The Rabbi (19 page)

The short, bearded man on the ground was sitting up. His wind had been knocked out of him and his breath rattled in his throat as he sucked air. Finally he breathed deeply, and grinned, ducking his head at the textbook. “The power of the printed word.” His words were thick with accent.

Michael helped him to his feet. A dark blob in the white snow turned out to be a
yarmulka
. It was full of snow. Snow and all, he stuffed it into his coat pocket with an embarrassed nod of thanks. “I was saying
Shema
. The evening prayer.”

“I know.”

Panting horribly, the police officer arrived. Michael told him what had happened, drinking the blood from his smashed mouth. The three men walked back into the pool of light beneath the street lamp. “Did you see their faces?” the policeman asked.

The short man shook his head. “No.”

Michael had seen a few features, blurred by motion. The cop asked if he could pick the man from a lineup. “I'm sure I couldn't.”

The officer sighed. “Might as well forget them, in that case. By now they're far away. Probably from some other part of town. They get anything?”

The bearded man had a dark bruise below his left eye. He reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out his fist. When he opened it, his palm contained a half-dollar, a quarter, and two nickels. “No,” he said.

“That's all you're carrying?” the cop asked gently. “No wallet?”

He shook his head.

“They'd kill you for your last nickel,” the policeman said.

“I'm taking a cab home,” Michael said to the bearded man. “Let me drop you.”

“No, no. It is only two short blocks. On Broadway.”

“I'll walk with you then, and take my cab from there.” They thanked the policeman and walked through the snow in silence, feeling their bruises. When finally the man stopped it was in front of an old brick building with an unreadable wooden plaque on the door.

He grasped Michael's hand. “I thank you. I am Gross, Max Gross. Rabbi Max Gross. Will you join me, please? A cup of tea?”

Michael was curious and he agreed, introducing himself. As they entered Rabbi Gross stood on his toes in order to touch a
mezuzah
placed high on the doorframe, then he kissed his fingertips. From his pocket he took the
yarmulka
, now sodden with melted snow, and clapped it on his head. A small cardboard carton contained a heap of other skullcaps, and he pointed to them. “This is God's house.” Michael put one on, thinking that if it were so, God needed a handout. The room was small and narrow, more of a hallway than a room, wide enough to accommodate only ten rows of attached wooden folding chairs set before the altar. A crumbling linoleum covered the floor. At one end of the room a tiny vestry contained a battered office table and some scarred cane chairs. Gross removed his coat, dropping it on the table. He wore an unpressed suit of navy blue. Michael couldn't tell if there was a tie beneath the beard. The rabbi was very clean, but Michael got the impression that if he had no beard he would walk around all the time needing a shave.

There was a rumble that shook the whole building and the naked yellow bulb at the end of its striped cord leaped, sending large shadows swaying on the ceiling. “What's that?” Michael gasped.

“Subway.” At the soapstone sink he filled a dented aluminum pot with water and set it to boil on an electric hotplate. The mugs were thick and cracked. He colored both cups of water with one tea bag. They used lump sugar. He said a
brocha
. They sat on the cane-bottomed chairs and sipped.

The bruise on the rabbi's face was turning purple. His eyes were large and brown and soft with innocence, like a child's or an animal's. A saint or a fool, Michael told himself.

“Have you been here long, Rabbi?”

He blew on his tea. He thought a long time. “Sixteen years. Yes, sixteen.”

“How many members do you have in your congregation?”

“Not many. A few. Old men, mostly old men.” He simply sat and drank. He showed no curiosity about Michael, asked him no questions. They finished the tea and shook hands, and Michael put on his coat. At the doorway he turned and looked back. Rabbi Gross seemed unaware that he was not alone. His back to his visitor, he swayed and bobbed, finishing the evening
Shema
that had been interrupted on the street:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One
. The subway rumbled. The building shook. The lightbulb leaped. The shadows swayed. Michael fled.

One night just before midterms he sat in the Student Union drinking coffee with two other students, one of whom was a desirable woman. All three of them were having just a little trouble with American Philosophy. “What about Orestes Brownson and his disillusionment over the Enlightenment?” Edna Roth asked. She had a small pink tongue that flickered as she licked Danish-roll stickiness from her fingertips.

“My God, all I remember about him is that he converted to Catholicism,” he said, groaning.

“I've been thinking about your father,” Chuck Farley said out of the blue. “Small capitalists like your father are the workingman's greatest enemies.”

“Most weeks my father has trouble meeting his payroll,” Michael said shortly. Farley had never met Abe Kind. A couple of times he had asked about Kind foundations and Michael had answered his questions. “The union is giving him an ulcer. What has that to do with American Philosophy?”

Farley raised his eyebrows. “Everything,” he said. “Can't you see that?” Farley was very ugly, with a prominent, freckled nose and ginger-colored hair, lashes, and brows. He wore octagonal frameless glasses and was a fussy but drab dresser. Whenever he gave a talk in class he pulled from his pants an enormous cartwheel of a gold watch and set it on the desk in front of him. Michael drank a lot of Student Union coffee with him because Edna Roth was always sitting by his side.

Edna was a soft, dark brunette with a beauty mark high on her left cheekbone and a slight swell to her underlip that made Michael want to try it between his teeth. A trifle fat, just slightly dowdy, neither pretty nor unpretty, she wore her femaleness comfortably in her brown eyes and she exuded a bovine heat and a faint, puzzling smell like milk.

“From now on no happy little drunkies,” she said, although Michael had never bar-hopped with them. “No forty winks, no tiddlywinks, no Cecil B. De Mille's extravaganzas. We need a lot more studying for that exam.” She blinked at Farley anxiously. She was nearsighted; it gave her face a dreamy, slightly out-of-focus look. “Will you have enough time to study, honeybun?”

He nodded. “On the train.” He was commuting to Danbury, Connecticut, where he was helping to picket the hat industry. Edna was very understanding about these activities. She was a widow. Her late husband, Seymour, had also been a Party member. She knew all about picketing.

Farley left, after touching his thin lips to her full mouth. Michael and Edna finished their coffee and retired to a cubicle on the third floor of Butler, where until closing time they wrestled with Brownson and Theodore Parker, the transcendentalists, the cosmic philosophers, the radical empiricists, Calvinism, Borden Parker Browne, Thoreau, Melville, Brook Farm, William Torrey Harris. . . .

On the stairs outside, he blinked his burning eyes. “There's too much, too many details.”

“I know. Look, honeybun, want to come to my place and study for another hour or two?”

They took the subway. She lived in an old red-brick apartment building in Washington Heights. She opened the door with her key, and he was surprised to see a thin young Negro girl seated by the radio, doing her math homework, which she started to gather together as soon as she saw them.

“How is he, Martha?” Edna asked.

“Fine. He's just a darling boy.”

The girl left, carrying her books. He followed Edna into the small bedroom and bent with her over the crib. He had thought that all Seymour had left her was enough money to return to Teachers College to pick up her meal ticket. But here was a different legacy.

“He's a handsome guy,” Michael said when they had returned to the living room. “How old is he?”

“Thank you. Fourteen months. His name's Alan.” She went into the kitchen and started putting on a pot of coffee. He looked around. There was a picture on the mantel. He knew without asking that this was the late Seymour, a somewhat handsome man wearing a ridiculous mustache and a strained smile. The furniture was Colonial borax. With luck it would last until she began to teach or remarried. When he looked out the window he saw the river. The building was nearer to Broadway than the Drive, but the land dropped away sharply toward the Hudson, and Edna's apartment was on the eighth floor. Warm little lights that were boats crawled slowly over the water.

They had coffee in the tiny kitchenette and then they studied without moving from their places at the table, his knee finding her thigh. Before forty minutes had passed he was through and she had closed her book, too. It was warm in the kitchen. Her milky smell was there again, faint but distinct.

“Well, I guess I'd better be going.”

“You can stay if you want, honeybun. I mean tonight.”

He used the telephone while she cleared the coffee dishes. His mother answered, her voice foggy with sleep, and he told her he was studying late and would sleep with a friend. She thanked him for calling so that she wouldn't worry.

The bedroom adjoined the baby's, and the door was open. They undressed back to back by the light of the baby's nightlight. He caught her underlip gently between his teeth, the way he had promised himself. In the bed, close to her, the faint, milky smell was very real. He wondered if she could still be nursing the baby. But her nipples were dry, hard little buds. Everything else was soft and warm, no shocks or surprises, a gentle rising and falling, the steady rocking of a cradle. She was kind. When he fell asleep, her palm was holding the back of his head.

The baby started to cry at four
A.M
., a thin rope of sound that pulled them into wakefulness. She yanked her arm from beneath his head, leaped out of bed, and ran to heat a bottle. Viewed naked from the back her buttocks were large and slightly drooping. When she took the bottle from the pan of hot water the milk-smell mystery was solved, she shook a white jet into
the soft, sensitive flesh in the bend of her elbow. Satisfied that the temperature of the milk was all right, she put the nipple into the baby's mouth. The wailing stopped.

When she had re-entered the bed he leaned over her body to kiss the place where the milk had fallen. It was still damp and warm. He let the tip of his tongue explore the softness inside her elbow. The milk was sweet. She sighed deeply. Her hand reached for him. This time he was more confident, she less maternal. When she slept he got out of bed carefully, dressed in the dark and let himself out of the apartment. Downstairs, outside, it was dark; a wind blew from the river. He turned up his coat collar and began to walk. He felt weightless and happy, relieved of the burden of innocence. “Finally,” he said aloud. A kid pedaling by in the gutter, his deep bicycle-basket loaded with packages, shot him a look hard and shining as a marble. Any other place in the world would still be sleeping at 5:05
A.M
. Manhattan was alive. People on the sidewalk, taxis and cars in the street. He walked for a long time. It had been light for several minutes when he recognized one of the buildings he was passing. It was the little
shul
where the subway shook the lights, the synagogue of Rabbi Max Gross.

He approached the door and put his eyes inches away from the almost-obliterated lettering of the small wooden plaque. In the gray light of dawn the faded Hebrew letters seemed to twist and squirm, but with difficulty he made them out.
Shaarai Shomayim
. The Gates of Heaven.

 

15

By the time he was four years old in the Polish town of Vorka, Max Gross could read portions of the Talmud. At the age of seven, when most of his small friends still were mastering language and the stories of the Bible, he had plunged deep into the complexities of the law. His father, Chaim Gross the wine merchant,
rejoiced that his storekeeper's seed had produced an
ilui
, a Talmudic prodigy who would bring the blessings of God on the soul of Soreleh, his late wife, who had been sent to Paradise by influenza while her son still crawled. From the time Max could read he accompanied his father and the other Chassidim when they gathered before their leader, Rabbi Label. Each Sabbath evening, the Rabbi of Vorka “presented his table.” The pious Jews would dine early in their own homes, knowing that their leader awaited them. When they had gathered around his table the elderly Rabbi would begin to eat, from time to time handing a tidbit—a piece of white chicken, a sweet marrow bone, a small portion of fish flesh—to a deserving Jew who nibbled it blissfully, aware that food from the Rabbi's hand was food that had been touched by God. Max the prodigy sat in the midst of his elders wearing a white velvet
caftan
, skinny and large-eyed, even then small for his years, with a perpetual frown on his face as he tugged at one of his earlocks while he strained to hear the Rabbi's words of wisdom.