The Rabbi of Lud

two

SO I’M WALKING DOWN Lud’s main street one fine Tuesday morning figuring I’ll pop by Sal’s, see can I hear anything worth listening to. I’m fresh from my prayers, the modified Shachris I do on my own about nine or nine-thirty, after my shower, before my breakfast. To keep myself honest, if you take my meaning. Because, in case I haven’t made myself clear, theologically speaking this is the sticks — ultima Thule. God — and I’m talking in my rabbi mode here — forsaken. I don’t even bother with the phylacteries anymore and haven’t since maybe my second or third year in Lud, since, that is, what was supposed to be temporary began to feel permanent. My wife, Shelley, thinks I still lay t’phillim every morning, but Shelley’s a little eccentric in her ways and doesn’t question me too closely about Jewish practices anymore — not since she saw those leather straps bound about my forearm and head and confessed they were a turn-on for her.

“You know what you’re saying? There are parchments inside these boxes with sacred quotations from the Holy Scriptures.”

“I can’t help it,” Shelley said, “I think you look sexy in them.”

“If that stays fair it’s blasphemous, Shelley,” I a little relented. Shelley always knew how to get to me.

“Well, you do” she said, and tried to get me to promise I’d wear my tallith when I came to bed that night.

“Shelley!”

“It’s the fringes, Jerry. They do something to me.”

“Cut it out, Shelley.”

“If you’d taken a post in Williamsburg I’d get to see you in those swell hats and long gabardine coats all the time,” idiosyncratic Shelley pouted.

“You don’t even keep kosher.”

“Would you put your yarmulke on?”

I’ll tell you the truth, now I think of it, maybe my backsliding had more to do with Shelley’s preposterous attitudes than with my growing awareness that I was playing to an empty house. I’m no Graham Greene rabbi, I never was. I don’t burn out so easy. What, because I have a lousy job and I’m stuck in the sticks, there’s no God? Who am I to say? I’m not even good at what I do. But even I have to admit it’s futile. What, it isn’t futile? In this travesty of a community? It’s futile. And face it, who’s to say if that extra hour or so of sleep I get by modifying the morning prayers to my own specifications doesn’t put me in a better mood for the day and make me not only a better husband to my wife but a better father to my daughter, Constance? Surely it does. Because, frankly, you have to be in a good mood to deal with some of Shelley’s idiosyncrasies. Although there’s never been any question in my mind of not dealing with them.

Do declarations of love embarrass you? I suppose it is difficult to accommodate to other people’s passion. Rapture’s the only feeling state that looks silly from the outside. Even, I guess, the other person’s absorption, your own partner’s in the bed. Listen, did I make the world? Was I around when they poured the foundations of the earth? Did I command the morn or cause dawn to know its place? I can’t draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, run a rope through his nose or put him on a leash for my maidens. The wild ox never spent the night at my crib. I never bound the chains of the Pleiades, I never loosed the cords of O’Brian. You’ve got no quarrel with me, what I’m saying. Close your eyes, shut your ears — I’m nuts about my wife. It’s a federal case, almost pathological, past pathological.

I’ll lay my cards on the table. I’m a licensed, professional rabbi, a certified, bonded spiritual counselor. Good and evil are my stock in trade. I carp and I hector, or would if I had anything like a real congregation and not just a bunch of dead people. I cavil, crab, deprecate and reprove. I chalk talk temperament like a coach of character. Yet despite what it says in the job description, and that for all my faults I’m no hypocrite, I tell you that if, on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur, I were to catch some fellow merely glance in my wife’s direction, at her legs or her figure, in what I construed as a lascivious, concupiscent manner, on the highest holiday, the highest holiday, I would stop whatever I was doing, it could be the holiest prayer on the most sacred day of the year, and beat the son of a bitch over the head with a Torah.

So past pathological. Way past.

I don’t care she’s eccentric, what I’m saying, I don’t care she’s idiosyncratic — I’m nuts about my wife. Smitten. Smited, I sometimes think. Yes, a visitation from the Lord, love like the Plague of Lud.

No, really. I get this bolus of lust whenever I look at her, in my throat, in my gut. Well, she’s a looker, of course, enough to drive even a high-minded religious like myself to apostasy. Great big bedroom eyes and this really sultry mouth and smashing, come-hither schnoz and hair. If I’d known her back on the atoll it’d have been curtains for this rebbe’s concentration. And, believe me, her face is the least of it. I don’t much care for locker-room tales or the men who tell them. Smut isn’t my métier, and even the mildest suggestiveness or whispered, low-key insinuation passed among the good old boys like loose change laid down on a table for a tip gets my Irish up and makes me want to sock somebody and do righteous things, but if I’m to be honest I have to admit that Shelley’s figure, even now, at thirty-seven, makes me think that the Creator has got to be at least part pornographer. She’s got these really incredible knockers and these long hubba-hubba legs and thighs. She’s built like a brick shithouse, my Shelley is, and has a behind on her, God bless, could make old Solomon sing all over again. Her scarlet lips and the halved pomegranates of her cheeks and those twin-fawn, lily-fed titties and her wheat-heaped belly and all those apple exhalations … So when I warned her about blasphemy that time she caught me in my phylacteries, in my prayer shawl and leathers, it wasn’t her soul I was trying to save, it was my own. Shelley, for all she’s the rabbi’s wife or speaks longingly about ultra-Orthodox Williamsburg, is essentially soulless. But does that bother me? It does not. What bothers me is something else entirely.

I swear it on the Bible, Shelley today is even lovelier than when we married. Her hair is longer and softer, her figure is shapelier, her breath sweeter in the mornings. She’s taller! I’m crazy about her. Do you know what this can do to a man? Always to go around like some goony, love-struck schoolboy? I could be burying somebody, no kidding, I could actually be saying Kaddish over some poor sap’s fresh grave, and all I have to do is see, oh, say, a dress that Shelley might have had once in a similar shade and that’s it, I’m a goner, my concentration is shot and I lose my place, not just in the text but literally. It’s as if I’m not in Lud anymore, not in New Jersey, and I’m horny as hell and off somewhere in fantasy cuckooland, and all I can think of is how soon it will be before I’m with Shelley again, grazing in my head her varied parts and wondering which square inch of her to nuzzle first.

And, as I say, she only gets lovelier. And has ever since she gave birth to Constance, our first child. It wasn’t that, like any woman, she sloughed off her pregnancy. No, she left the hospital slimmer, firmer, not just than when she went in but than before she got pregnant. And her features had changed, molded into gorgeous new Scandinavian planes and angles on her face. After Shelley gave birth it was as if she merely resembled Shelley, and don’t think it didn’t occur to me for a minute that, my God, what a place this is, they don’t switch the babies on you, they switch the mothers! I mentioned she’s taller? Here’s what I think happened. I don’t say this lightly. It goes against nature, and I’m enough of a scholar to know what God thinks about that sort of thing. I think her stretched-out belly not only snapped back into place and readjusted itself but was somehow recast in inches of actual height. Crazy, huh? Tell me about it. Because the same thing happened her second pregnancy!

And growing lovelier, always lovelier, and here am I, the humble Rabbi of Lud, a slave to my passions, married almost seventeen years to the same woman and practically a sex maniac, certainly a lunatic, taking what I take, accepting what I accept. All, I mean, the fair Shelley’s mishegoss and enthusiasms. Her obsession with playing the rebbitzin, for example, the rabbi’s wife. Of course we’re starved for community here, but some of the lengths Shelley goes to are absolutely potty. By nature she’s a warm and generous woman, compassionate and kind, but I grow fearful if I see her standing at the back of the room when I’m delivering a eulogy. I know that before I even began the service, that while the organ music was still playing and the chief mourners were gathering in the front benches to accept with their nods and all the authority of their grief the condolent, embarrassed sympathy of their relatives and friends, my Shelley has already been by to offer her solicitude on behalf of herself and her husband, the rabbi. If there’s anything she can do … she tells them, or invites them, transients in Lud, arrivals from out of town, people, many of them, bound for the Newark airport when they’re through at the cemetery, over to our house for “coffee and.”

Or there’s the business of the car pool.

Because there’s no school in Lud, Constance, who’s in the ninth grade at the high school in Fairlawn, is entitled to be bussed. Since it’s about an eleven-mile ride, it only makes sense to take advantage of what we’re paying taxes for anyway, but Shelley won’t hear of it. Shelley insists the kid should be driven in a car pool. As I said, I don’t see the sense myself, and neither, for that matter, did the other moms Shelley approached to share the ride. When they declined, Shelley volunteered to take their kids anyway, to drive both ways in fact, not twenty-two miles every day but more like thirty or thirty-five when you take into account the doglegs she has to make, the distance she goes out of her way each time to pick up or deliver the shirkers’ children. When I ask her why she goes to this trouble, she reminds me she’s the rabbi’s wife and it’s the duty of the rabbi’s wife to be useful. I’d say it’s got at least something to do with staying busy, with helping to keep her from going nuts. I’d say that, but she is nuts.

You need better evidence?

“Oh, Jerry,” she tells me after the stillbirth of our second child, a son, whose right leg would have been almost two inches shorter than his left, “Oh, Jerry,” she says, this beautiful woman in her late twenties who’d grown still another inch since the one she’d put on when Connie was born, “I don’t want to be tall if it’s to be at the expense of my children. Some of my height is rightfully the baby’s. I feel so guilty. I stole a piece of my stature from his poor little life. I’m not fit to be a mother. I must never allow myself to become pregnant again.”

She was serious, but I’m not so innocent in the matter myself. By now she was so beautiful I didn’t need anyone in the house who would make extra demands on her time or distract her attentions. I was too compliant. To my shame, I agreed. Sometimes I think I’m too uxorious for my own good.

You know she thinks she’s a frump? She actually believes she’s this dowdy, inelegant woman, some humble blind spot in her like the anorexic’s phantom weight. This is one of the reasons she stands by me, I think, why she’s the first to back off if we quarrel. I could take advantage here, never let on, cover the mirrors, keep her benighted, and I wouldn’t be the first, I bet, to withhold valuable information, but do I know my Shelley or do I know my Shelley? Every chance I get I’m all over her with the evidence, Johnny-on-the-Spot with the facts and the figures, Shelley’s advance man, Shelley’s flack. And I acknowledge up front I benefit from this, that Shelley believes I’m only being supportive and loyal. I even own up it could be some bread-on-the-waters, New Testament thing. So what if it is? Am I not supposed to do the right thing just because I stand to gain? I can just hear the disputations. “It depends,” says the one, “whether you do what’s right because it’s right or only because you stand to gain.” “No,” objects the other, “a world pleasing to God, a proper world, a good world, a successful world, is put together by piling right action upon right action.” Then a third puts in about intention and will. Another county heard from! Oh, please. I’m the rabbi, but you tell me, is it all religious? It makes my brains breathless to think of the possibilities. Let the Talmud stay put in the Talmud.

Anyway, I’m bringing all this in just to let you know what’s on the mind of a lowly man of God, a humble servant of the Lord, Yahweh’s instrument in New Jersey, as he ambles down Lud’s main drag of a beautiful Tuesday morning, fresh from his shower and his breakfast Shachris on his way to see Sal, codependent of Shull and Tober, Funeral Directors, and barber to the dead.

Sal’s is just about one of the swellest barbershops I’ve ever seen, the building itself in that neat Federal style, like a trim, salmon-brick Acropolis, three chairs, no waiting. There’s one of those heavy brass eagles over the entrance and a wooden barber pole next to the door like an antique in a restaurant. The minute you walk in you’re bathed in the sweet, crisp atmospherics of wonderful shampoos from the hair-oil orchards.

“Hey,” Sal said over the easy-listening station on the FM, “it’s Mr. G. What can I do you for, Rabbi?”

“I’m up for a trim, please, Sal,” I said.

“Take a chair. Any chair. Any chair at all,” he intones like someone setting up a card trick. I almost don’t have to hear him to hear him. It’s what he always says, a reference to his situation. Which is not unlike my own, for if I’m the Rabbi, then Sal is the Barber of Lud, la Figaro Figaro la, Figaro la. Because for all it’s one of the world’s swell barbershops, it’s only, like practically everything else in this town, a front. I’m not even certain it belongs to Sal. Perhaps Shull and Tober hold the paper on it, or Art Klein or John Charney of Lud Realty, or all of them perhaps, the whole entire complicated interlocking directorate behind the operation here. And except for myself and the pool Sal can draw from of maybe fifty or so people who live in Lud or work for one of the town’s businesses, he has no regulars. Sal is the contract barber for the two funeral parlors — he calls them “business parlors”—and tells me he doesn’t do badly. Not a soul goes into the ground, Sal says, until he gives them that final haircut. “I’m just like you, Father,” he tells me. “Here’s a mirror, see is it all right in the back.”

As usual, I’m a little saddened that my haircut’s finished, for it makes me realize how underemployed I am. I should challenge Sal with weird stylistic demands — to move my part from one side of my head to the other, or request dye jobs, layered sideburns, a more interestingly shaped nape. If I left now I’d have to kill time till lunch. I would be unwelcome at Seels, the stonecutter, who, though he works for a Jew and makes his living chiseling Jewish names and perfectly formed Stars of David and scraps of prayer in astonishingly fine Hebrew lettering, is a vicious anti-Semite. And I’d feel foolish poring over the greeting cards in the little Jewish notions shop. The flower shop is out. I see enough flowers. And I have no desire to kibitz the gravediggers or the guys scrubbing down the hearses and limos. And to be perfectly frank, dropping by the cleaner’s or the funeral home to see what’s up just isn’t the treat it once was. Of course I could always go home and shtup my wife thirty minutes before we have lunch, but I just shtupped her thirty minutes after we had breakfast.

“Sal,” I said, “I could do with a shave.”

“You’re clean-shaven.”

“A manicure.”

Sal gave me a funny look. “You know,” he said, “you say something like that to the ordinary barber, he’d probably tell you to get lost. It happens because of the nature of my work I do hand care. Head care and hand care.

“You know what else?” He’d lowered his voice.

“You apply their cosmetics.”

“You knew that?”

“You already told me.”

“I talk too much, don’t I?”

“Of course not.”

“Yeah,” Sal said, “I talk too much. Occupational what-do-you-call-it.”

“Hazard.”

“Yeah, but it’s interesting. If I had anything like a regular clientele instead of those stiffs on the preparation table over in Shull and Tober’s basement, they’d be popeyed at some of my tales.”

He’d taken a manicurist’s dish and emery board from a kind of doctor’s bag he kept stashed inside one of the cabinets under a shelf that held some of his razors and combs.

“You talk about cosmetics,” he said, “but most folks got no idea what that entails. I mean when you’re making up a corpse after it’s embalmed. You know we’re talking of at least one lipstick? Probably half of another. And a whole dish of rouge. And pancake and moisturizers? Forget it. Way too prohibitive. You could make up the entire cast of a Broadway musical for what pancake would cost you. And moisturizers, you start moisturizers into these folks they’ll drink you under the table. It’s because their skin’s so dry. You have to go to special tinted powders, slap on some fixative and hope the wind don’t blow.

“But I’ll tell you something,” Sal confided, “the haircut, that’s the real challenge. I got to wear gloves. Otherwise I’d prick myself on their hair. So spiky, so sharp. Like iron filings. And heavy? You wouldn’t believe it. Because hair is dead weight too. Even a kid’s. Even a baby’s.”

So we talked about our mutual trade, or Sal talked while I soaked in his warm, soft, soapy water, between us encompassing just about all there was to say about death, Sal speaking up for the long-term metabolisms, those gone-gray-overnight details of canceled flesh, rhapsodies of death gossip, intimate as singing — gore, juice — a little saliva, Sal said, always lay puddled under the tongue — life’s lymphs and ichors and gassy residuals, the finger and toenail legacies — the thin, keratinous plates lengthening, thickening, curling like the horns of a kudu — matter’s fabulous displacements, lividity, and all the other evidences from death’s black boxes. Pacemakers, implanted in the chest, Sal reminded me on the morning of my manicure, went on tick tick ticking for years.

“Brr, Sal. Brr.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” said Sal.

So I spoke up now too. A little. Coming round to meet him from the other side. Lighting up the spook house with the ineffable and sublime. We’re not just these bruises in the winding sheets, I told him, and the proof of a life and an identity ain’t only X rays and dental records. There’s good deeds, I told him in my rabbi mode, and almost mentioned that I’d fucked old Shelley that morning but said something instead about the wonderful memories we make for the people who love us and whom we love. What’s a few yards of gnarled toenail compared to that?

“I talk to them,” Sal said. “On the prep table. Just as if they were a regular customer. I ain’t scared. That ain’t it. It’s more, I don’t know, lonely like. It ain’t just that nobody’s there, it’s like they’ve gone away. I mean, I never even knew them but. Still, in their carcasses, it’s like they just stepped into the cab that will take them off to the airport. Bingo, they’re gone. I talk to keep my mind occupied. I’m not afraid of the dead. Though you know yourself, Rabbi, we probably got a right.”

“That’s crapola, Sal.”

“You say that because you’re so holy. We ain’t everyone a man of the cloth.”

Sal was making a veiled allusion to the rumors of bad things that get whispered by all help everywhere, but that are particularly nasty in the graveyard business. We have these blockbuster imaginations, my brothers, that truckles to disaster and caves in at the merest whiff of evil. I’d been in Lud almost twenty years, almost twenty years a pillar of this — to me — still frontierlike community, a limited, Noah’s Ark sort of town with its representative, time-capsule exemplaries and instances, its cornerstone samples and specimens, heavy on death but with certain greening shoots of the possible — lawyers, a nursery, the draper’s, Lud’s day laborers, the gravediggers who at any moment could beat their shovels into hoes and spades, all the rakes and irons of a proper agriculture. For almost twenty years an objective but finally unsympathetic ear, put upon by those wild stories — tales, legends — of illicit burials so grievous (and we’re Jewish, not subject to most of the strictures and taboos of other religions: drunkards we bury, suicides and incesters, atheists and excommunicados, blasphemers and trayf gluttons) that to shove one of these customers under Lud’s dirt would be like tarnishing the barrel with that one rotten apple that spoils all the rest, blemishing forever our consecrated ground. Outrageous tales of the secret disposal of great villains, outscale brutes and monsters, so that it was made out — I’m talking about what the natives heard, insiders like Sal, myself, even Mr. Shull, even Mr. Tober — that the cemetery was a blind, the eternal resting place of big-time mafiosi, executed and dumped under phony names in a Jewish cemetery in Jersey where no one would ever think to look for them.

Even, or so ran the scuttlebutt, famous Nazis were buried there, savage celebrities from the more infamous camps. One story had it that Doctor Josef Mengele may have been interred in Lud, unknowingly buried under the guise of a Morris Feldman, a hat salesman from Garden City, Long Island.

Which goes to show how silly these fables can get. Because it wasn’t unknowingly, and I was the guy who was supposed to have buried him and, at least at the time, I thought I knew what I was doing.

It was our second or third year in Lud, Shelley and I into what would have been the third or fourth year of our honeymoon, our first child not born yet and, if not exactly newcomers to Lud, then still in that state of innocence which encourages and then embraces what it perceives to be novelty, still, I mean, outsiders and enjoying those fervent sexual perks and practices of our first blooming, three and possibly four years — time itself blurred here, living in one long smudge of the now, the memorial, anniversary instincts as yet unkindled — running, not only not socialized but so protected by that innocence and the novelty of things we didn’t even know we weren’t being snubbed, that the town — this a novelty, too — was only the makings of a town, that that draper, that lawyer and those gravediggers were just signs, like a cowpoke’s pouch, tobacco and cigarette papers are signs, of some still-to-be-fired destiny. We observed nothing, knew nothing, thought — if we even took time out to think — we lived in a booming metropolis and not only did not resent — the new rabbi, his young rebbitzin — the fact that we were being ignored but, God help us, actually believed that all the world loved a lover as much as we did, and actually appreciated people’s thoughtfulness — shameless, a rakehell, his hoyden — in leaving us free to fuck each other’s brains out. Our heads in our beds and still getting, we thought, settled.

“My,” I might tell my Shelley as we promenaded Lud’s main avenue not only hand-in-hand but arm-in-arm too, and looking, I guess, like some fierce special team, “but I do so love it when an entire city looks like a mall. Oh, look, dear,” I might say with a snide, blue snicker, “it’s that little Jewish notions shop,” and elbow her ribs, blow in her ear, chew on her lobe, turning her round in the direction we’d just come, leaving no doubt what little Jewish notions had cropped up in this Jew’s head.

The astonishing thing is that they stood for it. Charney and Klein. Pete, the stone hauler. Seels the vicious, anti-Semite tombstone carver. Any normal Luddian. Though their tolerance could have been an honest mistake. Shull and Tober, who employed me, whose funerals I officiated, reciting last words, drawing the characters of the dead from inference, the chancy observations of the bereft like witnesses to a crime, like the paltry consensus portrait of a police artist, say, cheerfully running one Jew after the other into the New Jersey ground, hadn’t even bothered to interview me but had hired me by return mail when I’d responded to their notice clipped from The Rabbinical Assembly Newsletter tacked to a bulletin board in the placement office of the old alma mama back in the Maldives. Maybe they assumed my gaga flirtation with my wife some arcane, peculiar heterodoxy. The others, Lud’s Fortune two dozen, probably took our open sexuality as an extreme example of Jewish clannishness. Whatever, it was live and let live in that little community of death.

So if I say it wasn’t unknowingly you have to consider the source, and judge for yourself what does and doesn’t constitute knowing when the so-called knower is a horny, love-struck mooncalf.

It was Shelley who took the call. In the screened breezeway — I won’t forget this, it’s as good an indication as any of the way we were — both of us called “the rabbi’s study.” (This wasn’t cynicism. We weren’t cynical. We weren’t smug or disenchanted or cocksure. I remembered everything Wolfblock ever taught me. I knew who was a pisher and who wasn’t. If we called the breezeway where we watched television and read the papers and sometimes made love the rabbi’s study, we had good reasons. We were three or four years into our marriage and still playing house. We had good hearts.)

“It’s Mr. Pamella,” my wife said, holding the phone out and covering the mouthpiece. (You see? You see how good? It embarrassed me whenever she covered the mouthpiece on the telephone. I was mortified for the person on the other end. You see? You see how good she was, how good I had it? I thought this her worst flaw!)

The florist wanted to know if I could take a funeral service the next day. This was strange enough on its own merit. I worked for Shull and Tober. They were the ones who contacted me for a service.

“Lou,” I said, “tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t ask for a weather report.”

“It’s Shabbes. Jews don’t bury on the Shabbes.”

“Maybe these people ain’t so religious,” Pamella hinted quietly. “Maybe these people are desperate characters.”

Tober seemed nervous when I called, and asked if I’d stop by the funeral home so we could talk.

Tober is one of those big, slack, gray-faced men in a black wool suit, a shambler in a vest and gold watch chain who, though he doesn’t smoke, looks like someone with cigar ash on his clothes. He has the peculiar frailty of certain bearish men, some loose, dusty, posthibernative excess about him of meat and fabric.

He closed the door to his office. “What did he tell you?”

“That the family wants it over and done with. A party named Feldman.”

Tober nodded. “Almost a year a vigil by the bedside. A long, drawn-out cancer. The worst kind.”

“But it’s the Sabbath.”

“You know, Rabbi,” he said, “all these religious considerations are beating our brains into crap. You provide a service, I provide a service. It’s not always at our convenience that people die. Or even at their own. If we could, we’d all pass away after the holidays. We’d hold on till graduation was over. Till the kids got back from the honeymoon and were already set up in the new apartment. But who has a choice? We’re poor, weak creatures, Rabbi. Do I have to tell you?”

“It’s the Sabbath,” I repeated.

“We lose a lot of business because of these ultra-Orthodox arrangements,” Tober reflected.

“Ultra-Orthodox? This is common practice five thousand years.”

“Listen,” Tober said. “I’m not telling you your business, but suppose, just suppose, that this ‘Feldman’—or whoever he really is — was such a nonstop, no-good s.o.b. that being buried on Saturday was just one more thing to tick God off. If that’s the case then maybe we ought to bury the s.o. bitch in the name of justice and civil rights. Have done with the son o.b. Throw the s. of b. right down the toilet!”

“Manipulate Lord of the Universe? Manipulate Blessed-Be-He?”

You mustn’t think I’m the spoony I make myself out here. This was back when most things seemed novel and picturesque to me. My views of marriage you already know, but maybe the other side of that idyllic picture of the sweet, hand-holding life, the supersensitive, hold-your-nose-Dearheart, someone-just-cut-one-in-Europe one, is gloomy and sour to just the degree that the recto is bright. All Jersey I thought corrupt, not put off by the prospect of working there, never wincing at the idea of men on the take, not shying at the thought of whatever violent, even darker acts lay behind the bribes that co-opted those who so casually sold their witness to the baddies. On the contrary, I thought I’d just stumbled into life, as, had I been given a pulpit in Los Angeles, say, I might have supposed I’d come to live among the less than serious. I was governed, I mean, by clichés.

Of course I didn’t bury Feldman on a Saturday. And I didn’t believe for a minute that Tober expected me to. Pamella’s call is the key to what I thought. Lou Pamella was the floral guy, the nurseryman and landscaper for Lud’s two big cemeteries — Pineoaks and Masada Plains, the names pleasant and euphonious as the labels on aftershave. I worked for Tober, I worked for Shull. Not only was Pamella’s call to me unprecedented, it was impossible to conceive he could even have made it if Tober or Shull hadn’t asked him to. I didn’t know why, but they were covering ass. For reasons unknown they wanted me in on it, widening witness, spreading complicity. These were the novel, picturesque notions I had in those days.

You don’t want to look rushed. It’s best if the rabbi is on the scene before the family and friends of the deceased. It seems a strange, dark thing to say, but I’m the host on these occasions. Everyone else — the wife, the children, the brothers and sisters, even the parents — is a guest. Tober, Shull, and all their assistants, from the drivers to the men who work the hydraulics at the graveside, are just the caterers. The rabbi’s the host. It’s his fellowship, tact and hospitality they go out whistling. I’ve too many responsibilities, I can’t afford to be late. And I wasn’t. I was at the chapel better than half an hour before my first guests might reasonably have been expected, and a full hour before we were scheduled to begin. I even had my key in case Tober, Shull, or whoever else was on duty that morning hadn’t arrived yet. But when I came in Sunday, the casket was closed and the family already gathered. So, though the chapel was less than a quarter full, had the guests. I knew from the way they sat, facing forward, not talking to each other, quiet, even rapt, all eyes fixed on the casket, that no one else would be coming. It was as if — no small children played about the drinking fountain in the foyer (no children were there at all), no one smoked in the lounge — the service had already begun. Maybe what Pamella had told me was true, maybe they did want it over and done with.

When he saw me, Tober moved away from the side wall where he’d been standing and went to one of the people in the front and whispered something. The man looked at me for a moment, adjusted the yarmulke, black and shiny as a patent-leather button, he’d taken from the open box at the entrance to the sanctuary, and nodded. As he came up the aisle toward me he’d tip first one hand then the other to his skullcap like someone maintaining balance as he rushed along a tightrope. Tober, looming large and clutching the documents I would have to sign, followed wretchedly in his wake, distraught as a hand-wringer. “Not here,” Tober whispered and handed me the papers as we stepped out of the auditorium. “Rabbi Goldkorn,” he introduced, “Mr. — er — Levine.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told him.

“The casket stays closed,” Levine said in a faint German accent.

“Well, of course,” I said. “The family’s wishes, the ravages of the cancer. I perfectly understand.”

“The cancer?”

“Please,” big Tober said nervously, “can we just get on with it, Rabbi, please?”

“Of course I never had the pleasure of knowing the deceased personally. Could you tell me about your … For the eulogy,” I said. “I’ll need to know a little something about your—”

“Second cousin,” he said.

“I see. Your second cousin. Yes. Well, can you tell me something about him for my eulogy?”

“He was a hat salesman.” Though he stood still, he was still doing his balancing act with the skullcap.

“It’s just that I might be of some comfort to the widow,” I said. “The sons and the daughters. Sometimes it helps even if they only hear a list of characteristics, outstanding traits.”

“Jerry,” Tober said, “please.”

“You mean was he a left-handed hat salesman?”

“No, no, that’s all right,” I said, as if Tober had objected or the wise guy apologized. “Our teachers back in the Maldives used to remind us that men of the cloth are often God’s first line of defense. Ours is the contemplative, spiritual life, so naturally, people assume we’re His agents. We take the gibes and blows meant for Him. We’re quite used to it by now. His holy punching bags. Really. Particularly when Master-of-the-Universe sees fit to pull your loved ones up short.”

“Oh, Goldkorn, Goldkorn,” Tober chanted under his breath.

Even as he glared at me the man continued to position his skullcap.

It was true. Far from being angry, I had somewhat softened my opinion of him. I put my hand out to comfort him. “I can tell,” I said, “that you are only recently beneath the yarmulke. Don’t worry, they don’t fall off so easy.”

“Goldkorn, Goldkorn.”

“All right,” he said, “he was married. But circumstances — there’s no reason to go into them — prevent the wife and kids from being here today. My cousin”—he lowered his voice—“well, my cousin wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. People didn’t always understand him.”

I did, I thought. And just then, just there, I knew it was Mengele in that closed casket. My reasons? I had no reasons. I was a man of faith, wasn’t I? All right then, this was faith. The Nazi, Mengele, had happened in death to tumble into my theological jurisdiction. It came like a bolt from the blue. Which was all the more reason a man of faith didn’t need reasons.

“He was very well organized,” the guy was saying. “People who worked with him, his customers, may have thought he was obsessed. They never realized what drove him was his devotion to his job. That was unrelenting. If he’d been in medical research instead of a hat salesman they’d have called it scientific curiosity. He was an immensely passionate man. Immensely passionate.”

“I see,” I said. “Organized, passionate, misunderstood. Like a scientist when it came to his work. This was some hat salesman we’re talking about here.”

“Goldkorn!” Tober growled.

Levine, passionate himself now, had warmed to his theme and went on with his character reading like a handwriting expert or an astrologist on the radio. I wasn’t even listening anymore. The man in the casket was Mengele.

Or some other high-up Nazi.

I didn’t bat an eye. I nodded at the Levine character, winked at Tober, and indicated it was time we start back to the chapel.

As I moved down the aisle to take my place behind the plain, free-standing lectern that was the only pulpit I’d ever known, I could see that all the male mourners, all of them, not only sat under one of those Shull and Tober, in-house yarmulkes, at once as well-behaved and smug as tourists at a ritual of natives, but were as new to the skullcap as the phony Levine. A whole entire coven of Nazis!

Of course it was Mengele. Sure it was. Though I didn’t understand it. (But why would I? How could all that good death gossip have filtered down through all those layers of concentrated, unmediated lust, my four-year-long hard-on? Unless my marriage had sprung a leak. Was something awry? I’d heard things. I hadn’t known I’d heard them but I had, and maybe wasn’t so far gone in my boobery and bumbledom and all-thumbs, Tom Fool mooncalfery as I’d thought.) I’m not paranoid. Anyway, a rabbi’s got to be very careful about death. What do you think all that documentation is about? Those seals and death certificates? All mortality’s red tape? Why is death law — murder, probate — law’s biggest portion? It’s because the dead are potential contraband. (They are. Consider the pharaohs stashed in all those old bank vaults and safety deposit boxes. Saints’ relics come to mind. Old bones, the fossil record. And a skull-and-crossbones is still your dark signal of poison and stolen treasure!)

So there I was, Mengele or that other high-up Nazi behind me in the box. There I was, reciting the prayers, buttering up God, carrying on. And getting as big a kick out of it as when I was one of Wolfblock’s wandering minstrels in the minyan back on Chicago’s South Side. I could see big, gray Tober standing off to the side toward the back. He seemed to be hiding out right there in the open. Shull, on the other hand, I spotted sitting bold as you please smack in the middle of my little congregation just as if he were one of the mourners. Or spotted his smile rather. That strange broad beaming which complemented and set off the depleted energies of the grievers and seemed in its stubborn joy rather more like the exaltation of Christians assured of Heaven than the woe of a Jew. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him plunk himself down right in the midst of the customers. It always made a big hit.

And me? I wasn’t doing too badly, but there were tears in the eyes of the Nazis and some were openly sobbing, the bastards. That had taken me by surprise and made me more than a little furious too, the idea that this riffraff were not only moved by the loss of a world-class putz like the guy laid out in the casket but could be moved even in Hebe by a representative of a religion they hated. I poured it on, turned up the feeling and the temperature, chanting the prayers as if I were standing before the Wailing Wall and banging my breast like a rabbi in heat. Tober looked alarmed and Shull’s grin widened, but the S.S. only moaned the louder. No matter what I did there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. I threw extra trills into my broches, all the trills the traffic would bear. More. Tober stared at me, curiosity and frank, sober astonishment gradually replacing apoplexy. Shull’s grin, appraising me, seemed impressed.

I was excited. I was keen. Whatever might yet happen to me, whatever civil laws I was breaking, as well as whichever of God’s commandments I was violating — His injunction against false witness and, in view of my hammed-up prayers in front of the Nazis, probably the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain — and whatever arrangements had been arranged — I was sure now that Shull was the mischief-maker, that big, craven Tober was only his frightened, maybe even unwilling, accomplice — and which I in my anger and eagerness was determined to upset, I was resolved to deliver this day in New Jersey such a eulogy as had never before been heard.

I took a breath. You don’t fly off the handle, I cautioned myself. You control yourself. You don’t slander.

“I don’t know this Morris personally,” I began, “but don’t I hear your sobs and catarrhs? Copious, copious. I’m in the business, I’m a professional, and I’m telling you, you get to bury somebody pulls this much grief maybe once in an entire career. If that. This is probably it for me, I should think. I mean, what the heck, I’m a relative youngster. If, kayn aynhoreh, my health holds up, I suppose I can expect to bury maybe another six or seven thousand dead people. How do I know what lies in store, what mensches have yet to give up the ghost? But, the way I see it, it doesn’t matter. Let those six or seven thousand be six or seven times six or seven thousand, sorrow like yours knocks the needle out of the red and right off the grief-o-meter!

“What can one say about such a man? We see how loved he was all the way down the line. A second cousin is his chief mourner!

“Yes, and Cousin Levine tells me our beloved friend was a passionate, organized, misunderstood, scientific sort of man. Passionate. Organized. Scientific. Misunderstood. Ask yourselves, what does Talmud tell us it means when a man is passionate and scientific? When he’s well-organized and misunderstood? It tells us,” I told them, “it tells us that what we’re dealing with here is a super Jew, maybe the Messiah.

“That’s right, you heard me. The Messiah. Messiah Himself.”

It was, I recall thinking, the perfect touch. They were outraged. They stared at me in disbelief and wanted, I saw, to knock me down. They still wept, but now their tears were angry, furious in fact, so intense they might have scalded their retinas and burned through their cheeks.

“God takes,” I said, not through with them yet, “a Moses, He takes an Abraham and throws in an Isaac. He adds a Jacob and adds a Joshua. He takes an Elijah and stirs in a David. He folds in a Solomon and a Daniel, you homemakers and balebostes. He takes the First and Second Isaiahs and adds a dash of Noah, a pinch of Job. He separates your Maccabees, First and Second, and mixes with an Ezekiel.

“He takes,” I said, glaring at them and leaning forward, “He takes a Josef …”

I broke off and slipped into the Kaddish. It was just one more thing. They wouldn’t know. You say Kaddish at the graveside. Also, a lone man may lay t’phillim, but it takes a minyan of ten Jewish males to make a Kaddish. Me, Shull and Tober were the only Jews in the room. All my wailing, breast-knocking and trilled broches didn’t mean a thing. In God’s eyes the Kaddish not only didn’t count, it never happened! This is a Jewish mystery.

Shull’s grin had disappeared. I was pretty sure he was aware I knew what was up. What difference did it make? Nothing would happen. They kept me on because I was their stooge. They thought they could manipulate me. They knew I’d look the other way. It was all right with me. Why would I want to be in a Pittsburgh? Why would I care to go to a New York? My Shelley was here.

On the way to the cemetery I sat between Shull and Tober. We rode along in silence for a while. Then Shull chuckled. “That was one hell of a job you did back there,” he said and patted my thigh. “One hell of a job!”

“It was,” Tober agreed.

“I never heard anything like it.”

“Neither did I,” said Tober.

“You gave them a real run for their money, a real, what-do-you-call-it, catharsis.”

“You sure did,” Tober said.

“What an idea,” said Shull, shaking his head. “What a thing to do.”

“Messiah recipes.”

“Mocking their dead.”

“Making them feel guilty.”

“Having them eat their misery like pie.”

“Lick their loss like a lollipop. A catharsis. A real catharsis.”

“They’ll owe you forever. They’ll never forget it.”

“None of us will. Though you might have added,” Tober added, “about how they loan him all that money to open his hat place in Garden City, then, after he’s sick, when his visitors leave and his painkillers kick in, he turns around and jimmies the books on them right from his hospital room. Or how his widow wouldn’t come to his funeral because she was too humiliated.”

My God, a widow-humiliating book-jimmier! How could I have thought he was Mengele? Or any other high-up or low-down Nazi either? How could I? Because. Because you want to believe. Because you want to believe all the high jinks, all the back-room, front-page, deep-throat kinkery and irregularity, all the rumor, all the talk. Because you want to believe there’s all-out, anything-goes evil in the world, conspiracy, Armageddon moving in like a cold front, anything, whatever keeps you engaged. Like you want to believe there’s a God.

How could I? Because the honeymoon was starting to wind down, the three or four years of desert-isle lust and abandon beginning to feel more like four than three. She wasn’t there that morning and I hadn’t even realized she was missing, and both of us, me with the distractions that my work sometimes offered or that I could invent, and Shelley with her visits and Lady Bountiful routines, were just beginning to look around.

“I stay open,” Sal said, “in the hopes that Lud will grow and I can turn this place into a real barbershop one day.” He was brushing loose hairs from my jacket with one of those yellow, short-handled whisk brooms you don’t see anymore or you’d buy one.

“Nice job, Sal,” I told him, admiring myself in the mirror. “The wife’s been after me to get this done.” I handed him his money and waved off the change.

“Thanks,” Sal said, then made his voice lower than ever. I had to strain to hear him. “The gangland killing in that restaurant over in Brooklyn? Joe ‘Black Olives’ Benapisco that they shot bullets in his eyes?”

“Yes?”

“I think I may have to style his hair.”

“Sal,” I said, “come on.”

“No shit,” he said. “And Rabbi?”

“What is it?”

“There’s some bones and ashes I’m supposed to put into his pockets with him. Some ground-up teeth.”

“What?”

I couldn’t hear him.

“What’s that?” I said. “Who?”

“Jimmy Hoffa,” he whispered.