The Rabbi of Lud (34 page)

“Is this
harsh
?

“Because the alternative to Nature is Nature—flora, fauna, beauty, geology, corrosives and temperature. Floods and avalanches, forest fires, tidal waves and the Richter scale. We’re human beings. Is this harsh? We’re human beings and weren’t raised to be salvage. We’re human beings and weren’t created to become party dip for the vultures and buzzards. Or lie about on the lawn like the Sunday paper.
Is this harsh?
We’re human beings, and He didn’t make us to bob the high seas like flotsam or, random as jetsam, wash up on the shore.

“Come on,” I’ll tell them, “cemetery plots, cemetery plots here! Get your cemetery plots! I’m the ashes-to-ashes man, the dust-to-dust kid comin’ at you! Get your cemetery plots!”

And while they look up at me, staring, wondering (no longer recalling—last month’s talk now—exactly whose father I’m supposed to be) about me, maybe even a little frightened, gentle Jews unaccustomed to the stench of brimstone, more used, at least the older ones, to the odor of cooking, the smell of vaguely camphorous stews and briskets in the hall, family people (or why would they be here in the first place?), no use for mishegoss, impatient with it but too polite to say so, unapocalyptic altogether, I’ll finally tell them something that strikes a chord, that actually rings a bell.

“What, were you brought up in a barn? You weren’t brought up in a barn.

“Look,” I’ll say, “it’s like this:

“Who dies? Your children die. You die. Everyone dies. Your parents and uncles. Your cousins and aunts. Your wife and your husband. No, no, don’t you
dare
say ‘God forbid.’ What, God forbid God? I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. He
wasn’t
raised in a barn. It’s how He picks up after Himself. Death’s just the way He keeps up His housekeeping. He’s a balebatish kind of God. He’s neat as a pin. He makes us natural disasters no insurance policy in the world would cover us against, but He forbids us to lie in the rubble. It’s simple as that, ladies and gentlemen. It’s simple as that, my good friends. From the beginning. It was always as simple as that.

“Didn’t He guide Noah, didn’t He instruct Moses right down to the last cubit of the chore? Ain’t that His wont? Ain’t God in the details? Well, then. You think He’d trouble with the minutiae of weights and measures and then fail to ordain those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet of His holy metrics? What, you think so? Get outta here!

“Because the reason there was a Diaspora in the first place was just that Canaan’s soil was too sandy ever to hold a grave steady! Why do you suppose He jerked the Jews around for forty years in that wilderness? To prepare them, to get them ready. Because if you can scratch out those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic feet and bury your dead in just sand, you can bury them anywhere!

“It’s that important. It’s that important to Him. And that’s the reason for markers. (Didn’t I tell you we die? Didn’t I mention that everyone does?) Because how could He find us otherwise? That’s why it’s important we bury our dead, His dead. Why none dast break the chain of relation. Just so He can find us again if he should need us!

“Plots here!” I’ll hawk. “Cemetery plots here! Get your plots here! Nuclear and extended-family cemetery plots here! Get ’em while they last! Get ’em while
you
do!”

And they did. The harder, more outrageous the sell, the quicker and more eager they were to take me up on it, as if as long as they had to die anyway I could somehow sanctify their passage, or at least make the absurdity of their death le dernier cri, lending just that in-the-swim spin of flair and style and currency to it. I might have been that season’s caterer or society band leader. Nothing would serve but that they have their little plot of death from the Rabbi of Lud. I was good for business.

It didn’t last long. Probably no more than four or five weeks. So it didn’t last long. It couldn’t have. (Though if it had lasted even a little longer I’d probably have started to earn my commissions.) Anyway it didn’t, and the talk, already dying down when Tober and Shull traded me to Klein and Charney, had ceased now altogether. The archbishop, had I tried to get through to him—which I didn’t—would probably have taken my call. So either the talk had died down, or it no longer made a difference to anyone that my daughter used to receive Holy Mother socially. People were asking to have me at their funerals again—Sal called to tell me it had got back to some people he knew what a good job I did—and Klein and Charney, suspecting, I suppose, if not the staying power of such campaigns then the staying power of such campaigners, proposed trading me back to Shull and Tober.

It was about this time I heard from Al Harry Richmond in Chicago.

“I’m sorry about Stan Bloom, Al Harry,” I told him. “I gave her all I got.”

“Sure,” Al Harry said.

“I did,” I assured him. “I tried my best. I went after her tooth and nail. But you know how it is,” I said, holding my hands up for him almost a thousand miles away. “The old gray mare.”

“You saying she ain’t what she used to be,” Al Harry said.

“That’s right. That’s so.”

“Goddamn it, Goldkorn, she never was.”

“Oh, yes, Al Harry,” I said. “Don’t you recall Wolfblock and our charmed lives? We couldn’t get arrested, or come down with a cold.”

“I recall a thousand Kaddishes. I recall all that grief and remember thinking it’s a good thing death ain’t contagious.”

“Oh, no, Al Harry, that was some minyan, that minyan of ours. We were the ten musketeers. I even got a vocation out of it. And that was some Wolfblock, that Wolfblock of ours. What a character! I miss that old man.” But couldn’t get a rise out of him, or catch him up in my nostalgia, or any other of the historical sympathies who’d already, it seemed, let bygones be bygones. “Gee,” I mused, “ain’t it odd? Your turning out to be our sort of social secretary and all, the one who keeps up. I mean, I’m the one that came to New Jersey and turned out to be the rabbi, and you’re the one who stayed in Chicago and turned out to be the pope.”

“There’s one in every minyan,” Al Harry said. I listened to the contempt he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

“Listen,” I told him, “you only heard one side of the story. Ain’t you learned yet that anybody can make a good impression with just one side of the story?”

“A good impression? A good impression?” Al Harry shot back. “With her punim on matchbooks and milk cartons? On coupons to Resident offering half off on film, on tools and detergent? A good
impression
?! I wasn’t even struck by the goddamn
likeness
! Tell me, Rabbi, how come you didn’t give them a more recent photograph?”

“I didn’t have one.”

“Ahh,” said Al Harry.

“Al Harry,” I said, “it’s not what you think. Connie shies out of pictures. Literally. Really. She does. She jumps out of focus the minute you snap. Or ducks under parallax quick as a wink. She leans her head into shadows and wards you off with one hand to the side of her face, or a hankie she’s pulled out of the sky you didn’t even know she had. They don’t make ASA ratings or shutter speeds fast enough to catch her. She thinks,” I confessed, “she’s homely.”

“Oh, Goldkorn. Oh, Jerry.”

“I’m a different person now,” I told him. “You don’t judge a guy by the length of his haphtarah passage.”

“She’s flying into Newark,” he said. “I’ll call you when her plane takes off.”

“God bless you, Al Harry. Thanks, thanks a lot. Oh, and Al Harry?”

“What is it?”

“That picture of Connie that they ran in the
Star
? That didn’t come out until after the matchbooks and milk cartons had already gone to press.”

“Oh, Jerry,” he said, “oh, Goldkorn.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

And he didn’t, of course. Because how could he? Because it’s just like I said. No one can know the other side of a person’s life.

ten

H
ANGDOG. I was hangdog. Shelley was sheepish. Connie was like a little jellyfish. We seemed, come together outside the gate in the Newark airport where the TWA flight from Chicago had just landed, like characters in a fable, a little bestiary of the wishy-washy. Like embarrassed Animal Crackers.

“Uncle Al Harry signed me up for their frequent flyer program,” Connie said.

Sure, I thought. Just in case. “How was the flight?” I asked.

“Fine.” She was holding a stuffed animal I didn’t recognize. Al Harry must have given it to her.

“Did you eat on the plane?” Shelley asked.

“I ordered a kosher snack.”

I wondered if it was an apology.

“How was Chicago?” Shelley asked.

“Chicago was fine.”

“Did you go to the museums?” I said.

“I went to the Natural History Museum with Beverly and Diane.”

“Who are they?”

“Uncle Al Harry’s their grandfather.”

“Al Harry has grandchildren?”

“He has
three
grandchildren. Seth lives in Ohio.”

“Was it boring for you,” I said, “having to be around babies?”

“Diane’s almost thirteen. Beverly’s eleven and a half and tall for her age. Both kids are taller than I am.”

Shelley looked as if she’d been slapped. Long red wales appeared on her cheeks, without depth or texture, a blushed stigmata.

“Where else did you go?”

“We went to the Art Institute.”

“Did you get a chance to go to the Museum of Science and Industry?”

“Yes,” said Connie.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s a good one. That was always one of my favorites.”

“Do you have any bags?” my wife asked, and suddenly we couldn’t look at each other, a kind of mortification glancing off our eyes and wildly strafing the carpet, the passengers still coming out the jetway, the entire lounge area. It was the first allusion we’d made to Connie’s having run away. Until now it was as if she’d come back to us from a vacation.

“Yes,” she said, “there’s the duffel I took to camp that time,” and burst into tears.

Shelley had hurriedly removed her things from the spare bedroom, overlooking a tortoiseshell comb, a set of matching brushes. Connie brought them to her.

“Oh,” Shelley said, “I’ve been looking all over for those.”

She brought a porcelain lion Shelley kept on top of the dresser.

“Oh,” Shelley said, “thank you, sweetheart.”

She brought a small case in which Shelley kept her jewelry.

“Well,” Shelley said, “imagine that.”

“Guess what?” Connie said.

“What?” Shelley said.

“Cousin Diane has a boyfriend.”

“You told us she’s not even thirteen years old,” said Shelley.

“A boy in her Hebrew school class. Guess what else?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Mom?”

“What else?”

“Beverly’s on the swim team at her middle school.”

“That’s not all peaches and cream,” I said. “Every morning you have to get up early for practice. Her hair could dry out. Her ends could all split. She probably smells of chlorine.”

“Guess what?” she asked at the dinner table.

“What?” Shelley said.

“They belong to a health club. The East Bank Club. It’s very exclusive. They have a family membership and go whenever they want. I was their guest. There was this cosmetologist, there was this hair stylist. I had a makeover. They gave me a facial with collagen, the skin’s natural moistening conditioner, and taught me to use eyeliner, to start in the middle and go to the outer corners instead of starting from the inner corners. That opens your eyes and makes them look bigger. Guess what?” she demanded.

“What?”

“You have to pat it with a Q-tip to make it less harsh.”

“Connie?”

“Because my face is so round she showed me how to use blusher to bring out my cheekbones. She put apricot scrub on my skin to clean out the pores. I had a cellophane wrap. I lost three pounds.”

“Connie?”

“Guess what?”

“Connie?”

“Guess what?!”

“What?” Shelley said.

“They gave me a shampoo and washed it out with herbal rinse. They conditioned my hair, they styled it. They gave me the layered look. Guess what else?”

“Connie.”

“Go ahead, Dad. You can guess too.
Guess what else?!”

“What else?”

“Marvin? Diane’s boyfriend from Hebrew school? Marvin likes me. That’s what they told me at the slumber party. They said he got this crush on me when he saw my new makeover. They said he means to write me. And guess what else?”

“What else?” Shelley and I said together.

“They get clothing allowances. All the girls get clothing allowances. My colors are autumn. Forest green, deep orange, the browns. Guess what?”

“No, you guess what, Connie!
You
guess what,” I shouted at her.

“‘What?”

“More St. Myra Weiss? More with your St. Myra Weiss?”

“You don’t believe Marvin likes me? He
likes
me all right! You think I made that up? You think I’d lie about something like that? You just wait until he starts writing me letters.”

“Connie,” Shelley said.

“Connie,” I said, “Connie, sweetheart.”

“Or that they
don’t
get a clothing allowance? Well, they do too.”

“Connie,” said Shelley.

“Connie,” I said.

“And
they belong to the East Bank Club! It has Nautilus. It has free weights. It has aerobics and jazzercise. It has Jacuzzi and whirlpool and sauna and racquetball. It has an Olympic pool and a natural juice bar where they’ll mix you a cauliflower or spinach cocktail or anything else you want, or squeeze out the juice not just from organically grown fruit, melons and oranges or bananas or whatever, but from right out of the peel too. And they bring it right to your table. I had this cauliflower cocktail on a dare? And you know something? If you chug-a-lug it, it’s not half bad.”

“Connie, calm down.”

“No,” she said, “you calm down.
You
calm down!”

“How can I calm down,” I asked reasonably, “if I’m not the one who’s excited?”

“Well, you
should
be,” she said. “You
should
be.
I’d
be excited if I were you.”