The Rabbi Read online

  3

  On a dark night, when snowflakes as large as feathers fled on a horizontal line before the northeast wind, he carried three armloads of wood in from the back shed and made a fire in the fireplace, building it too high so that it roared its heat into the room. Then he made himself a large whiskey and soda and picked up the tractate Berakoth, slipping into the Babylonian Talmud’s intricacies like a man escaping into a dream.

  It was the kind of evening he hadn’t spent in too long; he read until after eleven o’clock, rising from his chair only to add more wood to the fire and to say good night to his children.

  Then, yawning and stretching, he sat down to consider the day’s correspondence.

  Young Jeffrey Kodetz had requested a character reference to go with his application to M.I.T. It was the kind of thing he tended to let slide if he waited to dictate it to Dvora Cantor, his secretary; he sat down and wrote a first draft that he could hand her in the morning for retyping.

  There was also a letter from the Columbia College Alumni Association, informing him that in eighteen months he and his classmates would be celebrating their twenty-fifth reunion; in addition to planning to attend, would he forward to them within the next three months an autobiography for inclusion in the Quarter-Century Class Book?

  He read it again, shaking his head in bewilderment: a quarter of a century?

  He felt too tired to do anything but write to Leslie. When he had sealed the envelope he found that he was out of stamps; this was a problem, since he mailed her letter each morning on the way to early services, before the post office was open.

  He remembered that Max usually carried a book of stamps in his wallet. When he entered Max’s room the boy was sound asleep, sprawled across the bed and snoring gently. One leg spilled from the blanket onto the floor. His pajamas were too short, and Michael saw with amusement that his feet were becoming enormous.

  His slacks were hung by their cuffs with careless efficiency in the top drawer of his dresser. Michael tugged the wallet from the pocket. It was fat with all manner of strange, tattered papers. His fingers, searching for the book of stamps, closed around something else. It was small, oblong, aluminum-foil covered. Unable to believe his fingertips, he carried it to the doorway and read the printing by the light of the hall bulb:

  “Trojan-Enz are individually water-tested on our special machines. Young Rubber Corporation Manufacturer, Trenton, N.J., New York, N.Y.”

  At his age, he asked himself fearfully, this adolescent, this ball-bouncer who only this morning had called him Daddy? And with whom? Some bored, possibly diseased slattern? Or worse, that clean-limbed red-haired child, God forbid? He held the thing up to the light. The foil was worn and cracked. He reminded himself that once long ago he had considered it a mark of juvenile maturity to carry if not to use a similar contrivance.

  Returning it, he replaced the wallet in Max’s pants, dislodging a jangle of coins from the side pocket. They clattered on the floor, rolling and skittering about the room. He held his breath, waiting for the boy to stir and waken, but Max slept as though drugged.

  Drugged? That’s next, he told himself grimly. He got down on his hands and knees, not to pray like a Christian but to sweep the floor with his fingers. Under the bed he found two nickels, a quarter, a penny, three socks and a great many dust curds. He located most of the coins and returned them to the pants pocket. Then he went downstairs, washed his hands, and put on coffee to perk.

  Listening to the midnight news over the second cup, he heard the name of one of his people. Gerald I. Mendelsohn was on the critical list at Woodborough General Hospital. His right leg had been caught between two pieces of heavy machinery during the night shift at the Suffolk Foundry.

  The Mendelsohns were a new couple in town, with probably few friends as yet, he thought wearily.

  Luckily he had not yet changed into pajamas. He put on his tie and jacket and coat and hat and six-buckle arctics and let himself out of the house as quietly as possible. The streets were bad. Wheels spinning, he drove the car at crawling speeds past dark houses whose sleeping occupants he envied.

  Mendelsohn was unshaven, his pale face like something from a crucifixion painting. He lay in a hospital bed in a room off the Emergency Ward, drugged to unconsciousness but groaning loudly.

  His wife was suffering. She was a small, attractive woman with brown hair and large eyes and a flat chest and very long red fingernails.

  He concentrated desperately and came up with her name: Jean. He seemed to remember her delivering children to the temple for Hebrew classes.

  “Is there anyone at home with the kids?”

  She nodded. “I have very good neighbors. Lovely Irishers.”

  She sounded like New York. Brooklyn?

  She was from Flatbush. He sat with her and talked of the neighborhoods he remembered. The man on the bed groaned regularly, as if the sound were mechanically timed.

  At two-fifteen they came and took him away and Michael and the woman waited in the corridor while the leg was amputated. After that, she seemed relieved. When he finally said good-by her swollen eyes were sleepy and calm, like the eyes of a passionate woman after love.

  It stopped snowing as he drove home. The stars hung low in the dark sky, ripe and bright.

  In the morning, gazing at his reflection in the process of shaving, he discovered that he was no longer young. His hair was thin, his nose was growing hawkish and hooked, like that of the Jew in the anti-Semitic cartoons, his flesh sagged, and his jowls jiggled under the blanket of shaving cream. He was like a leaf that felt itself turning brittle and cracking, he thought. Some day it would fall from the tree and the world would go on, scarcely noticing its disappearance from the scene. He realized that he barely remembered what the spring of his life had tasted like, but now it was unmistakably autumn.

  When the telephone rang he turned from the mirror in relief. It was Dr. Bernstein. It was the first time the psychiatrist had called him in the four weeks Leslie had been receiving electro-shock, and he felt a concern Dan immediately dispelled.

  “She can go home for a visit if she wants to,” he said casually.

  “When?”

  “Any time you say.”

  He canceled two appointments and drove straight to the hospital. She was seated in her tiny room when he came in. Her blonde hair was pulled flat back and held with a thick, ugly elastic band in a ponytail style he hadn’t seen her wear for years. Instead of being youthful, it made her look matronly. She had on a clean blue cotton dress and her lipstick had been freshly applied. She had gained a lot of weight, but it was becoming.

  “Hello,” he said.

  At first he was afraid it was going to be the way it had been in the early days of her illness. She looked at him and didn’t make a sound. But then she smiled and began to cry. “Hello,” she said.

  She felt soft and familiar in his arms. He filled his nostrils with the Leslie-smell he had missed so long, a combination of Camay soap and Paquin’s Hand Cream and warm flesh, and he held her close.

  Thank you God. Amen.

  They kissed clumsily, suddenly very shy, and then they sat on the edge of the bed, holding hands. The room smelled of a strong disinfectant.

  “The children?” she said.

  “Fine. They want to see you. Any time you say.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to see them. Not here, not like this. I want to go home as soon as I can.”

  “I’ve just talked to Dr. Bernstein. You can go home for a visit, if you’d like.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When?”

  “Now?”

  Michael got Dan on the telephone and it was arranged. Five minutes later he was helping her into the station wagon and then they drove away from the hospital grounds like two youngsters out on a date. Leslie was wearing her old blue coat and a white kerchief. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought; her face was alive and excited.

  It was shortly after eleven
o’clock. “It’s Anna’s day off,” he said.

  She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “Anna?”

  He had written to her about Anna half a dozen times. “The housekeeper. Shall we stop someplace nice for lunch?”

  “Un-huh. Home. I’ll find something on the shelves I can fix.”

  When they got there he left the car in the driveway and they went in through the back door. She wandered through the kitchen, the dining room, and the parlor, straightening pictures and pulling open curtains.

  “Take your coat off,” he said.

  “The kids will be so surprised.” She looked at the mantel clock. “They’ll be here in about three hours.” She shrugged out of her coat and he hung it in the hall closet. “You know what I want? A deep, hot bath. I want to soak in it for a long time. I don’t care if I never have another shower as long as I live.”

  “Coming up. The way you like it.” He went upstairs and ran the bath for her, sprinkling into it some of the bath salts that hadn’t been used since she had left them behind. While she bathed he took off his shoes and lay on the brass bed listening to the occasional splash noises and the snatches of songs she hummed and sang as she washed. It was a beautiful sound.

  She came out in his robe, running through the chill room to the closet, where she began shoving hanger after hanger along the pole, searching for a dress to wear.

  “What will I put on for this afternoon?” she said. “Come and help me decide.”

  He walked to her. “The green knitted jersey,” he said.

  She stamped a bare foot. “I couldn’t get it on my nose. Oh, I’ve grown so fat in that place.”

  “Let me see.” He swung the robe, and she stood still and let him look at her.

  She threw her arms around him and pressed her head to his chest. “Oh, Michael, I’m freezing.”

  “Come, I’ll warm you.” She waited while he hurried out of his clothes and then they shivered together on the cold sheet, arms wrapped around one another and her toes digging into his calves, holding him fast. Over her shoulder he saw their images captured in the large vanity glass that leaned against the wall. He gazed at their white bodies in the yellow glass, and he began to grow young. The leaf no longer was cracked and crumbling. It was full of summer instead of autumn. In a few moments they stopped trembling and grew warm and he stroked her and touched all the richness of her moist, soft body, and she was crying soundlessly in a way that broke his heart, sadly and without hope. “‘Michael, I don’t want to go back there,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

  “It will only be for a little while,” he told her. “A little while only. I promise you.” She covered his mouth with her own, alive and loving and tasting of Ipana.

  Afterward with the sheet she dried his eyes, then her own. “What a couple of fools,” she said.

  “Welcome home.”

  “Thank you.” She propped her head on her hand and looked at him for a moment, then she grinned, the same grin he saw every day on his daughter’s face, but this one riper, knowing. He bounded out of bed, jumping to the dresser to grab a comb and brush and bounding back beneath the covers again while she giggled at the sight, then he took the ugly elastic band away and let her hair fall free and beautiful around her neck while she sat up in bed with the comforter pulled up to her chin. He brushed her hair and parted it carefully, the way he did for Rachel, then he threw the elastic band against the far wall and she was once more the wife he knew completely.

  Max and Rachel said very little that evening but they stayed by her like twin shadows.

  After supper they sat and listened to records, Leslie in a chair with Max at her feet and Rachel in her lap, while Michael stretched out on the couch, smoking.

  Telling the children that she would go back to the hospital was difficult, but she did it herself, matter-of-factly and with the kind of efficiency he had always admired in her. Rachel went to bed at nine o’clock and at Leslie’s insistence Max kissed her and went up to do his homework.

  She was silent during much of the ride back. “It was a day,” she said. She took his hand and held it for a long time. “You’ll come tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  He drove home very slowly. Max was playing his harmonica, and for a while Michael smoked and listened. He went upstairs finally and kicked Max into bed, then he took a long shower and changed into pajamas. He lay in the dark. The wind blew in gusts that shook the house until the windows rattled. The brass bed seemed as big and empty as the whole world outside. He stayed awake for a long time, praying.

  Soon after he fell asleep, Rachel cried out in terror and then sobbed. She called out a second time and this time he heard and he slid out of the bed and hurried across the cold floors in his bare feet to her room, picking her up and moving her to the far side of the bed against the wall to make room for him.

  She continued to sob in her sleep, her face wet with tears.

  “Shah” he said, taking her in his arms. “Shah, shah, shah,” gently rocking his shoulders as he held her in the dark.

  Her eyes opened, white slots in her heart-shaped face. She smiled suddenly and pressed close to him, and he felt her wet face on his neck.

  Feigileh, he thought, little bird. He could remember when he was her age, the problems he had had when his own father was forty-five. My God, he could remember his zaydeh when the old man was not much older than that.

  He lay very still in the dark, trying to remember it all.

  4

  Brooklyn, New York

  September 1925

  His grandfather’s beard must have been black when Michael was a little boy. But he remembered it only the way it was when he was a young man—a full, white bush that Isaac Rivkind shampooed with care every third night and combed with love and vanity, so that it lay smooth and soft-looking beneath his tough and swarthy face down to the third button of his shirt. His beard was the only soft thing about him. He had a rapacious hawk’s nose and the eyes of a disgusted eagle. The top of his head was bald and as shiny as polished bone, set in a circlet of frizzled hair that never achieved the whiteness of the beard but remained a dark gray until the day of his death.

  The truth about Michael’s grandfather was that he was as tender toward the world as a mother nursing her fatally ill child. What covered his love with a thick veneer was an overwhelming fear of the Gentiles. He had gained that fear in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev, where he was born.

  There were 113,000 people in Kishinev. Almost 80,000 of them were Jews. Another few thousand were gypsies. The remainder were Moldavian Rumanians. Although they were the majority in the town, the Jews of Kishinev submitted with resignation to the curses, sneers, and scorn of the Moldavians, knowing that Kishinev was an island ghetto surrounded by a sea of hostility. Even if a Jew wanted to leave the town to work as a fruit-picker or a grape-treader in the vineyards and wineries of the countryside, he was forbidden by the government to do so. The administration taxed the Jews heavily, confined them closely, and supported a daily newspaper—the Bessarabetz—edited by an anti-Semitic fanatic named Pavolachi Krushevan, whose sole goal was to incite his readers to the shedding of Jewish blood.

  Michael became familiar with Krushevan’s name while he was still a little boy, learning on his zaydeh’s knee to hate it with the same feeling the name of Haman inspired. Instead of fairy tales or nursery rhymes, when he crawled up on Zaydeh’s lap in the mysterious gloominess of the tiny grocery store, he heard the legends of how his grandfather had come to America.

  Isaac’s father had been Mendel Rivkind, one of the five blacksmiths of Kishinev, a man with the stink of horse-sweat always in his nostrils. Mendel was more fortunate than most of his fellow Jews; he was a man of property. Against the north wall of the poor, sagging wooden structure he called his house were two homemade brick forges. In them he burned charcoal which he made himself in an earthen pit, blowing his fire with an enormous leather bellows fashioned from the hide of a huge bull.<
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  There was great unemployment in Kishinev. No one could afford to pay much to have his animals shod, and the Rivkind family was as poor as its neighbors. It was hard merely to exist, and saving money was something the Jews of Kishinev never considered because there was no spare money to save. But a month before Isaac was born, two of Mendel Rivkind’s cousins were savagely beaten by a crowd of drunken Moldavian youths. The blacksmith decided that somehow, some day, he and his family would escape to a better part of the world.

  If they had been poor before, the decision rendered them impoverished. They denied themselves a single luxury and eliminated expenses they had thought of as necessities. Ruble by ruble, a tiny hoard of money grew behind a loose brick at the base of one of the forges. Nobody but Mendel and Sonya, his wife, knew of its existence; they told no one because they did not wish to be murdered in their sleep some night by a beer-smelling peasant who came in search of their nestegg.

  The years passed, and each year the pile of money was increased by a painfully small amount. After Isaac was bar mitzvah his father took him out to the forge on a dark and frosty night and, prying the brick away, allowed him to feel the accumulated rubles, telling him of the dream.

  It was hard to build the freedom fund fast enough to keep ahead of their family. First Isaac had arrived, then three years later a daughter, whom they had named Dora after her grandmother, aleha hasholom, she should rest in peace. By 1903, a sufficient number of rubles had been saved to pay for three steerage passages to the United States. But by this time Dora was eighteen and Isaac was twenty-two and had been a married man for more than a year. His bride, the former Itta Melnikov, already was feeling life in her womb, a child who would require more rubles to be placed behind the brick in the years to come.

  The times grew worse. Krushevan grew more clamorous. A Christian girl who was a patient in the Jewish hospital of Kishinev committed suicide. In a nearby shtetl the uncle of a small boy beat him to death in a fit of drunken rage. Krushevan seized upon both incidents eagerly. Each of the victims had been killed by the Jews, who practiced the loathsome ceremony of ritual murder, his paper reported.