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Authors: Noah Gordon

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“Speaking of kisses, want the car New Year's?” he asked.

“I don't think so. Thank you.” Max threw a last shovelful and straightened up with a sigh.

“How come?”

“I don't have a date. Dess and I aren't going steady any more.”

He looked for signs of scar tissue.

“She was asked out by this older guy. He's already going to Tufts.” He shrugged. “That was that.” He knocked manure from the shovel blades. “The funny thing is, I'm not even upset. I always figured I was ape over her. That if anything ever broke us I'd be real shook.”

“You're not?”

“I don't think so. The thing is, I'm not even seventeen, this thing with Dess was like . . . well, a dry run. But later, when you're older, how do you tell?”

“What's your question, Max?”

“What's
love
, Dad? How do you know when you really love a girl?”

He saw it was a serious question, one that troubled the boy. “I don't have a workable definition,” he said. “When the time comes, when you're older and you meet a woman you want to spend the rest of your life with, you won't have to ask.”

They gathered up the cardboard cartons and placed them one inside the other for easy carrying. “Is it too late for you to get another New Year's date?” he asked.

“Yeah. I called a bunch of girls. Roz Coblentz. Betty Lipson. Alice Striar. They all had dates. Weeks ago.” He looked at his father. “I called Lisa Patruno last night, but she was busy, too.”

Oy. Steady, Zaydeh.

“I don't think I know her,” Michael said.

“Her father is Pat Patruno, the druggist. Patruno's Pharmacy.”

“Oh?

“That make you sore?” Max asked.

“Not sore.”

“But . . .
something
?”

“Max. You're a big guy, now, not quite a man. From here on in there are going to be decisions you're going to have to make on your own. Important decisions, more and more of them as you grow older. Whenever you want my advice, I'm right here to give it. You won't always make the right decisions—none of us does. But it's going to take an awful lot to make me sore at you.”

“Anyhow, she had a date,” Max said.

“There's a girl named Lois from New York. Sixteen. She's visiting Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Mendelsohn. If you want to take a chance you'll have to call information. They're not in the phone book yet.”

“Is she bearable to look at?”

“I've never seen her. Her older sister is what at one time I would have called Good-Looking Head.”

They started for the house and Max threw a punch that landed like a pole-ax, removing sensation from his shoulder probably forever. “You're not such a bad geezer to have for an old man—”

“Thank you.”

“For a rabbi who stands around throwing bird crap into snowstorms.”

Michael showered and changed and they had canned soup for lunch and then Max asked if he could take the car and go to the library. When the boy was gone he stood by the window for a little while and watched it snow and then he got the idea for a sermon and he sat at the typewriter and developed it. When he had finished writing he went into the hall closet and found a can of Brasso and took it upstairs. Zaydeh's bedstead was becoming
dingy. He worked on it slowly and carefully. After he had applied the polish he washed his hands and began to rub the bedstead with soft rags, enjoying it as the tarnish disappeared and the renewed metal shimmered through with layers of warm internal light.

He still had the entire headboard to do when he heard the front door open and the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

“Hello?” he yelled.

“Hello,” she said, coming in behind him.

She kissed him in the corner of the mouth as he turned and then buried her face in his shoulder.

“Better call Dr. Bernstein,” she said, the words muffled.

“We have time,” he told her. “All the time in the world.”

They simply stood, holding one another, for a long time. “I've been on the other side of the looking-glass,” she said.

“Was it good?”

She looked into his eyes. “I shacked up in a room and experimented with whiskey and drugs. Each day I took a different lover.”

“No. No, you didn't. Not you.”

“No, I didn't,” she said. “I went back to every place I had ever lived without you, trying to find out what I am. Who I am.”

“What did you find out?” he asked.

“That for me nothing important exists outside of this house. Everything else goes up in smoke.”

She saw in his face that he was tortured by the necessity to tell her. “I already know. I went to Hartford this morning,” she said.

He nodded and reached out and touched her cheek. “Love,” he said. This is what it is, he told the boy silently; it is what I feel for your mother, this woman.

“I know,” she said, and he took her hand, seeing their complicated images in the brass. Downstairs the front door opened and they heard the sound of Rachel's voice.

“Daddy?”

“We're up here, darling,” Leslie called.

He held her hand so tightly it was as if their flesh had grown together, so that even God would have found it difficult to pull them apart.

 

47

On the last morning of the year he reached out and turned off the alarm clock as Rachel crawled into his bed and burrowed against him for warmth. Instead of getting up he held her head against his shoulder, fingertips gently massaging the egg-shaped little skull beneath the thick warm hair, and they both fell asleep again.

When he awoke for the second time he saw with a pang that it was after ten o'clock; he had missed the morning service for the first time in months. But there had been no desperate telephone call from the temple, and he relaxed, realizing they had gathered a
minyan
without him.

He got out of bed and showered and shaved and dressed in chinos and lumberjacket shirt, taking only juice and then sitting in his study with his feet bare, writing a long letter to his father before lunch:
Leslie was overjoyed at the news. When are we going to meet the bride? Can you come soon? Give us enough notice so we can plan a suitable welcome
.

After lunch he went to the hospital. Bundled like Eskimoes against the cold, he and Leslie tramped through the long bright afternoon. They climbed the highest point on the hospital grounds, a wooded hill with no paths so their booted feet had to fight the crusted snow all the way, and when they reached the top he was short of breath and he saw that there was actually a round red Katzenjammer Kids spot on each of her cheeks. The sun was hard-bright on the snow and below and away was the lake, snow-covered but ploughed in places to permit skating, with the small clashing figures of hockey players. They sat in the snow and held hands and he wanted to hide the moment, make it last, stick it under his tongue like a piece of hard rock candy to be tasted at length and in stealth. But the wind blew snowdust demons into their faces and their behinds grew numb with cold and in a little while they deserted the hilltop and walked back to the ward.

Elizabeth Sullivan was brewing coffee in her cubicle and she invited them in for a libation. Before they could drink it, Dan Bernstein came striding in on morning rounds, and he pointed a blunt accusing finger at Leslie. “I've got a present for you. We just discussed you at staff meeting. We're going to kick you the hell out before long.”

“Can you tell us when?” Michael asked.

“Oh, we'll have another week of treatment and take a couple of days to rest up. And then, good-by charlie.” He patted Michael's shoulder and walked into the ward, Miss Sullivan following with the records wagon.

She opened her mouth to speak and couldn't, but she smiled at him and lifted her coffee mug and he touched his to it, trying to think of a very funny speech that would say it all and quickly realizing that speech was unnecessary; instead, looking into her eyes, he drank the coffee and burned his tongue.

That evening Max stopped the car in front of the temple and waited for him to leave.

“Good night, Dad. Happy New Year.”

Without knowing he was going to, he leaned over and kissed the boy on the cheek, smelling his own after-shave lotion.

“Hey. What's that for?”

“Because you're too old for me to do that ever again. Be careful how you drive.”

The downstairs function hall was crowded with people wearing silly little paper hats. Behind a makeshift bar, members of the Brotherhood dispensed drinks, making money for the Hebrew school. Five musicians thumped out a wild bossa nova and a double line of females moved their bodies to the beat like tribal communicants on the dance floor, eyes half closed.

“Ah, the Rabbi!” Ben Jacobs shouted.

Michael made his way slowly around the room.

Jake Lazarus grasped the Rabbi's hand. “
Nu
, twelve more months, another year. Fifty-two
shabbos
services,” the cantor said, his eyes dreamy with vision and rye. “A few more years, it will be the turn of the century. Two thousand. Imagine it.”

“Imagine harder and think of Fifty-Seven Hundred and Sixty,” Michael said. “We began counting earlier.”

“Two Thousand or Fifty-Seven-Sixty, what's the difference?
I will still be one hundred and three. Tell me, Rabbi, what will the world be like?”

“Jake, am I Eric Sevareid?” He
potched
the cantor on the cheek, a love blow.

He reached the bar and came away with bourbon, poured generously. On one of the tables laden with food by the Sisterhood, amid platters of
tayglech
and cookies, he discovered a miracle, a dish of candied ginger, and he took two pieces and walked out of the hall and up the stairway.

When the door of the sanctuary closed behind him the sounds from below were coated in velvet. He stood in blackness but it was his temple and he needed no light; he walked down the center aisle to the third row, one hand curled around the rim of the glass to insure against spilling.

He sat and sipped the whiskey and nibbled at the ginger. A small sip to three or four nibbles, possibly the wrong ratio; the ginger was soon gone and much of the bourbon remained. He drank, letting his mind graze in the dark, nibbling at thoughts. Around him the darkness thinned as his eyes adjusted; he began to distinguish solid shapes. He could make out the lectern now, where in twenty-four hours he would be standing and leading the
shabbos
service.

How many sermons since that first sermon in Miami? So many services, so many words. He grinned in the dark. Not so many as still stretched in front of him; he felt it in his bones, he could almost reach out and touch it, a ladder of Sabbaths to be climbed into the future.

Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations
.

Thank you, God.

Downstairs the orchestra began to play something lilting. If Leslie were here he would dance—he felt like dancing; next year they would dance.

The taste of ginger was faint now. The last faint, bittersweet taste of ginger. Don't be afraid, Zaydeh, he said silently into the darkness. Six thousand years is not the wink of an eyelash or the beat of a bird's wing. There is nothing new on the face of the ancient earth, and what could not be erased by bloodbaths and
ovens will not be erased by changed names or bobbed noses or the merging of our blood with mysterious bloodstreams.

He should tell Jake Lazarus he knew at least that much about the future, he thought. But instead he slumped comfortably and finished the last of the bourbon, relishing its warmth and filing the thought away.

He would turn it into a sermon in the morning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noah Gordon
has had outstanding international success.
The Physician
, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.”
Shaman
was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author's other novels—
The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice
, and
The Winemaker
—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon's novel,
The Last Jew
, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.

BOOK: The Rabbi
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