Mrs. Robbins curls her ponytail around her index finger, and her husband, forgetting to be a victim, sits up. The schoolteacher stops pouting and steps away from her husband’s side to hear better.

  “It was this very lake, in fact—a little closer to the children’s crib over there,” says the intern, pointing twenty yards to the right, where the guests’ children are splashing around in water wings.

  “It was early in the season and I’d just taken a few laps across the lake when a little guy came up to me and said, ‘Guess what I just saw, Mr. Doctor!’ ‘What did you see, sport?’ I asked him. ‘I saw a black log with arms and legs floating in the water.’ ‘A black log with arms and legs?’ ‘Yes, and I think it had a face, but I couldn’t tell cause it was down in the water.’ I figured this kid either had a pretty surrealistic imagination or that something was wrong, so I decided to check out the ‘log with the arms and legs.’ The kid took me to the spot where he’d seen it, and I swam out in that direction. I hadn’t gone very far, when I bumped into something—only it wasn’t a log. It was an old man. His body was bloated, his hair was full of slime, plastered to his skull, his face—”

  The intern conjures the blue, waterlogged face and staring eyes of the old man, and I shudder to think that I’m fifteen years younger than Barney and may not have the opportunity to wait for happiness to come to me in the ‘autumn of my life.’ I recall the engagement party thrown for us by the secretaries on the seventeenth floor of Belvedere Mills, when Barney drank too much red wine and ate too much lasagna, and I held his head while he vomited in the ladies’ lounge. Right after that was when I looked into Barney’s bloated, waterlogged face and was sorry I’d accepted his proposal.

  The intern says, “He seemed too far gone to bother with. Honestly, I was ready to push him further out, away from the shore where the kids were playing, and go back quietly for the police. But the little boy was standing there, staring at me; he just wouldn’t budge. He didn’t even look scared. It made me feel sort of ashamed, I guess. What do you do when a kid is watching you like that?”

  “You apply first aid, that’s what!” cries the man in the blue espadrilles.

  “Let the man tell his story,” the schoolteacher chides.

  “So I dragged the body to the shore. By this time, a whole group of kids had gathered around to have a look at the ‘log.’ They were amazing, those kids. Didn’t make a sound, didn’t blink an eye. It was eerie, the way they stood there waiting to see what I would do. Believe me, I was positive the old man was finished. He had all the symptoms, no pulse, no respiration—he’d even started to turn rigid in my arms!”

  Seeing that she is now lying partly in the shade, Betty-with-no-last-name gets up and pulls her chaise lounge out into the sun. After settling down on her back, she cups her silver reflector under her chin and resumes tanning her face.

  “So I started pounding the water out of him, and let me tell you there was a well inside of the old man. I mean, the water came gushing out of him like a geyser. It was a good show, a heroic effo rt for the kids’ sake. But then it dawned on me that even if he did come to, he wouldn’t be much good anyway. No oxygen in the brain for too long.”

  I grip Barney’s hand and wonder if he’ll become senile, and if I’ll have to change his diapers and cut his hair and mince his food until he finally dies cursing me and waving a fork at me with a piece of his breakfast omelet dangling from the tines.

  “As a last resort, I decided to try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

  Mitzi Dorman gasps.

  “That’s exactly how I felt about it, lady,” says the intern. “What if he had some contagious disease? From the look of him, his shabby clothes, the stuff running out of him—believe me, it wasn’t an appetizing thought. But it was the kids—they wouldn’t leave until I had proven myself.”

  The intern steps forward, taking his listeners into his confidence. “So I just shut my eyes, pressed my lips to his clammy mouth, and breathed into him.”

  The honeymooners loose a collective sigh.

  “And would you believe it, the old man started coming to?”

  “No?” says Mrs. Robbins.

  “Yessir, right there under my eyes, with me puffing and blowing myself purple in the face. The kids were suddenly jumping up and down, scaring me with the noise. Remember, it’s been so quiet up till then that all you could hear was the sound of my breathing, and then the old man’s feeble wheezing. But he came around.”

  “And?”

  I think the intern is making it all up, that he and the lifeguard are playing a sick joke on the guests.

  “Well, by then the local rescue squad had arrived with all their equipment. It’s a good thing they did, because I later found out that if I’d kept it up that way I would have hyper-oxygenated the old man and done him in for lack of CO2.”

  The honeymooners nod gravely.

  The intern says, “Old people can’t take that much oxygen, you know.”

  “Did he live?” asks the man in the blue espadrilles.

  “Oh, yes. I went to see him at the local hospital. They had this Indian resident on duty there—an Indian from India, I mean. It was some feat getting any information from him; his English was so hard to understand. We communicated mostly in sign language. It was ironic, the whole thing.”

  “Was he brain-damaged?” Mitzi Dorman calls out from the flagstone patio.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered either way,” the intern says. “He was an escaped mental patient from the nearby State Hospital—a chronic schizophrenic, twenty-nine years in the back ward, a burnt-out case. Maybe I hadn’t done him such a favor. Maybe I interfered with his one golden opportunity to finish it all—peacefully. He was still in the black hospital pajamas when I got to him. They said he wandered away from the nurse’s aide when they were out walking, that he was always wandering. A peaceful type guy, not at all violent.”

  “But he lived?” Mitzi Dorman persists.

  “Yes, if you want to call that living. And he had T.B., to add to the bargain. I had to be tested and X-rayed for a full year afterward.”

  The honeymooners flood the intern with admiration for his loyalty to the Hippocratic Oath and for his sacrifice. They are glad to hear of his bravery secondhand. They’re glad also not to be an old man in black hospital pajamas with a tendency to wander. They are a little peeved at the unappetizing details of the story so soon before lunch, and they look at the lake as if they’ll think twice before diving in. Everyone but Betty-with-no-last-name, who has fallen asleep under her silver sun reflector and is snoring, is impressed with the intern for outwitting death. I’m certain that, unappetizing as it is, the intern’s story will monopolize the dinner conversation. The guests will talk of nothing else.

  I look at the intern pawing the grass with his foot and know he hasn’t made up the story. I gaze at the lake where the old man had been lying face down in the black water, knowing that I will dream about the Indian, the blur of trees, the black log with arms and legs, and the curly-headed, gaping children. I know, too, that I will go on secretly despising my husband and will spend my life making it up to him.

  SHARON’S WAKING DREAM ENDED, not because she wanted it to, but because her mind had gotten stuck and refused to go further. It was all vaguely connected somehow with a nagging as yet unformed image that refused to come to the surface of her thoughts. Late
ly, a hint of the image would turn up during her morning meditation, and she could almost catch hold of it, but just as quickly, it would disappear again. Sharon looked at the wall clock. She’d spent four hours in the library. Gathering her notes together in a neat pile, she happened to look across the table and noticed that someone had taken a seat there while she’d been engaged in her waking dream—an Indian swami in saffron robes intently reading a book on trees. Instantly, the missing image surfaced, and Sharon saw herself lying next to Rabbi Joachim in a field of clover. Both of them were naked.

  THIRTEEN

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER TELLING THE CHILDREN a story and tucking them in their beds herself, Sharon sat with Pinnie at the kitchen table talking peaceably and sipping tea Russian-style, as they had when Sharon’s grandmother was alive and had led them in the tea drinking ritual: glasses filled almost to the brim with hot amber liquid, a steamy dividing line between the hot part of the glass and the one inch that could be comfortably held between thumb and forefinger; and raspberry jam, of course, tamped to the bottom of the glass with the back of a spoon, so much sweet raspberry jam that the glass was fairly choked with it. Berry remnants swam in amber as mother and daughter talked—idly at first—of the children, of moving to the country some day, of getting away from Brooklyn for good. Dreaming in tandem with her mother made Sharon feel pleasantly safe. Pinnie’s lively good humor, her occasional curse word and uninhibited guffaw broke into the sickroom of Sharon’s obsessions unrolling the blinds and throwing open the windows, announcing to the invalid that she’d taken a turn for the better—if only temporarily. During a lull in the conversation, they listened to the ticking of the three-legged clock on the refrigerator. It had sat there for as far back as Sharon could remember. When Pinnie had moved in with Sharon she’d brought the old clock with her, creating the illusion of home. And if Paulie had not called out crazily in his sleep in Hebrew, “Sheket babayit!”—Quiet in the house!—and the two women had not laughed at the intrusion, might they not really have been sitting at the old kitchen table drinking tea together on a Monday night as if twenty years hadn’t passed?