The Rabbi (59 page)

The next day she spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. The day after that she wandered in and out of galleries. She paid sixty dollars for a painting by a man named Leonard Gorletz. She had never heard the name before but she wanted the painting for Michael. It was a portrait of a girl with a kitten. The girl had black hair and didn't look like Rachel, but you could feel Rachel's brand of vulnerable happiness when you looked at the way she was looking at the cat, and Leslie knew that Michael would like the picture.

The following morning she got to see the Honeymooners. She was giving her hair a final touch with the comb before going down to breakfast and she heard their door open and then close, and the sound of their voices, and she dropped her comb and grabbed her handbag and went out after them. She was very disappointed when she saw them. She had imagined them to be beautiful animals. The man was pudgy and soft-looking, with dandruff on the collar of his blue suit, and the woman was thin and nervous with a sharp little beak like a sparrow. Nevertheless, in the elevator all the way down to the lobby Leslie took admiring little peeks, remembering her remarkable range and versatility of soprano expression.

For the next two days she went shopping by herself and for herself. She bought several things she needed and she window-shopped for a great many things she didn't desire but were enjoyable to look at. She bought an English tweed skirt for Rachel at Lord & Taylor and a thick blue cashmere sweater for Max at Weber & Heilbroner.

But that night things took a subtle shift. She couldn't sleep and she had become sick of the four small walls of the hotel room. It was the sixth day and perhaps subconsciously she already had had her fill of New York. To top it off, there was no sound of passion from the honeymooners; they had checked out and abandoned her. In their place was someone who gargled and flushed
the john a lot and used an electric razor and turned the television up very loud.

Early in the morning it began to rain and she stayed late in bed, half-dozing, until hunger drove her out. The entire wet afternoon was consumed in a place called Ronald's, a kind of matron's Playboy Club off Columbus Circle where customers went from sauna to masseur to hairdresser in particolored muumuus with big fluffy bunny tails that wiggled with their behinds. She baked at 190° F. while the Boston Pops played “Fiddle-Faddle” and then a Marchessa de Sade with muscles in her fingers kneaded and slapped and pinched her. A girl named Theresa gave her a shampoo. While a pink cream soaked into her facial pores a girl named Hélène gave her a manicure and a girl named Doris gave her a pedicure, both at the same time.

When she left the salon the rain had tapered off but still fell lightly, almost a mist. The Broadway lights threw shivering streaks on passing cars and the surface of the street. She opened her umbrella and walked downtown, feeling rested and very attractive. Where to have dinner was the vital question. Her mood called for a very fancy restaurant and then suddenly it didn't; it seemed silly to go through the business of waiting to be seated at a table and ordering and eating a large meal all by herself. She stopped under a pulsing slab of neon and peered through the wet window at a white-hatted psuedo-chef building a mountain of yellow egg in a pan, trying to decide whether to go inside. Instead she walked another half a block and entered a Horn & Hardart's. She swapped a dollar bill for a handful of change and collected tomato juice, vegetarian vegetable plate, Parker House rolls and jello. The cafeteria was crowded and she walked by table after table until she came to a two-chair table occupied by a fat man with a cheerful Stubby Kaye sort of a face, reading the
Daily News
over his coffee while his bulging brief case rested against his legs. She unloaded the tray and set it on the wagon of a passing busboy and then discovered she had forgotten her coffee. The coffee robot was only a few steps away and she walked to it and drew a cup that was a bit too full and carried it carefully back to the table.

Someone had propped a leaflet against her juice glass.

She picked it up and read the mimeographed lettering on the title page,
THE REAL ENEMY
.

She started to read it as she sipped her tomato juice.

The real enemy that faces America now is the Jew-Communist conspiracy to conquer us by diluting our white Christian race with the blood of an inferior and cannibalistic black race
.

Jews have long controlled our banks and propaganda media through the machinations of their international cartels. Now their sly sights have been set on education, in order to brainwash our children at a time when their minds are most malleable
.

What do you want for your children?

Do you know the number of kike communists teaching in the Manhattan public schools?

She dropped it on the table. “Does this belong to you?” she asked the fat young man.

He looked at her for the first time.

She picked it up and held it out to him. “Did you see anybody leave this?”

“Lady, I was just reading my paper. Jesus.” He picked up his brief case and walked away. One strap of the brief case was undone. Had it been that way before? She tried to remember, but couldn't. She looked at the people at the nearby tables, all of them ignoring her, eating, feeding blank faces. One of them? Anybody could have dropped the leaflet.

Why? she asked silently, speaking to the featureless face. What do you want? What do you gain? Disappear and leave us alone. Go into the forest and hold Black Masses at midnight. Poison dogs. Strangle small furry things. Walk into the sea. Or better, fall into a hole and let it close over you, clean earth.

What do you want for your children?

To begin with, I want them to have room to breathe, she thought. Just to breathe.

But you don't get it for them by hiding in a hotel room, she told herself. You begin by going home.

But there remained a thing important for her to do, she realized. There was no similarity between her father and the person who had written this poison. She had to look into her father's eyes and answer the question he had asked her, in a way that would make him understand.

On the train next morning she tried to remember when she had last given her father a gift and she wanted very much to
give him something. When the train pulled into Hartford she got off and went to Fox's and bought a book by Reinhold Niebuhr. In the taxi on the way to Elm Street she saw from the copyright date that it was several years old and realized that her father probably had read it.

At the parsonage nobody answered her knock but the door wasn't locked.

“Hello?” she said.

An elderly man came out of her father's library, holding a clipboard and a pen. He had a lion's mane of white hair and wild grey brows.

“Is Mr. Rawlins here?” she asked.

“Here? No. Ah . . . You don't know?” He put his hand on her arm. “My child, Mr. Rawlins is dead.

“Here, here,” he said in a worried voice. She heard the book strike the floor and she felt him leading her to a chair.

Rather surprisingly, in a few minutes he left her. She could hear him moving about in the back part of the house and she got up and walked to the mantel and saw a replica of her right hand in plaster of paris. He must have used the wax as a mould, she thought. The man came back with two cups of steaming tea and they drank it slowly together; it was very good.

His name was Wilson. He was a retired minister and he was assembling her father's church records. “The kind of job they give to an old man,” he said. “I must say in this case it's no difficult chore.”

“He was very orderly,” she said.

She sat with her head back against the chair and her eyes closed. He left her alone again. But in a little while he asked whether he might drive her to the cemetery.

“Please,” she said.

When they got there he pointed out the grave but he waited in the car, for which she felt very grateful.

The earth was still new-looking and she stood there looking at it and trying to think of something to say that would tell her father how, in spite of everything, she had loved him. She could almost hear the sound of his voice singing a hymn and she sang along with him silently.

Abide with me; fast falls the even-tide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide

When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

On the fourth verse she almost faltered.

Hold Thou thy cross before my closing eyes;

Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies.

Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;

In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

But she sang it through; that had been the gift. Now, although it was too late to make him understand, she answered the question with the prayers she had been saying for her mother for eighteen years. “
Yisgadal v'yiskadash shmay rabo, b'ol'mo deevro hir'usay, v'yamleeh mal'husay
. . . .”

 

46

He had gone to bed the night before with the temperature at a chilly ten degrees, but when he awoke in the morning there had been a New England thaw. When he drove downtown the gutters were streams and the ground showed through the snow in shaggy brown patches, like holes in a blanket.

In the temple they gleaned nine men painfully, one by one the way it happened some mornings, and he finally had to call Benny Jacobs, the Brotherhood president, and ask him to come over and complete the
minyan
as a special favor to the rabbi. As always Jacobs came. He was the kind of person who made it easy for a man to be a rabbi, Michael thought. When he tried to thank him after the service, Jacobs brushed his thanks aside. “I'm going in to pick up the liquor for the temple New Year's party. Want anything special, Rabbi?”

He smiled. “I've had experience with your taste in alcohol. Whatever you get, Ben.”

In his study he saw that there were absolutely no appointments on the calendar and he left the temple and went home to
check the mail: bills and the Burpee seed catalogue. He escaped for a fine hour looking at the new vegetables and reading the mouth-watering promises before filling out his order blank the same way he had the year before. He lay on the living room couch for a little while listening to FM radio music and then the station meteorologist predicted that the temperature would go a few degrees higher before rapid cooling followed by a heavy snowfall late that afternoon. He had neglected to fertilize the garden the preceding fall and realized this might well be the only time it would be possible all winter. He changed into worn slacks and an old jacket and work gloves and put on his six-buckle arctics, then he drove to the supermarket and picked up half a dozen empty cardboard cartons. He had a long-standing arrangement with the owner of a turkey farm and he drove to the field where each year after the Thanksgiving and Christmas rushes the man built a mountain of bird droppings. The manure was weathered and fine, the consistency of sawdust, full of long white ghost-haunted feathers he knew would vanish beautifully into the garden earth. It was odorless at that temperature and all the insects that made the job unpleasant during the spring and fall had been winterkilled. He shoveled it into the cartons, careful to fill them so there would be no spillage in the back of the station wagon, which he had lined with newspapers. The sun was warm and he enjoyed the work in the beginning, but he knew from experience that he needed five trips with the car to carry enough fertilizer for the garden, and when he had hauled the third load back to the house and carried it by hand to the garden and dumped it the clouds were rolling in and it was cooler, so that he no longer sweated. By the time he drove into the driveway with the last load the snow had started, light flakes like small barley.

“Hey.” Max was home from school, and he came to the car and looked at his father's work clothes. “What are you doing?”

“Gardening,” said Michael, while the snow gathered on his lashes and brows. “Want to help?”

They carried the last of the cartons to the garden together and dumped them and Max went into the cellar and brought out the shovels and they began to spread the manure while the snowflakes grew larger, floating heavily through the gray air.

“Tomatoes like pumpkins,” Michael called as he threw a shovelful—swoosh!—and saw a yard-square skim of snow covered with a dark layer of fertilizer.

“Pumpkins big as tangerines,” Max said. Swoosh!

“Corn sweet as kisses.” Swoosh!

“Radishes full of worms. Squash covered with black sores.” Swoosh!

“Punk kid,” his father said. “You know I have a green thumb.”

“This stuff stains through the gloves?” Max said. They worked steadily until all the fertilizer was spread and Michael leaned on his shovel like the character in the old WPA cartoons and watched his son finish the job. The boy needed a haircut badly and his hands were chapped and red. Where were his gloves? He looked more like a farmer's son than a rabbi's, and Michael thought how in the spring he and Max would turn this under together and plant the seeds and wait like
kibbutzniks
for the first pale green spikes to push up through the enriched earth.