The Rabbi of Lud (11 page)

For Connie. Needing to impress Connie. Because I meant it when I said the blood count prayers were a challenge, that my kid’s faith was riding on them. Even if what I really meant was her faith in me. (Though inevitably, down the road,
this
conversation—RABBI OF LUD: “Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.” CONNIE: “He died? Stan Bloom
died?”
RABBI OF LUD: “I think prayer must be like any other treatment. I think the earlier you start, the more effective it is. Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan until he was already down for the count.” CONNIE: “He died, Daddy? You said you could pray him back to health and—Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so
grisly
!”)

Am I a buffoon? Some wise-guy, ungood Jew? Understand my passions then. All my if-this-will-go-here-maybe-that-will-go-there arrangements were in their service. What did
I
want? What did
I
need? To keep my job with God. To hold my marriage and family together. Who was ever more Juggler of Our Lady than this old rebbie? As much the God jerk as any chanteuse out there in my rec room tuning her instrument or vocalizing scales.

Because let’s face it, I’m no world-beater. Lud, New Jersey, is not one of Judaism’s plummier posts. It’s hardly the Wailing Wall. Hell, it’s hardly Passaic. I haven’t mentioned it but it had already begun to see its better days. There is, for example, a small airfield in Lud, hardly more than an airstrip really. Its tattered windsock no longer waves more than a few inches away from its standard even in the strongest gale, and tough clumps of rag grass have not only begun to spring up through cracks in the cement but have started to puncture actual holes in the tarmac. The landing strip had been put in long before for the convenience of people who flew their own airplanes, wealthy, high-flying bereaved from all along the eastern seaboard, New York State and the near Middle West who didn’t want to deal with the traffic controllers at busy Teterborough a dozen miles off, and who came in not only for the actual funerals and unveilings but with guests and picnic hampers for casual weekend visits to the graves of their loved ones, and who were willing, even anxious, to stay in the tiny hotel that the funeral directors had had built, also for their convenience. Now, however, the landing field was hardly ever used and the hangar was just a place where the gravediggers and maintenance men stored their tools and parked their Cushmans and forklifts in an emergency.

It’s hard times.

Shull and Tober keep telling me so.

“Rabbi Goldkorn,” big Tober called out.

“Good morning, Reb Tober,” I said, raising an imaginary cap. “Good morning, Reb Shull.”

Sometimes, when we pass each other in the street, we pretend that Lud is this shtetl from the last century, this Ana Tevka of a town.

“Yeah, yeah,” Shull muttered, “good Shabbes, l’Chaim. Next Year in Jerusalem.”

“Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

Tober unlocked the coffee shop. It had closed its doors to the public long ago but its big stainless-steel coffee urn was still operational, its grill and freezer.

Shull stepped behind the counter. He looked oddly chic back there in his dark, expensively tailored suit. “You want something with your coffee, Rabbi? There’s marble cake in the bell. We might have some fruit in the back. I could heat soup in the microwave. I could make toast.”

“Coffee’s fine.”

“This was before your time,” Tober said. “When the hotel was still open for business. This coffee shop had one of the finest kosher chefs in all America behind the counter.”

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“Talk about your funeral baked meats,” Shull said.

“There just wasn’t the business,” Tober said. “We couldn’t justify it.”

“We had to send him packing.”

“The Association hired him for the prestige and convenience.”

Tober meant the Greater Lud Merchants’ Association. Even the anti-Semite, Seels, was a member. Even I was.

“Then, when business dropped off …”

“That’s the thing,” I broke in. “I don’t understand how business can drop off.”

“That’s because you’re a scholar, Rabbi.”

“Not so much a man of the world.”

“You busy your head with the important things.”

“Blessing the bread.”

“The candles.”

“The wine.”

“Making over dead people.”

“Making over God.”

“Look,” said Shull, “you don’t have to worry.”

“Your job is assured,” Tober said.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of my employers as some other rabbi might have thought of the people on the board of directors of his congregation. Trustees and governors.

They were not like the women.

They watched me like a hawk.

They listened to every word of every eulogy, professional as people at the rear of a theater on opening night, interested as backers, hanging on the sobs, waiting for the laughs and show stoppers.

“My job is assured?”

“If it’d make you more comfortable we could draw up a new contract.”

“I don’t think I—”

“Sure,” Tober said, “we could stick in a no-cut clause, guarantee you four or five more years.”

“Five or six.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

“But—”

“You know what keeps us going?” Shull said.

“The perpetual care,” Tober said.

“The perpetual care and the exhumations.”

“The perpetual care and the exhumations and the deconsecrations.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island and up to Connecticut.”

“Because this necropolis is dying on its feet.”

I’m a fellow whipsawed between admiration and contempt, hard men and soft women, needful daughters and loony wives, God jerks and morticians.

“Think, Rabbi. How many graves and tombstones have we dug up this year? Just this year? How many times have you found yourself having to mumble deconsecration prayers over some watertight, concrete vault?” Tober asked, emptying his cup and rinsing it in the deconsecrated sink.

“Sure,” Shull said,
“that’s
what keeps us going.”

“Fashion!”
Tober grumped.

“Fashion and the interment customs. The laws and principles of the Funeral Code of the Great State of New Jersey.”

“We live by checks and balances, Rabbi.”

“And what if,” Shull put in, “God forbid it should come to this, the fashionable Long Island or fashionable Connecticut funerary lobby bastards ever got to our Trenton bastards and made them do away with the points in the code which keep us viable?”

“Exhumation taxes.”

“Fees for rezoning deconsecrated back into consecrated ground.”

“The ten-buck-a-mile charge, point A to point B, to move the disinterred across a state line.”

“All your prohibitives and pretty-pennies.”

“Pffft!”

“Up in smoke.”

“Gone with the wind.”

“But it makes you more comfortable we draw up a brand-new contract.”

“No cut for two or three years.”

“One or two.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

Shull took an ice-cream scoop from behind the counter and hung over the open freezer, studying the flavors. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to make myself a frappe. Anyone else? How about it, Rabbi? You up for a frappe?”

“Why are you saying these things to me?” I asked Tober. “I don’t know why you’re saying these things to me,” I told Shull.

“Listen,” Tober said, “we’re not the type to go behind your back.”

“Of course not,” Shull agreed. “Believe me, Rabbi, if we had a beef we’d be in touch.”

“We perfectly understand your position,” Tober said.

“We comprehend totally your point of view.”

“It isn’t as if we could reasonably ask you to fix up your eulogies.”

“Good Christ, man, you never even
knew
these people!”

“By the time
you
see them they’re already dead!”

“All you got to go on is what their loved ones tell you about it,” Shull said.

“You going to trust loved ones at a time like that?”

“With all their special stresses and vulnerabilities?”

“Though you have to, of course.”

“Even they tell you their daddies could fly.”

“Stand around in the air like a guy on a staircase.”

“It’s the age-old story.”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Tober said.

“We won’t stand on ceremonies. What it comes down to is what it came down to the last time,” Shull said.

“Arthur Klein and Johnny Charney have been asking about you again,” Tober said.

“What with death moving further and further out on the Island and up to the bedroom communities in Connecticut, well,” Shull said, “we don’t honestly see how we can continue to protect you.”

“I’m a rabbi,” I protested.

“Of course you are. I’d come to you myself for spiritual guidance. Wouldn’t you, Shull?”

“In a minute, Tober.”

“I studied Talmud. What do I know about real estate?”

“Plots,” Tober said, laughing lightly. “Not real estate.
Burial
plots. Real estate is something else altogether.”

“They
tax
real estate.”

“We believe in the separation of church and real estate.”

“Posolutely,” Shull agreed.

“It’s Klein’s opinion you wouldn’t even need a realtor’s license.”

“Charney’s too.”

“Please,” I said, rising to go, “I’m not your man.”

“It isn’t as if you’d be knocking on doors.”

“Is that what he thought, Tober, he’d be knocking on doors?”

“Leads,” Tober said, “you’d be following leads. Charney said to say.”

“All you’d have to do is close.”

“And collect the commission Klein says you’re entitled to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee.” Again I raised my imaginary cap. “Reb Tober. Reb Shull.”

It was always astonishing to me to see them work in tandem, zip through routines I knew had to have been rehearsed, the letter-perfect meeting of their minds, their rhymed intentions. Though of course this wasn’t the first time they’d introduced the subject. For years they’d been after me to work part time at Lud Realty with Klein and Charney. Indeed, though they professed to be passing along Klein’s and Charney’s views—the business about the realtor’s license, the commission, the leads—the idea of my selling cemetery lots had been theirs. They thought a rabbi would have extra authority with the customers.

Shull and Tober knew they were dealing in a depletable resource—not the dead; the dead, like the poor, we would have always with us, but the land, parcels of ground no bigger than the doorway to your room—and they were terrified. Always they were turning new ideas over and over in their heads. They entertained (and dismissed) a plan for a new, ecumenical cemetery, and offered at discount burial plot, casket, funeral and tombstone combinations that could only be purchased in advance. They worked out all sorts of schemes and drew up models of landscaping (like Simplicity dress patterns) that the men and women who would one day be buried there could not only preselect but were encouraged to tend themselves, like people working on their gardens. They would even sell you the seeds and rent you the tools.

So their overture to me in the coffee shop was not new. Even my guarded outrage reflected old positions, and each time they introduced the idea it seemed a little less outlandish.

“Goldkorn,” said Tober, “think about this, please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting for the door and stepping out into the street. “I really don’t see what there is to think about.”

“Goldkorn,” Shull called, rushing to the door and shouting after me. “Hear me, Goldkorn! There are worse parishes than Lud! If this cemetery goes belly up you could finish your career in some condo on the Palisades! You could be The Bingo Rabbi, The Theater Party Rabbi! The Rabbi of Wheelchairs and Walkers! Is that what you want? Is it?
Is it, Goldkorn?”

So they were terrified. It was those indivisible cubic feet of earth they knew they were stuck with, saddled with, the seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet—just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet. Because they figured that all they really had to sell was the topsoil. Never mind that it had dimension, that it bottomed out at China. For these two, everything after those first twenty-eight-or-so initial square dirt feet was throwaway, pure loss leader, the mineral rights to which they could neither retain, sell nor give away. Hence the advance purchase plans, collaborative eulogies, all the layaway obsequies; hence the seeds and garden tools and elaborate landscaping arrangements. Hence their tandem, bicycle-built-for-two hearts.

But however alike Tober and Shull appeared to be in business, privately they were as different as day and night.

Emile Tober was the night.

Tober was a big, troubled, crafty and, on his own, secretive, taciturn and probably insane old man who was driven by a single goal—putting together enough money to guarantee that his son, Edward, once Tober was out of the picture—that’s how he put it—would be provided for for life, a life, Tober was convinced, that would not only outlast his own and that of Tober’s wife but the lives, too, of Emile’s and Sonia’s three other children, Edward’s brother and two sisters, as well as their kids’, Ed’s unborn nieces and nephews, should they ever
be
born, which, frankly, might never happen since they, the siblings, were not married yet and, so early were they enlisted into the service of their daddy’s obsession, that they not only believed in it and shared in it but were actually given over to it as much as the father, and who (not even
counting
Edward), the funeral parlor guy’s grown kids—ninety-six years old collectively, which was the only score Tober ever kept, and the only way he ever kept it, growing three additional collective years per annum which, should all of them live, would make them ninety-nine years the following year and one hundred and two the year after that one, only Edward getting the benefit of an individuated, customized, bespoke birthday—thirty-eight, according to his father, of the darkest, dizziest years in the recorded, concentrated history of man—therefore actively contributed to it, that hard-earned fund, store, reserve, hoarded, hope-chest and war-chest, nest-egg kitty, call it what you will, which, or so ran his dad’s mad theory, would, if only it were allowed to grow big enough (if, that is, only God saw fit to allow all of them to live longer, if only He found them better jobs, kept inflation down, improved interest rates and guided them into safe, terrific investment opportunities), might finally permit—twenty-nine, thirty-two, thirty-five, sixty-one and sixty-four were their actual ages—one of them to die, so long, that is, as the rest of them didn’t slack off and continued to chip in with their fair share, until, if God saw fit, they would perhaps have saved enough to permit another of them to breathe his or her last and thereby leave off putting by, so long, that is, as it was the surviving, least good wage-earner He took, and so on and so forth until the time, or so old Tober figured, that the nut was at last large enough to cover just about whatever might yet come up, leaving the by-that-time fatherless, motherless, brotherless-and-sisterless kid to all the devices in the armory of his protective attendants and retainers. Which had better be considerable.