The Rabbi (28 page)

“My belly isn't rumbling.”

“I heard it distinctly, a most animal-like noise.”

“I like you,” she said.

“I like you, too. I have so much confidence in you I'm going to take a nap.” He lay back on the blanket and closed his eyes and amazingly, although he had not at all intended to do so, he fell asleep. When he awoke he had no idea how long he had slept, but the girl was sitting there in the same position, looking as though she hadn't moved except that her sneakers were off. Her feet were well shaped but there were two little yellow callus ridges on her right heel and a small corn on the pinky of the same foot. She turned her head and caught him looking at her and she smiled and just then the fish struck and the reel gave a loud whir.

“Here,” she said, shoving the rod toward him, but he pushed it back into her hands.

“Count to ten, slowly,” he whispered. “Then give the rod a good jerk to set the hook.”

She counted aloud, her voice shaking with nervous laughter after she reached four. When she said ten she yanked, hard. She began to reel in but the fish ran back and forth across the pool, not breaking water but fighting all the way, and in her excitement she dropped the rod and hauled the line in hand over hand until she had the fish out of the water, a beautiful bass, better than the first one, deep and broad and about fifteen inches long. The fish bounced and flapped on the blanket, trying to get back into the pool, and they both tried to grab it until it was trapped between them and his arms went around her and her hands were in his hair and he felt her breasts separate and alive against his chest and the fish even more alive between her breasts, while as he kissed her the laughter bubbled into his mouth from hers.

He was afraid that Leslie would be angry with him when she saw Stan Goodstein's hunting lodge at the top of the hill, but
she began to laugh again when he showed her the shelves full of canned food. He set her to heating baked beans in the cabin while he took the carcass of the fish out to the pump behind the house. This was the part he had forgotten about when he had planned the day. Except for one small bass he had hooked with little Bobby Lilienthal two weeks before, the only fish he had ever caught were flounders which he and his father were accustomed to hand triumphantly to a neighborhood fish market clerk for conversion into food. He had watched Phyllis Lilienthal prepare her son's catch for their supper and now, armed with a rusty scissors, pliers, and a dull butcher knife, he tried to remember what she had done, step by step.

With the knife he made two deep but shaky incisions along each side of the spiny dorsal fin, then he used the pliers to yank it out. When Phyllis Lilienthal had done this the fish had proven to be still alive and it had leaped almost out of her hands. Recalling that, Michael had smashed the head of this fish against a rock with enough force to decapitate a man, but nevertheless the remembrance of the other fish's gory revival made him shudder. He used the scissors to slit the white belly from the anal opening to the jaw. Then he peeled the skin off with the pliers and was amazed at the ease with which the viscera popped out, with very little tearing. He had trouble cutting off the head. As he struggled and sawed the knife back and forth the red eyes seemed to stare accusingly, but then the head dropped off and he ran the blade down the backbone and over the rib cage. If the resulting fillets were a bit ragged, they were nevertheless fillets. He rinsed them under the pump and carried them inside.

“You look a little pale,” she said.

Bobby's mother had dipped her fish in beaten egg and cracker crumbs and then fried it in vegetable shortening. There was no egg and no shortening, but he found cracker crumbs and a bottle of olive oil. He was somewhat dubious about the omission and the substitution, but the fish came out looking like a Crisco ad in the
Ladies' Home Journal
. She watched and listened intently when he said the
brocha
. The beans were good and the fish was flaky and wonderful, and she had opened another can on her own and heated its contents, zucchini, which he usually hated but now ate with relish. For dessert they opened a can of Elberta peaches, drinking the juice.

“You know what I'd love to do?”

“What?”

“Give you a haircut.”

“What else would you like to do?”

“No. Really. You need one so badly. And the way your hair is, somebody who doesn't know you might think you're . . . you know.”

“I
don't
know.”

“Queer.”

“You hardly know me. How do you know I'm not?”

“I know,” she said. She continued to tease and in a few moments he gave in and moved one of Stan Goodstein's maple chairs outside into the sunshine. He removed his shirt and she went and got the scissors and began to snip and then he sniffed a couple of times and became angry.

“For Christ's sake, didn't you wash it? It's all fish.” He was ready to quit right there but she went back to the pump and rinsed the scissors and wiped them on the taut seat of her jeans and he told himself, I've never before had this much fun in all my life.

He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes and enjoyed the warmth of the sun while the rusty scissors went snip-snip, snip-snip.

“I'm very grateful to you,” she said.

“What for?”

“I responded when you kissed me. I responded very strongly.”

“Is that so unusual?”

“It is for me ever since I had an affair last summer,” she said.

“Hey.” He leaned forward so that she had to stop cutting his hair. “You don't want to be telling me about something like that.”

She grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back. “Yes, don't you see, I haven't been able to tell anybody, but this is so safe. This is practically made to order. You're a rabbi and I'm a . . . a
shickseh
, and we'll probably never see each other again. It's even better than if I were a Catholic telling it to a priest hidden behind a screen in a confessional, because I
know
the kind of person you are.”

He shrugged and sat quietly while the scissors snipped and the hair fell on his bare shoulders.

“It was with this Harvard boy I didn't even like. His name is Roger Phillipson, his mother went to school with my aunt, and to please them we went out a couple of times so we could both write home about it. I let him make love to me in his car, only once, just to see what is was like. It was simply awful. Nothing. Since then I haven't enjoyed kissing a boy and I've never been able to feel passionate. I was very worried. But when you kissed me after I caught the fish I felt as passionate as anything.”

He felt both flattered and extremely annoyed. “I'm glad,” he said. They were both silent.

“You don't like me as much as you did before I told you that,” she said.

“It isn't that. It's simply that you caused me to feel like something that made the right color on your litmus paper.”

“I apologize,” she said. “I've wanted to tell somebody about that ever since it happened. I grew so disgusted with myself afterwards, and so sorry that I had let my curiosity get the better of me.”

“You shouldn't let that single experience make a great big difference in your life,” he said carefully. His back was beginning to itch, and several clumps of hair had worked their way down into his trousers.

“I don't intend to,” she said in a low voice.

“None of us can go through life untouched. We all hurt ourselves and others. We feel boredom and we put a small creature on a hook, we feel hunger and we eat flesh, we feel desire and we make love.”

The girl burst into tears.

He turned to look at her, touched and amazed that his words should have so profound an effect, but she was staring at his head as she wept.

“It's the first time I ever cut anybody's hair,” she said.

They drove slowly over the mountain roads, talking quietly, until it was dark. Once Leslie covered her face with her hands and slumped down in the seat, but this time he knew she was laughing. When they arrived at the inn he kissed her good-by in the car.

“It was a day,” she said.

He sneaked up to his room without being seen. Next morning he got up and out very early, having instructed Leslie to make his excuses. In order to find a barber—one he had been avoiding for weeks because the man was careless and unskilled—he had to drive thirty miles beyond his next scheduled stop.

The old man kept shaking his head as he cut his hair. “Have to get it down mighty close to even it off,” he said.

When he finished, a
yarmulka
would not hide the fact that all that was left was a sort of brown fuzz. In a general store next to the barber shop Michael bought a khaki hunting cap, which during the next few weeks he wore even when the days became hot, feeling fortunate that he did not have to remove his hat to pray.

 

22

When summer actually came he stopped seeking shelter at night and unrolled the sleeping bag that had been one of the items on Rabbi Sher's good list, finding it slightly mildewed but very serviceable. At night he lay under the stars waiting to be eaten by a wolf or a bobcat and listening to the wind sliding over the mountain tops and making restless noises in the trees. On afternoons when the distant hills shimmered blue in the hot sun he stopped the car and imitated the fishes instead of trying to catch them, sometimes lying naked and alone in a shallow, tumbling stream and shouting and laughing aloud at the icy cold, and once in his BVD's joining a bunch of gawking, silent mountain boys in a river swimming hole. His hair grew, and as it did he soaked it with water every morning and brushed it straight back, getting rid of the part he had had before his short haircut. He shaved regularly and used the tub or shower wherever he made a stop. His congregation kept him too well fed, everyone planning large meals on the occasion of the rabbi's visits, and he stopped doing
his own laundry after receiving four offers from housewives along his route; he let them take turns.

Bobby Lilienthal was learning enough Hebrew to begin working on his
haftorah
in preparation for his
bar mitzvah
. Stan Goodstein's mother died and he had his first Jewish funeral in the congregation and then Mrs. Marcus reserved his services for August 12 and he had his first wedding.

It was a good-sized wedding, almost but not quite taxing the facilities at the inn, and surprisingly formal for the Ozark Mountains. Marcus and Beerman relatives came from Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Ohio, and two towns in Wisconsin. Mort's male friends were not there but four of Deborah's classmates were, including Leslie Rawlins, who was maid of honor.

Before the ceremony Michael sat for almost an hour in an upstairs bedroom with Mort and his younger brother, who was to be the best man. Both brothers were extremely nervous and had been nibbling on the contents of a pinch bottle in search of ease. Michael took the bottle with him when he left the room. He stood at the top of the stairway, wondering where he could dispose of the Scotch. In the room below him a crowd had gathered, the men in white jackets and the women in gowns that obeyed the New Look commandment of Dior. In their long gloves and big floppy hats and
peau de soie
dresses of lovely pastels, viewed from the top of the stairs the women looked more like flowers than females, even the fat ones. Obviously, he decided, he couldn't walk down among them carrying a bottle of booze. He disposed of it finally in an upstairs hall closet, standing it behind a vacuum cleaner and in front of a large can of floor wax.

When the ceremony began everything went as rehearsed. Mort was sober and serious. Deborah's white net cloud, topped by a halolike wreath of white blossoms, created the standard gasps when she entered on her father's arm, her eyes demure and doe-like behind the full veil. Only the tightness with which she held her floral prayerbook denied her tranquility.

When it was over and he had congratulated everybody, Michael found himself reaching for champagne while Leslie Rawlins' eyes stared at him over the rim of her glass.

She swallowed and smiled at him. “My,” she said, “you're an impressive fellow.”

“Was it all right?” he asked. “I'll let you in on a secret if you don't tell anyone. It's the first one I've ever handled alone.”

“Congratulations.” She held out her hand and he shook it. “Wonderful, honestly. You sent chills up and down my spine.”

The champagne was dry and icy cold, exactly what he wanted now that the ceremony was over. “You're the one to be congratulated,” he remembered presently. “You and Deborah were graduated in June, weren't you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I have a job. After Labor Day I'm going to be a researcher at
Newsweek
. I'm quite excited. And somewhat frightened.”

“Just remember to count ten and then set the hook,” he said, and they both laughed. Her dress and accessories were the color of cornflowers, the exact shade of her irises. The bridesmaids, who were the other three Wellesley girls plus one of Deborah's cousins from Winnetka, wore rose. Blue made her bronze hair blonder, he decided. “I like you in blue. But you're thinner.”