The Rabbi of Lud (31 page)

(Holy Mother explained this, too. “He doesn’t like to scare you. He’s very gentle. Didn’t He send the Angel Gabriel to explain what was going to happen to me? And, after it happened, after the Lord had already been with me and I’d begun to show so people could see, didn’t I concentrate and study on it as hard as I ever concentrated or studied on anything in my life to try to figure out just when it could have happened, and all I could ever come up with was just this thin memory I had of a draft I happened to be sitting in when I was sewing a few garments together one time for my dowry after Joseph and I were already betrothed. So He’s gentle. Whatever else He is, He’s gentle. Even though He’s only ever satisfied when His arrangements uproot and change the world!”

(No. The last thing that bunch is is shy. Gentle, yes, but persistent. They have something on their mind they let you know about it and don’t nod at you from the woodwork or send you signals from the plaster of Paris. I’ll tell you what they’re like—Scrooge’s ghosts.)

My first visitor was a young woman who looked to be maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. At first glance she could have been my older sister. Holy Mother introduced us.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” St. Myra Weiss said.

“St. Myra Weiss?”

“I thought so too,” I told Mr. Rockers. “I was really surprised. She looked too preppy to be a saint. But Holy Mother vouched for her. She must have been legit.”

“Go on.”

“She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.”

“Wait a minute,” the attorney said.

“I know. I was surprised myself,” I told him. “When she said what her job was I looked right at Holy Mother and rolled my eyes. I think I offended her. St. Myra. She got kind of defensive.”

“Not army brats.”

“Beg pardon?” I said.

“Someone else handles army brats. St. Captain Ralph R. Sweeney.”

“Hold it right there, young lady. Do I have to remind you that this is a deposition and that you’re under oath?”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know how ridiculous this is going to make me look when it gets out? I
know
all that. Did I make it snow? Did I lower the temperature so everything would freeze and they’d have to declare a snow day at the exact time Holy Mother was going to be in my neighborhood and practically guarantee that we’d run into each other? I didn’t do that stuff. What do you want from me? It’s God’s plan.”

“All right, Connie, that’s all right. Calm down. You can calm down now. Here’s a Kleenex. All right, you’ve got your own hankie. That’s fine.”

She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.

I told her in that case I thought she might have the wrong party.

“Aren’t you Jerry Goldkorn’s daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“I have the right party.”

Her father was an executive in Coca-Cola Bottling’s corporate headquarters down in Atlanta, Georgia. St. Myra was born there. “I was a Georgia peach,” she told me, smiling, looking down. “It’s true, I was. A Georgia peach. Oh, I loved Atlanta, loved my friends, our life there. Loved our club. You know my parents had to bribe me to get me to agree to go off with them to Europe in the summers? They promised that after I graduated high school I wouldn’t have to go East to college, or any further away from Atlanta than Agnes Scott College for Women in Decatur.

“I was as happy with my lot as any sixteen-year-old girl in America. Because I was best friends with nineteen dozen other kids just like me. Who were as happy with theirs. Who had the same credit cards for the same malls and department stores, who got the same clothing allowances and took their lessons from the same piano and ballet and figure-skating teachers and worked out at the same fitness centers and had children-of-paid-up members’ privileges at the same country clubs. Who went to the same humongous open parties on weekends in each others’ houses when our parents were out of town and then went on to meet at the same fast-food drive-ins when the parties got busted at midnight. Who got our learner’s permits at the same time, and our licenses, and, by default, the same second or third or fourth family car, till we’d get, for graduation, or some special birthday, the same cute red or yellow convertible of our very own and who couldn’t wait to be yuppies!”

“But you said you—”

“I am. I’m telling you. The patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city. It’s just that I was always such a good sport.

“Daddy called me in in the summer of my seventeenth year when I was on the cusp of my junior year in high school.

“ ‘Coca-Cola’s just bought out this blockbuster diet soft drink company in the Midwest, sweetheart, and they want your dad to head it up. Now I know, I know, the only home you’ve ever known has been right here in Atlanta, and that you’re very happy here, and that it’s a little unfair to ask you to leave your friends, and normally, well, normally, darn it, I wouldn’t think of asking you to make that sort of sacrifice, but the soft-drink business is entering a new phase. It’s expanding and changing right before our eyes, and if we don’t expand and stretch and change right along with it, well, sir, we’re going to be left at the starting gate and there won’t
be
any money for balls and country clubs and Junior League revels. I’m not asking now. I have too much respect for you for that. I’m requesting. If you say no then it’s no, and you and Mummy and Bubba and me will just have to stay put right where we are. If it were your senior year rather than the junior year you’re entering I wouldn’t even be requesting, or inquiring either for that matter, but as I see it you’ll have two whole years to settle in and put your life together and get yourself a gang as close to the one you have here in Atlanta as, given the demographics, you can get in Milwaukee.’

“It was the most disagreeable decision I ever had to make. I assented at once, of course, and even made out that I was getting a little tired of Atlanta anyway and actually looked forward to the move.”

“But you
loved
Atlanta.”

“A patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and relocate in a different city must be as devoted to her father as she is to that generation of children for whom she is the earnest, supplicatory object of appeal.”

“I see.”

“Milwaukee was a disaster.”

“You couldn’t duplicate—?”

“Kids our age are a demographics unto ourselves. Of course there was to be had in Milwaukee what was to be had in Atlanta. Doesn’t Milwaukee have malls and country clubs, doesn’t it have roadsters and fitness centers, the children of the CEO classes, credit cards, cotillions, open-invitationed weekend bashes by the pool when the folks leave town for a few days? Doesn’t it have fast-food hangouts and not only those places you can go to for a fake ID, but those other places you can go to where they will be honored? Of
course
there is to be duplicated in Milwaukee anything that had already been imprinted upon you in Atlanta.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“Because I was a Georgia peach. Because when I opened my mouth to speak they laughed and called me names and said, ‘Hey, get her, she talks like a nigger.’

“Because they always think they have to draw a line somewhere, so they draw it around you, or around themselves in some tight-knit, gerrymandered circle. Because there’s always this eleventh-hour, last-ditch, last-minute exclusivity among any given nineteen dozen best friends, Atlanta, Milwaukee, New Orleans or Paris, France, either.”

“Tell how they martyred you, dear.”

“They martyred me by pretending to capitulate, Holy Mother.”

“They betrayed you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was invited to one of those Friday or Saturday night parties that they didn’t have to bother to invite anyone else to because no one else ever even had to be invited. One of them called out to me after our ten o’clock French class.

“ ‘Myra. Myra Weiss. Myra, hold up.’

“ ‘Chapters eleven and twelve,’ I told her. ‘Mademoiselle says we’re responsible for the subjunctive and all the idioms with “coup” in them.’

“ ‘No,’ she said, ‘not that.’

“ ‘Monday. The quiz is Monday.’

“ ‘Not that either, silly. I know when the quiz is. Clyde Carlin’s folks are going out of town this weekend. He’s throwing a party. Around nineish.’

“ ‘I know that.’

“ ‘He wants you to come.’

“ ‘He does?’

“ ‘He asked me to invite you, didn’t he?’ ”

But when she showed up at Clyde Carlin’s house that Friday at around nine she didn’t see any cars in the driveway, though all the lights seemed to be on on the first floor. St. Myra could have kicked herself for coming so early. In Atlanta, too, these things never started on time. “Well,” she told herself,
“somebody’s
got to be first,” parked her car, and went up to the door and pulled on the bell.

Clyde Carlin’s little brother, Ben, opened the door.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Myra. Your brother asked me to come to his party.”

“Myra Weiss?” Ben said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Ben,” Ben said, “Clyde’s brother. Clyde told me to tell you that our parents changed their plans and didn’t go out of town this weekend after all, and that our party’s called off but Suzy Locke-Miller is having one at her house instead.”

He gave her Susan’s address and precise instructions how to get there. She knew something was wrong, but it was already the middle of the spring semester, nine months since they’d moved up from Atlanta, and this was the first time they’d ever even
seemed
to open their ranks for her. She couldn’t take the chance. So she took the carefully drawn map Clyde had left with Ben to give to her and started out for Suzy Locke-Miller’s.

Where the same thing happened. Only this time it was an older sister who came to the door.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Does Suzy Locke-Miller live here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m Myra Weiss.”

“Sooz went off to a par—Weiss? Hold on a minute, she left a note.”

And left the girl in the hall and went off to find it. It was so apparently hurried and scribbled it might almost have been what it purported to be, a hastily written apology, an explanation Myra couldn’t quite follow saying there’d been a change in plans, that the party had been moved again and that Myra must come to Franklin Bradbury’s house. She gave the address, and directions how to get there, and even put down a number Myra could call should she get lost.

She knew what was what now. What they were doing to her. But she kept on going anyway. She had to. Because she was into her martyrdom now, she said. She was on this scavenger hunt for her martyrdom. At one house it was the parents themselves who sent her on to the next place where the putative party was supposedly being held.

She drove from house to house, really seeing Milwaukee for the first time, reminded, in those pricey suburbs, how much like Atlanta it was after all.

It was when she was on her way to the seventh or eighth house that she became momentarily blinded by her own tears and missed the curve and swerved off the winding street and ran into a tree on the lawn of the very house where, ironically, the party they had been hiding from her actually was going on. It was Clyde Carlin himself who heard the crash and was the first on the scene. When he saw what had happened and who it was it had happened to, it took his breath away. The girl from French class came running up to him.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
she said.

“Don’t look,” Clyde said.

“No,” she said, “what?”

“Great goddamn,” Clyde said, “it’s the nigger. It’s that Myra. She’s gone and crashed the damned party!”

“But that’s not my problem,” I told St. Myra. “My father wasn’t transferred, he hasn’t relocated in a different city.”

“It’s still a question of being lost where one is,” St. Myra Weiss said; “Of becoming separated, locked from some Palestine of the heart’s desiring. You’re
already
relocated. I’m your man.”

So she sold me a candle.

“She
sold
you a candle?
She
did?”

“It’s how they live. You take money for depositions, don’t you? It’s how
you
live.”

“Go on.”

There’s not a whole lot more to tell. More saints came marching in. Holy Mother thought we should become better acquainted. So both sides would know what they were dealing with. It’s pretty specialized. More than a Jewish girl raised on the notion of Moses and monotheism would have guessed. I told Holy Mother.

“Land sakes, child, is that what you think? That God doesn’t have helpers, that He’s this Workaholic Who thinks He has to do everything Himself or nothing would ever get done? No, hon, that’s not what He’s like at all. He don’t only love us, He trusts us.”

She must have brought on more than a dozen. They just kept coming. Before I knew it I’d run out of money to buy their candles from them, but they kept coming anyway. Saints of shopping for a birthday present when you’ve been invited to a party at the last minute and the stores are all closed. Saints for throwing an outfit together when either they’ve seen everything you have, or what they haven’t seen is at the cleaner’s and you’ve got nothing to wear. Acne saints. Saints for your period. Saints of the S.A.T.’s and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests. Saints for split ends, for limp or oily hair. Brittle nails saints. Saints for putting in your contact lenses, or finding them again when they pop out in the grass.

“What’s that? What’s that smell?”

“It’s all right, Counselor, he’s had an accident. Mr. Hershorn? Mr. Hershorn, it’s Connie. That’s all right, no harm done, you’ve had a little accident, Mr. Hershorn. I’ll have you cleaned up in a jiffy.”

Then I interrupted my deposition and asked Counselor Rockers where the rest room was. I excused myself and led Mr. Hershorn off to make him more comfortable.

While Mr. Hershorn and I were in the washroom, Holy Mother appeared to me one more time. She watched what I was doing without saying anything. Then she said I would probably be a saint myself one day. When I asked of what, she just shrugged and said she didn’t really know but possibly of incontinent old men, and when I told her that didn’t sound like such a hot job to me, she allowed as how that might be so but that somebody had to do it.