The Frozen Rabbi (45 page)

Of the latter Julius seldom spared a thought. After all he had a family to raise and his position in the community to consolidate, his televised ad campaigns to manage. It was a good life in which he laid claim to the full complement of middle-class chattels, and wasn’t there also some precept of the Jews that stated that a man was not a man without a wife and children? Though never observant, neither was Julius ashamed of his heritage. Regarding religious attendance as a more or less civic duty, he went to services with his family on the High Holidays. It was important to him that he not be perceived as in any way un-American, an unease that perhaps had its source in his having been born abroad. So while he purchased his annual share of Israel Bonds along with the other members of the Temple Brotherhood, he had no relation to the so-called Jewish homeland; his own place was here in the South, where he belonged to a number of fraternal organizations in whose fund-raising activities he participated with zeal. Much as he desired the renaissance of his ill-starred city, however, Julius thought it just as well that the great world not interfere overmuch in local affairs. That’s why he was relieved when the relic from the deep freeze—notwithstanding the perversity of its defrosting—had adapted to the climate of these interesting times, and that its (his) message, while retaining its spiritual essence, did not contradict the basic values of the marketplace.

Nor had it seemed to upset the status quo when that message was translated into a profitable enterprise from which Julius Karp, as the rabbi’s chief investor and financial consultant, had benefited as well. So much had he profited, in fact, that he’d begun to contemplate selling the Showroom in order to devote himself exclusively to the operations of the New House of Enlightenment. Lately, however, that venture had come under fire from the municipality. Hysterical rumors abounded and a stink had been raised in the editorial pages of
The Commercial Appeal
, whose bloodhounds demanded full disclosure of New House dealings—which, despite Sanford Grusom’s facility for cooking books, were perfectly aboveboard. Nevertheless, Julius had started to wonder if, in getting involved with the recycled old huckster, he was perhaps in over his head, though his share in the revenues from the New House was simply too great to walk away from. Then there were the fringe benefits, which were hard to define, not the least of them being the tonic, almost joyful attitude that Julius’s association with the rebbe had instilled in his wash-and-wear breast. To say nothing of the peace of mind that Mrs. Karp had found since coming under the rebbe’s influence, in particular his Zen Judaism seminars. Truly, their relationship with Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had opened a compelling new chapter in the annals of the Family Karp.

But now Sandy Grusom, Julius’s trusted accountant, who had taken such an active role in promoting the House of Enlightenment, was seated on the opposite side of his desk advising his boss that the time had come to cut their losses.

“What losses?” Julius wondered, because the proof of the New House’s bullish fortunes was winking at him in fiscal radiance from the computer screen. He swiveled the screen toward Grusom, a droopy-jowled fellow with a torso like an onion bulb, who swiveled it back without looking.

“The losses we’re about to suffer when the shit hits the fan.”

Julius knew his accountant for a cautious man who never spoke out of turn, but still in denial himself, he refused to believe that the rabbi’s marvelous mumbo jumbo had had its day.

A week later the appliance maven was sitting in his office, still turning over the situation in his mind, when there came a knock at the open door. Shoving his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose, he saw in the doorway a slender, high-cheeked girl with particolored bangs like the teeth of a rainbow comb. She was wearing a braided military tunic like something out of a comic opera, drawing a bead on him with her forefinger as she accused him of being Bernie Karp’s dad.

“Who wants to know?” he replied, wondering what this peculiar young person could have to do with him. Not by nature a suspicious type, however, he softened. “Okay, you got me dead to rights. What can I do for you?”

“Ain’t you heard?”

“Guilty as charged,” he added, still playful. “Heard what?”

She lurched uninvited into his office and plunked herself down in the only available chair, where she began to rock restlessly back and forth—this despite the chair’s immobility. “The Mayor’s been on TV,” she announced a little breathlessly, studying the turquoise toenails at the tips of her sandal-shod feet. “He’s ordered the House of Enlightenment shut down till further notice. Seems they mounted an investigation into the affairs of Rabbi ben Zephyr, whose place of bidness is s’posed to stay closed pending the findings.” At which point she stopped rocking and stared up at Mr. Karp with heavily shadowed eyes.

This was troubling news indeed. The Mayor, Gaylord by name, a beetle-browed throwback to the apartheid South, had already been heard making veiled references to the New House’s imprudent mixing of the races. But Julius couldn’t get past the fact that the bearer of these ill tidings had yet to present her credentials.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“A bunch of the Rabbi’s followers,” the girl went on, “hacksawed the chain across the front door, and now they’re holed up inside the auditorium, which it is presently surrounded by cops. They want to arrest the lot of them, Rabbi included, for trespass and unlawful entry. The shit’s done hit the fan.”

“Is there an echo in here?” inquired Julius of the ceiling, loosening the knot of his tie. He wasn’t sure what he found more disturbing, the news of the event itself or the instrument of its communication. “I repeat, who are you?”

With a hint of uncalled for defiance, Lou Ella stated her name, adding almost inaudibly, “I’m Bernie’s girl.”

“What’s that?”

She repeated her avowal.

“Bernie? My son Bernie?”

“You maybe know another?”

“Don’t get smart with me, young lady,” snapped Julius more or less on principle, since reproach was never his strong suit. Then he tightened his tie again, musing out loud: “Bernie’s got a girl?” It was a confidence he needed to digest at his leisure, but the girl went right on talking.

“He’s playing with fire, your boy. He thinks he’s some kind of a saint, which maybe he is, but that ain’t the point.”

“You’re talking about my Bernie, the couch potato of Canary Cove?” But even as he said this, he was aware that the kid had changed, changed utterly, though he was damned if he knew exactly how.

“He’s my Bernie now,” murmured Lou Ella, straightening her spine for a proprietary instant before slumping again. “But mostly he don’t belong to anyone, leastwise his own self. He ain’t hardly a member of the human race no more. Do you know what a zaddik is?”

Julius assumed she was using some arcane teenage jargon. “Nooo,” he tendered hesitantly.

“With all due respect, Mr. Karp, where you been?”

“Where
have
I been?” he wondered aloud. “Making a hard-earned buck is where.” And if what she’d told him was true, then a goodly portion of that income was in serious jeopardy. But who was this little minx in her circus regalia to challenge him? “Let me get this straight,” he said, matching her vexation with his own. “You’re my son’s girlfriend? Since when does Bernie have girlfriends?”

But Lou Ella had no intention of backtracking. “A zaddik is a kinda Jewish swami. He suffers for everybody. The dude’s like in possession of all his mystical organs.”

“Eh?”

“Ecstasy and him are like this. He can leave his body whenever he wants, sometimes even when he don’t want, and rise up to glory or descend to the underworld to fetch back the soul of a person who died too soon. He’s also known to escort the dead to the afterlife and only hangs around this world for the sake of his flock…”

All of which seemed neither here nor there to the home appliance merchant, who was growing more on edge by the moment. But despite the girl’s unwelcome intrusion and the dire circumstance she’d come to impart, Julius found himself still dwelling on the news of his son’s affair of the heart, which had given him an unexpected twinge. Maybe the kid was normal after all.

“Your common or garden zaddik,” continued Lou, “can heal the sick too, which I ain’t seen Bernie do yet, though he got my little sister, who’s a might slow, to say her first word. Boykh, I think it was. He’s pretty good for self-taught, though he insists on giving the rabbi credit for teaching him everything he knows.”

“His girl,” uttered Julius, squinting at the garish intruder over the rims of his glasses. “Who’da thunk it.”

Lou Ella tilted her head, dangling an earring like a tiny tomahawk. “You still hung up on that? Well, if it makes you feel any better, we never done it, though it wadn’t for want of trying.”

Julius wasn’t sure the information did make him feel better, but it was finally more than he needed to know. The girl had been in his office only minutes and already she’d led him far beyond his comfort zone. “Whoa,” he said, hands raised like a holdup victim.

“Fact is,” Lou was relentless, “if we was just regular sweethearts, I’da prolly lost interest in him by now. But, Lord help me, I got a soft spot for the shmegegi.”

The unadorned declaration made the retailer doubly squeamish. “Why are you telling me all this?” he nearly shouted.

“‘Cause I think I’m gonna lose him. That is,” she conceded, “if I ever had him.”

Julius considered calling security—did the Showroom have security? The girl was unstoppable.

“He’s in trouble. He thinks he can save the rabbi, and he’s gone to the New House to try and do I dunno what.”

The thought of his laggard son venturing where angels feared to tread struck his father as absurd. “Shouldn’t you both be in school?” it suddenly dawned on Julius to ask, though he himself was stunned by the irrelevance of the question.

“That place is a hornets’ nest.”

“School?”

“The New House! Ain’t you been listening?”

He had, but enough was enough. “Well,” said Julius, clearing his throat with a sound like a faltering transmission, “what do you expect me to do about it?”

Lou Ella glared at the agitated merchant with her fishiest eye, then let it go. In fact, she had entertained some fantasy in which she and Bernie’s father joined forces to come to the aid of his son, even as Bernie rescued the rabbi from an uncertain fate. But there sat Julius Karp wearing the helpless expression of someone in the midst of taking a pratfall. Her lower lip trembled as she muttered, “Nothin’, I guess.”

“Then why drag me into this in the first place?”

“I just thought you oughta know. Also,” she admitted, “I wanted to share the worry with somebody else.” Feebly, “You know, like spread the wealth?”

“Okay, so now I’m worried. Are you happy?”

“No, but I’m a teensy bit relieved.”

“Glad to hear it. So what happens now?”

She shrugged and rose from the chair, aeons older, turning with a sigh to slouch toward the office door. “Tragedy I s’pose.”

As the girl made her melancholy exit without so much as a fare-thee-well, Julius was left stranded at his desk, harried by unbidden memories. So it seemed that the Karp family’s affinity for untoward behavior had indeed leapfrogged the appliance merchant to bedevil his son. There was cold comfort in the knowledge: for the curse he had ducked all his life, in afflicting Bernie, had as good as circled back round to bite Julius in his own tush.

H
e approached the New House of Enlightenment along a suburban street strewn with leaves and jackknifed squad cars flashing red lights. The tabernacle itself was surrounded by sawhorse barriers, onlookers from the neighborhood pressing against them as flak-jacketed police with bullhorns warned them to stay back. There were media vans, attendants fussing over broadcasters with perfect hair, pinning mikes the size of blood ticks to their lapels as they faced the cameras. Some enterprising children had set up a lemonade stand. The general air of expectancy seemed to Bernie, however, to have less in common with a crisis than the anticipation of a parade in which celebrities were due to appear. Maybe his own legend had preceded him and when he approached the barricades, explaining, “The rabbi is my teacher; I’m the one that discovered him,” the crowds would part and the cops wave him through. But that wasn’t likely. Besides, even if he was able to convince the authorities that he could be of assistance, they would no doubt attach such conditions that in the end he would be forced to betray the rabbi rather than rescue him. And rescue was what Bernie had in mind.

Having by now understood that his tenure as public guru had run its course, Rabbi ben Zephyr would have no choice but to accompany his onetime apprentice to some safe remove, where the holy man could again resume his original destiny as a hidden saint. But how to spirit the rebbe from the siege of the House of Enlightenment to some sanctuary beyond the reach of the law was a problem Bernie had yet to resolve, though he was confident that a solution would present itself when the time came. Meanwhile there was the more immediate problem of securing an audience with the old man in the first place. It occurred to him he might simply sidle through the police line, vault the barriers, and make a dash for the doors, but that would invite a doomed pursuit by the metro
SWAT
team, members of which were on hand for just such an event. And besides, Cholly Sidepocket, the rabbi’s implacable bodyguard in his mirror glasses, chinchilla coat, and matching cap, had planted himself in front of the doors with folded arms, ready to repel anyone who dared to seek entry or take a bullet in the attempt. Bernie recalled a meditation of Shlomiel ben Hayyim of Dreznitz that rendered one invisible, but the technique had unpredictable side effects. Then a third option suggested itself, and making an abrupt about-face, the boy backtracked along the street of single-story ranch houses, their raked lawns anchored by bags of leaves tilting like fat kids in a sack race.

Behind him the voice over the megaphone, calling on the occupants of the New House to “Come out and save your sorry selves from future harm,” was somewhat annulled by the bracing nip in the November air. In a block or two Bernie came to a place where the pavement was interrupted by a storm grate overarched by an inlet with cast-iron teeth, fixed into the lip of the curb like a snarl. Looking left and right, he sank to all fours and rolled his thin self between the iron teeth and the grate. He dropped some six feet into a shallow catchbasin full of sludge and standing water, stirring a swarm of drowsy mosquitoes and splashing ooze over his sneakers and jeans. From there he hauled himself into the mouth of a circular drainpipe through which, ducking his head, he proceeded at a simian stoop. It was dark in the pipe, but Bernie—veteran explorer (or so he told himself) of the obscurer reaches of the psyche—progressed with a blind assurance.