The Rabbi of Lud (33 page)

“The salt from my eyes, you bastard.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Well,” I relented, “thank you, then.”

“Tell me,” he said, and I could almost hear him bunch his shoulders, hunch forward, lean into the telephone, “you think the child may have a dybbuk?” Why, he was like the guy from the
Star-Ledger.

Sal Pamella called. He told me it was all off. Even the barber’s bogeyman wouldn’t let me near their dead now—all those Jimmy Hoffas of his fix-is-in imagination.

Still, I bore no grudges. Connie I forgave outright. She had her father’s wholehearted, up-front blessing. If I’d roughed her up with my tongue after I saw her deposition, why, I was only having my say, as a dad will with his kid, a Jewish Judge Hardy.

I couldn’t understand why Shelley wouldn’t allow me to sleep with her, why she had set up separate rooms for us, as if we were two fighters returned to our neutral corners.

“What happened to us?” I asked.

“Scissor cuts paper.”

“Scissor cuts paper?”

“Rock smashes scissor.”

“What are you talking about, Shelley? What are you trying to say to me, sweetheart?”

“Scissor cuts paper. Rock smashes scissor. Paper covers rock.”

“Two out of three, Shell.”

“Two out of three? Two out of three? ‘Husbands and wives cleave,’ you told Connie. Husbands and
wives?
Mothers and daughters. Scissor cuts paper, rock smashes scissor, paper covers rock. And mothers, mothers cleave to daughters! That’s who cleave!
There’s your two out of three!”

“This is all your fault,” she said another time.

“My
fault?
My
fault?”

“It isn’t your fault? It isn’t? Why do I drive all the car pools? Why do we own a car that accommodates nine people?
Why do we own a station wagon at all?
What do we even
need
a family car? We could get by with some two-door subcompact with a little lever on the bucket seat so she could climb into the back! Why do I bring her to libraries or take advantage every chance I get to put more miles on the car? If I were a pilot I would have had thousands of hours in the sky by now. It
isn’t
your fault?”

“How come you don’t talk Yiddish anymore?”

“So that I might at least lend her the illusion we were a family. So we might pretend for as long as it took to get us from one destination to the next that she might even be on her way to lessons—swimming, piano, tumbling, dramatics. Locating her gifts—baton, figure skating, beginning ceramics, beginning ballet. On all the bespoke errands—weaving and tennis and aerobics and tap—of any ordinary childhood. (Yes! Chasing her gifts. We could have been on a scavenger hunt.) Turning up the volume on the FM and going the long ways, choosing the routes with the most traffic signals to them so that when were stopped on red Connie could scout out the cars with the real mothers and the real daughters, sometimes offering an actual nod of recognition or even just that shy, tangential, enigmatic, secret sidelong Mona Lisa glance of acknowledgment from one teenager to another in that mysterious freemasonry of girls.”

“You’ve
had
thousands of hours in the sky.”

“Or our shopping expeditions. As if it weren’t Connie herself we were dressing but some bright Connie avatar, some inconstant Connie of a thousand forms and faces—Connie as matron, Connie as bride. Enrolled for showers, registered for gifts. Handling the china, fingering the forks. Browsing in Maternity or picking baby’s clothes. In Women’s Wear indifferent to sizes but examining the racks of suits and sweaters and dresses and coats and choosing from them as one might first pick out and then return a novel to its shelf at the public library, out of pure random instinct, some deft, unprincipled inspection. Trying on a hat or holding, hanger and all, a blouse out before her in front of the three-way mirror, then bringing it next to her body, brushing it against her with her arm. Looking toward me for an opinion, as if we weren’t just mother and daughter but any two females, related or not, even acquainted or not, in any boutique, shop or department store in the world. ‘With brown accessories? You think so?’ ‘With such a high heel?’ Not House we were playing but Other People.”

“Why hasn’t she? Why
hasn’t
she taken ballet? Why
hasn’t
she signed up for those classes?”

“What friends would she have taken them with? We live too far out. She’d have had to have dropped the illusion of those seven playmates in the car pool.”

“Why didn’t you? Why
didn’t
you buy her more clothes?”

“Where would she have worn them?”

Well, la de da, I thought, watching her closely, just look at her, just listen. In her own rabbi mode for once. Talk about your avatars. Shelley the rebbitzin, Shelley the vamp. Shelley the wronged and Shelley the miffed. Holy Shelley Mother dealing all her Shelley shell games like three-card monte in the street. (Sometimes, in old and, often, better days, I’d come upon her in the kitchen, pulling stuff out of the cabinets—plates, a glass—and drawers—knives, teaspoons—and darting from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter with food in her hands, talking to herself like one of those chefs on TV. “This afternoon,” she’d say into the wall telephone by the kitchen table, “we’re going to prepare a lox sandwich. For this we’ll need a bagel, some cream cheese, lox of course, and this lovely Bermuda onion for garnish-e-le.”)

“If you should happen to hear anything,” she abruptly said, and turned and went to her room.

Because she kept to herself these days, camping out in the spare bedroom like a self-conscious guest. Suddenly she wasn’t there anymore when I pulled my modified Shachris just before breakfast. Recalling other occasions, I pretended she didn’t want to disturb me at prayer, excite me, I mean. Stepped back, removed from the energy field of all that cumulate prayer like the politic, insistent-signaled clamor of traders, say, on some bourse of souls (as she might step around some just recently waxed floor), I told myself I guessed she didn’t want to stir stuff up. I guessed, or told myself I did, she meant to clear my air, help me get through, not break God’s radio silence.

It had been a while since I believed Shelley believed I still lay t’phillim. So one morning I got all dolled up. I strapped on my phylacteries, attaching one to my forehead and binding the other about my left forearm, girding myself, a Jewish Crusader.

“Get out,” Shelley said. “Don’t touch me.”

“No,” I said, “I’m praying. Honest. I am. I’m going at it for all I’m worth.”

The odd thing was that the talk about us had already begun to die down. We’d stopped hearing things even before that column appeared in the
Newark Star-Ledger.

I was following Klein’s and Charney’s leads now. Geniuses, those two, ahead of their time, with probably a couple of the greatest noses for death in the business. Bloodhounds of the terminal who could sniff out serum cholesterol, plaque, decay in urine, the dark spots on X rays, maybe even suicide—a thing for all the gamy pheromones of death.

Maybe because I’d been a rabbi too long and not only hadn’t kept up but had bought into some picturesque little peddler myth of the Jewish people, some one-on-one, door-to-door notion of intimately pressed spiel, all the pulled-stop oratory of insistent last-stand need, was overextended, that is, in some outmoded sweatshop/piecework notion of economics and salesmanship. Progress caught me unawares, unprepared, I tell you, for life as it’s lived, civilization as we know it. I mean there I was, thinking they were actually going to send me door to door, have me make calls on sick folks in genuine hospital rooms, or, at the very least, on their relatives grieving in waiting rooms or hanging about ICUs biting their nails and preparing themselves for their five minutes at a loved one’s wired bedside. (And me, a rabbi too long, recall, actually ready to do it, having talked myself into it, having sold myself this bill of goods: “Well, why
not?
Ain’t you how many times already in your career been Johnny-on-the-spot with your professional ordained consolation, and faced down genuine article, fait accompli, real-thing death, and not just the—admittedly—high-risk, long—admittedly—odds actuarials of the merely terminally ill? So what could one more lousy time into the breach mean to a fella like you? Haven’t you, I mean, been there already, sent out on all those sorrow sorties where we stuck our noses in? And anyway, isn’t it true that where there’s life there’s hope? Or that old Holy Holy Holy could always change His mind at the last minute? And what if Connie’s right, or at least on the right track, and there are, if not saints, then angels, all sorts of them, cancer and coma angels, bum-ticker angels, angels of the broken spirit, maybe even murder angels? So, if you can find words for the already bereaved, it only stands to reason that you ought to be able to come up with a little snappy patter for the simply only just apprehensive, tenterhooked, on-call, bedside-vigil expectant.” And
this
bill of goods: “Well,
why
not? I could tell them that if worse—God forbid—came to worst and we were faced with a bona fide, signed, sealed and delivered death-certificated corpse, what would be so terrible if the family were prepared? If it didn’t have to concern itself with those literally last-minute details, if it already had a plot picked out, taken whatever small—admittedly—advantage it could of prospect, access, and the rare shade tree. No one must be in a hurry to die, but it’s a first-come, first-served world, and just plain good husbandry not to buy more grief than you have to. ‘Who’s,’ I’d have asked them, ‘more entitled, more deserving?’ ”) Or utzing at them in the dayrooms of old peoples’ homes, on their cases from somewhere in the gridlock of walkers and wheelchairs that was like a metaphor for the very plat of the cemetery I had set up on an easel for them as a visual aid. But what did
I
know?

Because the world, it turns out, always takes you by surprise. It’s always one step ahead of you. If you look away for even a minute, and often even if you don’t, you have to be retrained.

They didn’t want me
near
sickrooms. Or doing my hovered-buzzard number in any dayrooms or otherwise, in nursing or retirement homes where this twenty-four-hour service or that twenty-four-hour service, or any damned service you could think of, including the one I was prepared to render, was constantly on call. I had no access to an official list of telephone numbers of even the merely widowed or widowered or bachelored or spinstered elderly, people living on their own who got called every morning by concerned volunteers ringing up just to see if they could still get to their telephones. They didn’t, I mean, want me where I might, even reasonably, become unctuous.

And had other plans for me altogether.

There are these seminars conducted in motels, sessions on tax shelters, positive thinking, how to get rich in real estate with no money down. Experts advise on ways to increase your word power, build your memory, bulk up your portfolio, and offer instructions on avoiding probate. Any number of transcendental arrangements take place in these ballrooms, hospitality suites, and private, sectioned-off dining rooms of the country’s leading motels. This—motels were only rarely the venue—was the aura—places where Kiwanis met, the Lions’ Club, the Jaycees. The scrubbed and neutral geography of profit and community service, some vaguely fraternal sense of the benevolent and secret.

Halls I mean. The card and game rooms of great condominium structures on the Palisades. Chambers of the hired-out and interchangeable. Though occasionally in the auditorium—never full—of a Jewish Community Center, and sometimes in an actual temple on an actual Friday night. These were the places that usually booked me, Lud Realty’s designated speaker. And where I came to them, Lud Realty’s booked and bookish man.

“Shalom,” I’ll begin. “Good yontif to you,” and sweep into my theme, speaking, except for the commercials, much as I might have spoken to them at their funerals:

“ ‘We owe God a death,’ says the poet, ‘He who pays it this year is quits the next.’ Yet we dassn’t rush to die, ladies and gentlemen, but must take our turn, and wait till the last minute.

“But you know something, friends? We are owed to earth, mortgaged to dirt, in debt to the very ground we walk on, up to our ears in arrears to the planet. God holds our note. This is the reason for sickness, this is the meaning of pain, why He duns us with sniffles, eczema, germs. Why He claims us with rashes and toothaches. Why He forecloses with tumors and strokes.

“We must never forget obligation. This is why it’s all right to smoke and stay up late, de rigueur to dance and carouse. Yet we must never forget obligation. It’s
good
God ties a string round our finger with troubles. It’s
good
He favors us with envy and ambition and plants needs in us in perpetual shortfall to our means.
Thank
Him for cancer and kidney disease, for our preoccupation with money and the kids who break our hearts. He gives us our renewable thirst and programs our hunger. He sets up our lives like a memento mori. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.

“Is this harsh?

“We must never forget we’re gifts He gives to Himself, that it’s His
right
to move us about like lead soldiers, to run us around like a set of toy trains. The world’s only this box where He puts away His things. Is this harsh? This Nutcracker view of Creation? Is this harsh? No, in thunder, says the Sugarplum Fairy. It’s delightful to be God’s bauble, this human doodad knickknack of the Lord’s.

“And that’s why we mustn’t get too big for our britches, mustn’t forget what’s what. Prepare to die. Let’s just get it over with, I say. Make our arrangements, I mean. Turn our thoughts to the time when we have to get back in our boxes, fluffed up in our deaths like pillows, mounted in our caskets like jewels or bright gewgaws.
Never
put off till tomorrow.

“Hey,” I’ll tell them, “I’m selling cemetery plots here. It’s your
duty
to ground yourselves in ground, that obligatory seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet—just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet of clay and dimension, that closes out your indenture like a valedictory ‘Yours truly’ above your signature in a letter.