The Rabbi of Lud

four

HEY, I make a good living. Not what they pay in those big Riverside and Lake Shore Drive congregations. Not what I’d get along your Wilshire Boulevards, of course, or your Collins and Fairfax avenues, the spiffy, upscale, co-op, gone-condo neighborhoods where on even an ordinary Shabbes there are plenty of cops to help with the traffic and guard against the anti-Semitism and, on the higher holidays, the force’s high-up Irishmen and brightest brass, captains and colonels sent from the Commish himself, in their ribbons, dress blues and white gloves, right down to the service revolvers in the spit-polished holsters you can’t even see — to show the flag, to show solidarity and all the unsuspected, circuitous routes and ecumenical closures of good fellowship and called debt. Or those kempt temples where professional men’s kids get bar mitzvah and their gentile partners go to so many affairs they own their own yarmulkes. Not so much. But enough. More than enough. We’re not hurting. We’re simple people of the clearing here. How much do we need? For the essentials we’ve got. The cardinals and paramounts. Even for the occasional fête champêtre and once-in-a-way skylark or dinner and opening night in NYC fifteen miles off.

So we’re not hurting. Shull and Tober pay me forty-two thousand a year and lease my house to me for the taxes and utilities. Also — this is privileged information — I do maybe another ten or fifteen K a year in tips. Don’t misunderstand me, my hand ain’t out. It’s just that my pickup congregations don’t always know the arrangements. How would they? Is a bill the decorous, proper place to stick in the overhead? Would the price of the electric be listed, what it takes to run the fridges and deep freezes, the cost of the fossil fuels burned in a good, roaring cremation? Why itemize the rabbi then? Certain things you assume. You weren’t born yesterday, you know I don’t come to you because the bereaved are good company. You figure something has to be in it for me, that solace and ceremony cost. So there’s often a check already made out with a blank where my name goes, one or two hundred bucks maybe. Shull shuts one eye and Tober the other. That’s the arrangement.

So I make a good living. What with one thing and another, my salary, my tips and my perks. But that’s not it. Why I told my daughter that leaving Lud was out of the question.

The fact is, I have obligations. I’m in my rabbi mode here, talking ex cathedra. A fellow’s family comes first. I’ve got the numbers. Three of the Ten Commandments relate directly to the family. Thirty percent. You honor your parents, you don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, you don’t commit adultery. God Himself counts for another three, the graven image and name-in-vain bits, and the business about no other gods before Him. It’s an even-steven split about the Sabbath day. So a fellow’s family comes at least first.

I’m just doing my duty is the way this cleric figures it. Why I shush my dejected, scared-stiff, upset, importunate little girl, wave her from the room and go to put my arms around her mother. Family comes first and the wife takes pride of place. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters. Honor thy Mom and Dad, runs the commandment, not the other way round. If Lord-of-All-Worlds wanted us to honor the kids he’d have spelled it out. He’s a don’t-mince-words sort of God, a stickler. The last thing He is is reticent. He covers the material. “You shall not do any work,” He instructs us re the Sabbath, “you, or your son, or your daughter, or your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” Doesn’t He even spell out the dimensions of the ark itself down to the last cubit, God like a voice from the Heathkit?

It’s a sort of sacrament then, what I’m doing, my husbandly obligation. I have to protect her from her nuttiness and outrageousness. Shelley would go crazy in a real congregation. So I have to condescend to her behind her back.

And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Do you know how much worse it is for you to be burdened with a lot? My heart goes out to the President and Joint Chiefs, to high-ups in the CIA and secret services, to everyone top-secreted, eyes-only’d. To editors with stories they dassn’t break. To anyone with knowledge too hot to handle. Oh, it’s awful, too terrible, and worse yet for the Rabbi of Lud. You think not? Are you kidding? Privy to the counsels of God? This is my rabbi mode. I don’t fool around in my rabbi mode. This is straight from my studies, my lessons in the Forbidden Practices seminar with Rabbi Chaim on the atoll in the Maldives. From my practically pitch-perfect memory of those notes that we were not only required to destroy at the end of each class, but required to destroy in front of the bearded, sidelocked monitors in their long coats and ancient Polish gabardines, the Orthodox proctors of my offshore schooldays.

We don’t tell you this stuff, the cruel, arcane orthodoxies that would scare you off and keep you out of Paradise — that it’s forbidden to dip your right eye in an eyecup, that you can’t be buried in your jewelry, no, not your wedding or engagement rings, not your locket with the picture of your kids, not even so much as a red paper Poppy Day flower or a tin button on your lapel from the Red Cross. That you mustn’t look at an X ray or handle the vital organs of a woman taken in adultery. That you shouldn’t wear contact lenses or shoes with lifts. That, strictly speaking — all of this is strictly speaking, of course — it goes against God’s law to walk with a cane more beautiful than the leg it’s intended to support or to use any prosthesis that improves upon the original body part. (Jews may place no hearing aid in their ears that corrects hearing acuity beyond what is considered normal in the population as a whole.) Left-handedness in an unmarried woman is a sin and, according to some interpretations of Talmud, a man may be denied his place with God if he can lift three times his own body weight. You’d be amazed how much evil we do without ever knowing it.

But the family comes first and, after the wife, the consanguineous loyalties are clear. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters, but sons and daughters before brothers and sisters. Am I my brother’s keeper? Of course not. Even old Cain knew it was a rhetorical question. The attenuate blood trailing away, thinning out and burning off till, if you want to know, the idea of humanity and the notion of universal love go up in smoke. God is no humanist, no One Worlder, and is hostile to the very concept of brotherhood. The fact of the matter is, even the thought of family, of family in its broader, metaphorical sense, is distressing to Him. He doesn’t want His people to get too cozy. And in Isaiah? The wolf dwell with the lamb? The leopard lie down with the kid? The calf, lion and fading together? Cows and bears feeding, and the big cats scarfing straw like the ox? This is theology? This is wish fulfillment. This is typos, bad translations, rotten scholarship. No? Give me a break. Are you kidding? Why did He give us zoos and cages then? Isaiah was a wuss.

To tell the truth, I talk too much. I don’t have the character to be this Rabbi of Lud. Not twenty-five years out of the Forbidden Practices seminar and already I’m selling my teachers and proctors down the river. “Sure,” I hear them saying, “go on, go ahead. Let everyone in on the cabala, why not? Tell them Lord of All Outdoors doesn’t even need rabbis, that He knew what He was doing when He invented the Diaspora, Hansel’d and Gretel’d the Jews and lost ten tribes of Israel. Go on, go ahead, blow your own people’s cover. Tell them, shout it from the rooftops, my yiddishe mama was a bad Jew, and chicken soup Hebes go against Nature. Go, ruin it for anyone who happens to believe Himself Himself is some big-spending Democrat, for the dole, disarmament, all the unilaterals, the A.D.C and other agencies.”

Well, of course you can’t look this up. It’s privileged information. Why do you suppose we were sworn to secrecy, why do you think we had to tear up those notes?

Me, I don’t agree with His politics. I happen to like and respect my fellow man. If it had been me, I’d have left Christ alone, and let him die our crowd’s natural death, overweight, and all stressed-, smoked-, whitefish’d and cholesterol’d out, like anyone else in his early thirties.

Anyway, I love my wife. With me it goes beyond orthodoxy, duty, the slavish fear of hell. Constance is a fine daughter, none better, and I love her very much. But there’s this glue in the glands for the Mrs. You have my word on it, I’d feel this way even if it weren’t my religious obligation.

So you see the dilemma. On the one hand my Connie’s everyday diminished fingernails bitten down to their bloody quicks while my nervous, heartsore child grazes beneath their gritty, jagged overhangs, waned moons and torn cuticles, settles in her anxiety and daily seeks fresh purchase, expert as some kid mouth-mountaineer contemplating the angles, all the flat, polished facets, approaches and billiard reckonings of face and, on the other, nutty Shelley, front-runner Poster Lady to the Loonies. I have to wonder. If she can do what she does for all dogleg kink, quirk and aberration just in little Lud, who knows what she might not yet get into, what marvels and wonders of the psy-chopathological she could work were she ever to come up to bat in the great world? There were my holy obligations and there was my good, old-fashioned romantic love, but there is also, I admit it, my heat-seeking curiosity, my blockbuster temptations. Because Eden ain’t over, you know. We weren’t thrown out of the Garden. We’re still in it. All He ever really did was lock the gate. Eden ain’t over. Beset we are by temptation, up to our fig leaves in it. So I have to wonder. And fear and tremble for the kid. But all I’m doing is speculating, talking momentary diversion, juggling the bright what-ifs. In the end it would be as it was in the beginning — no deal. The kid stays. The rabbi stands pat. The wife don’t make a move.

Well, a move. It isn’t as if she’s under lock and key. She comes and goes as she pleases, in winter and throughout the school year chasing up and down the back roads and side streets of northern Jersey in her one-woman car pool the thirty-some-odd miles she puts on the car every day, rain, snow or shine, even on days when Connie is poorly, or some other child either, and has to stay home, and Shelley, operating under her screwy, self-imposed rebbitzin’s rules of order, not only picks up the other kids anyway, but actually phones around, absorbing the city-to-city, intrastate tolls, to find an alternate, “so the seat-e-le shouldn’t go wasted,” every year trading in one big brand-new Buick station wagon for an even newer, even bigger one, some huge, gleaming Conestoga you wouldn’t be afraid to cross the plains in (a station-wagon nuch, for an intimate little nuclear family of three!) because she doesn’t want it on her conscience that a kid came to grief in any eensy, flimsy jalopy. So move. It’s just New Jersey she can’t leave, just, for more than her errands, Lud. Otherwise, she’s all over the map, not only free to move but positively running with the pack.

I’m just getting comfortable again. (Now my erection is silenced, my meat withdrawn and chemicals subsided like clarity returned to cloudy tap water. In less time than it takes to speak, or speak to, the problems, my rabbinical conundrums not only unresolved but forgotten, my sins, and all, now my wife and I have had congress, and Connie’s outside again, my cheese-it-there’s-the-kid! misgivings forgiven.) When the doorbell rings like a cue in a play.

It’s for Shelley. (And how, not being that kind of rabbi, not ever on call I mean, pulled to deathbeds or awakened and hustled into an emergency presentable enough to join the eloped religious in midnight matrimony or even, for that matter, hit up by salesmen in the Torah trade, how could it be for me?)

It was for Shelley and it was the girls, her sisters in an eight-lady group of musical Jews who entertained at various affairs in northern Jersey — showers, weddings, brisses, bar and bat mitzvahs, golden and other special anniversaries and do’s. Shelley was one of the singers, though she sometimes accompanies herself on the tambourine. Only two of the women, Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, were trained musicians, checked out on guitar, mandolin and balalaika. The charter membership — Shelley is a charter member — was still intact after seven years but the group experienced odd cycles of popularity. They could be booked months in advance, then go through most of an entire season when, as Miriam Perloff, their manager and first soprano, put it, they “couldn’t get arrested.” Their bookings constituted a sort of sociological shorthand, which I supposed — I had a lot of spare time — put them on the cutting edge of Jewish culture in New Jersey. They were this really bellwether chorus and combo, absolute musts for this season’s showers and anniversaries, le dernier cri for that season’s bat mitzvahs and brisses. In a sort of idle rabbi mode — I have spare time to spare — I figured it had something to do with the baby boom.

They used their spare time for intensive, additional rehearsals and to experiment with the name of the group, thinking perhaps that by adding to their repertoire or changing their name they might goose up their popularity. They’d been “The Sabras,” they’d been “The Balebostes.” Briefly they were “The Mamas and the Mamas” but dropped that when they started getting asked to kosher stag parties. Now, and for some time past, they were “The Chaverot,” Hebrew for members of a kibbutz, or fellowship, and, in addition to Yiddish and Israeli folk songs, standards like “Tzena, Tzena,” “Havah Nagilah” and “Ha Tikva,” they specialized in vaguely Jewish songs—“Those Were the Days,” the theme from Exodus, “Sunrise, Sunset,” and other vaguely Hebrew-sounding show tunes.

Shelley had volunteered our house in Lud for rehearsals and, in accordance with her special theories of good-natured martyrdom, frequently arranged to pick these women up at their homes and deliver them back again afterwards — two hundred sixty, two hundred seventy-five miles round trip, door to door — but I didn’t object because, well, frankly, I enjoyed having them in the house. They were Lud’s only visitors not there for death. They were crisp and affluent and gave off a snug illusion of company, a suggestion of the rich, cursive icing on coffee cake. They were all quite handsome and reminded me of women shopping in department stores, elegantly stalking fashion like beasts doing prey, professional as pigeons pecking dirt. In addition to Shelley, Sylvia Simon, Miriam Perloff and Elaine Iglauer, the other members of the group were Fanny Tupperman, Naomi Shore, Rose Pickler and Joan Cohen and, to be perfectly frank, that’s what I thought they ought to call themselves—“Miriam Perloff, Sylvia Simon, Elaine Iglauer, Shelley Goldkorn, Rose Pickler, Naomi Shore, Fanny Tupperman and Joan Cohen!” That’d fetch ’em. It’d have fetched me, but then I’m my own lost tribe, this exile, this standoffish, renunciated Jew. This, I mean, time-on-his-hands outcast-in-waiting. Whatever it was I had for Shelley spilled over and I had it for these women too. (I’m in my macho mode now, speaking out of the sweet lull in my glazed-over blood, the drugged hypnotics of my engaged attentions, handled as a guy in a barber’s chair.)

Meanwhile the women bustled about me, setting up music stands, rearranging chairs, turning our rec room into a sort of studio, and I was struck by the power implicit in their team-work. Women were not like this in my day. Then they were weak sisters, wimps, the beautiful nerds of time. Then they were without gyms, home fitness apparatus. Sometimes I think Shelley and Constance are throwbacks, designed to set a Sabbath table, bensch a little licht and, in the dark of their blindman’s-buff-shielded eyes, make solemn, mysterious passes over the candles like thieves palming light.

Coffee was perking, chipper as rhythm, and Miriam Perloff, Sylvia Simon, Elaine Iglauer, Shelley Goldkorn, Rose Pickler, Naomi Shore, Fanny Tupperman and Joan Cohen were everywhere at once, pulling cups and saucers out of cabinets, spoons out of drawers, shuffling napkins, placemats, preoccupied as stagehands in darkness. Out my high kitchen window like an embrasure in a fort I could see two of their station wagons drawn up casual and unattended in my driveway as police cars on a lawn.

“Does the rabbi want milk and sugar with his coffee?” Elaine Iglauer asked me, coming into my study.

“He drinks it black, Ellie,” Rosie Pickler told her. “Don’t you, Rabbi?”

“That’s so he doesn’t have to worry about mixing dairy with meat when he’s out at a function,” Syl Simon glossed.

“Oh,” said Miriam Perloff, “but that’s so interesting!”

“They teach us that in yeshiva,” I said. “It’s a trick of the trade.”

“Yes,” chorused Fanny Tupperman and Naomi Shore, crowding into my study with the others.

“But what about the sugar?” Joan Cohen wanted to know.

“It’s only forbidden during Passover,” I told her.

“I didn’t know that,” Naomi Shore said.

“Sure,” I said, “black coffee is a bitter herb.”

“The rabbi has a sense of humor,” Rose Pickler said carefully.

“I speak for my people,” I shrugged.

“Sometimes,” Shelley said, glaring in my direction, “my Jerry likes to tease-e-le.”

These women had been coming to the house seven years yet I was still a curiosity to them. People put us on a pedestal. Shelley, giggling, once told me they’d wanted to know about our sex life. “What did you tell them?” I said.

“I asked how they thought we got Connie.”

“What did they say to that?”

“You could have knocked them over with a feather-le.”

Yet I’d never doubted that they waged a kind of mass flirtation with me, even the dedicated fuss and bother of their preparations a pattern of honeybees, their hitherings and hoverings about our rooms some domestic cross-pollination. They treated me with an almost congregational deference which, if it wasn’t patronizing, may have been a kind of actual tilting with God — guarded, circumspect Godtease. Women, and men too, are sometimes burdened by their pious curiosities. Mystery makers, what, they wonder, do priests do with their hungers? Were they so different from Shelley, turned on by her own awful wonder? Into my holy leathers, my phylacteries and parchments, as well as the garments, the shtreimel and kittel and gartel I did not even own (let alone wear), and embracing who knew Whom in her head?

As I’ve said, these women were all attractive and I could, I knew, probably have made time with them if I’d shown more interest. Miriam Perloff and Fanny Tupperman had been divorced and were now remarried. And, according to Shelley, Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore had had affairs. (As “The Sabras” they’d entertained at both Miriam’s and Fanny’s second marriages and, during the period when Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore were fooling around, it wasn’t at all unusual for the group to work either Naomi’s or Rose’s favorite love songs into the program. Not wanting to abet immoral acts, Shelley, God bless her, was a little reluctant to go along with these practices even in the face of Sylvia Simon’s argument that supporting these lovesick ladies by singing their songs showed sisterhood. Shelley was a sucker for argument, she loved pleadings — I was privy to these proceedings, the rehearsals were held in my house, Shelley’s demurrers and Sylvia Simon’s justifications came through the thin walls of my study — and countered with an argument of her own: “My dear girls,” Shelley said, “of course we would want to show support, to come when we can to the emotional service of a sister in trouble. Why, in Old Testament, in Old Testament, didn’t Judith’s very own maidservant help her mistress chop off Holofernes’ head? Wasn’t that sisterhood? To make oneself an accomplice? If that isn’t sisterhood I’d like to know what is. But some principles outweigh other principles. That’s plain as the nose. So I ask you, if, as Sylvia Simon suggests, we went ahead and sang ‘My Man’ at Phyllis Levine’s bat mitzvah Saturday, what would that do to our artistic-e-le integrity?” Good old Shelley!) Good old Shelley! No wonder I’m uxorious. Who ever had a better, sweeter uxor?

Though if those assorted Sabras, balebostes and chaverot, the Fannies, Joans, Sylvias, Miriams, Elaines, Roses and Nao-mis, showed an interest in me — I mean in the fascinated, spellbound sense of the word — why, I was no less interested in them, all my powerful, exiled scholar’s instincts alerted to their own peculiar gynarchic routines. Joan Cohen shopped, one of those lanky, elegant women who wore her boots and leathers, suedes and woolens, their textures graduate as the gauge of knitting or the finish on sandpaper, and all her colors flat and dull as the shades on maps, as camouflage, as if fashion were only a step from actual blood sport. It was as if, her tints bleached by distance, you perceived her through binoculars, some quick tweed movement in a field. She looked like someone who could hold liquor. Because she seemed so efficient, she was probably the least credible of the women in the group when she opened her mouth to sing.

Joan Cohen shopped and Elaine Iglauer moved. She was one of those Jersey rovers — it’s a phenomenon I’ve only observed here — who regularly changed houses, trading up or down or even. Changing towns, following the school systems, following the country clubs, on the spoor of the fashionable synagogues. Once, it’s claimed, she actually bought a house because the town it was in was reputed to have a good newspaper. In the years we’d lived in Lud, Elaine Iglauer had lived in seven houses in six different towns and, word had it, was now on the trail of another.

But all these women—good old Shelley! — were on one trail or other, hot pursuit a way of life. Joan Cohen’s shopping sprees, Elaine Iglauer’s house hunting, Naomi Shore’s and Rose Pickler’s romantic involvements, even, I suppose, Fanny’s and Miriam’s divorces and subsequent marriages, and their flattering, collective forays into my (as the rabbi of opportunity) customs — oh, oh, how they stormed my fort! — and secrets — the question of sugar, the mystery of milk. The dietary proprieties and pieties. For openers, for conversational spur-of-the-moment ploys — a fishing expedition.

What, fishing myself, I might have told them!

That Lord-of-Kit-and-Kaboodle set Eve up, that He was never any equal opportunity Creator, that He disdains women — He doesn’t like the way they smell, as a matter of fact, and that’s why He makes such a big deal out of the mikvah, the ritual bath they’re supposed to cleanse themselves in after their menses — and why He never took a Goddess; that He isn’t even very interested if you want to know the truth, and never came on to one as a shower of gold or swan or any white bull either, and that the only books in the Bible named for women, Ruth’s and Esther’s, are — what? — ten lousy pages. That He’s this man’s-man God; that that’s why He gave them periods in the first place and relented only after He invented hot flashes and then gave them those instead; that as far as He was concerned they could stay in the tent barefoot and pregnant forever at the back of the bus, and that that’s why he made them beautiful, snappy (looking at Joan Cohen) dressers, good (glancing at Miriam Perloff) at real estate, interested (tucking my thumbs into my suspenders and taking all of them in at once) in the big questions. That this was why I had seen my Connie cry but never heard her whistle.

But this is what I thought, not what I would ever tell them. I’m only the Rabbi of Lud. You go along to get along.

Telling them nothing and settling instead for the cheap — my God, how difficult it is to have power, to be, I mean, however adjunct, however peripherally, in the glamorous way — some idol of the amateur, a rabbi, any insider — thrill-a-minutes of any on-site, backstage reality. Giving them instead, Shelley’s susceptible ladies, eyewitness, hands-on experience.

“Oh, Connie,” raising the window in the rec room where they’d been rehearsing, I called out sweetly, “Connie darling.” She was out front, risking the funeral corteges, which were the street’s only traffic, rather than play in our backyard that looked out on Lud’s biggest cemetery, gravestones floating on the level, becalmed surface of its unleavened earth like buoys. She was biting her nails, mauling her fingers with her mouth, drifting from station wagon to station wagon, aimless as a kid with a collection can at a red light.

“Connie,” I called, “shouldn’t we be doing Stan Bloom now? Come inside, sweetheart, and we’ll get to him while we’re both still fresh.” As I’d promised Al Harry, I’d been praying for Stan Bloom’s blood count, getting up Stan’s prayers with my daughter like a kind of 4-H project. “Come on, darling, you’ll play afterwards.” I lowered the window again. “I’ve this very dear friend in Chicago,” I told the ladies. “Connie and I have been praying for him.”

“A rare blood disease. He was on his last legs,” Shelley chipped in. “But Jerry thinks he may have caught it in time.”

They trembled, I tell you, shuddered. A small seizure. The chill of awe. Because people believe in intervention, in salvation and influence like a fixed ticket.

Connie lumbered in, the little girl all bulked up in her resentment as if it were a kind of steroid.

“Go wash,” I murmured.

“Ahh,” quivered Elaine Iglauer, Sylvia Simon and Joan Cohen together.

“Excuse me,” I told them, “I really ought to brush my teeth first.”

“Hmn,” vibrated Miriam Perloff, Rose Pickler and Fanny Tupperman.

When I came back I was wearing my yarmulke, I was wearing my tallith.

“Should we leave?” Naomi Shore asked.

“Not me,” Shelley said.

“That’s all right,” I said. “We’ll be in my study. Connie?”

“Here I am, Dad.”

I began with a couple of broches, laid on a Sh’ma, then, before they knew what had hit them — I could hear their attention through the thin walls — I was into my theme.

“Teller God of Collections and Disbursements, of Bottom Lines and Last Dipensations,” I prayed, “Lord, I mean, of Now-You-See-’em-Now-You-Don’t — Your servant, Jerry Goldkorn here with his lovely daughter, Constance.”

“Da-ad,” Connie bleated.

“—his lovely daughter, Constance.”

“Dad!” she scolded.

“Jerry Goldkorn here. Beseeching You from his hideaway in Jersey, Jersey Jerry Goldkorn. With my daughter at my side — the lovely Connie. As if,” I continued, “You didn’t know. Who knows everything. Eh, Old Sparrow Counter? Where we’re coming from. Why we’re here. You know what we’re up to. I don’t have to tell You!

“It’s Stan Bloom’s blood count again. Back in Chicago. In the Kaplan Pavilion. A young man. In his early fifties. With a lymphocyte count of a hundred and fifty thousand bleaching his blood. To only seven or eight grams hemoglobin. Is this a way to do a young fellow? Fix my old pal’s ratios, Lord. Bring that white smear down where it’s manageable. Down to ten, fifteen thousand. Beef up his red count to acceptable levels — twelve, fourteen grams.

“We have not yet forgotten Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird, whose falsetto prayers raised up a melanoma on his vocal cords like a welt to Your glory. Or those other good lads from the minyan — Norm Sachs, Ray Haas, Marv Baskin.

“Do what You can, would You? Grant our prayer. Oh, by the way, this happens to be a challenge grant. The kid’s faith is riding on it.

“Have you something to add, darlin’? Is there anything you’d like to say?”

“No,” she said.

“Connie joins me in the Amen.”

I could feel the frissons through the walls.

They so admire a rascal, other people’s cynicism. I was their rascal of God. Only Constance did not admire me. Though I was doing this for her. Getting His attention for her. Only for her. I wasn’t showing off for the women anymore. Not for Joan Cohen with all her wardrobe or Elaine Iglauer and her trade-up heart. Not for Naomi or Rose with their easy Valentine acquiescence. Or any other of those predisposed ladies, choir girls, songstresses for God. Not even for Shelley. (Though ultimately, I think, nearly everything I do is for Shelley.)

For Connie. Needing to impress Connie. Because I meant it when I said the blood count prayers were a challenge, that my kid’s faith was riding on them. Even if what I really meant was her faith in me. (Though inevitably, down the road, this conversation — RABBI OF LUD: “Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.” CONNIE: “He died? Stan Bloom died?” RABBI OF LUD: “I think prayer must be like any other treatment. I think the earlier you start, the more effective it is. Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan until he was already down for the count.” CONNIE: “He died, Daddy? You said you could pray him back to health and — Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so grisly!”)

Am I a buffoon? Some wise-guy, ungood Jew? Understand my passions then. All my if-this-will-go-here-maybe-that-will-go-there arrangements were in their service. What did I want? What did I need? To keep my job with God. To hold my marriage and family together. Who was ever more Juggler of Our Lady than this old rebbie? As much the God jerk as any chanteuse out there in my rec room tuning her instrument or vocalizing scales.

Because let’s face it, I’m no world-beater. Lud, New Jersey, is not one of Judaism’s plummier posts. It’s hardly the Wailing Wall. Hell, it’s hardly Passaic. I haven’t mentioned it but it had already begun to see its better days. There is, for example, a small airfield in Lud, hardly more than an airstrip really. Its tattered windsock no longer waves more than a few inches away from its standard even in the strongest gale, and tough clumps of rag grass have not only begun to spring up through cracks in the cement but have started to puncture actual holes in the tarmac. The landing strip had been put in long before for the convenience of people who flew their own airplanes, wealthy, high-flying bereaved from all along the eastern seaboard, New York State and the near Middle West who didn’t want to deal with the traffic controllers at busy Teterborough a dozen miles off, and who came in not only for the actual funerals and unveilings but with guests and picnic hampers for casual weekend visits to the graves of their loved ones, and who were willing, even anxious, to stay in the tiny hotel that the funeral directors had had built, also for their convenience. Now, however, the landing field was hardly ever used and the hangar was just a place where the gravediggers and maintenance men stored their tools and parked their Cushmans and forklifts in an emergency.

It’s hard times.

Shull and Tober keep telling me so.

“Rabbi Goldkorn,” big Tober called out.

“Good morning, Reb Tober,” I said, raising an imaginary cap. “Good morning, Reb Shull.”

Sometimes, when we pass each other in the street, we pretend that Lud is this shtetl from the last century, this Ana Tevka of a town.

“Yeah, yeah,” Shull muttered, “good Shabbes, l’Chaim. Next Year in Jerusalem.”

“Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

Tober unlocked the coffee shop. It had closed its doors to the public long ago but its big stainless-steel coffee urn was still operational, its grill and freezer.

Shull stepped behind the counter. He looked oddly chic back there in his dark, expensively tailored suit. “You want something with your coffee, Rabbi? There’s marble cake in the bell. We might have some fruit in the back. I could heat soup in the microwave. I could make toast.”

“Coffee’s fine.”

“This was before your time,” Tober said. “When the hotel was still open for business. This coffee shop had one of the finest kosher chefs in all America behind the counter.”

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“Talk about your funeral baked meats,” Shull said.

“There just wasn’t the business,” Tober said. “We couldn’t justify it.”

“We had to send him packing.”

“The Association hired him for the prestige and convenience.”

Tober meant the Greater Lud Merchants’ Association. Even the anti-Semite, Seels, was a member. Even I was.

“Then, when business dropped off …”

“That’s the thing,” I broke in. “I don’t understand how business can drop off.”

“That’s because you’re a scholar, Rabbi.”

“Not so much a man of the world.”

“You busy your head with the important things.”

“Blessing the bread.”

“The candles.”

“The wine.”

“Making over dead people.”

“Making over God.”

“Look,” said Shull, “you don’t have to worry.”

“Your job is assured,” Tober said.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of my employers as some other rabbi might have thought of the people on the board of directors of his congregation. Trustees and governors.

They were not like the women.

They watched me like a hawk.

They listened to every word of every eulogy, professional as people at the rear of a theater on opening night, interested as backers, hanging on the sobs, waiting for the laughs and show stoppers.

“My job is assured?”

“If it’d make you more comfortable we could draw up a new contract.”

“I don’t think I—”

“Sure,” Tober said, “we could stick in a no-cut clause, guarantee you four or five more years.”

“Five or six.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

“But—”

“You know what keeps us going?” Shull said.

“The perpetual care,” Tober said.

“The perpetual care and the exhumations.”

“The perpetual care and the exhumations and the deconsecrations.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island and up to Connecticut.”

“Because this necropolis is dying on its feet.”

I’m a fellow whipsawed between admiration and contempt, hard men and soft women, needful daughters and loony wives, God jerks and morticians.

“Think, Rabbi. How many graves and tombstones have we dug up this year? Just this year? How many times have you found yourself having to mumble deconsecration prayers over some watertight, concrete vault?” Tober asked, emptying his cup and rinsing it in the deconsecrated sink.

“Sure,” Shull said, “that’s what keeps us going.”

“Fashion!” Tober grumped.

“Fashion and the interment customs. The laws and principles of the Funeral Code of the Great State of New Jersey.”

“We live by checks and balances, Rabbi.”

“And what if,” Shull put in, “God forbid it should come to this, the fashionable Long Island or fashionable Connecticut funerary lobby bastards ever got to our Trenton bastards and made them do away with the points in the code which keep us viable?”

“Exhumation taxes.”

“Fees for rezoning deconsecrated back into consecrated ground.”

“The ten-buck-a-mile charge, point A to point B, to move the disinterred across a state line.”

“All your prohibitives and pretty-pennies.”

“Pffft!”

“Up in smoke.”

“Gone with the wind.”

“But it makes you more comfortable we draw up a brand-new contract.”

“No cut for two or three years.”

“One or two.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

Shull took an ice-cream scoop from behind the counter and hung over the open freezer, studying the flavors. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to make myself a frappe. Anyone else? How about it, Rabbi? You up for a frappe?”

“Why are you saying these things to me?” I asked Tober. “I don’t know why you’re saying these things to me,” I told Shull.

“Listen,” Tober said, “we’re not the type to go behind your back.”

“Of course not,” Shull agreed. “Believe me, Rabbi, if we had a beef we’d be in touch.”

“We perfectly understand your position,” Tober said.

“We comprehend totally your point of view.”

“It isn’t as if we could reasonably ask you to fix up your eulogies.”

“Good Christ, man, you never even knew these people!”

“By the time you see them they’re already dead!”

“All you got to go on is what their loved ones tell you about it,” Shull said.

“You going to trust loved ones at a time like that?”

“With all their special stresses and vulnerabilities?”

“Though you have to, of course.”

“Even they tell you their daddies could fly.”

“Stand around in the air like a guy on a staircase.”

“It’s the age-old story.”

“Garbage in, garbage out,” Tober said.

“We won’t stand on ceremonies. What it comes down to is what it came down to the last time,” Shull said.

“Arthur Klein and Johnny Charney have been asking about you again,” Tober said.

“What with death moving further and further out on the Island and up to the bedroom communities in Connecticut, well,” Shull said, “we don’t honestly see how we can continue to protect you.”

“I’m a rabbi,” I protested.

“Of course you are. I’d come to you myself for spiritual guidance. Wouldn’t you, Shull?”

“In a minute, Tober.”

“I studied Talmud. What do I know about real estate?”

“Plots,” Tober said, laughing lightly. “Not real estate. Burial plots. Real estate is something else altogether.”

“They tax real estate.”

“We believe in the separation of church and real estate.”

“Posolutely,” Shull agreed.

“It’s Klein’s opinion you wouldn’t even need a realtor’s license.”

“Charney’s too.”

“Please,” I said, rising to go, “I’m not your man.”

“It isn’t as if you’d be knocking on doors.”

“Is that what he thought, Tober, he’d be knocking on doors?”

“Leads,” Tober said, “you’d be following leads. Charney said to say.”

“All you’d have to do is close.”

“And collect the commission Klein says you’re entitled to.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee.” Again I raised my imaginary cap. “Reb Tober. Reb Shull.”

It was always astonishing to me to see them work in tandem, zip through routines I knew had to have been rehearsed, the letter-perfect meeting of their minds, their rhymed intentions. Though of course this wasn’t the first time they’d introduced the subject. For years they’d been after me to work part time at Lud Realty with Klein and Charney. Indeed, though they professed to be passing along Klein’s and Charney’s views — the business about the realtor’s license, the commission, the leads — the idea of my selling cemetery lots had been theirs. They thought a rabbi would have extra authority with the customers.

Shull and Tober knew they were dealing in a depletable resource — not the dead; the dead, like the poor, we would have always with us, but the land, parcels of ground no bigger than the doorway to your room — and they were terrified. Always they were turning new ideas over and over in their heads. They entertained (and dismissed) a plan for a new, ecumenical cemetery, and offered at discount burial plot, casket, funeral and tombstone combinations that could only be purchased in advance. They worked out all sorts of schemes and drew up models of landscaping (like Simplicity dress patterns) that the men and women who would one day be buried there could not only preselect but were encouraged to tend themselves, like people working on their gardens. They would even sell you the seeds and rent you the tools.

So their overture to me in the coffee shop was not new. Even my guarded outrage reflected old positions, and each time they introduced the idea it seemed a little less outlandish.

“Goldkorn,” said Tober, “think about this, please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting for the door and stepping out into the street. “I really don’t see what there is to think about.”

“Goldkorn,” Shull called, rushing to the door and shouting after me. “Hear me, Goldkorn! There are worse parishes than Lud! If this cemetery goes belly up you could finish your career in some condo on the Palisades! You could be The Bingo Rabbi, The Theater Party Rabbi! The Rabbi of Wheelchairs and Walkers! Is that what you want? Is it? Is it, Goldkorn?”

So they were terrified. It was those indivisible cubic feet of earth they knew they were stuck with, saddled with, the seven-or-so dirt feet by four-or-so dirt feet by six-or-so dirt feet — just those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet. Because they figured that all they really had to sell was the topsoil. Never mind that it had dimension, that it bottomed out at China. For these two, everything after those first twenty-eight-or-so initial square dirt feet was throwaway, pure loss leader, the mineral rights to which they could neither retain, sell nor give away. Hence the advance purchase plans, collaborative eulogies, all the layaway obsequies; hence the seeds and garden tools and elaborate landscaping arrangements. Hence their tandem, bicycle-built-for-two hearts.

But however alike Tober and Shull appeared to be in business, privately they were as different as day and night.

Emile Tober was the night.

Tober was a big, troubled, crafty and, on his own, secretive, taciturn and probably insane old man who was driven by a single goal — putting together enough money to guarantee that his son, Edward, once Tober was out of the picture — that’s how he put it — would be provided for for life, a life, Tober was convinced, that would not only outlast his own and that of Tober’s wife but the lives, too, of Emile’s and Sonia’s three other children, Edward’s brother and two sisters, as well as their kids’, Ed’s unborn nieces and nephews, should they ever be born, which, frankly, might never happen since they, the siblings, were not married yet and, so early were they enlisted into the service of their daddy’s obsession, that they not only believed in it and shared in it but were actually given over to it as much as the father, and who (not even counting Edward), the funeral parlor guy’s grown kids — ninety-six years old collectively, which was the only score Tober ever kept, and the only way he ever kept it, growing three additional collective years per annum which, should all of them live, would make them ninety-nine years the following year and one hundred and two the year after that one, only Edward getting the benefit of an individuated, customized, bespoke birthday — thirty-eight, according to his father, of the darkest, dizziest years in the recorded, concentrated history of man — therefore actively contributed to it, that hard-earned fund, store, reserve, hoarded, hope-chest and war-chest, nest-egg kitty, call it what you will, which, or so ran his dad’s mad theory, would, if only it were allowed to grow big enough (if, that is, only God saw fit to allow all of them to live longer, if only He found them better jobs, kept inflation down, improved interest rates and guided them into safe, terrific investment opportunities), might finally permit — twenty-nine, thirty-two, thirty-five, sixty-one and sixty-four were their actual ages — one of them to die, so long, that is, as the rest of them didn’t slack off and continued to chip in with their fair share, until, if God saw fit, they would perhaps have saved enough to permit another of them to breathe his or her last and thereby leave off putting by, so long, that is, as it was the surviving, least good wage-earner He took, and so on and so forth until the time, or so old Tober figured, that the nut was at last large enough to cover just about whatever might yet come up, leaving the by-that-time fatherless, motherless, brotherless-and-sisterless kid to all the devices in the armory of his protective attendants and retainers. Which had better be considerable.

Edward Tober had been blind since birth.

Which might not, considering all the possible curses and combinations of curses, have been so bad. There’s leglessness and armlessness, hearing loss and a broad palette of the chronic and congenital that not only outruns, but will probably continue to outrun, however correct our priorities, strong our commitment or deep our pockets, however refined and elegant our solutions or frequent and prime-timed our telethons, our needs. And now we are up old Tober’s alley, on old Tober’s turf, somewhere along his twisted and complicated, infinitely long corridor and rich vein of troubles. There was just too damn much on Edward’s plate.

He had been born without a labyrinthine sense. He had, that is, not only none of the blind man’s comforting overcompensations but an additional and quite dreadful undercompensation with which he had to deal. He had perfect pitch, a keen, too keen, sense of smell, strength, a good heart, brains, common sense — all the attributes. Only a good sense of direction he did not have, or any sense of direction at all. He could not tell left from right, up from down, or even in from out. There he was, a loose cannon on the deck, apparently without the gift of gravity, unfixed as an astronaut. Thrown into a pool, or fallen into the sea, he would as likely swim to the bottom as to the top.

Because he was unable to see and had none of his labyrinthine senses, he couldn’t learn to knot his tie, or tie his shoes, or dress himself at all. He buttoned a shirt by chance and main force, sometimes actually pushing — he was strong — the buttons through the cloth. He forced both feet into the same pants leg, blew his ear in his handkerchief and wore his hat rakishly on his shoulder. He could never learn braille, or even turn on a radio. He wouldn’t be able to make love, of course, and I refuse to think about how he handled his bodily functions.

Yet Edward more than held his own in conversation, told delightful stories, had a sweet, equable disposition, and there was no one I knew whom I would rather go to for advice.

Shull.

Shull was the day, affable as sunshine. If Tober was driven to miserliness by his sense of the terrible consequences his death would bring to his handicapped son, Shull was hounded to earn by nothing more urgent than the pursuit of happiness. Not even happiness — pleasure. Though you couldn’t tell it from his behavior during the long hours of his working day, which, until you knew him better, would have seemed to you not only full but frantic — the two and sometimes three phone conversations he could conduct simultaneously, a telephone held like an earache between his inclined head and shoulder, and another in each hand, shouting orders to his chemicals supplier in Philly, discussing a floral arrangement with his nurseryman in Lud, solicitous of some broken-hearted widow on the other end of a third phone, and perhaps already catching the eye of some workman just then passing the open door to his office and signaling with nothing more than directions jabbed out with his chin not only where he wanted the workman to go but what he wanted him to do when he got there — even his stomach-knotting, ulcer-growing, stress-inducing activities a source of pleasure to him (as almost everything was that he could feel — a sore throat, a headache, an abscessed tooth, and his coffee and marble cake and two- and three-frappe lunches too), though he perfectly understood that what hurt him hurt him, was not, that is, good for him, and betrayed nerve endings that might just as well be used in a better cause than the destructive impulses and synapses of masochism. Understood, that is, that if he was to be a voluptuary, if he was to make his pleasures extend over a long lifetime — he was already sixty-one, the same age as Sonia, his partner’s wife — then he’d better knock it off, get right with his body. Periodically he gave up smoking, cut down on his drinking, traveled two to three times a year to the most expensive fat farms, had himself checked by important specialists, elected surgeries not covered by his health insurance, all the while balancing, even juggling, the golden means of moderation in all things, including his concern for his own health.

He spent what he earned. He could have been some dedicated, even obsessed, hobbyist or collector deliberately setting, despite its cost, a final treasure triumphantly into place in the collection. Yet he had no hobbies, no collection. His pleasure was pleasure, his pastime was fun.

He’d once purchased a big-ticket, luxury item from a mail-order catalogue and now he received catalogues from every mail-order house in the country. These retailers, whatever they sold, must have pictured him as some world-class yuppie and, indeed, the stuff he sent away for was exactly the sort of merchandise you might expect to see on the wish list of any upwardly mobile, spoiled-rotten kid in the land. He owned almost everything L.L. Bean and Sharper Image had to offer. Banana Republic sent him pith helmets and commando gear — sweaters, boots, compasses and flight jackets — from a dozen armies. He owned a Swedish submariner’s first-aid case, fuses and assorted makings that might have been used by the PLO. He owned an official knife from the Portuguese Fishing Fleet that he used to loosen knots though it was designed to fillet fish. He sent away for the best telescopes. He had an expensive home gym. He owned a robot. He purchased state-of-the-art Camcorders, audio equipment, edge-of-the-field cameras, rifles, Betamax machines, and alarm systems to protect all this shit. He gave elaborate luaus and liked to charter planes on New Year’s Eve and fly his friends to mystery destinations. He hired symphony musicians to entertain at his parties. They strolled among the guests and took requests like gypsies in a restaurant. He flew to Europe only if he could get reservations on the Concorde and, though he did none himself, at parties he would lay, with this tiny, special limited-edition sterling silver spoon beside it he’d purchased from the Franklin Mint, cocaine out on the coffee table as if it were fruit. His measurements were on file with half a dozen Jermyn Street shirtmakers and Savile Row tailors. A Brazilian bootmaker had lasts for his feet. He had season tickets to everything.

But oh, oh, infinite is the cash cost and list price of pleasure. There seemed no bottom to the bottom line. He was always strapped, as desperate as Tober to think up new ways to make the funeral home pay off, to parlay the other guy’s cancer and bad germs into cash flow, additional ready for the general fund, store and reserve, that hoarded hope-chest, war-chest treasury and nest-egg kitty, that protective cushion, call it what you will, that Tober wanted for the rainy day when he would be dead and Shull to tide him over until the weekend.

Because he was a ladies’ man, of course, a good-time Charlie, an actual out-and-out Lothario.

I never met a more romantic-looking sixty-one-year-old. In his camel’s-hair coat, brushed Borsalino, suckling lionskin gloves and soft Gucci shoes, he was the sharpest grandpa I’d ever seen. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d once been Rose Pickler’s and Naomi Shore’s lover.

“You see too much death in our business, Rabbi,” he’d told me. “Well, you know, not too much, I don’t mean too much, but all there is. I mean, what the hell, we don’t rent the land out for picnics, do we? We don’t use the organ for dances or pin corsages on the basic black. Jerry, Jerry,” he’d moaned, “we’re under the gun, we’re working at knifepoint here. I memento mori morning, noon and nighttime too. It’s all I ever think about. It makes me crazy and costs me money. Sure. Death makes me a big spender. It puts the glow in my cheeks and the stiff in my cock. Sure. Because I put a big day in at the office, all I’m good for is playing with my electric trains, trying on my new suits, easing the Jag out of my garage and putting the top down and taking her for a spin. I watch my weight, brush after every meal, and regard my pressure like I loved it. I’m aware of every organ, Rebbe. Not just my heart, lungs, guts and glands, but what covers them too, the hankie sticking up out of my breast pocket, the press in my pants. I’ll tell you something. It’s death made me cheat on my wife when she was alive. Because basically I’m a family man basically, or wanted to be, would have been. But you tell me, Goldkorn, you tell me — how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm? How, hey?”

“It ain’t easy for me to get girls,” he’d confessed another time. “Hell,” he said, “it ain’t easy for me to get full grown-up women. Pie bakers, widows, ladies with varicose in their veins, blue rinse in their hair, yellow in their underpants. It ain’t even the immorality of it, that they know I’m this only recently widowered old man. You know what it is? They know I’m a mortician. How? It ain’t the first thing I tell them. I think maybe they sniff it on my fingers. Me, who hasn’t personally handled a stiff since to tell you the truth I don’t even remember. Handled? Looked at in the casket even. Who can say? Maybe they smell the flowers on me, all that death grass. You think that don’t make a difference? You think so? I’m telling you, Rabbi Jerry, I drive these ladies to their own bank accounts! An evening with yours truly and they’re looking for the Neiman Marcus catalogue, the Henri Bendel. A night on the town with me and they’re circling the item, checking off the size, choosing out the color, turning down the page.”

“Hey, listen,” he said yet another time, “it isn’t as if I’m bringing you the news. You’re the rabbi here. You’re familiar with what goes on. Death’s your speciality, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know or haven’t thought about plenty. Only, the way I see it, with you it’s not so geferlech. There’s even something spiritual about it, some natural order business, God’s plan, that people like me don’t even think about. Sunrise, sunset. Whatever. But personally, and speaking strictly for myself, and given the nature of the business even, I’ve got to be thinking ‘Here today and gone somewhere else tomorrow.’ Hell, that is the way I think. It’s the way Tober thinks too, even if he comes at it from a different priority. So I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

“I know what’s on your mind,” I said.

“Rabbi, please,” he said, “give me a break. You know as well as I do it’s all in the details.”

“What’s up, then? What is it?”

“This AIDS business is doing me in. I don’t think I can handle it.”

“AIDS? What do you mean? Who’s got AIDS?”

“Not me. I don’t know, nobody. It’s a figure of speech, a sign of the times, just one more straw. I told you about the fingers, that maybe they sniff on me what I do? They go further. They flinch when I touch them. They’re thinking, you know, the blood. God knows what they think. But they do, they flinch when I touch them. That’s my stock in trade. Contact. Comfort. My hand on their arm. I lose that, I lose everything.

“They’re terrified out there, Rabbi. They’re shaking in their shoes. No, no, I mean it. They’ve soured on the venereal. Something’s up. Something vicious and narrow-spirited that robs us of our consolations. Jesus, Rov, there ain’t even tea dancing no more, one two three, one two three. What am I, a spring chicken? I’m an old fart. They look at me they’ve got to be thinking ‘Do I need this? I don’t need this.’ I’m wrong they sniff it on my fingers, I’m wrong they smell the flowers on my suit. They breathe it in the ground, in the clods and clumps of my sanctified fields. It sticks to their nostrils, it goes to their heads.” He leaned toward me, he lowered his voice. “There are eleven AIDS victims in the ground here.”

“Hey.”

“Eleven I know of, eleven that’s sure.”

“Hey.”

“This mustn’t get out. It would devastate business. We agreed,” Shull said. “Me and Tober. We made a policy decision.

“Because,” he said, “he saves his money like a miser and I spend mine like a drunk sailor. And because you just ain’t doing your part, Rabbi. Content to call ’em as you see ’em, happy like a clam with all those Ecclesiastes checks and balances of your position, all bought into the goeth ups and cometh downs, the milchiks and fleishiks seasonals. Well, me too. Me too, Rebbe Goldkorn! It’s fucking now or fucking never!”

“What are you saying to me? Why are you talking to me like this?”

“Ach,” said Shull.

“Why would he speak like that?” I asked Tober when I saw him. “What’s he trying to tell me?”

“Argh,” said Tober.

“What do you want from me?” I demanded of both. “I do my job. Don’t I do my job? Is it Charney? Is it Klein? Is that why you’re pressuring me?”

“Phoo,” they agreed.

“And what’s all this about AIDS?”

“You told him?” Tober snapped.

“I told him a figure of speech, I told him a metaphor.”

“You told him.”

“I told him about eleven people,” Shull said. “I never told him we’re the Holy Faygeleh Sacred Burial Ground.”

My God, I thought, they’re crazy. Those multiple hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet lots again. The policy decision. Burying AIDS victims their bold new marketing scheme!

Tober came to the house. He was pushing Edward in a wheelchair.

“Hello,” Tober said, “shalom.”

“Hello,” I said. “How are you, Edward?”

“May I leave him with you a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We’re not disturbing you?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Interrupting anything?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll be twelve minutes.”

“Take your time.”

“He means well,” Edward said when his father had left.

“Oh,” I said, “he’s a good man.”

“He’s a driven, self-centered, totally obsessive human being, but he means well.”

“Well, Edward,” I said, a little embarrassed as I often was with him, “you’re looking fit.”

It was true. For all his handicaps, his blindness and the fluids sloshing and tumbling in his inner ears like water in a washing machine, Edward was as poised and equable as a man with a pipe. He appeared to lounge in his wheelchair, like a fellow sitting up, taking his ease on a pal’s hospital bed. Though it wasn’t, you imagined one leg crossed smartly over the other. His opaque, fashionable glasses fit comfortably across his face like a dark, thin strip of style on the eyes of a musician. I knew that if he removed the glasses, the clear eyes behind them would seem intelligent, tolerant, amused. As I had before, I wondered again if he knew how elegant he was, how he’d developed — he evidently chose his own clothes — his graceful impeccables and flawless stunnings. He’d been blind since birth.

“In my dreams,” he told me, “I’m someone else altogether.”

I’m sorry?

“You remarked my appearance,” Edward Tober said, “you said I looked fit.”

“You do, kayn aynhoreh.”

“In my dreams I am.”

“That’s terrific.”

“I can see in my dreams.”

“Really?”

“Quite clearly, in fact. Twenty-twenty the gnarled, brown stems of apples, the tight weave of wicker or the nubbing of towels. All twenty-twenty. Inches perceiving, acres and rods and nautical miles. Weights and measures, metric equivalencies. The size of a pint. The heft of a scruple, the length of a dram. All calibration’s ordered ranks, where the decimal goes, the bull’s-eye’s dead center, or where to put your nail to hang a picture on the wall twenty-twenty. The stain of the sky in a time zone, presented the hour, given the pressure, the weather, the wind. My dreams as matched to reality as pairs of perfectly teamed horses. I see in my dreams. The orange’s blemished, unfortunate pores, its pitted sheen. I see in my dreams.”

“Vai, such a megillah!”

“I do,” Edward said, “I can. Things most blind men don’t even know about, let alone see.”

“The emes?”

“Freckles like a personal astronomy, suntan like the cream in your coffee.”

“It’s a miracle!”

“It is,” he insisted, “it is. I see trees, their barks like rich textiles. Bolts of birch like sailcloth, and aspen like linen. Elms like a corduroy, and hickory like a patch of burlap. Quilted sycamore, I see. Silken cherry.”

“Genug, I am fartootst!”

“I do,” he insisted, “I can! I see plants, I see flowers. Not just art’s abstractive, generical shapes, the wallpaper posies and the bouquets on ties, but trillium, cattleya, dahlia and quince. And see, in what even a blind man would recognize as the dark, the shaded mosses and shielded ferns — all drizzled ground’s weathered cover.”

“Gevalt, what a gesheft!”

“And shapes like a geometer — triangles, rectangles, pyramids, wedge. Cones and spheres, cylinders and tubes. The rhomboid, the quadrature, the octagon, the pill. All nature’s jigsaw doings.”

“And otherwise?”

“What, my balance you mean?”

“Otherwise.”

“I walk across tightropes and stand on the flyer’s narrow perch as lightly as the most casual man on the trapeze.”

“Oh,” I said, “the trapeeeze.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Eddy, forgive me, you sleep in your bed with the rails up.”

“I’ve no vertigo in dreams. I’m as surefooted as an Indian. Comfortable in height as a steeplejack.”

“It don’t make you nauseous?”

“It doesn’t,” he said, “it really doesn’t. I’ll be riding downhill on a bicycle. Untroubled by curves, negotiating the hairpin turns and spirals, the violent mountain switchbacks, momentum at my back like a gale-force wind. All derring do, all derring done. All will’s and spirit’s exuberant, unencumbered Look-Ma-No-Hands.”

“And Eddy, if you fell, who’d say Kaddish?”

“Listen to me, Rabbi. You’ve known for years about my mazed bearings, my perturbed compass loose, free as a roulette wheel. I’m a guy who doesn’t clean his teeth because I can’t hold a toothbrush in my mouth, because it falls off my teeth. Because I lose track of where everything goes and gag on the bristles. I see, I see in my dreams. And not only see — I’m graceful.”

“You have them often, these dreams?”

“Last night. I had one last night.”

“Ahh,” I said, dovetailing as expectantly into his tale as a psychiatrist.

“So I’m walking along beside this river,” he said, as if breaking into his own story, “when suddenly I realize why those clouds are called ‘cumulus.’ Why, of course, I thought, it’s for the idea of accumulation implicit in them. That’s just what they look like — huge piles, great mounds, high white heaps of accumulated cloud stuff. I saw this reflected in the water — their dense, well-defined, straight-edged bases, their rounded, fluffy tops like the fluting on scallops. In the water, the imposed, accumulated clouds glanced off the current like a bunch of balloons.

“From the swiftness of the current in that latitude, and the light and color values reflected in the river, reduced, packed, tamped by the filters of the air and climate like an image in a lens, I judged it to be about one P.M. Time for lunch. And, indeed, I was starting to feel peckish, not outright hunger, understand, just the crisp snap and bristle in the throat and belly that is the beginning of appetite. I thought to bring it to the boil with some light exercise and determined to go for a swim before I ate. There was a very high, very narrow railroad trestle about a hundred yards ahead which I could probably climb by clambering up the sides of its steep ramparts. I pulled off my shoes and socks, placed them beside a low bush, and began my ascent.

“When I reached the top I heard a train. Well, no,” he corrected, “I didn’t hear the train so much as feel its vibrations on the tracks. There was a palpable shimmy, the rails, it seemed to me, like loose teeth, and swaying with what I could only hope were the factored, mathematical givens, the wobbled, engineered allowances of skyscrapers in a strong wind, say. Though of course I knew better.”

Edward’s voice was cracked now, dry, his tongue thickened around the story of his dream like spoiled meat. His handsome face had lost its poise, and I saw moisture collecting along the black rims of his dark glasses, spouting from God knew what pale and awful skin, tender, vulnerable and secret as a genital.

“It was a dream,” I said dismissively.

“I looked around,” Edward said, “trying to get my bearings.”

“It was only a dream.”

“By my best estimate I was maybe thirty-eight-and-a-half meters high. Throw in my height, I was probably forty-and-a-half meters from the surface of the river.”

“It was just a bad dream, Edward,” I told him.

“Light travels faster than sound. I could see the train, the locomotive, though I still couldn’t hear it.”

“Take it easy,” I said, “you always wake up from these nightmares.”

“I gazed down into the surface of the water. You have to do your calculations and make your allowances in split seconds. Two flattened piles of gray cumulus rushed toward the trestle and flowed under it. You know that moment when you look at something and can’t tell whether it’s you or the object that’s moving? You know that instant of vertigo and confusion?”

“A dream, Eddy. A lousy dream.”

“Is it hot in here? Did it get hot in here all of a sudden?”

“It is a little warm,” I said, to reassure him.

“I could see the train, the locomotive, its black tatter of burned diesel tearing away from the engine like a dark pennant. And heard it now too. And felt the vibration of the rails, and what weren’t vibrations but the drunken sway and stagger of the actual wooden trestle. Did I tell you I had to scan the water, search beneath and between its surface reflections to determine its depth? I mean, I knew mine. Not my depth, of course, my height. A hundred and eleven feet — and, from the apogee of my dive, probably more like a hundred fourteen — above that taut, flowing skin of cloud-bearing, sky-bearing water. Searching, as the speed and weight and sight and sound, and smell now, too, of that train came bearing down on me, for the exact and singular depth between the reflections where it would be safe for me to dive into the river. And did I tell you I not only had to do all this, not only had to find those needle-in-a-haystack clearances almost half a hundred meters beneath me, but that I had to find them through my opaque, black glasses, because what with that charging locomotive and my straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back weight on that flimsy trestle and all, there just wasn’t any time to take them—”

“It was a dream.”

“—off?”

“Edward, please, don’t make a tsimmes. It was only a—”

“So I dove. Or danced. Or maybe just fell, my arms furiously pinwheeling, rotating about some imaginary axis that ran through my armpits — diving, dancing, falling, stumbling along that shaking perimeter of trestle. And recovered. And entered the water at the perfect angle, an angle so perfect, in fact, that if I hadn’t felt the wetness climbing up my fingers as if I were pulling on a pair of gloves I’d have actually thought I was still diving.”

And it was as if he actually had dived into that river he’d dreamed. He was soaked clean through now, what I’d come to think of as his relaxed, summery bearing, his picnic-hamper, seersucker demeanor ruined, soiled.

“After all that,” he said, “boy, was I hungry!”

“You were?”

“Famished.”

“Sure,” I said, “all that climbing, the excitement, that dive that you dove. Who wouldn’t be hungry?”

“And I didn’t get out of the water right away.”

“No.”

“I went for my swim.”

“Your swim.”

“Fortunately, I’d been able to look around from the trestle just before I dived.”

“I see.”

“I’d spotted some wild strawberry bushes not far from where I’d left my shoes and socks. Though the bush in which I’d actually hidden my stuff was a lingonberry. I’m not partial to lingonberries. Too acidic.

“But even if there hadn’t been those strawberries there’d have been plenty of other good things to eat. There were crab apples and plums and, near the poison ivy, a strain of breadfruit I’m rather fond of. There was iceberg, romaine, and good Bibb lettuce.

“So it wasn’t any hardship for me to live off the land. What with the strawberries and the breadfruit and the fish I fried up, it was quite a grand lunch.”

“You caught a fish?”

“Well,” he said, “while I was on the trestle I happened to notice a kind of soil particularly hospitable to bait. I just dug down into it, carefully chose a worm—”

“Carefully chose?”

“—for texture, for color, I’d seen these perch—”

“Go on.”

“—and fitted it to its hook like a stitch in crochet.”

“Then what happened?”

He shrugged. “Nothing much,” he said. “That’s about it. I finished my lunch and dreamt I took a nap beside this weeping willow.”

“Well, well,” I told him, “that was quite a dream. You went for a walk, figured out clouds, had an adventure on a railroad trestle, observed nature, took a swim, went berry picking, fishing, prepared a first-rate lunch for yourself, and caught forty winks in the shade of the old weeping willow.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You did all that.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Yes.”

“What’s wrong? Is anything wrong? Why are you crying?”

“In my dream,” he said, “in my dream I was napping. Not dreaming a dream, only dreaming my nap.”

“Yes?”

“Dreaming sleep.”

“Yes? Dreaming sleep? Yes?”

“Dreaming the darkness. Dreaming the dark.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh.”

“So I didn’t know when I woke up.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh,”

“Because I’m without sight,” he said. “Because I’m without sight and couldn’t tell if it was the satisfied comfort of fulfilled coze and snug or only the dark, ordinary blackness of the blind.”

“Oh, Edward,” I said.

“So I had to try to turn my head.”

“Oh, Edward. Oh, Eddy,” I said, and didn’t bother to echo his words this time or ask him questions. Because I was no longer interested — this is my rabbi mode now — in playing straight man, in feeding him lines, my faked incredulity and poised astonishment. It was too awful. He was making me uncomfortable. Because this is just ballast I do, only the dappered-up charm of my phony accommodation, ingenuous as a host on a talk show egging on a naive guest. Maybe, awash in my agog wonder, by playing to reason, I could make out I was playing to God.

“Or grab the safety rails of my raised hospital sides. I had to. To see if I’d throw up. To see if those liquids in my inner ear would move. And start the long rinse-and-tumble cycles of my spinning day. Help my father,” he growled suddenly, his sightless, bobbing, handsome head loose on his neck as he sought a kind of random, flailing contact with me. “Work for Charney,” he urged, “work for Klein. Help my father, help my brother. Help my mother and sisters put together an estate that will help me keep body and soul together after they’re gone. Please, Rabbi,” he pleaded, “provide, provide!”

I got word my friend died and, when Connie came by for Stan Bloom’s Get-Well-Soon prayers, I had to tell her it had been called off.

“He died?” Connie said. “Stan Bloom died?”

“We’ll pray,” I said, “for the repose of his spirit.”

“He died?”

“Hey, Connie,” I said, “it happens. People die. It’s a fact of life.”

I began the El moley rachamim.

“El moley rachamim,” I prayed, “shochen bamromim, hamtzeh, menucho, nechon al kanfey hashchino, bemaalos k’doshim ut’horim kezohar horokeea mazirim, es nishmas Stanley Bloom sheholoch leolomoh, baavur shenodvoo z’dokoh b’ad hazkoras nishmosoh. B’gan eden t’hay M’nochosoh. Locheyn baal horachmim yastireyo beseser k’nofov leolomim—”

“He died?” she said. “Stan Bloom died?”

“—ve’itzror bitzror hachayim es nishmosoh—”

“Stan Bloom,” she said, “Stan Bloom died?”

“Connie,” I said, “hey, I’m praying here.”

“He died?”

“What’s all this about then?” I said, a little angry now, a little steamed. “He was my friend. You never even met him.”

“He’s dead?”

“Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.”

“He’s dead? Stan Bloom’s dead?”

“Prayer’s like any other treatment, Connie darling. Unless you catch it early enough … Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan Bloom until he was already down for the count!”

“You said you could pray him back to health. You said … Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so grisly!”

“Come on, Connie,” I said.

“I hate it here,” she said. “I hate looking out my bedroom window and seeing all those dead people.”

“You don’t see dead people. Why do you say you see dead people? You see markers. You see a few markers. It’s like seeing a sign on the corner with the name of the street written on it. Why do you say you see dead people? If we lived on Jefferson Street and outside your window you saw the sign on the corner, would you say you saw Jefferson? Would you tell me you saw Elm or River or Michigan or Maple? Be a little reasonable, why don’t you? You see a few markers here and there in a field. Don’t say you see dead people.”

“I hate it here, I do, I hate it here, I hate it!” she said over and over with her hands on her ears to drown out my objections.

“Connie,” I said, holding her, stroking her hair. “Connie Connie Connie.”

“I hate it! I hate it! I hate it here, I hate it! I hate it!”

“Connie Connie Connie. Connie Connie Connie. Connie Connie Connie,” I told my child.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please?”

“What, sweetheart? Please what?”

“Let’s go away. Let’s go away from here.”

“Leave our home?”

“Daddy, our back yard is a cemetery!”

“It’s beautifully landscaped.”

“It’s perpetual care!”

“Kids these days. I tell you, you can’t put a thing past ’em.”

“Stop joking me! I’m not a tough customer!”

“Can’t you tell I’m teasing? Maybe I was giving you a little more credit than you deserve.”

“I’m a little girl. Smoke rises from some of the chimneys here even in summer! You smell flowers all year round. Even out of season you smell flowers, even in winter! Everyone is always all dressed up! The florist and the man in the dry cleaner’s. The barber wears a suit and tie, the man who drives the wrecker! I’m only fourteen years old. I shouldn’t have to live around all this goddamn death!”

“It’s all right to let me know what’s on your mind once in a while,” I said, “even if you talk back, but don’t you ever say ‘goddamn’ to your father. I’m a rabbi, young lady, and don’t you forget it!”

“You’re a goddamn fool!” she shouted.

“What? What did you say?”

“You’re a fool!” she screamed. “You’re a goddamned fool!”

“Please God,” I prayed suddenly, “You-Who-Hear-Everything, You didn’t hear that! It was a slip of the tongue. She didn’t mean it. She was having a bad dream, she was talking in her sleep. Don’t strike her dead tonight when she’s just drifting off. And whatever You do, don’t You go disfiguring her, or crippling her legs for life, so no man will ever want to marry her unless it’s out of sympathy, and the only job she’ll be good for is sitting outside in the cold against a tall office building selling pencils out of her hat. CONSTANCE GOLDKORN OF LUD, NEW JERSEY, would never have said a thing like that if she’d been in her right mind, and she does too honor her father and also obeys some of the rest of Your commandments.”

“Oh,” said my daughter, “you think you’re so cool. You think you’re so cool. But you know something? You’re just an asshole.”

I slapped her face but she was already crying.

My wife was in the doorway.

“What happened? What’s wrong? Why is she crying?”

“She’s got a fresh mouth.”

“Darling,” she asked Connie, “what is it, what’s wrong?”

“She’s got a fresh mouth. She called me a fool, she said ‘goddamn.’ She said I’m an asshole.”

“Did you? Did you say these things to your father?”

“She sure did. I was saying the El moley rachamim for Stan Bloom.”

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Shelley said. “Why would you do such a thing? He was praying the El moley rachamim for his old friend, Stan Bloom. Connie, he was talking to God!”

“Sure,” Connie said. “That’s when he prayed I’d be crippled. That I’d lose my legs.”

Shelley stared at me.

“That stuff she was saying, she really ticked me off.”

“Just because I’m so scared here, Mama. Just because I’m always so scared.”

“Scared? You’re scared here? What are you scared of?”

“I hate it here, Mama. I don’t have any friends my own age. They’re afraid to come. The place stinks of dead people. Anyway, it isn’t as if he was a regular rabbi. All he does is bury people.”

“It’s where I work, it’s what I do.”

“You’re really frightened?”

“Oh,” Connie said, “it’s terrible.”

“You’re lonely here?”

“Yes.”

“You miss your friends?”

“How can she miss what she never had?”

“See?”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I only mean—”

“He prayed God would disfigure me, that He’d throw acid in my face.”

“I never prayed God would throw acid in her face. I never said that. That’s not my style.”

“Didn’t you say about being struck dead in my sleep and that my face would be disfigured so no man would marry me?”

“No.”

“He’s lying.”

“I’m not lying! I prayed He wouldn’t do those things! Didn’t I? Well, didn’t I!”

“Well, yes, I suppose so, but that’s not how it sounded, that’s not what he meant.”

“Oh, how it sounded, what I meant! As if Talmudists don’t spend entire lifetimes arguing over a comma, what’s meant by whether something that happened happened on a hill or at sea level.”

“Look,” Shelley said, as no-nonsense, sensible and serious as I’d ever seen her, “I don’t have a very clear idea of what’s going on here. I don’t even know if it would make that much difference if I did. All I know is that the two people I love most in the world aren’t being very kind to each other.” Connie had stopped crying but was fretting with some yarn that had loosened on her sweater. “Listen to me!” Shelley said sharply. “Do you know how it hurts me, how it should hurt all of us, or how disgraceful it is when people who are supposed to love and protect each other lose that kind of control? Well, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” Connie said.

“So am I,” I said.

“It’s probably something to do with the misconceptions we have about what one another is thinking. Jerry,” she said, “it’s true I’ve made good friends here, dear and wonderful friends. The mothers of the children in my car pools. The girls in my group. Old Hershorn, the stonecutter. Reb Shull and Reb Tober. Others in the congregation. But it’s not as if I was a hundred years old. I’m still young. You are too, Jerry. And if Connie’s even half as miserable as she says she is—”

“I’m twice as miserable,” Connie said.

“Well,” said Shelley, “there you are. It isn’t as if there’s anything really holding us here. You could get another place. At least it isn’t too late to start looking.”

“You’d move? You want to move?”

Then, as suddenly as I’d shifted from one language to another when Connie and I had been quarreling, Shelley’s finger was at her lips and she darted an anxious glance in our daughter’s direction at the same time that she seemed to be warning me. “Life is too short. Stan Bloom’s should have taught us that much. So then,” she announced with conviction, “if that means we have to say good-bye to the good friends we’ve made here, pick up and leave Lud, I guess we’ll just have to say good-bye to our friends, pick-e-le up and leave-e-le Lud!”