Snow in August

7

On New Year’s Eve, horns blew and church bells rang and pots were banged on fire escapes, but it wasn’t like the year before, the first New Year’s after the war. There was too much snow, muffling the sound, and there were too many men and women who had lost their jobs in the war plants. As 1947 arrived, Michael stayed at home. His mother went downstairs to a party in Mrs. Griffin’s flat on the second floor, and he was alone when Guy Lombardo played “Auld Lang Syne” on the radio at midnight. He wondered what the words meant. Auld was easy: old. But what did lang mean? Or syne? He couldn’t find them in the dictionary and hoped he would remember to ask his mother about them in the morning. He read The Three Musketeers in bed, thinking that he and Sonny and Jimmy Kabinsky were like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and that they needed one more guy to be D’Artagnan. The title of the book wasn’t really accurate because there were actually four musketeers, but in the end, that didn’t matter. What mattered was their slogan, their motto: All for one, and one for all. That’s the way he and Sonny and Jimmy were. Even when they disagreed on some things, they were together. Friends. Musketeers. Forever. He was thinking about that when he fell asleep.

On the following Saturday, on the last weekend of vacation, Michael was assigned to serve the seven o’clock mass at Sacred Heart. The snow had ended. But cars were still frozen in reefs of black ice, and on Kelly Street the icicles were even more menacing as they aimed their frozen snouts from the burst copper drains of the armory. The giant toppled elm had been shoved to the side by a snowplow, but the smashed fence and the ruined car were still there, encrusted with ice. Michael saw them as he turned past the Venus, shoved along by the hard wind off the harbor.

When he reached the synagogue, the door was closed. He heard no voice saying please from the dark interior, and he felt a certain relief. All week long, Sonny had pushed him to go back to the synagogue as a spy. To befriend the rabbi. To locate the secret treasure. In short, to betray the man with the sad voice and the frayed cuffs and the story Michael wanted to know. For a moment, Michael hesitated, thinking he should knock and ask the rabbi if he was needed to turn on the lights. He did not knock. He kept walking, all the way to the church on the hill.

But for the entire mass, as Father Heaney raced through the liturgy, Michael thought about the rabbi. He knew he should be meditating on the Passion of Christ, giving personal meaning to the memorized Latin phrases. But Michael couldn’t get the rabbi out of his head. Not only because of the treasure. Maybe there was a treasure and maybe there wasn’t, but Michael still could not see himself entering the synagogue at night to carry it away. And besides, if Jews were bad because they were sneaky and treacherous, wouldn’t he be just as bad if he was sneaky and treacherous too? For a moment during the offertory, he heard his own voice arguing with Sonny, telling him he couldn’t do what Sonny wanted him to do. Sonny, it’s wrong. Sonny, we can’t even think about doing this because it is just goddamned well wrong. He heard Sonny laugh. He saw Sonny shrug. He heard Sonny remind him that their motto was all for one and one for all.

Then it was time for Communion, and the old ladies came up from the pews, and some young women too, and two older men, and he held the paten and then imagined the rabbi’s face. Maybe he was still sleeping, he thought. After all, last week I served the eight, not the seven, so maybe he’ll be waiting for me at ten to eight. But then maybe he’s sick. Or maybe he heard about what Frankie McCarthy did to Mister G and he’s afraid to open the door. Michael brooded, while Father Heaney deposited the host on various tongues. For a moment, Michael hoped that someone else had come along to switch on the lights, and then felt a stab of jealousy. Nobody else should do that job. I did it last week, I should do it again today.

The Communion ended. Father Heaney rushed to the conclusion, muttering his blunt Latin phrases, while Michael returned his automatic responses. But the boy’s mind wasn’t on the mass; he was too full of his own hard questions. Why did I keep walking? Was it because I was afraid of being late for mass? Or because I was so cold? Of course not. I was afraid of going in there to case the joint. Of being tempted to find the treasure and then being too weak to resist the temptation. But, hey: what the hell would we do with a treasure anyway? Answer me that, Sonny. Would we take it to Stavenhagen’s Pawn Shop and sell it? Bring it to some fence down on Garfield Place? If three kids showed up with diamonds and rubies, the cops would know in two hours. It’s a goddamned joke. And another thing, Sonny: The synagogue is a house of God. And the Christians came from the Jews. The same God! And those people wrote the Bible, man. It says so in the encyclopedia. Before Jesus, there were the Jews. They invented the goddamned alphabet, Sonny! It would be like robbing a church, Sonny. He could hear Sonny laughing. Worse, he could see Sonny turning away from him, their friendship over.

But maybe there was another reason, he thought. A much simpler reason. Maybe I kept walking because the bearded man was a Jew. Maybe it was as simple as that.

After mass, Michael hung his cassock in a closet, folded his surplice, grabbed his mackinaw, and hurried down the passage connecting the altar boys’ room with the priests’ sacristy. He wanted to talk to Father Heaney. The eight o’clock mass had already started, and he could hear Father Mulligan out on the altar, saying the mass in his more sedate, high-pitched voice.

Father Heaney had removed his own vestments and was sitting on a folding chair, his feet wide apart, deep in thought and smoking a Camel. He didn’t look up when Michael entered the sacristy. The boy eased over and stood in front of him. Father Heaney said nothing.

“Father Heaney?”

The priest looked up. “Yes?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, kid.”

“Did the Jews kill Jesus?”

The priest looked directly at him now, and Michael noticed that his hooded eyes were red and watery.

“Why are you asking me such a dumb question at this hour of the morning?” he said sharply.

“I, uh, well, some kids say, you know, down on Ellison Avenue, they say that the Jews killed Jesus, and—”

“They’re jerks.”

“The Jews?”

“No, the idiots you’re talking to down on Ellison Avenue.”

The priest looked up, pulled a final drag on his Camel, and turned on the water tap in the sink. He held the cigarette under the water and then dropped the drowned butt down in the chute used for dead flowers. He cupped some water in his hands, splashed it on his face, then turned off the tap and reached for a towel. He dried his face and rubbed his eyes. Every movement seemed part of a ritual.

“The Romans killed Jesus,” Father Heaney said, with disgust in his voice. “They were the big shots in Jerusalem, not the Jews, and they saw Jesus as a threat to their power. Like most politicians. Or better, like racket guys. So they bumped him off. Just like racket guys do it. If your idiot friends on Ellison Avenue could read, they’d know that.”

Michael loved the way Father Heaney talked; if Humphrey Bogart were a priest he’d talk about Jesus being bumped off too.

“Besides, Jesus was himself a Jew,” Father Heaney said. And then sighed. “Although you’d never know that, the way the world has turned out.”

He reached into a closet and grabbed his army overcoat, pulled it on, and walked to the door.

“Find someone else to hang out with, kid,” the priest said, and then was gone.

Michael was excited. Father Heaney had confirmed it: the encyclopedia was right. Jesus was a Jew. And if that was true, then everything else in the blue book must be true. About Jews. About other subjects. He glanced through the open door to the altar and saw parishioners assembling for Communion. He went out by the sacristy door into the sanctuary, passing the old ladies with their bowed heads, breathing the air thick with the smell of incense and burning candles. He reached the front door without looking back and then stepped into the street and gulped the clean, cold air of January.

The Romans killed Jesus!

As he moved down the icy hill, he remembered pictures of the Romans doing the deed. Men with iron helmets jabbing spears into the side of the crucified Jesus. And other Romans gambling for his robe. In his mind, they resembled Frankie McCarthy. A bunch of nasty pricks.

When he reached the synagogue, Michael went directly to the side door and knocked hard. He waited a moment, and then the rabbi opened the door. When he saw Michael, his face brightened and he smiled. He was dressed in the same frayed tweed overcoat, the black hat clamped on his head, the horn-rimmed eyeglasses dangling on a string from his neck. Behind him, the vestibule was dark.

“Did you find someone?” Michael said. “You know, to turn on the lights?”

The rabbi smiled. “No,” he said. “A Shabbos goy I didn’t find.”

“A what?”

“A Shabbos goy. Today is Shabbos. In English, the Sabbath.” He opened the door wider. “Come in. Please to come in. Koom arayn, bitte…”

Without being asked, Michael reached to his right and flipped the switch. The ceiling light came on. The rabbi’s blue eyes twinkled, and he closed the door on the snows of Kelly Street. “Thanks you,” he said. Then he started up the three steps on the far side of the vestibule, gesturing for Michael to follow.

“Come in, please,” he said. “Here, is very cold.”

For a moment, the old fear rose in the boy. Maybe now the rabbi will spring the trap. Maybe that’s why he’s smiling. What could be beyond this second door? Why should I trust him? Maybe Father Heaney is wrong, maybe the lies are all true, maybe… Michael hesitated for a moment, fighting down the impulse to back away and run home. And heard Sonny, urging him to be a spy.

“A Shabbos goy I need in here also,” the rabbi said. “To make tea I need a stove and…”

His voice trailed off as he opened the door. Michael took a breath and followed him into a boxy, low-ceilinged room that smelled of pickles. Newspapers lay open on a table in the center of the room, with a red pencil beside them and a thick book that looked like a dictionary. There was a sink against the wall to Michael’s left. Beside it was a gas stove with a chipped oven door. The rabbi gestured at it, making a twisting gesture with his right hand, until Michael turned on a gas jet under a pot of water.

“Is cold,” the rabbi said. “So is better we have now a glass tea. You like tea? Good hot tea on cold day.”

“Okay.”

“Gut.” The word sounded like goot.

“Rabbi?”

“Yes?”

“What was that word you said before?” Michael said. “Sobbis?”

The rabbi pondered this, then brightened. “Shabbos! The Sabbath, you say. Friday night it starts, and goes all day Saturday. God’s day. The day of rest.”

“And the other word?”

“Goy? Is a word… it means a person not a Jew. Like you. Shabbos goy is a person not a Jew who comes on Shabbos to turn on lights or stove or broiler, like that. We can’t do it.”

“How come?”

The rabbi shrugged. “That’s the rules. A Jew like me, he can’t work on Shabbos. Is the rule. Some Jews, nine days a week they work. Me, I’m a Jew that I go by the rules. Turning on a light, work. Turning on a stove, work. A letter, writing it is work. And money you can’t put a hand on. That’s the rules. To honor God.”

Michael thought: This is the dumbest goddamned rule I ever heard of.

“So how come I can do it?” he said.

“You are a goy,” the rabbi said. “A goy, is okay for him to do this. Not a Jew.”

“But it’s the same God, right? I mean, I read in a book that Christians came from the Jews. They worship the same God. So if it’s the same God, why does he have one law for Jews and another law for the goys?”

“Goyim. More than one, goyim.”

“Why a different rule for… goyim?”

“Good question.”

“But what is the answer?”

The rabbi turned away, to see if the water was boiling.

“This I don’t know,” the rabbi said. “Some questions, we got no answers.”

The rabbi gestured again and Michael turned on the water tap for him, thinking: This is why his hands were dirty last week; he couldn’t turn on the water. The boy tried to imagine a priest, even Father Heaney, admitting that to some questions there were no answers. Impossible. While the rabbi washed his hands, Michael glanced at the newspaper, which had certain words circled in red. Words were also circled in the dictionary. He looked around and saw two more doors. One was thick, with brass handles and an elongated keyhole. The other was smaller, cracked open an inch. And he thought: Maybe the big door opens into the treasure room.

Against the opposite wall, there was a small unmade bed, and a packed bookcase. Wedged into the top shelf was a framed browning photograph of a woman. With an oval face. Hair tied back. Liquid dark eyes. Michael drifted toward the books, glancing again at the woman’s face but trying not to be too interested. He ran his fingertips over the spines of the books and remembered some movie where a detective pushed at a bookcase and it suddenly swiveled, opening into a secret room.

“You like my treasures?” the rabbi said, and Michael’s heart slipped.

“What?”

“My books,” the rabbi said, his own hand touching the books on the second shelf, below the photograph of the dark-haired woman. “Is all I have, but treasure, yes?”

Michael’s heart steadied as he peered more closely at the books. Their titles were in languages he did not know or letters that he did not recognize.

“You like books?” the rabbi asked.

“Yes,” Michael said. “I love books. But — are these books written in Jewish?”

The rabbi pointed at the leather bindings of the thickest books.

“Not Jewish, Hebrew, these here,” he said. And then he touched some smaller books, with worn paper bindings. “These are Yiddish.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Hebrew is, eh, the, eh…” His eyes drifted to the dictionary. “Language of Yisrael.”

The word came out lan-goo-age, the last syllable rhyming with rage. Michael pronounced it correctly for the rabbi, who nodded, his bushy black eyebrows rising in appreciation.

“Eh, language.” He said it correctly. “Good, I need your help. Please tell me when I make mistake. Language, language. Good. Anyway, Hebrew is language of Torah and Talmud—”

“The language,” Michael said, remembering the endless drills in grammar class. “The the? It’s called an article,” Michael explained. “A definite article, they call it. The language, the table, the stove.”

The rabbi smiled. “The tea!”

He went to the stove and lifted the boiling water and poured it into a pot.

“We soon have the tea!”

“What are those other books?” Michael said. “You started to say—”

“Yiddish,” the rabbi said. “The language of the people. The ordinary people. Not the rabbis. The ordinary people.”

“What are the books about?”

The rabbi stood before the bookcase.

“They are about the everything,” he said, lifting a volume. “Religion. The history of the Jews.” He hefted a volume. “But also Balzac. You know Balzac?”

“No.”

“Very good, Balzac. A very smart Franceman. You should read the Balzac. He knows everything. And this, this is Henrich Heine. Very good poetry. And here, Tolstoy, very great.”

Michael squatted down, took a dusty book off a bottom shelf, and opened it.

“Is this Hebrew or Yiddish?”

The rabbi perched the glasses on his nose.

“Yiddish.”

“What’s it say?”

“Is a very funny story. Very sad too. Good Soldier Schweik. A Czech soldier, he knows the war is crazy. I am sure all are in the English books too.”

The rabbi turned away and found two glasses on a shelf above the sink. He poured the tea. Then he folded the newspapers and moved them aside and set the glasses on the table and gestured for the boy to sit down. Michael had never had tea in a glass before. The rabbi then placed a sugar bowl and a spoon between them. Suddenly he reached forward awkwardly, offering his hand. Michael shook it.

“I am Rabbi Hirsch,” he said. “Judah Hirsch.”

“Michael Devlin,” the boy said.

“You are kind boy,” the rabbi said, rhyming kind with kin. Michael repeated the word, rhyming it with rind. Then the boy lifted the tea and sipped. The glass was hot in his hand.

“This is great,” he said, putting the glass down to let it cool.

“Is hard to get the good tea in America,” the rabbi said. “Maybe the water?”

So he was from Europe, where the water was different. Michael remembered the blue books and said: “Are you from Poland?”

“No. From Prague. You know where is Prague?”

“I know about the Infant of Prague. It’s a statue of Jesus that’s supposed to work miracles or something. They sell little copies of it up at Sacred Heart. But I’m not sure exactly where Prague is.”

“In Czechoslovakia,” he said. “Beautiful city, Prague. Shain. Zaier shain…. Most beautiful city in all of the Europe.”

Sadness surged in his voice then, and he seemed guarded, and Michael thought of his mother when she would sing certain songs about the Ireland she’d left behind. The Old Country, she would always say. While living in the new country.

“Why you think I am Polish?”

“I read in a book that before the war there were three million Jews in Poland.”

“True. Now? None left. All dead.”

Abruptly, he shifted his eyes to the newspaper.

“English, very strange language.”

“Are you going to school to learn it?”

“No. No. Teaching myself. But is very hard.” He held up the back page of the Daily News and pointed at the headline. “Look, what is this mean?”

The headline said: FLOCK SIGNS ROBBIE.

“Well,” Michael said. “It’s about baseball.”

For the first time, and not the last, Michael began to explain the mysteries of baseball to the rabbi from Prague. He started with the word flock, which meant the Brooklyn Dodgers. The reason they were called the flock, he said, was that years ago they were called the Robins. And robins were birds. So even after they changed their name they remained a flock of birds.

“But nobody ever calls them the flock,” the boy said, “except in the newspapers. Here we just call them the Dodgers. Or dem Bums.”

The rabbi’s eyes looked quizzical.

“Dem Bums?” He paused. “What it means?”

“Well, a bum is like a tramp, a worthless person.”

“So they don’t like them?”

“No, we love them. But when they lose, here in Brooklyn, we call them dem Bums. Dem is a Brooklyn word for them. We should say ‘those Bums,’ but — You see, Rabbi, it’s like a Brooklyn way of saying things. In the movies or on the radio, they talk different…”

Michael’s voice dribbled into frustrated silence; in some ways, baseball was really too hard to explain. He could never explain any of it to his mother. You probably had to be born to it. The rabbi stared at the boy, his brow furrowed, as if he were realizing again that learning English would not be simple. Then he pointed at the other word.

“What is Robbie? Is a Bum?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Michael explained that Robbie was a baseball player named Jackie Robinson. He was a colored man, a Negro, and there had never been a Negro player in the big leagues before. So the headline meant that the Dodgers had signed a contract with Jackie Robinson and if Robinson got through spring training he should be playing in Ebbets Field by the middle of April. This year. Nineteen forty-seven. The first Negro in the big leagues.

“What is the big leagues?” Rabbi Hirsch said.

“Well, there are two major leagues, which is another way of saying big leagues. The Dodgers are in the National League. So are the Giants, who are over in Manhattan in a place called the Polo Grounds. But the Yankees, who are up in the Bronx, they’re in the American League. Then there are a lot of minor leagues. The best players are in the major leagues, especially now that the war is over….”

He struggled to make all of this simple. But the rabbi’s face became a tight grid of concentration.

“I must to learn all this,” he said, shaking his head. “If I am to be in America, I must to learn.” He looked up at Michael. “Maybe you can teach me.”

“Aw, gee, Rabbi, I don’t know. I’m still learning it myself.”

“No, no, you speak good. You could teach me. I know this.”

Michael felt suddenly trapped; the rabbi was asking him to do something a lot more complicated than turning on a light switch.

“Money, I don’t have, to pay you with it,” the rabbi said. “But Yiddish I could teach you. You give me English, I give you Yiddish.”

Michael glanced at the bookcase. The rabbi looked poor. This room was as poor as any room on Ellison Avenue; by comparison, Sacred Heart was a palace. If the rabbi had a secret treasure, he certainly wasn’t using it for himself. But he did have this other treasure, right here in front of him: these mysterious books with their strange alphabets. For a moment, Michael felt people rising from the books, bearded men and dark-haired women, a soldier who hated war, a Frenchman who knew everything, all of them speaking languages he had never heard. They rose from the bookcase like a mist.

He wanted to speak to them and for them to speak to him. And perhaps that could be done. In this deep and endless Yukon winter, there was nothing much to do in the afternoons, no ball games to play, no aimless journeys around the parish with his friends. He had time on his hands. Too much time.

“You really think you can teach me Yiddish?” he said.

“Sure thing,” the rabbi said, pleased with his use of the American phrase.

“Well, we could try,” Michael said.

The rabbi smiled broadly.

“Good! Very good!” He drained his tea, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Yiddish is very great language, but not hard. Not hard like the English is hard. You can learn.” He slapped Michael on the back. “How you say it? Is a deal!”

Michael finished his tea and looked around for a clock. There was no clock. There was no radio either. He glanced at the heavy door in the corner.

“Is the church out there?” Michael said, feeling like a spy.

“Yes,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “But not a church. We say—” He leafed through the dictionary, ran his finger down a page. “Sanctuary.” He pronounced it sank-TOO-uh-rye. Michael said sanctuary for him. The rabbi repeated it several times.

“Can I see the mass, or whatever you call it? I mean, it’s not secret or anything, is it?”

“Yes, yes, is not the secret. You come sometime.”

So it was not a door to a treasure house, with gold ducats spilling from chests, and rubies and emeralds gleaming in the dim light. It was just a church. All he had to do now was convince Sonny. He turned to go and then saw the picture of the woman again.

“Is her name Judith?”

“No.” The rabbi paused. “Leah. Her name is Leah.” He stared at the framed photograph for a long time. “My wife.”

“She’s very beautiful.”

“Yes,” said Rabbi Hirsch. “But she’s dead.”

“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” the boy said.

“Is hard for a boy to understand, death.”

“My father’s dead too,” Michael said. “He was killed in the war.”

The rabbi turned away from his wife’s photograph.

“Excuse,” he said. “I am a fool. I think I am the only person with someone dead.”

“It’s okay, Rabbi,” Michael said.

“No. Death, is not okay for someone so young. At least I, I…” He couldn’t find the words. “I am very sorry.”

“Forget it,” the boy said. “I’m sorry about your wife, you’re sorry about my father. So next week we start English lessons.”

“Yiddish lessons,” the rabbi said.

“Both,” Michael said.

“Yes, both.”