The Rabbi (42 page)

“Sure. Or you can give it to me now.”

“I can't. I don't have my checkbook with me.”

“Oh.” The girl looked away. “Wow . . . I don't know. This never happened to me before.”

“I'm a Y member. Last year I was in Mrs. Bosworth's slimnasties
class,” Leslie said. She smiled. “I'm really perfectly respectable.” She dug into her purse and found her Y membership card.

“Oh, I'm
sure
you are.” The girl studied the card. “It's just that if you forgot they would fire me, don't you see, or I'd have to pay for your room myself, which I really can't afford to do.”

But she reached behind the desk and then held out a key with a numbered tag on it.

“Thank you,” Leslie said.

The room was small but very clean. She hung her clothes in the closet and then got into bed in her slip. She felt very grateful to the girl at the desk. She would have to call Michael first thing in the morning, she thought drowsily.

But next morning the room was quiet; there were none of the early-morning hospital noises which now awoke her daily, and she slept until almost nine.

When she opened her eyes she lay without moving in the warm bed and thought how nice it was not to have had an electroshock treatment, which she knew was what would have happened that morning if she had been in the hospital.

A middle-aged woman with bland eyes and blue-white hair was at the registration desk when she turned in her key.

Outside the Y, she hailed a taxi. Instead of telling the driver to take her to the hospital, she gave him her home address.

I'm an escapee, she thought as she entered the cab. The idea should have terrified her, but it was so absurd it made her smile.

The house was quiet and deserted. She found the extra key where they always left it on the little ledge over the back door and she let herself in and brushed her teeth and drew a deep bubble bath and soaked in it and later, when she had changed into fresh clothing, she made herself a large breakfast of eggs and rolls and coffee and ate every bit of it.

She knew she had to go back to the hospital, that she was nearly finished there, but the thought was disgusting to her.

One-week vacations for long-term patients should be built into their schedules, she thought.

The more she considered the idea, the more it appealed to
her. In the third drawer of her bureau, beneath her slips, she found the bankbook for the account that held Aunt Sally's money. She packed a small bag and then wrote
I Love You
on a slip of paper and placed it in Michael's bureau on top of his white shirts.

Then she called another cab and when it came she took it into town; when she paid for it she had eleven cents left, but at the bank she withdrew almost six hundred dollars.

At the Y she found out that the young night clerk's name was Martha Berg, and she left her an envelope with a ten-dollar bill in it.

It occurred to her that the note she had left for Michael was hardly reassuring, and she stopped at Western Union and sent him a telegram.

The first bus leaving the depot was going to Boston and she got into it and paid the fare. She had no real desire to go to Boston, but she hadn't thought this thing through, she really didn't know where she wanted to go. It was an old red bus, and she sat on the left side two seats behind the bus driver, trying to decide between Grossinger's and a plane to Miami.

But when the bus came to Wellesley she stood and pulled the cord. The driver looked surly as she gave him her ticket stub. “Paid to Boston,” he said. “You want a refund, you'll have to write the company.”

“That's all right.” She got out and walked down Main Street slowly, enjoying the shop windows. When she reached the train station her arm was very tired and she turned in and checked her bag in a twenty-five cent locker, then she walked to the college campus unencumbered.

A lot of it was new and unfamiliar, but some of it was exactly the same. She walked until she came to Severance and then, feeling a little foolish, she went in. There were only a few girls around; it was the time of day when most girls would have a class somewhere. On the second floor she went to the right door without hesitation, as though she had left it only half an hour before to go to the library.

She had half-expected no answer to her knock and when the girl opened the door she stood tongue-tied for a moment.

“Hello,” she said finally.

“Hello?”

“I'm sorry to disturb you. I had this room a long time ago. I thought it would be fun to see it again.”

The girl was Chinese. She was dressed in a shortie nightgown and her thick, muscular legs were like ivory columns.

“Please come in,” she said. When Leslie did she took a housecoat from the closet and put it on.

It was furnished differently, of course, and the colors were all different. It really didn't look like the same room. She walked to the window and looked out and the view really
did
take her back. Lake Waban was unchanged. It was frozen and snow-covered and near the shore some of the snow had been plowed away and the girls were skating on the ice.

“How long did you live here?” the girl asked politely.

“Two years.” She smiled. “Do the toilets still stop up and overflow?”

The girl seemed puzzled. “No. The plumbing seems to be very efficient here.”

All at once she felt like a perfect fool and she shook the girl's hand and started to edge toward the door.

“Won't you stay and have a cup of coffee?” the girl said, but Leslie could see that she was relieved to get rid of her and she thanked her and left the room and then the dorm.

The Old Grad, she thought. Ugh.

There was a new building, the Jewett Arts Center, and she went inside and into the gallery, which was good. They had a small Rodin and a small Renoir and a head of Baudelaire in light stone with large sightless eyes that she liked. She spent a long time in front of a St. Jerome by Hendrik Van Somer. The picture showed an old man with wrinkled dugs, a bald head, a hooked nose, a long beard and very fierce eyes, the fiercest eyes she had ever seen, and she thought immediately of the way Michael described his grandfather.

She went out the other side of the building and the moment she stepped through the door she knew exactly where she was.

There was old Galen Stone Tower and the courtyard and the trees and the stone benches, most of them snow-covered but one brushed clean. She sat facing Severance Hill, on which a solitary skier floundered and then fell. She remembered the hill
in May, Tree-Planting Day with Debbie Marcus in a kind of bedsheet playing a vestal virgin.

A man in a black chesterfield and a woman in a gray cloth coat with a fox collar came out of the administration building. He had the kind of red face that made Leslie think he was a problem drinker without knowing a thing about him. “This seems to be the only bench without snow,” the woman said to her husband.

“There's plenty of room,” Leslie said, moving over.

The man sat on the other end of the bench and the woman sat in the middle.

“We're here to see our daughter,” she said. “A surprise visit.” She looked at Leslie. “Are you visiting one of the girls, too?”

“No,” Leslie said. “I've just been visiting the museum.”

“Which building is the museum?” the man asked.

She pointed it out to him.

“Is it all that modern business?” the man asked. “Junkyard scrap and framed paint rags?”

Before she could answer, a girl came running down the path, a high-colored brunette wearing blue jeans and a wind-breaker. “How
are
you,” she said, kissing the woman on the cheek. The man and the woman stood.

“We wanted to surprise you,” the woman said.

“Well, I'm surprised.” The three of them started to move down the path. “The thing is, I have a guest staying at the inn until tomorrow. Jack Voorsanger, the fellow I wrote you about?”

“I never heard about any Jack Voorsanger,” the man said. “Well, why can't we all visit together?”

“Oh, we can. Of course,” the girl said heartily. They walked away, the girl talking quickly and both her parents bending toward her as they listened.

Leslie looked up at the tower and remembered the carillon, how they played before chapel in the morning and before and after dinner. They always ended up with the same song; what was its name? She couldn't remember. She sat for a little while wishing that they would play now, and then she got to her feet, recalling what she had been told by the first boy who had ever kissed her: she had complained to him, a tall, bookish boy who was her father's prize Sunday-school pupil, telling him that she
hadn't disliked it or liked it particularly, and he had said angrily, “What do you expect, chimes?”

She walked back to the railroad station and got her suitcase, then she bought a ticket and in about twenty minutes the New England States came in looking almost as it had when she had taken it home for the holidays, except a little shabbier, the way all trains were now. Right after the conductor took her ticket she fell asleep. She dozed intermittently and when she awoke the last time they were eight minutes outside of Hartford and she remembered with a small feeling of triumph what the song was; it was “The Queen's Change.”

She and her father exchanged astonished glances when he opened the door in answer to her ring. He was amazed by her presence and she was astounded by his appearance. He wore a navy-blue sweatshirt and a pair of rumpled black pants marked with gray-white streaks and little lumps of something, maybe wax. His fine white hair was in disarray.

“Well,” he said. “Well, come in. Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

She walked past him and into the parlor. “New furniture,” she said.

“Bought it myself.” He took her coat and hung it in the closet. They stood and looked at one another for a difficult moment.

“What ever are you working on?” she asked, looking again at his clothing.

“Oh, my goodness.” He turned and hurried away from her, into the kitchen. She heard him open the door to the cellar and then go down the stairs, and she followed him.

It was a warm, dry cellar, bright because he had turned on all the lights. In a big cast-iron cannibal pot a bed of coals glowed, and in the coals there was another pot filled with something thick that boiled and bubbled. “Must keep watching this,” he said. “To leave it unattended is to invite fire.” From a brown paper bag he took a handful of candle stubs and dropped them into the smaller pot. He watched anxiously while they melted, then he fished out the freed wicks with a long barbecue fork.

Senility?

She wondered, watching him closely. Certainly some kind of personality change, she told herself.

“What do you do with it?” she asked him.

“Make things. My own candles. Other things in molds. Want me to do your hands?”

“Yes.”

Pleased, he utilized two pot-holders to take the molten wax off the fire. Then he took a jar of Vaseline from a cabinet drawer and watched critically as she followed his instructions, smearing the petroleum jelly thickly over each hand and forearm. He kept casting anxious glances into the pot. Finally he nodded. “Put them in. Once it gets too cool you might as well not do it.”

She looked dubiously at the hot wax. “Won't it burn?”

He shook his head. “That's what the Vaseline is for. I won't let you keep them in long enough to burn.”

She took a deep breath and plunged her hands into the wax and in a moment he pulled them out of the pot and she was holding them up in front of her face, hands covered with thick wax gloves. The wax was still quite hot but she could feel it cooling and hardening, and the heat and the slipperiness of the melting Vaseline, the oddest combination of conflicting sensations. She wondered how he was going to get the skin of wax off her hands without breaking it, and she started to giggle. “This is so unlike you,” she said, and he smiled at her.

“I suppose it is. A man getting old needs something strange to do.” He filled a pail with water, using hot and cold alternately as he tested the water in the pail with his fingertips.

“We should have done this together when I was about eight years old,” she said, her eyes searching for his. “I would have loved it.”

“Well—” He placed her hands in the pail of water and waited anxiously. “Temperature's the important thing. If the water is too cold the wax will break. If it's hot, the wax will melt.” The water was warm. The wax became plastic enough for him to stretch it at her wrists, allowing her to pull her hands free. She jerked her left hand and the wax tore.

“Carefully,” he said, annoyed. She withdrew her right hand slowly, and the wax glove that resulted was perfect. “Want to do the left one again?” he asked.

But she shook her head. “Tomorrow,” she said, and he nodded.

They left the good cast hardening in a pail of cool water. “How long are you going to stay here?” he asked her as they climbed the stairs.

“I don't know,” she said. She realized that she had not had dinner. “Can I have a cup of coffee, Father?”

“Of course,” he said. “We'll have to make it ourselves. Woman down the street comes into make dinner, and to clean. I handle my own breakfast. Eat lunches out.” He sat on a kitchen chair and watched her while she made coffee and toast. “Have you quarreled with your husband?”

“Nothing like that,” she said.

“But you have some sort of trouble.”

She found it tremendously moving that he understood her sufficiently to perceive this; she had not thought it possible. She was about to tell him this, then he spoke again—

“I see people in trouble every day.”

—And she was glad she hadn't.

He spooned saccharine into the cup of coffee she served him and took a tentative sip. “Would you care to discuss it with me?”