Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  OK, services (intellectual-spiritual tortures) over, time for a little talk-time, snack-time, ONEG, the joy of Sabbath, brownies and cookies and you name it, getting in line, hugging some old pals, Corngold filling his plate with two oatmeal and raisin cookies, some pieces of pear dried-out, a brownie (in spite of it being 9:20 PM and chocolate being filled with caffeine), then a little water and over to his usual table off in the corner, Warren Daper (92 and still zipping)(unzipping) and his wife, Clotilde (90 and the incarnation of shakiness, a hilltop in multi-directioned winds), bushy-white-bearded Dave from South Carolina (a “convert,” he wasn’t sure and didn’t want to push the topic, what was the difference?),his wife and wife’s sister, Dumbo Wolf (retired English professor) and his Indonesian wife, Gema, both of them “converts,” although Dumbo’s grandmother had been Jewish (even though he had been raised a Catholic) so he was , strictly speaking, already a Jew, and there was Fluffy Brownstone, eighty-five and shaky but still the greatest investment genius he’d ever met, probably the richest woman (person) in the state of Massachusetts, or in all of New England...

  “Shabbat Shalom! How you guys and gals doing?”

  “Are you trying to take over the synagogue?” laughed Warren, “You better watch out, some of these feminists can get really andro-killerish!”

  “Fair questions/comments,” said Fluffy, beyond feminism or masculinism or any other “isms” except big-bucks-isms, “you’ve always got to question the questions and face the answers, that’s what it’s ALL about, I re-think the whole stock-profit thing every day, most of the no-sleep night, in spite of all the herbs I take, Passion Flower...although I haven’t felt any of that kind of passion for the last thirty years.”

  “Just bank-passion,” smiles Dumbo.

  “I hear the most stable economy in the world today is Slovakia!” adds Dumbo’s wife, Gema, a urologist with a degree from the Boston University School of Medicine, hardly an accent any more, Dumbo had met her when he was teaching (English) in Karachi.

  “Why? Such a monkey-thumb of a country?” asks Fluffy a little shakily.

  “They manufacture everything they use, no international nothing, totally self-contained....Banska Bystrica towers, Kosice ethnicities, Bardejov cathedrals...it’s time-travel back into sanity....,” tears in Gema’s eyes, a moment of silence while everyone sympathizes/identifies with her, all of them full of huge ethnic European, Middle Eastern, Israeli smudges of memory, except for the converts....and even they could never depart entirely from their old(est) country smudges of the past.

  Corngold taking advantage of the pause to step in.

  “My interruption of the service....I feel ‘ashamed,’ or if not ‘ashamed,’ let’s say ‘repentant,’ I’d like to apologize to the Rabbi...,” looking all around in the lounge for her, but she wasn’t there, neither was the Cantor, and they usually hung around at least for a while (there was a Saturday morning service after all) and played chatty-watty with everyone, never really quite ‘ them there,’ but professionally effective.

  “So try her office, that’s where she probably is,” suggested Warren Daper with his usual pontifical/Adonai-ish finality, “we’ll save a few pickled beets for you....”

  “Pickled YOU!” laughed his wife, everyone always suprised at how well her brain worked in her decrepit, decomposing body.

  Corngold up, a quick smirk.

  “Molto Grazie!”

  “De Neante,” answered Gema, always playing total Euro-omniscience, in spite of her obsessive self-contained Slovakian nationalism.

  And off he went, smiles and hugs as he went, all the old gang, missing Steve, who had died (ruptured ventricular aneurysm) the week before, but everyone else there, all the old most unmistakable Jewish faces, the genetic survivors of thousands and thousands of years of genetic one-way-streetness...down the hall into the long, dark hall that led to the Rabbi’s office.

  She was there alright, the door open, the light on. Talking with rabid certitude, words engraved on the hallway walls. He stopped. Reluctant to interrupt her, at the same time gravely seriously. Engrave, grave, Rest not in Peace but Turbulence.

  “I mean how can there be a God at all? Everything has to begin...n’est pas..and how can God just begin, from Nothing to Everything, and then create eighty billion galaxies, and what can they be contained in?”

  He can see the Cantor’s beautiful legs, seated in a chair in front of the Rabbi’s desk. Legs that looked like twenty-three, a twenty-three year old basketball player, instead of...how the hell old was she anyhow.

  “What about the seeds in Papayas?” asked the Cantor, “You cut open a papaya and it’s full of a hundred seeds for procreation, continuing the species, if there wasn’t any magic design in the universe, OK, but design equals designer. What about sperms and eggs and fallopian tubes and uteri, that’s the plural, isn’t it, ‘uterus,’ ‘uteri...’?”

  “Whatever,” the Rabbi obviously turned off by any incursions into even remotely-related intercourse implications.....

  “Well...maybe I should go now,” the Cantor obviously turned off by the Rabbi’s concrete sidewalks too suddenly hardening, “I have to drive back to Medford and then be back here in the morning....”

  The two of them flash-embracing, a moment of incandescence, and then the Alaska coastline again.

  “You really ought to get a place in the Boston-Cambridge area, lots of good deals these days now that we’re all on the edge of Pharonicuptcy...”

  “Pharonwhat...?”

  “You know, the early Muslims taking over Egypt...minerating all over the Cairo landscape....so Moses was forever talking to God, so the Jews were held captive in Egypt and God killed off the firstborns and the Pharoah let them go....Mount Sinai, the last time I was there,it couldn’t have been less deified....,” a silence, another coldish, quick embrace and the Cantor started for the door,one last little joke-smile, Hebrew mixed in with Arabic “Shalom...Salaam...Shalom...”

  The Rabbi trying to smile, not making it, one last wave and suddenly Corngold was fifteen again, no knee- or back-pain, out down the corridor and out the doorway, back to the Oneg Goodtime Palace, only all his buddies were gone, just his pal Dumbo and Dumbo’s wife waiting for him, a few oldsters still left at other tables, you’d think they’d have enough social-life in their elderly care caves, wouldn’t you?

  “So how did it go?” asked Gema, as always-always-always the soul of concentrated interest.

  “Go....that’s the word....” More waves, “Zayt gesund...,” giving both Dumbo and Gema a hug, then out into the cooling-off parking-lot night, negatively anticipating the big not cool-down but cold-down in another week or so, a month.... his grandparents’ Yiddish never quite leaving him, the Yiddish and all the rest, the beards and shawls and food, goodnight kisses, parks, swings, saxophones (his uncle Jake)....a million years of cultural-genetic continuity, regardless Who was Up There or Down There or Anywhere Else.

  WAS

  Out with her father on one of his obsessive-fun drives out into the summer-end west-Massachusetts landscape where he was forever pointing out, “Look at that French Chateaux-ish house on the hill over there...and the landscaping,the gazebo, the winding road, all the tiger lilies...,” or through a houseless section, just huge luxurious trees bending over the road from both side, “It’s so great that they left so much land alone, alone, alone...the cranes and deer and black beers...and don’t you love queen anne’s lace?,” when all she wanted to talk about was her mother, the two of them divorced for thirty years now and him still supporting her, well...not “him” exactly, more his M.D. (pathologist) wife and all the cash that flowed in across her every month, but still....she waited until he stopped a moment and they were passing through endless acres of just-harvested wheat, hills and hills and hills of golden stalks still there after the harvest, and they’d always leave a touch of a forest surrounding the fields, so there were the dark,luxurious green bundles at the ends of the flowing gold.....A moment of silence while
he Moneted it into ecstasy.

  “I don’t know why she just doesn’t get a job tutoring foreign students in English. Something like that. She has a Ph.D. in English after all, and even taught for a while until she went into Microbiology and never finished that Ph.D., met Lucille and ran off with her to Morocco for three years until they broke up and you decided to support her....”

  “The mother of three of my children. What was I supposed to do,let her just street-starve or something? And I still always loved her. She was always close, close, close....and, if I may say so, a real flesh-time sky rocket, twice, sometimes three times a day....”

  Leah genuinely irritated.

  “It’s not that I’m prudish or anything, but....”

  “Sorry, I guess you’re still a Catharist at heart....”

  Thinking she wouldn’t pick up on the reference, but....

  “The Cathars, an early bunch of heretics in France, mostly destroyed by the Inquisition...they’d cut them up in pieces and throw the pieces off the Massif Central. Some escaped to Ireland and became the basis of the Black Irish, anti-flesh, anti-everything-but-the-Next-Life.....”

  Smiling that she was able to pick up so thoroughly on his library cubicle references.

  “Yes, I’m impressed....,” passing vast fields of corn now, stretching all the way to the forested horizons, “look at that corn, you can see the cobs and their fuzzy little kid-hair. All this talk about the poverty of small-town Massachusetts, there’s enough land to put Israel in, enough land to feed the whole world....”

  “I can’t see the Israelis here.”

  “All that sacredness of God-given sacred places.....”

  “That’s the way it went/goes...’went’ and ‘goes’ inextricably bound together....”

  Coming to a dirt road now.

  “Look at that sign. Lost Road. That’d be a great address to have, n’est pas? Let’s give it a try!”

  “You really love the out-of-the-way, don’t you?”

  “Trips into history. Imagine how it was living out here when people first settled the area, a hundred and fifty plus years ago, no paved roads, horses and carriages, no phones, no electricity at all, TV, cell-anythings, no piped-in water, gas heating, logs and fireplaces....,” he went on nostalgically as if he were talking about heaven.

  “Sounds pretty hellish to me!” Smiling, but under the smile an intellectual toughness that he both hated and was proud of. “I mean so Mom could have gotten the Ph.D.’s and ignored them, no research, no writing, no-nothing, but there’s all kinds of jobs out there, she could have worked at Penny’s or Marshall Fields or been a secretary, a court-clerk, anything but just be a permanent drop-out....there’s a stream-river inside all of us that we should pay attention to and let carry us to where we ought to be going...anything but just NOTHING.....”

  Leah a lawyer herself. In Boston no less. Married to a minor-court judge. Originally from Paris. Which a lot of people considered a “conflict of interests,” not that there was anything ever done about it. They were what they were. Harvard, Tufts....three kiddies...home with grandma now as they took their ride back into history.

  “Look at that mansion!,” he awed, passing a huge almost Gothic-looking stone mansion, “new...can’t be more than five years old. Amazing how people get out here in the middle of nowhere and love it....well-water, electricity...and, of course, the internet, all the TV you can imagine, what else do you need these days. But imagine back a hundred and fifty pre-electricity years....”

  Always marveling at how the big-big bucks would choose to come into Nowhere-Everywhere and step back in time and become naturalistic primitives. He’d have five dogs, of course, and all sorts of alarm systems, anyone tries to mess with me and gets turned into a mess...

  “I think Mom has a serious concentration problem, really pathological...” Leah continuing, like she was in a windowless talk-room/-office somewhere talking to her psychologist, “no immersion what-ever in real-time and real-place, as if money was just going to fall out of the sky. After the divorce she could have found another guy, another gal, another something, some togetherness instead of your supporting her in a house all by herself...except for her half-dead dogs....”

  Not hearing her any more, pantheistically floating into the forests they were passing through now, mile after mile of houselessness, you could put whole cities out here...tear down the forests and turn them into more farmland, Massachusetts could support the whole planet, if only they wouldn’t use millions of gallons of petroleum every hour, reducing the weight of the planet so its whole gravitational balance with the sun and other planets would be destroyed and it would...what?, fly out away from the sun, or right into the sun itself. Edge of magic bears and cranes and wolves, coyotes...anything could live out here, couldn’t it? Almost like a manless planet, back into Devonian times, he’d love to just live out here himself, not alone, but with Sarah-Thai-Wife or with Leah’s Mom thrown in too, menage a trois.....just rain, sun, leaves down, leaves back, snow, les animaux....

  The forest density decreasing, and then hills, and on top of one of the hills, slowing down.

  “What is that I’m seeing?” breaking into Leah’s unlistenable-to “What she needs is an immersion in psycho-straightening-out sanity-pills...or to be born again, get on track this time instead of being allowed to spend a childhood wandering on the beaches of no-direction, non-sense....,” slowing down, pulling over the barely-pull-over-able side of the road, a house behind a flurry of trees, old, old, old, something out of 1850, 1860....made out of concrete blocks that as always stood up against the ravages of the years, but the roof a bit wasted, sagging, still fix-up-able, though.

  “Just an old busted-up house!” Leah as always sword-sharp sarcastic when it came to visions, oddities, museumish remains. Pulling up ahead to the old, old entrance-road that led up to the house, starting to pull in. “Come on, this could be dangerous....”

  Shusshing her softly, still one of his favorite daughters for all of her Knights Templar roughness, her sitting back, simply “enduring,’ waiting things out, the incarnation of testy patience. Up to the top of the hill, even more impressive the closer you got, impressive, but at the same time depressing to see such a gem discarded, like dinosaur bones that you look at and suddenly the dinosaur itself is there....

  Stopping. Getting out. No asking permission.

  Walking up the solid concrete block front steps to the concrete block front porch, Leah staying in the car. OK. So be it!

  Looking in the windows that somehow were still intact, unbroken....furniture inside......trying the front door...locked...but fragile enough that a little light kick opened it.

  “You’re gonna get your ass in trouble, Dad!”

  Door open now, the lawyer-judge in her taking over.

  “It could be another planet, that’s how much interference you can expect!,” him going in, her getting out of the car and following him, when she got out the censorious anger slowly evaporating as he saw her get caught up in the historical magic of the place itself, following him as he walked into the living room, all this old Victorian furniture, chairs, sofas,and family pictures on the walls.

  “I can’t imagine how this even ‘happened,’ “ her lawyerliness sticking its nose into the spellbinding historicity of the moment, “how the state lets it happen....I suppose way out here in the middle of nowhere....”

  “The middle of everywhere,” you mean.

  Stinky. A little. But not what you’d expect.

  A picture over the fireplace, a woman alone in a long dress, and a wide-brimmed, peaked hat. Black. Everything black.

  “Why all in black?” asks Leah.

  “She’s pretty old there....upper seventies...maybe it’s a funeral outfit. Husband’s death?,” looking around, the old kitchen and dining room, the dining room table with the two right-side legs twisted off, the table at a forty-five degree angle. Old oak, “I can just imagine her cooking the meals, some nice chicken and cabbage, peas,
beans.... maybe a little sauerkraut...and apple pie for desert. Always coffee, even at night. Always beer. Then her and her daughters washing the dishes...winter fireplace, maybe a little reading, lots of talk, in the summer out for a walk on the hills, making and unmaking the beds, ‘I just changed the sheets,’ and him answering with a smile, ‘About time. How about a little....?,’ always time for a little...until it was time for him to leave for the heavens, ad the kids got married, into cities, into wars, maybe no one left to take care of the property, that’s why it ended up totally deserted, and the state doesn’t have time for trivia....”

  “But how come no one ransacked it, took all the pictures, the furniture? I can almost hear her talking, ‘It’s such a beautiful day, let’s go down to the lake ’or ‘Mary Lou, re-comb that hair. It’s church-time, not seduction-time....’ “

  “Not ‘seduction’, not with her kids....”

  “Always a sense of humor. And she’d be reading Dickens wouldn’t she...”

  “Dinner-time: ‘Bless Us, Oh Lord, and these gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.’ I wonder how far the closest church is. Carriage-wheels on dusty or snowy roads...”

  “A lot of knitting, an old foot-peddle-driven sewing machine. And the kids in bed, pneumonia, T.B., those were the La Boheme days....”

  Looking around at the other pictures. One with five kids and the old lady forty years earlier with her cowboy hatted husband, another with husband and wife standing behind two seated ancient women and one ancient (seated) man.

  “Their parents.”

  “Can’t you just imagine Mom here....’Leah, lace up those boots properly, we had two feet of snow last night,’ or ‘Finish up that lamb, there’s no place for waste in this house,’ or at night ‘Sleep well, do you think you have enough blankets? Let me put this quilt on the chair next to your bed...just in case...I’ll put two more logs on the fire...just in case...,’ and when I bring my first spouse-to-be home, afterward ‘Well, I like him too, but the family’s a little, how shall I put it, ‘lost,’ fine someone in our congregation....’ What congregation was it, United Methodist, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Catholic? I’d like to go around this area and check the places out..a little research....”