The Rabbi (48 page)

At one o'clock in the morning, when everyone had gone, they sat alone at last in the kitchen and drank coffee.

“Why don't you go to bed, Ruthie?” Abe pleaded. “You had that long plane trip. You must be exhausted.”

“What are you going to do, Poppa?” she asked him.

“Do?” he said. His fingers crumbled a toll-house cookie that had been baked by the wife of one of his cutters. “No problem. My daughter and her husband and their kids are going to move here from Israel and we'll be very happy. I'm selling Kind Foundations. There'll be enough money for Saul to go into any business he wants. Equal partners. Or if he wants to teach, let him go back to college for more degrees. We got kids here need teachers.”

“Poppa,” she said. She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Why not?” he asked.

“To live in Israel you don't have to be a pioneer. You'd be like Rockefeller. If you come back with me there's a place near us with a little whitewashed courtyard shaded by olive trees,” she said. “You can have a garden. You can exercise with your weights in the sun. Your grandchildren will come every day and teach you Hebrew.”

Abe laughed without smiling. “Go let your kid marry a foreigner.” He looked at her. “I would write lots of letters. Too many letters. It would take me ten days to know whether the Yankees beat the Red Sox or the Red Sox beat the Yankees. And sometimes they play two games in one day.

“You can't even buy a
Women's Wear Daily
there. I know, I tried the last time Momma and I—” He got to his feet and walked quickly into the bathroom. They heard the toilet flush as soon as he closed the door behind him.

There was a silence. “How's the plumbing over there now?” Michael asked.

Ruthie didn't smile, and he saw that she didn't remember, and then she did. “I don't mind it at all now,” she said. “I don't
know if that means it's gotten better or I've grown up.” She looked in the direction her father had gone and she shook her head. “What do you people know?” she said softly. “What do you people
really
know? If you really knew, you'd be there instead of here.”

“Pop said it,” Michael said. “We're Americans.”

“Well, my children are Jews the way you're Americans,” she said. “They knew what to do when the planes came over. They ran like hell for shelter and sang Hebrew songs.”

“Thank God none of you was hurt,” Michael said.

“Did I say that?” she said. “No, I know I didn't. I said we were all
well
, and we are, now. Saul lost an arm. His right arm.”

Leslie drew a quick involuntary breath and Michael felt tired and ill. “Where?” he said.

“At the elbow.”

He had meant where had it happened, and when he didn't say anything she understood this. “A place called Petah Tikvah. He was with the Irgun Zvai Leumi.”

Leslie cleared her throat. “The terrorists? I mean, weren't they a kind of underground?”

“They were in the beginning, with the British. Later, during the war, they became part of the regular army. That's when Saul was with them. For a very little while.”

“Is he teaching again?” Leslie asked.

“Oh, yes. For the longest time. The arm makes it easy for him to control the children. He's a big hero in their eyes.” She snubbed out her cigarette and smiled at them with something less than tenderness.

The morning after the period of
shiva
was over Abe and Michael drove Ruthie to Idlewild.

“You'll come at least to visit?” she said to Abe as she kissed him.

“We'll see. Remember the date. Don't forget to say
yahrzeit.
” She clung to him. “I'll come,” he said.

“It's a pity,” she said when she hugged Michael just before boarding. “I don't know you or your family and you don't know me or my family. I have a feeling we'd all like one another.” She kissed him on the mouth.

When she had left them they watched until the El Al plane dwindled into nothing in the sky and then they walked back to the car.

“What now?” Michael asked when they were on the road. “How about California? You're welcome in our house. You know that.”

Abe smiled. “Remember your Zaydeh? No. But . . . thank you.”

Michael kept his eye on the traffic. “Then . . . what? Florida?”

His father sighed. “Not without her. I wouldn't be able to do it. I'm going to Atlantic City.”

Michael grunted. “What's there?”

“I know people who have retired there. I know other people who haven't retired yet, but who go there for the summer. Garment manufacturers. My kind of people.

“Come down there with me tomorrow,” he said. “Help me pick out a place to live.”

“All right,” Michael told him.

“I like the waves. And all that goddam sand.”

They found him a bedroom, kitchenette, sitting room and bath in a small but good residential hotel in Ventnor two blocks from the beach. It was furnished.

“It's expensive, but what the hell,” Abe said. He smiled. “Your mother had grown sort of tight the last four-five years, you know that?”

“No.”

“You want the stuff in the apartment?” Abe asked.

“Listen—” Michael said.

“I don't want it. Nothing. If you want it, take it. An agent will sell the apartment.”

“Okay,” Michael said after a while. “Maybe Zaydeh's brass bed.” He felt angry, but he didn't know why.

“The rest, too. What you can't use, give away.”

After lunch they walked a long way, stopping for a while at a fake auction where
shlahk
items were sold at three times their worth, and then they sat on deckchairs under a dazzling noonday sun and watched the Boardwalk pour its stream of people past them.

Fifty feet away two hawkers separated by a beer stand fought a battle of sex symbolism. A shirtsleeved man in a straw hat was spieling hot dogs,
THE BIGGEST FRANKFURTER IN THE WORLD GET IT HERE GET IT HOT GET IT EIGHTEEN DELECTABLE INCHES LONG
, the man screamed.

ALL COLORS BALLOONS BIG AND ROUND AND LOVELY AND BOUNCY AND JOUNCY AND BEAUTIFUL
, he was answered by a short Italian-looking man who wore faded levis and a torn blue jersey.

A sweating Negro pushed a rolling chair containing a very fat lady holding a naked baby.

A covey of teen-age quail in bathing suits walked by, rolling their skinny hips in pathetic imitation of the voluptuous rotating behinds of their Hollywood favorites.

Carried on a salt breeze from a mile down the Boardwalk came the husky whisper of a distant crowd and faint far-off cries of terror.

“The broad jumped into the
yahm
on her horse,” Abe said with satisfaction. He breathed deep. “A
michayeh
. A real pleasure,” he said.

“Stay here,” Michael said. “But when you get bored, remember we've got beaches in California, too.”

“I'll come to visit,” Abe said. He lit a cigar. “Don't forget, any time I feel like it here, I can jump in the car and visit her grave. That I can't do in California.”

They were silent for a while.

“When are you going back?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, I guess,” Michael said. “I've got a congregation. I can't stay away forever.” He paused. “If you're all right.”

“I'm all right.”

“Pop, don't keep going to her grave.”

His father didn't answer him.

“It won't do anybody any good. I know what I'm talking about.”

Abe looked at him and smiled. “At what age does the father have to begin obeying the son?”

“At no age,” Michael said. “But I see death, sometimes half a dozen times a week. I know it doesn't pay for the living to sacrifice themselves. You can't turn back the clock.”

“Doesn't it depress you, your job?”

Michael watched a sweating Shriner, wearing a fez that
looked too small for his fat bald head, put his arm around a tiny, cool-looking redhead who appeared to be sixteen years old. The girl looked up at the fat man as they walked. Maybe her father, he thought hopefully. “Sometimes,” he said.

“People come to you with death. Sickness. A boy gets in trouble with the law. A girl gets pregnant behind the barn.”

Michael smiled. “Not any more, Pop. Today that happens, but not behind the barn. In cars.”

His father waved off the distinction. “So how do you help these people?”

“I do my best. Sometimes I manage to help. Lots of times I don't. Sometimes nobody can help, only time and God.”

Abe nodded. “I'm glad you know that.”

“But I always listen. That's something. I can be an ear.”

“An ear.” Abe looked out to sea where a trawler sat apparently motionless, a black fleck on the blue horizon. “Suppose a man came to you and said he was living up to his knees in ashes, what would you tell him?”

“I'd have to know more,” Michael said.

“Suppose a man had lived like an animal most of his life,” he said slowly. “Fight like a dog for a dollar. Screw like a cat at the whiff of a woman. Run like a race horse, round and round and round without even a jockey on his back.

“And suppose,” he said in a low voice, “he woke up one morning and found that he was an old man, without anybody who really loved him?”

“Pop!”

“I mean
really
loved him, so that he was the most important thing in the other person's life.”

Michael could think of nothing to say.

“You saw me once at a pretty ugly moment, for you,” his father said.

“Don't start that again.”

“No. No.” he said, speaking quickly, “but I just want to tell you that it wasn't the first time I had other women while I was married to your mother. Nor the last. Nor the last.”

Michael gripped the edges of his chair. “Now
why
do you feel you have to inflict this on me?” he said.

“I want to make you understand,” Abe said. “Somewhere
along the line all that stopped.” He shrugged. “Maybe my glands, maybe change of life. I can think of half a dozen funny possibilities. But I stopped, and I fell in love with your mother.

“You never had a chance to know her,
really
know her. You didn't and Ruthie didn't. But now it's worse for me. Can you see that, Rabbi? Can you understand that,
m'lumad
, my wise man? I didn't have her for a long time, and then I had her for only a little while, and now she's gone.”

“Pop!” he said.

“Hold my hand,” his father said. He hesitated, and Abe reached over and took his son's hand in his own. “What's the matter,” he said roughly. “You're afraid they'll think we're queer?”

“I love you, Pop,” Michael said.

Abe squeezed his hand. “Shah,” he said.

Gulls wheeled. The crowd poured past. There were lots of fezzes, an entire Shrine convention. Little by little the small black trawler crept across the rim of the sea.

THERE ARE MANY PRETENDERS TO THE TITLE BUT THIS IS THE ONE THE ONLY THE BIGGEST FRANKFURTER IN THE WORLD
.

The girl on the horse must have jumped into the sea again. People screamed faintly. In front of them their shadows grew longer and less distinct.

When it was time to leave, Abe drew him toward the beer stand and held up two fingers. There was a young girl behind the counter, brown-haired and bored, an ordinary
zaftig
girl of about eighteen, slightly pretty but with crooked teeth and an imperfect complexion.

Abe watched her as she took the mugs off the tray and reached for the spigot. “My name is Abe.”

“Yeah?”

“What's your name?”

“Sheila.” In her cheek, a dimple.

He sampled it between his thumb and forefinger, then he went to the balloon man and bought a balloon, a passionate red one, and he came back and tied the string around her wrist so it floated above them like a big bloodshot wink. “This guy is my son. Stay away from him. He's a married man.”

Coolly she took his money and made change. But she laughed as she walked away from the cash register, bouncier
than she had walked before, the balloon bobbing above and just a little to the rear.

Abe slid him a schooner of beer.

“For the road,” he said.

 

36

Life, he began to understand, was a series of compromises. The Temple Isaiah rabbinate had not worked out the way he had hoped, with hordes of people to sit at his feet and listen to his brilliant twentieth-century interpretations of Talmudic wisdoms. His wife was now a mother and he surreptitiously searched her eyes for the girl he had married, the one who had shuddered when he looked at her in a certain knowing way. Now sometimes at night in the middle of their lovemaking a thin wail from the other room caused her to push him away and run to the baby, and he lay there in the dark hating the infant he loved.