The Rabbi (36 page)

One evening, at a cocktail party given by the Larry Wolfsons in honor of her sister and brother-in-law from Chicago, Leslie was asked what she had done before her marriage, and she mentioned her job on the magazine.

“We could use a good feature writer at the
News
,” Dave Schoenfeld said, deftly snaring a gibson from a passing tray. “Can't pay New York prices of course, but I wish you'd give it a try.”

“You've got yourself a girl,” she said. “What are your sacred cows?”

“You can write about anything except early pregnancies and United Nations darkies,” he said.

“That's too restrictive for me,” she said.

“Come on down to the office in the morning,” he said as he moved away. “We'll line up your first assignment.”

That night as she and Michael got ready for bed she told him about the encounter.

“Sounds good,” he said. “You going to do it?”

“I guess so,” she said. “But I don't know if I can get away with it. They're so damn sick about skin color. Last Wednesday night at bridge the girls spent half an hour telling each other how impossible the
schwartzes
have become since the war. And
they didn't bother to lower their voices because Lena Millman's maid was working in the next room. The poor girl kept right on working with her face a perfect blank, as if they were talking Hindustani.”

“Or Yiddish.” He sighed. “Actually, some of our members have very good attitudes about race.”

“Privately. Very privately. They're so intimidated they're afraid to discuss it unless all the windows are locked. Darling?” she said. “Aren't you going to have to face this kind of thing from the pulpit sooner or later?”

“Make it later,” he said, closing the bathroom door behind him.

He had already admitted defeat in the area of race relations.

The Temple Sinai
shamus
, or janitor, who in a Brooklyn
shul
would have been a pious old Jew using the job as an excuse for a life of prayer and study, was a plump Negro named Joe Williams.

Michael observed from the start that the trash bin was never emptied, the metalwork never shined, the floors unwashed and unwaxed unless he insisted repeatedly that they be done. Williams also did other things infrequently, as testified by the fact that he carried with him an acrid odor that matched the salt-rimmed stains which spread beneath both armpits of his shirt.

“We should fire him and get somebody else,” Michael insisted to Saul Abelson, chairman of the Maintenance Committee.

Abelson smiled tolerantly. “They're all alike, Rabbi,” he said. “The next one will be just as bad. You have to ride their tails.”

“You mean to tell me I don't see clean, cheerful, and alert Negroes every day right here in town? Why don't we try to hire someone like that?”

“You don't understand yet,” Abelson said patiently. “If Joe's been lazy I'll have to talk with him.”

One day, irritated because the sacramental silver hadn't been polished, Michael invaded the
shamus
' domain.

The cellar was gloomy, smelling of dampness and molding newspapers.

He found Joe Williams in a drunken sleep on a grimy army cot. He shook him; the man mumbled and licked his lips but did
not waken. There was a notebook and a stub of pencil on the floor next to the sleeping figure. Michael picked it up.

He read only the single line scrawled on the first page.

Nigger is six foot tall. Would like a room with four foot ceiling
.

He placed the notebook where he had found it and never bothered Joe Williams again.

Instead, he began to lock himself into his study for half an hour each Friday afternoon. Spreading newspapers on his desk, he used a rag and International Silver Polish to make the sterling Sabbath wine chalice gleam in time for the evening service. And sometimes, while he rubbed, getting the gray grit of the polish under his nails and setting his teeth on edge, he could hear thumping or an occasional curse from the
shamus
' domain in the cellar, proving that Joe Williams was still alive.

Leslie wrote a story for each edition of the
News
. They were light, humorous pieces or historical articles with a human-interest angle. For each she received seven dollars and fifty cents and a byline which her husband regarded with a certain amount of awe.

Their lives developed routine, and they found it good. The days fell predictably as tin ducks in a shooting gallery, and they both became certain that they had always been married to one another. She started to knit him a bulky sweater for a first-anniversary present, which he soon discovered hidden in the spare closet and thereafter studiously avoided.

As the seasons changed the leaves turned, not the bright colors splashed on the trees along the Hudson and the Charles, but shriveled browns and anaemic yellows. Then the rains came instead of the snows of their previous winters, the kind of rains to which they were unaccustomed.

One evening the rain came with a rush as Leslie walked past the General's statue toward the office of the
News
. She ran until she burst through the door and stood inside, dripping and gasping. The small editorial room was deserted except for Dave Schoenfeld, who was turning out lights and preparing to follow the example of the office staff and go home.

“Didn't you ever learn to swim?” he said, grinning.

She sat on a desk, tilting her head and squeezing water out of handfuls of hair. “The Atlantic Ocean just fell out of the sky in pieces no bigger than nickels,” she said.

“That's news, but the edition's closed,” he said. “We'll have to tell them about that on Thursday.”

She took off her sodden coat and rescued her story from the pocket. Some of the pages had gotten wet, and she smoothed them flat on the top of a filing cabinet and started to edit the copy. The feature was about a man who had been a brakeman on the Atlantic Coast Line for thirty years. After his retirement, he had confided to her, he had stayed drunk for three months, living in a caboose in a siding outside Macon under the care and protection of loyal former colleagues. “Don't print that, if you please,” he had said with great dignity, “just say I spent the time traveling on my railroad pass,” and Leslie had promised despite a vague feeling that she was breaking a journalistic code. When the old man had sobered up, in sheer boredom one day he had picked up a chunk of pine and a pocket knife and had started to whittle. Now his American eagles sold as fast as he could carve them, and at seventy-eight he was still making bank deposits.

It was a good feature and she thought that she might try to sell it to the Associated Press or the North American Newspaper Alliance and surprise Michael with the check. She edited it carefully, making a low moaning sound when her pencil point mushed through a wet spot in the copy paper.

Dave Schoenfeld came over to her and read for a few minutes over her shoulder. “Looks like a pretty fair piece,” he said, and she nodded.

“Rabbi's been pretty busy these nights?”

She nodded, still reading.

“Must get lonesome.”

She shrugged. “It gives me time to work on these stories.”

“You spelled chisel wrong, next-to-last graph,” he said. “
Ee-el
, not
el-ee
.” She nodded and made the correction. She was so engrossed in the editing of the story that it took her a little while to realize that what she felt was his hand. By the time she was ready to admit this somewhat astounding fact to herself he had bent forward and covered her mouth with
his. She stood perfectly still, her lips closed, her hands by her sides still holding a pencil and a piece of copy, until he took his mouth away. “Don't be frightened,” he said.

She carefully gathered up the pages of the story and walked away from him to where her coat lay in a wet heap on the advertising counter. She put it on and pushed the story into her pocket.

“When can I see you?” he said.

She merely looked at him.

“You'll change your mind,” he said. “I have things to teach you and you'll think about them.”

She turned and walked toward the door.

“I wouldn't say anything to anybody,” he said. “I can break your little
Yiddisheh
parson in ways you never dreamed of.”

When she was outside, she walked very slowly in the rain. She didn't think she was crying, but her face was so wet almost at once that she couldn't be sure. She wished that she had left the story. The poor old man with the pocket knife and the pieces of wood, she thought, waiting for his name and his picture in the paper.

Their anniversary fell on a Sunday and they had to get up early because Michael taught a nine-o'clock class at the Temple. They exchanged gifts at the breakfast table, and he wore his sweater and she was very happy with the cameo earrings he had bought for her months before.

After lunch Michael took a rake and attacked the foundation beds, pulling out bucket after bucket of evil-looking leaves. He had finished one bed and was halfway through another when the parade of cars began.

This time he had a vantage point and plenty of time. He forgot the leaves and sat back to observe the cars.

The sick people usually sat in the back seat.

Many of them held crutches. Some of the cars had wheelchairs strapped to the roof or sticking out of the trunk.

Once in a while a rented ambulance rolled by.

Finally he could stand it no longer. He dropped his weeding tool and went into the house. “I wish we had a television set,” he told Leslie. “I'd like to see what that fellow has that attracts so many people every Sunday.”

“He's only a couple of miles away,” she said. “Why don't you take a ride out to his tent?”

“On our first anniversary?”

“Oh, go ahead,” she said. “It will only be for an hour or two.”

“I think I will,” he said.

He had no idea where the prayer meeting was held, but finding it was simple. He waited for the first break in the line of traffic and then pulled his car out of the driveway. The line snaked over the curling road, through the General's square, out the other side of town, past a Negro district of dilapidated houses and unpainted shacks, and onto the state highway. Here it mated with another motorized serpent which came from the opposite direction. The new line, Michael saw, contained in addition to Georgia cars a few vehicles bearing plates from South Carolina and North Carolina.

Long before the big tent came into view, cars began turning off the road and bumping over the fields to park under the direction of Negro youths and straw-hatted white farm boys who took money and made change, standing near homemade signs whose prices rose as the cars drew closer to the tent:

PARKING 50¢
.

PARK YOUR CAR 75¢
.

PARK HERE $1.00
.

Some of the cars, Michael's included, remained on the highway until they came to a huge red-dirt parking lot which had been bulldozed to encircle the canvas church. The parking lot was roped off from the highway. Entrance was gained through a narrow ropeless opening, hardly more than the width of a single car, which was manned by a bald man wearing shiny black trousers, a white shirt and a black cotton tie.

“Bless you, brother,” he said to Michael.

“Good afternoon.”

“That will be two dollars fifty cents.”

“Two-fifty. For parking?”

The man smiled. “We try to keep this lot reserved for the lame an' the halt,” he said. “Our method of doin' this kindness is to charge two dollars fifty cents per car. Money goes to the Holy Fundamentalist Preachers Fund to further the Lord's work. If you rather not pay it, you can go back an' park in one of the fields.”

Michael looked over his shoulder. The road behind him was solidly blocked. “I insist,” he said. He reached for his money and isolated two one-dollar bills and a fifty-cent piece.

“God bless you,” the man said, still smiling.

Michael parked his car and walked toward the tent. Ahead of him a thin, pasty-faced little boy leaned against a car mudguard and made gargling sounds.

“Now you listen here, Ralphie Johnson, you cut that out,” a middle-aged woman said as she stood over the boy. “Here we come all this way, with that healin' preacher only a few feet off from us, an you start your monkey business. You just come on. Hear?”

The boy began to cry. “Can't,” he whispered. His lips were light blue, as if he had stayed in the water too long.

Michael stopped. “Can I help you?”

“Perhaps if you can carry him in?” the woman asked hesitantly.

The boy closed his eyes when Michael lifted him. Inside, the tent was already crowded. Michael set his burden down on one of the wooden folding chairs.

“Say thank you to the nice man, Ralphie,” the woman said brightly. The blue lips didn't move. The eyes remained closed.

Michael nodded and moved away. The chairs in the front of the tent were filled with people. He moved into an empty row about two thirds back and took a seat in the middle. In three minutes the entire row was filled. Ahead of him sat a fat woman whose head twitched spasmodically and with regular rhythm, left to right and then straight again, as if pulled by a string.

In the seat to his left sat a middle-aged blind man eating a sandwich held in long, narrow hands hooked into claws by rheumatoid arthritis.

In the seat to his right sat a well-dressed, attractive woman who looked fit and sound. She kept brushing her hand across her bosom. Presently she flicked her fingers over Michael's shoulder.

“Joy,” the woman in the seat next to her said softly. “Leave the man alone.”

“But the ants,” she said. “Now they're all over him.”

“Just leave him alone. He likes them.”

The woman made a face. “I don't,” she said, brushing her chest again and shuddering.