For her part, the aura reader was never sure of the nephew’s reasons for avoiding her. She thought he might be shy. But the smile he returned to her today was so sour that she quickly charged her books at the cash register and left without pressing on him her usual lists. She was the last to leave; the store was now empty of customers. Outside, in the bleak downtown streets, the rain fell in thick sheets against the dusty storefront. Good that it’s raining, the nephew thought, at least it saves us the cost of a window washer this week. He signaled the stringy-haired girl at the counter to let no one into the store until otherwise informed before returning, his lip curled in disdain, to the scandal downstairs. His doctor, only two weeks ago, had warned him of ulcers if he continued to torture himself over the business, so the nephew made a conscious effort to remain calm and to take the stairs slowly. He even paused to glance at a bright orange notice with black lettering announcing the arrival of a new Indian Messiah at Hunter College in September. Not in my lifetime, thought the non-believer, as he caught the first loud shouts coming from Seymour’s basement cubicle. Then, straightening his skinny woolen tie over his protruding Adam’s apple, he descended.
Priceman’s inner sanctum, the cubicle of cubicles, was an exact square, running ten feet by ten feet either way. The walls were lined with books culled from esoteric libraries all over the world: wrinkled yellow volumes from Philo to Zoroaster; an eighteenth-century leather bound edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, worth fifteen hundred dollars; three Sanskrit versions of The Lotus of the True Law; and Rabbi Joachim’s own seven-volume translation of the Zohar shared a special glass-enclosed hutch reserved for Seymour’s personal collection of “the rarest of the rare.” The floor was partially covered by two skimpy, foot-worn Hamadan carpets thrown catty-corner to each other at a time when Mrs. Priceman had thought to undertake the decorating of her husband’s private office. Unfortunately, she’d gotten into an argument with one of the Priceman daughter-in-laws, a heavy-cheeked young woman who had entered the store’s every book title and invoice number into a ledger according to a system that was unintelligible to anyone else and therefore indispensable to the business. Thus, much to Seymour’s relief and their triumphant daughter-in-law’s satisfaction, the decorating ended. These days, Mrs. P. contented herself with decorating the homes of “Long Island lady friends and acquaintances,” spending most of her time in the designer showcase buildings along Lower Fifth Avenue, choosing glass trinkets and matching bathroom accessories for her clients. In addition to their faded designs, the Hamadans boasted four years’ worth of unvacuumed book dust, to which Seymour and his white-haired secretary, but not their occasional visitors, had grown immune long ago. One ancient faded plush-covered easy chair of no recognizable color stood in a corner; to compensate for the “negative energy” coming from the overhead fluorescent lighting, the absent-minded medium had placed a reading lamp of obscure origins on a table behind the easy chair as a courteous gesture toward her boss, but Seymour, as he had once confided to Rabbi Joachim, only published books and did not read them, so the lamp went largely unused. Seymour did, however, make use of the enormous cluttered desk awkwardly placed at the center of the cubicle, from which he shouted into the telephone and dictated letters to the white-haired medium, who took notes in her own psychic shorthand, then translated them into business English before typing them on long white paper, which she collated and stacked on a wheeled iron table located directly under the glass-enclosed rare bookcase.
Rejoining the conference, Seymour’s nephew noticed with some bitterness that his thoughtfulness in going upstairs and closing the store had cost him his seat. But the nephew was used to paying for his loyalty and accepted the loss, contenting himself with a disdainful curl of the lip, his trademark gesture reserved for such occasions. Besides, even if he’d chosen to drop a sarcastic comment, it would not have been heard, because the Draconian widow Mrs. Wolstein was shouting. It was her voice he’d heard at the top of the stairs drowning out all the others. And it was she, in a brightly feathered hat made of extinct birds’ tails who’d leapt immediately into his vacated seat, the only comfortable one in the cubicle—the plush armchair.
With a face as gray as the rainswept streets outside, Seymour sat behind the great, cluttered desk doodling on the border of a brief New York Times article, many times perused, but only freshly torn from the morning edition. “Health Cure Fraud Charged to Leader of Jewish Mystical Cult,” read the headline.
Mrs. Wolstein’s lawyer, who had removed his raincoat to reveal what the nephew estimated to be a two-thousand-dollar (at least) custom-tailored suit, was sweating profusely. Repeatedly wiping the thick pouches of skin under his rimless eyeglasses with an oversized Belgian linen handkerchief, he was trying in vain to calm his noisy client. Leon Berkowitz, the once mild-mannered philanthropist who never spoke beyond a whisper but had unaccountably metamorphosed into a loud-mouthed tyrant since his mugging and subsequent hospital stay, was now seated on a carton stocked with recently delivered copies of the Bhagavad Gita, banging his cane on the floor for attention. Because they were all too accustomed to thinking of Berkowitz as timid, they didn’t take his display of anger seriously, and no one in the room was paying attention to him. The white-haired medium, not the least put out by the cane banging—for she was accustomed to louder rapping noises from the astral plane and was, besides, slightly hard of hearing—sat at her table and took notes in psychic shorthand.
Only two people in the crush of bodies that included a generous sprinkling of the usual Priceman relatives remained silent. The first, Rabbi Mordecai Tayson, all in black, stood surveying the tumult from a small pocket of space to the left of the armchair from which the shouting Mrs. Wolstein leaned forward gesturing excitedly with both jeweled hands. The second, Sharon Berg (the last to arrive at the meeting and almost forgotten but for Seymour Priceman’s last minute phone call), was squeezed shoulder to shoulder against the heavy-cheeked Priceman daughter-in-law on one side and the widow Wolstein’s sweating lawyer on the other. Only one person was missing, and it was in his name that this motley group of people had assembled.
Rabbi Albert Joachim, spiritual leader of the Center for Mystical Judaism, had been unavoidably and unaccountably delayed. Bypassing Sharon, he had only a week ago sent Seymour Priceman a manila envelope from Israel containing the first of his “Clover Cure” pamphlets, written in his own fine crabbed hand, along with a letter explaining his change in plans and a request that the pamphlet be rushed into print immediately. A second manila envelope, with a London postmark, had arrived that very morning and been unceremoniously stuffed into Seymour Priceman’s upper-left-hand desk drawer when Mrs. Wolstein had barged into his office unannounced. There it rested on last year’s Christmas catalog of Occult Books for Special Customers at a Discount.
Although Rabbi Joachim’s plans were vague, Seymour, trusting to his own intuition, had contracted with the publisher of a widely circulating health food magazine for a continuing series on Kabbalistic herbal remedies—starting with the simple clover weed. August being the slow season at his Varick Street printer, Seymour had not only managed to rush the first chapter of the series into print, but had gotten the printer to design a special edition with an exquisite lavender-colored cover. By some strange quirk—whether the printer had lavished special care on it out of boredom during the slow season, or whether by sheer chance—the book, according to Rabbi Joachim’s accompanying blurb, bore about it an exotic Asian air, the ancient quintessential herbalist sort of thing people inclined to Orientalism automatically associated with the alternative healing methods of the “inscrutable Chinese.” This, or indeed, perhaps the interceding spirit of Rabbi Joachim’s deceased uncle himself could have been responsible for the book’s maniacally successful hot-off-the-presses sales—Seymour did not presume to judge, nor to question his good fortune—for the minute his lanky clerk placed the first batch on a rotating wire book rack at the cashier’s counter at the front door of the store, the �
��Clover Cure” pamphlets were swept up. By mid-afternoon on the second day, they were entirely out of stock, and Seymour had already placed another rush order with the printer, a larger and more ambitious one this time. On a gamble, he took out an expensive four-inch advertisement in selected spiritual magazines featuring an intentionally Oriental looking line drawing of a clover plant. By the end of the week, the latest batch of clover pamphlets was gone, too. It must be the Chinese medicine and acupuncture craze that’s doing it, thought Seymour. Who am I to question?
On the following Saturday, Seymour received a call in his Brooklyn apartment. He was seated on the terrace under a striped awning watching a baseball game and scanning the latest fall book lists from England, drinking orangeade and feeling more mellow than he had in months. Mrs. Priceman was out playing mah jongg, so he’d asked the cleaning lady to please answer the phone. On taking the receiver from her, Seymour heard an unfamiliar man’s voice at the other end of the line.
“Hello, this is John Davis. I’m an investigator for the Food and Drug Administration.”
The man had wanted to know if he was speaking to the Seymour Priceman, owner of an occult bookstore located at 1432 Delancey Street in Manhattan.
Seymour at first thought it might be his belligerent nephew playing a smartass prank—he wouldn’t put it past him. Pausing before answering, he said amicably, “That’s me. What can I do for you, Mr. Davis?”
The investigator came right to the point.
“There’s been a lawsuit lodged against Rabbi Albert Joachim, purveyor of an untested herbal remedy, by a Mrs. Ethel Wolstein. And against you, Mr. Priceman, whom she’s charging for publishing Rabbi Joachim’s false health care claims. I’ve been assigned by the criminal department of the FDA to investigate both of Mrs. Wolstein’s charges.”
Seymour was amazed. Some Harlem kid might be feeding on rat turds in a candy bar for five years before the FDA sent anyone to investigate. And here, only one crazy rich woman with “connections” had enough power in her arthritic pinky to ruin a lifetime’s work. What was wrong with spreading around some human kindness? Since when did a little placebo effect ever hurt anybody? It certainly had helped that poor aura reader in the neck brace, a woman who might otherwise never stick her head out of her apartment in the morning. Otherwise, who knew what she might do—or not do—to herself out of loneliness?
“Are you still there?” asked the real (Seymour was sure now that it wasn’t his nephew) investigator.
“Yes, I’m still here,” said Seymour, his voice breaking a little. “Listen, Mr. Davis,” he motioned for the cleaning lady to close the bedroom door and turn off the vacuum cleaner, but she didn’t see him and he had to yell over the noise. “Why don’t you come down and see me at the store on Tuesday? I haven’t got anything here at home, all my materials are at my office.”
“That’ll be fine, Mr. Priceman. How is Tuesday morning at ten?”
“Good, we’ll have coffee,” Seymour said placidly, feeling stupid and lightheaded and triumphant all at once—the same feeling that came over him when he’d smoked one too many of his father’s smuggled-from-Canada Cuban cigars.
Setting the phone in its cradle, he’d returned to the terrace and numbly resumed watching the ballgame. It was the top of the fourth inning, with bases loaded for the Mets, his favorite team, when Seymour panicked.
Fortunately, Mrs. Priceman had come home early and dragged him off to a party in Forest Hills. The sheer physical act entailed in driving the car and the effort to socialize with near strangers, most of them overweight and overdressed, made Seymour forget temporarily about his panic. At night, however, in his sleep, he tossed through dreams in which his store burned to the ground.
Short, wearing a shiny brown suit and brogans, John Davis looked more like a Christian book salesman from Omaha than a government inspector. But then, Seymour reasoned, how would he know what a government inspector looked like? He’d never had any business with them, never had been forced to pay off those notoriously crooked New York fire inspectors (honest Joe Banduti had come around for years and never demanded so much as a cup of coffee). Thank God he didn’t own a restaurant! His uncle on his father’s side had warned him away from the food business years ago.
The inspector refused the cup of coffee Seymour offered him but said he didn’t mind if Seymour drank his while they talked. The sallow-faced nephew stretched his neck almost out of his collar trying to overhear what was going on in the cubicle, so Seymour got up from behind his desk and closed the door. The nephew muttered something that sounded like a question, but luckily the telephone rang then and Seymour didn’t have to answer him. As he returned to his desk he heard the nephew roar something into the telephone about an “overdue bill”—he could have been threatening any one of a number of clients or business associates. From the brief snatches of conversation he heard from behind the closed door, Seymour surmised that it was a long distance call from a small bookstore in California that owed them fifteen hundred dollars for the latest shipment of the Clover Cure.
Sitting down in the plush armchair and crossing his chunky legs, Davis explained that this sort of investigation was nothing new, really—phony swamis and cancer cures abounded in these “Aquarian times.”—he chuckled—as surely, being in the business of the occult, Mr. Priceman was himself aware. Mrs. Wolstein had apparently alerted the F.D.A. months before this, when a crop of Rabbi Joachim’s alleged “talismans” costing her a total of one hundred and seventy-five dollars did not alleviate the “psychic disturbances” in her home.
“Considering that she’s been a founding member of Rabbi Joachim’s Center for Mystical Judaism from its inception, and a continuing patron, having donated more than fifty thousand dollars to date, Mrs. Wolstein is not levying these serious charges against him frivolously.”
“My understanding was that the rabbi never forced anyone to buy his talismans or his books, that you only paid for those things if you felt like it—a contribution, so to speak.” Seymour leaned back in his chair and cupped his ear, a habit he’d picked up from his father.
The inspector shrugged. “All I know is that she attempted back then, so she claims, to contact the party involved, namely Rabbi Albert Joachim. But it seems the only person who would talk to her was his associate, that Rabbi Tayson fellow, who stated that the Center was closed for the summer and that Rabbi Joachim had gone abroad for an indefinite length of time.”
“That’s right,” Seymour nodded.
“As you would imagine, the news upset Mrs. Wolstein considerably. She’s not the most stable person.”
“That, I know. I’ve met her only twice, but it’s obvious,” said Seymour ingratiatingly, trying hard to make light of the matter.
The inspector ignored him and went on. “So she insisted on a face-to-face meeting with his associate, Rabbi Tayson.”
“To whom, no doubt, she poured her heart out.”
“Well,” the inspector frowned at being interrupted twice, “the second-in-command himself, it seems, has been kept in the dark about most of the goings on at the Center, and when Mrs. Wolstein suggested that maybe they ought to speak with a Mrs. Berg, the Center’s secretary, Rabbi Tayson told her that it would be foolish, since Mrs. Berg was fiercely involved—that’s his word, ‘fiercely’—with Rabbi Joachim, and with his schemes, too, so Mrs. Berg scarcely could be expected to be reliable.”
Davis stopped for breath, cleared his throat and resumed in a more official tone. “According to the complainant, Rabbi Tayson appeared to be genuinely unaware of the quackery going on under his nose, so to speak, and, because he was unwilling, he said, to lend his name to it any further, he told Mrs. Wolstein that he would join forces with her in exposing Rabbi Joachim as a fake. Rabbi Tayson then agreed to undertake an internal investigation of the Center’s activities himself.”
“Oh?”
“And he hadn’t gotten very far when the Clover Cure pamphlet was dropped, so to speak, into his lap. On the advice
of Mrs. Wolstein’s attorney, Rabbi Tayson telephoned our district branch asking for tests of the medicinal properties of the plant. And that’s where you—as the publisher of the book—come in, isn’t it, Mr. Priceman?” Davis smiled good-naturedly, simultaneously tugging at his socks.
The inspector went on to tell Seymour that it was Mrs. Wolstein, through her late husband’s cousin, a publicity agent, who telephoned (prematurely, in Davis’s opinion) the New York Times about the story, and asked her attorney to file a lawsuit against Rabbi Joachim and the Center for Mystical Judaism for marketing an unproven cure for addiction and other mental disturbances, and against Seymour Priceman, for publishing Rabbi Joachim’s false claims.
“To put it bluntly, it was Mrs. Wolstein’s idea to make a stink about it. Rabbi Tayson strikes me as the quiet type; he doesn’t want any publicity at all.”
According to Davis, several additional claims were made, none of which could be proven. Besides, those complaints were under the jurisdiction of the vice squad, not the FDA. But, Davis confided, leaning forward in his chair, being a man of the world, Seymour Priceman could easily guess what kinds of complaints he was talking about: “the usual sordid accusations relating to so-called gurus and ‘spiritual teachers’ like Rabbi Joachim, hanky-panky, the blond divorcée secretary, the way-with-the-ladies sort of thing that’s so common with these guys, the flashy car, even the misappropriation of funds designated by a contributor named Leon Berkowitz for the construction of a new building for the Center in Los Angeles that never got built. It’s your typical religious scandal, a pit without a bottom, so to speak.”
The Kabbalah Master Page 16