Read The Rabbi Online

Authors: Noah Gordon

The Rabbi (2 page)

BOOK: The Rabbi
4.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Then, feeling guilty, he jumped up and set out to make his pastoral calls.

His first stop concerned his wife.

The grounds of Woodborough State Hospital were sometimes
mistaken by strangers for a college campus, but halfway down the long, winding driveway the presence of Herman left no doubt about the hospital's identity.

Michael had a crowded morning schedule, and Herman would see to it that it took him ten minutes to negotiate the rest of the driveway and ease his car into a parking space, a process that otherwise would have taken about sixty seconds.

Herman wore bell-bottomed dungarees, an old pea coat, an Orioles baseball cap, and fluffy earmuffs that had once been white. In each hand he carried an orange ping-pong paddle, the kind covered with tiny rubber pips. He walked backward, guiding the car's progress with a fierce intentness, conscious that the Rabbi's life and the fate of an expensive government aircraft were on his shoulders. Twenty years before, Herman had been flight operations officer on a wartime aircraft carrier. He had chosen to continue the assignment. For the past four years he had been meeting cars and guiding drivers in to landings on the hospital parking lot. He was an annoyance, but an appealing one. No matter how hurried Michael was, he found himself acting out a role that made him a willing part of Herman's illness.

Michael was the hospital's Jewish chaplain, a post that occupied half a day of his weekly routine, and he had arranged to work in the chaplain's office until notified that Dan Bernstein, Leslie's psychiatrist, was free.

But Dan was waiting for him.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” he said. “I always forget to leave a couple of extra minutes for Herman.”

“He bothers me,” the psychiatrist said. “What will you do if some day he decides to wave you off at the last minute and signals you to fly around and make a new approach?”

“I'll pull back hard on the stick and my station wagon will roar up over the administration building.”

Dr. Bernstein settled himself in the one comfortable chair in the room, slipped off his brown loafers and wiggled his toes. Then he sighed and lit a cigarette.

“How's my wife?”

“The same.”

He had hoped for better news. “Is she talking?”

“Very little. She's waiting.”

“What for?”

“For her sadness to go away,” Dr. Bernstein said, rubbing his stockinged toes with fat, blunt fingers. “Something grew too strong to face, so she withdrew. It's not uncommon. If she reaches understanding she'll come out and face it, and allow herself to forget what is causing her depression.

“We had hoped to help her to do this with psychotherapy. But she doesn't talk. I think electric shock is indicated.”

Michael's stomach twisted. Dr. Bernstein looked at his face and snorted in undisguised contempt. “You call yourself a mental hospital chaplain? Why the hell should shock frighten you?”

“Sometimes they thrash around. Broken bones.”

“Not for years, not since we've had muscle-paralyzing drugs. Today it's a humane treatment. You've seen it, haven't you?”

He nodded. “Will she experience aftereffects?”

“Of the treatments? Probably some slight amnesia, partial loss of memory. Nothing serious. She'll remember everything that's important in her life. Little things, things that don't matter, will be gone.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Perhaps the title of a movie she's seen recently, or the name of the film's leading man. Or the address of a slight aquaintance. But these will be isolated incidents. Most of her memory will be retained.”

“Can't you attempt to make progress with psychotherapy for a little while longer before you try the shock?”

Dr. Bernstein allowed himself the luxury of mild annoyance. “But she's not talking! How can therapy be conducted without communication? I have no idea what's
really
making her depressed. Have you?”

“She's a convert, as you know. But she's been completely Jewish for a long time.”

“Other pressures?”

“We moved around a lot before we came here. Sometimes we lived in situations that were difficult.”

Dan Bernstein lit another cigarette. “Do all rabbis move around that much?”

Michael shrugged. “Some men go to one temple and stay there for the rest of their lives. Others keep traveling. Most rabbis are on short-term contracts. If you struggle too hard, break too
many lances in the congregation's tender skin, or if they break too many in yours, you move on.”

“You think that's why you've moved so often?” Dr. Bernstein asked in a flat, impersonal way. Michael knew intuitively that the tone was part of his session technique. “Have you broken the lances, or received them?”

He took a cigarette from the pack Dan had left on the desk between them. He noticed with annoyance that his hand trembled slightly as he held the match. “A little of both,” he said.

Dr. Bernstein's eyes were on his face, gray and direct. They made him uncomfortable. The psychiatrist pocketed his cigarettes. “I think electric shock is your wife's best bet. We could start her on a course of twelve treatments, three times a week. I've seen marvelous results.”

Michael nodded in reluctant agreement. “If you think it's best. What can I do for her?”

“Be patient. You can't reach out to her. You can only wait for her to reach out to you. When she does, you'll know she's taken her first step toward recovery.”

“Thank you, Dan.”

He rose to his feet and Michael shook his hand. “Why don't you drop around the temple some Friday night? You might get some therapy out of my
shabbos
service. Or are you another atheistic man of science?”

“I'm not an atheist, Rabbi.” He pushed first one pudgy foot into a loafer, then the other. “I'm a Unitarian,” he said.

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings of the following week Michael was very irritable whenever approached. He silently cursed the fact that he had ever become a chaplain; it would have been so much easier if the details were shrouded in mystery.

But he knew that by seven the treatments would begin in Templeton Ward.

His Leslie would wait in an anteroom with other patients until her turn came. Then the nurses would lead her to a bed and she would lie down. The attendant would take off her shoes and slip them under the thin mattress. The anesthetist would slip a canula into her vein.

Each time he had watched the treatments there had been
several patients whose veins were so small they could not be pierced, and the doctor had sweated and grumbled and cursed. Leslie's veins would give them no trouble, he thought thankfully. They were narrow but distinct. When you touched them with your lips you could feel the blood pumping up strong and clean from the core of her body.

The canula would drip a barbiturate into her bloodstream, and thank you, God, his wife would fall asleep. Then the anesthetist would inject a muscle relaxant, and the tensions that kept her functioning as a living machine would slacken. Her chest muscles would grow flaccid, no longer operating the lovely bellows of her chest. Instead, from time to time a black cup would be fitted over her mouth and nose and the anesthetist would force oxygen into her lungs, breathing for her. A rubber wedge would be placed between her jaws to protect her tongue from her fine white teeth. The attendant would rub her temples with electrode jelly and then the electrodes, the size of half-dollars, would be pressed into her skull.

The anesthetist would say “All right,” in a bored voice, and the resident psychiatrist would press his fingertip down on a button in a little black box. The alternating current would surge silently into her head for five seconds, an electrical storm that in the tonic stage would jolt her arms rigid despite the relaxant, and then in the clonic stage would leave her limbs twitching and jerking like those of the victim of an epileptic fit.

He drew books from the library and read whatever he could find about electric-shock treatments. He realized with a slow horror that Dan Bernstein and every other psychiatrist in the world didn't know exactly what happened when they buffeted his wife's brain with electric bombardment. All they had were theories, and the knowledge that the treatments got results. One of these theories said that the electrical charge burned out abnormal circuits in the switchboard of the brain. Another said that the shock was close enough to the death experience to satisfy the patient's need for punishment and assuage the guilt feelings that had plunged him into despair.

That was enough; he stopped his reading exercises.

Each treatment day he called the hospital at 9
A.M
., and a ward nurse with a flat, nasal voice told him that the treatment had been uneventful and that Mrs. Kind was resting comfortably.

He wanted to avoid people. He did paperwork, catching up with his correspondence for the first time in his life, and he even cleaned out his desk drawers. On the twelfth day after Leslie began the shock treatments, however, the rabbinate caught up with him. That afternoon he attended a
bris
, blessing a baby named Simon Maxwell Shutzer as the
mohel
slit away the foreskin of the little bloody penis and the father trembled and the mother wept whitely and then laughed in joy. Then, covering the life span from birth to death in two short hours, he officiated at the funeral of Sarah Myerson, an old lady whose grandsons wept to see her lowered into the grave. Darkness had fallen by the time he returned home. He was bone-weary. At the cemetery the sky had begun to spit a fine sleet that stung their faces until they burned, and he felt chilled through to the marrow. He was on his way to the liquor cabinet for some whiskey when he saw the letter on the foyer table. When he picked it up and saw the handwriting he had trouble ripping it open. It was written in pencil on inexpensive blue stationery, probably borrowed.

My Michael
,

Last night a woman down the hall screamed that a bird was beating its wings, beating its wings against her window, and finally they came and gave her a needle and she fell asleep. And this morning an attendant found the bird, an ice-covered sparrow, lying on the walk. Its heart was still beating, and when they fed it warm milk with a dropper it lived, and he brought it to show the woman it was all right. They left it in a box in the dispensary but this afternoon it died
.

I lay in my bed and remembered the sound of the birds in the woods outside our cabin in the Ozarks, and how I would lie in your arms and listen to them after we had made love, our hearts the only thing we could hear in the cabin and the birds the only thing we could hear outside
.

I want to see my children. Are they well?

Wear your thermal underwear when you make pastoral calls. Eat leafy vegetables and stay away from your spices
.

Happy birthday, my poor old man
.

Leslie

Mrs. Moscowitz came in to announce dinner and stared in amazement at his wet face. “Rabbi, is anything wrong?”

“I just got a letter from my wife. She's going to be all right, Lena.”

The dinner was burned. Two days later Mrs. Moscowitz announced that she was needed by her widower brother-in-law whose daughter was ailing in Willimantic, Connecticut. Her place was taken by a fat, gray-haired woman named Anna Schwartz. Anna was an asthmatic with a wen on her chin, but she was very clean and she could cook anything, including a
lochshen kugel
with two kinds of raisins, light and dark, and a crust that was so good you hated to chew.

 

2

When the children asked what their mother had written he told them she had wished him a belated happy birthday. He wasn't hinting—or perhaps he was—but the next day resulted in a crayoned card from Rachel and a store-bought one from Max, plus a gorgeous loud tie from the two of them. The tie matched nothing he owned, but he wore it to temple that morning.

Birthdays made him optimistic. They were turning points, he told himself hopefully. He remembered his son's sixteenth birthday, three months before.

The day Max had lost his belief in God.

In Massachusetts, at sixteen a boy becomes eligible to apply for a driver's license.

Michael had taught Max to drive the Ford and he had an appointment to be examined for his license at the Registry of Motor Vehicles on the morning before his birthday, which fell on a Saturday. On Saturday night he had a date with Dessamae Kaplan, a child-woman with blue eyes and red hair who made Michael envy his son.

They were supposed to go to a square dance at a barn overlooking the lake. Leslie and Michael had asked a group of their son's friends to a small birthday party before the dance,
and they had planned to hand him the keys to the car so he could celebrate by driving for the first time without parental escort.

But it was on the Wednesday before Max's birthday that Leslie fell into the deep emotional depression that sent her to the hospital, and by Friday morning Michael had been told that she would be there for an indeterminate stay. Max canceled his appointment for the driver's test and called off his party. When Michael heard him breaking his date with Dessamae, too, he pointed out that Max's becoming a hermit wouldn't help the state of his mother's health.

BOOK: The Rabbi
4.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Food Fight by Anne Penketh
The Beggar's Garden by Michael Christie
THE TORTURED by DUMM, R U, R. U. DUMM
The Host by The Host
Baby, Don't Lose My Number by Karen Erickson
THE WHITE WOLF by Franklin Gregory
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist by Robert Damon Schneck