The Rabbi of Lud (5 page)

“But I’ll tell you something,” Sal confided, “the haircut, that’s the
real
challenge. I got to wear gloves. Otherwise I’d prick myself on their hair. So spiky, so sharp. Like iron filings. And
heavy?
You wouldn’t believe it. Because hair is dead weight too. Even a kid’s. Even a baby’s.”

So we talked about our mutual trade, or Sal talked while I soaked in his warm, soft, soapy water, between us encompassing just about all there was to say about death, Sal speaking up for the long-term metabolisms, those gone-gray-overnight details of canceled flesh, rhapsodies of death gossip, intimate as singing—gore, juice—a little saliva, Sal said, always lay puddled under the tongue—life’s lymphs and ichors and gassy residuals, the finger and toenail legacies—the thin, keratinous plates lengthening, thickening, curling like the horns of a kudu—matter’s fabulous displacements, lividity, and all the other evidences from death’s black boxes. Pacemakers, implanted in the chest, Sal reminded me on the morning of my manicure, went on tick tick ticking for years.

“Brr, Sal. Brr.”

“Ain’t
that
the truth?” said Sal.

So I spoke up now too. A little. Coming round to meet him from the other side. Lighting up the spook house with the ineffable and sublime. We’re not just these bruises in the winding sheets, I told him, and the proof of a life and an identity ain’t only X rays and dental records. There’s good deeds, I told him in my rabbi mode, and almost mentioned that I’d fucked old Shelley that morning but said something instead about the wonderful memories we make for the people who love us and whom we love. What’s a few yards of gnarled toenail compared to that?

“I talk to them,” Sal said. “On the prep table. Just as if they were a regular customer. I ain’t scared. That ain’t it. It’s more, I don’t know, lonely like. It ain’t just that nobody’s there, it’s like they’ve gone away. I mean, I never even knew them but. Still, in their carcasses, it’s like they just stepped into the cab that will take them off to the airport. Bingo, they’re gone. I talk to keep my mind occupied. I’m not afraid of the dead. Though you know yourself, Rabbi, we probably got a right.”

“That’s crapola, Sal.”

“You say that because you’re so holy. We ain’t everyone a man of the cloth.”

Sal was making a veiled allusion to the rumors of bad things that get whispered by all help everywhere, but that are particularly nasty in the graveyard business. We have these blockbuster imaginations, my brothers, that truckles to disaster and caves in at the merest whiff of evil. I’d been in Lud almost twenty years, almost twenty years a pillar of this—to me—still frontierlike community, a limited, Noah’s Ark sort of town with its representative, time-capsule exemplaries and instances, its cornerstone samples and specimens, heavy on death but with certain greening shoots of the possible—lawyers, a nursery, the draper’s, Lud’s day laborers, the gravediggers who at any moment could beat their shovels into hoes and spades, all the rakes and irons of a proper agriculture. For almost twenty years an objective but finally unsympathetic ear, put upon by those wild stories—tales, legends—of illicit burials so grievous (and we’re Jewish, not subject to most of the strictures and taboos of other religions: drunkards we bury, suicides and incesters, atheists and excommunicados, blasphemers and trayf gluttons) that to shove one of these customers under Lud’s dirt would be like tarnishing the barrel with that one rotten apple that spoils all the rest, blemishing forever our consecrated ground. Outrageous tales of the secret disposal of great villains, outscale brutes and monsters, so that it was made out—I’m talking about what the natives heard, insiders like Sal, myself, even Mr. Shull, even Mr. Tober—that the cemetery was a blind, the eternal resting place of big-time mafiosi, executed and dumped under phony names in a Jewish cemetery in Jersey where no one would ever think to look for them.

Even, or so ran the scuttlebutt, famous Nazis were buried there, savage celebrities from the more infamous camps. One story had it that Doctor Josef Mengele may have been interred in Lud, unknowingly buried under the guise of a Morris Feldman, a hat salesman from Garden City, Long Island.

Which goes to show how silly these fables can get. Because it wasn’t unknowingly, and I was the guy who was supposed to have buried him and, at least at the time, I thought I knew what I was doing.

It was our second or third year in Lud, Shelley and I into what would have been the third or fourth year of our honeymoon, our first child not born yet and, if not exactly newcomers to Lud, then still in that state of innocence which encourages and then embraces what it perceives to be novelty, still, I mean, outsiders and enjoying those fervent sexual perks and practices of our first blooming, three and possibly four years—time itself blurred here, living in one long smudge of the now, the memorial, anniversary instincts as yet unkindled—running, not only not socialized but so protected by that innocence and the novelty of things we didn’t even know we weren’t being snubbed, that the town—this a novelty, too—was only the makings of a town, that that draper, that lawyer and those gravediggers were just signs, like a cowpoke’s pouch, tobacco and cigarette papers are signs, of some still-to-be-fired destiny. We observed nothing, knew nothing, thought—if we even took time out to think—we lived in a booming metropolis and not only did not resent—the new rabbi, his young rebbitzin—the fact that we were being ignored but, God help us, actually believed that all the world loved a lover as much as we did, and actually appreciated people’s thoughtfulness—shameless, a rakehell, his hoyden—in leaving us free to fuck each other’s brains out. Our heads in our beds and still getting, we thought, settled.

“My,” I might tell my Shelley as we promenaded Lud’s main avenue not only hand-in-hand but arm-in-arm too, and looking, I guess, like some fierce special team, “but I do so love it when an entire city looks like a mall. Oh, look, dear,” I might say with a snide, blue snicker, “it’s that little Jewish notions shop,” and elbow her ribs, blow in her ear, chew on her lobe, turning her round in the direction we’d just come, leaving no doubt what little Jewish notions had cropped up in this Jew’s head.

The astonishing thing is that they stood for it. Charney and Klein. Pete, the stone hauler. Seels the vicious, anti-Semite tombstone carver. Any
normal
Luddian. Though their tolerance could have been an honest mistake. Shull and Tober, who employed me, whose funerals I officiated, reciting last words, drawing the characters of the dead from inference, the chancy observations of the bereft like witnesses to a crime, like the paltry consensus portrait of a police artist, say, cheerfully running one Jew after the other into the New Jersey ground, hadn’t even bothered to interview me but had hired me by return mail when I’d responded to their notice clipped from
The Rabbinical Assembly Newsletter
tacked to a bulletin board in the placement office of the old alma mama back in the Maldives. Maybe they assumed my gaga flirtation with my wife some arcane, peculiar heterodoxy. The others, Lud’s
Fortune
two dozen, probably took our open sexuality as an extreme example of Jewish clannishness. Whatever, it was live and let live in that little community of death.

So if I say it wasn’t unknowingly you have to consider the source, and judge for yourself what does and doesn’t constitute knowing when the so-called knower is a horny, love-struck mooncalf.

It was Shelley who took the call. In the screened breezeway—I won’t forget this, it’s as good an indication as any of the way we were—both of us called “the rabbi’s study.” (This wasn’t cynicism. We weren’t cynical. We weren’t smug or disenchanted or cocksure. I remembered everything Wolfblock ever taught me. I knew who was a pisher and who wasn’t. If we called the breezeway where we watched television and read the papers and sometimes made love the rabbi’s study, we had good reasons. We were three or four years into our marriage and still playing house. We had good hearts.)

“It’s Mr. Pamella,” my wife said, holding the phone out and covering the mouthpiece. (You see? You see how good? It embarrassed me whenever she covered the mouthpiece on the telephone. I was mortified for the person on the other end. You see? You see how good she was, how good I had it? I thought this her worst flaw!)

The florist wanted to know if I could take a funeral service the next day. This was strange enough on its own merit. I worked for Shull and Tober. They were the ones who contacted me for a service.

“Lou,” I said, “tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t ask for a weather report.”

“It’s Shabbes. Jews don’t bury on the Shabbes.”

“Maybe these people ain’t so religious,” Pamella hinted quietly. “Maybe these people are desperate characters.”

Tober seemed nervous when I called, and asked if I’d stop by the funeral home so we could talk.

Tober is one of those big, slack, gray-faced men in a black wool suit, a shambler in a vest and gold watch chain who, though he doesn’t smoke, looks like someone with cigar ash on his clothes. He has the peculiar frailty of certain bearish men, some loose, dusty, posthibernative excess about him of meat and fabric.

He closed the door to his office. “What did he tell you?”

“That the family wants it over and done with. A party named Feldman.”

Tober nodded. “Almost a year a vigil by the bedside. A long, drawn-out cancer. The worst kind.”

“But it’s the Sabbath.”

“You know, Rabbi,” he said, “all these religious considerations are beating our brains into crap. You provide a service, I provide a service. It’s not always at our convenience that people die. Or even at their own. If we could, we’d all pass away after the holidays. We’d hold on till graduation was over. Till the kids got back from the honeymoon and were already set up in the new apartment. But who has a choice? We’re poor, weak creatures, Rabbi. Do I have to tell you?”

“It’s the Sabbath,” I repeated.

“We lose a lot of business because of these ultra-Orthodox arrangements,” Tober reflected.

“Ultra-Orthodox? This is common practice five thousand years.”

“Listen,” Tober said. “I’m not telling you your business, but suppose, just suppose, that this ‘Feldman’—or whoever he
really
is—was such a nonstop, no-good s.o.b. that being buried on Saturday was just one more thing to tick God off. If that’s the case then maybe we ought to bury the s.o. bitch in the name of justice and civil rights. Have done with the son o.b. Throw the s. of b. right down the toilet!”

“Manipulate Lord of the Universe? Manipulate Blessed-Be-He?”

You mustn’t think I’m the spoony I make myself out here. This was back when most things seemed novel and picturesque to me. My views of marriage you already know, but maybe the other side of that idyllic picture of the sweet, hand-holding life, the supersensitive, hold-your-nose-Dearheart, someone-just-cut-one-in-Europe one, is gloomy and sour to just the degree that the recto is bright. All Jersey I thought corrupt, not put off by the prospect of working there, never wincing at the idea of men on the take, not shying at the thought of whatever violent, even darker acts lay behind the bribes that co-opted those who so casually sold their witness to the baddies. On the contrary, I thought I’d just stumbled into life, as, had I been given a pulpit in Los Angeles, say, I might have supposed I’d come to live among the less than serious. I was governed, I mean, by clichés.

Of course I didn’t bury Feldman on a Saturday. And I didn’t believe for a minute that Tober expected me to. Pamella’s call is the key to what I thought. Lou Pamella was the floral guy, the nurseryman and landscaper for Lud’s two big cemeteries—Pineoaks and Masada Plains, the names pleasant and euphonious as the labels on aftershave. I worked for Tober, I worked for Shull. Not only was Pamella’s call to me unprecedented, it was impossible to conceive he could even have made it if Tober or Shull hadn’t asked him to. I didn’t know why, but they were covering ass. For reasons unknown they wanted me in on it, widening witness, spreading complicity. These were the novel, picturesque notions I had in those days.

You don’t want to look rushed. It’s best if the rabbi is on the scene before the family and friends of the deceased. It seems a strange, dark thing to say, but I’m the host on these occasions. Everyone else—the wife, the children, the brothers and sisters, even the parents—is a guest. Tober, Shull, and all their assistants, from the drivers to the men who work the hydraulics at the graveside, are just the caterers. The rabbi’s the host. It’s his fellowship, tact and hospitality they go out whistling. I’ve too many responsibilities, I can’t afford to be late. And I wasn’t. I was at the chapel better than half an hour before my first guests might reasonably have been expected, and a full hour before we were scheduled to begin. I even had my key in case Tober, Shull, or whoever else was on duty that morning hadn’t arrived yet. But when I came in Sunday, the casket was closed and the family already gathered. So, though the chapel was less than a quarter full, had the guests. I knew from the way they sat, facing forward, not talking to each other, quiet, even rapt, all eyes fixed on the casket, that no one else would be coming. It was as if—no small children played about the drinking fountain in the foyer (no children were there at all), no one smoked in the lounge—the service had already begun. Maybe what Pamella had told me was true, maybe they
did
want it over and done with.

When he saw me, Tober moved away from the side wall where he’d been standing and went to one of the people in the front and whispered something. The man looked at me for a moment, adjusted the yarmulke, black and shiny as a patent-leather button, he’d taken from the open box at the entrance to the sanctuary, and nodded. As he came up the aisle toward me he’d tip first one hand then the other to his skullcap like someone maintaining balance as he rushed along a tightrope. Tober, looming large and clutching the documents I would have to sign, followed wretchedly in his wake, distraught as a hand-wringer. “Not here,” Tober whispered and handed me the papers as we stepped out of the auditorium. “Rabbi Goldkorn,” he introduced, “Mr.—er—Levine.”