The Rabbi of Lud (6 page)

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told him.

“The casket stays closed,” Levine said in a faint German accent.

“Well, of course,” I said. “The family’s wishes, the ravages of the cancer. I perfectly understand.”

“The cancer?”

“Please,” big Tober said nervously, “can we just get on with it, Rabbi, please?”

“Of course I never had the pleasure of knowing the deceased personally. Could you tell me about your … For the eulogy,” I said. “I’ll need to know a little something about your—”

“Second cousin,” he said.

“I see. Your second cousin. Yes. Well, can you tell me something about him for my eulogy?”

“He was a hat salesman.” Though he stood still, he was still doing his balancing act with the skullcap.

“It’s just that I might be of some comfort to the widow,” I said. “The sons and the daughters. Sometimes it helps even if they only hear a list of characteristics, outstanding traits.”

“Jerry,” Tober said,
“please.”

“You mean was he a left-handed hat salesman?”

“No, no, that’s all right,” I said, as if Tober had objected or the wise guy apologized. “Our teachers back in the Maldives used to remind us that men of the cloth are often God’s first line of defense. Ours is the contemplative, spiritual life, so naturally, people assume we’re His agents. We take the gibes and blows meant for Him. We’re quite used to it by now. His holy punching bags. Really. Particularly when Master-of-the-Universe sees fit to pull your loved ones up short.”

“Oh, Goldkorn, Goldkorn,” Tober chanted under his breath.

Even as he glared at me the man continued to position his skullcap.

It was true. Far from being angry, I had somewhat softened my opinion of him. I put my hand out to comfort him. “I can tell,” I said, “that you are only recently beneath the yarmulke. Don’t worry, they don’t fall off so easy.”

“Goldkorn, Goldkorn.”

“All right,” he said, “he was married. But circumstances—there’s no reason to go into them—prevent the wife and kids from being here today. My cousin”—he lowered his voice—“well, my cousin wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. People didn’t always understand him.”

I did, I thought. And just then, just there, I knew it was Mengele in that closed casket. My reasons? I had no reasons. I was a man of faith, wasn’t I? All right then, this was faith. The Nazi, Mengele, had happened in death to tumble into my theological jurisdiction. It came like a bolt from the blue. Which was all the more reason a man of faith didn’t need reasons.

“He was very well organized,” the guy was saying. “People who worked with him, his customers, may have thought he was obsessed. They never realized what drove him was his devotion to his job. That was unrelenting. If he’d been in medical research instead of a hat salesman they’d have called it scientific curiosity. He was an immensely
passionate
man.
Immensely
passionate.”

“I see,” I said. “Organized, passionate, misunderstood. Like a scientist when it came to his work. This was some hat salesman we’re talking about here.”

“Goldkorn!”
Tober growled.

Levine, passionate himself now, had warmed to his theme and went on with his character reading like a handwriting expert or an astrologist on the radio. I wasn’t even listening anymore. The man in the casket was Mengele.

Or some other high-up Nazi.

I didn’t bat an eye. I nodded at the Levine character, winked at Tober, and indicated it was time we start back to the chapel.

As I moved down the aisle to take my place behind the plain, free-standing lectern that was the only pulpit I’d ever known, I could see that all the male mourners,
all
of them, not only sat under one of those Shull and Tober, in-house yarmulkes, at once as well-behaved and smug as tourists at a ritual of natives, but were as new to the skullcap as the phony Levine. A whole entire coven of Nazis!

Of course it was Mengele. Sure it was. Though I didn’t understand it. (But why would I? How could all that good death gossip have filtered down through all those layers of concentrated, unmediated lust, my four-year-long hard-on? Unless my marriage had sprung a leak. Was something awry? I’d heard things. I hadn’t known I’d heard them but I had, and maybe wasn’t so far gone in my boobery and bumbledom and all-thumbs, Tom Fool mooncalfery as I’d thought.) I’m not paranoid. Anyway, a rabbi’s got to be very careful about death. What do you think all that documentation is about? Those seals and death certificates? All mortality’s red tape? Why is death law—murder, probate—law’s biggest portion? It’s because the dead are potential contraband. (They are. Consider the pharaohs stashed in all those old bank vaults and safety deposit boxes. Saints’ relics come to mind. Old bones, the fossil record. And a skull-and-crossbones is still your dark signal of poison and stolen treasure!)

So there I was, Mengele or that other high-up Nazi behind me in the box. There I was, reciting the prayers, buttering up God, carrying on. And getting as big a kick out of it as when I was one of Wolfblock’s wandering minstrels in the minyan back on Chicago’s South Side. I could see big, gray Tober standing off to the side toward the back. He seemed to be hiding out right there in the open. Shull, on the other hand, I spotted sitting bold as you please smack in the middle of my little congregation just as if he were one of the mourners. Or spotted his smile rather. That strange broad beaming which complemented and set off the depleted energies of the grievers and seemed in its stubborn joy rather more like the exaltation of Christians assured of Heaven than the woe of a Jew. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him plunk himself down right in the midst of the customers. It always made a big hit.

And me? I wasn’t doing too badly, but there were tears in the eyes of the Nazis and some were openly sobbing, the bastards. That had taken me by surprise and made me more than a little furious too, the idea that this riffraff were not only moved by the loss of a world-class putz like the guy laid out in the casket but could be moved even in Hebe by a representative of a religion they hated. I poured it on, turned up the feeling and the temperature, chanting the prayers as if I were standing before the Wailing Wall and banging my breast like a rabbi in heat. Tober looked alarmed and Shull’s grin widened, but the S.S. only moaned the louder. No matter what I did there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I threw extra trills into my broches, all the trills the traffic would bear. More. Tober stared at me, curiosity and frank, sober astonishment gradually replacing apoplexy. Shull’s grin, appraising me, seemed impressed.

I was excited. I was keen. Whatever might yet happen to me, whatever civil laws I was breaking, as well as whichever of God’s commandments I was violating—His injunction against false witness and, in view of my hammed-up prayers in front of the Nazis, probably the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain—and whatever arrangements had been arranged—I was sure now that Shull was the mischief-maker, that big, craven Tober was only his frightened, maybe even unwilling, accomplice—and which I in my anger and eagerness was determined to upset, I was resolved to deliver this day in New Jersey such a eulogy as had never before been heard.

I took a breath. You don’t fly off the handle, I cautioned myself. You control yourself. You don’t slander.

“I don’t know this Morris personally,” I began, “but don’t I hear your sobs and catarrhs? Copious, copious. I’m in the business, I’m a professional, and I’m telling you, you get to bury somebody pulls this much grief maybe once in an entire career. If that. This is probably it for me, I should think. I mean, what the heck, I’m a relative youngster. If, kayn aynhoreh, my health holds up, I suppose I can expect to bury maybe another six or seven thousand dead people. How do
I
know what lies in store, what mensches have yet to give up the ghost? But, the way I see it, it doesn’t matter. Let those six or seven thousand be six or seven
times
six or seven thousand, sorrow like yours knocks the needle out of the red and right off the grief-o-meter!

“What can one say about such a man? We see how loved he was all the way down the line.
A second cousin is his chief mourner!

“Yes, and Cousin Levine tells me our beloved friend was a passionate, organized, misunderstood, scientific sort of man. Passionate. Organized. Scientific. Misunderstood. Ask yourselves, what does Talmud tell us it means when a man is passionate and scientific? When he’s well-organized and misunderstood? It tells us,” I told them, “it tells us that what we’re dealing with here is a super Jew, maybe the Messiah.

“That’s right, you heard me. The Messiah. Messiah Himself.”

It was, I recall thinking, the perfect touch. They were outraged. They stared at me in disbelief and wanted, I saw, to knock me down. They still wept, but now their tears were angry, furious in fact, so intense they might have scalded their retinas and burned through their cheeks.

“God takes,” I said, not through with them yet, “a Moses, He takes an Abraham and throws in an Isaac. He adds a Jacob and adds a Joshua. He takes an Elijah and stirs in a David. He folds in a Solomon and a Daniel, you homemakers and balebostes. He takes the First and Second Isaiahs and adds a dash of Noah, a pinch of Job. He separates your Maccabees, First and Second, and mixes with an Ezekiel.

“He takes,” I said, glaring at them and leaning forward, “He takes a
Josef
…”

I broke off and slipped into the Kaddish. It was just one more thing. They wouldn’t know. You say Kaddish at the graveside. Also, a lone man may lay t’phillim, but it takes a minyan of ten Jewish males to make a Kaddish. Me, Shull and Tober were the only Jews in the room. All my wailing, breast-knocking and trilled broches didn’t mean a thing. In God’s eyes the Kaddish not only didn’t count, it never happened! This is a Jewish mystery.

Shull’s grin had disappeared. I was pretty sure he was aware I knew what was up. What difference did it make? Nothing would happen. They kept me on because I was their stooge. They thought they could manipulate me. They knew I’d look the other way. It was all right with me. Why would I want to be in a Pittsburgh? Why would I care to go to a New York? My Shelley was here.

On the way to the cemetery I sat between Shull and Tober. We rode along in silence for a while. Then Shull chuckled. “That was one hell of a job you did back there,” he said and patted my thigh. “One
hell
of a job!”

“It was,” Tober agreed.

“I never heard anything like it.”

“Neither did I,” said Tober.

“You gave them a real run for their money, a real, what-do-you-call-it, catharsis.”

“You sure did,” Tober said.

“What an idea,” said Shull, shaking his head. “What a thing to do.”

“Messiah recipes.”

“Mocking their dead.”

“Making them feel guilty.”

“Having them eat their misery like pie.”

“Lick their loss like a lollipop. A catharsis. A real catharsis.”

“They’ll owe you forever. They’ll never forget it.”

“None of us will. Though you might have added,” Tober added, “about how they loan him all that money to open his hat place in Garden City, then, after he’s sick, when his visitors leave and his painkillers kick in, he turns around and jimmies the books on them right from his hospital room. Or how his widow wouldn’t come to his funeral because she was too humiliated.”

My God, a widow-humiliating book-jimmier! How could I have thought he was Mengele? Or any other high-up or low-down Nazi either? How could I? Because. Because you want to believe. Because you want to believe all the high jinks, all the back-room, front-page, deep-throat kinkery and irregularity, all the rumor, all the talk. Because you want to believe there’s all-out, anything-goes evil in the world, conspiracy, Armageddon moving in like a cold front, anything, whatever keeps you engaged. Like you want to believe there’s a God.

How
could
I? Because the honeymoon was starting to wind down, the three or four years of desert-isle lust and abandon beginning to feel more like four than three. She wasn’t there that morning and I hadn’t even realized she was missing, and both of us, me with the distractions that my work sometimes offered or that I could invent, and Shelley with her visits and Lady Bountiful routines, were just beginning to look around.

“I stay open,” Sal said, “in the hopes that Lud will grow and I can turn this place into a real barbershop one day.” He was brushing loose hairs from my jacket with one of those yellow, short-handled whisk brooms you don’t see anymore or you’d buy one.

“Nice job, Sal,” I told him, admiring myself in the mirror. “The wife’s been after me to get this done.” I handed him his money and waved off the change.

“Thanks,” Sal said, then made his voice lower than ever. I had to strain to hear him. “The gangland killing in that restaurant over in Brooklyn? Joe ‘Black Olives’ Benapisco that they shot bullets in his eyes?”

“Yes?”

“I think I may have to style his hair.”

“Sal,” I said, “come on.”

“No shit,” he said. “And Rabbi?”

“What is it?”

“There’s some bones and ashes I’m supposed to put into his pockets with him. Some ground-up teeth.”

“What?”

I couldn’t hear him.

“What’s that?” I said. “Who?”

“Jimmy Hoffa,” he whispered.

three

I
N LUD, on the night before a funeral, you used to be able to see, through the wide plate glass of the funeral homes, the dead laid out in their caskets. The practice was discontinued when the oversight committee that passes on such things, that determines the height of the buildings you can put up and rules on the color of the bricks you may use, decided that however convenient it was for the old and infirm to be driven past their loved ones lying in state behind the mortuary’s big windows and view them from their cars, it never quite made up for a certain lapse in taste, that the deceased always looked too much like the lobsters one picks out for one’s dinner at the bottom of the tanks in seafood restaurants.

It was before her time, so I’d been explaining this to my daughter, Constance, filling her in on the history and heritage of Old Lud.