The Rabbi (23 page)

“Right.”

“So, what will it be? Medicine? Law? You got the marks. You got the brains. I got enough money to make a doctor or a lawyer. Take your pick.”

“No, Pop.” Two desperate jerks pulled the line in his hands and he hauled dripping lengths of it into the boat, glad for something to do.

“Michael, you're older now. Maybe you understand certain things better. Have you forgiven me?”

Damn it, he thought savagely. “For what?”

“You know very well what I'm talking about. For the girl.”

There was nowhere to look but the water, with the bright sun reflecting to hurt his eyes. “Forget that. It doesn't do any good to hang on to things like that.”

“No. I must ask you. Have you forgiven me?”

“I've forgiven you. Now—
let it go
.”

“Listen. Listen to me.” He could hear the relief in his father's voice, the excitement and the rising hope. “This shows
how close we really are, you and me, to be able to survive something like that. We got a business in our family that's always given us the best of everything. A good business.”

At the end of the line was a fish the size of a dinner plate. When Michael hauled it into the boat it thrashed, knocking over the bottle of beer and sending foaming liquid spilling onto one of his sneakers.

“Once I thought I could do it,” Abe said. “But I'm of the old school, I don't know big business. I got to admit it. But
you
—you could go to Harvard Business for a year, come back full of modern methods, and Kind Foundations could be a leader in the industry. What I always dreamed of.”

To control the flopping of the fish Michael placed the foot with the beer-wet sneaker on the flounder's mottled brown flatness, feeling the fluttering spasms through the thin rubber sole. The fish was hooked deeply. Its white, blind side was down, and both dark goggle-eyes looked up at him, still bright and unglazed.

Michael spoke the words quickly. “Don't Pop. I'm sorry.” He started to twist out the hook, hoping that it wouldn't hurt but feeling the tearing of the flesh as the barb pulled free.

“I'm going to be a rabbi,” he said.

 

19

Temple Emanuel of Miami Beach was a large brick building with white Georgian columns and wide steps of white marble. Over the years the crystals in the marble had been worn by the feet of worshipers until they were highly polished, causing the stairs to glitter in the strong Florida sun. Within the building there was air conditioning that was almost noiseless, a sanctuary of seemingly endless rows of red plush seats, a sound-proofed ballroom, a complete kitchen, an incomplete library of Jewish reading, and a small but carpeted office for the assistant rabbi.

Michael sat in misery behind a polished desk that was only a few square inches smaller than the desk in the larger office down the hall, the domain of Rabbi Joshua L. Flagerman. He frowned as the telephone rang. “Hello?”

“May I speak to the rabbi?”

“Rabbi Flagerman?” He hesitated. “He isn't here,” he said finally. He gave the caller the rabbi's home telephone number. The man thanked him and hung up.

He had been on the job for three weeks, or just long enough to ascertain that he had made a mistake in becoming a rabbi. His five years as a rabbinical student at the Jewish Institute of Religion had sadly misled him.

He had shone at the rabbinical school. “Like a jewel among the Reform pebbles,” Max Gross commented bitterly on one occasion. Gross didn't try to hide his sense of betrayal over the fact that Michael had chosen Reform as the vehicle for his rabbinate. They remained bound by spiritual ties, but their relationship never became what it might have been if Michael had become an Orthodox rabbi. He had found it difficult to explain his choice. He knew only that the world was changing quickly and Reform seemed to him the best available way to handle the change.

During the summers he worked in a settlement house in lower Manhattan, trying to throw straws of faith to children who were drowning in invisible seas. Some of them were kids whose fathers were away in the military and whose mothers worked double shifts in war plants or brought home a variety of unfamiliar, very temporary “uncles” in uniform. He learned to recognize the bouncy walk and the dilated pupils of the teenage junkie who was high, and the spastic limb control and the jerky gum-chewing of the tortured juvenile who was hung up without a supply. He watched childhood being ground down by ugliness. Once in a very great while he was conscious that he had helped someone in a very small way. The realization prevented him from quitting in favor of a counseling job at a summer camp.

He had finished three semesters at the rabbinical school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Most of his friends enlisted or were quickly sucked into the funnel of Selective Service. Theological students were exempted from the draft; half a dozen boys resigned from the school and got into uniform. The
others, Michael among them, were convinced by their advisors that rabbis would be needed more than ever in the days ahead. For the most part he felt regret, as if he had been cheated out of an adventure that was rightfully his. In those days he believed in death but not in dying.

Nevertheless, when he received occasional letters from places with names that were unfamiliar and sometimes unpronounceable they seemed exciting and romantic. Maury Silverstein kept in touch. He had entered the Marine Corps as an enlisted man slated for Officer Candidate School at Quantico as soon as he finished boot training. He boxed a little at Paris Island, and during one bout he and his drill instructor somehow became entangled in a grudge feud, the details of which never were described to Michael. What Maury did say in a letter was that several weeks later he and his enemy met with bare knuckles outside the ring. As a matter of fact it was outside the gymnasium, or to be more exact, behind it, with his entire squad yelling approval as he broke the jaw of the other man, who was a corporal. The corporal had removed the shirt that bore his stripes and no formal disciplinary action was taken, but from then on the other DIs bore down heavily on the trainee who had made one of their number useless as a molder of men. Silverstein was placed on report at the slightest hint of a rules infraction, and his expectations of becoming an officer soon vanished. When he left boot camp he received a few weeks of instruction as a mule skinner and then he was placed in charge of a short-legged mule with a fat behind. He named the animal Stella for sentimental reasons, he told Michael in the last letter he wrote in the United States. He and Stella were shipped out together to an unnamed and presumably mountainous Pacific island where he languished, hinting by V-mail of phenomenal lechery with native women. Respect for the cloth, he wrote, prevented him from revealing these exploits in their fullest detail.

During Michael's last year at the Institute he was assigned to assist in the high-holiday ceremonies at a temple in Rockville, Long Island. The services went without a hitch and he felt that at long last he was truly a rabbi. He began to ooze a cocky self-confidence. Then, three weeks before graduation and ordination, the Institute placement service arranged for him to be interviewed by Temple Emanuel in Miami, where they were looking
for an assistant rabbi. He preached a guest sermon at a Friday-night service. He had written the sermon carefully and polished his delivery in front of his bedroom mirror. It had been praised by his faculty advisor; he knew that the sermon had power and style. When he was introduced in Miami, he felt ready. He greeted Rabbi Flagerman and the congregation in a strong voice. Then he gripped the speaker's platform with both hands and leaned forward slightly.

“What is a Jew?” he began.

Upturned faces in the front of the hall looked at him with such mute expectancy that he found it necessary to shift his glance. But wherever he looked, in every row, there were faces turned up at him. Some were old, some were young, some were unmarked, some were furrowed by experience. He was paralyzed by the realization of what he was doing. Who am I, he asked himself, to tell them anything, anything at all?

The pause grew into a silence, and still he could not speak. It was worse than the day he was
bar mitzvah
. He grew numb. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. In the back of the hall a girl tittered, the small sound causing people to shuffle their feet.

Through sheer will power he forced himself to talk. Stumbling several times, he hurried through the sermon. Afterward he made desperate small talk and then took a taxi to the airport. Stolid with despair, he looked out the window most of the way back to New York, merely grunting his refusals when the red-haired stewardess offered coffee or liquor. That night, travel-weary, he found escape in sleep, but the next morning he lay in bed and wondered how he had become trapped in a calling for which he had no shred of talent.

During the next week he reviewed the alternatives to the rabbinate. The war with Germany had already ended and Japan could not hold out very long; it would be sheer anticlimax to enlist now. He could teach; but the prospect made him melancholy. That left only Kind Foundations. He was screwing up sufficient courage for a talk with Abe when a wire came from the hiring committee of the Florida congregation. They were not quite sure; would he be willing to visit them again at their expense and preach another sermon on the coming week end?

Queasy of stomach, filled with self-loathing, he made
another trip to Miami. This time, although his knees trembled and he was certain his voice quavered, he reeled off the sermon on schedule.

Two days later the call came.

His duties were uncomplicated. He conducted the children's service. He assisted the rabbi on the Sabbath. He read the back issues of the temple bulletin. At the request of Rabbi Flagerman he worked on a catalog of rabbinical literature. During the day, when both the older rabbi and his secretary were present, Michael did not answer the telephone, which rang simultaneously on all three of their lines. But if he was in the office in the evening, when they were not there, he took the calls. If someone wanted the rabbi, he gave out Rabbi Flagerman's home number.

He made some pastoral visits to members of the congregation who were ill. Because he didn't know Miami, members of the Temple Youth Group drove him. One afternoon his chauffeur was a blonde sixteen-year-old named Toby Goodman. Her father was a wealthy meatpacker with his own herds in the grazing country around St. Petersburg. She was very tanned and she wore white shorts and halter and drove a long blue convertible. She asked him wide-eyed questions about the Bible which he answered with great seriousness, even though he knew that she was laughing at him. While he made his calls she waited patiently in the car, parking in the shade when it was available and eating melting candy bars and reading a paperback whodunit with a sexy cover. When the calls were completed they headed back toward the temple in silence. He watched her while she tooled the car slowly through the crowded streets.

Everywhere there were uniforms. Miami was full of overseas veterans attending the rest and rehabilitation centers in the famous hotels that lined the beach. They filled the streets, strolling singly or in groups and marching loosely in double files to attend a lecture or a movie.

“Get out of the way,” the girl muttered. She threw the shift into neutral and gunned the motor, causing three Air Force men to leap aside hurriedly.

“Take it easy,” Michael said mildly. “They didn't make it
home just to be run down by a rabbi making pastoral calls.”

“All they do is lie around in the sun and whistle and make remarks about how they just saw you in a film.” She giggled. “I have a boy friend in the Navy, you know? He was home last month. He never wore anything but civvies. We drove these guys nuts.”

“How?”

She appraised him, narrow-eyed. Then, making up her mind, she braked swiftly and leaned past him to fumble in the glove compartment. When she straightened up, she held a half-filled gin bottle in her hand. Forty feet away, a double line of men, many of them wearing Combat Infantry Badges, filed slowly by in the hot sun. They looked up when she whistled shrilly. Before Michael knew what she was doing, she had thrown one arm around his shoulders, the hand at the end of it waggling the bottle enticingly.

“He's
4-F!” she called mockingly at the marching men. Then she kissed the top of his head.

The convertible jolted so hard he was thrown back against the seat as the car roared away. Even so, he preferred the rough ride to the alternative. The file of GIs had broken at once. Some of them chased the long blue car for half a block. The girl shook with laughter, appearing not to hear the words shouted by the running men.

He sat in silence until she pulled the car to a halt in front of the temple.

“You're mad, huh?”

“That doesn't quite describe it,” he said carefully. He got out of the car.

“Hey, that's my bottle.” He was holding it by the neck, having picked it up from the seat where she had dropped it.