The Rabbi (16 page)

Isaac was buried in the plain wooden box of the devout Jew,
along with a new prayer book with ivory covers and a handful of earth from
Eretz Yisroel
, the Promised Land. Michael would have buried him with the tattered old
siddur
he had prayed from for so many years, and he would have enclosed a sack of candied ginger and a bottle of booze. When the rabbi shoveled in the first spadeful of earth, stones clattered down on the lid of the box and his father's knees sagged. He and his mother had to hold Abe up while the rabbi cut the black ribbon pinned to his lapel. He said the
kaddish
through gulping sobs, while Dorothy turned her head and cried like a little girl.

They held the seven days of
shiva
in the apartment. On the second night of mourning, his sister Ruthie returned from Palestine. They hadn't wired her, and she took one look at the covered mirrors and went into hysterics that started his mother and father weeping again. But gradually things quieted down. There were always too many people in the apartment, and too much food. Every day people brought gifts of food, and every day a lot of yesterday's food was thrown out. Most of Zaydeh's real friends were dead. The people who visited the Kinds were their friends, neighbors, and customers and employees of Abe's. They brought cakes and fruit and cold cuts and chopped liver and nuts and candy. Mimi Steinmetz came in and squeezed Michael's hand while her father told his father to sign up for perpetual care of the grave, because then you didn't have to worry about details every year, you could just forget about it.

Michael thought a great deal about the things his grandfather had said before he had died. He knew they were the kind of things he might have expected Zaydeh to say, and that his warning had nothing to do with Ellen Trowbridge. But he was troubled that Isaac had died full of fear of death and the gentile, even though the first was inevitable and the second wouldn't bother him ever again. He tried to tell himself that Zaydeh was an old man from a world that no longer existed. On the fifth night, while his parents and their visitors sat in the living room and listened to Ruthie describe orange-picking in Rehovob, he went into the kitchen and took the phone off the hook. He dialed operator. The line buzzed twice and the operator came on. “I want to call long distance,” he said.

“What is the number of the party you wish to reach?”

His mother came into the kitchen. “I'll put on some tea,”
she said. “Ah, I'll be glad when this is over. People every day and people every night.”

He replaced the receiver in the cradle.

The night after the week of mourning ended, they went to a restaurant for dinner. Halfway through the steak he was eating, he couldn't swallow. He excused himself and walked out of the dining room. He gave the cashier three dollars and took the change in quarters, dimes, and nickels. Then he went into the telephone booth. He sat on the little seat and pressed his head against the glass, but he didn't place the call.

The next day when his mother asked him to stay home instead of returning to The Sands, he felt relieved. “It will help your father to have you around,” she said.

He called the hotel's New York booking office and they said they would send him a check. He had four hundred and twenty-six dollars and nineteen cents coming.

His father went back to work and Michael saw very little of him. He took long walks and he started going to small theaters that showed old movies. When the time came, he registered at the university. On his third day as a student he went to his mailbox on campus and found a letter from Ellen Trowbridge. It was a short letter, friendly but a little formal. She didn't ask why he hadn't gotten in touch with her. She just said that she was living at a place called Whitman Hall if he wanted to write to her at school, and she said she was sorry about his grandfather. He put the letter in his wallet.

Two nights later he went to a prepledge stag at a fraternity house on 114th street. He had four drinks and decided he didn't want to join, because he would be living at home and anyway the fraters didn't look particularly interesting. He left the party and walked until he came to a small bar and he went inside and ordered a straight shot of V.O. He had two more, remembering Zaydeh's bottle in the lima-bean barrel. Then he wandered outside and walked until he was on the campus. He circled the Butler Library and sat down on a stone bench next to a splashing fountain. All the buildings were dark except the library behind him and the journalism building. Below him the statue of John Jay loomed like a
golem
. He took the letter from his pocket and tore it carefully in half, then in quarters, then into little pieces that lay on the cement at his feet. Somebody was sobbing. Pretty
soon he realized it was he. Two girls came walking down the library stairs. They stopped and goggled at him.

“Is he sick?” one of them asked. “Shall I go for a cop?”

The other one came toward him. “Evelyn,” the first one said. “Be careful.” How embarrassing, he thought.

The girl stuck her face into his. She wore glasses. She had buck teeth and freckles. Her sweater was blue and fuzzy. She sniffed and then grimaced. “Drunk as a skunk,” she said. “A crying jag.” Their heels clicked righteously into the darkness.

He knew she was right. There were no tears on his cheeks. He did not weep because Zaydeh was below the ground or because he was afraid to love Ellen Trowbridge. He gulped and sobbed because he wanted the wind to blow the scraps of letter toward Amsterdam Avenue, and instead they were being blown toward Broadway. Then the wind changed and the scraps fluttered quickly in the right direction. But he kept on sobbing. It felt so good.

BOOK II:
Wandering in
the Wilderness

12

Woodborough, Massachusetts
November 1964

Mary Margaret Sullivan, R.N., eased her huge hips into the chair behind the desk in the head nurse's office and sighed. She reached over and took a metal-covered file from the records stand. For several minutes her pen scratched, recording a disturbance in Templeton Ward caused by a Mrs. Felicia Serapin, who had struck another woman in the face with the heel of her shoe.

When she was through she gazed thoughtfully at the coffee kettle and the hotplate on top of a file cabinet across the room. She had decided that coffee would not be worth the effort required to heave her body from its resting place when Rabbi Kind stuck his head through the door.

“Ah, the Jewish padre,” she said.

“How are you doing, Maggie?” He came into the office and stood there with a pile of books in his hands.

She stood with great effort and walked to the cabinet for two cups, plugging in the hotplate as she passed it. She set the cups on her desk and spooned in brown powder from a jar she kept in the top drawer.

“I can't have coffee. I want to give these to my wife.”

“She's over at occupational therapy. Most of them are.” She sat again joltingly. “We've got a new Jewish patient here in the ward you might try saying hello to. Her name is Hazel Birnbaum. Mrs. Birnbaum. Poor thing thinks we're all conspiring to get her. Schiz.”

“Where is she?”

“Seventeen. Don't you want some coffee first?”

“Thanks, but I'll look in on her. If there's time afterwards you can sell me a cup.”

“It'll be gone. See the chaplain.”

Smiling, he walked through the nearly deserted ward. Everything was so depressingly clean: the mark of patient labor.

In room seventeen a woman lay on the bed.

Her hair splashed dark and tangled against the white pillow.
My God, he thought, this one looks very much like my sister Ruthie.

“Mrs. Birnbaum?” he said, smiling. “I'm Rabbi Kind.”

Large blue eyes flicked at him for one damning moment and then switched their gaze back to the ceiling.

“I just wanted to say hello. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Go away,” she said. “I won't bother anybody.”

“All right, I won't stay. I come through the ward regularly. I'll see you again.”

“Morty sent you,” she said.

“No. No, I don't even know him.”

“Tell him to leave me
ALO-O-ONE!
”

No screams, he thought, I am defenseless against screams. “I'll see you again soon, Mrs. Birnbaum.” Her legs and feet were bare and the ward was chilly. He took the gray blanket at the foot of the bed and covered her, but she kicked it off like a petulant child. He left hurriedly.

Leslie's room was down the corridor and around the corner. He put the books in the middle of the bed and then ripped a page from his notebook and printed a note:
I'll come back this afternoon. You were at O.T. I hope what you're making is useful, like a pair of men's socks with no holes
.

On the way out he looked into Maggie's office to say good-by. But the head nurse was gone. The water in the kettle was sending a pillar of steam to wet the ceiling. He pulled the hotplate plug and, deciding that he had time, poured water into one of the cups.

Drinking the coffee slowly, he wrote a list:

THINGS TO DO

At Woodborough General Hosp
—

Susan Wreshinsky in maternity (boy, gl?) Wish mazel tov
.

Lois Gurwitz (Mrs. Leibling grnd-dtr), apndx
.

Jerry Mendelsohn, leg

At public libr
—

Order Bialik biog

Microfilm of NY Times stories on Jewish vigilantes in racially-torn nbrhoods, for sermon
.

His eyes saw his wife's name on one of the metal covers in the records rack and of their volition his hands lifted the file. He
hesitated only a moment and then he opened it. Shuffling through the papers, he took another swallow from the coffee cup and began to read.

Woodborough State Hospital

Patient: Mrs. Leslie (Rawlings) Kind

Case history presented at

Staff Conference

Dec. 21, 1964

Diagnosis: Involutional Melancholia

The patient is an attractive, well-formed white female, forty years of age, who has the appearance of good health habits. Her hair is dark blonde. Her height is 5′ 7″, her weight is 143 lbs
.

She was brought to the hospital August 28, 1964, by her husband. Pre-admission symptoms were those of a “neurasthenic” state, during which she complained that things had been too heavy for her, that she was easily tired both mentally and physically, that she was irritable, restless, and unable to sleep
.

For the first eleven weeks of hospitalization the patient remained mute. Frequently she had the appearance of wanting to weep without being able to achieve relief by doing so
.

Speaking was resumed at the conclusion of the second in a course of twelve electroconvulsive treatments, nine of which have been administered to date. Thorazine seems to have given her good symptomatic relief. Its use is being supplanted with Pyrrolazote in a gradually increasing dose up to 200 mg
. q.i.d.

Amnesia resulting from the treatment appears to be minimal. In interviews with her psychiatrist during the past week the patient has told the therapist that she recalls maintaining silence because of a disinclination to share with anyone her guilt arising from an estrangement from her father and from the supposition that she was an unfit wife and mother because of a premarital sexual experience while she was a college student more than two decades ago. Her husband was made aware of this experience before their marriage, and the patient does not remember being bothered by any further remorse—or even thinking about the incident—until several months ago. While she clearly recollects the recent advent of guilt feelings regarding both the youthful sexual incident and the loss of her father's love, these feelings of
guilt no longer plague her. The patient now appears calm and optimistic
.

She described her sexual relationship with her husband as a good one. Her menstrual cycle has been irregular for almost a year. Her present illness apparently is an anxious, agitated delusional depression of the menopause
.

The daughter of a Congregational minister, the patient converted to Judaism prior to her marriage to her rabbi husband eighteen years ago. Her commitment to the Jewish religion appears strong, and her guilt feelings appear not to be centered upon her abandonment of her Christian beliefs, but rather upon what she considered as the betrayal of her father. The patient, reared in a home where biblical lore was an integral part of the environment, since her marriage has become a Talmudic student who has the friendship and admiration of recognized authorities at the rabbinical schools, according to her husband
.

Their life has been the intermittently transient existence of the family of a clergyman with somewhat rigid ideas concerning the behavior of his congregation. This apparently has placed certain emotional burdens upon both the patient and upon her husband
.