The Rabbi (43 page)

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Your privilege.”

She felt the first stirrings of anger. “You might care to ask me how my husband and children are. Your grandchildren.”

“How is your family?”

“Fine.”

They said nothing for a few minutes, until they had finished the toast and coffee and there was nothing more to do with their hands and with their mouths.

She tried again. “I'll have to show Max and Rachel how to make wax hands,” she said. “Better still, I'll have to bring them here and you can make some for them.”

“All right,” he said without enthusiasm. “How long has it been since I've seen them? Two years?”

“Eighteen months. Two summers ago. The last visit wasn't a pleasant experience for them, Father. They're very fond of their other grandfather. They could be of you, if you'll let them. It shook them to hear the two of you.”

“That fellow,” her father said. “I still don't understand how you might have felt I would be interested in entertaining him in my home. Nothing in common. Nothing.”

She was silent, remembering an awful afternoon of shattered and bleeding personalities. “May I sleep in my old room?” she asked finally.

“No, no,” he said. “It's full of cartons and things. Take the guest room. We make sure it always has clean sheets.”

“The guest room?”

“Second on the left at the head of the stairs.”

Her Aunt Sally's room.

“There are clean towels in the linen closet,” her father said.

“Thank you.”

“Are you . . . ah . . . in need of spiritual help?”

Towels and spiritual help dispensed cheerfully, she thought. “No thank you, Father.”

“It is never too late. For anything. Through Jesus. No matter how far or how long we have strayed.”

She said nothing, making a little motion of supplication with her hand, so small that perhaps he didn't see it.

“Even now, after all this time. I don't care how long you have been married to him. I cannot believe that the girl who grew up in this house could renounce Christ.”

“Good night, Father,” she said faintly. She got up and carried the bag upstairs and turned on the light and shut the door of the room behind her and leaned her back against it for a long moment, staring at the room she remembered from so many nights of burrowing into her Aunt's bed to sleep huddled against her dried-out virgin's body. She remembered exactly how her aunt had felt in her arms; even how she had smelled slightly, body odor and stale roses, probably the scent of a perfumed soap Aunt Sally had used in secret.

She changed into her nightgown, wondering if you still had to light the gas ring in order to get enough hot water for the bath, too weary to find out. She heard him come upstairs and then the sound of his hesitant knock on her door.

“You run away when I try to talk to you,” he said.

“I'm sorry, Father.”

“What makes you so afraid?”

“I'm tired,” she said throught the closed door.

“Can you tell me that you feel as though you are one of them?” he asked.

She was silent.

“Are you a Jew, Leslie?”

But she would not answer.

“Can you tell
me
that you are a Jew?”

Go away, she thought, sitting on the bed in which her aunt had died.

In a little while she heard him go into his own room down the hall and she reached up and pulled the cord that shut the light. Instead of going to bed right away she went to the window and sat on the floor with her breasts crushed against the sill and her face pressing into the cold pane in the familiar old way, looking through a glass darkly at the street that had once been a part of her prison.

In the morning when they met for breakfast it was as though nothing had happened the previous evening. She made him bacon and eggs and he ate them with appetite, even a trifle greedily. When she served the coffee he cleared his throat. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I have a full calendar of appointments this morning at the church.”

“Then I had better say good-by now, Father,” she said. “I've decided to take an early train.”

“Oh? All right then,” he said.

Before he left the house he stopped at her room and handed her two long yellow candlesticks. “A little gift,” he said.

When he had gone she telephoned for a taxi and when it arrived rode in it to the depot. Inside the railroad station she bought a paperback Robert Frost collection and read it for twenty minutes. When the train was five minutes away she lifted her bag to the waiting-room bench and opened it, picking up the yellow candles to move them to make room for the book, and one of the candles came apart in her hand, the yellow wax crumbling away to show the flaw, a piece of undigested white wax at its heart. In disgust she picked the waxy crumbs out of her suitcase as best she could and threw them with the broken pieces into a trash barrel.

On the train she began to wonder what she could do with one candle and going through Stamford she removed it from
the suitcase and dropped it down the crevice between the armrest and the wall beneath the window. Without knowing why, she felt better.

As they drew closer to New York she watched the scenery roll past like a long television plea for urban renewal. It was a warm day for winter. Off the tracks, mist rose from the snow in gray banks, and she thought of mornings in San Francisco where to look out the windows was to know that the earth was waste and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the earth and the face of the waters, disguised as lovely mother-of-pearl fog.

31

San Francisco, California
January 1948

The house, a narrow three-story gray shingle with a white picket fence, clung by the knuckles of its foundation to the side of a very steep hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. The man was middle-aged, short and broad. He stood with his foot on the running board of a discolored black panel truck laden with ropes and ladders and color-crusted buckets. He wore an air of somewhat raffish competence, clean but paint-spotted white coveralls, and a painter's cap with
DUTCH BOY
printed across the bill.

“So,” he said,
basso profundo
, with satisfaction but no smile, “you made it. Lucky you caught me home. I was just leaving for my work.”

“Can you tell us how to get to our new address, Mr. Golden?” Michael said.

“Never find it. Long way from here. I'll drive my truck, you'll follow.”

“We don't want to cut into your workday,” Michael said.

“Cut into my workday every day for the temple. Only way the temple gets anything done. Not an officer, like the
machers
, the big shots who talk-talk-talk all the time. Just a worker.” He opened the door and climbed into the truck. He had a heavy foot on the gas pedal; the motor started with a roar. “You follow me,” he said.

They followed, grateful for the truck ahead because Michael had trouble seeing the traffic lights; they were located in places an Easterner expected they had no right to be.

They drove for a long, long time. “Where is it, in Oregon?” Leslie said, whispering as though Mr. Golden were in the back seat instead of in the car ahead.

Finally they turned off into a street of small, neat ranch houses with closely clipped green lawns. “Michael,” Leslie said, “they're all alike.” Street after street of the same house, set in the same way on identical lots of land.

“The colors are different,” Michael said.

The house Mr. Golden stopped in front of was green. It was set between a white one on the right and a blue one on the left.

Inside, there were three bedrooms, a good-sized living room, a dining area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The rooms were half-furnished.

“It's very nice,” Leslie said. “But all those other hundreds of houses just like it . . .”

“A big tract,” Mr. Golden said. “Everything mass-produced. Get more for your money that way.” He walked over and stroked a wall. “I painted these rooms myself. Good job. You won't find nicer walls even if you decide to look around.”

He studied Leslie's face shrewdly. “You don't take it, well just rent it out to somebody else. Except this would be a good deal for you. The temple bought this house from our former Rabbi. Name of Kaplan, went to Temple B'nai Israel in Chicago. We don't have to pay taxes on it. Nonprofit religious institution. So it wouldn't cost you much.” He disappeared through the doorway.

“Maybe we can live in a big old house with gingerbread. Or an apartment on one of the high hills,” Leslie said in a low voice.

“I was told that good places are hard to find in San Francisco
now,” Michael said. “And very expensive. Besides, if we take this, it will mean one less headache for the congregation.”

“But all the carbon copies.”

He knew what she meant. “In spite of that, it's a nice little house. And if we find that we don't like living in a tract we can simply look around at our leisure and then move out.”

“Okay,” she said, and came to him and kissed him just as Phil Golden came back into the room. “We're going to live here,” she said.

Golden nodded. “Want to see the temple?” he asked her.

They went for another drive which ended at a yellow-brick building. Michael had seen it only on the evening of his audition service. By daylight it looked older and wearier.

“Used to be a church. Catholic. Saint Jerry Myer. Jewish saint,” Phil said.

The interior was roomy but dark and Michael thought it smelled faintly of age and the confessional. He had forgotten what an ugly temple it was. He tried to put down the disappointment that welled within him. A temple was people, not a building. But some day, he could not help thinking fiercely, he would have a temple full of light and air and a sense of beauty and wonder.

They spent the afternoon shopping for furniture, buying several pieces for more money than they had intended to spend and making an alarming dent in the bank balance.

“Let me use the thousand dollars Aunt Sally left me,” she said.

He remembered her father's face. “No,” he said.

She sat very still. “Why not?”

“Is the reason important?”

“I think the reason might be important. Yes,” she said.

“Save it and someday use it for something our children really want,” he said. It was the right answer.

The house was spotlessly clean and this time they had come prepared with clean sheets and towels. Nevertheless when night came they lay in the darkness of the unfamiliar room without sleeping. Leslie tossed.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

“I hate to meet those women,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” he said, amused.

“I know what I'm talking about. Remember, I've been through it before. Those . . .
yentehs
. . . flock to the temple, not to pray, not even to hear the new rabbi, but to see the
shickseh
.”

“Oh, God,” he said heavily.

“They do. They look you up and down. ‘How long are you married?' they ask. And then, ‘Do you have any little ones?' and you can see their minds ready to go to work like little computers to see if their rabbi had to marry me.”

“I didn't realize it was that bad for you,” he said.

“Well, now you realize.”

They lay next to each other in silence.

But a moment later she turned to him and covered his face with quick kisses. “Ah, Michael,” she said. “I'm sorry. I don't know what gets into me.” He reached to take her in his arms but she turned suddenly and slipped out of the bed and ran for the bathroom. He listened for a few moments and then followed after her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, tapping at the door.

“Go away,” she said in a strangled voice. “Please.”

He went back to bed and put the pillow over his ears, unsuccessfully trying to blot out the tortured noise of her nausea. How many nights had this happened while he slept undisturbed, he wondered.

All we needed, he thought.

Morning sickness.

Ech.

Her beautiful belly will blow up into a balloon.

She's wrong about the women, he thought, this will take care of everything. She'll sit in the first row and during Friday night services the women will look from her swelling stomach to me and their lips will smile tenderly but their eyes will say, Beast, you did this to all of us.

Big. Very soon now.

Oy, I love her.

I wonder if we have to stop making love?

When she came back, limp with sweat and her mouth smelling of Listerine, he held her and touched her stomach carefully with his fingertips, finding it flat and hard and unchanged.

He looked at her in the growing light and the nausea was gone and unexpectedly she smiled a satisfied female smile, proud that she was in a position to have morning sickness. As he put his arms around her and his cheek on her cheek she belched into his ear and instead of excusing herself she burst into tears. The honeymoon was over, he told himself as he stroked her head and kissed her eyelids that were soft and wet like little flowers.