The Rabbi (27 page)

Since the Arkansas mountains could not be visited from Massachusetts over long week ends and Hartford was only two hours away from the Wellesley campus, Deborah Marcus had gone home to Connecticut with Leslie Rawlins half a dozen times during their three-year friendship. At a New Year's party in Cambridge during their senior year, while kissing the man she loved and simultaneously on another level of consciousness worrying whether her parents would like him, Deborah had conceived the idea that Leslie could accompany her to Mineral Springs during their spring vacation, to lend her moral support while she told her mother and father about Mort.

Five weeks later, toweling her long bronze hair in the shower room of the deserted dormitory on a Saturday night when she should have had a date but didn't, Leslie noted that someone had blocked up the toilet again, causing it to overflow. This circumstance, although hardly a rare one, enraged her sufficiently to make a break in routine eminently attractive, and the next morning, while sleepily handing sections of the Boston Sunday
Herald
back and forth between their beds, she told her roommate that she would go with her to the Ozarks.

“Oh, Leslie!” Deborah stretched and yawned, then smiled radiantly. She was a large-boned girl, slightly topheavy, with pretty brown hair and dark features that were plain until she smiled.

“Will we have Passover?” Leslie asked.

“With all the trimmings. My mother's even going to have a rabbi, this year. You'll be a real Jew by the time vacation's over.”

Ugh, Leslie thought. “Many are called but few are Chosen,” she said, rattling the comics.

Mineral Springs proved to be just that—three springs that bubbled out of the earth at the top of a hill, over which Nathan Marcus, Deborah's father, had built a bathhouse adjoining their small inn. A limited but regular clientele composed mostly of arthritic Jewish ladies from the large cities of the Midwest came to the inn annually for the waters, which smelled like rotten eggs and brimstone and tasted only slightly better than they smelled. But Nathan, a graying kewpie doll of a man, assured the city folks with great sincerity that the waters contained sulphur, lime, iron, and other things that would cure anything from sciatica to puppy love, and the ladies were always certain that their pains were fewer following a ten-minute immersion. Anything that smelled that bad, they remarked to him archly and often, had to be good for you.

“Temperature of the springs is going up,” Nathan told the young rabbi as they sat on the lawn in wooden-slat chairs with Deborah and Sarah, Nathan's wife. Leslie, wearing jeans and a blouse, lay on a blanket at their feet, gazing into the meadow and woodland that fell away below them in the dusk.

“How long has the temperature been rising?” the rabbi asked. He looked a little like Henry Fonda, Leslie decided, but not as big in the shoulders as he might be, and somewhat thinner. He needed a haircut dreadfully. When she had seen him yesterday for the first time, climbing out of that dirty station wagon wearing high boots and rumpled clothes that had never seen a dry cleaners from their looks, she had thought that he was some kind of mountain man, a farmer or a trapper. But now he wore a sports coat and slacks and he looked more
acceptable and just as interesting. Only, the hair was too long.

“Been going up every year for six years, about half a degree annually. Up to seventy-three degrees now.”

“What is it that warms the water up?” she said lazily, looking up at them. He could be Italian. Or Spanish, she thought, or even Black Irish.

“There are several theories. Maybe way underground the water is meeting molten rock or hot gases. Or some chemical reaction down below may be heating the water. Or radioactivity.”

“Wouldn't it be nice if the water became real hot,” Sarah Marcus said hopefully.

“Make us rich as kings. Nothing like that anywhere between here and way out to Hot Springs. And the government owns those. With hot mineral water on our ground, this would be
some
health resort. As it is, you have to heat the water before these damn women will get into it. Don't know why. Over two hundred years ago the Indians were using these springs to cure whatever was wrong with 'em. Quapaw tribe. Used to camp here for a couple of weeks every summer, I'm told.”

“What finally happened to them?” his daughter asked innocently.

“Died out, mostly.” He frowned at her. “Got to take the temperature,” he said, and got up and walked away.

Sarah was shaking with laughter. “Oh, you mustn't tease your father,” she said to Deborah. She pushed herself out of the chair. “They didn't ship out enough matzo meal. If we're going to have matzo-meal pancakes tomorrow, I'd better crumble up a lot of matzos.”

“I'll come and help you,” Deborah said.

“No, you stay here with the other young people. I don't need any help.”

“I want to talk to you.” She rose. “See you later,” she said, and she winked to Leslie.

When they were gone the girl on the ground chuckled. “Her mother wanted her to stay with you. Mrs. Marcus is a real matchmaker, isn't she? But her daughter's engaged. I imagine that's what Deb is going to tell her now, while they're sitting there making matzo crumbs.”

“Wow,” he said. He took a cigarette and handed it to her, then took one himself and struck his lighter. “Who's the lucky man?”

“His name is Mort Beerman. He's a graduate student in architecture at M.I.T. He's coming here in a couple of days. They're sure to like him.”

“How do you know?”

“He's very nice. And he's Jewish. Deb has told me several times that they feel guilty and afraid about having raised her out here, away from young Jews.” She rose from the blanket, rubbing her goose-fleshed arms. When he took off his coat she allowed him to place it around her shoulders without thanking him. She sat in the chair next to his, the one Deborah had sat in, tucking her legs under her.

“It must be hard for you here,” she said. “There can't be many Jewish girls around.”

From the kitchen of the inn ripped a short scream, followed by a delighted babbling.

“
Mazel tov,
” Michael said, and the girl laughed.

“No,” he said, “there aren't many Jewish girls here. There aren't any the right age for dating.”

Her eyes mocked him. “What is the word you people use? For a gentile female?”

“We people? You mean
shickseh?
”

“Yes.” She paused. “Am I a
shickseh?
Is that the word you think of when you look at me?”

Their glances locked. They stared at one another for a long time. Her face was pale in the gathering darkness and he noticed the smooth flesh planes under her high cheekbones, and her mouth, full-lipped but not slack, perhaps a little too large for beauty.

“Yes, I guess it is,” he said.

He left after the
seder
the next day, not intending to return to the Marcus inn for four or five weeks. But three days later he found himself turning the car back in the direction of Mineral Springs. He tried to tell himself that he was curious to see Mort Beerman and then he grew angry and thought to hell with excuses, I haven't had a real day off since I began this crazy hillbilly existence, or talked to a woman like a human being instead of a rabbi. Anyhow, maybe she had a boy friend who was driving up with Beerman or perhaps she had already cut her visit short.

But when he got to the inn she was still there and there was
no boy friend in sight, only Beerman. He had thinning hair and a sense of humor and a second-hand Buick, and the proud Marcuses had made him their son upon introduction. That night Leslie and Michael played bridge against the engaged couple, and Michael bid very badly, even getting his counting all mixed up, but nobody cared because they were drinking good brandy that Nathan Marcus had brought up out of his cellar, and laughing a great deal about things they couldn't recall an hour later.

Next morning when he appeared for breakfast, the girl was eating alone. She was wearing a cotton skirt and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that made him look away as if by reflex.

“Morning. Where is everybody?”

“Hi. Mrs. Marcus is training a new housekeeper. Mr. Marcus is off in the pickup, buying vegetables.”

“And your hostess and her beau?”

“They vant to be ah-lone,” she whispered.

He grinned. “Can't say that I blame them.”

“Not at all.” She applied herself to her grapefruit.

“Hey. Would you like to go fishin'?”

“Really?”

“Sure. I've been giving Hebrew lessons to a little boy and he's been giving fishing lessons to me. It's opened up a whole new world.”

“I'd love to.”

“Fine.” He threw another brief glance at her blouse. “Better wear old clothes. In places this country's rough as a cob, as we people say.”

He drove slowly toward Big Cedar Hill, making one stop at a river landing to buy a bucket of chub shiners. He had rolled all the windows down, and the warm spring air, exciting with the smell of melted ice, poured over them. The girl had changed into sneakers, jeans, and an old gray sweatshirt. Sitting beside him she yawned and stretched, grunting in unashamed pleasure.

He drove over the suspension bridge and then parked. She carried a blanket and he took the bait and the fishing rod, walking after her along the narrow path that followed the stream-cut gulley. The path was lined with flowering shrubs, heavy with small red blossoms and larger white ones. Her jeans were faded
from repeated washing until some of the threads were almost white, and they were very tight; he could imagine her wearing them while hunched over the handlebars of a bicycle, riding around the campus. The dappled sun set off little lights in her hair.

They followed the path until the gulley's sides leveled off and disappeared and the river widened and slowed in tempo, then finally they found a spot and spread the blanket on a grassy bluff overlooking a deep, clear pool at the foot of a riffle caused by drift logs. She watched in silence as he palmed a shiner from the bucket and plunged the hook in one side of its body and out the other, careful to place the hook above the spinal column so the bait would stay alive.

“Does that hurt the minnow?”

“I don't know.” He swung it out into the center of the pool and they watched it for a few moments as it wriggled deeper, to where the water was slightly green and cold-looking and they could no longer see it.

A blossom floated at the water's edge and she leaned over the bluff to pick it up. Her sweatshirt rode up, revealing two inches of lower-back flesh and the first sweet spreading hint of hips above the top of her beltless jeans, then dropped back as she sat up holding the dripping flower, large and creamy-white but with one of its four petals broken. “What is it?” she asked, and looked at it with wonder when he told her it was dogwood.

“My father used to tell me stories about the dogwood,” she said.

“What kind of stories?”

“Religious ones. It was dogwood from which the Cross was fashioned. My father is a minister. Congregational.”

“That's nice.” He tugged experimentally on the line.

“That's what you think,” she said. “He was my minister, just as he was everybody's, but he was so busy serving God and the people he never found time to be a father. If you ever have a daughter, Rabbi, watch out for that.”

He started to reply but then he held up his hand and pointed to the floating line that was beginning to disappear beneath the surface, a few feet at a time, tugged by something unseen. He stood, reeling hard, and the fish broke the water, a good brassy-green fish about a foot long with a white belly and a broad tail
that it walked on twice before shaking off the line and disappearing in the pool. He reeled in. “Hit it too soon and forgot to set the hook. My teacher would be ashamed.”

She watched him rebait and cast. “I'm almost glad,” she said. “If I tell you something will you laugh?”

He shook his head.

“From the time I was fourteen until my senior year in high school, I was a vegetarian. I just decided that it was wicked to eat living things.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“I didn't, really. But I began to go out with boys and a whole crowd of us would go out for dinner all the time and people would eat steak and I would munch salads and the smell would drive me out of my mind. So finally I ate meat, too. But I still hate the thought of living things suffering.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand. But you'd better hope that
that
living thing bites again, or one of his cousins. Because that fish is your lunch.”

“Didn't you bring us any other lunch?” she asked.

He shook his head again.

“Is there a restaurant around?”

“Nope.”

“My God,” she said, “you're crazy. Suddenly I'm famished.”

“Here, you try,” he said, handing her the rod. She stared into the water.

“Kind is a funny name for a rabbi, isn't it?” she said after a while.

He shrugged.

“I mean, it's not very Jewish.”

“It used to be Rivkind. My father changed it when I was a little boy.”

“I like originals. I like Rivkind better.”

“So do I.”

“Why don't you change it back?”

“I'm used to it. That would be just as silly as his changing it in the first place, wouldn't it?”

She smiled. “I understand what you mean.” About two feet of the floating line went under suddenly and she placed her hand on his arm. But it was a false alarm, nothing else happened.

“It must be very uncomfortable being Jewish, far worse than being a vegetarian,” she said, “with all those people hating you
and knowing about the death camps and the ovens and all that.”

“If you're in the ovens or a concentration camp, yes, it must be uncomfortable,” he said. “Outside, anywhere else, it can be marvelous or I imagine it can be uncomfortable if you let it, if you let people ruin a good day for example by talking when they should be concentrating on filling their beautiful but hungry and rumbling bellies.”