The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Ah. So …” The Rebbe nodded and pursed his lips.

  It was as if I had been able to step into a story I had heard my parents relating about the Orthodox Jewish world into which they had been born. But sometimes at night I awoke and recent memory flooded in, bringing pain that made me want to reach for the bottle. Once I left my bed and walked downstairs and out into the dew-wet yard in my bare feet. I opened the trunk of the car and found the vodka and drank two great life-saving swallows, but I didn’t bring the bottle back in with me when I reentered the house. If either the Rebbe or Dvora had heard me, neither of them said anything to me in the morning.

  Every day I sat with the scholars, feeling like one of the cheder children who came to the classrooms in the afternoons. These men had sharpened their intellects throughout their lifetimes, so that the least of them was light-years beyond my own feeble scholarship of the Bible and halacha, Jewish law. I made no mention to them that I had been graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and ordained as a rabbi. I knew that to them a Conservative or Reform rabbi wasn’t a rabbi. And certainly not a rebbe.

  So I listened in silence as they debated about human beings and their capacity for good and evil, about marriage and divorce, about treyf and kashruth, about crime and punishment, about birth and death.

  I found myself especially interested in one exchange. Reb Levi Dressner, a trembling old man with a husky voice, pointed out three different sages who said a good old age could be a reward for righteousness, but even the righteous could meet death early in life, a great misfortune.

  Reb Reuven Mendel, stout and fortyish, with a red face, cited work after work that allowed those who survived to be comforted with the thought that in death young people often were reunited with a mother or a father.

  Reb Yehuda Nahman, a pale boy with sleepy eyes and a silky brown beard, cited several authorities who were certain the dead carried on a connection with the living and had an interest in the affairs of their lives.

  46

  KIDRON

  “So, did you spend the entire year with the Orthodox Jews?” R.J. asked.

  “No, I ran away from them, too.”

  “What happened?” R.J. said. She picked up a triangle of cold toast and took a bite.

  Dvora Moscowitz was quiet and respectful in the presence of her husband and the other scholars, but as if aware that I was different, when she was alone with me, she became chatty.

  She was working hard to make the apartment and the study house spotless in time for the High Holidays, and in between washings and polishings and scrubbings she filled me in on the history and legends of the family Moscowitz.

  “Twenty-seven years I have been selling dresses at the Bon Ton Shop. I am really looking forward to next July.”

  “And what will happen then?”

  “I’ll be sixty-two years old, and I’ll retire on Social Security.” She relished weekends because she didn’t work Fridays and Saturdays, her Shabbos, and the shop was closed on Sundays, the owner’s sabbath. She had given the Rebbe four children before she was unable to bear more, God’s will. They had three sons, two of them in Israel. Label ben Shlomo was a scholar in a study house in Mea Shearim, Pincus ben Shlomo was rabbi of a congregation in Petah Tikva. Her youngest, Irving Moscowitz, sold life insurance in Bloomington, Indiana. “My black sheep.”

  “And your fourth child?”

  “She was a daughter, Leah, died when she was two years old. Diphtheria.” There was a silence. “And you? You have children?”

  I found myself telling her, not only forced to face it, to think about it, but to put it into words.

  “So. It’s a daughter you’re saying Kaddish for.” She took my hand. Our eyes became moist, I was desperate to escape. Presently she made tea and plied me with mandel bread and carrot candy.

  In the morning I got up very early, while they still slept. I made my bed, left money and a brief note of thanks, and stole away with my suitcase to the car while darkness still hid the stubbled fields.

  I stayed drunk throughout the Days of Awe—in a flophouse in the town of Windham, in a rickety tourist cabin in Revenna. In Cuyahoga Falls, the manager of the motel let himself into my locked room after I had been drinking for three days and told me to leave. I sobered sufficiently to drive that night to Akron, where I found the shabby old Majestic Hotel, a victim of the motel age. The corner room on the third floor needed paint and was full of dust. Through one window I saw smoke from a rubber factory and through another glimpsed the brown flowing of the Muskingum River. I stayed holed up there for eight days. A bellman named Roman brought liquor whenever I ran dry. The hotel had no room service. Roman went someplace—it must have been a distance because it always took him so long—to fetch bad coffee and greasy hamburgers. I tipped generously so Roman wouldn’t roll me while I was drunk.

  I never learned whether that was the bellman’s first or last name.

  One night I awoke and knew someone was in the room. “Roman?”

  I turned on the light, but no one was there.

  I even searched the shower and the closet. When I switched off the light, I felt the presence again.

  “Sarah?” I said at last. Then, “Natalie? Is it you, Nat?”

  Nobody answered.

  I might as well call out to Napoleon or Moses, I thought bitterly. But I couldn’t rid myself of the certainty that I wasn’t alone.

  It wasn’t a threatening presence. I kept the room unlit and lay in the dark, remembering the discussion in the study house. Reb Yehuda Nahman had quoted sages who had written that the beloved dead never are far away, and that they take an interest in the lives of the living.

  I reached for the bottle and was struck by the thought of my wife and daughter watching me, seeing me weak and self-destructive in this foul room stinking of vomit. There was enough alcohol already in me to bring a sodden sleep, finally.

  When I awoke I felt that I was alone again, but I lay on the bed and remembered.

  Later that day I found a Turkish bath and stretched out on a bench in the steam and sweated booze for a long time. Then I took my filthy clothes to a Laundromat. While they were drying I found a barber and received a very bad haircut, saying good-bye to the ponytail; time to grow up, try to change.

  The next morning I got into the car and left Akron. I wasn’t surprised when the car drove me back to Kidron in time for the minyan; I felt safe there.

  The scholars greeted me warmly. The Rebbe smiled and nodded as if I were just returning from an errand. He said the room was vacant, and after breakfast I carried my things upstairs. This time I emptied the suitcase, hanging some things in the closet and placing the rest in the bureau drawers.

  Autumn became winter, which in Ohio was very much like winter in Woodfield except that the snow scenes were more open, field upon field. I dressed as I had in Woodfield, long underwear, jeans, woolen shirt and socks. When I went outside, I wore a heavy sweater, a stocking cap, an ancient red muffler Dvora gave me, and a navy pea coat I had bought secondhand in Pittsfield my first year in the Berkshires. I walked a lot, my skin roughening in the cold.

  Mornings I participated in the minyan, more as a social obligation than because prayer made full contact with my soul. I was still interested in listening to the scholarly discussions that followed each service and found that I was understanding more of what I heard. After noons, the cheder children came noisily into their classrooms adjoining the study room, and some of the scholars taught them. I was tempted to volunteer to help in the classrooms, but I understood that the teachers received payment, and I didn’t want to break anyone’s rice bowl. I read a lot from the old Hebrew books, and occasionally I asked the Rebbe a question and we talked.

  Each of the scholars knew it was God who made it possible for him to study, and they took their work seriously. When I watched them, it wasn’t quite like Margaret Mead studying the Samoans—after all, my grandparents had belonged t
o this culture—but I was only a visitor, a stranger. I listened hard and like the others often dove into the tractates on the table in an attempt to buttress an argument. Once in a while I forgot my reticence and blurted a question of my own. This happened during a discussion of the world to come.

  “How do we know there is an afterlife? How do we know there’s a connection with our loved ones who have died?”

  The faces around the table turned to me with concern.

  “Because it is written,” Reb Gershom Miller murmured.

  “Many things that are written are untrue.”

  Reb Gershom Miller was irate, but the Rebbe looked at me and smiled. “Come, Dovidel,” he said. “Would you ask the Almighty, Blessed Be He, to sign a contract?” And reluctantly I joined in the general laughter.

  One evening at supper we discussed the Secret Saints, the Lamed Vav. “Our tradition says that in every generation there are thirty-six righteous men, ordinary humans going about their daily work, on whose goodness the continued existence of the world depends,” the Rebbe said.

  “Thirty-six men. Couldn’t a woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?” I asked.

  The Rebbe’s hand crept into his beard, scrabbled about as it did whenever he pondered. Through the open door to the pantry, I saw that Dvora had stopped what she had been doing. Her back was turned to my vision, but she was a statue, listening.

  “I believe she can.”

  Dvora resumed her work with great energy. She looked pleased as she carried in the salmon salad.

  “Could a Christian woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?”

  I asked it quietly, but I sensed that they felt the weight of the question in my voice and knew it stemmed from something intensely personal. I saw that Dvora’s eyes searched my face as she set the plate on the table.

  The Rebbe’s blue eyes were inscrutable. “What do you think is the answer?” he said.

  “Of course she can.”

  The Rebbe nodded without surprise and gave me a little smile. “Perhaps you are a Lamed Vovnik,” he said.

  I took to waking up in the middle of the night with a perfume in my nostrils. I remembered breathing it in when my face was buried in your throat.

  R.J. looked at David, and then she looked away. He waited a few moments before he began to speak again.

  I dreamed of you sexually and my sperm leaped from my body. More often I saw your face, watched you laugh. Sometimes the dreams didn’t make sense. I dreamed of you sitting at the kitchen table with the Moscowitzes and some Amish. I dreamed of you driving a team of eight horses. I dreamed of you dressed in the long shapeless Amish garb, the Halsduch over your breast, the apron around your waist, a demure white Kapp on your dark hair….

  In the yeshiva I was offered goodwill to a point, but little respect. The scholarship of the men of the study house was deeper than my own, and their faith was different.

  And everyone at the yeshiva knew I was a drunk.

  On a Sunday afternoon the Rebbe officiated at the marriage of the daughter of Reb Yossel Stein. Basha Stein was united with Reb Yehuda Nahman, the youngest of the scholars, a seventeen-year-old who throughout his life had been an ilui, a prodigy. The wedding was held in the barn, and everyone in the yeshiva community came. When the couple was beneath the canopy, they sang lustily:

  He who is strong above all else,

  He who is blessed above all else,

  He who is great above all else,

  May he bless the bridegroom and bride.

  Afterwards, no one turned to me to offer a glass when the schnapps was poured, as no one ever offered me a glass of wine at the Oneg Shabbat that marked the end of each Sabbath service. They treated me with gentle condescension, performing their mitzvot, their good deeds, like bearded Boy Scouts being nice to the maimed in order to earn their merit badges toward the ultimate reward.

  I felt the onset of spring weather like new pain. I was certain my life was going to change, but I didn’t know how. I stopped shaving, deciding to try a beard like all the other men around me. I toyed very briefly with the idea that I might make a life for myself in the yeshiva, but I recognized that I was almost as different from these Jews as I was from the Amish.

  I watched the farmers become busy in their warming fields. The heavy, honeyed stink of manure was everywhere.

  One day, I sought out Simon Yoder on his farm. Yoder was the farmer who rented and worked the yeshiva’s land; it was his runaway horse I had stopped the day I had come to Kidron.

  “I’d like to work for you,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “You can drive?”

  “Behind horses? No.”

  Yoder looked dubiously at me, studying this strange English. “We don’t pay minimum wages here, you know. Much less.”

  I shrugged.

  So Yoder tested me, put me to work on the manure pile, and I shoveled horseshit into the spreader all day. I was in heaven. When I returned to the Moscowitz apartment that evening, muscles in protest again and clothing reeking, Dvora and the Rebbe assumed that either I had gone back to drinking or I had lost my mind.

  It was an abnormally warm spring, slightly dry but with enough moisture for decent crops. After the manure was spread, Simon plowed and disked with five horses, and his brother Hans plowed behind a row of eight great beasts. “A horse produces fertilizer and other horses,” Simon told me. “A tractor produces nothing but bills.”

  He taught me how to drive. “You already do a good job of handling one horse. That’s really the most important part. Into the traces one at a time you back them. One at a time you take off the harness. They are used to working as a team.” I found myself working behind two horses, plowing the corners of all the fields. By myself, I planted the cornfield surrounding the yeshiva. As I walked behind the horses, holding the reins, I was conscious that each window was filled with scholarly, bearded faces watching my every move as if I were a man from Mars.

  Soon after planting was done, it was time for first hay to be cut. Each day I worked in the fields, breathing in a work perfume, a mixture of horse musk, my own sweat, and a heady olfactory slap, the scent of large areas of cut grass. I grew dark from the sun, and my body gradually strengthened and hardened. I let my hair grow long, and the beard sprang from my face. I was beginning to feel like Samson.

  “Rebbe,” I asked one night at the supper table, “do you believe God is really all-powerful?”

  The long white fingers scrabbled in the long white beard. “In every thing except one,” the Rebbe said finally. “God is in each of us. But we must give Him permission to come out.”

  All through the summer, I found genuine joy in work. I thought of you as I labored, allowing myself to do this because I believed I was becoming my own master. I had begun to dare to hope, but I was a realist and knew I was a drunk because I lacked a certain kind of courage. All my life I had been running away. I had run from the horror I had witnessed in Vietnam, into booze. I had run from the rabbinate, into real estate. I had run away from personal loss, into degradation. I had few illusions about myself.

  A pressure was building in me. As summer waned, I tried to divert it, sometimes almost frantically, but finally it couldn’t be denied. On the hottest day of August, I helped Simon Yoder store the last of the second cutting of hay in the barn, and then I drove to Akron.

  The package store was just where I remembered it. I bought a liter of Seagram’s Seven Crown whiskey; in a kosher bakery I found kichlach, and in the Jewish market I bought half a dozen jars of pickled herring. One of the jar lids must have been loose. Before I had driven far, my car was filled with the sharp, greasy odor of fish.

  I went to a jeweler and made one more purchase, a single pearl on a delicate gold chain. I gave the little pendant to Dvora Moscowitz that evening, and a rent check in lieu of notice to vacate. She kissed me on both cheeks.

  Next morning after the service, I broke out the food and whiskey for the minyan. I shook ha
nds with everyone. The Rebbe followed me out to the car and gave me a bag Dvora had left for me, tuna sandwiches and streusel squares. I expected something more portentous from Rabbi Moscowitz, and the old man didn’t disappoint.

  “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He shine his countenance on you and bring you peace.”

  I thanked him and started the motor. “Shalom, Rebbe.” I was aware that for once I was departing a place properly. This time I told the car where to go, driving it straight toward Massachusetts.

  When finally he reached the end of the narrative, R.J. looked at him.

  “So … shall I stay?” he asked her.

  “I think you should, at least for a time.”

  “For a time?”

  “I’m not certain about you now. But stay for a little while. If we decide we shouldn’t be together, at least …”

  “At least we can bring it to a decent end? Closure?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t have to consider. But you take your time. R.J., I hope …”

  She touched the smooth, familiar but unfamiliar face. “I hope so, too. I need you, David. Or somebody like you,” she said, to her own astonishment.

  47

  SETTLING IN

  That evening, R.J. came home from the office to the rich smell of roasting leg of lamb. There was no need to announce that David had returned, she realized. If he had gone to the general store to buy the lamb, by now most of the people in town knew he was back.

  He had made a wonderful meal, baby carrots and new potatoes browned in the gravy, corn on the cob, blueberry pie. She let him do the dishes while she went to her room and took the box from the bottom drawer of her bureau.

  When she held it out to him, he wiped his soapy hands and carried it to the kitchen table. She could tell he was afraid to open the box, but finally he removed the cover and lifted out the fat manuscript.