The Rabbi (31 page)

“Oh.”

“Give me your coat,” she said, but as she took it her features melted and she dropped the coat and began to cry with such intensity that he became frightened.

She lay down on the couch and turned her face to the wall. “Go away,” she said. “Please.”

But he picked up his coat and threw it over the top of a chair and then he stood and watched her. She had drawn up her knees and she was jiggling back and forth with insistent rhythm, as if trying to rock the pain to sleep.

“Can't you take something?” he asked. “Aspirin?”

“Codeine.”

The bottle was in the medicine chest and he made her swallow one of the tablets with some water and then he sat at the foot of the couch. In a short time the codeine took effect and she stopped jiggling. His hand touched her foot and it was cold. “You should wear slippers,” he said, taking a foot between his hands and kneading.

“That feels so good,” she said. “Your hands are warm. Better than a hot water bottle.” He continued to massage her feet.

“Put your hand on my stomach,” she said.

He moved up on the couch and slipped his hand into the robe.

“That's nice,” she said sleepily.

Through the cloth of the pajama bottoms his hand felt the smoothness of the skin of her belly, trisected by two harness straps. The tip of his middle finger lightly recognized that the well of her umbilicus was astonishingly wide and deep. She shook her head.

“Tickles.”

“I'm sorry. Thy navel is like a round goblet, wherein no mingled wine is wanting.”

She smiled. “I don't want to be your friend,” she murmured.

“I know.”

He sat looking at her long after she slept. Finally he removed his hand from her stomach and took the blanket from the closet and covered her, wrapping her feet well. Then he drove back to Queens and packed his bag.

At breakfast the next morning he told his parents that a congregation emergency had forced him to cut his vacation short. Abe cursed and offered him money. Dorothy complained and packed him a shoebox full of chicken sandwiches and a thermos of tea, wiping her eyes with her apron.

He pointed the station wagon southwest and drove steadily, eating the sandwiches when he got hungry but making no stops until four
P.M
. when he called Leslie from the telephone booth of a roadside diner.

“Where are you?” she asked when the chime of the last dropping coin had died away.

“Virginia. I think Staunton.”

“Are you running away?”

“I need time to think.”

“What is there to think about?”

“I love you,” he said roughly. “But I like what I am. I don't know if I can throw it away. It's very precious to me.”

“I love you, too,” she said. They were silent.

“Michael?”

“I'm here,” he said gently.

“Would marrying me mean definitely that you would have to throw it away?”

“I think it would. Yes, it will.”

“Don't do anything yet, Michael. Just wait.”

He was silent again. “You don't want to marry me?” he said finally.

“I do. God, if you knew how much. But I have some ideas and I have to think them out. Don't ask me any questions and don't do anything hasty just now. Simply wait and write to me every day and I'll write to you. All right?”

“I love you,” he said. “I'll call you on Tuesday. Seven o'clock.”

“I love
you
.”

On Monday morning Leslie clipped the Boston and the Philadelphia newspapers and then she went to the magazine's library and withdrew six fat brown manila envelopes marked
JUDAISM
. She read the clippings in the envelopes during her lunch hour and that evening when she went home she took with her a bundle of selected clippings which she had wrapped in an elastic band and placed in her purse. On Tuesday morning she clipped the Chicago papers and then asked Phil Brennan, her boss, if she could have a couple of hours off to take care of some personal business. When he nodded she put on her hat and coat and took the elevator downstairs. In Times Square she waited under the billboard that blew real smoke rings, studying faces and trying to guess which ones were and which ones were not, until a Broadway bus came along and then she rode uptown until the bus came to the block in which was located the funny-looking little Jewish church; no, synagogue.

 

23

Max Gross looked at the girl in her stylish clothing and with her sleek legs and bold American eyes and he felt a surge of annoyance. Only four times during his entire rabbinate at
Shaarai Shomayim
had
goyim
sought him out and asked him to transform them into Jews. Each time, he reflected, the request had been
made as if he were someone who could wave his hands in the air and—pouf!—in a cloud of smoke change the facts of their births. He had never seen fit to undertake a conversion.

“What do you see among the Jews that makes you want to be one of us?” he asked coldly. “Don't you realize that Jews are persecuted and alone in the universe? Don't you know that as individuals we are despised by the gentile and that as a people we are cut asunder?”

Leslie stood and collected her gloves and purse. “I didn't expect you to accept me,” she said. She reached for her coat.

“Why not?”

The old man's eyes were bright and piercing, like her father's. The thought of the Reverend John Rawlins triggered relief that this rabbi was sending her away. “Because I don't think I could
feel
like a Jew. Not if I lived a million years,” she said. “It's inconceivable to me that anyone could ever really want to harm me, to kill my future children, to lock me away from the world. I myself have had certain prejudices against the Jews; I must admit this. I feel unworthy to join a people who bear such a burden of mass hatred.”

“You feel
unworthy?
”

“Yes.”

Rabbi Gross stared. “Who told you to say that?” he asked.

“I don't know what you mean.”

He stood up heavily and walked to the ark. Pulling aside the blue curtains and pushing open the sliding wooden door, he revealed two velvet-encased Torahs. “In these scrolls are the laws,” he said. “We do not seek recruits to Judaism; we discourage them. It is written in the Talmud that rabbis must say specific things when apostates from other religions seek us out. The Torah says the rabbi must warn the gentile about the Jew's fate in this world. The Torah also is specific about another detail. If the gentile in effect answers ‘I know all this yet I feel unworthy to be a Jew' he is to be accepted immediately for conversion.”

Leslie sat down. “You mean you will take me?” she asked faintly.

He nodded. Ah, she thought, what can I do now?

She met with him on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He talked and she listened, more carefully than she had listened in her most difficult lecture course at college, asking no idle questions,
interrupting only when it was vital to get his explanation.

He outlined for her the fundamental principles of the religion. “I will not teach the language,” he said. “New York is full of Hebrew teachers. If you wish, go to one of them.” In
The Times
she saw an advertisement which brought her to the 92nd Street YMHA, and that took care of Wednesday evenings. Her Hebrew teacher was a worried-looking young Ph.D. candidate at Yeshiva University. His name was Mr. Goldstein and he ate his supper in the cafeteria below the classroom, always the same thing, she noticed, a cream cheese-and-olive on toast and a cup of black coffee. Total: thirty cents. The cuffs of his shirt were frayed and she knew that his supper was modest because he couldn't afford more. Her own well-filled tray by comparison always seemed gluttony to her, and for a couple of weeks she tried cutting down, but the class lasted two hours and then she went to another lecture down the hall, this one on Jewish history, and she found that unless she ate well she became dizzy with hunger.

Mr. Goldstein took his teaching seriously and the evening students were giving up valuable spare time, so they were well-motivated. One of the students, a middle-aged woman, came to only one session and then dropped out. The other fourteen members of the class learned the thirty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet in a week. By the third week they were taking turns saying aloud the silly short sentences of their limited Hebrew vocabularies.

“
Rabi ba
,” Leslie read, and translated, “My rabbi is coming,” with such exultation that the teacher and class stared.

But when it was again her turn to read aloud, the exercise was:
Mi rabi? Ahbah rabi
. “Who is my rabbi? My father is my rabbi,” she translated. She sank quickly into her chair, and when she again glanced at the book it was as though she were looking at the page through milk glass.

Rabbi Gross was not an old man, she realized one evening as she listened to his voice tell her about idols and warn her that the Christian finds it extremely difficult to visualize a God without an image. But he looked and acted old. Moses himself could not possibly have appeared sterner. Now, as he glanced over her shoulder at her notebook, his mouth tightened.

“Never write the name of God. Always write G–d. This is
very important. It is one of the commandments that His name should not be taken in vain.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “There are so many rules.” Her eyes filled. He looked away in disgust and resumed his pacing, his voice droning on, while the knuckles of his right hand gently slapped the palm of his left hand behind his back.

When she had been studying with him for thirteen weeks he told her one evening that she would be converted on the following Tuesday; unless, he suggested delicately, for any reason she could not undergo immersion in the ritual baths on that day.

“Already?” she asked wonderingly. “But I haven't studied for very long. I know so little.”

“Young woman, I did not say that you were a learned scholar. But you have absorbed enough information to become a Jew. An ignorant Jew. If you want to be an educated Jew, that is something you will have to arrange by yourself as time goes on.” His eyes softened and the tone of his voice altered. “You are a very hard-working girl. You did well.”

He gave her the address of the
mikva
and some preliminary instructions. “Do not wear jewelry. No bandages, not even a corn plaster. Your nails should be cut short. Nothing, not even a wisp of cotton in your ear, should keep the waters from touching every outer cell of your body.”

By Friday she had a continually nervous stomach. She didn't know how long the ceremonies would take, so she decided to plan on being away from the office the entire day.

“Phil,” she said to Brennan, “I need Tuesday off.”

He looked at her wearily and then at the pile of unclipped papers. “Holy Mother, our ass is dragging as it is.”

“It's important.”

He knew all the important reasons why female researchers needed the day off. “Grandmother's funeral?”

“No, I'm becoming a Jew and Tuesday is my conversion.”

He opened his mouth to say something and then began to roar. “Jesus,” he said, “I was going to say no, but how can I cope with a mind like that?”

Tuesday was gray. She had allowed too much time and she arrived fifteen minutes early at the synagogue where the
mikva
was located. The rabbi was a middle-aged man, bearded like
Rabbi Gross but much gentler and very cheerful. He showed her a seat in his office.

“I was just having coffee,” he said. “Let me give you a cup.”

She started to refuse but then she smelled the coffee when he poured and it was good. When Rabbi Gross arrived he found them sitting and chatting like old friends. Another rabbi arrived a moment later, a younger man, unbearded.

“We will be witnesses to your immersion,” Rabbi Gross said. He saw her face and laughed. “We will stay outside, of course. With the door open just a crack. So we can hear the splash when you enter the water.”

They conducted her downstairs. The
mikva
was located in a one-story addition at the rear of the synagogue. In a dressing room they told her to make herself comfortable and to wait for someone named Mrs. Rubin. Then the rabbis went away.

Leslie wanted to smoke but she wasn't quite sure that it would be all right. The room was very depressing. It was small, with a wooden floor that creaked when you walked and a small braided rug that had been thrown in front of the little wooden dresser that stood against the wall. The dresser supported a mirror that had little yellow hemorrhages in the lower right corner and light blue hemorrhages in the upper right corner; it gave back a wavy, distorted image when she looked into it, like the mirrors in an amusement-park fun house. The only other furniture was a white-painted kitchen table and one kitchen chair, which she sat on. She was memorizing the nicks in the surface of the table when Mrs. Rubin came.