The Rabbi (58 page)

But the blue-and-white car had made a right turn here. He saw it two short blocks away, just beginning to move as a red light turned to green.

He didn't dare jump his own red light; the traffic was heavy.

When the light changed he slid the car around the corner with wheels spinning, like a teen-ager in a hotrod. There was a small hill and he didn't see the other car until he topped the rise, and then he saw it just making a left turn, and when he got to the corner he made the turn and then drove very fast, faster than he had ever driven in the city, weaving in and out of traffic.

Four or five blocks down he was lucky; they were stopped for another light and he pulled up short three cars behind them.

“Leslie!” he shouted as he got out. He ran to their car and hammered on her window.

But when she turned around, it was the wrong face. It was even the wrong coat, cut differently, a slightly different shade, with big gilt buttons where Leslie's were smaller and black. She rolled down the window. She and the man stared at him. They didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I thought you were somebody else.”

He went back to his car and got in just as the light changed. The blue-and-white Chevrolet went straight ahead and Michael whipped his car into a U-turn. He slowly drove back the way he had come, trying to retrace the exact route, but when he had made all the turns there was no sign of the funeral procession.

But pretty soon he came to a cemetery and he swung the car through the gates.

It was a large cemetery, laid out in blocks formed by grids of road, and he drove in one direction on some of the roads and
in the other direction on some of the others, trying to catch sight of the funeral. The roads were ploughed and well-sanded.

But all he could see were gravestones, no people.

Then he noticed a
Mogen Doved
. And another, and he slowed the car and read some of the inscriptions.

Israel Salitsky, Feb. 2, 1895–June 23, 1947.

Jacob Epstein, Sept. 3, 1901–Sept. 7, 1962.

Bessie Kahn, Aug. 17, 1897–Feb. 12, 1960, A Good Mother.

Oy, have you got the wrong cemetery!

He sat there, wanting to give up and go home. But if she were there, at the graveside?

He drove down one more block of graves and then there was an old man sitting there in a long brown coat and with a black stocking cap over his ears, on a metal folding chair next to one of the graves. Michael stopped the car near him.

“
Ah guten tag
.”

The man nodded, peering over horn-rimmed glasses that rode low on his nose.

“Grace Cemetery. How would I get there?”

“The one for
skotzim
, that's right next door. This is B'nai B'rith.”

“Is there a gate connecting the two?”

He shrugged, pointing forward. “Maybe at the end.” He blew on his hands, which were bare.

Michael hesitated. Why was the old man sitting here, next to the grave? He couldn't bring himself to ask. His gloves were next to him on the seat of the car. Not at all intending to, he picked them up and held them out the window.

The old man looked at them suspiciously. Finally he took them and put them on.

“It's going to be warmer tomorrow,” Michael said, furious at himself.

“
Gott tsedahnken
.”

He started the car and drove. There were graves on both sides of the road as far as the eye could see; it was a limitless world of graves, he felt like some kind of motor-age
molach ah mohviss
, the angel of death.

Then finally he was approaching the cemetery's end. There was a roadway and a cyclone fence and fifty feet on the other side of the fence he saw the funeral party standing with bowed heads, preparing to bury his father-in-law.

He stopped the car. There didn't appear to be a gate. Did they need an unclimbable fence to keep the dust and the souls from mingling? he asked himself furiously.

He was certain that if he turned the car around and sought to go all the way back out the front gate of B'nai B'rith Cemetery and then in through the front gate of Grace Cemetery, the funeral would be over before he found it again.

He drove the car along the road that ran alongside the fence. On the other side were graves and an occasional mausoleum. He stopped the car as close to the fence as possible next to a very impressive granite crypt and got out. The funeral was hidden by monuments and a small rise. He clambered uncertainly onto the hood of the car and then onto the roof, from which it was possible for him to pull himself onto and over the top of the fence, feeling the dull metal points of the heavy wire bruising his body through his clothing.

He had torn nothing, he noted with satisfaction. There was snow on the roof of the crypt. He walked through it to the far side and looked over the edge thoughtfully. The ground fell away and the drop was at least eight feet. But there seemed to be no other way to get down.

Geronimo!

He landed clumsily, like a dropped log, his heels sliding out from under him on the soft snow and sending him sprawling on his back. When he opened his eyes he saw behind him and overhead the stone-chiseled inscription on the large tomb.

Nothing appeared to be broken. He stood and tried to dust the snow from his clothing. There were wet lumps of cold down his neck.

I beg your pardon, he told the Buffingtons.

There was no path through the deep snow to the ploughed lane within the cemetery; he collected more snow in his shoes and in his pants cuffs, then he was able to walk down the lane to where the funeral was being held.

He stood at the fringe of the crowd. There were a lot of
people. She would be standing at the grave, he realized. He shoved his way forward.

“Sorry . . . Excuse me . . .”

A woman glared at him.

“Member of the family,” he whispered.

But the people were standing too close together, he couldn't get through.

He could hear the minister reciting the benediction,
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his son Jesus Christ our Lord. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you, and remain with you always. Amen
. But he could not see which of the three ministers it was, or anyone else near the grave, and he realized that he might as well have stayed in the B'nai B'rith Cemetery.

He had a sudden mental picture of himself standing with his nose poking through the wire of the fence watching the funeral, a separate but equal mourner, and in spite of himself and to his horror he felt it as if it were a gathering gas bubble: a desire to laugh, an uncontrollable urge to laugh, a necessity to shake with mirth while only few feet away his father-in-law was about to be placed in the ground. He dug his fingernails into the skinned flesh of his palm, but then heads in front of him began to move and he could see that the minister was the young one. There was nobody standing near him whom Michael knew.

Oh God, he shouted silently.

Leslie, where are you?

 

45

When she got off the train at Grand Central Station she walked directly to the hotel and got a room that was smaller than the room she had had at the Woodborough YWCA and not nearly as clean, with half-filled set-ups and glasses all over the place and
dirty towels on the bathroom floor. The bellboy said he would have somebody take care of it right away. But nearly an hour went by and nobody came and she grew tired of the mess, so she called the manager and told him that at fourteen dollars and seventy cents a day she felt entitled to a clean room. A maid came right up.

She had dinner alone at Hector's Cafeteria, across from Radio City. It was still a decent place to eat a lonely meal. A man tried to pick her up while she was eating her dessert. He was a polite man, not at all repulsive-looking although probably a bit younger than she, but she ignored him until she had finished the last of her chocolate pudding, and then she walked away. He began to follow her and she lost her patience. There was a policeman sitting at a table near the door dunking a cruller into his coffee and she stopped and quietly asked him for the correct time, looking over at the man. He turned around and walked quickly up the stairs to the second floor of the restaurant.

She went back to the hotel, still angry but consciously flattered, and went to bed early. The walls were very thin and in the room next door she heard a couple making love. They made love for a long time and the woman was very noisy. She kept making shrill little cries. The man made no sound at all, but there was the noise from the woman and the bed and she found it very hard to go to sleep. When she finally slept toward morning it was for a very little while; the noises woke her again at about five o'clock and there was nothing to do but listen.

But it grew light outside; the sun came up over the city and she felt better. She opened the window and leaned on the sill and watched the New Yorkers begin to crowd the sidewalks far below. She had forgotten how exciting Manhattan could be, and it made her want to get out and see it. She got dressed and went downstairs and had breakfast in a Child's and read
The New York Times
, pretending she had a job in an office to go to. After breakfast she walked down Forty-Second Street to the old building but the magazine wasn't there any more. She looked it up in the telephone book inside the Times Tower and she saw that it was on Madison Avenue, and then remembered reading some time back that it had moved. There was nobody still working there whom she knew well enough to look up, anyway.

She walked, breathing in through the nose and out through
the mouth and seeing things. It was just as it had been on the campus; buildings that she remembered were missing and new buildings had been built in their places.

When she came to 60th Street she turned west automatically. Long before she came to the roominghouse she was looking for it, wondering whether she would recognize it, and she did right away; the brick was freshly painted but it was the same shade of red. There was a
Rooms for Rent
sign on the door and she went up the stairs and knocked on the super's door and he sent her to Apartment 1-B, where the landlord lived. He turned out to be a skinny middle-aged man with a freckled bald head and a scraggly, dirty-looking gray mustache, the ends of which he chewed in the corners of his mouth.

“May I see an efficiency?” she asked.

He led her up the stairs. When they reached the second story she asked if 2-C might be vacant, but he said it was not. “Why are you interested in 2-C?” he asked, looking straight at her for the first time.

“I lived in it, a long time ago,” she said.

“Oh.” He continued to climb stairs and she followed him. “I can give you a room on Three. Just the same as 2-C.”

“Whatever happened to the woman who used to be my landlady?” she asked.

“What might her name have been?”

But she couldn't remember.

“I don't know,” he said indifferently. “I bought this property four years back from a fellow named Prentiss. Owns a print shop down in the Village somewhere.” He led her down the hall; its walls still were painted that incredibly ugly dark brown.

She had made up her mind that she would spend the rest of the week living here and thinking about how it was when she had lived here previously, but when he opened the door and she saw the drabness and the discomfort, it overwhelmed her. She made a show of looking the place over, wondering how she ever had endured such ugliness.

“I'll think it over and let you know,” she said finally. But it was a mistake; she should have asked what the rent was before telling him that.

“You're a fussy woman,” he said, chewing his mustache. She said good-by and, without waiting for him, went quickly down the stairs and out of the building.

She went to a clam bar for lunch and had shrimp and dark beer, then she spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, thinking with happy scorn of the man on the Wellesley campus. She had dinner in a small French restaurant and then went to a bright and brassy musical. That night the couple she had come to think of as The Honeymooners were at it again. This time the man spoke quick, low words while the woman sounded her cries, but Leslie couldn't hear what the words were.