The Rabbi (45 page)

The obstetrician was named Lubowitz. He was a fat grandfather and an old hand, and he knew when to be tender and when to be tough. He put Leslie on a regimen of walking and exercise that gave her a ravenous appetite and then placed her on a diet that kept her hungry all the time.

Michael spoke to her as little as possible about the temple as her pregnancy advanced, preferring not to disturb her. He was becoming increasingly disturbed himself.

His congregation puzzled him.

Phil Golden's family and a handful of others could be relied upon to attend services regularly. But his contact with the body of people who made up his temple remained almost nonexistent.

He went to the hospitals daily in search of sick Jews he might comfort and get to know. He found some, but rarely from his own congregation.

Calling at the homes of temple members, he found them polite and friendly but strangely remote. In a patio apartment on Russian Hill, for example, a couple named Sternbane regarded him uneasily after he had introduced himself. Oscar Sternbane was an importer of Oriental curios and owned a small interest in a coffee house on Geary Street. His wife, Celia, gave voice lessons. She had black hair and pink skin and was arrogantly aware of her looks, with a coloratura's chest tenderly displayed in a bulky scoop-neck sweater and flanks that deserved to be hugged by blue Pucci slacks, and nostrils that cost six hundred dollars apiece.

“I'm trying to reorganize the Brotherhood,” Michael said to
Oscar Sternbane. “I thought we might begin by having Sunday breakfasts at the temple.”

“Rabbi, let me be frank,” Sternbane said. “We're happy to belong to the temple. Our little boy can learn Hebrew every Saturday morning, and all about the Bible. That's nice, it's cultural. But bagels and lox! We were happy to leave bagels and lox behind when we came here from Teaneck, New Jersey.”

“Forget the
food
,” Michael said. “We have
people
in the temple. Do you know the Barrons?”

Oscar shrugged. Celia shook her head.

“I think you'd like them. And there are others. The Pollocks. The Abelsons.”

“Freddy and Jan Abelson?”

“Hey,” he said, delighted. “You know the Abelsons?”

“Yes,” Celia said.

“We've been there once and they've been here once,” Freddy said. “They're very nice, but . . . to tell you the truth, Rabbi,
square
. They don't”—he held up his hand and turned it slowly, like a man screwing in an invisible light bulb—“
swing
enough for us. You know? Look,” he said kindly, “we've all got our own groups of friends, our own interests, and they just don't revolve around the temple. But what time will the breakfasts begin? I'll try to make the scene.”

He didn't. In the end, eight men showed up on the first Sunday morning, four of them named Golden. Only Phil and his sons came back the second week.

“Perhaps a dance,” Leslie suggested when he finally discussed his problems with her after he had consumed three martinis one evening before dinner.

They spent five weeks planning it; they prepared a flyer, sent two mailings, devoted the front page of the temple bulletin to the affair, hired a combo, ordered a catered buffet, and on the night of the dance watched with frozen smiles as eleven couples shuffled over the floor of the large temple hall.

Michael continued to visit the hospitals. He spent a great deal of time on his sermons, as if every seat in the temple were being fought over.

But this left a great deal of unfilled time. There was a public library two blocks away. He took out a card and began to draw books. At first he went back to the philosophers, but soon the
jackets of the novels tempted him. He developed a nodding-smiling acquaintanceship with the ladies behind the circulation desk.

He returned to the Talmud and the Torah, studying a different portion each morning and reviewing it with Leslie each evening. In the stillness of the afternoons, when the temple building was quiet with the dead weight of undisturbed air, he began to experiment with the mystic theosophy of the Cabala, like a small boy dipping his toe into dangerously deep water.

St. Margaret's, the Catholic parish in which the Kinds lived, was building a new church. One morning, driving past the site, Michael double-parked for a few minutes to watch a steam shovel rip giant chunks of earth and rock from the foundation hole.

The next day he came back. And the next. He began making a habit of dropping by to watch the steel-helmeted workers when he had a few spare moments. It was relaxing to lean against the makeshift fence of random lumber and stare at the noisy mechanical monoliths and the leather-skinned construction crew. Inevitably he met the pastor of St. Margaret's, the Reverend Dominic Angelo Campanelli, a sleepy-eyed old priest with a huge strawberry mark like a sign of divinity on the right side of his face.

“Temple Isaiah,” he said when Michael introduced himself. “That would be St. Jeremiah's. I grew up in that parish.”

“Did you really?” Michael said, adding ten years to his original estimate of the age of the temple building.

“Served as choirboy for Father Gerald X. Minehan, who subsequently was associate bishop in San Diego,” Father Campanelli said. He shook his head. “St. Jeremiah's. I carved my initials in the belfry of that church.” He looked into the distance. “Right under an old gas lamp that used to hang from one of the walls.” He colored and seemed to shake himself mentally. “Yes,” he said. “Nice to meet you,” and walked away, a black-cassocked figure whose fingers moved restlessly over the hundred and fifty beads on the cord around his waist.

That afternoon Michael overturned an old shoebox on his desk and one by one went through the tagged keys it had contained, until he came upon one whose tag was marked
belfry
.

The narrow door opened with a satisfying screeching. Inside
there was gloom, and a short flight of wooden stairs, one of which cracked alarmingly as he set his weight upon it. How embarrassing it would be, he thought, to plunge through and break a leg—or worse. How would you explain it to the congregation?

The wooden stairs led to a landing. A diffuse gray light which fell from high, grime-colored windows revealed small round trays of rat bait set on the floor against all four walls.

A circular iron stairway spiraled to a trapdoor in the ceiling which opened noisily but with no difficulty. Birds exploded into the air as he climbed through. He held his breath against the stench. The walls were whitewashed with guano. Three droppings-encrusted stick nests contained incredibly ugly small birds. The baby pigeons were naked and fist-sized, with bulbous beaks.

The bell still hung. It was a large bell. He flicked it with his middle finger, getting only a bruised nail and a dull click. When he leaned over the side, careful to keep his clothing well off the befouled railing, San Francisco fell away below, looking older and wiser than it had ever looked to him before. Two of the adult pigeons came back, fluttering anxiously just above the belfry and making alarmed-mother noises as they cooed.

“Okay,” he told them, picking a path through the guck. He pulled the trapdoor shut above him as he descended, gratefully snorting in an attempt to clear the stench from his nostrils.

In the belfry landing he paused for a closer look. The old gas lamp was still on the wall. He turned the tiny spigot and was alarmed at the resulting hiss and gas smell. “Something will have to be done about
this,
” he murmured, shutting it off.

The light was too dim for him to see whether the priest's initials were in fact there, but he took out some matches and after waving frantically to disperse any gas fumes, he struck one.

There was a heart, he saw as he held the flickering match. It was a large heart. Carved in its center were indeed the initials
D A C
.

“Dominic Angelo Campanelli,” he said aloud, pleased.

Beneath the
D A C
there had been another set of initials. But they had been scrubbed out with a heavy black pencil which had remained heavy and black through the years. Instead of them, written in the heart with Dominic Campanelli's initials, was the scrawled word:

JESUS
.

The match burned his fingers and he dropped it with a little grunt. He placed his fingertips in his mouth until the pain went away and then he ran them over the obliterated initials. The carved indentations still remained. The first letter was unmistakably M. There was another letter, either a
C
or an
O
, he couldn't tell which.

What had her name been?

Maria? Myra? Marguerite?

He stood there wondering whether young Dominic Campanelli had cried as he scrubbed out her initials.

And then he descended from the church tower and left his temple and went home to stare at his wife's comic-strip balloon belly.

In the slow peace of early morning Michael and the priest began to talk to one another as they leaned on the board fence letting the smoke from their pipes get lost in the fog and watching the giant steam shovel taking huge bites out of the hill. They steered their conversations away from religion. Sports was a good safe topic; they depended heavily on the status of the Seals and the team's running series with Los Angeles. While they talked of averages and clutch hitters, of the animal grace of Williams and the gallantry of DiMaggio, they watched the hole in the ground take shape and then the forms being built.

“Interesting,” said Michael, seeing the outline of the forms emerge: an oblong leading to a much larger circle.

Father Campanelli would give no hints. “A departure from the stereotype,” he said, and his head turned involuntarily to look up the street to where the old St. Margaret's, aged and too small but built of red brick along simple and beautiful lines, stood in ivy-covered dignity. His hand went up and his long thin fingers began to stroke the strawberry mark that stained his aquiline face. Michael had noticed the gesture before whenever they had discussed items that had cast ominous shadows: the Seals on a losing streak; Williams sullying his magnificence with a stiff finger for the fans; a slowing DiMaggio letting his light go dim with a hopeless love for Marilyn Monroe.

One Sunday, driving with Leslie through the golden afternoon deep into the Monterey peninsula, he saw a temple that had been built on a rocky cliff overlooking the Pacific.

The setting was magnificent. The building was all wrong. Redwood and glass, it looked like the offspring of a deck house that had been mated with an ice castle.

“Isn't that terrible?” he asked Leslie.

“Mmmm.”

“I wonder what that church in town is going to be like.”

She shrugged drowsily.

A little later she stretched and looked at him. “If you were asking an architect to design you a temple, what would you ask for?”

This time he shrugged. But he thought about the question for a long time.

Next morning, after he had studied the Talmud, he sat in his study and drank coffee and began to plan the ideal temple.

It was more fun than reading, he discovered, but full of frustrations, like a game of self-chess. He worked with pencil and paper, drawing rough plans which he promptly threw away, making out lists to ponder and rewrite. He went to the library and withdrew books on architecture. He found himself constantly confronted by stalemates which caused him to revise his image of what the temple should be, so many revisions that he emptied an entire filing-case drawer in his study for the storage of notes, volumes, and the crude drawings he made over and over again, filling the empty hours easily now, but with a kind of personal parlor game, a rabbinical version of solitaire.

There were occasional interruptions. A drunken merchant sailor, unshaven and with a cut under one eye, wandered through the doors one morning.

“Like say confession, Father,” he said, slumping heavily into a chair, eyes closed.

“I'm sorry.”

The sailor opened one eye.

“I'm not a priest.”

“Where is he?”

“This isn't a church.”

“Snow me, pal. Said confession here lots durin' the war. Distinc'ly remember.”

“It used to be a church.” He started to explain the facts concerning the building's conversion, but the sailor cut him off.

“Well Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He got up unsteadily
and walked away. “If this isn't church, what the hell you doin' here?”

Michael sat and stared at the door through which the man had lurched into the bright sunlight outside.

“I won't snow you, pal,” he whispered finally. “I'm not sure I know.”

 

33

He came home one evening to find Leslie's eyes red. “What's the matter?” he asked, his thoughts leaping to Ruthie's family, his parents, her father.

But she held out a small package. “I opened it for you.”

He saw that it had been forwarded by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. It contained a Hebrew prayer book bound in black buckram that was limp with age. There was a note in spidery Spencerian script.