Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home

by Harry Kemelman

  “Oh, sure, Mr. Wilcox, I understand. And I’d like you to know that I appreciate this chance, and I’ll do my best–”

  Wilcox smiled sardonically.

  “I mean it, sir. I–”

  Wilcox cut him off with a wave of the hand. “Everybody tries to knock a little off the top. We expect it. Just don’t get greedy.” He reached for his wallet. “You need a little expense money to tide you over?”

  “I can manage.”

  Wilcox riffled through a sheaf of bills and then drew out two new twenties. “Well, call it an advance. Just a minute.” He left the room but returned almost immediately with a plastic tobacco pouch, which he tossed to Moose. “There’s an ounce package. You can consider this a kind of promotion package, uh–samples. There’s no charge for this. But after this, everything is cash on the barrelhead. Get it?”

  “Oh sure. And thanks.”

  Wilcox went over to the cigarette box and pressed a catch on the side. The top tray of cigarettes swiveled to one side, exposing another layer of cigarettes underneath-somewhat irregular in shape and obviously homemade. “Have a couple for yourself,” he offered.

  “Gee, that’s neat.”

  Wilcox smiled. “A gimmick. Nothing to rely on if cops get around to actually looking.” Moose picked up a cigarette from the box, rolled it in his fingers, and sniffed deeply.

  “I don’t think you’d better smoke it here. Take a few with you. You got a cigarette case? Wait a minute.” He searched in the desk drawer and brought out a flat cigarette case of German silver. He slid a number of the cigarettes inside the elastic band of the case. “Here,” he said. As Moose reached for it he had another thought. From the top tray of the cigarette box he took several ordinary cigarettes and slid them alongside the others. “Now you got an assortment,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Much of the beach was rocky, and what sand there was was coarse and gravelly. But it was secluded. Principally that was because it was situated on a kind of peninsula, and when the tide was in-which would be shortly-it was surrounded by water on three sides. Broken branches from the stand of pines provided plenty of wood for a fire; and driftwood was plentiful, too, since the point jutted out into the current.

  Bill Jacobs, who had been a camp counselor for the last two years, took command automatically. “Someone, put the beer and Cokes in the water to chill. You guys get some of these bigger rocks for a fireplace, and the chicks can gather the wood.”

  “Hey,” said Adam Sussman, “remember when we had a cookout here some years ago–the Sea Scouts? Were you in that, Stu?”

  “Yeah, I remember. There was some kind of stink about the fire. The beach isn’t public; it belongs to the Hillson estate. We didn’t have a permit, that was it. Say, Didi, did you get a permit for a fire for tonight?”

  “We don’t need one,” said Didi, suddenly apprehensive. “I’m sure we don’t That’s only during the summer.”

  “Well, all they can do is kick us off, I suppose.” said Stu philosophically. And then he laughed, and Didi saw she was being ribbed and chucked a handful of sand at him. “You really had me going there–permit for a fire!”

  “Well, let’s at least wait until it gets dark,” said Sue Arons. “That’s when a fire is fun.”

  Everyone scattered to carry out his assigned task. Bill arranged the large rocks in a circle for the fireplace, and after the boys had finished, they helped the girls gather wood. After a while there was a big enough pile for Bill to call a halt “Okay, you guys, I think we’ve got enough.”

  “I could use a beer right now,” said Adam.

  “Yeah, me too,” said Stu. He looked at his watch. “Damn, I’ve got to cut out around six thirty to drive my folks over to Lynn.”

  “But we’ll be doing our cooking around then,” protested Didi. “You’ll miss all the food.”

  “It was the only way I could get the car,” he said. “But I’ll be back in no time. Say, who’s got the beer?”

  “When are you going to light the fire, Bill?”

  “I don’t know. After it gets dark and we start getting hungry. Anyone in a hurry?”

  “No, let’s wait a little while.”

  The sea was calm, almost unnaturally so. They could hear the gentle swish of the waves as they struck against the sea wall. From the distance came the screeching of sea gulls. Otherwise the air was still, and there was something about the quiet that tended to restrict conversation. They had paired off now, and what talk there was tended to be between couples, and they kept their voices low. They sipped their drinks reflectively and waited for it to grow dark.

  Adam Sussman rested his head on his girl’s lap; encouraged by his example, the others began to maneuver into more intimate positions. Suddenly Sussman sat up and exclaimed in disgust, “Jee-sus.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We got company.” He pointed at a lone figure coming toward them.

  “Hey, it’s Moose Carter,” said Stu.

  “God’s gift to women,” said Didi.

  “Hiya, Moose.” Bill Jacobs waved lazily at him.

  “Hi, kids. H’lo Bill, Stuie. And Didi and little Sue. Betty baby, where you been?” Then he saw Jenkins. “Why shut my mouf if we haven’t got us a genuwine integrated cookout.”

  “Take a can of beer and cool it,” said Bill Jacobs shortly.

  “Sho, sho, as we say down in Alabam. Don’t mind if I do.”

  He ripped open the top of a beer can and said, “Any of you ever seen this before?” He threw his head back and let the beer gurgle down his throat without a ripple of his Adam’s apple.

  “Alan Jenkins. Moose Carter.”

  Neither man offered his hand, but both said “Hi.”

  “Have another,” suggested Jacobs.

  “I guess I can use one. Maybe I’ll sit down for this one.” As he saw Stu move over to make room for him near Jenkins, he said, “I’ll just sit over here with my old sweetheart Betty–in the front of the bus, if you don’t mind, Stu.”

  Didi felt Stu’s hand clench under hers. She peered at her watch. “It’s half past six. If you have to go for your folks, you’d better leave now.”

  “Maybe I better stick around for a while,” he muttered.

  “No, go now,” she whispered back. “It’ll be all right.”

  It was only after Stu had been gone for some minutes that they felt the first drops of rain.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  When it was his turn to lecture the executive trainees on personnel management, Ben Gorfinkle always ended with a short disquisition on the recalcitrant subordinate.

  In dealing with a subordinate who has got out of line, even if you hold all the trumps and can fire him like that–a snap of the fingers–it’s better to first give him a chance to shape up. Because if he’s a good man and shapes up, then you’re all set. But if you fire him, you have to get a replacement. And how do you know he won’t be just as bad? It’s a good idea to arrange for a conference.

  As soon as he got home from the plant Monday, he called the rabbi. “I’d like to get together with you, Rabbi, for a little conference. We really haven’t talked face to face since I became president, and I think there are a lot of things we ought to iron out.”

  “Any time at all.”

  Sometimes it’s a good idea to arrange for the conference well in advance so that he can stew for a while. Other times, you may find it better to hold it right away, with no prior notice, so that he’s kind of taken by surprise and is unprepared. It depends on the circumstances.

  “How about this evening?”

  “I go to the minyan at seven.”

  “I’ve got a dinner engagement at that time, but if we could get together a little before–”

  “That would be all right.”

  “Stu has my car–”

  “I can come over to your house,” said the rabbi.

  As the rabbi shook hands with Gorfinkle he could
not help thinking that with each of the presidents of the temple, his relations had been different. With Jacob Wasserman, the first president who had originally selected him, there had been not only mutual respect, but a true friendship. In spite of the difference in their ages, they liked each other as people, and that first year at Barnard’s Crossing the Wassermans had had them to dinner on any number of occasions, and the Smalls felt themselves free to drop in on them on a Sunday afternoon for a cup of tea and talk. He had needed a friend in the president then. Looking back, he realized that he had been incredibly young and inexperienced and that only the strong friendship of Wasserman and the respect with which the old man was held by the entire community had saved him from countless embarrassments, including the ultimate embarrassment of not having his contract renewed after his trial year.

  With Al Becker, who had taken over after Wasserman, his relations were quite different. Originally Becker had been the leader of the opposition, and only by the sheer luck of being able to help him in a personal matter had the rabbi been able to win him over. Becker had felt guilty about his original opposition and became not only respectful but at times almost obsequious. Now he had no stauncher champion than Becker, but he never felt quite at ease with him.

  Morton Schwarz, the third president and Gorfinkle’s predecessor, had no such attitude toward the rabbi. He was friendly and sometimes even unbent enough to josh him about his little shortcomings, such as his chronic tardiness and his tendency to forget appointments that he didn’t care to keep in the first place. But in Schwarz’s mind, at least, this was strictly a oneway street, and when the rabbi occasionally answered in kind, he was sure he was considered presumptuous. However, he had grown in the years that he had been at Barnard’s Crossing, and he had found the president’s attitude amusing rather than annoying. The fact that he had been given a five-year contract may have had something to do with it.

  Ben Gorfinkle was something else again. He knew something of his capacity from having sat on the board with him for several years, but he had had little chance to work with him. What few dealings they had had to date had been quite neutral, neither friendly nor hostile.

  Start by putting him at ease. Establish a friendly atmosphere.

  Gorfinkle led the way into the living room, and when they were both seated, he said, “You quite comfortable there, Rabbi? Would you prefer this chair?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  Encourage discussion, but keep him on the defensive.

  He smiled benignly. “I wish you’d tell me, Rabbi, what your idea is of the purpose and function of a temple and what you consider the rabbi’s responsibility to the institution.”

  The rabbi recognized the gambit and declined it. He smiled. “I’ve spent the last half dozen years doing just that. Surely you didn’t call me–so urgently and under pressure of a pending engagement–to hear me synopsize what I’ve been saying ever since I came here. I’m sure you have something to say to me.”

  Gorfinkle nodded in appreciation. He was silent for a minute and then he said, “You know, Rabbi, I don’t think you understand what the temple is all about. I’m not sure that any rabbi ever does. They’re too much involved in it; they have a professional interest.”

  “Indeed! Perhaps you can explain it to me.”

  In your part of the discussion, appear frank and open, Let him feel that you are not trying to conceal anything.

  Gorfinkle disregarded the rabbi’s irony. “You think of a temple as being started by a group of religious men, which once underway, draws other religious-minded people.” He shook his head. “Maybe there’s one man who is really religious, like perhaps Wasserman, but the rest are interested in it merely as an organization. And once the organization is successful–and it takes a lot of work-then the original group becomes a drag on the organization, and a different type of person has to take over. Sometimes originators get so puffed up with their success that there’s no living with them. They act as though they own the place because they started it. It rubs the new people the wrong way. That’s what happened here, and in a sense, that’s how I happen to be president. But it goes even deeper than that: To start an enterprise calls for a different set of talents than those you need to keep it going. They’re two kinds of people.”

  “They’re both Jews,” the rabbi observed.

  “That’s only incidental, Rabbi.”

  “Incidental? In a synagogue?”

  Gorfinkle nodded. “That’s right. You’re aware that there are two factions in the temple, mine and the one led by Meyer Paff. Now Paff, for all his Orthodoxy, isn’t terribly concerned about Judaism or religion in general. All these people who are involved with the temple, men and women both, do you think it’s because they’re religious? Or that religion is important to them?” He shook his head in violent negation. “No, Rabbi. Do you know what they’re interested in? They’re interested in the temple as an organization.

  “Every man wants to be something, to be somebody. He wants a sense of achievement, of accomplishment. He’s gone to school, and he’s gone to college, and he dreamed of being somebody, of being important. Then he got himself a job or established a small business of some kind and thought at last he was on the road. And now at the age of thirty-five he realizes that he’s not going to become the President of the United States or lead an army; he’s not going to win a Nobel Prize; his wife is not a movie actress, and his children are not geniuses. He begins to realize that the business of getting up in the morning and going to work and coming home to go to sleep in order to get up in the morning to go to work-that is not going to change in any dramatic fashion. His whole life is going to be pretty much like that until he dies. And when he dies, his family will remember him, and that’s all.

  “That’s a hard thing to swallow in a society like ours, where everybody starts out with the assumption that he can be President of the United States or at least a millionare. So these people throw themselves into organization work so they can be somebody. It used to be lodges where they could wear a fancy uniform and have a fancy title. Well, lodges are a little out of fashion these days, and in a Yankee town like Barnard’s Crossing it’s not easy for newcomers, Jew or Gentile but especially Jewish newcomers, to have very much to do with the politics of the town. But here the temple is an organization that is theirs. They can do something and be somebody. There’s the temple and the Brotherhood, and for the women there is the Sisterhood and Hadassah. All they have to do is do a little work, and sooner or later they become a somebody. They become chairman of a committee, or they become an officer. They get their names in the papers. And if you don’t think that’s important, you talk to some woman who folded napkins, say, for the Hadassah luncheon and didn’t get her name mentioned along with the rest of the committee that was involved in setting it up.

  “But to get back to Paff. All the time he was running things he was important. Now that he isn’t running things, he’s not important, and it irks him.”

  “If it were only that,” said the rabbi mildly, “would he have contributed such large sums and done so much work and given so much time?”

  Gorfinkle shrugged his shoulders. “What is a large sum to you, Rabbi, is not a large sum to Meyer Paff. You grow up to a certain standard of living. When you come into a lot of money, do you think you can change that standard very radically? You buy a bigger car, you buy an extra suit or two, and you pay a little more money for it; you have a few extra pairs of shoes, and you pay a little more money for them. It’s still nothing. There’s this vast sum of money coming in, and you’re nowhere near being able to spend it. So what do you do with it? You use it for advertising. You move out of your thirty-thousand-dollar house into a hundred-thousand-dollar mansion. You buy paintings; you get an interior decorator. Why? Because you suddenly developed artisitic sensibilities? No. You’re successful, but you don’t feel any different. So you do the things that prove to other people that you’re successful. Their envy or respect make you feel like
somebody. Some go in for display, and some let themselves be seen with expensive-looking women. Others, like Paff, give their money to various worthwhile institutions.”

  “And you?” asked the rabbi.

  If challenged, don’t hesitate to admit your own shortcomings. It makes for a better atmosphere.

  Gorfinkle shrugged. “I’ll admit it. I’m no different.” He grinned. “You might even say I’m a classic example, I’m an electronics engineer. When I got through at MIT, the field was comparatively new at the time. I graduated high in my class, and I figured I’d be heading up a big electronics lab by the time I was thirty. But there was the war, for one thing, and that delayed me. Then when I did get started, I found that the promotions didn’t always go to the most able man–not in big corporate industry, anyway. Being a Jew didn’t help either. And then the Ph.D.’s began to appear on the scene–overeducated nincompoops. That didn’t help the picture. So what do you do? If you’re a married man with a child, you can’t go back to school. You shift to another job that looks as though it might lead somewhere. And it doesn’t, of course. You try again, and it doesn’t pan out either. I even switched to a small outfit where there was talk about stock options–talk–but there would be a chance to grow with the company, and the company looked as though it might grow. I even took a small cut in salary, because I figured this was my last chance. In this business, you’ve got to make it when you’re still in your thirties, or you don’t make it at all.

  “For a while it looked good. And then we sold out to a big outfit, one of the giants, and I was working for a big corporation again. So now, when I’m forty-five, I’m a section head, which means I’m middle management. And that’s what I’ll probably be until I retire. I admit that when I first threw myself into temple politics, it was because I felt I could do a better job. I still think that’s part of it. But I don’t kid myself. I know that a good part of it is just to be somebody, to have an influence on the people around me.”