by Rhoda Lerman
9
THE THREE JAUNDICED PALMS GLOWED IN THE DARK. RED AND green Christmas lights outlined the long building. Behind the Arizona rose a new cluster of snowy white tents. The flagpole clinked with greater melancholy than the first time Yussel had heard it, perhaps because under it lay a rectangle of grave marked by flowerpots and large stones painted white. Everything else was the same: brutal, isolated, bleak. Yussel switched his headlights off, then the engine.
“Yussele, your grandfather told me once about a ladder to Heaven by a little railway station in a barren field in old Russia where crowds of Jews climbed up to a fiery cloud. I think possibly it looked like this place.”
He tapped his fingers on the dashboard and tried to calm his chest. A cold wind blew off the mountains behind the Arizona. On his screen, Yussel saw blizzards, a tractor in a ditch, a car stuck in the mountains. His father watched also. They saw a stray mountain lion, sixteen phone poles knocked over by a chinook wind, their wires great lacy scallops along a field of snow, the skies howling white. “It snows up here, Totte. It’s seven thousand feet high. Over there the mountains are twelve, fourteen thousand feet high. Men die on them.”
“You’re the ladder, Yussel. Feet on the ground, head brushing Heaven. You lift yourself too high, you let go of the world, you lose your people. A zaddik holds fast to the lower and the higher, to Heaven and to earth, lets the mercy come down, lets the souls go up.”
Yussel heard his own voice crack. “Totte, I’m no zaddik.”
A light inside the Arizona turned on. An old coconut face hung among the three palm trees: Grisha, returned from the Lubavitchers, yelling, “Someone’s here! Someone’s here!”
“Totte.” Yussel shook his head. “I can’t do this.” He was going to cry.
His father put his hand on Yussel’s arm. His touch was gentle. “These are sweet good people, my shmegeggies. Stupid, self-involved, stubborn. But decent. Torah Jews. Together me and my congregation learned by the Torah, died by it, grew by it, came from death to life by it, had such satisfaction. Believe me, Yussele, such satisfaction. I’d go back in a minute.”
“They killed you.”
“There are worse ways to die.” His father sat up, shook a finger, took a little notebook from his bathrobe pocket, opened it to a scribbled list with lots of x’s, exclamation points, underlines, question marks. Yussel’s name had big question marks around it. “Listen. Babe’s here because your mother wanted her to be. And Bingo. Who drove the cab? Who put the buzzer in his wife’s hand and scared her to death? Make sure he keeps up his payments. She’s a boiled potato in a nursing home. Bingo sleeps. He wakes up if you mention sex. Grisha’s here because this is where he dreams. Natalie because she hasn’t finished fighting with me yet. She’s also waiting for the Messiah. Except she thinks she’s going to be His mother. The others—little families, seekers, people who need, people who have a little spark in them for you to light. Listen, Yussele, you watch out for Babe. Babe’s got so much money if you counted it by thousand-dollar-bills for a year, you wouldn’t be finished. But if you take a penny from her, you’re dead in the water and she’s running the boat. Don’t take a red cent from her. And no advice from Grisha. He’s sore because he isn’t the Rabbi, that he has to take from a kid, so he’ll sabotage you the first chance he gets.”
“Totte,” Yussel’s voice cracked. “What are you doing to me?”
“Your mother would say it’s terrible what I’m doing.” His father pushed his hat back on his forehead, interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you should forget the dynasty. Drive away now. Get your Shoshanna, pack her up, go home, be a wealthy Jew. A zei gezunt. Go, live civilized. You’re right, Yussele. How can I do this to my only son?”
As if he were slitting both their throats, his father drew two heavy lines through Yussel’s name, climbed out of the car, doorknobs gleaming gold in the blue-dark like cat’s-eyes. His father yawned, belched, stretched, swung his doors back and forth as if he were exercising them, folded his doors around him from the cold, called from inside them, “Look, my grave,” and then stood long, tall, dark, sadness cut in every line. Yussel had the remarkable thought that his father was peeing on his own grave. “On the other hand, as Jacob wrestled through the night with the angel, as you’ll wrestle with Chaim, my shmegeggies need to wrestle with you, to change themselves, so they can see the dawn. You’re their angel. So, come, Yussele, come.”
“I think it’s Yussel!” It was Grisha yelling. “Yussel, is that you?” More shapes came out and stood in front of the building.
“Yussel?” Grisha called into the dark again. “That you?”
“Luftmensch! Grisha! Turn off the inside lights so we can see who it is.” It had to be Babe.
Yussel stayed in the car.
“So then, go home, mein kindt. Save yourself, Yussele, while you can. I deserve what’s coming to me.”
A tight knot of people were moving out by inches toward them, hands shielding their eyes from the glare of the mercury lights.
“Who’s there? Who are you? What do you want?”
When Yussel didn’t answer, they backed away. Yussel started up the car, pulled out, hit the highway, turned on his headlights, rammed his foot to the floor. Sand and dust rose behind him. Just like Moses in the desert: a cloud by day and by night a pillar of fire. He’d give them Chaim’s phone number in Moffat, give Chaim Indian Joe’s deed, go home, put his client list together again, buy another SL, send out letters, get his territory back, buy two cars for his Shoshanna.
He tore across the desert, snaked around the bottom of a mountain, then into a deep canyon. His father deserved what was coming to him, the way he sacrificed his family. So his life was over, so what. So he was getting his share of punishment in the World to Come. It wasn’t Yussel’s problem. He had his own life to lead. Better he should handle his finances, make sure his wife and kids have in abundance instead of sacrificing them for the lost souls at the Arizona. All those poor shmendricks waiting for him in the desert. What would they do out there without him? “Look,” he said to his father who might or might not have been listening. “If I stayed, I’d be a worse disappointment.”
His father said, “What will become of them? What will become of you?” He also meant what will become of me but was smart enough not to say it.
At the Riverside Cafe, which was on the other side of the mountain, Yussel bought two cartons of Chesterfields, two half-pound bags of Reese’s Pieces, listened to the water rushing below the parking lot, ate his candy, smoked a cigarette. It was a big empty wide-open night. There was plenty of water on the other side of the mountain. Why hadn’t his father found a piece of real estate with water? His heart was running ahead of him like a diesel engine, pulling him along back over the mountain, betraying him. He lit up two cigarettes and put both of them in his mouth. His father coughed from the backseat. Yussel started up the mountain.
His father’s doors made a tent. Smoke rose from his keyholes. “You nervous, Yussele?”
“Why should I be nervous? They’re your congregation, not mine.”
“My first day, my first congregation, I didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to do with my hands, my face. My face seemed so big, like it was going to blow up and show everybody what was going on inside. Please God you should do better than me.”
“So I can die younger?”
Yussel’s father unfolded his doors, leaned over the front seat, clutched Yussel’s shoulders. The road curved, abysses hung right and left. Yussel couldn’t see through his own cigarette smoke.
“Grisha’s very depressed. I’m really worried about him. The little couple from Santa Fe, she needs to get pregnant. The butcher Slotnik, his son’s on coke. Slotnik won’t give you any trouble. He studies all day. Natalie. Oy, Natalie. A good man would help. Also Ernie’s taking blood pressure pills—too many. I think maybe he could be violent. And there’s a woman from Denver who …”
“Okay
, okay.” Yussel pulled directly under the mercury light and tooted the horn. Like a moth, Grisha fluttered in circles under the light. “He’s here. Yussel’s here!”
Suddenly his father grabbed him by the collar, talked very fast, hard-sell fast. “Look, Yussele, before you go in. I have to tell you something. This is more serious than you think. Yussele, I don’t get into Heaven unless you do good in there. I don’t get into Heaven, Yussel. I stay outside the Gates forever.” His father’s voice broke. “It’s all riding on you. I couldn’t tell you. It’s … it’s a terrible thing. But, Yussel, forever. I’m with murderers, thieves. A Fetner. I’m the only one in my whole Yeshiva class, Yussele. The rest of them already entered the Gates. You understand?”
“I understand. You already told me. However, even I know they don’t sentence you to Hell over a kitchen door.”
“Fetners they do. Other men they’d forgive.” His father gripped his arm. “Would I kid you about this? They gave me my judgment and said my son could help me out of it. The only way I could get out of my judgment is if my son helps me. I said ‘Look, my son doesn’t know enough. I would have to teach him.’ They said, ‘Try dreams.’ But, Yussele, your poor soul drowns in the filth of your dreams. Your Neshama, your soul, she can’t hear me. So I went back and told them, ‘Look, I can’t do it unless I go back and be with him for real.’ So, Yussele … what can I say? Be nice. You hear me? Be nice. Because if you don’t make it here, I stay there forever.”
“I thought you were just sort of waiting around to get clearance after the obligatory year.”
“I’m already sentenced. I’m not waiting at the Gates, Yussele. I’m not near the Gates. You’re my only chance.”
“I thought you wait in line to change decrees that HaShem has made. I thought you were at least nearby Him.”
“On Shabbas when they let us out I go ask for your family they should be healthy and live long lives and for my congregation. Someone’s sick, someone’s going to be hurt, go bankrupt, the decree is written. I go fight the decree for them. We all do. Listen, Yussele, if you don’t make it here, I stay there forever.”
Yussel removed his father’s hands from his shoulders. “Just what do you mean by ‘make it here?”
“Do good.”
“Go on.”
“Be a great leader. Light sparks.”
“Go on.”
His father looked at the palms of his hands. “Become a zaddik.”
“That’s what you promised them?”
“What else could I offer?”
“My life. You promised them my life.” Yussel turned away from him. “So you could get into Heaven, you promised them my life.”
“Yussele, please, try to understand. So I can get out of Hell.”
“I understand. You haven’t changed a bit. I understand completely.”
10
THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE WORLD WHO WAS MORE BITTER THAN Yussel’s mother, was Yussel’s mother’s best friend, Babe. Babe was barren. She said she wasn’t; she said her husband was, you could tell from his poetry. Babe treated her bad luck like the family jewels. Yussel used to try to imagine Babe when she’d been a girl like his sister Bloomke. Tall, heavy, square-jawed, dark, dog-eyed, sharp-tongued, loving—the kind of woman who slits your throat with one hand and feeds you chocolate pudding with the other. She’d sit in the kitchen and carry on about her husband, his poetry, and Yussel’s father, who referred to her as Mrs. Mouth behind her back, would ask nobody in particular, “You know why Jewish men die early? To get away from their wives.” Babe didn’t have a sense of humor. She also carried a sharp-edged H.O. gauge miniature train track in her apron pocket.
His mother called her a balabusteh, a real power and doer around the house. His father called her a ball-buster. She used to beat Yussel with the H.O. track. Once she chased him up the street, screaming at him for touching her husband’s poetry notebooks, beating him on the shoulders in front of everyone in the neighborhood. When his mother went east to visit her mother, Yussel went to Babe’s house. For five bucks a week she also gave him piano lessons. He didn’t practice. He argued that for every half-hour he practiced on the piano, his IQ dropped ten points. She said if she didn’t know him better she’d have thought he practiced all the time. Then she’d flatten his knuckles on the keyboard with the H.O. track.
Babe’s father was a refugee rabbi who was deaf. When he met Babe’s husband-to-be, a poet who was a mumbler, the Rabbi asked, “So, what do you do you should marry my beautiful Sonya?”
“Poetry,” the poet mumbled.
“Tackeh. The chicken business is a good business. My Sonya will never be without.”
Babe always said she should have said something then and there, but what difference would it have made? It began the big lie of their lives: the poultry farm they didn’t have. Even though they were always up to their necks in hock, like Rothschilds they carried dozens of freshkilled kosher chickens to her father’s house for Shabbas and told him the farm was too far for him to drive to, one excuse after another. Babe’s father gave chickens to everyone, a big mitzvah. Sometimes Babe and her husband ate cornflakes for supper while her father was giving chickens for charity.
Babe’s poet never worked a day with his hands. He wrote his poetry in Yiddish and English, together, filled his notebooks with poems about the Dallas Cowgirls, Dunlop tires, raccoons, frankfurters, garbage cans, God. Once he spent a week and a half looking for a word in Yiddish that rhymed with Dunlop. He never found it.
Finally her father, the Alte Reb, retired, moved to Israel, bought a little flat in Safat. A year later he called, said he was coming back because he wanted to bless the farm before he died.
Babe sold a menorah and candlesticks from her mother’s side, a tea set from her father’s side. She bought two hundred chickens, a little land, a little fencing, went, in four days, into the poultry business for real. After her father went back to Israel, she decided poultry wasn’t such a bad idea after all. She liked land. Land, unlike a husband, you tell it what to do, it does.
Babe worked hard, registered Conservative, stuck a bumper sticker on her Ford pickup: KILL A COMMIE FOR YOUR MOMMY. Nearby farmers gave her advice, feed, seed, once a loan. Soon she started to sell little pieces of farmland for this farmer, for that farmer, sold larger pieces of land. And then one day, her husband the poet rhymed Dallas with tallis and thought the world had come to an end. Babe laughed in his face. He left immediately to live with a woman artist— from where, from what, how did he know her, what would he live on?—in an adobe shack on Indian land outside Los Alamos, because he couldn’t write his poetry with all the noise from the chickens.
Babe was head of the Women’s Holy Burial Society. She prepared bodies. She used to whisper to each dead lady, “See? I told you so.” She came to Thursday night classes only to ask the Rabbi questions about suffering. Yussel, still on the edge, a kid, sixteen, seventeen, would sit in the kitchen, preparing kugel for Shabbas, peeling potatoes, grinding potatoes, breaking eggs, mixing eggs, potatoes, listening. It was all slippery. The lessons, the potato peels on the floor, the eggs. Each week, with his chin, his father would motion from the dining room for Yussel to join. Yussel wouldn’t come sit with the shmegeggies. He wanted, he said, to learn separately.
“Rabbi, why do I suffer? What have I done I should suffer like this?”
“Babe,” the Rabbi would answer her. “What can I tell you about suffering you don’t already know?”
“What am I waiting for? Why isn’t HaShem coming to me?”
“Because you haven’t trusted Him.”
Everyone would nod. Babe hadn’t trusted. They went through this a dozen times a year with Babe.
“How do you know?”
“Number one, I know. Number two, if you trusted, HaShem would have provided.”
Yussel wanted, even then, to shove a potato down his father’s throat. Greek logic turned inside out by the Jews. Jewish thought turned inside out by Greek logic.
&
nbsp; Babe couldn’t be fooled. “Okay, I trust. He provided. He provided a nebbisheh poet, a life that’s a lie, a barren man, mishugge chickens who peck each other’s eyes out.” She held up scarred hands. “Bloody fingers from making them masks. So, I trust. You know what I trust? I trust nothing will change. That’s what I trust.”
No one could look at the other. Yussel turned his back to the dining room, the class, his father. Babe had spoken the truth.
Then babe sold a racetrack near Phoenix. No one understood how. What would she do now without her bad luck? The day they heard about Babe’s racetrack, Yussel had come home from Yeshiva. Everyone was sitting around the kitchen table, heads hanging between their shoulders, his father’s lower than the others. Two brown wigs curled up in small boxes, like cats, were on the kitchen table. Yussel thought Babe had dropped dead. He exulted. “What happened to Babe?”
“She got a new wig,” his sister Bloomke answered sourly.
That morning Babe had flown in a snowstorm to New York in someone’s Lear jet to collect $800,000 in commissions and accept a partnership in an Orthodox real estate firm in TriBeCa. Yussel’s father had driven her in the Shanda to a private airport. She was going to be picked up in New York by a limousine. Just before she left, Babe gave the Rabbi her polyester wigs to give to his wife. Babe, Yussel’s mother told them, bought a blond wig of human hair that dropped straight to the shoulder and came, for $400, all the way from Paris. Also an entire new wardrobe and a sable jacket, used but sable, which Yussel had always thought was a kind of whitefish you eat at Bar Mitzvahs. And Babe left. “Just like that,” his mother snapped her fingers, threw the wigs into the garbage can. “Babe was never really my friend, anyway,” his mother mumbled, which wasn’t true at all.
From the kitchen table, his father flung a fist at the ceiling. “You’re all going to kill me. All of you.” When the Rabbi quieted down, Bloomke, who was by then engaged to a rabbinical student and knew she’d be hungry the rest of her life, retrieved Babe’s wigs from the garbage can and took them up to her room.