Sweet Like Sugar (28 page)

Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar

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“Maoz tsur yeshuati,”
I began, looking at the rabbi's face as I sang the cheerful melody.
“Lecha na'eh leshabeach.”

The rabbi didn't look back at me. Instead he stared straight ahead at the candles, tiny flames flickering in his eyes.

CHAPTER 11

I
could smell my mother's latkes cooking in the kitchen, the scent of frying potatoes and onions drifting up the stairs to my old bedroom. I only had a few minutes before they were readyâand really, what good is a cold latke?âbut I needed to make a quick call.

“It's bad,” I said.

“How bad?” asked Irene.

“Bad,” I repeated. “He can barely talk and he looks awful.”

I told her about the rabbi's stammering, his shoddy appearance, how he cried. She listened, without interrupting to ask questions. While I talked on my parents' cordless phone, I played with the plastic dreidel Mrs. Goldfarb had given me that afternoon, spinning it on my desk and taking note of how it fell.
Nun. Nun. Gimel. Nun. Shin.

I had kept Irene up to date by phone for a solid week, relating whatever Mrs. Goldfarb told me about the rabbi's condition. During that time, Irene had never once pressured me to visit him, nor had she ever asked why I wanted to stay away. As someone who knew how it felt to be snubbed by the rabbi, to be drawn closer only to be pushed away, she probably understood my feelings better than anyone else.

But as I sat at the desk in my old bedroom in my parents' house, barely an hour after I first saw the rabbi in the hospital, I found that my feelings had changed.

“I'm glad I went to see him,” I told her.

“That's good, dear,” she said.

“I think you should go, too,” I said.

Irene was quiet for a moment, clearly surprised by my change of heart.

“It's been a whole year since he's spoken to me,” she said. “I don't know why he'd want to see me now.”

There was no anger in her voice. Determination, perhaps, or resignation. But no anger.

“I honestly don't know what he wants,” I replied. “But I think I know what he needs.”

I went to Holy Cross again the next evening. The rabbi's hospital room stank of disinfectant and boiled corn. And it was quiet; was he the first hospital patient in history who didn't ever turn on his television?

“Benji,” said the rabbi, still speaking in single words although his stammering was already starting to subside.

“I'm back,” I said.

“Candles?” he asked.

I put my backpack on a chair and pulled out the menorah and the candles again. And once again, I recited the blessing and sang “Maoz Tsur” while the rabbi listened.

“I brought you something else,” I said, while the candles burned on his table.

He raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “
Nu?
What is it?”

“I thought a lot about you when I was in Florida,” I said.

I checked to see if he'd betray surprise that I'd actually gone to Miami after our fight. Nothing. Maybe Mrs. Goldfarb had already told him.

“I learned a lot down there,” I said. “And I got some good advice. From Sophie.”

Now he opened his mouth again. “Sophie.”

“She made a needlepoint with a quotation from Hillel. Do you remember?”

He nodded.

“I think there's a lot of wisdom in those words.”

“Benji,” he said.

“You gave me a wonderful present for my birthday by sending me to Miami,” I said. “And now I want to give you a present. For Hanukkah.”

I walked over to the door and opened it and there stood Irene. She'd flown in that afternoon with a ticket I'd bought for her.

Seeing the rabbi in such a state must have shocked Ireneâshe hadn't seen him in quite some time. But she didn't let on; she looked at him as if he were still a handsome, smooth-talking teenager taking her for a stroll through Van Vorst Park.

“Zisel,” she said, taking his hand as she stood by his bedside.

“Irene,” he said.

“If not now, when?” I said. And I turned to leave the two of them alone.

When Jamie asked me to pick a place for my belated birthday dinnerâour first dateâI named a couple of options in the District: a French place in Georgetown, a Caribbean cafe in Adams Morgan. “We both live in the suburbs,” he said. “Why don't we just stay out here?”

Sharing a bowl of kimchi in a Korean grill in Wheaton, I told Jamie the whole story about the rabbi, and Irene, who'd arrived just a few hours before. I didn't want to bore him with tales about a couple of old people he'd never even met, especially on our first date, but he kept asking questions and prodding me to continue. So I did.

I waited for him to pull a Michelle, to interrupt and change the subject back to himself. But he never did. Not when our main courses arrived, not when the dessert arrived, not when the check arrived. He just listened, for an hour and a half.

“I'm not used to talking so much,” I said as we left the restaurant.

“You seemed like you needed to talk,” he said.

“Next time we'll talk about you,” I said. “Promise.”

“I really don't care what we talk about,” he said. “As long as there's a next time.”

The rabbi went home from the hospital later that week. Irene went with him.

She moved into his study, across the hall from his bedroom, sleeping on the foldout couch.

Irene arranged for a visiting nurse to come every day after lunchâto give the rabbi his medication, check his vital signs, and help him batheâand a speech therapist who would help him regain his ability to talk. The rest of the time, she planned to take care of him herself, cooking his meals, washing his clothes, and, most importantly, keeping him company day after day.

Within a few days, Irene had the rabbi's schedule running smoothly and she walked down the hill to the shopping center one afternoon, while the others were attending to him. After she picked up a few things at the supermarket and the bakery, she stopped in the bookstore to chat with Mrs. Goldfarb, whom she'd finally gotten to meet face-to-face earlier in the week at Holy Cross. And when she was done with Mrs. Goldfarb, she came around to the back of the shopping center and knocked on my door.

A hug and a kiss and I ushered her in. My couch was too big for her; her feet dangled several inches above the carpet. But she made herself at home there.

“Oh, the Barry Sisters, I used to love them,” she said, pointing to the poster.

“The rabbi gave that to me,” I said.

“He was never big on gifts,” she said. “He must really like you.”

“Maybe he did,” I said. “Before.”

She told me about the rabbi's health, how he'd already progressed from single words to short phrases. While the stroke had caused aphasiaâloss of the ability to produce wordsâthe rabbi was recovering quite well and, she noted, he had never lost his ability to comprehend other people's words, spoken or written. He was physically weakâsome-what shaky on his feet, he spent most of the day in bed or sitting in his living roomâbut his spirits, she said, were strong and he was very nearly his old self again.

“He still davens every morning,” she told me. “And he still spends hours a day reading his books. But that was always Zisel. Forever with his books. I guess even a stroke couldn't change who he was.”

For better or worse, I thought.

I drove Irene back up the hill when we were done chatting. As we pulled into the rabbi's driveway, she asked me to come in, “just for a minute, to say hello.”

“You know that I can't,” I said.

“I thought you were past that,” she said. “You visited him in the hospital.”

“That was different,” I said. “He made it perfectly clear that I'm not welcome in his house.”

“But that was before all this,” she said.

“I can't just pretend it didn't happen,” I said, “forgive and forget.”

She turned to face me from the passenger seat.

“That's not what this is all about, kiddo,” she said. “Nobody's asking anyone to forgive or forget. Do you think I've forgotten what Zisel did to me? Or that I've forgiven him? Think again. I'm here because I love himâin
spite
of what he did to me.

“You should never forget what he said to youâonly a fool forgets,” she continued. “And forgivenessâthat's something you get from God. Or your mother. You don't have to forgive him, or pretend this never happened.”

I folded my arms. “So what
do
I have to do?”

“You need to understand him, and accept him on his own terms, and get beyond all this,” she said. “You need to get over it.”

“Get over it?” I asked, incredulous. “He condemns my entire life and I'm supposed to just get over it?”

“Sweetheart, if I can get over what he did to me, you can do it, too,” she said.

She did have a point.

“And what about him?” I asked. “He gets to crap on everyone in his life and we all just look past it and keep taking care of him?”

“Oh, no, Benji, it's not like that at all,” she said, index finger in the air. “There's plenty that he needs to get over.
Plenty
. And if you think I'm not telling him the same thing every day, then you don't know Irene Faber.”

I sat for a moment, wondering what exactly Irene was saying to the rabbi as he sat on the living room couch.

“Come inside,” she said. “You'll see.”

I wasn't ready to go back inside that house. I told her: “Not today.”

“You're just as bad as he is,” she said gruffly, giving up the argument and grabbing her bags from my backseat. Then, looking at my face, seeing that I was more wounded than upset, she quickly softened: “I'll see you tomorrow, same time,” she said, and she blew me a kiss against her brown leather glove.

“I just can't do it,” I explained to Jamie that night over dinner at an Italian restaurant around the corner from his apartment. “I can't go back inside that house.”

Jamie was a good listener. Despite my earlier promise, I found myself doing most of the talking on our second date. And once again, he let me.

My relationship with the rabbi was particularly intriguing to him. My feelings toward the rabbi had begun to shift. I wasn't feeling guilty anymore: I knew that I'd done everything I could to look out for the rabbiâand now that he had Irene or the nurse with him twenty-four/seven, he didn't need me checking up on his physical or emotional health. I wasn't even angry by this point. Yes, his words had stung, and yes, I was pissed that my months of friendship seemed to count for nothing in his Torah-blind eyes, but that feeling, too, had lifted after I confronted him in the hospital, however briefly. Just letting him know that he'd hurt me was enough to unburden myself.

By this point, I mostly pitied him. No matter how many times I'd thought otherwise, Mrs. Goldfarb had been right about him from the start: He was a rigid man who'd pushed away everyone who ever cared about him. He'd rejected every bit of kindness and sympathy, not only with indifference, but with snubs and dismissal. If he'd been left completely alone, he'd have deserved it; the fact that he had Irene by his side was actually
more
than he deserved.

“Everyone told me that I needed to make the first move,” I said. “Well, I did. I went to see him in the hospital and I brought Irene here to stay with him. That's a pretty big move.”

Jamie nodded.

“But I tell you, the next move is his. If he wants me to come visit him at home, he's got to invite me personally. He's the one who kicked me out, he's the one who's going to have to ask me back in. Irene keeps saying that it's all fine now, that I should just get over it. But it's not that simple.”

“Why not?” Jamie asked.

“I'm still hurt,” I clarified. “Look, I'm twenty-seven. I'm a grown man. I don't need to justify myself to anyone. I don't need to defend my existence as a gay man to some homo-phobic rabbi. He's not my dad. He's not even my
rabbi
. Who is he to judge me? Why do I care what he thinks?”

I was getting agitated. Jamie was calm. “Why
do
you care?” he asked.

I wasn't sure of the answer.

“Okay, before the fight,” Jamie said, “why did you take such an interest in him?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe because he let me, and he trusted me.”

“He treated you like family,” Jamie offered.

“Only he didn't make as many demands,” I said. “And he didn't tell me what
not
to do.”