The Rabbi of Lud (8 page)

And me. She had
me.
I was still giving her instruction, coaching her in her theosophics, rabbinics and doxologicals.

“When Hear-O-Israel wants—”

“Why do you use those names?”

“What names?”

“Hear-O-Israel. Holy One, Blessed-Is-He. Whole-Kit-and-Kaboodle. Master-of-the-Fruit-and-Vegetables. Those names you call God.”

And I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t mockery but I/Thou, only a little tit for tat. “He likes it,” I said. “He likes the way I do business.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” I said, “He don’t mind. He’s got a terrific sense of humor.”

“Really?”

“Hey,” I said, “didn’t He hang some monikers on the Jews? Why, your own name is Goldkorn. Your mother was a Guttman. Or take a look at the names on those stones out there. Schwartz and Fishbloom, Cohen, Lebowitz and Prumm and Stein. Steins fore and aft. Steinberg. Rothstein.
All
the Steins—Goldstein, Rubenstein, Finklestein, Finestein. Feigenbaum, Wiedenbaum, Teitelbaum. Weinberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg. The Baums and the Bergs. The Baums and the Bergs and the Blooms. Goldbloom, Rosenbloom, Blumbloom. You see? He stuck us with Plotkin and Popkin. He stuck us with Krochmalnik and Eppel.

“Even first names. Names you’d have every right to expect would be denomination-neutral. What did Old Nachas-Giver give
us?
Irving and Sam, Jake and Izzy. Moe and Meyer. Are these proper Christian names? Names out of jokes, Connie. Tailors’ names, names from the rag trade. Of peddlers, diamond merchants, the owners of discount appliance stores.

“And what about Jew itself?
Jew
ish?”

“Oh, Daddy!”

“Papa.”

“
Fa
-ther!”

“Pop.”

Because, as I told my Connie, we’re not a chosen people so much as a marked one. Handles on us like signs over pubs. A called attention. This way to the Jews! The sounds of our titulars like cleared sinuses, the intimate throat and nose catarrhs. This way to the Jew! The blums, blooms, baums and bergs, the steins and itzes like a periodic table of the percussive, all the booms, snares and rimshots of baggy pants and low comedy.
This way, this
way to the Jew! All the landmarks, signposts, milestones. Our banners and gonfalons. The heraldry of our hair. The footprint of our faces. Something in our mien and countenance, at large in the lineaments like handwriting. The spectacle of the schnoz, the shrug like a broken code and an accent like a visible scar. Our outsize pores and busted profiles like difficult coastline. Some faint sweat and kasha scent and feel in the ambiance. And all the rest. Our farpotshkets, zaftigs, zhlubs, and shlumperdiks. The loksh’s unleavened life. Genug! Who said genug?
Not
genug! Step right up, right this way, ladies and gentlemen.
This
way to the Jew! The ghetto and mezuzah. The menorah, the yarmulke, the golden chai. The inscribed gates, I mean, the lintels and frontlets—all the blood plagues, all the frog, the vermin and beasts and marred cattle, the boils, the hail, the locusts and darkness and smiting of the firstborn—the Angel-of-Death-blessed, God-fingered children of Israel with their bloodied, odd-and-even, apotropaically marked doors. This way,
this
way to the Jews!

So don’t talk to
me
about designation and nomenclature, don’t tell
me
about the shrill, brassy mouthfuls, the racket of roll call. Because if I feel like mixing it up with Him once in a way now and again or, as I was laying it right out for my daughter, if I take Him at His Word and choose to engage Him in the I/Thou’s and Me/You’s, it ain’t only any testy Old Testament God we’re dealing with here, it’s a testy Old Testament rabbi, too! Don’t go screaming Mocker! Heresiarch! Blasphemer! Apostate! Pagan! at
me.
I’m in a game two can play, and am only living the quid pro quo, turn-table, give and get, measure-for-measure life. Ain’t that so, Blessed-Art-Thou? Do I have the range, All-Including-I-Am-the-One-and-Not-the-Other? Do I, Messiah-Scheduler? Am I at least in the ballpark, Sabbath-Sanctifier? How about it, Eternal-Our-God, Ruler-of-the-Universe? How about it, King-of-the-King-of-the-Kings?

Now
genug! Basta!
Genug
already!

Anyway, Shelley came in at this point in the discussion and threw me one of those quick little as-you-were headshakes, sloughing her existence with some don’t-mind-me squint and grovel of the eyes, all her voluntary, I’m-not-here subordinatives and Cheshire meltdowns of being. She may even have put a finger to her lips. They were like salutes, selfless Shelley’s sinuous sloughings and shruggings, and I’m here to tell you you wouldn’t
believe
what one of my wife’s elaborate downcast-eyes gestures could do to this little man of God.

Or I, apparently, in my rabbi mode, to her.

“Go, doll,” I told my daughter, “go play.”

“No,” Shelley said in what I can’t help but think of as her piggy Jew Latin, “go on with the lessons-e-le. Don’t mind-a-le me.”

“It’s all right, Shelley. We were through anyway.”

“Oy, I’m interrupting,” Shelley said, pouting obeisance.

“Really,” I said, “we’re finished. Aren’t we, Connie?”

“I guess.”

“Sure,” I said. “Go on, sweetheart. Go and play.”

“Who with?”

“What about Robert? Go find Robert and keep him company.”

“That’s so
grisly.
Daddy. Robert’s crazy.”

“Robert is
not
crazy. Don’t say Robert is crazy. Robert has a touch of Alzheimer’s.”

I don’t know what it is Shelley does to me. Or vice versa either. Some mutual sucker punch to the wayward randoms of our drifting sexuals, I guess. A shove in the frictions, the rubbed chilblains of our underground plates and riled, misunderstood tectonics of all low nature’s abrasive underbite, I suppose. The attractions and curious customaries—tits, testicles, elbows and armdown, great gams, fleshy cocks, muscles and eyebrows, kneecaps, jawlines and hairlines, the heft of an ass or tone of a tooth—in us converted to stuff lifted above conventional flesh and blood and bone, lifted beyond fact or even ordinary aberrant deviation, the quotidian fabrics and metals, I mean—your leathers, your irons, I do declare! In us converted to stuff beyond parsing, mysteries, enchantments, beyond, in fact, my rabbi’s mode to understand, all my offshore learning notwithstanding, all that talmudic quease and quibble I was telling our Connie about. Our aphrodisiacs, our spice and pick-me-ups, sorcerous endearings, something amiss in the character perhaps. In Shelley a thing—though I wear none—for beards. (Didn’t I
say
lifted above the conventional flesh and blood and bone?) The gray and unkempt beard she cartoons in on me in her imagination to her only some necessary high sign of spirit. God the turn-on and the rabbi, in her mind, merely the conductor or maybe the buffer or just the good grounding that will keep her from harm. Or in love, could be, with the dark Jew gabardines of the head and heart. And in me—the attraction—to quirkiness itself, Shell’s forlorn, fussy, pseudo-baleboste ways. I don’t
know
what it is Shelley does to me. Well, of course I know
what.
It’s
how
that sends me to the encyclopedias.

Meanwhile I’m growing a hard-on as big as the Ritz and Shelley is filling up with wet like you could let in a tub from her. She’s probably raining on herself. I know this. I can tell. It’s urgent. We’ve got to dispose of Connie. And it’s Shelley who’s going to handle it.

“Sha,” she says. “Let-e-le me. I’ll talk-e-le to her.”

“I under
stand
Yiddish, Ma!” Connie, exasperated, said.

“I know that, darling. We’re just so
proud
of you. But you know,” she said, “Daddy’s right. Robert’s always been so fond of you. It cheers him up just to look at you. I know it does. And I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve been meaning to send over some of that bread of mine he loves so much. You could do Mommy a favor and take it over for her.”

Connie rolled her eyes, but Shelley had already turned her back and was headed into the kitchen. When she returned she was holding a loaf of Wonder Bread. She held it out to our daughter. “Tell Robert he’s always in our thoughts and that I’m going to get over myself just as soon as I can make time-e-le.”

“Sure,” Connie said, and left.

“Oh, oh!” Shelley exclaimed as I danced around her and shook my head and snapped my fingers like a naked Tevya. “Oh! Oh!”

“In Yiddish,” I groaned, coming.

“Oy!” she said. “Oy!”

We lay back, breathless, spent.

“Maybe,” Shelley said after a while, “I should have sent over some of my jelly too.”

“Your Welch’s?”

“My Smucker’s,” she said. “It’s Robert’s favorite.”

Robert Hershorn couldn’t have been in his sixties but presented symptoms everyone regarded as the onset of Alzheimer’s. (It’s surprising how little we knew in Lud about disease, what with its being a cemetery town, I mean.) The stuff we got from the papers, the cover stories in the newsmagazines—a spotty and, in Hershorn’s case, loosely reasoned paranoia, a memory in visible retreat, sliding, that is, off the tip of his tongue (in most people his age there’s still this tension at least, this urgent, clumsy reach and stretch for forgotten words and names as for badly fielded ground balls, some nervous working of the visible will to hold on and draw up, like an inexperienced fisherman, say, with a bite on his line) and out of sight, slipped through the cracks forever. Robert hadn’t only surrendered the words and names but had almost absently, and quite possibly with some relief, agreed to the surrender terms. The struggle had gone out of him, I mean. Abandoning even his confusion. (That other big symptom in the inventory we all recognized.)

As far as we knew all his autonomics were still in place. He didn’t appear incontinent. He didn’t smell of urine or the telltale clays. If he felt a sneeze coming on he reached into the pocket where he kept his handkerchief.

He even drove an automobile, negotiating the distance between his home in Ridgewood twelve miles off, and managing the correct turns on the half-dozen streets in his hometown that would take him the seventeen blocks to the one state, then one federal, then one state highway again that brought him to the first of the three-and-a-quarter blocks to Seels, the vicious, anti-Semitic tombstone carver and Jewish monument names chiseler who figured that a jew buried was a jew nailed (and who probably
thought
“jew,” in lower case, as if it were a verb or adjective, and once remarked in my hearing that the pebbles and stones people placed on jew gravestones wasn’t a kind of calling card, or for remembrance, it was for the extra weight, to keep them down, in the earth), and who, at least officially, was still on Hershorn’s payroll, though anyone would have thought it was the other way around, that it was Seels who kept Hershorn on the books, for the humiliation of the thing, for the pleasure it gave him to see a Jew in decline.

Robert even remembered how to use his tools, all that crisp cutlery of his profession—the variously weighted ball peens, chisels, bevels and gauged nibs. But had forgotten the Hebrew alphabet he worked in, and no longer knew how to use even the apprentice beginner’s open-windowed stencil, even for the least complicated Star of David or simplest ornamental menorah flame.

So Seels gave him buffers, rags and smoothers, the employee turning the employer into some benignly tolerated Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none sort, a kind of gofer-cum-handyman, and set him to work polishing markers and sopping up and breathing into his already defiled lungs the harsh marble dust and grating stone powders. I guess we wanted Seels to buy him out and fire him already.

They’d been pals. Hershorn and Connie. When she was small, and even after he no longer recognized her and Connie had to remind him who she was every time she went over.

As I say, a town’s only child has got to be at least a little spoiled, pulling the attentions of its laborers and artisans and taking the benefit of its folklore. The lunch-pail insights and time-clock wisdoms. It was Hershorn, for example, not me, who taught my daughter to read Hebrew. But now she visited only on assignment, Shelley’s silly, envoyed charities, my own wanton occasions.

She was crying when she returned.

“Tears?” Shelley said. “What’s-e-le wrong-e-le?”

Connie scarcely glanced in our direction but moved through the hall to the stairs.

“Hold it right there, young layd-e-le. I asked you a question.”

“Ma,
please.”

“Connie,” I said.

“She always does this to me, Daddy.”

“Connie, shh.”

“What did I do-de-le? I asked her a question. Did-e-le I do-de-le something so terrible?”

“Shelley, please, she’s upset. Connie, what happened?”

“I don’t know she’s upset? Who saw her tears-e-le? Who heard her sobs-e-le? I don’t know she’s upset?”

The thicker Shelley lays it on the thicker I get. (And pose myself a question, not my style, though well, I suppose, within the parameters of my mode. Am I a heavier man, I ask myself, with an erection than without? I realize it’s just a displacement of the blood, but the explanation feels wrong. I feel this perceptible increase of my meats, the sluice and slosh of barbarous, heavy chemicals. And is it a sin, I worry, to consider these questions with my daughter in the room?) But no matter. Nothing’s to be done. Connie, who has taken the offensive, has stopped crying and her mother has begun. There is anger and dejection in the room. War and wailing. (And desire petering out like the diminuendo of a siren.)

“She always does this,” Connie complained.

“What? What
do I always do-de-le? My daughter comes back crying from that fascist palooka-le, I’m expected to hold my tongue?”

“Who sent me to him?
You
sent me to him!”

“Shh,” I said.

“Just to Hershorn, not that other-le!”

“Shelley darling, shh,” I said.

“Why? To bring him
Wonder Bread?
To take him jelly from the
A&P?”

“Connie, shh, the neighbors.”

“What neighbors?” my daughter demanded.
“What
neighbors, Daddy? Our neighbors are all dead. Oh, I hate this place! I’m so scared here! It’s so grisly here! Why don’t we get out? Why do you have to be the Rabbi of Lud? Why can’t we move to a real town?”