The Rabbi of Lud (37 page)

“Why do you think they tell me?” Sal demanded suddenly. “Why do you think he showed off in front of you? Why do you think they let us know their business? What’s wrong with you? If they didn’t want to make certain we were going to protect their secrets, why would they let us learn them in the first place? Guys like that? Like him? God
damn
Tober’s goddamn Edward! God
damn
his sporty poster kid who can’t tell here from there, up from down, in from out. God
damn
Shull’s fucking goddamn needs. God damn need itself or whatever else it was stole shit from the gods and brought it to goddamn Lud!”

“Hey, easy,” I said, “easy there, Sal. Easy.”

“Like Beirut. I swear. Like he was in an earthquake. Jesus, Rabbi, he looks like a fucking act of God!”

“Who, Sal? Who does?”

“Who
knows
who does?” Sal said, and showed me a death certificate. “The guy, the special delivery in the business parlor, but who
knows
who does? He could have been anybody. They bring them in from all walks of life. Guys behind on their payments. Insider trader guys from Wall Street whose inside information didn’t pan out. He could have been anyone who ever disappointed them.”

“This has a woman’s name on it.”

“So,” Sal said, “I guess they’ll be wanting a closed casket then, hey, Rabbi?”

Our own odd version of the car pool—sillier than ever, I suppose, since Connie would no longer permit her classmates to ride with her—had started up again. She was adamant about the point, even though some of the mothers had begun to call, making overtures, devising schedules, proposing ways to divide the labor. She was too humiliated, she said, and told us that the only reason the kids were willing to start up a car pool with us was her notoriety, that she’d become a character. Nor, for the same reasons, would she agree to ride in the school bus. I tried to reason with her, but she had put her foot down, made up her mind.

“The only one you’re punishing here is your mother,” I said.

“I’ll run away if you make me ride to school with other kids,” Connie said.

“It’s all right,” Shelley said. “I don’t mind driving. Really. Real-la-le-lee.”

“This isn’t fair,” I said. “Do you think this is fair, Connie?”

“Whoever said life is fair?” Connie said.

“No one,” I said.

“I don’t even mind if life isn’t fair,” Shelley said.

“Hey,” Connie said, “no sweat. I’ll run away.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Go ahead and do it.”

“I’ll turn tricks on Forty-second Street for a couple of weeks. What have I got to lose? It’s not as if I still had my cherry or anything.”

“Go ahead,” I agreed, “run away and turn tricks on Forty-second Street. It’s not as if you still had your cherry.”

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll lick some dick for a couple of weeks, put a few bucks together, then come home for a visit.”

So the strange car pool started up again, on the road again in the brand-new season’s one-woman show in that year’s late-model, big new traded-up Buick station wagon, an open door speaking to them for company, an unfastened safety belt, a still-engaged emergency brake, a tank low on gas or an unnecessary light, all the machine’s articulate parts nagging at them for attention. More ridiculous than ever, Shelley more like a chauffeur than ever, Connie more like the poor little rich kid, no matter what they did or where my daughter sat, beside her mother or way behind her, deep in the boondocks of the huge automobile, looking more than ever as if they had already arrived at the end of whatever journey they had been on, even as they were pulling out of the driveway, as if everyone else must already have been dropped off or, peculiarly, as if the car had been hired. It seemed a sort of Air Force One, some company jet, I mean, vaguely conspired, tax loopholed, as if, if you came right down to it, it was no one’s station wagon at all, or a station wagon under some Bahamian or Liberian registry. And though their route no longer required them to make doglegs and detours to pick up anyone else, it seemed as if the car might accumulate mileage by the simple fact of its existence.

Despite what it may sound like, Shelley and I had settled into a sort of truce with each other. As if not just the station wagon but we too had settled beneath some flag of convenience, pulling our testiness, our neutrality a legal fiction. Whatever else, we were each of us relieved to have somehow made it through the summer.

And, whatever else, we had.

I said nothing about Sal. I never mentioned Bubbles.

We went almost directly from summer into Indian summer that year. There was a blustery Labor Day weekend when a sudden, fast-moving front lay down cold, withering, hard-driving rains during the nights like sustained blasts of heavy incoming, and left the days out to dry in a thin, heatless sunlight. This was followed by a week or so of damp, stalled cold weather, bright, freezing days alternating with nighttime cloudbursts and record lows. (Resorts in the Poconos and Cape May and Atlantic City and Greenwood Lake screamed blue murder over their lost profits.) Then, suddenly, a few days after Rosh Hashanah and before Yom Kippur, the front moved out to sea, and New Jersey looked washed, fresh in the new, immaculate weather like God coming out. The foliage flamed on the trees and then some of it began to fall, laying a torn, bruised cover over the yellowing fields, motley as pizza.

I would have come clean too, the troubled tzadik, I would, the muddled chuchm, and went off to Tober’s to burst Bubbles’s bubble. I meant to make it up to Shelley, too, for my infidelity, and balance the books with Connie.

But the boys weren’t in, were off on some errand and, when I got back, Shelley was crying.

“What?”

“Joan Cohen,” she said.

“Shelley, I’m sorry.”

“Elaine Iglauer told me,” she said. “I picked her up after I dropped Connie off. We were going to look at a house in Oakland.” She spoke—and wept—in griefless tones of shock in some register beyond outrage.

“Shelley, I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was, and cursed my lousy timing and wondered how I could have allowed them to beat me to the punch and why it had never occurred to me that Joan Cohen would ever share Rutherford with anyone. Meanwhile thinking, the sons of bitches. Thinking, kiss and tell, kiss and tell. Thinking, base kissers; thinking, base tale bearers. “Shelley,” I said, emotionally toed-in as a child, “if there was anything I could do …”

“I know,” she said, and laid her hand on my arm. “Elaine would have been with her. It was only because we had this appointment.”

“I’m sorry?”

“To look at the house. In Oakland. Because the agent who normally shows it had to be somewhere else. So she let Elaine have the key. Well, they know her. Well, they do so much business. Or Elaine might have been killed too.”

“Killed?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“Killed?”

“If Elaine hadn’t already promised to go with me after I dropped Connie off at school.”

“Killed?”

“Sure,” Shelley said. “That’s why she had to tell her no when Joan invited her. Because we already had this appointment to look at the house.”

“Invited her.”

“To go walking,” she said. “In the woods. Near the lake. She wanted to try out her new boots. Elaine saw them. She said they were gorgeous, that they looked beautiful with that new fawn skirt she was wearing. She would have gone, too. Such a lovely, crisp day. After all this rotten weather we’ve been having. Elaine Iglauer says I saved her life.”

“Killed?
Joan Cohen?”

“Yes,” Shelley moaned, “isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“Who killed her?”

An image of Bubbles came into my head, twenty dollars’ worth of manicure clutching a hand mirror, examining his face, the blood Sal had brought up.

“Rangers found casings,” she said. “They think it was a hunter. They think it was a hunting accident.”

Sure, I thought, of course. What else? A hunting accident. Do ye ken Joan Cohen? It was hunters jumping the season must have bagged her.

twelve

I
T FELL TO ME to do the honors.

All these years in the business and—touch wood—there’d never been anything personal before. No one—thank God—had died on me. (Well, there was my little stillborn boy, but he didn’t even have a name, and we didn’t have the koyach to bury him.) What I’m saying is that, well, for me, kayn aynhoreh, it had
all
been in the rabbi mode. Not that any man’s death doesn’t diminish me too. Sure it does. It does. If a clod be washed away by the sea, isn’t Jersey the less? This is a given. Still, there’s loss and there’s loss, there’s death and there’s death.

They came the same bright, crisp afternoon of the day she was shot, Fanny Tupperman and Miriam Perloff, and assured me they spoke for the surviving Chaverot, for Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, for Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore, even, they said, for Shelley.

“My,” I told them, “such a vote of confidence, but surely, wouldn’t it be better if her own rabbi performed the service?”

“You
were her rabbi,” Fanny Tupperman said.

“What’s Judaism coming to?” I deplored. “No one belongs to a temple nowadays? I was her rabbi? I was? I rabbi the dead. I minister the fallen away, the caught out and caught short in New Jersey.”

“That’s Joan all right,” Fanny Tupperman said.

“I don’t know,” I said, “if I’m up to it. A grotesque, off-season hunting accident. Listen, I’m still in shock.”

I was. I was a draikopf, and couldn’t keep it straight who knew what and when they knew it. I was her rabbi, singing Fanny Tupperman had enigmatically piped. Plus there was the truly false light into which I would be plunging my wife, and daughter, too, for that matter, who would probably take a day off from school and martyrdom to hear the family’s other religious, her dad, recite his holy bygones-be-bygones above Joan Cohen’s gamy remains. A tall order for a guy who for most of his professional life had tried to maintain a low profile. Plus the fact of my own real, adulterous, grief. Which was unresolved and would make, along with the visions I continued to access in my head of Joan Cohen’s doelike leaps to errant, risky freedom, all that tragic dodge and cut-and-run (because surely she would have picked up his scent even before he—the killer poacher, man-eating, deer-stalker hunter—would have picked up the visual equivalent of hers—that quick tweed movement in the field, that flash of leather boot or hoof), any words of mine of no avail, of never any glimmer of avail. (Who would still think “doomed” the moment I remembered the moment she proposed to Elaine Iglauer that they go walking in the woods. And still ask
God-God!
—“What would a woman like this be doing out on a day like that anyway? Tell me, what could You have been thinking of?” Or scold,
scold
her memory. “Running such risks! Practically inviting every trigger-happy, redneck, rifle-bearing yahoo in this neck of the woods to take a potshot at you! You were asking for it. You almost
deserve
to have been killed!”)

I tried to tell them I was the wrong man for the job and marshaled all the fool-for-a-client arguments I could think of. They looked at me closely. “It’s just that I knew her,” I told them lamely. “I couldn’t be objective.”

“Those other times,” Fanny Tupperman said, “those were
objective
funerals?”

Shelley asked me to do it. “If not for me, then for Joan Cohen. She’d have wanted it that way.”

“Boy,” I said, “every Tom, Dick and Harry knows what dead people have in their heads, what they’ve got up their sleeves and would get off their chests. Why do they draw up wills? What do we need lawyers?”

“Jerry,” Shull confided, “I’m picking up the expenses on this one. The deluxe mahogany. Down stuffing in the satin lining. I’m going all out.”

“What, you are?”

“My pleasure,” he said.

“Your pleasure? That’s very kind, Sam.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. My
pleasure.
I dated her.”

“I see,” I said.

“Twenty grand I must have spent on that woman. At
least
twenty grand. I was the one who put her into all those suedes and Harris tweeds she wore. The tiny pinstripes. I dressed her for success. What the hell? What’s a few thousand more? Still, well, you know, if we had to bring in another rabbi …”

That she’d never married. That she left no survivors. That was the angle I meant to punch up. Working her childlessness, working her spinsterhood, working the theme we were all her survivors.

Her singing. I’d bring in her singing. Her musical Judaism. And sketch her, powerfully clapping, bounding round the campfire, draw her generous kibbutz heart. A cheerful, reliable, companionable sort, her soul in the backpack with the provisions. This echt Sabra, some maiden Jewess, say, who might have been there with Moses on the long voyage out from Egypt to the Promised Land. Some slim, dark au pair of the wilderness who kept an eye on the kids and helped with the tents. Though this, of course, was not how I really saw her. (Oh, how I
really
saw her! Never mind how I
really
saw her!) Though you know? In a way I did.

Her good-sport mode, I mean, and elegant outdoor ways. Which got her killed for her trouble, slaughtered for her style. And led her out into the very fields and locales where models posed for their pictures, out into the unfenced surreal, that deer-stalked, fox-hunted, cony-catchered bluegrass where you could almost have anticipated the sniper would be.

And that’s not how I really saw her either.

One time—this was two years ago—Shelley came to me, very excited.

“We’ve got a gig-e-le.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A gig-e-le, a booking. It’s a show biz-e-le term.”

“Who does?”

“We do, the girls. The Chaverot.”

“Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.”

“It is,” she said. “Jack Perloff finally popped the question. Miriam doesn’t have to be a divorcee anymore.”

“Well, that
is
good news,” I said. Jack Perloff had an automobile dealership in the Oranges. He and Miriam had been seeing each other for years. There was a question about his intentions. Until Shelley’s announcement it was understood that, officially, they were only “going steady.”