The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  “I’m sorry,” Ari said, because now he felt guilty for ever having hated the woman and her son. “I just don’t understand what you’re looking for.”

  The woman looked like she was about to say something, but the son shook his head. “We’re not looking for anything,” he said. The woman turned to him, questioning, but he kept talking. “We just wanted to know if you remembered Leland Bloom-Mittwoch.”

  Without thinking, Ari made an offer he instantly regretted. “Would you like me to call my father and ask him if he remembers Leland?”

  The woman nodded and the son shrugged.

  This would be good, Ari reassured himself. This would be weird, sure, but good. He’d find out who Leland was (finally!) and get this mess straightened out in his head and he’d talk to his father, which he hadn’t done in a few months. Now they’d have something to talk about. He could say, “These two people are waiting in my office with me, Dad, and they want to know about Leland Bloom-Mittwoch.” His father would have to respond with more than the usual grunt.

  The three of them crowded in his office, which made Ari realize how small it was. He barely had enough room for his books on the shelves: he’d had to start stacking them on the floor. His desktop was all computer and printer and papers and no pens. The landline phone buzzed. The mother and son were sitting in front of him, knees against the desk, the son peeling a sheet of dead skin off his thumb and the mother looking at Ari like he was the president about to drop a bomb on Al Qaeda. Nothing he was doing could be that important. He dialed his father’s home number. He asked the woman where she was from and she smiled pleasantly and said, “Cleveland.” Now there was a place nobody talked about anymore. Or had anybody really talked about Cleveland to begin with? What did he know about Cleveland, other than that people called it the Mistake by the Lake? He had gone to grad school with someone from Cleveland. Simon Yeltsman. Or had he been from Cincinnati?

  The phone kept on ringing. His parents didn’t even have voice mail. Leave it to the Kamzins to distrust any technology invented after the Cold War. He hung up and tried again. Then again.

  On the fourth try his mom picked up.

  “Ari,” she said. “What’s happening? Why are you calling so close to sundown?”

  “Ma, I’m sorry, I’m just in a little bit of a situation here,” he said, and the woman leaned forward in her seat. “Is Dad there?”

  A raspy sigh. He remembered that sigh from her, the way she’d huff it in the mideighties after a drag from a Gauloise, Ari having just done something unforgivably stupid.

  “Some people want to know about a member of the congregation. Do you remember someone named Leland Bloom-Mittwoch?”

  “What? Bloom-Mittwoch?”

  “Yeah, they’re here because they think—”

  “We think he might have left something,” the woman whispered from her seat.

  “They think he left something here many years ago that belongs to them.”

  “In the late nineties,” the woman went on. “He died in 1999.”

  “He was here in the late nineties,” Ari said.

  Another raspy sigh. His mom was probably wearing a turtleneck and jeans over her boy-slim hips, chewing on the inside of her mouth and making that little scowl she always made when she had to think about something she didn’t like. “I have no idea.”

  “I’m his ex-wife,” the woman stage-whispered, and her son rolled his bulging eyes.

  “I’m looking at a woman who claims she’s Leland Bloom-Mittwoch’s ex-wife,” Ari said.

  “Stop this nonsense,” his mother hissed. “Put the ex-wife on the phone.”

  He did as he was told, and he watched the woman’s face go from expectant to polite to miserable. She handed the phone back to Ari, who hung up.

  The woman began crying. Her son held her.

  “I’m so sorry to have bothered you,” she said.

  Ari reached across his desk to put a hand on her forearm. “Oh, um—”

  “Melinda.”

  “Right, Melinda, please don’t let my mom ruffle your feathers like that. She’s a very matter-of-fact woman. I shouldn’t have given the phone over.”

  “No, it wasn’t her.” She shuddered, massaging her cheeks. “It was just that it was, it was just chasing a lie.” And then the son whispered something to his mother that Ari couldn’t hear and she cried harder. What to do with these people?

  “Would you prefer if I, um, tried to give them a call back tomorrow?” Ari asked. “Are you in town long?”

  The son shook his head. “No need. Right, Mom? We’re going to forget about this and go home.”

  The woman said nothing.

  “For what it’s worth,” Ari said, “I think there must have been a Leland Bloom-Mittwoch in the congregation because you are two of six total people who’ve asked about him in the past week.”

  “Six total,” the woman intoned.

  “Okay, yes, we don’t doubt that. What we doubt is literally anything else about him, especially rumors originating from the man himself.” The son leaned forward in a way that made Ari uncomfortable. “Apparently he had a giant briefcase full of money and somehow hid it in this temple.”

  Ari smiled, finally understanding. More temple lore. Shosh was going to eat this story up when he got home.

  He asked them if they needed a moment and the son nodded yes. He stepped outside: no texts from Shosh, just smiling baby Lina as his wallpaper. He would never change that wallpaper, no matter how old she got—he’d whip that phone out at her bat mitzvah and her sweet sixteen, “embarrassing” her with proof of how adorable she’d been. Her hazel eyes and little ridgeless nose and gummy smile. He could think of nothing better to look at. It wasn’t fair that kids grew up, for their sakes or their parents’. Even he’d been adorable at one point in time, chubby-legged and quick to smile. He used to call his mom Mimi and his dad Poppy. Where he’d come up with those names, he had no idea. At least he had Shosh and Lina. Everything would be different with him and Shosh and Lina. Lost in thought, he hardly even noticed the mother and son walking past him on their way out of his office.

  * * *

  He called his father back again that week, during hours of the day he knew he’d be by his phone. No response. It wasn’t unlike his father to act stoic or distant or gruff, but it was entirely unlike him to be unreachable. Were they now officially estranged? That would be a shame—not for Ari, for whom it would mean less grunting, less judgment, less haranguing about the progressive changes he was trying to make to the temple, but for Lina, who deserved to grow up with grandparents. Shosh’s parents had passed of heart attacks within months of each other two years before Lina had been born. It had been horrible for Shosh, who lost twenty pounds and slept three hours a night and wore dark gray circles under her eyes. A grief-destroyed wife shouldn’t be held accountable for maintaining a perfect Jewish household, so Ari had done everything around the house in addition to running the show at Chaim Sheltok. Seeing Shosh like that had made him realize how awful life must have been for his mother, expected to serve his father regardless of how she was feeling—no wonder she’d been so angry at Ari all the time. Where else could she vent her emotions? No one would expect any complaints from the rabbi’s wife.

  After a week of no response from his father, he stopped trying. Why beat a dead horse? So they were estranged—that would probably last as long as the High Holidays, and then his father would want something from him, and then the phone would start ringing again. He used to be envious of boys who seemed to have close relationships with their fathers, like Eric Shimmel, whose father coached the Little League team, or John Tao, whose father was leader of the Boy Scouts. Mr. Tao had a wide, kind face and always let Ari put double marshmallows in his s’mores when they went camping. John, who was tall and girl-graceful and constantly acted like he was better than everyone else, probably didn’t appreciate his father enough. If Ari had been the son of Mr. Tao, he wouldn’t have avoided being in the same
canoe as him, or groaned when he was called on to be partners with him during CPR class. He was going to make sure Lina dodged the ungratefulness bullet. She would know from the start how lucky she was to have a home and two loving parents and a college fund.

  He was preparing for the service while Shosh played with Lina in his office. Having the two of them there always made services better. All the congregants loved cooing at Lina, especially the female ones, and Shosh wasn’t stingy about letting them hold her. The three of them made the temple homier, unlike his father, who had forced Ari to wear a tiny suit and shake everyone’s hand as they filed out the door to the parking lot. Surprisingly, Shosh had been less interested in the Leland Bloom-Mittwoch story than he had, attributing the barrage of visitors to a recent full moon. She could get weirdly pagan, his Shosh, and there was no predicting how or why. She thought the tides controlled moods and crystals prevented illnesses and accidents happened for a reason. Ari had always been skeptical about that stuff, but who was he to judge? Plenty of people believed in those new age healing rituals, and far be it from him to question their beliefs. Probably a lot of people thought Judaism was a crock of ancient snake oil cooked up to make a group of regular people feel special.

  He’d taken to the Internet: according to the St. Petersburg Times archive, Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. had died jumping off the roof of a hotel in Tampa in 1999. He was survived by a wife and a son, Diedre Bloom-Mittwoch and Lee Bloom-Mittwoch. Other than that, there wasn’t much information on old Leland Bloom-Mittwoch. He tried searching “Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Jr.” and got a photo of the thin son looking considerably less thin, shaking the hand of someone whom the photo caption described as Winn Maxwell’s largest investor. Winn Maxwell was some kind of hedge fund in Chicago. After looking at the Winn Maxwell website for a while, Ari got bored.

  He’d just finished de-linting the parochet when he saw them. First came a tall old man with a head that looked like it had been badly dented and then reformed. He wrapped his arm around the hips of a woman who appeared to be his age, who surveyed the temple critically through a pair of black-frame glasses. Behind them were two men with the same face, one of them shorter than the other. The taller one held the hand of a woman Ari could have sworn looked like the painter Netta Barochin, but then all he’d seen of her had been a grainy photo in the New York Times. The shorter one held the hand of a nervous and birdlike white woman.

  “Hello,” Ari said, aware that he was maybe sounding overgenerous, like the dorky, mustachioed dad who wants to be liked by his teenager’s friends. He hoped he wouldn’t actually become that dad when Lina was a teenager, walking into the living room with freshly baked cookies and interrupting some gossip about hot boys at school, an apron tied around his growing paunch, asking if anyone wanted oatmeal raisin clusters (because of course as a dorky dad he wouldn’t make the kind of cookies kids like, and of course he’d call them clusters instead of cookies). Lina would surely roll her eyes at him after he left the room. She’d say something like “Sorry about my dad, you guys, he’s just a little … desperate.”

  “Hi,” the shorter twin-faced man said, and separated himself from the pack to shake Ari’s hand. The white woman crossed her arms and stood apart from the rest of the family—Ari had the feeling that it was less her wanting to stand apart and more the family’s pushing her away. He couldn’t blame them, which was mean of him to think, but she looked like a hard little person, the kind of person who would send back her steak at a restaurant because it hadn’t been properly dressed. The older woman with the glasses took a seat on a bench.

  “I’m Caleb Marshall,” the shorter twin-faced man said, and gave Ari a business card that read Caleb Marshall, Attorney at Law, Lewis & Mathers & Marshall. “I’m here with my family. We made the trip down here together. It’s a special occasion for all of us.”

  He introduced them: the man with the dented head was in fact his father, and he was named Reggie Marshall. Caleb’s mother was named Natasha Marshall. They were obviously in love. As Ari spoke to them, Reggie massaged the base of Natasha’s neck and she smiled at his touch. They were a beautiful couple. He used to think that sort of thing was impossible, especially among the older generations, because his mother nitpicked and his father handled it with stony silence.

  The white woman was introduced as Jocelyn, and she gave a terse little wave. The twin-faced man was Aaron, Caleb’s brother. And his wife was Netta.

  “Oh my God,” Ari said. “Are you the painter? Netta Barochin?”

  Netta smiled at Aaron, whom Ari saw give her a strong-jawed look and a shrug like Whatever you want. Why would Aaron be giving her this look and shrug? They seemed to be in love, too, but not like Reggie and Natasha—more recklessly, but maybe more passionately. Aaron and Netta were also tall and beautiful and made Ari feel like a schlub. Which he knew was unfair, was just his bad self-esteem talking, but it was hard not to feel that way.

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “I sometimes get asked that.”

  Was she lying? Ari liked her already, the soft way she spoke. He’d known a girl in grade school like her who was the tallest in class but also the shyest, and whom he would sometimes walk home and talk to about a collection of bugs she kept in jars under her bed. He couldn’t remember her name. It started with a T. Why was he remembering a grade-school crush now? He figured if Netta was lying, he’d let her lie, because there was no harm in wanting to be modest. His mother used to say modesty was the best policy. Netta Barochin was well-known enough that people were probably always bothering her for autographs, and that had to be annoying, although Ari was such a civilian type that being famous seemed like a blast to him. How did rabbis get famous? There were no megarabbis like there were megapastors, which was probably good for the faith but obviously bad for getting famous. Ha, like he really wanted to be. He had everything he wanted in his life already.

  “We’re very sorry about this,” Caleb Marshall said. “We don’t really want to occupy any more of your Sabbath. The radically truncated version of the story is we all know a man named Leland Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. who was a member of this congregation in the nineties, and we have reason to believe he left a sum of money here. A donation perhaps?”

  “It was in a yellow briefcase,” Reggie Marshall said. “It belonged to me.”

  “You have something that belongs to him,” Aaron Marshall echoed.

  They knew this Leland, too?

  Ari was realizing for the first time the magnitude of his ignorance about the Temple Chaim Sheltok’s history. He didn’t know, for instance, that his father had once tolerated in his congregation the presence of a drug addict named Leland Sr., an inconsequential person with a wild brain who’d shown up on the temple steps one evening begging for “spiritual shelter.” He said he lived thirty-five minutes from Heimsheim but was willing to make the drive as many days as the rabbi would let him. Thinking he was doing the poor man a mitzvah, Ari’s father sat Leland Sr. behind the women’s cheesecloth so he wouldn’t embarrass himself during services. He’d even allowed Leland Sr. to volunteer his free weekdays cleaning the temple. After some time of that, he let the poor man bring his family to Friday services, his pale ghost of a son and his strangely beautiful wife sitting behind the cheesecloth while he sat with the rest of the congregation. When Leland Sr. finished a volunteer cleaning session, the rabbi always left his office through the back exit and walked around through the front entrance, greeting the man as though he’d just arrived back from running errands or performing a bris, as though he trusted him fully.

  The work seemed to calm Leland Sr., and he was always so eager to discuss scripture with the rabbi afterward. The rabbi would listen patiently to him, trying his best to chalk up the man’s many inconsistencies to sloppy self-study. When Leland Sr. reached his limit discussing scripture, the rabbi would invite him to talk about personal matters. Then he’d try his best to mask his emotions as Leland Sr. told him about the first wife and son who hated him, the disappearance and li
kely violent death of his best friend in 1973, his unshakable need for “medicine.” The rabbi asked him about the good in his life and Leland Sr. assured him there was plenty—his second wife and son who loved him, the fact that he needed only two doses of medicine a day now.

  The rabbi truly pitied him. Although he knew no good could come from pity, he allowed himself to feel it thoroughly, allowed himself to imagine the unfortunate series of events that could have landed him in a pair of shoes similar to the man’s.

  “We all suffer traumas that threaten impurity in our souls,” the rabbi said. “And we should be freed from them, not punished for them.”

  It wasn’t until three years later, on the evening before his birthday in 1999, that Leland Sr. finally understood the rabbi’s words. The true meaning occurred to him like a divine slap to the back of the head. That night he stayed up watching TV long after Diedre and Lee had gone to bed. Then he went to the basement, where for years he’d been hiding Reggie’s money in a yellow briefcase (the money changed briefcases often, the old ones serving as decoys for those whom he wanted to throw off his noxious, cursed trail) to which he’d recently added a study Torah the rabbi had gifted him. He loaded it into his car and pressed his forehead to his steering wheel, whispered to G-d that he hoped his wife and son would be okay, that he even hoped his other wife and son would be okay, that he was very sorry for everything he’d done.

  He drove to Heimsheim and pulled into the temple parking lot. By then the rabbi had made a copy of the master key for him, trusted him enough to come and go as he pleased. He silently thanked the rabbi for his trust, then thanked G-d for trusting the rabbi. The moon was bright over Chaim Sheltok’s high marble dome; the massive door screeched as he pushed it open.