The Rabbi of Lud (12 page)

Edward Tober had been blind since birth.

Which might not, considering all the possible curses and combinations of curses, have been so bad. There’s leglessness and armlessness, hearing loss and a broad palette of the chronic and congenital that not only outruns, but will probably continue to outrun, however correct our priorities, strong our commitment or deep our pockets, however refined and elegant our solutions or frequent and prime-timed our telethons, our needs. And now we are up old Tober’s alley, on old Tober’s turf, somewhere along his twisted and complicated, infinitely long corridor and rich vein of troubles. There was just too damn much on Edward’s plate.

He had been born without a labyrinthine sense. He had, that is, not only none of the blind man’s comforting overcompensations but an additional and quite dreadful undercompensation with which he had to deal. He had perfect pitch, a keen, too keen, sense of smell, strength, a good heart, brains, common sense—all the attributes. Only a good sense of direction he did not have, or any sense of direction at all. He could not tell left from right, up from down, or even in from out. There he was, a loose cannon on the deck, apparently without the gift of gravity, unfixed as an astronaut. Thrown into a pool, or fallen into the sea, he would as likely swim to the bottom as to the top.

Because he was unable to see and had none of his labyrinthine senses, he couldn’t learn to knot his tie, or tie his shoes, or dress himself at all. He buttoned a shirt by chance and main force, sometimes actually pushing—he was strong—the buttons through the cloth. He forced both feet into the same pants leg, blew his ear in his handkerchief and wore his hat rakishly on his shoulder. He could never learn braille, or even turn on a radio. He wouldn’t be able to make love, of course, and I refuse to think about how he handled his bodily functions.

Yet Edward more than held his own in conversation, told delightful stories, had a sweet, equable disposition, and there was no one I knew whom I would rather go to for advice.

Shull.

Shull was the day, affable as sunshine. If Tober was driven to miserliness by his sense of the terrible consequences his death would bring to his handicapped son, Shull was hounded to earn by nothing more urgent than the pursuit of happiness. Not even happiness—pleasure. Though you couldn’t tell it from his behavior during the long hours of his working day, which, until you knew him better, would have seemed to you not only full but frantic—the two and sometimes three phone conversations he could conduct simultaneously, a telephone held like an earache between his inclined head and shoulder, and another in each hand, shouting orders to his chemicals supplier in Philly, discussing a floral arrangement with his nurseryman in Lud, solicitous of some broken-hearted widow on the other end of a third phone, and perhaps already catching the eye of some workman just then passing the open door to his office and signaling with nothing more than directions jabbed out with his chin not only where he wanted the workman to go but what he wanted him to do when he got there—even his stomach-knotting, ulcer-growing, stress-inducing activities a source of pleasure to him (as almost everything was that he could feel—a sore throat, a headache, an abscessed tooth, and his coffee and marble cake and two- and three-frappe lunches too), though he perfectly understood that what hurt him hurt him, was not, that is, good for him, and betrayed nerve endings that might just as well be used in a better cause than the destructive impulses and synapses of masochism. Understood, that is, that if he was to be a voluptuary, if he was to make his pleasures extend over a long lifetime—he was already sixty-one, the same age as Sonia, his partner’s wife—then he’d better knock it off, get right with his body. Periodically he gave up smoking, cut down on his drinking, traveled two to three times a year to the most expensive fat farms, had himself checked by important specialists, elected surgeries not covered by his health insurance, all the while balancing, even juggling, the golden means of moderation in all things, including his concern for his own health.

He spent what he earned. He could have been some dedicated, even obsessed, hobbyist or collector deliberately setting, despite its cost, a final treasure triumphantly into place in the collection. Yet he had no hobbies, no collection. His pleasure was pleasure, his pastime was fun.

He’d once purchased a big-ticket, luxury item from a mail-order catalogue and now he received catalogues from every mail-order house in the country. These retailers, whatever they sold, must have pictured him as some world-class yuppie and, indeed, the stuff he sent away for was exactly the sort of merchandise you might expect to see on the wish list of any upwardly mobile, spoiled-rotten kid in the land. He owned almost everything L.L. Bean and Sharper Image had to offer. Banana Republic sent him pith helmets and commando gear—sweaters, boots, compasses and flight jackets—from a dozen armies. He owned a Swedish submariner’s first-aid case, fuses and assorted makings that might have been used by the PLO. He owned an official knife from the Portuguese Fishing Fleet that he used to loosen knots though it was designed to fillet fish. He sent away for the best telescopes. He had an expensive home gym. He owned a robot. He purchased state-of-the-art Camcorders, audio equipment, edge-of-the-field cameras, rifles, Betamax machines, and alarm systems to protect all this shit. He gave elaborate luaus and liked to charter planes on New Year’s Eve and fly his friends to mystery destinations. He hired symphony musicians to entertain at his parties. They strolled among the guests and took requests like gypsies in a restaurant. He flew to Europe only if he could get reservations on the Concorde and, though he did none himself, at parties he would lay, with this tiny, special limited-edition sterling silver spoon beside it he’d purchased from the Franklin Mint, cocaine out on the coffee table as if it were fruit. His measurements were on file with half a dozen Jermyn Street shirtmakers and Savile Row tailors. A Brazilian bootmaker had lasts for his feet. He had season tickets to everything.

But oh, oh, infinite is the cash cost and list price of pleasure. There seemed no bottom to the bottom line. He was always strapped, as desperate as Tober to think up new ways to make the funeral home pay off, to parlay the other guy’s cancer and bad germs into cash flow, additional ready for the general fund, store and reserve, that hoarded hope-chest, war-chest treasury and nest-egg kitty, that protective cushion, call it what you will, that Tober wanted for the rainy day when he would be dead and Shull to tide him over until the weekend.

Because he was a ladies’ man, of course, a good-time Charlie, an actual out-and-out Lothario.

I never met a more romantic-looking sixty-one-year-old. In his camel’s-hair coat, brushed Borsalino, suckling lionskin gloves and soft Gucci shoes, he was the sharpest grandpa I’d ever seen. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d once been Rose Pickler’s and Naomi Shore’s lover.

“You see too much death in our business, Rabbi,” he’d told me. “Well, you know, not
too
much, I don’t mean
too
much, but all there is. I mean, what the hell, we don’t rent the land out for picnics, do we? We don’t use the organ for dances or pin corsages on the basic black. Jerry, Jerry,” he’d moaned, “we’re under the gun, we’re working at knifepoint here. I memento mori morning, noon and nighttime too. It’s all I ever think about. It makes me crazy and costs me money. Sure. Death makes me a big spender. It puts the glow in my cheeks and the stiff in my cock. Sure. Because I put a big day in at the office, all I’m good for is playing with my electric trains, trying on my new suits, easing the Jag out of my garage and putting the top down and taking her for a spin. I watch my weight, brush after every meal, and regard my pressure like I loved it. I’m aware of every organ, Rebbe. Not just my heart, lungs, guts and glands, but what covers them too, the hankie sticking up out of my breast pocket, the press in my pants. I’ll tell you something. It’s death made me cheat on my wife when she was alive. Because basically I’m a family man basically, or wanted to be, would have been. But you tell me, Goldkorn, you tell me—how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm? How, hey?”

“It ain’t easy for me to get girls,” he’d confessed another time. “Hell,” he said, “it ain’t easy for me to get full grown-up women. Pie bakers, widows, ladies with varicose in their veins, blue rinse in their hair, yellow in their underpants. It ain’t even the immorality of it, that they know I’m this only recently widowered old man. You know what it is? They know I’m a mortician. How? It ain’t the first thing I tell them. I think maybe they sniff it on my fingers.
Me,
who hasn’t personally handled a stiff since to tell you the truth I don’t even remember.
Handled?
Looked at in the casket even. Who can say? Maybe they smell the flowers on me, all that death grass. You think that don’t make a difference? You think so? I’m telling you, Rabbi Jerry, I drive these ladies to their
own
bank accounts! An evening with yours truly and they’re looking for the Neiman Marcus catalogue, the Henri Bendel. A night on the town with me and they’re circling the item, checking off the size, choosing out the color, turning down the page.”

“Hey, listen,” he said yet another time, “it isn’t as if I’m bringing you the news. You’re the rabbi here. You’re familiar with what goes on. Death’s your speciality, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know or haven’t thought about plenty. Only, the way I see it, with you it’s not so geferlech. There’s even something spiritual about it, some natural order business, God’s plan, that people like me don’t even think about. Sunrise, sunset. Whatever. But personally, and speaking strictly for myself, and given the nature of the business even, I’ve got to be thinking ‘Here today and gone somewhere else tomorrow.’ Hell, that
is
the way I think. It’s the way Tober thinks too, even if he comes at it from a different priority. So I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

“I
know
what’s on your mind,” I said.

“Rabbi, please,” he said, “give me a break. You know as well as I do it’s all in the details.”

“What’s up, then? What is it?”

“This AIDS business is doing me in. I don’t think I can handle it.”

“AIDS? What do you mean? Who’s got AIDS?”

“Not me. I don’t know, nobody. It’s a figure of speech, a sign of the times, just one more straw. I told you about the fingers, that maybe they sniff on me what I do? They go further. They flinch when I touch them. They’re thinking, you know, the blood. God
knows
what they think. But they do, they flinch when I touch them. That’s my stock in trade. Contact. Comfort. My hand on their arm. I lose that, I lose everything.

“They’re terrified out there, Rabbi. They’re shaking in their shoes. No, no, I mean it. They’ve soured on the venereal. Something’s up. Something vicious and narrow-spirited that robs us of our consolations. Jesus, Rov, there ain’t even tea dancing no more,
one
two three,
one
two three. What am I, a spring chicken? I’m an old fart. They look at me they’ve got to be thinking ‘Do I need this? I don’t need this.’ I’m wrong they sniff it on my fingers, I’m wrong they smell the flowers on my suit. They breathe it in the
ground,
in the clods and clumps of my sanctified fields. It sticks to their nostrils, it goes to their heads.” He leaned toward me, he lowered his voice. “There are eleven AIDS victims in the ground here.”

“Hey.”

“Eleven I know of, eleven that’s sure.”

“Hey.”

“This mustn’t get out. It would devastate business. We agreed,” Shull said. “Me and Tober. We made a policy decision.

“Because,” he said, “he saves his money like a miser and I spend mine like a drunk sailor. And because you just ain’t doing your part, Rabbi. Content to call ’em as you see ’em, happy like a clam with all those Ecclesiastes checks and balances of your position, all bought into the goeth ups and cometh downs, the milchiks and fleishiks seasonals. Well, me too. Me too, Rebbe Goldkorn!
It’s fucking now or fucking never!”

“What are you saying to me? Why are you talking to me like this?”

“Ach,” said Shull.

“Why would he speak like that?” I asked Tober when I saw him. “What’s he trying to tell me?”

“Argh,” said Tober.

“What do you want from me?” I demanded of both. “I do my job. Don’t I do my job? Is it Charney? Is it Klein? Is that why you’re pressuring me?”

“Phoo,” they agreed.

“And what’s all this about AIDS?”

“You told him?” Tober snapped.

“I told him a figure of speech, I told him a metaphor.”

“You
told
him.”

“I told him about eleven people,” Shull said. “I never told him we’re the Holy Faygeleh Sacred Burial Ground.”

My God, I thought, they’re crazy. Those multiple hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet lots again. The policy decision. Burying AIDS victims their bold new marketing scheme!

Tober came to the house. He was pushing Edward in a wheelchair.

“Hello,” Tober said, “shalom.”

“Hello,” I said. “How are you, Edward?”

“May I leave him with you a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We’re not disturbing you?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Interrupting anything?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll be twelve minutes.”

“Take your time.”

“He means well,” Edward said when his father had left.

“Oh,” I said, “he’s a good man.”

“He’s a driven, self-centered, totally obsessive human being, but he means well.”

“Well, Edward,” I said, a little embarrassed as I often was with him, “you’re looking fit.”

It was true. For all his handicaps, his blindness and the fluids sloshing and tumbling in his inner ears like water in a washing machine, Edward was as poised and equable as a man with a pipe. He appeared to lounge in his wheelchair, like a fellow sitting up, taking his ease on a pal’s hospital bed. Though it wasn’t, you imagined one leg crossed smartly over the other. His opaque, fashionable glasses fit comfortably across his face like a dark, thin strip of style on the eyes of a musician. I knew that if he removed the glasses, the clear eyes behind them would seem intelligent, tolerant, amused. As I had before, I wondered again if he knew how elegant he was, how he’d developed—he evidently chose his own clothes—his graceful impeccables and flawless stunnings. He’d been blind since birth.