The Rabbi of Lud (28 page)

I got out of bed, left the sleeping Shelley, and made my calls, but instead of leaving a complicated message on the machine about having finally decided to take Charney and Klein up on their offer to push grave lots because we were thinking of buying a house and would need the extra income, I simply left my name and asked if they could get back to me in the morning.

I couldn’t get over it. A person’s
so
single-minded, so committed to one avenue of thought he really
can’t
see the forest for the trees. Shelley’d told the kid we’d pick up and leave Lud, and I’d thought she meant it was all up with me in the rabbi business, that I couldn’t be Rabbi of Lud anymore. I couldn’t get over it, I really couldn’t. I’m thinking life after Lud, she’s thinking Ridgewood.

And so I’m lying there beside my sleeping Shelley, all stimulated and pleased with how things work out and, if you want to know, actually looking forward to the new duties I’d be taking on if we were to avoid being kicked in the head financially. And kicking ideas around in
my
head, things I could say to the people I’d be dealing with, the folks whose names Klein and Charney would have given me as leads. For openers—I’d have on my yarmulke, to show the flag, you know?—I’d say, I’d say, oh, “Shalom, shalom. How are you today, Mr. Fishbone? Mrs. Fishbone? I’m Rabbi Jerome Goldkorn, the Rabbi of Lud. Mr. Charney suggested I speak with you. Mr. Charney? Charney and Klein? Realities? What, did I say ‘realities?’ I meant realtors, but face it, it’s realities we’re really talking about here, isn’t it?”

Working variations in my head, versions of the instructions they dictated to their machines, reprises of the messages I had left on them, until, one thing leading to the other as it does in the act of drifting off, I lost my place and fell asleep.

And when the phone woke me the next morning and I heard Emile Tober’s voice, it was as if it had been a perfectly seamless night.

“Yes, Emile,” I said, “thanks for getting back to me. It’s about—”

“I
know
what it’s about! Just what in the hell is wrong with that lunatic daughter of yours? Has she fucking gone
crazy?
!”

seven

B
ECAUSE she’s as single-minded as I am. Single-minded on my behalf, taking an even more single-minded view of things than I did. Not figuring the kibbutz into the equation, not figuring Ridgewood or Israel or the Law of the Return or any other loophole. Too single-minded for that, her single-minded eyes focused on one single-minded principle—Rabbi of Lud or nothing.
More
single-minded. (Because with me there was never any question of stealth, but then—give the devil her due—she wasn’t her father but only the helpless kid in the affair, so maybe she felt she had to. Well, of course she
felt
she had to, obviously she
felt
she had to, though—though this is the father in me talking—it was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly honorable stealth, like that famous letter hidden right in front of your eyes in the story—a sort
of purloined
stealth. Getting Shelley to drive her to all those libraries that spring and winter and even, when she was over the limit herself, to check out extra books for her on her card. And we worried because no matter how much work she did it didn’t seem to get reflected in her grades. To say nothing of the three or four hundred dollars she was able to put away by never volunteering to return the change we had coming to us, or by saving ten or eleven bucks out of the fifteen we gave her each week for her allowance. The little dickens.)

This is what she said in the deposition:

I, Constance Ruth Goldkorn, being of sound mind and body, do solemnly swear and attest that what I am about to affirm is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I didn’t know who she was. When I saw her that first time I didn’t recognize her from Adam and would have hurried away as fast as my legs could carry me, but of course I didn’t, and probably couldn’t, even though I wanted to because when I saw her that first time it was a snow day and the sidewalks and streets were all covered with ice and snow and it was very slippery out, which is the reason, she said, the schools were closed and our paths happened to cross in the first place.

I told her excuse me, that I was on this errand for my mom, and started to walk away from her, and that’s when she started to cry.

Which I thought was very curious. Not that she was crying because it was very cold out, ten or fifteen below maybe, and there were tears in my eyes too, only the tears in my eyes were because of the cold weather, that like icy stinging you get in your eyes when it’s real cold and you almost feel your eyeballs are going to crack, or those sharp, sticky pains that you get in your temples. I’m a little embarrassed to tell this next part, but my attorney, Counselor Christopher Rockers, says that a deposition is a testimony taken down under oath for use in court, although in this case there’s not going to be any trial or anything and I’m making this deposition only because I want what happened to go on the record. Anyway, the point is, the lady was not only crying but crying so hard she had this runny nose too. (I was raised in a cemetery, I know about Nature. I don’t get the giggles if a boy cuts a fart. I don’t go all squeamy when it’s that time of month. I know that bodily functions often have nothing to do with whether a person has or has not got bad manners. I’m like a kid on a farm in that respect.) Anyway, what was so curious was that the tears were pouring out her eyes and running down her cheeks, and the mucus was dripping out her nostrils just exactly as if she was crying indoors in a warm, toasty room and not outside on a cold, blustery ten- or fifteen-degree-below-zero snow day. That’s the sort of tears and mucus they were—soft, room temperature tears and mucus.

My father, Rabbi Jerome Goldkorn, works for Shull and Tober Funeral Directors of Lud, New Jersey, and even if I am only fourteen years old, I’ve been around enough unhappiness, sadness, sorrow, gloom and grief in my time almost to be able to tell the difference between them (and, if you ask me, I think it was all five), and certainly to swear that whatever it was that caused all that weeping didn’t have anything to do with weather.

Though you’d almost think it could have because all she had on was this—I don’t know how to describe it exactly—not a kimono or shroud, more like what those ladies wear in Middle East countries so men can’t look at them, that they wrap around them like a shawl and that covers their heads too—big blue gown like a housewife who’s locked herself outside her own house.

Now this next thing is embarrassing because it’s on me. I don’t have a whole lot of friends. My father thinks it’s because of where we live, and there’s some truth in that because there certainly aren’t a whole bunch of kids around here to play with. Anyway, even if I don’t have a lot of friends, those kids who do get to know me, the kids in my car pool, for example, or some of the people who know me from class, will tell you I’m shy, that I keep to myself and like to mind my own business. I’ll give an example that comes to my mind. Last year I graduated from Junior High and there was some foulup at the printer’s about the school colors—they’re brown and white, not green and red—and our yearbooks all had to go back to the bindery and we didn’t get to see them until after we actually graduated. What happened was, they sent us this announcement that the yearbooks were ready and that we could come to the gym and get them if we brought our receipt along to show that we’d paid. Only I had a bad cold the day we were supposed to pick up the yearbook and didn’t get to the school until three days later. They had to open the gym especially for me (which as you can probably imagine was pretty embarrassing just in itself), and Mrs. Sayles, the lady from the office who opened the gym, went to the table where they’d put all the yearbooks. “It’s too bad you had that cold, Connie,” she said, “or you could have written in your friends’ yearbooks.” Then she said, oh, well, at least mine had been inscribed, that she’d seen to it herself that the kids wrote something in all the kids’ yearbooks who couldn’t pick them up on the regularly scheduled day they were supposed to. Well, after she told me that I never got up the nerve to even open my yearbook. Because she’d made them write something in it, you see. I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. It would have been like reading someone else’s mail.

That’s why I didn’t ask her anything. Like why she was crying, or if she was lost—I’d never seen her before—or cold in just her thin blue wrap, and made out like it was perfectly natural to find someone in the street on the coldest day of the year, crying like a baby with stuff coming out of its face, and even—and I’m
really
embarrassed about this part because shyness and keeping to yourself and minding your business are one thing and only part of a person’s particular makeup, but this was something else altogether, not just disposition but character—that people around here were free to behave like they want to behave, as if letting someone suffer was democracy in action or something and not asking them if any thing’s wrong is a plus, rather than the cruel minus I knew it was even then. And wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t turned the tables on me, making out as if it was me and not her standing out there in the street in this summery lightweight with the wind tearing at my head, and the temperature banging my blood to a standstill.

I’ve already mentioned how I’m this agony expert. I wasn’t boasting. I wasn’t even trying to suggest that it’s a natural gift. I think it’s just what a person is accustomed to. If I’m able to tell which one is really in mourning and which one is probably only putting on a show, I don’t think I should get extra credit for it. As I say, it’s what a person gets accustomed to. You live and learn. I just happen to have this sort of perfect pitch for heartache. It’s unusual in a person of my years, I admit, but I come by it honestly. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if I thought I was good at different shades of misery and grief, it was because I’d never seen this lady before. She made me feel insensitive. She made me feel like, well, some tone-deaf piker.

But this is a deposition and that last part, while it’s true as far as it goes, isn’t really what I was paying a lot of attention to at the time. I mean I really wasn’t into whether I was feeling insensitive or worrying about losing my perfect pitch for the somberness of the heart or not. Anyway, I hadn’t. Lost it, I mean. I could read hers, the somberness of
her
heart. And I was scared. Because what I saw there, in her woe, in her wracked heart, was the deepest mourning I’d
ever
seen. It was for me. She was in mourning for
me
!

I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

She said, “I am the holy mother, Constance child.”

“What do you want? Why did you come? Why are you here?”

“For the harrowing of Lud’s cemeteries. For the harrowing of Pineoaks and Masada Gardens. To rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews.”

Well, maybe I am afraid of Lud, maybe I
am.
Maybe I
am
bothered by having only dead people for neighbors like my father thinks, or hurt because kids won’t play with me, who won’t even visit even though my mom drives the car pools and would not only go out of her way to pick them up in the first place but would bring them home too, even though I try to make my folks think that shyness and a solitary spirit and minding my business are part of my nature and not just these add-ons to my character like those cardboard cutouts in which you dress your paper dolls. (Because I’m not shy
really.
And don’t keep to myself by choice, or mind my business like some miser in his counting house in love with his ledger. No. Really I’m like some cheerleader and could name things even in Lud that swell my pom-pom heart and fill me with pride. Our monument carvers and landscapers, for example, are the best there are!)
But even if I am, even if I am afraid to live here, even if I secretly agree with the kids who make fun of me because of what Lud stands for, I’m no anti-Semite!
I’m no anti-Semite, and my first reaction was that the woman in blue was probably Seels’s wife. Seels is a vicious anti-Semite who probably felt exactly the same way the woman did. Only he wouldn’t have thought
poor
and he wouldn’t have thought
righteous,
and he wouldn’t have wanted to rescue them.

So, given the bite-my-tongue probables of my reputation, I did the only thing I could have done. I excused myself.

“Wait up. Hey, Connie, wait up,” said Holy Mother.

And, again given the house odds of my character, did. Like I might have waited on a girl friend, if I’d had one, who offered to walk me home. (I’ve seen them. Waiting for my mother, sometimes I’ve seen them. Boys walking boys, girls walking girls—they could almost be sweethearts, they could almost be sweethearts putting off for as long as they dared some significant curfew—as if, so long as they never quite reached their destination, or no, so long as they never stopped
moving,
shuffling in place, in front of their own addresses maybe, in motion like people treading water are in motion, wearing the pavement like mutual convoys in mutual seas. Waiting for Mom I’ve seen them make two-and-a-half round trips—and filled in, or at least wondered about, the others—that half or trip-and-a-half or even more that would have permitted them to come out even, as friends should. Or with one friend still graciously owing the other, or the other as graciously owed, the extra half trip that could always be made up tomorrow. Just speculating here as I—the other kids in the car pool off to one side—waited for my mother to come pick us all up, doing the even-steven, double-entry bookkeeping I thought was all there was to friendship.)

Did wait up. And strolled, just as if we
were
girl friends, Holy Mother and me, to the corner and back. (I’m fourteen-and-a-half years old but I’ve never had a sleepover or even been. So I don’t know what happens, if they’re more like camp than birthday parties, or closer to overnights in the woods than either, or treats after sports, say, the station wagon pulled up outside McDonald’s and the team piling out. Do they talk about boys? Who’s cute, who’s gross? Do they talk about how far they’ve gone, do they talk about who’s done it? Is it okay to go if it’s your time of month?) Walked to the corner with her and back to Sal’s, where my dad gets his hair cut. Walked to the corner, turned around and went to the florist’s and looked in Lou Pamella’s window and admired the flowers and Holy Mother said to me, “Oh, Connie, look at the lilies. Aren’t they gorgeous? I’ve always been partial to lilies.” And walked to the corner and crossed the street, and then we stopped outside Klein’s and Charney’s but neither of us said much and soon we were walking again. Despite the difference in our ages, or that she was divine and I was only this mortal female teenager, and just as if it wasn’t ten or fifteen below out, two best friends, chatting about life and stuff and harrowing Lud’s long main street.