The Rabbi (41 page)

“I'll clean out my study at the temple,” he told Leslie.

The first thing he noticed when he parked his car in the Temple Sinai driveway was the remains of the cross on the lawn. He stood and looked at it for a long time. Then he unlocked the door. There was no sign of Joe Williams, the
shamus
, and anyhow Michael assumed that Williams would not relish the job of cleaning up after the Klan or its equivalent. He found a
rake and a spade in the utility shed and he raked the ashes and the charred chunks of wood carefully and then loaded the debris into a wheelbarrow and added it to the overflowing rubbish bin in the back yard. Then he came back to the front lawn and inspected what was left. The top of the cross evidently had been consumed before the entire flaming structure had toppled and burned itself out on the ground. The result was a T-shaped scar etched blackly into the turf, with each bar of the T about twelve feet long. Michael kicked the spade into the turf and began to turn the sod over along the burned lines. It was an old lawn, with a deep layer of interwoven roots that gave like a sponge before allowing the edge of the spade to cut through. Soon he was sweating.

A green Chevrolet, prewar but clean and shining, drifted slowly by. Three houses beyond the temple the driver stopped the car and then shoved it into reverse. A very black man got out and sat on the car's front mudguard, rolling up the sleeves of his blue workshirt. He was tall and thin and balding. What hair he had left was mixed with gray. He watched Michael in silence for a few minutes and then he cleared his throat.

“Trouble with that,” he said, “is that the places you turned over are gonna have to be seeded. Then they're gonna come up a lighter green than the rest of the grass. That cross is still gonna be there.”

Michael paused and leaned on his shovel. “You're right,” he said, frowning. He looked down at the half-spaded T. “Why don't I just connect the corners?” he asked. “Then there'll be nothing but a green triangle.”

The man nodded. He reached through his car window and took the keys from the ignition, then he walked around and unlocked the trunk and took out an edger. He came over to the place where the cross had been burned and began to stamp the half-moon blade into the turf. They worked together without speaking until the triangle was completed. The Negro's face had grown a crop of tiny water droplets, causing his pate to gleam darkly. He took a large handkerchief from his back pocket and carefully wiped his face and neck and bald spot and his circlet of hair and then his palms.

“My name is Lester McNeil,” he said.

Michael held out his hand and they shook firmly.

“Mine is Michael Kind.”

“I know who you are.”

“Thanks for your help,” Michael said. “You did a beautiful job.”

The man waved a hand. “Ought to. I'm a gardener by trade.” He looked down at the triangle. “Tell you what,” he said. “All we need do is add three little corners and we can make this into one of them stars of yours.”

“A Star of David, yes,” Michael said. They fell back to work and soon it was done.

McNeil made another trip to his car trunk and came back with a cardboard box full of seed packets. “Get them at cost,” he said. “It's not much of a bed. A lot of them won't come up. But some of them will. What kind of flowers shall we plant?”

They made the center of the star white verbena and the six points blue alyssum. “Kind of late to be startin' 'em from seed,” McNeil said. “But I guess they'll be all right if you water 'em plenty.”

“I won't be here,” Michael said.

“We heard somethin' like that,” McNeil said. “Well, maybe they'll be lots of rain.” He returned the edger and the seed to his car trunk. “Tell you what,” he said. “I'll stop by once in a while an' give 'em a little drink for you.”

“That will be nice,” Michael said. Suddenly he felt fine. “Maybe we can start a trend. Wherever a cross is burned, a flower bed will spring up.”

“Be good for business,” McNeil said. “Speakin' of drinks, could I have one? Work makes my throat like parched ground.”

“Of course,” Michael said.

In the kitchen he looked in the refrigerator, but found only half a bottle of orange soda left from a
bar mitzvah
six weeks before. It was flat.

“I'm afraid it will have to be water,” he said, spilling the stale soda water into the sink.

“I never drink anything with bubbles except one bottle of beer every night after work, to clear the dust,” McNeil said. They let the water run from the tap until it was cold and then Michael drank two glasses and McNeil drank four.

“Wait a minute,” Michael said. He went to the
bema
and pushed aside the black velvet curtain behind the lectern and pulled out half a bottle of port.

He poured some into each of their glasses and they clinked them and grinned at one another. “
L'chayem
,” Michael said.

“Whatever you said goes double for me,” McNeil said. They knocked the glasses back and tossed off three fingers of warm Manischewitz, neat.

When it came time to go, Leslie called Sally Levitt and Sally drove over and she and Leslie clung to one another and cried and promised to write. Ronnie didn't come, nor did anyone else. Michael could think of nobody he really wanted to see except Dick Kramer, and they drove by his house on the way out of town. It was locked and the shades were drawn. A note tacked to the front door asked that mail be forwarded care of Myron Kramer, 29 Laurel Street, Emmetsburgh, Ga.

With Leslie at the wheel they drove past the pigeon-spotted statue of General Thomas Mott Lainbridge, past the Negro district, onto the state highway, past Billy Joe Raye's tent, and beyond the town limits.

Michael put his head back against the top of the seat and slept. When he awoke they were out of Georgia and he sat for a long while without saying anything, watching the Alabama scenery wheel slowly by.

“It was the wrong way to tackle the issue,” he said finally.

“Forget it. It's over,” she said.

“I should never have attacked it head-on like that. If I had been more tactful I could have stayed there and chipped away at it slowly over the years.”

“There's no use iffing,” she said. “It's over. You're a good rabbi and I'm proud of you.”

They were silent for several miles and then she began to giggle. “I'm glad we left,” she said, and she told him about how Dave Schoenfeld had acted toward her on the night it had rained so hard.

Michael slammed the heel of his palm into the dashboard. “That no-good
momser
,” he said. “He wouldn't have tried that with the rabbi's wife if you had been a Jewish girl.”

“I am a Jewish girl.”

“You know what I mean,” he said in a little while.

“Only too well,” she said clearly.

It settled between them, like an uninvited and hated passenger, and for almost two hours they talked only in short and infrequent
sentences. Then, after stopping at a gas station outside Anniston to allow her to go to the bathroom, he got behind the wheel, and when they were on the road again he put his arm around her and pulled her close to him.

In a little while she told him that she was going to have a baby, and for the next twenty miles they drove again without talk. But this time they were wrapped in a different kind of silence, his arm still around her even though it had fallen asleep long before, and her left hand, fingers spread, resting lightly on his right thigh, a gift of love.

BOOK III:
The Migration

30

Woodborough, Massachusetts
December 1964

The attendant they called Miss Beverly was a vivacious, wiry little girl who was working in the hospital to pay her way through the Sargent College of Physical Education at Boston University. She believed in the value of exercise. With the permission of Dr. Bernstein she had taken Leslie and a patient named Diane Miller for a long walk through the grounds. They had even held hands and jogged a little, so that when they came back into the ward they were cold and merry and ready for the hot chocolate Beverly had promised to make.

Leslie had been just about ready to take off her coat when the Serapin woman had thrown herself on Mrs. Birnbaum, screeching like a cat. They saw her arm rise and fall twice, the tiny blade in her fist glittering in the rather dim yellow light, and then they saw the unbelievable redness spreading on the floor and heard Mrs. Birnbaum's groaning, an ugly sound.

Miss Beverly had pulled Mrs. Serapin's hand behind her back and kept yanking the wrist upward, like some three-hundred-pound wrestler on television, but Mrs. Serapin was much taller and she wouldn't release the knife and finally Beverly began to shout and staff people began to come from every which way. Rogan, the night nurse, came running down from the nursing station with the other attendant and Peterson came charging in from the hall, her eyes bulging and her face the color of sour cream.

Mrs. Birnbaum kept crying and calling for someone named Morty and Mrs. Serapin continued to scream and in the struggle with her somebody had stepped in the blood on the floor, so that a large area was covered with red footprints, like a crazy Arthur Murray diagram.

Leslie felt faint. She turned and walked toward the door, which Peterson had left ajar. At the door she stopped. Only Diane Miller was staring at her. Leslie smiled at Diane reassuringly
and then stepped out of the ward and closed the door behind her.

She walked through the hallway, past the vacant desk where Peterson should have been sitting and reading her television magazine, and into the little alcove between the hall door and the outside door. She stood there in the dark, smelling the cold fresh air coming through the bottom of the outside door, waiting for someone to come out and tell her she should not be there.

But nobody came.

In a few minutes she opened the outside door and stepped outside.

She would take another walk, this time in privacy, she told herself.

She walked down the long winding driveway, past the front gate and the two little stone statues of sitting lions with iron rings in their noses. She breathed deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth, the way Miss Beverly insisted they should.

She no longer felt faint, but she was tired from the earlier exercise and the tension, and when she came to the bus stop she sat down to rest on the bench in the illuminated enclosure provided by the bus company.

In a little while a car came and stopped and a very pleasant woman rolled down the front window and asked if they could rescue her from the cold.

She got in and the woman told her they were from Palmer and bus service was not the best in the world in their neck of the woods, either. They would be glad to drop her off in town, the woman said.

It was quarter to eleven when she got out of their car. Main Street in Woodborough was not the great white way at that hour. Maney's Bar & Grille was open, so was the Soda Shop, a light burned over the window of the YWCA and the bus depot was illuminated; but the shop windows on both sides of the street were dark and blank.

She went into the Soda Shop and ordered coffee. The juke box was blasting and in the booth behind her three boys sat and slapped the table with their palms to the beat of the music.

“Call her, Peckerhead,” one of the boys said.

“Not me.”

“She's probably waitin' for you right now.”

Go ahead, Peckerhead, call her, make some little girl's evening, she thought. They were just a little older than Max.

The coffee came in a cup just like those in the hospital; even the color was the same. She thought of taking a taxi back to the hospital but she was becoming frightened at the thought that she had walked away. She wondered what Dr. Bernstein would say.

“Call her, Peckerhead. You're chicken if you don't.”

“I'm not chicken.”

“Well, call her.”

“You got a dime?”

Evidently the coin was passed, because behind her she heard the boy leave the booth. There was only one telephone in the Soda Shop, and he was still using it when she finished the coffee, but there was a sidewalk telephone booth outside the Y and she started toward it after making certain she had a dime in her change purse with which to call Michael.

However at the last moment instead of entering the telephone booth she walked past it and turned into the YWCA.

A girl with hair like a brown Beatle wig sat at the desk, scratching her scalp with the eraser end of a yellow pencil while she leaned over a very large book, the kind that could only be a college text.

“Good evening,” Leslie said.

“Hi.”

“I'd like a room. Just for the night.”

The girl slid her a registration blank and Leslie filled it out. “That will be four dollars.”

She opened her purse. Spending money at the hospital was paid directly into the commissary. The patients used chits. From time to time she took a couple of dollars in cash from Michael for the coffee machine and newspapers. The purse contained three dollars and sixty-two cents. “Can I pay you by check in the morning?”