The Rabbi (46 page)

My Dear Rabbi Kind:

I am sorry that I must tell you of the death of Rabbi Max Gross. My beloved husband died of a stroke in the synagogue on July 17 while reciting Mincha
.

Rabbi Gross was not a talkative man, but he spoke to me of you. He told me once that if our son had lived he would have wanted him to be like you, only Orthodox
.

I am taking the liberty of forwarding to you the enclosed siddur. It was the one which he used in his daily devotions. I know he would have liked you to have it, and it will give me comfort to know that Max's siddur will continue to be used
.

I hope you and Mrs. Kind are very well and prospering in a lovely place like California, with such a climate
.

Yours very truly
,

Mrs. Leah M. Gross

She put her hand on his arm. “Michael,” she said.

He shook his head, unwilling to talk about it. He was unable to weep like Leslie; he had never been able to cry at death. But he sat alone the entire evening going through the
siddur
, page by page, remembering Max.

Finally he crawled into bed to lie unsleeping next to his wife, praying for Max Gross and for everybody who remained alive.

After a long time, Leslie touched his shoulder apologetically. “Darling,” she said.

It was 2:25
A.M
. according to the alarm clock.

“Go to sleep,” he said tenderly. “We can't help him.”

“Darling,” she said again, this time half-groan.

He sat up. “Oh my God,” he said, a different sort of prayer.

“Take it easy,” she said. “There's no need to get excited.”

“You're having pains?”

“I think it's time to go.”

“Are they bad?” he asked, by this time pulling on his pants.

“They're not even pains. Just . . . contractions.”

“How often?”

“Every forty minutes in the beginning. Now, every twenty minutes.”

He called Dr. Lubowitz and then carried her bag outside and came back and helped her into the car. The fog was very thick and he realized that he was very nervous; he couldn't take deep breaths and he drove extra-slowly, hunched up over the wheel with his head close to the glass of the windshield.

“What are they like?” he asked. “The contractions.”

“I don't know,” she said. “Like an elevator going up very slowly. They hang on up there at the top for just a little while and then they start sliding down.”

“Like an orgasm?”

“No,” she said. “Jesus.”

“Don't say that,” he said involuntarily.

“Oh, Moses?” she said. “Is that better?” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “For a bright guy you can be the biggest damn fool.”

He said nothing, driving through the foggy streets, hoping he wasn't lost.

She reached out and touched his cheek lightly.

“My darling. I'm sorry. Ah,” she said, “here's another one.” She took his right hand from the wheel and placed it on her
stomach. As she held it there the soft flesh grew hard and then rigid; then, gradually, soft again under his fingertips. “I can feel it inside like that, too,” she whispered. “Making a hard ball.”

He found suddenly that he was trembling. A taxicab was parked on a corner curb under the light of a street lamp, and he pulled in behind it.

“I'm lost, dammit,” he said. “Can you move from the car into the taxi?”

“Of course.”

The cab driver was a bald man in chinos and a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt. He had a red Irish face that was knotted in its need for sleep.

“Lane Hospital,” Michael said.

The man nodded, yawning gustily as he started the motor.

“It's on Webster between Clay and Sacramento,” Michael said.

“I know where it is, buddy.”

He was watching Leslie's face and he saw her eyes widen. “You can't tell me that was just a contraction,” he said.

“No. Now they're pains.”

The driver turned his head and took a good look at her for the first time, suddenly fully awake. “Holy mackeral,” he said. “Why didn't you say so?” He stepped down on the gas pedal, driving very carefully, but faster.

In a few minutes Leslie groaned. She was the kind of girl who ordinarily refused to recognize pain; the sound that came from her lips was animal-like and strange, and it frightened him.

“Are you timing the pains?” he asked. She made no sign that she had heard his voice. Her eyes were slightly glazed.

“Ah. Jesus Christ,” she said softly. He kissed her cheek.

She groaned again and he thought of barns and hay and the sound of suffering cows. He looked at his watch and in a little while another bovine groan sounded from his wife's lips and he looked at his watch again.

“Oh, God, that can't be right,” he said. “
Four minutes?
”

“Keep your legs together, lady,” the cab driver called, as though she were half a block away.

“What if she has it in the car?” Michael asked. He looked down at the floor and repressed a shudder. A fat, wet cigar lay mashed in a corner of the rubber floormat like an evil dropping.

“I hope not,” said the driver, shocked. “Her waters break in here, they tie up the cab for thirty-six hours while it's being sterilized. Board o' Health.” He slid the car around the corner. “Just a little while more, lady,” he called.

Leslie had her feet against the front seat now. With each pain she slid lower and pushed, her shoulders against the back seat and her feet against the front seat, arching her pelvis toward the roof as she groaned. Each time she pushed she crowded the driver into the wheel as the seat jolted forward.

“Leslie,” Michael said. “The man won't be able to drive.”

“It's all right,” the driver said. “We're here.” He killed the motor and left them in the still-quivering car as he ran into the red brick building. In a moment he came out with a nurse and an attendant and they put Leslie in a wheel chair and took her bag and wheeled her away, leaving him standing with the cab driver on the sidewalk. He ran after her and kissed her cheek.

“Most women, they're built like ripe fruit,” the driver said when he returned to the cab. “The doctor will give her a little squeeze and the baby will squirt right out, like a seed.”

The meter said two dollars and ninety cents. The man had hurried, Michael thought, and he hadn't made any lousy jokes about expectant fathers. He gave him six dollars.

“Got sympathy pains?” the driver asked, stuffing the bills into his wallet.

“No,” Michael said.

“Never lost a father yet,” he said, grinning as he ran around to enter his cab.

Inside the hospital, the lobby was deserted. A middle-aged Mexican man took him up to the maternity floor in the elevator.

“That your wife they have just brought in?” he asked.

“Yes,” Michael said.

“Won't be long. She is almost there,” he said.

In the maternity ward a crewcut resident pushed through the swinging doors. “Mr. Kind?” Michael nodded. “She seems to be doing fine. We have her in the labor room.” He rubbed a palm across his fuzzy head. “You can go home and get some sleep, if you like. We'll call you as soon as anything develops.”

“I'd just as soon wait here,” Michael said.

The resident frowned. “It could be a long time, but you're welcome, of course.” He showed him the way to the waiting room.

The room was small, with highly waxed brown linoleum floors that reminded him of the home in which his grandfather had died. There were two magazines on the rattan sofa, a three-year-old copy of
Time
and a year-old copy of
Yachting
. The only light came from a lamp with an inadequate bulb.

Michael walked to the elevator and pushed the button. The Mexican operator was still smiling.

“Is there someplace where I can buy you a drink?” Michael asked.

“No, sir. I can't drink on the job no-how. But you want cigarettes and magazines and such, there's an all-night drugstore two blocks north.”

On the ground floor he stopped Michael as he was about to leave the elevator. “Tell him I sent you, he'll give me a free smoke next time I go in.”

Michael grinned. “What's your name?”

“Johnny.”

He walked slowly through the misty darkness, praying, to the drugstore, and bought three packs of Philip Morris, an Oh Henry and a Clark Bar, a newspaper,
Life, The Reporter
, and a paperback whodunit.

“Johnny sent me,” he told the clerk as he waited for change. “From the hospital.” The man nodded.

“What's his cigarette?” Michael asked.

“Johnny? I don't think he smokes cigarettes. Cigarillos.”

He bought three packs of cigarillos for Johnny. The fog was still thick but the first light was breaking as he walked back. Oh God, he said silently, let her be all right. The baby too but if only one of them then let her be all right, Please God Amen.

Johnny was delighted with the cigarillos. “your doctor's here. Her water went and broke,” he said. He looked dubiously at the load Michael carried. “You just ain't gonna be here that long,” he said.

“The young doctor said it would be a long time,” Michael said.

“Young doctor,” Johnny said. “He has been here eight months. I have been here twenty-two years.” The buzzer sounded and he slid the elevator door shut.

He opened the newspaper and tried to read Herb Caen's column. In a couple of minutes the elevator was back. Johnny came into the waiting room and took a seat near the door where
he could hear the buzzer. He lit up one of the cigarillos. “What do you do?” he asked. “For a living?”

“I'm a rabbi.”

“Is that a fact?” He puffed for a few moments. “Maybe you can tell me something. Is it true that when a Jew boy is a certain age they hold a party and he becomes a man?”

“The
bar mitzvah
? Yes, at thirteen.”

“Well, is it true that all the other Jews come to the party and they bring money and they give it to the boy to open up a business?”

Before he was through laughing a nurse stood in the doorway. “Mister Kind?” she said.

“He's a rabbi,” Johnny said.

“Well, Rabbi Kind, then,” she said tiredly, “congratulations, your wife just had a little boy.”

When he bent to kiss her the smell of ether almost took his breath away. Her face was flushed and her eyes were closed and she looked dead. But she opened her eyes and smiled at him and when he took her hand she held it tightly.

“Did you see him?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Oh, he's lovely,” she whispered. “He's got a penis. I asked the doctor to check.”

“How do you feel?” he asked, but she was asleep. In a few minutes Doctor Lubowitz came in, still wearing delivery-room greens. “How is she?” Michael asked him.

“Fine. They're both fine. Baby's eight pounds. Damn these women,” he said. “They won't learn it's easier to grow 'em big once the baby is outside. Make the doctor work like a horse.” He shook Michael's hand and walked away.

“Do you want to see him?” the nurse asked. He waited outside the nursery while she picked out the proper bassinet and then as she held the baby close to the glass he saw with a shock that it was a very ugly infant, with eyes that were red swollen slits and a broad, flat nose. How will I ever love him, he thought, and the baby yawned, stretching his lips and displaying the pink ridges of tiny gums, and then started to cry, and he loved him.

When he let himself out of the hospital the sun was up. He
stood on the curb and in a little while he hailed a taxi. The driver was a plump, gray-haired woman and the cab was very clean. There was a nosegay of spicy-smelling flowers in a vase attached to the back of the front seat. Zinnias, he thought.

“Where to, Mister?” the woman said.

He looked at her stupidly and then he threw back his head and laughed, stopping when she looked frightened.

“I don't know where I left my car,” he explained.

 

34

Leslie was awake when he returned to the hospital that afternoon. She wore fresh makeup and a lace-trimmed nightgown and had a blue ribbon in her brushed hair.

“What will we name him?” he asked as he kissed her.

“How about Max?”

“That's the homeliest, most unassimilated,
shtetl
-type name I can think of,” he objected, tremendously pleased.

“I like it myself.”

He kissed her again.

A nurse brought the baby into the room. Leslie held him gingerly. “He's so beautiful,” she whispered, while Michael looked at her with pity.

But over the next few days the baby's appearance altered. The birth-swelling subsided from his eyelids, revealing eyes that were large and blue. The nose grew less flattened and more a nose. The red over-all color was replaced by a delicate pink-white.