The Rabbi (57 page)

A small boy whose hair was still wet from the brush stood and began to speak in an incredibly sweet voice. “Now it came to pass in those days, there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed . . .”

The Nativity was acted out by the players, Jean Mendelsohn squirming when the Wise Men came bearing gifts. When the small drama was over, dissolving into “Silent Night, Holy Night,” the children sang other carols, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “The First Noel,” “The Drummer Boy,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “O Holy Night.” Rachel, he noticed, did not sing. She stood by the piano gazing at the audience while all around her the voices of her classmates were raised in song.

When it was over he said good-by to Jean and went to meet his daughter.

“They were good, weren't they?” she said.

“Yes, they were,” he said. They filed out of the overheated school building and got into the car and he drove home, but when they got there he didn't want to lose her company right away. “Do you have homework?” he asked.

“Miss Emmons didn't give us any, on account of the pageant.”

“Tell you what, let's take a walk and get real tired. Then we'll go in and have some hot chocolate and go to sleep. That sound all right?”

“Mmmm.”

They got out of the car and she put her mittened hand in his. No stars shone through the overcast. A raw wind blew, but without force. “Tell me if you grow cold,” he said.

“We're going to have a New Year's program. Not for parents, just for the children,” she said. “I can sing in that, can't I?”

“Sure you can, honey.” He pulled her to him as they walked. “You minded about not singing tonight, didn't you?”

“Yup.” She looked up at him hesitantly.

“Because you were the only one not singing, standing in front of so many people?”

“Not only that. The songs and the story. . . . They're so beautiful.”

“They are,” he agreed.

“Old Testament stories are beautiful, too,” she said staunchly, and he hugged her close again. “If Max buys hockey skates can
I buy figure skates with the Chanukah check from Grampa Abe?” she asked, sensing an advantage.

He laughed. “How do you know you're going to get a Chanukah check from Grampa Abe?”

“We always do.”

“Well, if you do this year perhaps you should take the money and open a bank account of your own with it.”

“Why?”

“It's good to have money of your own. For college. Or money that the bank can keep safely just for you, in case you want it some day—”

He stopped short and she laughed and tugged at his hand, thinking he was playing a game, but he was remembering the thousand dollars Leslie's Aunt Sally had left her before they were married. The money he had never allowed her to put into a joint account, so that some nebulous day she could use it in whatever way she saw fit.

“Daddy!” Rachel shouted in delight, tugging, and he became a tree that sank new roots every three steps all the way home.

In the morning after services he left the temple and walked over to the Woodborough Savings and Loan, where he and Leslie did their banking. The plate on the window said the teller's name was Peter Hamilton. He was a young man, tall and thin with a Saltonstall jaw and a little pinched furrow between his eyes. His black hair was sprinkled with gray and clipped close and high over his ears so that he looked like a Marine second lieutenant in a brown flannel Ivy League suit. Michael remembered Leslie asking him once if he had ever seen a fat bank teller.

Two people, a middle-aged woman and an elderly man, had gotten into line behind him, so when it was his turn in front of the cage he was a little self-conscious. He explained to Peter Hamilton that he wanted some information about a possible withdrawal made by his wife that morning, and as he talked he could feel the two people behind him lean forward.

Peter Hamilton looked at him and gave him a little smile with no teeth showing. “Is that a joint account, sir?”

“No,” he said. “No, it isn't It's
her
account.”

“Then there is no question of . . . ah . . . dower rights, sir?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The money in the account is all
hers
legally?”

“Oh, of course. Yes.”

“Is it impossible for you simply to . . . ah . . . ask her? I'm afraid we're morally obligated not to . . .”

Vey
.

“Where can I find the president?” he asked.

He was a man named Arthur J. Simpson in a large walnut-paneled office with high-pile rust-colored carpeting, a very daring shade for a banker. He listened to Michael with uncommitted courtesy, and when Michael had finished he pressed a button in the intercom and asked that Mrs. Kind's bank records be brought to his office.

“It was a one-thousand-dollar account to begin with,” Michael said. “It would be more now with the interest.”

“Oh, yes,” the banker said. “Indeed it would.” He picked out a card and held it up. “The account has fifteen hundred in it.”

“Then she didn't get any money today?”

“Ah, she certainly did, Rabbi. This morning the account held two thousand and ninety-nine dollars and forty-four cents.” Mr. Simpson smiled. “Interest mounts up. Figured every year, you know, with rates going higher all the time.”

“The rich get richer,” Michael said.

“That's exactly right, sir.”

How far away could she get on six hundred dollars? But even as he asked himself the question, he told himself the answer.

Far enough.

When the telephone rang that night and he heard her name he felt his legs start to tremble, but it turned out to be another false alarm, a call
for
her instead of from her.

“She's not at home,” he told the operator. “Who is calling, please?”

This is Long Distance, the operator repeated. When is Mrs. Leslie Kind expected?

“I don't know.”

“Is that Mr. Kind,” the caller, a strange voice, said.

“Yes. Rabbi Kind.”

“I will talk to him, Operator?”

Yes, ma'am, thank you for waiting. Go ahead, please. She clicked off.

“Hello?” Michael said.

“My name is Potter, Mrs. Marilyn Potter?”

“Yes, Ma'am,” Michael said.

“I live just three doors down from the Hastings Church? In Hartford?”

Good Lord, of course, he told himself, she's gone to her father's for a couple of days. Then he remembered again that the call was for her from there, and he knew that it couldn't be that. But what the hell was this woman saying, he asked himself numbly, suddenly aware.

“So I was the one who found him. It was a stroke.”

Ah.

“Calling hours from one to three and seven to nine tomorrow and Thursday. With the funeral at the church Friday at two. Burial in Grace Cemetery, according to his written instructions?”

He thanked her. He listened to her sounds of condolence and he thanked her. He promised to extend her condolences to his wife and he thanked her and said good-by, and then without knowing why he reached up and switched off the lamp and sat in the dark until Max's harmonica pulled him upstairs, a lifeline of sound.

 

44

By Thursday she still had not come home. He had heard nothing more from her, and he was caught in indecision. The children should be taken to their grandfather's funeral, he told himself.

But they would ask why their mother was not there.

Perhaps she
would
be there, perhaps she had read the obituary, or had somehow heard that her father had died.

He decided not to tell Max and Rachel. Thursday after
Shaharit
he got into the car and drove to Hartford alone.

Two uniformed police officers directed the parking. Inside the church the organ vibrated soft hymns and almost all the white pews were filled.

He walked slowly up and down the aisles, but if Leslie was there he didn't see her. Finally he took a seat—one of the few remaining—in the rear of the church, on the aisle two rows from the back, where he would be able to see her if she came in late.

The flower-banked casket was closed, he saw with relief.

In the two seats next to him a middle-aged woman was discussing his late father-in-law with a younger woman who bore her a remarkable resemblance. Mother and daughter, he knew at once.

“Goodness knows, he wasn't perfect. Nevertheless, for more than forty years he served here. It would have been only proper for you to have gone to the funeral home. You can allow that Frank to do for himself for
one
evening, for goodness sake.”

“I don't like to look at dead people,” the daughter said.

“Dead, you wouldn't have known he was dead. He looked distinguished.
Handsome
. His face didn't look made up or anything. You'd never have known.”

“I'd have known,” the daughter said.

The clergymen appeared. One was young, one was old, one was somewhere in between.

“Three,” the daughter whispered hoarsely as they rose for the invocation. “Mr. Wilson, the retired one. And Mr. Lovejoy, from First Church. But who's the young one?”

“They said from Pilgrim Church in New Haven. I forgot the name.”

The middle-aged minister said the invocation. His voice was mellow and practiced, a voice accustomed to floating out over bowed heads.

A hymn: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” The voices rose around him. The mother sang only a few lines in a tired croak. The daughter had a sweet, soaring soprano, just a little off key.

One thing have I asked the Lord that I will seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life
. . . .

Psalm Twenty-Seven. Ours, Michael thought, recognizing that his pride was senseless.

As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more
. . . .

I lift my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth
. . . .

Psalm One Hundred Three and Psalm One Hundred Twenty-One. He had offered them himself at how many funerals?

But some will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body
. . . .

New Testament, now. If he had to guess, he would say—First Corinthians. Next to him the middle-aged woman eased her weight from her right to her left buttock.

In my father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go and prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going
. . . .

The middle-aged minister spoke in praise of the dead man and thanked God for the promise of eternal life and for the fact that the late Reverend Rawlins had labored in his behalf and in behalf of the entire community of souls.

Then they stood again and sang another hymn, “For All the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest,” and the voices around Michael rose and fell, and he knew what Rachel had felt in school at Christmas-carol time.

The elderly minister gave the benediction, and the organ began to play and the crowd melted from the pews into the aisles and toward the exits. Michael stood there looking for her but not seeing her, until everyone had gone out and only the pallbearers remained, gathered around the box; then he went outside, blinking against the winter sunlight. He didn't know where Grace Cemetery was, but he got into his car and waited and then moved it into the line of vehicles well behind the hearse, which was a new black Packard, highly polished but speckled with a spattering of slush.

There were hillrows of soiled snow in the gutters on both sides of the street. The funeral cortege moved slowly across the city, snarling traffic all along its route.

Two cars behind Michael a driver gave up and moved out of line. It was a blue-and-white Chevrolet hardtop; as it passed him he caught a glimpse of her in the front seat, half-turned and
talking to the young man at the wheel: the small hat was unfamiliar to him, but not the bronze-blonde hair or the blue coat or the way she held her head.

“Leslie,” he shouted.

He rolled down the window and called again.

The car made a left turn at the next corner. By the time he had pulled his own car out of line and had negotiated the turn himself, it was nowhere to be seen. He left a huge moving-van behind, passing on the right with millimeters between his wheels and the curb, then shot by a bus and was held up by a red light at a broad avenue.