Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (3 page)

“Ridiculous,” he said and drained his orange juice.

She had brought a cup of coffee for herself and sipped at it while he ate. “What harm does it do?” she asked reasonably. “A boy living alone? Better he should be interested in religion than in some of the things young people are involved in these days.”

“Did you talk to him after I went to bed? Did he say anything about his plans?” Marcus asked hesitantly.

“Just that he had to get back to Philadelphia by Monday, he just had the week off.”

“I mean his plans in general. Did you talk to him about the store? Did you tell him about Safferstein?”

“I told him we had a buyer for the store and that you said you wouldn’t sell unless you knew definitely that your son would not take it over.”

“And what did he say?” he asked eagerly.

“He said you should go ahead and sell. You could retire and we could travel or go to Florida or –”

“And then what would I do?” he demanded. “So I travel for a while, for six months, even a year? Then what? I’m sixty-two years old and I’m in good health. What do I do after I’ve traveled? Sit around and wait to die?”

“But if he’s just not interested…”

“He’s got to be interested.” Aptaker insisted, his voice rising. “I put almost forty years into that store, and my father fifteen years before that. It’s a family enterprise. Do you just walk away from something you’ve worked at all your life and your father before you? It’s not just a way of making a living. It’s something we’ve built over the years.”

“Yes, and you work sixty or seventy hours a week there. Why should a young boy like Arnold be interested when he has a good job where he works forty hours a week and doesn’t have the headache and the responsibility?”

“But working for wages! If he has his own business –”

“So in time maybe he’ll get his own store. Why should he tie himself up with this one that’s been going downhill –”

“It’s not going downhill,” he shouted and banged on the table with his fist for additional emphasis. “We netted more this year than last year.”

“A few hundred more.”

“All right, so a few hundred more. But a young man could build it up –”

“It’s the location, Marcus.” She shook her head sadly. “You can’t build up a location. You can fancy up the store, put in a new front, some new fixtures, but if the location is going down, it won’t help.”

“Locations change. If that high-rise for senior citizens goes through, it will be an A-one location for a drugstore again. If the location is so bad, why does a smart real estate man like Safferstein want to buy it?”

“Like he said, for his brother-in-law. I can imagine what the situation is. His wife has a brother whom he has to help support. So he figures he’ll set him up in his own store and get him off his back. But for a young man like Arnold –”

“I tell you he could do well here,” Aptaker insisted. “I’d make it easy for him to take over. I’d take back notes and he wouldn’t have to worry about paying them on time, and I’d come in a few hours a day to help him, not for regular pay but just for expense money.”

“So talk to him. Tell him what you have in mind.”

Aptaker’s shoulders drooped in despair. “I can’t talk to him. It’s like we don’t talk the same language.”

“What do you expect? If you talked to him like you talk to anybody else, like you talk to a customer or to McLane, quietly, reasonably –”

“I can’t talk to him like to McLane,” he exploded. “He’s not just another pharmacist applying for a job. I can’t sit down and discuss wages and working hours with him, he’s my son, he should feel that the store is his, that I’m just holding it for him until he can get around to taking it over like I took over from my father.”

“But how can he understand how you feel unless you tell him?”

“I shouldn’t have to tell him, he should feel it himself. If you have to tell him, then right away, it’s no good.”

Rose Aptaker sighed. “Go to the store already, please, Arnold should be coming home soon, and the way you’re feeling now, I don’t think it’s a good idea you should be here.”

“So I have to hide from my own son?”

“You don’t have to hide, but sometimes it’s a good idea if – I don’t know, lately you’re so irritable. Go to the store, please, and I’ll talk to him again.”

Say, Miriam, do we know anyone named Rokeach?” the rabbi asked his wife when he got home. “Akiva Rokeach? Do you recall my ever mentioning the name?”

She was small, with the trim figure of a young girl, she had wide blue eyes and an open frank face that would have appeared naive were it not for the firm determined chin, the mass of blond hair piled on top of her head threatened to come tumbling down about her neck and shoulders as she shook her head in vigorous denial. “A name like that I’d be sure to remember. It sounds like an Israeli name.”

“He’s certainly not Israeli. His Hebrew is bad and his English has no trace of accent.” He told her about the incident at the temple.

“He doesn’t have to be a sabra.” Miriam pointed out. “He could have emigrated, you know, and come back for a short visit, a lot of them take Israeli names. Or they translate their names into Hebrew. Does Rokeach mean anything in Hebrew?”

“Why yes. It means druggist, an apothecary.”

“An apothecary? How about Aptaker? That means apothecary too, doesn’t it?”

“In Russian, I believe. I wonder –”

“The proprietor of Town-Line Drugs is a Mr. aptaker. Could it be his son?”

“You know, Miriam, I think you’re right. Remember a few years back –”

“Of course. Jonathan got that terrible attack in the middle of the night and you called the doctor –”

“And he called Mr. aptaker at his home, and his son opened the store and got the medicine and delivered it.” He screwed his eyes shut in an effort to recall young Aptaker’s appearance. “He had no beard, of course, and his hair was cut short. It could be.”

“I didn’t see him.” Miriam smiled ruefully. “I was with Jonathan, he wouldn’t let me out of his sight.”

“And I never saw him again either,” the rabbi said. “I went there a couple of days later to pay for the medicine, and he was gone. I seem to recall that I spoke to his father, and he was rather stiff and formal with me. I got the feeling that perhaps he resented having been put to the trouble since I didn’t normally trade there.”

“Well, if it’s Aptaker’s son, you can thank him properly now that he’s back.”

“I gather he’s not. Just visiting, he said, maybe he’ll be at the evening service and I’ll get a chance to talk to him then. I would have this morning – I sensed that he wanted to talk to me, but with his usual officiousness Kaplan came over and dragged me off.”

“You don’t like him much, do you, David?”

“Who, Kaplan? Oh, I like him well enough.” His face twisted into a sour smile. “Though I liked him better before he became president of the congregation.” He laughed shortly. “Since his election, we appear to be in competition, the president is supposed to be the executive director of the congregation while the rabbi guides its religious life. Usually we’re on opposite sides of the fence, they want to shorten the service or update it by substituting modern poetry for some of the prayers, or they want to get the temple to take sides on national politics.”

“But you’ve always been able to set them right,” she interposed.

“True. But then we were in opposition. I represented the religious side, while they represented the secular. But with Kaplan –”

“He’s trying to be both the president and the rabbi of the congregation. Is that it?”

He nodded grimly. “Just about, he holds weekly At Homes for religious discussions and lectures. Every few weeks he leads a group up-country to some camp and holds a retreat of prayer and meditation and religious discussion.”

“And you object to that? What was it my Aunt Gittel used to say – ‘Is it a flaw that the bride is pretty?’”

“You can err on the right just as much as on the left,” her husband retorted. “And you can be so meticulous in your observance of the regulations that you lose sight of the reason for them in the first place. But where the error is in the direction of excess, criticism becomes almost impossible. It’s like those airline people who instead of calling a regular strike tied up the airports by adhering rigidly to the regulations. What could you say to them? Don’t follow the regulations? Can I say to Kaplan and his group, don’t be so religious? At the last meeting he proposed that the temple buy this property in New Hampshire to establish a permanent retreat. This new idea of retreats, and of the special group, or the commune, or the chavurah – whatever they call it – withdrawing from the world and society to expand their precious souls, it’s contrary to traditional Judaism.”

“It’s attracting the young people, though,” Miriam observed. “I was reading –”

“What’s the point in trying to attract young people to traditional Judaism by changing it? So if they do get interested – hooked, is the expression I’ve heard – it’s not Judaism. It’s something else that has only a superficial resemblance to it. I’ve read about them, too, there is a group that celebrates Rosh Hashonah by baking a birthday cake with candles for the world, if you please, another, down in Florida, tried to rent a lion from some outfit that supplies them to the movies to see if they could make him lie down with a lamb. What’s the sense of attracting young people, if they turn out to be nuts? Some are in the neo-Chasidic movement. This Akiva may be one of those, judging from the way he was gyrating and rocking back and forth while davening, they’re terribly concerned about such things as having the mezzuzah affixed to the doorframe exactly right and that it be handwritten by a scribe on real parchment. Otherwise, presumably, it won’t work, and all of them are so self-righteous and so condescending to what they call ‘establishment Judaism’ as though for the last couple of thousand years we’ve just been going through the motions and haven’t really understood what it’s all about. It’s the same attitude that led to the recent ‘improvement’ in our colleges.”

“Whew! I had no idea you felt so strongly.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I got carried away. It was just that it occurred to me that when this Akiva, if it is he, brought that medicine in the middle of the night, he was doing a real mitzvah. It certainly was more of a religious act than his coming this morning to pray.”

Marcus Aptaker arrived at his store at half past seven, a good hour before he normally opened for business, and within minutes his resentment and annoyance with his son fell away from him, he liked to come in early so he could do his paperwork leisurely, pecking out necessary correspondence on one of the two ancient typewriters in the prescription room, checking statements against bills, making out checks for supplies, then he would wander about the store, straightening a package on the shelves or turning a bottle so that the label showed; sometimes changing stock from one shelf to another; or even just touching things as a lover might touch his mistress to be sure she was there, to make contact.

For he loved the store. It gave spice and variety to his life. Every customer who came in to buy was a problem to be solved. Should he suggest an alternative to the item he did not stock, or would the customer resent it as officious? Should he show a higher priced item? Should he offer an opinion at all? Then there were major decisions: should he transfer the toothpaste next to the toothbrush rack so that the one might suggest the other, or should he keep them far apart so that the customer, in naturally going from the toothbrushes to the toothpaste, would have to pass still other items which he might be tempted to buy? These were all problems that presented themselves one after another all through the day, and he solved them, each in turn as they came up. It was challenge and accomplishment.

And also, he loved the things he sold, although he did not smoke, he delighted in the smell of the tobacco when he slid open the door of the cigar showcase, or the feel of a briar pipe as he passed it across the counter to a customer; the delicate shape of the flagons of perfume and the new line of men’s toiletries packaged in masculine solidity; the cameras, the pocket radios, the clocks and watches; the colorful boxes of candies, and the mechanical pencils and ballpoint pens in their special rack; the sunglasses, and the new display of rubber gloves that had come in only last week, the rack cleverly designed so that as one flat box was drawn out, another automatically took its place; the expensive line of French soaps; the tiny scissors and nail clippers, all in gleaming chrome; and best of all, the special patent medicines that a pharmaceutical house had made up for him under his own label.

Also he liked the people who came into the store, but ha liked the idea of the counter between them, because while amiable and friendly as became a good retailer, his professional status required that he not be too friendly, that was the beauty of it, that he was not just another tradesman like the grocer or the hardware man, he was a businessman and a professional man, a member of the corps of doctors and scientists and researchers who were engaged in the healing and care of the sick and like them with a diploma and a degree and a license to practice with all the duties and responsibilities thereunto pertaining.

At eight-forty, the first customer came in, and Marcus Aptaker came forward to greet him, his face automatically assuming the retailer’s smile of polite inquiry.

Did you eat someplace?” demanded Mrs. aptaker, her son, on his return from the temple, had said he didn’t want breakfast, that he wasn’t hungry.

“No, but –”

“But me no buts. How do you think it makes me feel when my own son won’t accept food from me? So you’ve become pious and my dishes aren’t kosher? All right. I’ll give you some cereal and milk in – in – the mixing bowl. It’s glass, so you can eat anything in it. Isn’t that right?”

He did not have the heart to point out that the spoon was not glass and hence, from his point of view, not kosher, but he reflected that the injunction to “Honor thy father and mother” was of equal importance to the dietary laws, so he said. “All right, I guess since it’s glass, I can eat from it.”